The Germans are looking to dominate Europe once again, only this time it’s not through a sneaky attack on Blighty. The kind of dominance they’re after now concerns the UK and European MP3 player market, and to help them in their venture they’ve enlisted some of the finest minds in Cambridge.

TrekStor are a multimedia and digital specialist who outsell the Apple iPod in Germany with their range of MP3 players, and they’ve setup a research and development department with the Cambridge egg-heads with a view to discovering a technology that they believe will replace MP3 entirely.

TrekStor are hoping to launch in the UK in May and have set their sites on becoming the third largest UK supplier of MP3 players within seven months, just in time for Christmas.

They currently see their biggest threat to be the ever evolving mobile phone, as MP3 players look to be severely threatened by the more versatile phone/camera/MP3 player combinations.

TrekStor’s chief executive Shimon Szmigiel said:

The whole MP3 market is slowing down. There has been little innovation in MP3s over the last couple of years and we are not fully focused on them, it’s an exchangeable market. The innovation focus is now based on different mobile solutions.