Late December last year, Creative started a teaser website for the company's "new direction", the Zii. Back then it was courteous enough to give us a clue about what it was about and how big a deal it was, with its rather bold tag-line "Everything you know is about to change". Today Creative dispatched emails to all those who registered for updates on the website, revealing a lot more about Zii, and we can tell from what's given, that Creative has embarked upon something big, which makes its digital audio product lineup look irrelevant to the matter.

The Zii, according to Creative, is inspired from nature's building block of life, the stem cell. A stem cell is a basic cellular unit found in multi-cellular organisms that holds the potential to divide and differentiate into the many different kinds of cells an life-forms have. Here's a revelation: Creative claims to have devised a stem cell-like silicon that can "grow and multiply into different solutions and eco-systems", it can be seen as something parallel to the process in which life functions, only that it's going to be silicon doing it. Creative goes on to add "With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination." Given the state the world economy is in, Creative states that the technology is recession-friendly and will in-turn unlock countless business opportunities based around the technology and its expansion. Creative will be throwing a lot more things out of the box at the upcoming CES event. The Matrix era of artificial life is beginning not to sound too much of an imagination.