From the New York Times
When Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, decided to mount a serious challenge to Apple Computer’s iPod music player early last year, it turned to a little-known Silicon Valley software start-up with a cluttered one-room office tucked away here in a building above a mortgage title company.
The result of that partnership is Samsung’s newest Z5 portable MP3 player, which will appear on store shelves March 5. The software inside the player was forged at Iventor Inc. by a small team of programmers led by Paul Mercer, 38, a veteran Apple Macintosh software designer.
Samsung’s decision to hire Mr. Mercer is significant because Apple, in designing the original iPod four years ago, turned to Pixo Inc., the company Mr. Mercer founded after he left Apple in 1994 to create software for hand-held devices.
Apple used Pixo software to create the music player’s simple interface, and Pixo’s name appeared in the credits of the original iPod MP3 player. Sun Microsystems acquired Pixo in 2003.
For Mr. Mercer, the Samsung project is the culmination of more than two decades of focus on extending personal computer technologies to the realm of portable devices.
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