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Intel Intros Flash Memory for Internet-enabled Cell Phones
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 4/17/2002
Intel has introduced what the company claims to be the world's highest performance flash memory for cell phones. Built using 0.13 micron process technology and incorporating innovative flash memory packaging techniques, Intel's 1.8 Volt Wireless Flash memory reportedly operates at speeds that are up to four times faster than existing Flash products, while consuming less power than standard Flash chips. The device is targeted at data-intensive Internet phone applications such as browsing, streaming multimedia and text messaging.
"Flash memory plays a vital role in Internet-enabled phones," said vice president Ron Smith in a prepared statement. "As more data-intensive Internet applications are operated on cell phones, higher densities of high-performance, low-power flash memory are required, and Intel is leading the charge to produce them."
The Intel vice president also reports that it has developed Flash memory packaging techniques that have been designed specifically for enabling high-performance memory in smaller cell phones, including stacking multiple, high-density memory and memory-logic chips in a single package, as well as stacking folded packages that can accommodate higher levels of multi-die integration and memory density in a smaller space.
The company has also announced that its 1.8-Volt Flash memory will employ folded and stacked packaging techniques in both the 64- and 32-Mbit density versions. The 64-Mbit density is already sampling and will be in production by August at a price of $14.91 in 10K quantities, while the 32-Mbit density will begin sampling this June and be in production by October of this year for $8.97 each. In addition, a 128-Mbit-density chip will sample later in the year with full production slated for 2003. The Flash memory chip is currently in production on a 0.18-micron version in all three densities.
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA212495&spacedesc=news
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Intel Debuts Flash Memory for 3G Phones
Online staff -- Electronic News, 4/17/2002
Intel Corp. today introduced a 1.8V flash memory device for 3G cell phones that the company said offers up to a four-fold improvement over other flash memories.
The device, released today at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Tokyo, was built on Intel’s 0.13-micron process. The company said it offers the highest performance available, leading to better data throughput rates that speed up 3G phone features, such as Internet browsing and streaming multimedia.
"Flash memory plays a vital role in Internet-enabled phones," said Ron Smith, senior VP and general manager of Intel’s wireless communications and computing group. "As more data-intensive Internet applications are operated on cell phones, higher densities of high-performance, low-power flash memory are required, and Intel is leading the charge to produce them."
Intel today also unveiled its latest flash memory packaging technology that it said will allow for high-performance memory in smaller cell phones. The packaging techniques include stacking multiple, high-density memory and memory-logic chips in a single package, and stacking folded packages that accommodate higher levels of multidie integration and memory density in a smaller space, Intel said. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker said it intends to begin sampling flash memory using this folded and stacked packaging technique later this year.
The Intel 1.8V Wireless Flash memory will be available in 64- and 32Mbit densities. The 64-Mbit density is sampling now and is scheduled to be in production in August, while the 32Mbit density will sample in June and be in production in October. A 128-Mbit density chip will also sample later this year and is slated for production in 2003. In 10,000-unit quantities, the 64Mbit device is priced at $14.91 each, and the 32Mbit device is $8.97 each. The chip is currently in production on a 0.18-micron version in all three densities
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA212559&spacedesc=news
Intel Introduces World's Highest Performance Flash Memory for Internet-Enabled Cell Phones
Intel Discusses Innovative Flash Memory Packaging Techniques at Intel Developer Forum in Japan
TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2002-- Intel Corporation today introduced the world's highest performance flash memory for cell phones and detailed innovative flash memory packaging techniques.
The Intel® 1.8 Volt Wireless Flash memory is built on Intel's industry-leading 0.13 micron process technology and is up to four times faster than existing flash solutions. This increased performance results in higher data throughput rates that speed up data-intensive Internet phone applications such as browsing, streaming multimedia and text messaging. The new chip also consumes less power than standard flash chips, resulting in extended battery life.
``Flash memory plays a vital role in Internet-enabled phones,'' said Ron Smith, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Wireless Communications and Computing Group, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). ``As more data-intensive Internet applications are operated on cell phones, higher densities of high-performance, low-power flash memory are required, and Intel is leading the charge to produce them.''
The Science of Flash Packaging
Intel also disclosed innovative flash memory packaging techniques at IDF that will enable high-performance memory in smaller cell phones. These techniques include stacking multiple, high-density memory and memory-logic chips in a single package, and stacking folded packages that accommodate higher levels of multi-die integration and memory density in a smaller space. Packaging techniques are crucial in a small form factor device such as a cell phone, where higher levels of memory are required but board space is at a minimum. Intel will begin sampling flash memory using this folded and stacked packaging technique later this year.
``In addition to manufacturing flash at 0.13 micron that is one product generation ahead of our competitors, Intel, the leading flash supplier, also provides world-class packaging solutions from single die to integrated multi-die subsystems,'' said Darin Billerbeck, vice president of Intel's Wireless Communications and Computing Group and general manager of Intel's Flash Products Group.
Wireless Devices: Anywhere, Anytime
Intel's wireless products are built around three core technologies: Intel Wireless Flash memory, the Intel® XScale(TM) microarchitecture for applications processing and the Intel® Micro Signal Architecture for signal processing. These technologies are optimized for higher performance and lower power consumption for users of wireless devices and are the key ingredients of the Intel® Personal Internet Client Architecture, Intel's development blueprint for designing wireless handheld communication products that combine voice communications and Internet access capabilities.
Intel 1.8 Volt Wireless Flash Memory: Pricing and Availability
The Intel 1.8 Volt Wireless Flash memory will be available in 64- and 32-Mbit densities. The 64-Mbit density is currently sampling and will be in production in August, while the 32-Mbit density will sample in June and be in production in October. A 128-Mbit density chip will also sample later this year and be in production in 2003. In 10,000- unit quantities, the 64-Mbit density is priced at $14.91, and the 32-Mbit density is priced at $8.97. The chip is currently in production on a 0.18 micron version in all three densities.
About IDF
The Intel Developer Forum is the technology industry's premier event for hardware and software developers. Held worldwide throughout the year, IDF brings together key industry players to discuss cutting-edge technology and products for PCs, servers, communications equipment, and handheld clients. For more information on IDF and Intel technology, visit http://developer.intel.com.
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.
Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. Intel and StrataFlash are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020417/172394_1.html
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ot-fonix news-
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020417/law045_1.html
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Rotating storage makes the audio world go 'round
By Brian Dipert, Technical Editor -- EDN, 4/11/2002
Last December and again in January of this year, I did some live-music recording, using a set of Oktava MC012 small-diaphragm condenser microphones and cardioid capsules. On the first occasion, my subject was a trio of musicians, two playing Dobros and the third on acoustic guitar, at a party thrown by friends. More recently, I captured the first set of Leftover Salmon's concert at the Alpine Meadows ski resort in Lake Tahoe, CA. Notice I said "recording," not "taping." No analog tape for this budding audio engineer, and I left my DAT (digital-audio-tape) gear at home, too.
Instead, I went to the performances straight from work with my NEC Versa UltraLite notebook PC in hand, plugged a Digigram VxPocket sound card into the PCMCIA slot, and dumped the audio directly to the hard drive using Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge version 5. Editing the result (with some performance limitations), burning it to a CD, or converting it to a lossy-compressed format for streaming is no problem; I can do it all right from the PC. And with 20 Gbytes of storage at my disposal, I can archive many hours' worth of high-quality 24-bit, 48-kHz recordings (approximately 1 Gbyte/hour). Or—if I'm at a show that lasts several days, such as this summer's High Sierra Music Festival—I can move the recordings to an even larger external hard-disk drive made by companies such as LaCie.
Another indication of how the times are changing became clear to me in early January, when I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Digital audio remains red-hot in popularity, but the most innovative and attention-catching of the latest generation of portable audio players use neither removable flash cards nor embedded solid-state memory. Instead, exemplified by Apple's iPod and Creative Labs' upcoming Nomad 3, they store music on small-form-factor, high-density hard drives. Or they employ 3-in. miniature CDs instead of traditional 4.75-in. CDs. Why the shrinking optical-disc size? You can store a lot more music with a less-than-100-kbps lossy audio codec (assuming your player supports it) than with the now seemingly dated 1.4-Mbps lossless PCM (pulse-code-modulation) approach.
What's going on here? Traditional wisdom held that hard drives were too bulky, too unreliable, and too power-hungry for portable use, and that tape's far cheaper cost per minute also gave it an edge over hard-disk drives in penny-pinching applications. But both consumers' expectations and technologies' capabilities have evolved. For one thing, computers are becoming an increasingly central piece of the audio process. People no longer want to just record audio presentations or buy them prerecorded, then play them back unchanged and unduplicated. They want to make their own "best-of" collections and fine-tune the contents of those collections. They also want to quickly and easily share music with others, within the boundary conditions of copyright law, of course. (Note that all of the bands that I record allow such activity; I don't record in stealth.)
The need for removable storage diminishes when the embedded storage becomes enormous in density and when the transfer speeds between that storage and the outside world become lightning fast, thanks to standards such as USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, and IEEE 802.11. As that embedded, rotating storage becomes smaller in form factor and lighter in weight, it consumes less power and becomes more shock-tolerant. Just like basic physics tells you, force=(mass)×(acceleration). Thanks to cheap RAM and the consequently larger system buffers it enables, momentary data-transfer disruptions are hidden from the listener, and the drive can remain in low-power spin-down modes for more time. When you do need removable storage, a CD-R or DVD-R is even cheaper than tape. It's also more durable than tape and, like a hard-disk drive, enables near-instant access to any point in the recording along with high-speed lossless duplication.
If the 1990s marked the era of upstart flash memory, the 2000s are shaping up as the counterattack of optical storage and the hard-disk drive. The semiconductor vendors are, with multilevel-cell and other technologies, doing their utmost to keep pace with rotating media's plummeting cost per bit (Reference 1). But they're falling further and further behind, and rotating media's power and reliability improvements are eliminating semiconductors' traditional advantages here, too. Isn't innovation amazing?
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout=article&stt=000&articleid=CA207107&pubda...
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The End of Computer Rebooting
By Jay Wrolstad
NewsFactor Network
April 12, 2002
http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17236.html
'This could be the next generation of mainstream computer memory,' Sheng T. Hsu, director of integrated circuits technology at Sharp Laboratories of America, told NewsFactor. 'It can be used in PCs, cell phones, networks - anything that needs massive memory.'
The time-consuming and often annoying task of restarting the operating system of your computer every time it is shut down, or rebooting, may soon be gone for good, following an innovative development in computer memory research.
The new thin-film technology that could give rebooting the boot is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic used in most PCs and other memory-enabled devices. It also is considerably faster than current memory systems and holds the promise of reducing the time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files.
Please note that this material is copyright protected. Therefore, it is illegal to display or reproduce this article for any commercial purpose, including use as marketing or public relations literature. To obtain legal reprints of this article, please call a sales representative at +1 (818) 528-1100 or visit http://www.newsfactor.com/about/reprints.shtml.
No Power, No Memory
"Unlike the memory used in most computers, ours is nonvolatile, or nonmechanical," said Alex Ignatiev, one of the researchers who created the new technology. Ignatiev is director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials at the University of Houston.
PCs now use two kinds of memory: random access memory, or RAM, and magnetic mass memory. RAM is used to run programs, open files and process data. "But when the power is turned off, the information is gone," Ignatiev told NewsFactor.
Most computer hard drives use magnetic memory for storing data -- mechanical systems that operate slowly, Ignatiev said. The resistive random access memory technology could replace both drives.
All Electronic
"It is a constant, permanent memory, and it's all electronic, with no mechanical parts like those used in hard drives to read and store data," said Ignatiev. Thus, he said, when the power is turned off, all of the information on the computer remains when it is turned back on. Users do not lose whatever has not been saved when the computer reboots during a restart.
Ignatiev said the new technology is about 1,000 times faster than flash.
Next-Gen Memory
The breakthrough is based on thin-film memory elements called manganites that are electrically programmed to become more or less resistive to the passage of electricity. Thousands of these tiny elements could be arranged to create a resistive memory chip for use in PCs or other memory-enabled devices, Ignatiev explained.
Japanese electronics giant Sharp has licensed the technology, with an eye on creating a broad range of applications through its Sharp Laboratories of America subsidiary.
"This could be the next generation of mainstream computer memory," Sheng T. Hsu, director of integrated circuits technology at Sharp Laboratories of America, told NewsFactor. "It can be used in PCs, cell phones, networks -- anything that needs massive memory."
Coming Soon
The technology is highly suitable for broadband Internet connections, Hsu said, noting that it combines the features of low voltage, high speed and low power consumption.
Sharp Labs will create memory chips with the nonvolatile elements and integrate them into Sharp products, he said, and will fabricate chips for sale to other manufacturers.
Commercial availability of the chips is expected within three years, and Hsu said they should be less expensive than current memory technology.
http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17236.html
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OT-Wireless Data Blaster
Radio's oldest technology is providing a new way for portable electronics to transmit large quantities of data rapidly without wires
http://www.sciam.com/2002/0502issue/0502leeper.html#further
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Computer Hardware Giants Jump Into Online Music Fight
Bob Keefe
April 16, 2002
Last week, the RIAA lambasted Gateway, accusing it of using scare tactics and misinformation to mislead consumers about threats to online music use.
Some high-tech heavyweights are joining the increasingly ugly fight over the future of downloadable music and movies.
The involvement of some of the biggest names in computer hardware is destined to change the dynamics of a fight that previously pitted a few adolescent Web startups - think Napster Inc. and MP3.com Inc. -- against major recording companies.
"This is becoming a different battleground than what you've seen historically," said Steve Vonder Haar, an analyst with Interactive Media Strategies in Arlington, Texas.
Free Lessons
Last weekend, visitors to Gateway Inc.'s 277 stores could get free lessons on how to legally download songs from the Internet and make their own CDs. Poway, Calif.-based Gateway also added a downloadable music area to its Web site and launched a nationwide ad campaign against a congressional bill banning the duplication of copyrighted music and movies.
For months now, Apple Computer Inc. has encouraged users to make their own CDs - advertising that they should "Rip, Mix, Burn." Entertainment industry leaders have said the slogan blatantly encourages music piracy.
Even computer makers that shun controversy are starting to speak out.
Speaking Out
"We know our customers want to be able to continue to use their computers in ways they've been able to in the past," said Dell Computer Corp. spokeswoman Jennifer Jones.
Her boss, Michael Dell, is chairman of an industry trade group that has come out against proposed rules for digital rights management. "And we know there will be a backlash if we have to produce products that would limit that."
Representatives of other big tech companies, ranging from Intel Corp. to Cisco Systems Inc., have testified before Congress in recent weeks that the new rules could seriously hurt any recovery in the tech sector.
Politics and Money
What's got the tech giants riled up is politics and money.
The political focus is on a bill by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., that would require computer hardware makers to install new devices or software that would automatically limit the transfer or duplication of copyrighted material.
Supporters, led by the entertainment industry, say something must be done to stem the growing illegal exchange of copyrighted movies and music over the Internet that's costing them billions of dollars.
Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner testified before Congress last month that PC makers haven't done more to protect copyrighted materials because online piracy drives computer sales.
Intel: 'Impossible'
He and others claimed that tech companies can develop a simple semiconductor chip to stem trading of copyrighted materials. The leading chip maker, Intel Corp., and others in the industry have said that is impossible.
No one in the PC industry is advocating music piracy or the unauthorized exchange of digital music and movies. The Hollings bill, opponents say, simply goes too far and would prohibit legal uses of digital entertainment, such as a consumers' right to copy songs off a CD they already own, or record a television show or movie off the Internet using a DVD drive.
On the money side, PC makers and suppliers know that entertainment is a growth area in an otherwise shrinking business.
About half of the computers Gateway sells today come with CD-writable drives. Dell, which traditionally ignored the consumer market for the higher-profit business market, recently began a full-court press for consumers that includes bundling features such as DVD drives and high-end speakers with some machines.
Music is so important to Apple that it now sells a compact MP3 music player, the iPod, in addition to entertainment-ready computers.
Fleas on a Yard Dog
"Everybody knows that as certain as there are fleas on a yard dog, music distribution is going to go from CDs to on line," said Phil Leigh, an analyst with brokerage firm Raymond James & Associates. "From the point of view of the (computer) companies, this fits into their needs well."
With its moves last week, Gateway is taking the most aggressive public moves of any tech company.
Along with adding a music download section to its Web site, it plans to announce in a few weeks that it has signed a deal with record labels, artists and others that will promote legal music downloading, Williams said.
Gateway isn't saying which record labels it's working with, but it's not likely to be any of the major ones.
RIAA Outraged
Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents all the major record labels, Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents all the major record labels, lambasted Gateway, accusing it of using scare tactics and misinformation to mislead consumers about threats to online music use.
"If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading ... but that wouldn't help them sell more CD burners, would it?" RIAA President Hillary Rosen said in a statement.
The RIAA successfully sued Napster and other online music swapping sites, and has pulled no punches pursuing any company that threatens industry profits.
But Gateway and other computer makers show no signs of backing down.
"Digital music is an important part of the business and an important part of why people buy PCs in this country," said Gateway spokesman Brad Williams. "We've definitely upped the stakes a bit."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17278.html
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Microsoft preps content locks for devices
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 4, 2002, 5:20 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-876449.html
Microsoft is preparing an upgrade to its anti-piracy technology aimed at bridging the gap that continues to separate online music subscription services and portable devices such as MP3 players. Code-named Mercury, the upgrade will add features to the company's Windows Media digital rights management software that sits on handhelds, MP3 players and similar gadgets. The company has had a version of the software available for portable devices since 1999, but that version has had fewer features than technology Microsoft produces for PCs.
The move is an attempt to ease the fears of record companies and other content providers who worry that anti-piracy locks used to protect online content will break down on portable devices, which don't have the processing power or software support of a computer.
"This will be significant for them," said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division. "It is going to have a direct impact on what subscription services will be able to offer."
The problem of portable devices has been a tricky one for record companies and other content producers trying to sell their work online or create subscription services.
Most devices lack critical features found on a computer, such as a system clock. The absence of those features makes it difficult to instruct a song to expire after a given date, or set a number of times that a song can be played once it has been transferred to the device.
As a result, most of the big subscription services, such as MusicNet, Pressplay or Listen.com's Rhapsody, prevent their subscribers from moving music onto portable devices. Rioport, which already has technology for protecting content on devices, has won a few licenses from record companies to offer music for MP3 players. Analysts say the portability problem must be solved before the subscription services can become mainstream.
To begin with, the devices must be released with advanced functions, such as system clocks, built into their hardware. Many of the big device manufacturers are beginning to give their products these new capabilities.
Gartner analysts Mark Gilbert and James Lundy say that the clearest opportunities for managing digital rights lie in the enterprise market.
see commentary
Even if the devices do add the advanced PC-like features, today's Windows digital rights management for devices would not be able to take advantage of them, Aldridge said. The Mercury upgrade will be able to tap into these newer features.
The new software will be a part of Microsoft's next full release of its Windows Media technology. Aldridge declined to give a date for that release.
In related news, Liquid Audio said Thursday that it won a patent on its own technology for anti-copying technology aimed at portable devices.
News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-876449.html
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e.Digital and DivXNetworks Take the Plunge
By Gretchen Hyman
Digital video technology maven DivXNetworks and electronics manufacturer e.Digital joined hands today in a strategic partnership to develop electronic devices that can store and play back high-quality compressed video from portable video players and home entertainment networking hardware.
San Diego, Calif.-based DivXNetworks has already taken a large bite out of the online digital video market with its rapid proliferation technology that can send DVD-quality video content over IP networks via broadband, and today took a step toward moving the company's flagship DivX technology beyond the PC and into a broader, mass market electronics market.
DivX is based on MPEG-4-compatible compression technology and provides high-quality downloads of let's say, a 90-minute feature film in less than 30 minutes. The DivX Open Video System is a complete solution for the distribution and promotion of video-on-demand over broadband IP networks that boasts more than 2 million downloads per month.
And while Microsoft and RealNetworks currently dominate the streaming media turf, DivX represents a new generation of standards-based rivals that with time and some solid name-branding strategies could some day lure away the estimated 600,00 registered users that have so far pledged allegiance to Media Player and RealPlayer as choice vehicles for downloading digital video.
"I don't think it's possible to overestimate the importance of DivX video technology and the global influence it will have on entertainment media," said Jim Collier, president and COO of e.Digital. "It holds the promise to be to video what MP3 compression technology has been to audio, but on a much wide and far-reaching scale."
The newly penned partnership will call upon e.Digital, also a San Diego-based company, to develop and jointly market a range of consumer electronics devices that house DivX playback video technology.
The first line of products are expected to be market-ready by the end of the year and according to DivXNetworks, will include handheld DivX video players, DivX-enabled DVD players, home video jukeboxes, digital video recorders, digital set-top boxes, and video cameras.
The two partners will also work to implement digital rights management (DRM) technology into these new devices for the protection of digital content copyright that provides authentication, authorization, encryption, fingerprinting, and multiple watermarking techniques to ensure the protected delivery of IP video.
"Our enthusiastic user base has been clamoring for hardware solutions that leverage the power of DivX video, and by working closely with e.Digital we will be able to meet that demand for the first time," said Jordan Greenhall, CEO of DivXNetworks and a former MP3.com executive who co-founded the company in 2002.
"DivX has already established itself as the most popular and efficient video technology for IP networks, and the first line of high-quality, secure consumer electronics devices specifically optimized for DivX video will extend the DivX experience beyond the PC, ultimately benefiting consumers and content providers alike," said Greenhall.
Financial terms of the e.Digital partnership were not disclosed.
April 12, 2002
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article/0,,3531_1008831,00.html
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Babyface design for mobile devices and the Web
By Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.
April 2002
Abstract:
Small displays on mobile devices and information appliances, e.g., cellular phones and personal digital assistants, provides special challenges to effective user-interface (UI) design, especially for Web-based services. This extreme form of UI design can be called babyface design. Challenges include limited spatial and color resolution, limited font choice, limited space, and information visualization in the form of miniature charts, maps, and diagrams, particularly table/list navigation. Current products will improve as designers gain more experience.
Introduction
Cellular phone usage in Asia, and to a lesser extent Europe and North America, is increasing so quickly that most forecasters predict that wireless access to the Web will overtake worldwide desktop wired access within at most two years. The growth in the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in Asia, Europe, and North America is also increasing dramatically. The widespread availability and usage of these mobile devices, including many Web-connected information appliances, all point to one important design challenge: developing effective user experiences with small displays. The author's firm, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc., has coined the term "babyfaces" to describe these displays, which cover products such as the following:
Telephones, videophones, pagers Organizers, palm PCs, PDAs, memo devices Navigators (GPS compasses): vehicular or personal Wrist watches, weather instruments (time, weather) Cameras, rulers, leisure/work tools and equipment Appliances: for the kitchen, den, office, vehicle Games, toys
What is extreme about babyface design?
Why do user-interface designers need to think specifically about babyface design? Because of the extreme diversity of user communities and usage contexts as well as the worldwide distribution of the technology. Globalization implies the need for localization, because different cultural contexts as well as language preferences must be considered in the design. Already issued in approximately 40 different languages, these mobile computation and communication products will continue to multiply the support of local languages. Note that many users of such devices and appliances will be novices in the content as well as the technology of the equipment. Their lack of familiarity creates particular challenges for the designer who must provide self-evident cues and clues to the meaning of icons, hard-buttons, and other user-interface design for navigation and interaction details. One of the most obvious challenges of the displays is the small area in which to show any data or functions at all. However, differences of user's conception of their roles, tasks, and even content hierarchy will test designer's ingenuity.
The nature of the mobile device marketplace creates extreme demands on the part of consumers. Users want/need/expect portability, low cost, and constantly emerging or merged functions and features. Telephoning, messaging, organizing, scheduling, and accessing the Web, email, short messages, video, and music all become possible characteristics of products. This convergence of functions and features creates additional extreme demands on accommodating a wide variety of technology support: global positioning satellite (GPS), short messaging system (SMS), html, WAP, Cdma, and other underlying systems support. Of special note is the more important role for voice input/output and mixed visual/acoustic display and interaction techniques. Bear in mind that the products must in the end cost less than US $500, with the price rapidly diminishing to approximately $20 or even free if the user signs up for service contracts.
Another factor to consider are the legal challenges that have been raised regarding mobile device use while driving or in environments that require quiet, such as musical performances, theater, or cinema. Different countries have studied the dangers of cellphone use while driving (USA) or the use of in-vehicle navigation systems. Designers may be able to respond to these challenges with unique solutions of multi-modal input and output. Add to this convergence the challenge of designing a coherent, systematic, and efficient set of user-interface components and you have a recipe for a designer's headache. It is not surprising that few if any cross-device, cross-application, cross content, cross-culture, or cross-nation conventions and standards have emerged (See Figure 1)
UI design components
What are these user-interface components? All user interfaces can be thought of as having these components:
Metaphors: Fundamental concepts communicated via words, images, sounds, and tactile experiences. Concepts of pages, shopping carts, chatrooms, and blogs (Weblogs) are examples. The pace of metaphor invention and neologism will increase because of rapid development, deployment, and distribution through the Web.
Mental models: Structures or organizations of data, functions, tasks, roles, and people in groups at work or play. Content, funtion, media, tool, role, and task hierarchies are examples.
Navigation: Movement through the mental models, i.e., through content and tools. Examples include dialogue techniques such as menus, dialogue boxes, control panels, icons, tool palettes, and windows.
Interaction: Input/output techniques, including feedback. Examples include the choices of keyboards, mice, pens, or microphones for input and the use of drag-and-drop selection/action sequences.
Appearance: Visual, auditory, and tactile characteristics. Examples include choices of colors, fonts, verbal style (e.g., verbose/lterse or informal/formal), sound cues, and vibration modes.
Here are some of the challenges that baby faces present to these user-interface components.
Metaphors: Baby faces will need to design new, fundamental concepts that differ from the traditional desktop metaphors (e.g., files/folders on the desk and trashcan, or even desktop Websites, e.g., pages and shopping carts). Candidates might be maps, dashboards, or other concepts not typically associated with computers.
Mental models and navigation: Babyfaces will need to simply access to desired content, to create clear "monuments" and primary routes of travel to regions or neighborhoods of data and functions.
Interaction: Babyfaces will require innovative techniques for selection and character (language) input. Keyboards and keypads on small devices have limited utility, especially for novices, people with large hands, and the disabled.
Appearance: On many mobile phones, the display area may be limited to 320 x 240 (one-fourth VGA) or even100 x 100 pixels. The color and sound resolution may also be limited. Special care will be required in the use of simple spatial layout grids, limited varieties of fonts and colors in order to reliably, consistently, and clearly indicate all categories of content. Even in personal digital assistants (PDAs), varying paradigms of "real estate" usage are to be found. For example, the Palm Pilot uses a fixed area for text input while others use pop-up areas, thereby freeing up more valuable space on a limited-area display.
In all of these components, culture plays a role. How much complexity is tolerable? How much ambiguity? How comfortable are users with detailed and miniaturized displays and buttons? How do people prefer to learn content, including the functions: systematically or in an ad hoc manner? How much help is necessary? How flexible or rigid are their typical tasks and needs?
In all of these components, also, there are opportunities for manufacturers and designers to establish unique brands, product identities, and corporate identities (see Figures 2-4). For example, a particular device's metaphors might be unique and especially useful to embody the essential data items, or special table, chart, map, and diagram techniques might be very effective in presenting the typical contents of lists, hierarchies, or networks
How are current products doing?
The marketplace of mobile devices in particular shows much innovation, but also a fair amount of chaos. Products quickly emerge and disappear, like the Scout Electromedia Modo in the USA, which provided access to urban information through a non-standard network on a small handheld device. Introduced in the summer of 2000, it was gone by the fall of 2000 (www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19699,00.html). Many products may face challenges to business models in addition to the quality of the user experience and the user-interface design.
In many of the popular mobile devices and information appliances, legibility and readability of the displays remains modest. In the USA, most models of the popular Palm Pilots and Motorola phones feature low contrast monochrome displays that make for difficult reading under many typical ambient light conditions. Even though some color PDAs can display miniature Web pages, the content is not displayed in a form that makes it easy to read the contents of page elements. In many small-screen Web-capable phones, the characters are limited in number and legibility in addition to possible low contrast. Often less than seven lines of text may be displayed. It is not surprising that a recent analysis of Web-enabled WAP phones by the Nielsen Norman Group show poor usability and low user acceptance of these devices (http://siliconvalley.internet.com/ news/article/0%2C2198%2C3531 _463321%2C00.html). Many product reviewers also urge consumers to avoid these products.
Regarding user-interface design conventions, many products have designs that seem to ignore much of the knowledge gained from usability research in user-interface design over the past several decades. Some devices feature tiny keyboards that seem to have doubtful utility, like that for the Cybiko (www.cybiko.com), a combination of a Palm Pilot and a Gameboy device. No doubt popular among teenagers for its functions as a note-passing and music-accessing device, perhaps only teenagers would find its tiny keyboard (Figure 5) appealing.
Nokia (www.nokia.com) seems to have gone farther than many of its competitors in carrying out consistent user-interface standards for its products. For example, in navigation by means of soft keys and hard keys, the left soft key is used for forwarding, selecting, and confirming. The right soft key is used for stepping back, exiting and clearing. Scroll keys are used for moving to other menu items and options. The Nokia standards allow for flexibiility in adding new features. Nokia has been exemplary but tends to be a more closed development environment. Palm Pilot third-party applications for its PDAs show a typical non-standard approach to the positioning of soft keys, their appearance, their labels, and their semantics (see Figures 6-9). This often occurs when there are little or no controls or incentives for more systematic development, such as Apple was able to accomplish for the Macintosh by offering programmers code that made it easier to do it Apple's way than a variant.
The power of mobile devices held in the hand is moving from the palm-top device to even smaller versions, the wrist-top device. Already the OnHand wrist-top PC boasts the world's smallest (www.onhandpc.com) PC, and IBM has announced porting the Linux operating system to a wrist-top device. The wrist-top real estate seems an excellent location for computing and communication functions. Consumers are already used to a wristwatch being located there, so there is a precedent for a device with additional functions. Unfortunately, the design of many of these devices seems more appropriate for the Darth Vader character of Star Wars fame, not for the more elegant Princess Leia, that is, most of these devices seem targeted narrowly to early adapters of high technology, typically young males, and are not designed with suffciently broad aesthetic style to qualify as high-demand, higher-cost fashion accessories of a more jewelry-like nature.
Information visualization challenges
One aspect that has received relatively little attention is information visualization. Most devices wish to provide users with a maximum amount of content. One MP3 music device boasts that 2500 items can be stored. This amount of content begs the question: how can the choices be easily displayed and navigated among so that a user can quickly pick the desired items. The content must be categorized and ordered in some efficient manner. If the content can be submitted to alphabetical, chronological, geographical, or numerical searches, that may be sufficient to quickly locate desired contents. However, in many cases, structure, hierarchical lists or networks of contents may need to be examined. How this might be accomplished best in baby faces remains to be determined.
The author's firm developed some initial approaches to solving this problem in its own prototype designs for wrist-top user interfaces placed onto the screen of the Samsung wrist-top telephone, the AnyCall (www.samsung electronics.com). The design assumes a list will have key characteristics known to the user and shown by small symbols. A single line of enlarged text enables the viewer to read "marching" contents.
Conclusion
Hand-held mobile devices may yield to their next generation, wrist-top devices, and then even their next competitors, finger-top devices or devices embedded within clothing or the body. All of these mobile devices attempt to bring into reality useful computation and communication assistants. Science-fiction writers and even cartoonists like Chester Gould, the creator of the US cartoon strip about detective Dick Tracy who had a wrist-communicator in the 1950s, envisioned these devices long ago. Now the challenge is for designers to turn conceptual fantasies into practical realities.
What will make a significant difference for designers? Some primary factors are these: Designers must be able to manage and resolve conflicting engineering and marketing requirements more efficiently, to use more sophisticated tools to plan the business cases and usability evaluations of new devices, to maintain more control over a process in which software-oriented user interfaces are dominated by hardware engineers, to be able to use techniques that localize semi-automatically international-ready user interfaces, including cultural aspects, and to use techniques for more efficient and effective information visualization.
Compromises are always necessary to harmonize business, engineering, marketing, and design requirements. However, effective planning, innovative approaches to metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction and appearnce can keep design quality high. Even industry breakthroughs are likely in usability and acceptance of mob ile devices and information appliances with radically different solutions for babyfaces.
Acknowledgements
This article is an abridged version of [Marcus, 2001]. Reprint and republication requests may be sent to Reprints@AMandA.com. Other information and publications are available at www.AMandA.com.
References
Marcus, Aaron, 2001. "Babyface Design for Mobile Devices and the Web," in Smith, Michael J., and Salvendy, Gavriel, Eds., Proceedings, Vol. 2, Human-Computer Interface Internat. (HCII) Conf., 5-10 Aug., 2001, New Orleans, LA, USA, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ USA, pp. 514-518.
Marcus, Aaron, and Emilie W. Gould, "Crosscurrents: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-Interface Design," Interactions, ACM Publisher, www.acm.org, Vol. 7, No. 4, July/August 2000, pp. 32-46.
Marcus, Aaron, "Designing the User Interface for a Vehicle Navigation System: A Case Study," in Bergman, Eric, editor, Information Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2000, ISBN 1-55860-600-9pp. 205-255.
Marcus, Aaron, Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces, Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 1992, ISBN: 0-201-54364-8 (available in Japanese).
Marcus, Aaron, "Chapter 19: Graphical User Interfaces," in Helander, M., Landauer, T.K., and P. Prabhu, P., Eds., Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Elsevier Science, B.V., The Hague, Netherlands, 1997, pp. 423-440, ISBN 0-444-4828-626.
Resiel, J.F., and B. Shneiderman, "Is Bigger Better? The Effects of Display Size on Program Reading," in Salvendy, G., ed, Social, Ergonomic and Stress Aspects of Work w. Computers, Elsevier, Amst.,1997, 113-122.
Aaron Marcus is President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc., 1144 65th Street, Suite F, Emeryville, CA 934608-1053. He can be reached by phone at 510-601-0994 x19, or by fax at 510-547-6125. His e-mail address is Aaron@AMandA.com. For more information on Aaron Marcus and Associates, please visit www.AMandA.com.
The article is (c) Copyright 2001 by Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc
http://www.nextinterface.net/telematics/april02/babyfacedesignformobiledevices.html
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Audible pumps up its volume of digital content
Special Guest Star: Guy Story, Chief Scientist, Audible Inc.
April 2002
This is no ordinary guy story, it's the story of the emergence of a new information medium. It just happens to be about a man named Guy Story, the chief scientist at Audible. At the start of our conversation, we discussed his name, which I believed was the perfect name for a CNN correspondent. He said that "people think my name is perfect for Audible," which uses technology to distribute the telling of stories.
Story said he heads up "two related things: the technology platform as well as business development as it relates to technology partnerships, in particular device manufacturers and wireless partners, and so on." He added, "I was originally VP of technology at Audible. I was the guy who ran the technology organization for the first three years when we built the system. I have since moved on to what is next for the company."
Story said his story begins at Bell Labs. "I was at Bell Labs for 11 years - most of that time in research. The majority of that time was spent in research, mainly in multimedia, working on interactive television and online document systems, and so on." Story left Bell Labs - then known as Lucent - to work for Audible "in the middle of 1996."
When asked if he had sold his Lucent stock - which over the last year has fallen 90 percent, Story said no. One more Lucent hard-luck story! "But I do have a chunk of Audible stock which I suspect will be valuable in time."
A Silicon Valley-like experience
Just before Story made the leap to Audible, the company "had just gotten venture funding. Don Katz, a founder of Audible had gotten some seed financing the year before and was at work developing the idea of Audible, and then got Venture funding in the middle of 1996 from well known West Coast VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Patricof on the East coast - reflecting an interesting blend of technology and content publishing that had characterized Audible from the beginning. Around 1996 when they got their funding, they went on to hire their first management team. There was a guy I knew at Bell Labs who recommended me to Don and the folks who were looking for a VP of technology. I got a call out of nowhere, telling me of this Silicon Valley-like opportunity just up the road in New Jersey from where I was working at Bell Labs. I met Don and some other folks and thought this was a great opportunity for a West Coast experience, but did not have to move to the West Coast."
Story said this new opportunity meant he would have "to leave the protective embrace of the giant corporate entity for the unknown of the startup," something which, at that time, was less common than in later years. "We now see the 'protective embrace' of the large entity is largely an illusion" in this post dot-com bubble, post Enron collapse era.
"It has been quite an adventure" at Audible, where its startup environment "had that instant urgency quality, going from the protective corporate R&D center to a startup where you had almost no resources and where there weren't a dozen people down the hall who could answer your questions if you had any hard, technical questions. It has been quite the experience being in this environment, but I am glad that I did!"
Building an end-to-end digital content business
Story said that Audible "set about building an online, digital content business that was end-to-end, and we built the first end to end system for Internet-delivered commercial digital audio distribution." In addition, Audible "developed the first digital audio player for the Internet, the Audible MobilePlayer, which predated MP3 players that came out in 1998." Story noted that Audible's player became commercially available in October 1997.
That player is now in the Smithsonian collection, as the very first digital audio player.
However, with the arrival of MP3 and the proliferation of digital players, Story says making hardware wase suspended. "The fact is, we abandoned that device realizing it was going to be a tough thing to do. As well, we were seeing a lot of different things going on in the industry - like PDAs with audio and MP3 players. Most recently we ended up going back to selling a player branded by Audible, simply to have a basic player whose feature set and availability we can control, to have a good starter device for new customers. Ironically, we went back to having player, even after we decided not to have one!"
Story said this circular journey - from practically inventing the digital audio player, to suspending its manufacture, to reinstating such a product "was all part of, in the larger picture, the need for a startup to constantly revisit its assumptions." He added, "it's just too unstable an environment out there in general" for any other approach.
Content for hire
Story said that Audible, from its start, "has always been about selling the content." In the beginning, that meant "having to build all this technology to play it - digital rights management, an online e-commerce system, PC software, a digital player - all to the end of selling the very high margin digital content. We never strayed from that goal once. And to further that goal, we continue to shift what we have to do."
The dawn of digital content
Added Story: "Having been there at the beginning - building a player ourselves, and working with lots of different companies building players and doing digital rights management - it made us experts on the subject matter, and that's a good asset for the company as we keep revisiting our assumptions and adjusting our tactics to get from here to there."
When Audible started, "we were the only guys outside a very small niche of tech-savvy folks who were talking about downloading audio to a portable device." As a result, "we had to explain what downloading meant, and what this device meant with no moving parts - everything about it was unfamiliar to the general user, including folks who were comfortable going on to Amazon and buying books." Only later did MP3 players emerge, "and then Napster became very well known - and there was a lot of very generalized education to help us come along in an uncoordinated, bumpy kind of way! People are now aware of what all this stuff is!"
"We struggled against the unfamiliarity of it." Even now, "We still get customers who sign up and buy something from us, and still send mail saying we are still waiting for our cassettes to arrive in the mail!"
And though the occasional customer may be confused when it comes time to download digital media, Story said Audible has no plans to sell physical media. "It drags in a bunch of operational issues outside our core competencies, and we've just never done that. We believe digital distribution is the future. It is the thing we are doing now, and will continue to do."
Toward a membership model
Story said Audible originally sold "what you might think of as an a-la-carte content - one at a time purchases of books and radio shows such as NPR's Fresh Air." But now, the company is shifting "to selling subscriptions to things that are recurrent like radio shows or audio products derived from print publications, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Scientific American or Forbes. We've gone from a-la-carte toward membership - a flat-rate monthly charge for which you get a choice of some things per month. More and more of our customers are becoming Audible listeners - joining the membership program as opposed to simply registrants who buy a thing a la carte." Story said Audible is rapidly "moving toward what folks in the music industry call the subscription model, something we have been doing for about 17 or 18 months - and have people billed monthly for access to content. It is working, it is happening!"
In Q4 2001, Audible's percentage of revenue from recurring content was 80 percent of $2.4 million. The number of Audible listeners is approaching 50,000. "This is the real thing! These are people who are not churning out," observed Story.
Spoken audio - the medium is the message
Audible's content library includes the audio versions of books, magazines, original content like comedy, radio shows, and speeches. We call it spoken audio, for lack of a better term. Adds Story: "If you listen to a book, you want another book; if you listen to today's Fresh Air, you want to listen to tomorrow's. It matches the subscription model - and becomes part of my lifestyle, so I am happy to pay monthly. I don't just buy a couple of books, and listen over and over. It's more like buying a CD, you listen to it for a while and then buy another. It is addictive and you always want something new."
"We're trying to offer on-demand personalized content - it's a broad catalogue. There's something for everyone, everywhere! We're all about listening to whatever you want, whenever you want and wherever you want."
However, one thing is not included as primary content: music. Music only appears as a secondary element.
"We don't do music. And we do not plan to at this stage. We've created a new category of stuff - and music may be in it, but it is secondary to it, like in a musical background, or music as incidental content. But the main thrust of our content - whether it is comedy or an interview show or The New York Times or an audio book - it is people telling stories, telling jokes, getting information, a bunch of stuff. It used to be scattered around but now it is gathered in one place. But not music. That means a technical advantage - because it is speech, you can compress it more and deliver more of it over wireless networks where the bandwidth may not be ready yet for high quality music. If you were trying to deliver an hour of high quality MP3s, it would not work. Our deliverables are ready now. Music deliverables are not."
Music has also been excluded partly because there continue to be problematic issues with licensing.
Story recalled, "I saw a couple of players people had in the labs at Bell Labs, and elsewhere - but no one could start a business because no one could get the rights to the songs. Everybody was stuck - they are still stuck. That is why digital music is moving so tentatively forward."
Audio books
In addition to its recurring content like newspapers or radio shows, Audible is also building up its collection of audio books. "Audio books are already a mature business in the U.S. and there are multiple publishers and people buying them. Audible has addressed a number of issues and inefficiencies in that business, and made it better but have not tried to change what people do when they listen to audio books - listen to them by headphones and in cars. However, e-books more about reading them off screens and on devices, and it is just unknown what is going to happen there. So far, people have not gone and bought up dedicated e-book devices in droves. Though there is undoubtedly a future for text-books on devices, off the screen - no one is sure where it will go!"
One strike against audio books, according to Story, is that they "are priced too high for what it is. There are fewer things produced as audio books than could be produced as audio books, if you got rid of the cost and time issues." That is one of the reasons why Audible has started its joint venture project with Random House, called Random House Audible. Story said it will have a "digital imprint" and that Audible has been "finding books that were not produced as audio books, after the fact and later on in the publishing process - but which are good candidates as audio books - and producing them in digital format exclusively at Audible." For instance, Story mentioned an Oprah Pick, "Drowning Ruth," for which no one had purchased audio rights. "So Audible picked up the rights, and there was no delay of getting it into stores, so we did not lose the excitement or the buzz in the marketplace of Oprah picking it."
By delivering digital audio content over the Internet, Audible has a medium for the nearly instant distribution of content - a big advantage over physical media like books on tape or CD.
Beyond technology - a new category of content
"It was the brilliance of Don - the founder - and the publishing folks he hired early on who went looking for content to license and amassed 150 content deals - a chaotic, spread out, deal of licensed content. We were able to get it and build a service. The technology is not enough - you also need content! A player is not enough - you need music, and it has to be Brittney Spears and Madonna - not just Indy labels!"
Story explained "that Audible has created a new category, we think, and has taken all this content from disparate sources which are not recognized as a category unto itself - radio, speeches, comedy, ebooks - there wasn't a category for people to seek."
"When we first launched the company, it was all proprietary and end-to-end, and over time we expect the ecosystem - the guts of the ecosystem itself - will gradually get replaced piece by piece by standard ecosystem parts, and we'll ultimately be a more of a media content company with original content as well as other stuff. We'll be more like HBO with a lot more levers and knobs on it, because we are more flexible than a broadcast company in terms of distribution."
Story said Audible will "continue to try to do better job or find better opportunities for making distribution work. The world of digital distribution of content is still very immature. We still do not have in-home systems like the big 60 GB jukebox in your living room, and we don't yet have all the PDAs that are packet-data enabled for wireless or audio players with the right technology on them. We're looking at ways to stay ahead, and be better by building those extra little pieces."
One thing Audible is working on with its partners is "to get its content delivered directly to the device. That will likely affect the service itself. In the beginning - there might be special shorter content for that new medium. Our AT&T relationship is a good example of that - finding a good partner who is deploying wireless data networks, and who sees the potential to use that to do something like having the New York Times show up in your device overnight without having to do anything."
Tethered to the PC
"One of the reasons Audible built a player - was we could not launch a business until we had a player. We never thought you'd want to sit in front of your PC and listen to content. It wasn't 'Oh cool, you can listen to Stephen King at your PC.' It was, 'Cool, I could get Stephen King anytime at low cost and listen to it anywhere like the car or train,' where you would listen to it anyway. It's always been about trying to get the content to you in a place where you want to listen to it. One of the aspects of it today - still, until we have a new distribution system or aspects of the industry evolve or develop - you still have to use the PC to connect to the Internet, and have to connect your audio device to you PC."
"That's not the most mass-market designed scenario if you compare it with watching TV or radio - but wireless delivery offers the opportunity to deliver straight from the Internet to the playback device."
Preparing for 3G
Audible has announced a pilot project delivering content over AT&T's 3G wireless network.
As 3G becomes reality, "a lot of convergence will continue to go on with regard to mobile devices and in-car systems where PDAs take on more telephony-like features and vice versa. So at one point, wireless-enabled devices will be able to be used as players of audio content, or audio players will be wireless-enabled, and wireless devices will be play-back enabled."
Story said Audible's pilot project with AT&T is currently being technically tested, with market testing to follow in its next phase. "We will evaluate this as we go, and see what it turns into. Our hope is through understanding the technology and the market acceptance issues, that we can create a commercial service out of it! It's premature to say what that will be!"
"We are looking at whether it should be shorter stuff, whether it should be longer stuff, what are peoples' expectations." Story said he expects it will "start to be like your personal radio station. At the beginning of our discussions with AT&T, we said we would not do audio books" over 3G wireless networks. "They were just way too long - let's do more short form stuff. But now we are asking ourselves, 'now that it is all working , maybe we should consider audio books.' This is a new GPRS network for AT&T as well."
Story said he expects Audible "will end up delivering larger files than the wireless guys tended to think about delivering. They were thinking about delivering text to information, and weather data. And now they are delivering two or three or four or even five MB of audio."
In addition to the project with AT&T, Story said Audible is looking at other wireless networks and markets including overseas markets. "Nothing specific yet, but we are looking at opportunities arising out there internationally. We see that we built a bunch of stuff for this end-to-end delivery to wired devices, tethered devices that is all re-purposeable. We can take bits and pieces of it and repurpose it for wireless delivery. It can also be repurposed for variations of our service and new kinds of content as well including localized content. We're looking at all of that."
Added Story, "There is a lot of wireless environments in Europe and Asia that are different from here. They are ahead of us in certain ways, and behind us in certain ways, too - so we are looking at that too."
Audible expects that wireless may turn out to be its main distribution channel at one point - and at the very least a dominant one. "It will absolutely become more and more a natural part of the system, and we won't have so many technical hurdles to deal with. It will be just refining the kind of content you want to get in your car verses in your living room, and changing the packaging and the pricing and on and on."
"We're pretty excited and just got off the phone with AT&T, and they are pretty excited too! This is going to go on for quite while - and will stay exciting!"
Audible's focus is currently on distribution, "and that is where it will all happen for us. We're throwing a lot of effort behind the wireless channel for our distribution. It's going to be an interesting year." http://www.nextinterface.net/nextinnovators/april02/audiblepumpsupitsvolumeofdigit.html
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Best Buy Seeks Copy Protection
By Alan Wolf
TWICE
4/10/2002 7:52:00 AM
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Minneapolis, Minn. - Best Buy said it is willing to work with the recording industry, manufacturers, distributors and other retailers to develop an anti-copying process for CDs.
Best Buy president/chief operating officer Allen Lenzmeier told Reuters this week that the company supports a hardware or software solution that would allow consumers to make a limited number of copies for personal use while preventing wholesale replication.
Best Buy is the nation’s No. 1 seller of pre-recorded music, but also sells the CE hardware used to copy CDs and download and record music from the Internet. The chain said continued softness in music sales at its Musicland subsidiary will impact current quarter profits, and attributes the weakness to Internet file swapping and a lack of hit albums.
In related news, music distributor Handelman Co. said it is providing Best Buy with direct-to-store shipment of certain pre-recorded selections, including new store opening inventory and replenishment of selected product.
http://www.tvinsite.com/twice/index.asp?layout=story&doc_id=80624&display=breakingNews
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OT-Sirius Deployed In 11 States
By Amy Gilroy
TWICE
4/10/2002 9:40:00 AM
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New York --Sirius Satellite Radio announced today that its service is now available in 11 states, with 17 more to receive service as of May 15.
Sirius has been deployed in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North and South Dakota and Wyoming. These are states which have a limited choice in radio programming and that include a large number of truck drivers who are potential customers for the service.
By May 1, seven more states are slated to receive Sirius service including Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma and Utah. On May 15th, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin will come on line and Sirius will be available nationally on July 1, said the company.
http://www.tvinsite.com/twice/index.asp?layout=story&doc_id=80697&display=breakingNews
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Article: The 4G Car
Article written by Allen H. Kupetz, MeshNetworks, Inc. (4/12/2002)
By now you've probably seen those commercials with Batman locking his keys in the Bat Mobile and calling OnStar to open his door remotely. This service also gives the Dark Prince access to personal concierge services, roadside assistance, and - in the event of a bad encounter with the Joker - can even send his medical records to the Gotham Hospital, for about US$69.95 per month. The magic of OnStar is a combination of an analog cellular network, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and a staff of employees who manually process many of Batman's requests. "Holy twentieth century," Robin might say.
In the event of another Batman sequel, he might want to save Gotham and the rest of the world with a car that can talk directly to other cars, get real-time streaming audio and video, obtain geo-location services with greater accuracy than GPS, and download his favorite Web sites. And he'll be able to do all this at 60 mph at download speeds faster than when he is sitting back in the Bat Cave with a cable modem. The wireless ad hoc peer-to-peer mobile broadband network that has been deployed in Orlando, Florida, can do this today in support of local police and firefighters and regular citizens, too. It's no wonder that Cat Woman doesn't visit the local tourist attractions.
The Wireless Driver
The word "telematics" comes from the combination of telecommunications and informatics. It means those products, services, or support systems that provide information to cars and other vehicles. If the definition seems broad, perhaps it is because by adding a high bandwidth link to every car, the list of possible services is also quite broad. The OnStar-type basic services are easy to deliver and one doesn't need a lot of imagination to see the utility.
According to a Nikkei Business Publications Consulting study of 20,000 Japanese drivers, the killer applications for telematics are largely security and safety related. About 46% of the respondents wanted such a service to find missing cars. 41.3% selected "notification to the owner's cell phone or mobile terminal when his/her car is operated while unattended." And 38.2% chose "requesting assistance in case of emergency." Further down the scale, "prediction of an optimal travel route," was ranked 10th at 22.4%. "Providing maps and traffic information," was ranked 30th, at 12.0 %. These last two choices are probably the most used features in the United States today via the NeverLostÒ and similar systems in rental cars.
One issue is, then, what would adding bandwidth capacity to this network accomplish given that so much can already be offered today? How about a service that allows you to tap into the real-time streaming local Department of Transportation cameras that are already mounted throughout the city? You are stuck in traffic and want to see how many exits you need to pass before the congestion eases. Then you can decide to wait it out or use the technology at your fingertips to find an alternative route.
How about a "where is the nearest 'fill in the blank'?" application that carriers could provide on behalf of restaurants, hotels, and gas stations? How about comparison shopping for the best price for gasoline at a given exit? These services would provide revenues for the carriers in terms of advertising dollars from featured businesses, while at the same time providing a useful, revenue generating service to consumers.
How about streaming video to the flat screen in the back seat? Or streaming audio in lieu of your current radio or the new, heavily promoted satellite radio systems? In the simplest of terms, broadband telematics offers drivers and their passengers the same Internet experience they get at home.
The future of the automobile lies in having access to data - anytime, anywhere. With all of these smarts under the hood, a car will be able to warn its driver that its radiator is going to malfunction long before it actually happens - and then provide the location and directions to a nearby repair shop.
How Does it Work?
With a cellular infrastructure, vehicles (or the people driving in them) contribute nothing to the network. They are just consumers competing for resources. But in wireless ad hoc peer-to-peer networks, users cooperate - rather than compete - for network resources. Thus, as the service gains popularity, and the number of users increases, service likewise improves for all users.
Wireless ad hoc peer-to-peer networking technology is significant because users joining the network essentially add mobile routers and repeaters to the network infrastructure. Because users carry much of the network with them, network capacity and coverage is dynamically shifted to accommodate changing user patterns. As people congregate and create pockets of high demand, they also create additional routes for each other, thus enabling access to network capacity from neighboring access. Users will automatically hop away from congested routes to less congested routes. This permits the network to dynamically and automatically self-balance capacity, and increase network utilization.
What may not be obvious is that when user devices act as routers and repeaters, these devices are actually part of the network infrastructure. So instead of wireless operators subsidizing the cost of user devices (i.e., handsets), users actually subsidize and help deploy the network for the carrier.
Not Your Father's Oldsmobile
In addition to OnStar, there is a growing number of companies in this space, either as service providers or technology developers. The partial list includes: At Road, ATX Technologies, Delphi, ERG Group, Golden River Traffic, Espial, FleetNet, ITT, Johnson Controls, Kivera, Liberty Mutual, LoJack, MeshNetworks, MobileAria, Mobility Technologies, Motorola, Navigation Technologies, SimpleDevices, Telcontar, Trafficmaster, TransCore, TRW, Westwood One, and Wingcast. But despite all this effort, telematics have not been as widely deployed as one might expect.
The two main reasons seem to be the perceived failure of the technology and the cost to the manufacturer. One over hyped concept was the idea that drivers would be able to browse the Internet for news, weather, and moving listings while commuting in heavy traffic. That is still a few years off. "The notion of Internet browsing is not a realistic one," says Marios Zenios, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola's automotive communications and electronic-systems group.
"Car companies are not going to put $400 worth of equipment in a car, betting you'll order a $30-month service," says ATX Technologies president and CEO, Steven Millstein.
To quote Bob Dylan, "The times, they are a changing." The notion of browsing the Internet at 60 mph is a reality today, although everyone hopes it is not the driver of the vehicle actually do the browsing. The data rates can exceed the fixed-line rates of DSL or cable modems. And forget about $400 worth of equipment in the car; how about an ASIC costing less than US$50 per vehicle?
As with many things wireless, the Japanese have been more aggressive than most others. The cellular behemoth NTT DoCoMo and Nissan agreed to develop a 3G car navigation service. The Japanese parts giant Denso is partnering with Kyocera and Kenwood in the telematics business. And General Motors (GM) and Toyota are working together to provide information services in car devices. The Europeans are getting into the space, too, but the dominant players are voice-centric cellular carriers, seemingly intent on bringing skinny pipes into the car. Nokia, for example, has delivered products to Daimler Chrysler, Audi, and GM that provide GSM phone functionality, including a positioning module with a GPS receiver and gyro for navigation.
There is a Zen saying, "If you don't change the path you are on, you will likely end up where you are heading." That is true even if you are going 60 mph. But if you had wireless ad hoc peer-to-peer networking in your car, you could choose a new path at download speeds even Batman couldn't have imagined.
Allen H. Kupetz is the Director of Sales for MeshNetworks, Inc. (www.meshnetworks.com), the firm that developed the revolutionary mobile broadband network architecture based on patented ad hoc peer-to-peer (p2p) routing technology, allowing self-forming, self-healing, fully mobile wireless networks. Mr. Kupetz lived in Seoul, South Korea, from 1992 to 1996 while serving as the telecommunications policy officer for the U.S. Embassy. He has an M.A. in international relations from the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Kupetz can be reached at akupetz@meshnetworks.com.
Footnotes to this article are available from Simon Butt upon request.
http://www.telematicsupdate.com/homepage2.asp?news=27581
culater
Renault Samsung Enters Telematics Partnership
Renault Samsung Motors Corp. forged Friday a business tie-up with the SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics Co (4/12/2002)
The companies have partnered in a bid to enhance cooperation in the field of information-provision services for motor vehicles, the carmaker said.
With telematics, motorists can get dynamic route guidance, real-time traffic information, remote vehicle diagnostics and safety and emergency help. The auto company plans to use the partnership to launch the services from the first half of next year by installing Samsung Electronics' handsets in vehicles and using SK Telecom's mobile telephone network and NATE drive navigation service.
http://www.telematicsupdate.com/homepage2.asp?news=27582
culater
OT-Heavenly music
Mar 14th 2002
From The Economist print edition
A handful of satellite start-ups are hoping to deliver global digital audio to the last analogue holdout: radio. Meanwhile, conventional AM and FM broadcasters are responding with their own digital scheme
THE launch of America's first satellite-radio service was not without its hitches. XM Satellite Radio, the first firm to go live in the United States, began broadcasting late last year. But its start had already been postponed following September 11th. Eventually, when Hugh Panera, XM Radio's chief executive, was able to flip the switch, the company's two geostationary satellites began beaming 100 channels of CD-quality music and talk to listeners in San Diego and Dallas—the two first test markets.
But no sooner had the trials started than another problem emerged. The solar arrays on both of XM's Boeing 702 satellites were found to be degrading faster than expected. The estimated 15-year lifespan of the $150m satellites was suddenly cut in half. It is a good thing that XM keeps a spare.
Such technical snags do not trouble Mr Panera. Nor do they bother executives at Sirius Satellite Radio in New York, XM's only American competitor at the moment, which has been equally plagued with high-tech hiccups. If XM and Sirius succeed in rejuvenating the geriatric analogue radio industry with dozens of niche music, news and entertainment channels available to anyone, anywhere, in America's lower 48 states, even the most ardent sceptics will forgive their embarrassing start.
But XM and Sirius are not alone in the heavens. With plans to launch a third satellite within the next year, WorldSpace, based in Washington, DC, will serve South America, Western Europe, Africa and Asia with 40-odd channels in more than 20 languages—including Swahili, Tamil and Thai. WorldSpace plans to equip 30,000 Kenyan schools with receivers in the hope of profiting from a distance-learning initiative. Meanwhile, Global Radio in Luxembourg is aiming to start its satellite service in 2005. It will target Eastern and Western Europe with six “spot” beams from three satellites delivering 150 channels in ten languages.
Even conventional radio operators are diligently preparing for the inevitable shift to digital. In August 2000, a merger of Lucent Digital Radio and USA Digital Radio formed iBiquity Digital in Columbia, Maryland. Robert Struble, the company's chief executive, wants to persuade analogue radio operators to upgrade because he is convinced that flawless sound—packaged with regional news and local personalities—will keep listeners loyal to AM and FM.
It is satellite radio—with its ability to broadcast nationally or even across whole continents—that tantalises media analysts. Most expect satellite radio to aggregate niche markets that would not normally be profitable. That could shake up the antiquated radio world much as cable challenged network television in the 1980s. Mr Panera, who spent a decade with Time Warner Cable and five years at Request TV, an American pay-per-view network, remembers when the television networks scoffed at the introduction of cable. He believes that many of those broadcasters fell behind because they failed to embrace the technology.
Two companies with a little imagination and a lot of cash snapped up chunks of the spectrum in the newly available S-band
Nevertheless, satellite radio cannot depend on the same lures as cable providers, who tempt prospective customers with complimentary receiver boxes and free home set-up. None of the satellite-radio firms will be giving away $229 receivers or doing installation for nothing. Mark Fratrick, a radio analyst with BIA Financial Network, predicts that even after satellite firms smooth out the technical wrinkles, it will still be tough to persuade millions of potential listeners to upgrade. In five to ten years, Mr Fratrick reckons that companies such as XM will win a respectable share of the market. In the meantime, XM and Sirius are going to need all the cash they have got.
In 1992, America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earmarked a slab of the country's radio spectrum for something called Digital Audio Radio Service. At the time, the technology for compressing packets of digital music and voice—and transmitting them from orbiting satellites 23,000 miles above the equator to cheap little receivers on the ground—was barely on the drawing-board. But two companies with a little imagination and a lot of cash snapped up chunks of the spectrum being offered in the newly available S-band (around 2.3 gigahertz). American Mobile Radio and CD Radio paid the FCC $80m each for the rights to rain digital entertainment from the heavens. American Mobile Radio became XM and CD Radio became Sirius.
Scrunching the sound
All four satellite-radio firms—XM, Sirius, WorldSpace and Global Radio—employ similar technology to deliver their service. Music or spoken programming is first compressed using proprietary algorithms based on the Movie Picture Experts Group Audio Layer-3 (commonly called MP3). This lets broadcasters cram dozens of channels into a thin slice of bandwidth. After scrunching the audio data, operators must also decide on a bit rate—ie, the kilobits per second (kbps) of data that each signal can carry. As with streaming audio over a telephone line to a PC, a low bit rate translates into poor sound. For commercial reasons, XM does not reveal its exact bit rates, but it confirms that it uses higher levels on music channels to ensure CD-like quality. News and talk, however, transmit at much lower bit rates. Ground stations then upload the signal—now packaged as 1s and 0s of digital signalling—to satellites. These bounce the signal earthwards to mobile or (in the case of WorldSpace) stationary receivers.
The amount of processing power and data storage needed to handle 100 channels of compressed audio is staggering. XM's headquarters, which contains 82 studios with all the latest equipment, is networked top-to-bottom with fibre-optic cable to ensure that the gargantuan loads of audio data can zip from servers to studios to satellites effortlessly. When audio is not being beamed out live, it is kept on 400 workstations that together store 1.5m songs or 50 terabytes (ie, 50m megabytes) of data—more than four times that held in the Library of Congress. The firm's operations centre puts the Pentagon's early-warning system to shame, with banks of computers scrutinising the output of each channel, while the positions of the satellites and overall reception are tracked on three massive overhead screens. The military analogy is fitting: XM's senior vice-president of engineering and operations is a retired air-force brigadier-general.
Though the studios are impressive, the most critical component for digital radio is in the receiver. At its core is a set of chips whose job it is to reassemble multiple digital signals arriving at varying times from alternate directions. This chipset then decompresses the stream into clean, crisp audio. More than any other factor, the chipset defines the audio experience. A poorly designed chipset will corrupt the sound with pops, clicks or dead air.
Working with Germany's Fraunhofer Institute (the birthplace of MP3) and STMicroelectronics, XM essentially re-engineered an existing chipset. Supplied by SGS-Thomson, the earlier chipset had been used by WorldSpace since 1997, but could not get mobile reception. Among other things, it lacked a memory “buffer” which banks audio in a separate storage area that can be drawn on if line-of-sight reception is blocked.
A closer look at XM's chipset reveals two unique integrated circuits, each assigned to different tasks. The first scrutinises multiple streams of data arriving from satellites and ground repeaters (which help boost weak signals), then decides how best to reassemble them. The second circuit handles decompression and encryption. Relying on subscription-paying customers, XM, Sirius and Global Radio scramble their signals so that they cannot be heard free of charge. The second circuit also buffers four seconds' worth of incoming data, so that tunnels, underpasses or other blind spots do not hinder reception.
By contrast, the Sirius chipset, which is manufactured by Agere Systems (formerly part of Lucent Technologies), encompasses eight integrated circuits. Pundits surmise that getting such a complex device to work properly has been one of the reasons why Sirius had to delay its launch. Eight months behind schedule, Sirius finally got its system in orbit on February 14th.
Operators of traditional radio stations in America claim not to be worried about the satellite invasion, saying there is plenty of advertising to go round
Sirius has had other difficulties. Instead of “hovering” two geostationary satellites over the equator due south of its American market like XM, Sirius chose to fly three satellites in an orbit that is 29,000 miles above the earth and inclined at an angle to the equator. This was supposed to make things easier. Each satellite covers the continental United States for only 16 hours each day; but with two satellites in sight at any one time, the elliptical orbit places the signal's emitter more directly overhead. In theory, this should improve reception a lot. However, it also requires the Sirius satellites to “hand-off” signals from one to another as they move out of range. Some engineers believe that passing the signal between the satellites, coupled with data arriving from repeater stations on the ground, could create anomalies in reception. To be fair, Sirius argues, with some justification, that its system should eventually provide superior sound. That is because, instead of limiting broadcasts to fixed bit rates, Sirius continually fine-tunes its audio quality—a practice called “statistical multiplexing”.
Global Radio has taken yet another approach. Eschewing the “hard-wired” design that is difficult to upgrade, Global Radio has set out to create a software-driven chipset that is based on a generic digital signal processor (DSP). In doing so, Global Radio can upgrade the software or replace the hardware whenever newer and better technology become available, allowing its chipset to improve steadily with time. In addition, being able to buy DSPs off the shelf has saved the company a fortune in not having to create a custom-built chipset from scratch.
The company's co-founder and chief executive, Paul Heinerscheid, talks of adding a GPS (global positioning system) feature to the receivers. With Global Radio's transmissions and GPS signals being neighbours in the radio spectrum, it ought not to be too difficult to make a dual-function chipset for an all-purpose, music-everywhere, never-get-lost gizmo. Global Radio needs $1.3 billion to achieve its ends. Assuming the money can be raised, it is going to take a further two years before it is broadcasting from space.
Room for all?
Operators of traditional radio stations in America claim not to be unduly worried by the satellite invasion—or at least, not by the prospect of competing with hundreds of specialist channels or even a national broadcaster. They point to the 51 different types of radio formats they beam out to 200m potential listeners. With XM and Sirius targeting only 4% of the market between them, radio operators say there are plenty of advertising revenues to go round. But that assumes the 11% annual growth in advertising revenue that the terrestrial stations enjoyed in the latter half of the 1990s will return. It also assumes that satellite radio goes ahead successfully as planned.
The one thing that gives local broadcasters sleepless nights is the network of repeater stations that the satellite companies are setting up in dozens of cities—to capture the incoming signal from orbit and retransmit it to “dark” areas that are hard to serve by line-of-sight transmission from satellites. The worry is that if satellite radio founders, the 1,500 or so repeaters perched on hill tops and tall buildings could easily be rerigged to broadcast local content. Objectors point to Boston, where XM Radio has set up 66 repeaters, giving it the option of establishing that many independent radio stations should it desire.
In the United States, Edward Fritts, the president of the National Association of Broadcasters, has made this an issue. His comments have roused the fears of local broadcasters, who have demanded a response from the FCC. They are not alone. Protests have also come from big providers of mobile-phone services, including AT&T, WorldCom and BellSouth, who claim that the terrestrial repeaters could interfere with reception of future data services planned for their wireless networks. There have even been grumblings from the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) community—developers of a new wireless broadband technology—who argue that the repeaters could disrupt their own 2.5 gigahertz transmissions.
For the time being, the FCC has sided with XM Radio and Sirius. Last September, the regulatory agency granted both companies temporary licences to operate their repeaters in areas where a satellite signal might be blocked. A final ruling was due as this issue of TQ went to press. Most expect XM Radio and Sirius to get a permanent green light.
In the meantime, radio operators in the AM and FM bands are supporting their own brand of digital broadcasting, from iBiquity Digital. The company's core technology, called In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) broadcasting, lets station owners add a digital signal to the same chunk of spectrum that they already use for their analogue transmissions. With a solution to hand, iBiquity has quelled many of the local broadcasters' fears about satellite radio. If anything, Mr Struble views XM and Sirius as clients rather than competitors. That is because the audio compression technology used by the satellite operators is licensed from iBiquity.
Off to a wrong start
Digital AM and FM is not new. Since the mid-1990s, many broadcasters in Europe, Canada, Asia and Australia have struggled to implement their own versions of digital radio, using a common standard called Eureka 147. This transmits CD-quality audio along with extra data to provide the performer's name and song title, or weather and traffic reports. However, Eureka 147 is rooted in an outmoded compression technology. It also requires radio broadcasters to transmit their digital signals over an entirely separate swathe of frequencies to their analogue signals.
In America, that part of the spectrum is simply not available, having long since been allocated to the armed forces. How about tweaking Eureka 147 to transmit elsewhere on the spectrum? Unfortunately, that is not a realistic option. It would still require broadcasters to pay for two licences—one for analogue and another for digital. That is what makes IBOC so attractive. It lets broadcasters use their existing part of the spectrum for both digital and analogue transmissions.
For that, America's radio broadcasters can thank some extra precautions taken by the FCC. When the regulator apportioned spectrum to radio stations, it added a tiny 200 kilohertz buffer to each slice of assigned frequency—like saddle-bags on a horse (see illustration above). An FM station that was assigned the 93.5 megahertz broadcasting frequency actually got an allocation that spanned from 93.3 to 93.7 megahertz. The FCC's intention was to prevent interference from one station affecting others broadcasting on adjacent frequencies. What engineers at iBiquity found was that they could squeeze a compressed digital signal into that buffer and still have 100 kilohertz left over to prevent their signal from interfering with a neighbouring station's.
The company has designed a chipset that can not only process the old analogue signal, but also combine it with two new digital streams. Moreover, the digital broadcast was found to consume very little bandwidth, leaving plenty of room for the fat analogue signal to spread its wings. In fact, enough space was found in the saddle-bags to carry additional data. So, apart from hearing local AM and FM with pin-sharp digital reception, listeners can also get stock quotes, news headlines, weather forecasts, or movie times on a display fitted in their car's dashboard. And if digital reception is somehow obstructed, the IBOC chip can switch back to analogue, which tolerates weak or reflected signals.
To station owners, the advantage of IBOC is that it does not require new transmitters or additional licences. Stations can switch in three days
Field trials of the IBOC hardware in Las Vegas, Washington, DC, and San Francisco have been overwhelmingly successful. The National Radio Systems Committee, a standards body, wrote of one test that “the digital signal remains robust and unimpaired [when] analogue reception is severely compromised.”
To station owners, the advantage of IBOC is that it does not require new transmitters or additional licences. Mr Struble estimates that stations can make the switch in three days. The average cost to upgrade a station's broadcasting equipment is a modest $75,000. He argues that, with all other entertainment media having joined the digital bandwagon, it is time for terrestrial radio to climb aboard.
America's first terrestrial digital transmission equipment will be demonstrated in Las Vegas this April. Later this year, stations in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle will start trials by adding digital streams to their analogue broadcasts. The first digital radio receivers will be unveiled to the American public in January 2003. No one expects motorists to replace their existing car radios with satellite receivers overnight. More likely, car radios will evolve over the years to include IBOC circuitry along with such features as navigation and mobile telephony.
Some audiophiles will not wait that long. They will tune in to the Internet instead. At present, there are some 4,000 radio stations offering together more than 100,000 streaming audio channels online. However, the only way to enjoy such programming today is with a PC and a broadband connection such as DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable modem. But what if there was a wireless device that could tune into thousands of Internet stations, but small enough to fit in a mobile receiver? This is what 3COM, a computer network company based in Santa Clara, California, had in mind when it paid $80m for Kerbango, a small company in Cupertino that marketed a portable Internet radio. However, faced with the need for drastic corporate restructuring, 3COM closed Kerbango last year.
For now, Internet radio—and, for that matter, iBiquity's and Eureka 147's terrestrial digital audio as well—are still years away from widespread use. Mr Fratrick at BIA predicts that it will be at least a decade before ground-based digital radio replaces analogue FM. By contrast, he expects XM Radio and Sirius—which have raised $3.5 billion between them from public offerings and private investors—to have little trouble luring gadget-mad consumers and high-mileage motorists to switch to satellite radio.
Tie-ups are the key
To that end, XM Radio has already signed agreements with General Motors (which has a 5.6% stake in the company), Saab, Suzuki and Isuzu. It has also been working with manufacturers of car stereo equipment, including Sony, Pioneer, Alpine and Panasonic. Deals have been concluded with such retailers as Best Buy, Circuit City and Sears. The 2002 Cadillac Seville is the first car to come equipped with an XM receiver. Meanwhile, Sirius is signing up a posse of retailers as well as such radio makers as Kenwood and Clarion, and motor manufacturers such as Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes and Volvo. WorldSpace has done the same with Hitachi, JVC and Sanyo, while Global Radio plans to secure similar relationships.
It is these strategic partnerships that will decide the success of satellite radio. The idea that millions of car owners will toss out a perfectly good radio and spend several hundred dollars for a new one that receives XM or Sirius broadcasts, no matter how pristine the signal, is hardly realistic. But tacking $250 for a satellite radio on to the price of a $30,000 new car is a different matter.
On average, some 14m new cars are bought annually in America, each with a radio installed. Add to that a chunk of the 22m Americans who live so far out in the countryside that they can get fewer than five radio stations, and the potential audience for satellite radio begins to look respectable. XM and Sirius say they need only 2% of that market to break even. Indeed, analysts expect both companies to be in the black by 2005.
But what if America makes the same mess of digital radio as it did with mobile telephones? The hotch-potch of standards for mobiles means consumers have to buy a new phone every time they want to switch contracts or travel abroad. Will motorists have to pull out the receiver in the family saloon when they tire of XM's content and want to switch to Sirius?
Maybe not. XM Radio's 10K filing with America's Securities and Exchange Commission mentions “development of a unified standard for satellite radios”. As part of a settlement to end litigation filed by Sirius in 1999, which charged XM with patent infringement, the two firms have decided to share various aspects of their technology—with the intention of developing a radio that will, one day, let listeners buy one receiver that can recognise either signal. Now, if the satellite-radio devotees could only start talking to their terrestrial counterparts, the future could hold the promise of all manner of “narrowcast” radio programming—from classroom exercises to minor league sports events, ethnic news and a million other things that never get the time of day on AM or FM radio. Wishful thinking? Perhaps, but worth the wait all the same.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1020741
culater
'Disk on Chip' Beefs Up Mobile Data Storage
Dan McDonough, Jr.
April 10, 2002
M-Systems said its new flash storage, called Mobile DiskOnChip, will come in 16 MB, 32 MB and 64 MB sizes. Each of the devices measures 9 mm by 12 mm and runs at only 3 volts, thus not draining much power. 'Less power is important,' Gartner analyst Phillip Redman told Wireless NewsFactor.
Looking to drive the growth of multimedia and data applications on mobile devices, storage device maker M-Systems has introduced disk-on-chip flash storage that can accommodate as much as 64 MB in a device that measures a square centimeter, give or take a millimeter or two.
Allowing mobile devices to store so much information in so little space will help to propel usage of mobile data systems, Gartner Dataquest analyst Phillip Redman told Wireless NewsFactor. In fact, he believes the two will grow in tandem. As 3G (third generation) wireless systems give mobile users access to more applications, the need for increased storage capacity will explode.
"Eventually, with minidisk technology, mobile devices will be able to store gigs," Redman said.
In the meantime, storage technology such as the new offering from M-Systems will serve as a catalyst for the mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and other wireless devices that are going to take advantage of next-generation wireless services.
Tiny Storage
M-Systems said its new flash storage, called Mobile DiskOnChip, will come in 16 MB, 32 MB and 64 MB sizes. Each of the devices measures 9 mm by 12 mm and runs at 3 volts, thus not draining much power.
"Less power is important," Redman said.
The challenge with mobile devices is providing the features and power necessary for the evolving wireless landscape by using as little power as possible, according to analysts.
However, with a mobile device, power is limited. A next-generation system that lasts only two hours on one charge will not do, according to Redman.
The reason storage capacity on mobile devices is such a concern, according to M-Systems, is that storage allows users to have immediate access to a wealth of information without having to connect to a network. Also, with advancing multimedia options -- such as video -- for mobile devices, storage capacity will allow users to show friends and business associates their video clips.
Stiff Competition
For M-Systems, the bad news is that flash memory may have some stiff competition relatively soon. In a recent Gartner research note, Redman explained that miniature hard drives will eventually become the norm in data-rich mobile devices.
"The 1.8-inch hard disk drives can now store 5 GB of data; such devices should be able to store 20 GB to 30 GB of data by 2005," Redman wrote.
But the main advantage for M-Systems is in the footprint. Even a 1-inch hard drive cannot go up against a square centimeter of significant memory -- especially in the realm of mobile devices, where maintaining a reasonable size is critical.
Rolling, Rolling
The embedded security features on the M-Systems disk-on-chip include read/write hardware protection, a one-time programming area and a unique ID for each device that is designed to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the operating system, application software or configuration information.
M-Systems said the 16-MB flash disk is available now with the data protection and security-enabling upgrade. It will go into mass production along with the 32-MB disk in May. M-Systems plans to ship the 64-MB disk in October.
http://techextreme.com/perl/printer/17194/
culater
OT Future Computers Beat the Clock
Lou Hirsh
April 10, 2002
Clocks have come to impose limitations on the performance of increasingly complex computer systems. The electrical pulses travel at the speed of light but still are not fast enough to keep accurate time as they traverse the tens of millions of transistors now found on a single chip.
Researchers contend that one of the best ways to make computers run faster is to take them off the clock.
Computer science Professor Alex Yakovlev and his team at England's Newcastle University are developing new ways to make processing systems asynchronous -- that is, not limited by traditional internal timing mechanisms.
Instead of the clock, which has been integral to processors since the 1960s, asynchronous systems operate on a protocol of data transmission and acknowledgement that is not regulated by time. The protocol can be set up locally within a computer or globally between computers.
Speedy and Secure
Asynchronous systems will not only be faster and more accurate, but much more secure, Yakovlev told NewsFactor. These systems will cause trouble for hackers because the irregular pattern of data transmission will allow information to be encrypted more effectively than present methods.
Yakovlev said he prefers the term "self-timed" over "asynchronous" to describe the clock-free computers. He explained that such systems are more robust in withstanding security breaches because of their ability to analyze signal spectra generated by the circuit. "Clocked systems are more prone to such attacks," he said.
Researchers say self-timed circuits have worked well in the laboratory, so far, and that new software tools currently under development will make their commercial production viable.
Technology Makes Headway
The basic technology has been studied over the past few years by several universities and companies, and already is beginning to show up in products.
"For example, Philips produces pagers with a self-timed microcontroller, and this has led to considerable power savings in terms of the lifetime of the battery," Yakovlev told NewsFactor. "In the next couple of years, I would expect self-timed devices to appear in smart cards."
Down the road, he added, self-timed blocks could be installed to boost speed and security on complex "networks-on-chips."
Yakovlev and his team are presenting papers on the latest developments at this week's International Symposium on Advanced Research into Asynchronous Circuits and Systems, being held in Manchester, England.
Crystals Losing Ground
In computer processors, the "clock" is actually a microelectronic crystal that emits rapid pulses of electricity to synchronize the flow of data.
Experts note that these clocks have come to impose limitations on the performance of increasingly complex computer systems. The electrical pulses travel at the speed of light, but still are not fast enough to keep accurate time as they traverse the tens of millions of transistors now found on a single chip.
This lag creates errors in data -- a phenomenon that scientists call metastability -- and it is posing challenges for chip designers looking to balance the need for speed with requirements for reliability.
Yakovlev noted that while future failures of clock-based systems would be inconvenient to PC users, they could prove disastrous to industries like aviation, where reliability is crucial.
In addition to boosting security, asynchronous technology also could keep devices cooler and eventually make them smaller. Yakovlev said that since computer clocks generate heat and high frequencies, removing the clock would let portable devices run on less power, making further miniaturization possible.
http://techextreme.com/perl/printer/17183/
culater
IBM Wants You to Talk to Your Devices
allNetDevices
04/08/2002
Voice recognition technology is no longer science fiction. It's been a reality for decades, though it remains immature. Now voice technologies, spurred by standards like VoiceXML, are increasingly finding their way into the market with applications in telephony, PDAs and automobiles.
With that in mind, IBM Corp., a pioneer in voice recognition, is pouring the resources of IBM research -- the world's largest information technology research organization, with more than 3,000 scientists and engineers at eight labs in six countries -- into an eight-year project to revolutionize voice technologies. The company has assigned about 100 speech researchers to the task.
Dubbed the "Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative," IBM's push aims to create new technology that supports what IBM Voice Systems Director Nigel Beck calls "conversational computing."
Beck said that in the past 50 years, "it was always you learning how to use the machine." With conversational computing, Beck said the goal is "making the machine learn how to interact with the end user."
The Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative's ultimate goal is to create technology that performs better than humans for any transcription task, without the need for customization. It seeks accurate transcription of everything from voice mail to meetings and customer service calls -- with full audio (and possibly) video searching capabilities. Along the way, the company plans a number of milestones that it expects will have wide-ranging applications in everything from data mining in call centers to interpersonal communication to biometrics.
While IBM's decision to devote such resources to an idea that seems "out there," may seem surprising at first, Big Blue thinks of it more as an effort to capture a lucrative market opportunity. Market research firm, the Kelsey Group, has projected worldwide spending on voice recognition will reach $41 billion by 2005.
Voice drivers
IBM said it sees a number of key forces that will drive that growth:
Voice can be used to improve services from customer call centers while reducing costs. By utilizing voice recognition, companies can automate customer service over the phone, without subjecting customers to hold times or older systems that require people to respond to rigidly structured menus. Such automation can dramatically reduce expenses; a typical customer service call costs $5 to $10 to support while an automated voice recognition system can lower that to 10 cents to 30 cents per call. Such systems are already coming online with current technology. Silicon Valley-based start-up TuVox Inc. has automated the after-hours technical support lines for both Handspring and Activision, while IBM itself has created a system for investment management firm T. Rowe Price which allows customers to access and manage their accounts through natural conversations.
The use of Telematics, or the combination of computers and wireless telecommunications with motor vehicles. Telematics can provide customized services like driving directions, emergency roadside assistance, personalized news, sports and weather information, and access to e-mail and other productivity tools. The Kelsey Group predicts U.S. and European spending on telematics alone will exceed $6.4 billion by 2006. IBM is providing speech software to automotive supplier Johnson Controls, which has created a voice-enabled mobile communications system for the Chrysler Group. The system consists of a receiver module behind the dashboard, an embedded microphone in the rearview mirror, and the driver's own mobile phone, which synchronizes with the receiver module via Bluetooth technology in the car's audio system. When a call is placed, audio is suspended and the call comes through the car's speakers. IBM's software allows drivers to use spoken commands in English, French or Spanish to place calls or access the system's audio address book.
Businesses which want to voice-enable the Internet and their IT establishments to provide information to consumers through "voice portals" or allow employees to access corporate databases through spoken commands over the phone.
The ability to squeeze speech recognition into smaller and smaller devices like phones, PDAs and other mobile devices.
Current solutions
Currently, IBM has a number of offerings, based on VoiceXML and Java, which tap these areas. The solution it crafted for T. Rowe Price utilizes WebSphere Voice Server with Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Voice Server allows companies to voice-enable their Web sites and intranets, databases and business applications.
Also, on March 26, the company added WebSphere Translation Server 2.0 to its server-based offerings. Translation Server now supports both Chinese-to-English and Japanese-to-English translations, meaning it now supports 16 language pairs. It delivers both on-the-fly translation of static and dynamically-generated Web pages and translation using a servlet or JSP. Additionally, Translation Server can be integrated with Lotus Domino and Sametime servers via Lotus Translation Components and Lotus Translation Services for Sametime. This allows users to engage in multilingual e-mail and chat. For instance, two co-workers -- one an English-speaker and the other a Japanese-speaker -- could have their chat client dynamically translate messages. IBM is looking to take this farther with a prototype for PDAs that would allow a user to dictate into the PDA, which would translate the speech and read it back in another language.
On the dictation end, IBM offers the consumer-grade ViaVoice software, available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms. The software has been on the market since 1996. It also offers WebSphere Voice Server for Transcription, which enables large vocabulary dictation over a network from a variety of devices, including PCs, digital recorders and telephones. Big Blue's goal in this area is to perfect the dictation technology to the point where it could be used in courtrooms, for medical transcription, to transcribe call center calls, even in radio and broadcast journalism. This in turn would make multimedia data mining a possibility -- allowing rapid searches of audio visual data.
Finally, on the embedded solutions front, IBM offers Embedded ViaVoice, which focuses on voice-enabling mobile and pervasive computing devices, from smart phones and PDAs to car dashboards.
Hurdles
But while these things are already happening, the technology must improve before it can gain wide-spread acceptance.
"The state of the speech world is roughly where the state of the Web world was six years ago," Beck said.
To take voice technology to the next step, a number of large obstacles must be overcome, according to electrical engineer David Nahamoo, manager of Human Language Technologies at IBM Research, responsible for setting IBM's worldwide speech recognition software research strategy and leader of the Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative.
Nahamoo said noise, which can prevent a machine from interpreting speech, may be the most pressing problem. Another problem is grammar and punctuation (which poses more trouble for transcription technologies). "There's no good model for spontaneous conversation," Nahamoo said. Modeling accents is another problem.
The biggest obstacle of all, though, may be the need for human users to mold their speech interactions with computers in such a way that the computers can understand them. "Today's technology for speech recognition asks the user to be cooperative," Nahamoo said.
IBM's milestones in the Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative are designed to overcome these hurdles on the way toward the grail of automated transcription that outstrips the performance of human efforts. Currently, IBM Research data suggests that today's speech recognition technology, depending on the task, is anywhere from a factor of three to a factor of 10 worse than human performance.
Combating noise is one of the first milestones. To do it, Big Blue is expanding into the sphere of audio visual speech recognition, which uses computer vision technology to "read lips." Nahamoo said that by using a camera to pick up the movements of the lips and jaw, the technology should improve speech recognition technology by about 10db. As an added bonus, audio visual speech recognition should allow the software to determine when a user is actively attempting to utilize it.
"With a camera, you can make the environment attentive," Nahamoo said, explaining that this would allow the technology to know when it should respond to the user's speech and when it shouldn't.
Multimodal access
Largely, however, Beck said IBM's first steps in the Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative will be establishing standards that will ensure that devices utilizing voice are interoperable and will run in heterogeneous environments.
To that end, working with partners Motorola and Opera, IBM has submitted a specification for Multimodal Access to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The specification, XHTML+VoiceXML, would allow users to access data on devices through multiple modes of interaction.
"Multimodal is the mixing of voice and data," Beck said. "People operate in multiple modes at once."
The technology allows users to use multiple input and output methods simultaneously, including stylus, touch, screen, keypad, keyboard and voice. For instance, the technology would allow a user to request stock information from a wireless PDA by voice, and receive the information as a chart.
The company has also put together a number of prototypes to display its ideas.
One, Meeting Miner, is an agent used during meetings to passively capture and analyze meeting discussion. It also has the capability of becoming an active participant in the meeting when it finds information it determines to be pertinent to the discussion. Meeting Miner uses the audio streams from one or more microphones to capture the speech during the meeting and converts it to a text transcript.
Another prototype has been dubbed ePIM, and is intended to give users access to their Personal Information Management tools and data through unified, anytime/anywhere access. The ePIM prototype provides voice mail for the Lotus Notes inbox; notification of e-mail, voice mail and calendaring to a cell phone or pager; voice-enabled natural language interface to Notes messages and calendar through a phone call; and WAP/HDML access to Notes inbox, calendar and address book.
Finally, to show off voice technology's utility is security applications, IBM has created a speech biometrics prototype which uses voice print match together with knowledge-based verification via a conversational interface to determine the identity of a user or to authenticate a claimed identity.
http://allnetdevices.com/icom_cgi/print/print.cgi?url=http://allnetdevices.com/wireless/news/2002/04...
culater
OT A Roadmap For Telematics
Automakers betting on telematics face a highly uncertain market. They should focus on building great cars while choosing their telematics investments carefully.
Anjan Chatterjee, Hans-Werner Kaas, T. V. Kumaresh, and Philip J. Wojcik
The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002 Number 2
Backseat video, gadgets that automatically notify the authorities of a crash or help drivers navigate, sophisticated diagnostics, and their kin—in the mid-1990s all this was expected to bolster the stagnant car industry by offering a flood of new revenues. But telematics, a suite of technologies centered on communications systems within cars, now seems less likely to alter the economics of the automotive industry so radically.
Telematics technologies might indeed deliver an enticing variety of in-car services, which may still revolutionize the experience of driving. But carmakers aren’t likely to capture a huge windfall from them. First, the total market won’t be as big as predicted in some of the more optimistic forecasts. Second, the vehicle itself won’t be critical to every application. Automakers should therefore shift their strategies and focus on dominating a few core telematics applications—not all of them. In the long run, investing primarily in the development of great cars while selectively pursuing telematics will have a much better payoff than pouring funds and management effort into a full offering.
Deflating the $40 billion promise
Some analysts and executives, eyeing the fees and valuations cable television operators netted by offering information and entertainment services to a ready-made audience, have predicted that by 2010, total annual US tele-matics revenues could reach $40 billion.1 For carmakers, the lure has been the promise of a steady revenue stream from the subscription fees that their own captive audience—drivers—would provide.
As players in an industry whose growth is estimated at 2 to 2.5 percent a year, it is hardly surprising that many carmakers want to grab a piece of the telematics pie. General Motors leads the pack. Its OnStar system, first installed in Cadillacs in 1996, is now available in 36 of GM’s 54 models as well as in some models from Honda (Acura) and Toyota (Lexus). OnStar’s features include voice-activated telephoning, navigation, roadside assistance, and remote diagnostics.
Another competitor is Wingcast, a joint venture created in 2000 between Ford Motor and the US wireless provider Qualcomm. DaimlerChrysler and BMW, working with Texas-based ATX Technologies, are in the race as well. But the attractive revenue payoff these companies seek seems increasingly out of reach now. To find the explanation, we considered four growth paths that telematics might follow over the next few years, looking particularly at potential differences in demand and in the availability of products. Although the most optimistic projections still have supporters, we believe that annual revenues will likely come to $15 billion to $20 billion (Exhibit 1).2
What will keep the market from reaching $40 billion quickly? Available technology and current demand simply don’t support such rapid development. For the revenues of the US telematics industry to approach $40 billion a year, every car off the assembly line would have to be fitted with a telematics system, and average monthly revenues would have to be at least $50 per car owner (Exhibit 2). Comparisons with similar industries are enlightening. US cable television subscribers, for instance, pay an average fee of about $35 a month, while the typical US mobile-phone bill is about $50 a month. OnStar throws in a year’s free subscription and thereafter offers three packages ranging in price from about $17 to $70 a month. If other offerings followed a similar price structure, at least 40 percent of telematics subscribers would have to enroll in top-tier plans. That seems unlikely.
Moreover, penetration probably won’t reach 100 percent. Our research shows that for a new automotive technology to achieve blanket penetration, a regulatory push (as in the case of air bags and fuel injection systems) is generally needed. For telematics, regulation may instead inhibit develop-ment as the authorities limit some applications that might distract drivers. Without a government mandate, the penetration of features rarely tops 80 percent and typically takes 12 years to reach even 50 percent. Niche products, such as power seats and car-based computers, spread out even more slowly (Exhibit 3).
Furthermore, strategies to increase the penetration of telematics come at a price. Most estimates suggest that it costs about $200 a car to install the hardware. Assuming a monthly subscription of $30 and a monthly profit to carmakers of $10 a subscriber, it would take 20 months to recover the cost of the hardware alone. Add a year’s free subscription, and a car has to be off the showroom floor for almost three years before the telematics suite begins to pay off. Of course, some car buyers won’t subscribe, and others won’t renew after signing initially. If the hardware’s cost isn’t added to the sticker price—and so far it doesn’t seem to have been—the paying customers will have to subsidize the hardware installed in all of the cars. For carmakers to recover their costs, about two-thirds of all owners of each model would have to subscribe. To be sure, equipment costs could fall over time, but competitive pressure on subscription fees could also erode whatever profit margin there might be.
We feel that in a more realistic short-term picture, telematics would be installed in half to three-quarters of all new cars, with average monthly fees of about $30. Foreseeable technology and a moderate increase in demand would bring the market to about $15 billion to $20 billion in all.
The limits for carmakers
How much of the potential revenues will actually reach the carmakers? When the buzz around telematics began, automobiles seemed the best candidate to be a star in a mobile world where everyone was connected anywhere and anytime. In those days, mobile phones were expensive analog-based power guzzlers. PDAs were weak and rare; cars and trucks, by contrast, had enough electrical output to handle more powerful phones and other devices. Since then, mobile phones and PDAs have pushed cars from the limelight, and their diminishing role in consumer electronics works against automakers trying to capture the value from telematics applications.
Product life cycles represent another barrier for carmakers. Consumer electronics companies often release several versions of a product a year, each version embodying changes in technology or consumer tastes. Carmakers, however, release new products every several years, with yearly iterations. Lead times required for car iterations can stretch out to months or years, putting automakers at a disadvantage. It is very unlikely that an automaker forced to develop a telematics offering several years before a car is launched will be able to make that offering attractive throughout the car’s eight- to ten-year life span. When proprietary hardware is bolted onto a car with such a long lifetime, the problem is exacerbated. Standard interfaces might address it by allowing hardware to be installed late in the design cycle or even after the car was sold, but they would also allow third-party developers to bypass carmakers and market their own applications.
Besides generating increased revenues, it was thought that telematics would help carmakers to improve their relations with customers and to differentiate their products more extensively. Customer relationship management (CRM) was expected to improve in several ways: through the entrenchment of relationships with consumers who subscribed to services, the provision of data on driving behavior (how much, when, and where cars were used, for example), and the ability to alert manufacturers when their customers’ cars broke down and had to be rescued. But even if consumers don’t balk at feeding their carmakers information about their driving habits, those carmakers already have trouble sorting through the volumes of data available today, and telematics would add to the deluge. More contact with customers could certainly improve a carmaker’s image, but the effects on business are hard to quantify, and companies have traditionally struggled when basing big strategic moves on such intangibles.
As for differentiating products, telematics might at first help distinguish the vehicles of a company from those of its competitors and thereby raise its market share. But this effect is likely to wane as more cars offer similar services. If a gadget proved tremendously popular with customers, rivals of the company that introduced it would probably follow with their own versions, quickly eroding its distinctiveness. In fact, as telematics becomes more commonplace, customers will likely demand standardization for ease of servicing and greater flexibility in applications.
A change in strategy
Carmakers have already sunk billions into telematics. We think that the risks of investing heavily in this area are high for these companies, while the revenues remain uncertain. Moreover, telematics must compete directly for capital with the core business of vehicle design, which is what the market expects carmakers to do best. Vehicle design should be the priority, since its return on investment will be higher and more secure than the potential return from providing a full suite of telematics services. Telematics embodies higher risks for carmakers because they have little experience in the field and the consumer market remains untested. Therefore, carmakers should pursue telematics selectively, choosing the most promising areas for investment and keeping options open in others.
Look at the numbers. Designing a new vehicle based on a common platform or chassis costs $300 million to $500 million. A very popular design, such as Chrysler’s PT Cruiser or Ford’s Expedition, can add more than $500 million to the maker’s operating profit annually during the model’s four-year life span.3 Although the carmakers have a century of experience, successful car designs remain elusive, and less than 10 percent of all designs are hits. Of the remainder, about 70 percent are modest successes, generating $100 million to $500 million in annual operating profit, and about 20 percent fall below this level, often making no operating profit at all or losing money. On average, $500 million invested in a new automobile design might return $600 million—a 20 percent return on incremental investment. Some years are good and some bad; the overall return is unexceptional; but the mix of hits, modest successes, and misses moderates the risk carmakers face.
Compare these returns with the likely risks and returns of telematics. The carmakers’ current business models provide for a full suite of telematics services and the supporting infrastructure, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars a year in up-front investment. Optimistically, the payoff could reach $750 million a year, but profits would take several years to reach this level. Our research suggests that investing several billion dollars in a full-scale telematics package could bring carmakers returns of 15 to 20 percent under the best-case scenario and much less under the pessimistic ones. But even in the most optimistic conditions, the returns would roughly equal those of a good car design, while the risks would be much greater.
Given the unattractive risk-reward profile, selective investments in telematics make more sense. The selective approach raises two questions. First, is an application’s value proposition credible? Right now, all telematics players—carmakers and others—are struggling to understand what features customers are willing to pay for and how much they are willing to spend. Given the uncertainty around demand, a probe-and-learn strategy, in which companies make many small bets on a number of applications and gauge the response, might be most appropriate.
The second question is whether carmakers are the natural owners of the businesses surrounding a given application. Carmakers know about air bag sensors, for example, and are thus in a good position to develop applications, such as crash notification systems, that rely on data from them. Carmakers would also be well positioned to take ownership of applications (for instance, diagnostics equipment) that require integration with vehicles.
Choosing your application
Three applications satisfy the criteria for ownership by carmakers: reselling mobile-phone time, safety and security, and telediagnostics. The former makes sense because the carmakers can deliver millions of customers and thereby eliminate the big acquisition costs facing wireless providers. By purchasing wireless time at bulk discounts, carmakers should be able to resell it at a profit to their telematics customers and remain competitive with companies offering standard wireless rates. A significant portion of the carmakers’ profits from telematics will probably come from this source.
Automakers can also claim ownership of the telematics markets for safety and security and for telediagnostics. These services—such as systems that use wheel-based sensors to warn drivers when their tire pressure is low and systems that alert call centers when air bags inflate—must be tightly integrated with vehicle systems. Safety-and-security hardware must be able to call for help after surviving crashes that destroy vehicles. Designing such gear requires the automakers’ expertise. Telediagnostics devices must also operate in the harsh environment under the hood, where temperatures range from below freezing to beyond boiling and components are exposed to rain and road debris—clearly not the normal environment for consumer electronics. Here too, carmakers have accumulated expertise that strengthens their right to ownership.
In these cases, carmakers should seize control of the applications and invest to become leaders in them. But instead of putting telematics hardware in all cars, these companies should offer it as an option and target customers who are relatively likely to subscribe to the services. This approach not only lets the carmakers concentrate on customer demand but also eliminates the hidden subsidy of giving away hardware to customers who end up not subscribing. Carmakers should also crank up their marketing machines to create demand for these features and ensure that their customers benefit from the ability to get discounts on mobile-phone time. By offering below-off-the-shelf wireless fees, carmakers can migrate their customers from mobile telephones to telematics systems.
Playing a supporting role
If the value proposition of an application is clear but carmakers are not its natural owner, they should avoid large investments and instead attempt to capture part of the value, typically by using their vehicles to enhance the application. Into this category fall two applications—driving services (navigation, traffic reports) and in-car commerce—that can be provided or installed relatively easily after cars are purchased but work better if integrated into them. If automakers aren’t the natural owners, which companies are? Content and hardware providers will likely be the key players in applications such as navigation and traffic reports, which require a reliable voice-activated interface plus sophisticated software that can solve real-time problems. In-car commerce would call for products that people want so urgently as to purchase them from behind the wheel. No such products have yet emerged, but one offshoot of the application is worth noting: transactions closely linked to the telematics equipment already installed in cars. An auto insurer, for example, could gather location and usage data from vehicles equipped with OnStar and use this information each month to adjust premiums to actual risk.
Automakers also seem better positioned to support rather than own the operations of a solutions provider: a company that offers a range of services centered on gathering information and delivering it to vehicles. Companies that have experience integrating information from disparate sources and the ability to keep down labor and other costs will have an advantage in providing solutions using telematics. These companies could range from established portals such as Yahoo! to experienced call-center operators such as AT&T. Carmakers, which typically pay union wages and have little experience specific to these applications, do not appear well positioned to enter this charmed circle.
To play a supporting role in these applications and claim some of the revenues from them, carmakers must form alliances with key players to ensure that the applications are enhanced by a car’s design. Consumer electronics companies might, for example, offer both systems that integrated telematics content (traffic reports, navigation directions) into the stereo systems of cars and built-in microphones tuned to the cars’ acoustics. While the potential revenues for solutions providers are large, the investment carmakers would have to make to develop the necessary infrastructure and expertise in operations such as call centers makes this a very difficult road.
Waiting in the wings
Finally we come to applications whose value proposition remains murky. Although these applications—including high-bandwidth information and entertainment as well as bureaucratic applications such as the automatic registration of vehicles and certification of up-to-date insurance coverage—may hold dizzying potential, they are too uncertain and too recent to justify huge investment by carmakers now.
In general, such applications require a car’s telematics system to accommodate many of the customer’s portable devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones, in addition to content ranging from games to movies for backseat passengers. To stay involved in these areas without investing massive amounts of money, carmakers should consider options that allow them to add and subtract applications quickly rather than develop a multifeatured product that would be expensive though likely to fall short of what customers need. Carmakers could, for example, install sockets allowing several hardware configurations to be plugged into the telematics hardware. Then they could license access to these sockets to applications developers. The danger for carmakers from this strategy is that by providing a standard interface, they would help outside developers create compatible applications.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times have changed since telematics arrived as a white knight and carmakers seemed destined to lead the mobile world. Today, those betting on a full suite of telematics services face strong competition from entrenched devices such as mobile telephones and PDAs. To win by providing a full suite, the automakers would have to force their customers to pay for overlapping services and somehow make those customers at least partly satisfied with last year’s technology—a difficult proposition. When carmakers update their telematics strategies, they must abandon the hype that surrounded the field, focus on building great cars, and carefully choose where to invest.
Notes:
Anjan Chatterjee is a director and Hans-Werner Kaas is a principal in McKinsey’s Detroit office, where T. V. Kumaresh and Phil Wojcik are consultants.
1The research that forms the basis of this article focused on the US market. More broadly, the market for telematics in Japan, the United States, and Western Europe has been forecast to reach some $100 billion by 2010 under an optimistic scenario. See François Bouvard, Andreas Cornet, and Philip J. Rowland, "The road ahead for telematics," The McKinsey Quarterly, 2001 Number 2, pp. 6–9.
2This range represents a weighted average of the four scenarios in Exhibit 1.
3After four years, a model must generally be redesigned, at a cost of an additional $250 million.
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.asp?tk=561223:1180:2&ar=1180&L2=2&L3=38
culater
OT The road to telematics
From the McKinsey Quarterly
Special to CNET News.com
April 7, 2002, 6:00 AM PT
http://news.com.com/2009-1017-877385.html
Backseat video, gadgets that automatically notify the authorities of a crash or help drivers navigate, sophisticated diagnostics, and their kin--in the mid-1990s all this was expected to bolster the stagnant car industry by offering a flood of new revenue.
But telematics, technologies centered on communications systems within cars, now seems less likely to alter the economics of the automotive industry so radically.
Telematics technologies might deliver an enticing variety of in-car services, which may still revolutionize the experience of driving. But carmakers aren't likely to capture a huge windfall from them. First, the total market won't be as big as predicted in some of the more optimistic forecasts. Second, the vehicle itself won't be critical to every application. Automakers should therefore shift their strategies and focus on dominating a few core telematics applications--not all of them. In the long run, investing primarily in the development of great cars while selectively pursuing telematics will have a much better payoff than pouring funds and management effort into a full offering.
Some analysts and executives, eyeing the fees and valuations cable television operators netted by offering information and entertainment services to a ready-made audience, have predicted that by 2010, total annual U.S telematics revenue could reach $40 billion. For carmakers, the lure has been the promise of a steady revenue stream from the subscription fees that their own captive audience--drivers--would provide.
As players in an industry whose growth is estimated to be 2 percent to 2.5 percent a year, it is hardly surprising that many carmakers want to grab a piece of the telematics pie. General Motors leads the pack. Its OnStar system, first installed in Cadillacs in 1996, is now available in 36 of GM's 54 models as well as in some cars from Honda (Acura) and Toyota (Lexus). OnStar's features include voice-activated telephoning, navigation, roadside assistance and remote diagnostics.
Another competitor is Wingcast, a joint venture created in 2000 between Ford Motor and the U.S. wireless provider Qualcomm. DaimlerChrysler and BMW, working with Texas-based ATX Technologies, are in the race as well. But the attractive revenue payoff these companies seek seems increasingly out of reach now.
To find the explanation, we considered four growth paths that telematics might follow over the next few years, looking particularly at potential differences in demand and in the availability of products. Although the most optimistic projections still have supporters, we believe that annual revenue will likely come to $15 billion to $20 billion.
Automakers should shift their strategies and focus on dominating a few core telematics applications--not all of them.
What will keep the market from reaching $40 billion quickly? Available technology and current demand simply don't support such rapid development. For the revenue of the U.S. telematics industry to approach $40 billion a year, every car off the assembly line would have to be fitted with a telematics system, and average monthly revenue would have to be at least $50 per car owner.
Comparisons with similar industries are enlightening. U.S. cable television subscribers, for instance, pay an average fee of about $35 a month, while the typical U.S. mobile-phone bill is about $50 a month. OnStar throws in a year's free subscription and thereafter offers three packages ranging in price from about $17 to $70 a month. If other offerings followed a similar price structure, at least 40 percent of telematics subscribers would have to enroll in top-tier plans. That seems unlikely.
Moreover, penetration probably won't reach 100 percent. McKinsey research shows that for a new automotive technology to achieve blanket penetration, a regulatory push (as in the case of air bags and fuel injection systems) is generally needed. For telematics, regulation may instead inhibit development as the authorities limit some applications that might distract drivers. Without a government mandate, the penetration of features rarely tops 80 percent and typically takes 12 years to reach even 50 percent. Niche products, such as power seats and car-based computers, spread out even more slowly.
Furthermore, strategies to increase the penetration of telematics come at a price. Most estimates suggest that it costs about $200 a car to install the hardware. Assuming a monthly subscription of $30 and a monthly profit to carmakers of $10 a subscriber, it would take 20 months to recover the cost of the hardware alone. Add a year's free subscription, and a car has to be off the showroom floor for almost three years before telematics begins to pay off.
Of course, some car buyers won't subscribe, and others won't renew after signing initially. If the hardware's cost isn't added to the sticker price--and so far it doesn't seem to have been--the paying customers will have to subsidize the hardware installed in all of the cars. For carmakers to recover their costs, about two-thirds of all owners of each model would have to subscribe. To be sure, equipment costs could fall over time, but competitive pressure on subscription fees could also erode whatever profit margin there might be.
We feel that in a more realistic short-term picture, telematics would be installed in half to three-quarters of all new cars, with average monthly fees of about $30. Foreseeable technology and a moderate increase in demand would bring the market to about $15 billion to $20 billion in all.
The limits for carmakers
How much of the potential revenue will actually reach the carmakers? When the buzz around telematics began, automobiles seemed the best candidate to be a star in a mobile world where everyone was connected anywhere, anytime. In those days, mobile phones were expensive, analog-based power guzzlers. PDAs were weak and rare; cars and trucks, by contrast, had enough electrical output to handle more powerful phones and other devices. Since then, mobile phones and PDAs have pushed cars from the limelight, and their diminishing role in consumer electronics works against automakers trying to capture the value from telematics applications.
Product life cycles represent another barrier for carmakers. Consumer-electronics companies often release several versions of a product a year, each version embodying changes in technology or consumer tastes. Carmakers, however, release new products every several years, with yearly iterations. Lead times required for car iterations can stretch out to months or years, putting automakers at a disadvantage.
It is unlikely that an automaker forced to develop a telematics offering several years before a car is launched will be able to make that offering attractive throughout the car's eight- to 10-year life span. When proprietary hardware is bolted onto a car with such a long lifetime, the problem is exacerbated. Standard interfaces might address it by allowing hardware to be installed late in the design cycle or even after the car was sold, but they would also allow third-party developers to bypass carmakers and market their own applications.
Even if consumers don't balk at feeding their carmakers information about their driving habits, those carmakers already have trouble sorting through the volumes of data available today, and telematics would add to the deluge.
Besides generating increased revenue, it was thought that telematics would help carmakers improve their relations with customers and differentiate their products more extensively. Customer relationship management (CRM) was expected to improve in several ways: through the entrenchment of relationships with consumers who subscribed to services, the provision of data on driving behavior (how much, when, and where cars were used, for example), and the ability to alert manufacturers when their customers' cars broke down and had to be rescued.
But even if consumers don't balk at feeding their carmakers information about their driving habits, those carmakers already have trouble sorting through the volumes of data available today, and telematics would add to the deluge. More contact with customers could certainly improve a carmaker's image, but the effects on business are hard to quantify, and companies have traditionally struggled when basing big strategic moves on such intangibles.
As for differentiating products, telematics might at first help distinguish the vehicles of a company from those of its competitors and thereby raise its market share. But this effect is likely to wane as more cars offer similar services. If a gadget proved tremendously popular with customers, rivals of the company that introduced it would probably follow with their own versions, quickly eroding its distinctiveness. In fact, as telematics becomes more commonplace, customers will likely demand standardization for ease of servicing and greater flexibility in applications.
A change in strategy
Carmakers have already sunk billions into telematics. We think the risks of investing heavily in this area are high for these companies, while the revenues remain uncertain. Moreover, telematics must compete directly for capital with the core business of vehicle design, which is what the market expects carmakers to do best. Vehicle design should be the priority, since its return on investment will be higher and more secure than the potential return from providing a full collection of telematics services. Telematics embodies higher risks for carmakers because they have little experience in the field, and the consumer market remains untested. Therefore, carmakers should pursue telematics selectively, choosing the most promising areas for investment and keeping options open in others.
Look at the numbers. Designing a new vehicle based on a common platform or chassis costs $300 million to $500 million. A popular design, such as Chrysler's PT Cruiser or Ford's Expedition, can add more than $500 million to the maker's operating profit annually during the model's four-year life span. Although the carmakers have a century of experience, successful car designs remain elusive, and less than 10 percent of all designs are hits. Of the remainder, about 70 percent are modest successes, generating $100 million to $500 million in annual operating profit, and about 20 percent fall below this level, often making no operating profit at all or losing money. On average, $500 million invested in a new automobile design might return $600 million--a 20 percent return on incremental investment. Some years are good and some bad; the overall return is unexceptional. But the mix of hits, modest successes, and misses moderates the risk carmakers face.
Compare these returns with the likely risks and returns of telematics. The carmakers' current business models provide for a full suite of telematics services and the supporting infrastructure, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars a year in up-front investment. Optimistically, the payoff could reach $750 million a year, but profits would take several years to reach this level. Our research suggests that investing several billion dollars in a full-scale telematics package could bring carmakers returns of 15 percent to 20 percent under the best-case scenario and much less under the pessimistic ones. But even in the most optimistic conditions, the returns would roughly equal those of a good car design, while the risks would be much greater.
Given the unattractive risk-reward profile, selective investments in telematics make more sense. The selective approach raises two questions. First, is an application's value proposition credible? Right now, all telematics players--carmakers and others--are struggling to understand what features customers are willing to pay for and how much they are willing to spend. Given the uncertainty around demand, a probe-and-learn strategy, in which companies make many small bets on a number of applications and gauge the response, might be most appropriate.
The second question is whether carmakers are the natural owners of the businesses surrounding a given application. Carmakers know about air-bag sensors, for example, and are thus in a good position to develop applications such as crash notification systems that rely on data from them. Carmakers would also be well positioned to take ownership of applications (for instance, diagnostics equipment) that require integration with vehicles.
Choosing your application
Three applications satisfy the criteria for ownership by carmakers: reselling mobile-phone time, safety and security, and telediagnostics. The former makes sense because the carmakers can deliver millions of customers and thereby eliminate the big acquisition costs facing wireless providers. By purchasing wireless time at bulk discounts, carmakers should be able to resell it at a profit to their telematics customers and remain competitive with companies offering standard wireless rates. A significant portion of the carmakers' profits from telematics will probably come from this source.
Automakers can also claim ownership of the telematics markets for safety and security and for telediagnostics. These services--such as systems that use wheel-based sensors to warn drivers when their tire pressure is low and systems that alert call centers when air bags inflate--must be tightly integrated with vehicle systems. Safety-and-security hardware must be able to call for help after surviving crashes that destroy vehicles. Designing such gear requires the automakers' expertise.
Vehicle design should be the priority, since its return on investment will be higher and more secure than the potential return from providing a full collection of telematics services.
Telediagnostics devices must also operate in the harsh environment under the hood, where temperatures range from below freezing to beyond boiling, and components are exposed to rain and road debris--clearly not the normal environment for consumer electronics. Here, too, carmakers have accumulated expertise that strengthens their right to ownership.
In these cases, carmakers should seize control of the applications and invest to become leaders in them. But instead of putting telematics hardware in all cars, these companies should offer it as an option and target customers who are relatively likely to subscribe to the services. This approach not only lets the carmakers concentrate on customer demand but also eliminates the hidden subsidy of giving away hardware to customers who end up not subscribing.
Carmakers should also crank up their marketing machines to create demand for these features and ensure that their customers benefit from the ability to get discounts on mobile-phone time. By offering below-off-the-shelf wireless fees, carmakers can migrate their customers from mobile telephones to telematics systems.
Playing a supporting role
If the value proposition of an application is clear but carmakers are not its natural owner, they should avoid large investments and instead attempt to capture part of the value, typically by using their vehicles to enhance the application. Into this category fall two applications--driving services (navigation, traffic reports) and in-car commerce--that can be provided or installed relatively easily after cars are purchased but work better if integrated into them. If automakers aren't the natural owners, which companies are?
Content and hardware providers will likely be the key players in applications such as navigation and traffic reports, which require a reliable voice-activated interface plus sophisticated software that can solve real-time problems. In-car commerce would call for products that people want so urgently as to purchase them from behind the wheel. No such products have yet emerged, but one offshoot of the application is worth noting: transactions closely linked to the telematics equipment already installed in cars. An auto insurer, for example, could gather location and usage data from vehicles equipped with OnStar and use this information each month to adjust premiums to actual risk.
Automakers also seem better-positioned to support rather than own the operations of a solutions provider: a company that offers a range of services centered on gathering information and delivering it to vehicles. Companies that have experience integrating information from disparate sources and the ability to keep down labor and other costs will have an advantage in providing solutions using telematics. These companies could range from established portals such as Yahoo to experienced call-center operators such as AT&T. Carmakers, which typically pay union wages and have little experience specific to these applications, do not appear well-positioned to enter this charmed circle.
To play a supporting role in these applications and claim some of the revenue from them, carmakers must form alliances with key players to ensure that the applications are enhanced by a car's design. Consumer-electronics companies might, for example, offer both systems that integrated telematics content (traffic reports, navigation directions) into the stereo systems of cars and built-in microphones tuned to the cars' acoustics. While the potential revenue for solutions providers is large, the investment carmakers would have to make to develop the necessary infrastructure and expertise in operations such as call centers makes this a difficult road.
Waiting in the wings
Finally we come to applications whose value remains murky. Although these applications--including high-bandwidth information and entertainment as well as bureaucratic applications such as the automatic registration of vehicles and certification of up-to-date insurance coverage--may hold dizzying potential, they are too uncertain and too recent to justify huge investment by carmakers now.
In general, such applications require a car's telematics system to accommodate many of the customer's portable devices, such as a PDA or mobile phone, in addition to content ranging from games to movies for backseat passengers. To stay involved in these areas without investing massive amounts of money, carmakers should consider options that allow them to add and subtract applications quickly rather than develop a multi-featured product that would be expensive though likely to fall short of what customers need.
Carmakers could, for example, install sockets allowing several hardware configurations to be plugged into the telematics hardware. Then they could license access to these sockets to applications developers. The danger for carmakers from this strategy is that by providing a standard interface, they would help outside developers create compatible applications.
Times have changed since telematics arrived as a white knight and carmakers seemed destined to lead the mobile world. Today, those betting on a full suite of telematics services face strong competition from entrenched devices such as mobile telephones and PDAs. To win by providing a full suite, the automakers would have to force their customers to pay for overlapping services and somehow make those customers at least partly satisfied with last year's technology--a difficult proposition. When carmakers update their telematics strategies, they must abandon the hype that surrounded the field, focus on building great cars, and carefully choose where to invest.
For more insight, go to the McKinsey Quarterly Web site.
Copyright © 1992-2002 McKinsey & Company, Inc.
http://news.com.com/2009-1017-877385.html?tag=cd_mh
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"KITT, Shift From First Gear To Second Gear, Please"
BY MIKE VON WAHLDE
I recently bought a Toyota Land Cruiser -- a beautiful, metallic bronze truck from the ripe old year of 1986. With only 85,000 miles, my FJ60 is a thing of beauty, modestly equipped with manual locking hubs, a manual transmission, a manual transfer case, manual windows, manual door locks, manual seats… you get the idea. In fact, this particular model year came with only one option: floor mats. It is a true mechanical wonder, and I love putting up with its hassles.
My wife, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with it. Her Honda is power this and that, and if she has her way, her next car will be something akin to the Batmobile, filled to the gills with onboard computing gadgetry. Telematics will provide her with all the customization she requires, and it will make sure that she gets to her destination awake, on-time, and by the most efficient route possible.
KITT Has Nothing On Telematics
Telematics, or in-vehicle computing systems, are no longer relegated to futuristic portrayals on TV shows, like the artificially intelligent KITT car on the 1982-1986 series Knight Rider.
More and more auto manufacturers are making arrangements to ensure they hold part of the forecasted 80 percent of the vehicle market that in the next five years (says Forrester) will incorporate telematics into their vehicles. The services being rolled into cars -- onboard navigation via GPS; Internet access; telephony; emergency assistance; and links to travel information such as traffic and weather -- are already a part of our daily driving ritual. But to have them simplified so that they wait on our beck and call can get even me -- Manual Mike -- excited (at least a little). Factor in the added entertainment value of games and video on-board, and you've got a winning combination.
So what is driving the adoption of telematics? There are simply too many answers to that question, because once equipped with telematics capabilities, the applications that a manufacturer can build into automobiles will satisfy everyone from the always-on-the-go, always connected executive commuter to the just-passed-the-driver's-exam sophomore girl lost on the New Jersey Turnpike in daddy's Lincoln Navigator. There are even options that are designed to prevent drivers from falling asleep behind the wheel, and who doesn't need that every once in a while?
Forrester also predicts the telematics industry will grow in annual revenues to $20 billion in 2006 from $1.6 billion in 2001, and that in five years nearly 40 million cars will come with integrated hands-free cell phones. More than 46 million cars will have monitoring systems that connect motorists to roadside assistance. So who is leading the charge, and what can we expect in the coming months and years? A few recent announcements indicate we should get buckled in and ready to go…
Wingcast, Egery Wire Up Ford, Renault, Nissan, And Peugeot
U.S. auto maker Ford along with France's Renault and PSA Peugeot-Citroen have agreed to form a three-way joint venture to develop wireless services for the European auto market. The new company will produce a telematics platform that will offer drivers a host of in-car mobile voice and data options including navigation, roadside assistance, and location-based dining, and lodging services. It will combine Peugeot's auto communications services unit Egery with Ford's European arm of its Wingcast telematics unit. Renault's Japanese partner Nissan will also be a participant in the telematics revolution enabled by this partnership.
Via IBM, Chrysler And Bluetooth
Via IBM partner Johnson Controls, DaimlerChrysler will be implementing an integrated communications system. The system requires only a single push of a button to make a phone call, with all other functions being activated through voice commands. By placing a receiver module behind the dashboard, an embedded microphone in the rear-view mirror, and hooking into the driver's own mobile phone, the phone will synchronize with the receiver module to create a wireless connection via Bluetooth technology with the car's audio system. When the phone is in use, the car radio is overridden, and the call comes through the speakers. The software enables drivers to use spoken commands to place calls. The voice activated response system also allows access to the system's audio address book, which is customizable by the owner.
IBM also recently patented an automatic in-car dialog system that carries on a conversation with the driver. The system analyzes the driver's answers together with his or her voice patterns to determine if the driver is alert while driving. The system also warns the driver or changes the topic of conversation if it determines that the driver is about to fall asleep. (Note to self: I need this one!)
Autodesk Locations Services Are Wiring Up Fiat With Connect
Connect is a next-generation telematics solution offering a wide range of location-based services that was developed through a joint venture between Autodesk Location Services and TargaSys, a division of Fiat Auto. The Autodesk LocationLogic platform is a key component of the overall solution, providing a stable environment for the deployment of location-sensitive applications -- far more than any basic hand-held GPS. Real-time weather and traffic information; "Follow Me" navigation to get you to your destination efficiently; roadside assistance; emergency services; online medical advice; a concierge service that books tickets for travel and makes reservations for hotels, restaurants, and entertainment; locations and operating hours of vital resources such as pharmacies; service stations, and ATMs; and personalized business, financial, and sports news are all "Connect"-ed. Connect is now available in the Alfa Romeo 147, Fiat Stilo, and Lancia Thesis.
On The Road Again
The list goes on and on. Some other telematics players worth mentioning include Texas Instruments, offering a Bluetooth solution for automobiles; and Motorola (who is never behind in anything wireless) boasting deployments with Mercedes Benz, Lincoln, and BMW, all in the past six months.
So where does that leave me and my '86 FJ60? It leaves me wondering when telematics computing devices will be available at Circuit City, and whether or not that in-car computer module will fit where my AM radio is right now. It also keeps me praying that my wife doesn't read this column and drag me to the car dealer for that Alfa Romeo tomorrow...
Mike von Wahlde is the associate editor of Internet Telephony magazine. He welcomes your comments at mvonwahlde@tmcnet.com.
http://www.planetpdamag.com/content/032002mv.htm
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Embedded Speech Recognition: Is It Poised for Growth?
By Todd Mozer
The Early Days of Embedded Speech Recognition
The embedded speech recognition market has been around about as long as the speech technology industry itself. Over twenty years ago, products such as telephones and toys emerged on the market with algorithms running on 8 bit micro-controllers. Most of the products used speaker dependent recognition requiring training, but some products appeared using early DSPs that implemented speaker independent algorithms. A U.S. subsidiary of Tomy Corporation was formed to market voice recognition products including a telephone that had a single button for voice dialing and speaker dependent digit dialing. Embedded implementations throughout the 1980’s tended to be either high in cost or poor in performance.
Chip and Software Companies Focus on Embedded Speech During the 1990’s
The 1990’s saw the first public offering of a company focused on selling embedded products with speech recognition. Voice Powered Technologies (VPTI) was a pioneer in speech controlled consumer products and introduced a speaker dependent voice operated remote control in the early 1990’s. The remote was backed by one of the very early telemarketing campaigns and included a videotape on how to use it. VPTI had a string of follow on products eventually leading to a voice organizer which had reasonable market success, but not enough to save the company from eventually going out of business.
With advances in semiconductor processing technology, the first dedicated, low cost, high quality speech recognition ICs came into production during the mid-1990’s from companies such as, OKI Semiconductor (using technology from Voice Control Systems), Sensory and Hualon Microelectronics Corporation (HMC). As memory and processing power became relatively less expensive, software-based recognizers started appearing on digital signal processors (DSPs) for markets such as automobiles and telephones, with companies including ART, Conversay, Lernout & Hauspie, Sensory and Temic providing the embedded speech recognition software engines.
Increased focus has recently moved towards the embedded speech space. Convergence concepts with Internet, PDAs, cell phones, and various media devices hold a lot of promise for speech recognition. Although the successes are still few and far between, there has been substantial hype that has analysts focusing on, and new players moving towards, the embedded speech markets. Over the past few years, companies such as IBM and Philips have expanded from their large vocabulary dictation roots, and have refocused on telephony and embedded applications. More recently, SpeechWorks has expanded its speech recognition efforts beyond their initial telephony segment and into embedded speech software. Almost a dozen other smaller companies have emerged all across the world that are now focusing on small footprint solutions for speech recognition. Market researchers from firms such as Frost and Sullivan, IDC, Morgan Keegan, and JP Morgan H&Q have begun covering the embedded speech markets, and for the first time are thinking of speech recognition beyond telephony and computer/dictation and are, in fact, projecting fast growth for the embedded market segments.
Market Opportunity for Embedded Speech Recognition
The embedded speech recognition story is very compelling. The user interface on electronic products has changed very little in the past 30 years. We have moved from analog to digital displays and have increasingly improved the quality of LCDs, but the basic knobs, switches, and buttons have stayed the same. Access to data through Internet, satellite, cable, CD ROM, and other mediums has exploded and we now have more available information than we can possibly access or organize. Being able to access this information by voice is very compelling.
Devices are getting more feature-rich and therefore more complex, but our access to the information remains primarily through manual manipulations. The size of computing devices has compressed over time and keyboards for the devices have gotten smaller and more compact, but our fingers have not shrunk. It appears that we have now reached the point where any product with a user interface will soon incorporate a voice user interface.
The speech recognition market in general has always held a widespread and intuitive appeal. We want to communicate with our products in the same way we communicate with each other. We want full-featured products that are easy to use. We want to access loads of information without navigating through menu structures or reading manuals.
Although these concepts are appealing, the markets have not yet attained their potential. Few success stories exist in the speech recognition industry overall and the embedded markets are no exception. There are no publicly traded speech recognition companies that have reached profitability, and very few of the private companies have reached this point. To make things worse, several high profile players in embedded speech recognition have gone out of business over the past year, and several of the larger, well financed players in the industry are expected to pull out in the months and years ahead.
Many of the most promising markets within the embedded speech recognition industry pose huge challenges. Despite most speech recognition vendor’s attempts to work in high noise through techniques of echo cancellation, noise subtraction and other noise reduction techniques, executives in the automotive industry say that nobody’s speech recognition engine works well enough in a noisy environment. Most of the leading cell phone companies have developed their own speech recognition technology and are therefore reluctant to go outside for minor improvements in accuracy or features. Competition within the embedded software and IC space have driven prices down, making it difficult for all but the leanest and best financed players to survive.
With the funding boom during the late 1990’s, there was substantial investment made in the embedded speech technology space. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on development and commercialization of technologies. Many of these technologies are only now coming to market. For example, Sensory Inc. acquired Fluent Speech Technologies in 1999 and has invested millions of dollars in compressing the footprint and productizing the Fluent technologies. Sensory is only now starting to roll out development tools so external developers can create embedded applications with a very high powered engine that combines text to speech with speech recognition. New noise immune technologies, continuous digits, and large vocabulary small footprint engines are about to be released and offer a substantial improvement in the state-of-art embedded products that are on the market.
What Lies Ahead for Embedded Speech Technologies?
Although historically the embedded speech recognition market has under-performed expectations, now is the best time in history for manufacturers to start implementing speech technologies. New introductions are, or soon will, enable a wealth of platform specific tools for development with very high quality, small footprint solutions. Substantial efforts on improving performance in noise are now in effect. Chip and software pricing have been pushed down by competing players and will not impact sales opportunities in high volume segments. The near future holds combinations of recognition, synthesis and animation for incorporating multimodal I/O techniques into a small footprint engine. The broad appeal for voice access and control has never waned, and now is becoming an excellent time for products to get voice activated.
A big part of the embedded speech business is making products easier to use and allowing information access in a convenient and safe manner. Embedded speech applications are popping up all across the automotive, home, and personal electronics markets. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, there were over 20 products being shown across the floor using speech recognition technology. This number has consistently grown at CES for each of the past three years.
Speech recognition alone is not the solution for the future. Speech synthesis, whether through a compressed digital recording or text to speech, is a critical component of a user interface system. By combining synthesis and recognition into a common engine, technology vendors are able to create a much smaller footprint than the sum of the individual parts. The continuing mantra of personal electronics is “smaller, lighter, cheaper” so movements in this type of integration are very desirable to the product manufacturers.
The future of embedded speech technology is very exciting and holds the incorporation and integration of new embedded speech technologies such as animated speech. Animated speech (when combined with recognition and synthesis) allows the creation of an agent or avatar that can talk, hear and look very realistic in its lip-synchronization and emotional displays. Companies such as Sensory and LIPSinc are pioneering these animation technologies for a future that holds the ultimate dream of a home with animated agents hidden in every wall. These agents can pop up and announce telephone calls, or they can be told to record or play your favorite TV show!
Certainly the speech technology industry has gone through its struggles, and the embedded segment has only recently emerged as a substantive component of the overall market. The embedded opportunities are very persuasive and some of the solutions offered today are quite compelling. The technologies are better than ever, and are being priced aggressively and manufacturers are starting to deploy increasing use of embedded speech technologies.
Todd Mozer is president, CEO and chairman of Sensory Inc., which he co-founded in 1994. Mr. Mozer has spent over 20 years in the field of speech technology working with high tech companies in positions of sales, marketing, product development and general management.
http://www.speechtechmag.com/issues/7_2/cover/411-1.html
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Speech and Language Technology: Going Global, Thinking Local
By William S. "Ozzie" Osborne
In China, Tom.com, a voice portal, provides virtually anytime, anyplace automated access to stock, entertainment and weather information in Mandarin - in a country where the presence of cell phones outpaces the number of PCs by far.
In Japan, ASIMO, a walking, talking robot, charms visitors in Japanese and moonlights as a celebrity host at public events.
In Germany, bankers at Deutsche Bank receive English language research reports from their colleagues in London and have those translated into German using machine translation so they can read them more quickly.
In the U.S., T Rowe Price plan participants can call a virtual account rep to get the account information they need. Participants can steer the conversation where they want it to go thanks to natural language understanding, rather than having to wade through lengthy menus to get what they want.
After years of expectation, speech technology is fulfilling its promise. Faster chip speeds and more sophisticated algorithms mean voice recognition is performing better than ever before. New speech-enabled applications are hitting the market as businesses and consumers realize that voice is the most natural way to access information from the Internet, mobile phones, car dashboards or handheld organizers. Voice technology may have started with desktop computers, but today, speech is making its way beyond talking to desktop computers to the various touch points of an increasingly mobile e-business world.
The question is, how can this be deployed across the globe? With all that information technology offers today, speech and language technologies are perhaps the most dependent on cultural context.
Voice technology, which for a long time has been confined to research, is now putting a natural interface on the computing environment, from end-user devices to infrastructure behind the scenes - crossing national boundaries. Worldwide spending on voice recognition will reach $41 billion by 2005, according to the Kelsey Group, a market research firm. There are several forces driving the growth:
· Companies view voice as a way to improve service from their call centers while also reducing costs. Voice recognition allows companies to use automation to serve customers over the phone, 24/7, without subjecting them to hold times or requiring people to respond to rigidly structured menus. Then there are the business savings: a typical customer service call costs $5 to $10 to support; automated voice recognition can lower that to 10 to 30 cents. The market research firm Datamonitor says call center managers are seeing an increase in customer acceptance of automation and self-service, along with cost savings.
· The rise of telematics, which combines computers and wireless telecommunications with motor vehicles, provides customized services such as driving directions, emergency roadside assistance, personalized news, sports and weather information, and access to e-mail and other productivity tools. The Kelsey Group predicts U.S. and European spending on telematics will exceed $6.4 billion by 2006.
· Companies looking to voice-enable the Internet and their IT establishments, whether it's providing information to consumers through "voice portals" or allowing employees to access corporate databases through spoken commands over the phone.
· The ability to squeeze convenient speech recognition into ever-smaller devices, such as phones, PDAs and other mobile devices.
This is happening not only in the U.S. but across the globe. For the most part, companies looking to deploy voice face a lot of similar issues. They want to know what business applications will bring more value to their customers and set them apart from their competition. Of course, the underlying question is, is the technology available in their language?
But because the goal of speech is to put a natural interface across technology and lower communications barriers, language is not the only consideration speech providers need to bear in mind. Cultural context is key. Speech providers need to consider not only whether specific applications will transfer across borders, but also how people in a country are likely to ask questions or request services, demographic variations, and what type of technology they are likely to warm toward. This can differ not only by country, but also within regions in a country.
Take something as basic as demographics for example. Even in a largely English-speaking country like Singapore, English accents vary. Data collected for automatic speech recognition show that older Singaporeans, influenced by a largely British education system, speak with a UK English accent. Younger ones, who've grown up on MTV and American movies, lean toward U.S. English. Another factor is language input. Because of the difficulty of Chinese character input on keyboard, Chinese software developers have brought to market applications using a combination of dictation, keyboard and pen input. Having the option of using more than one input method gives users added flexibility and convenience. Apart from language, we also need to consider the extent to which technology is embraced. Go to Akihabara in Japan and you'll find a proliferation of devices and gadgets. Japanese teenagers and even adults are glued to wireless services for communication, entertainment and their social interaction. Speech-enabled toys and games become a natural fit. A video game called Seaman, for example, has players interacting with a character that looks like a cross between a man and a fish. You talk to it; it talks back and asks you pointed questions. To the average American, the game might seem slow, even tedious.
Another example is ASIMO, Honda's "humanoid robot", which the company rents out at functions and events. The robot speaks Japanese, walks and understands voice commands and can be controlled by an operator tens of yards away by voice. It also knows which direction to face when a person talks to it. Honda says this is one step toward building robots of the future that "work in harmony" with people.
In Europe, especially Northern Europe, where countries have a much higher rate of wireless usage, telecommunications companies are looking to deploy value-added, Internet-related services to keep and grow customer loyalty. Apart from Web-related, wireless transactions, companies are interested in applications including services such as personal dialing assistant, where you can connect calls using your voice.
Businesses are also keen to deploy mobile workforce applications, for instance, where salespeople in the field can access price lists, order information, transact wirelessly and by voice or use multimodal applications. In Europe, more than anywhere else, there is a pent-up demand for transactional capabilities using both voice and, in the future, multimodal devices. This way, salespeople can ask for product specifications and have the information returned to them as a graphic. What companies want are robust voice applications for constant business use.
The combination of voice and machine translation technology used in tandem should not be overlooked. In the coming years, machine translation technology will bring an added dimension to speech, as the two are coupled together. Taken together, speech and language technologies are set to grow, and have the potential to bring business value and differentiation to companies worldwide.
Deutsche Bank already deploys machine translation to do gist translations of research reports and emails they receive from their English-speaking counterparts. Gist translation gives its readers enough accuracy to understand the meaning of the document, without the added polish of text edited by a human translator. The bank’s staff feel they are more productive reading the material in German than English much of the time. Taking this further, European developers and service providers are looking at how to offer machine translation over wireless networks and devices - and what types of services the public, as well as corporations, would subscribe to.
In the U.S., businesses are voice-enabling their call centers to perform simple, repetitive tasks so that their live agents can be put to more complex, value-added work. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology has helped participants in T Rowe Price's system, for example, to be receptive to using voice for simple inquiries. NLU not only allows end-users to speak naturally to the system rather than be bound by menus, it also enables the system to understand context. After you ask, for instance, for the price of the Franklin Templeton Growth Fund, you can ask for the objective of "that" fund and get your question answered.
There is no doubt that businesses here and abroad are looking to speech technology to help them do business more efficiently, save costs, and offer better customer service. Speech technology has come a long way, and has become a practical way to implement a range of applications. Base technology is becoming more robust, with improved algorithms and chip speeds, and with devices having as much power as the laptops of yesteryear.
Speech will increasingly be part of critical applications, and has the potential to become the means by which large segments of populations access technology – naturally and easily. The industry now needs to focus on making the interface more natural, tailoring it to fit specific cultural differences. Only then will speech move rapidly across cultural and national boundaries and become truly pervasive.
Ozzie S. Osborne is general manager of IBM Voice Systems.
http://www.speechtechmag.com/issues/7_2/cover/407-1.html
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Can someone explain this>????>
E.Digital IBM Microdrive 340MB
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"Manufactured by: e.Digital
Manufacturer Part No: 13-160059 "
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-Details.asp?sku=E124-1010
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?keywords=e-digital
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Bertelsmann, Perhaps Hedging Napster Bet, Will Try New Digital Format
DataPlay, a miniature storage system, has big dreams of supplanting CDs. With three of the five major labels now signed up, will it strike gold like DVDs or strike out like MiniDiscs?
by Warren Cohen
Inside.com
Monday, March 12, 2001
Bertelsmann may have one foot in the Napster camp, but the other is with the rest of the music industry in trying to find a new format for its music that will be piracy resistant. On Monday, BMG Entertainment announced that it has settled on one such format, as it signed a deal to release future recordings on DataPlay media.
The format, created by a Boulder, Colo.-based company, is a 250- or 500-megabyte micro-optical disc a bit bigger than a quarter, which stores the equivalent of five full-length CDs. These discs can fit in tiny drives that BMG hopes in the near future will be added to a host of devices -- home stereos, computers and portable players and perhaps digital cameras and Palm Pilots. DataPlay expects BMG to release music in the new format in time for the holiday season. 'I think the stars are aligned for a new miniature format that works in different appliances,' says DataPlay CEO Steve Volk.
Universal Music Group and EMI have already agreed to put music on DataPlay as well. With the three major labels now committed to the format, DataPlay has just over than 50 percent of the country's music repertoire (based on current market share figures for new and catalog sales). So if having the newest and most popular recordings is a key to success, DataPlay has a good head start. In contrast, the MiniDisc, a recordable CD-like product released by Sony, hasn't caught on in the U.S. because other labels don't release music for it.
But even with a stock of music, it is something of mystery why one format takes off and another stalls in the market for lack of interest. There are many theories for why the world listens to CDs today and not Digital Audio Tapes or Digital Compact Cassettes. But that exact formula for mass appeal -- the mysterious combination of interest from labels, retailers, stereo equipment makers and consumers is still indefinable. While DataPlay has a lot going for it, there are a few small things that could trip it up.
The strengths, however, are quite apparent. CEO Volk has engineering credibility as the developer for the standard hard drives used in today's laptop computers. The company has raised more than $115 million from its investors and partner companies and is busy building production facilities in East Asia. 'DataPlay is going to be a major player,' says Jay Samit, EMI's senior vice president for new media. 'They've got broad industry support without even being in the market yet.'
In addition to the three labels, music device manufacturers like Toshiba and Samsung, and portable MP3 makers SonicBlue (maker of the popular Rios) and Creative Labs have licensed the technology. Right now, a $5 to $12 DataPlay disc represents significant per megabyte savings over the flash memory typically used in MP3 players. Volk expects the DataPlay portable players to retail for $200 to $300, offering many more hours of music because of its capacity and ability to insert new discs easily.
DataPlay's popularity with manufacturers is also a partial sign that equipment makers may find it easier to add tiny DataPlay drives to machines to increase music playing power rather relying on an Internet connection to keep the stream of new music flowing. Certainly, those concerns are particularly true for home and car stereos.
The allure for the music industry is that the DataPlay discs play off the existing retail structure of the music business while providing some digital advantages. Music on DataPlay is protected like DVDs, so that labels can keep content from being copied. And with so much storage capacity, labels can slip things like samplers, music videos, artist interviews or even additional back catalog albums on a disc, which consumers can unlock later via the Internet for additional charges.
Unlike digital music, which potentially bypasses retailers, shopkeepers should hail DataPlay because tracking systems built into the media allow stores that made the initial sale to get a cut when a full DataPlay disc is accessed. 'When you go to Musicland and buy a Sting album on DataPlay, you could go back to Musicland.com to unlock the music video,' says Volk.
This combination allows for all sorts of new business and pricing models. EMI's Samit says that upselling is the key. He thinks the industry could even give away singles on DataPlay and have the entire album encrypted on the disc so that it could only be unlocked later for an additional fee. DataPlay could also bring the cost of music down. Says Volk: 'When you activate more content on DataPlay, it may cost less (than the primary album) because there is no distribution cost.'
The idea of locked content also avoids the current bottleneck in slow download times for Internet music, not to mention security concerns. Samit thinks subscription services could also be enhanced. 'When you talk about subscription services, some of them could let you make copies and hold on to them with this medium,' he says.
DataPlay gives a leg up to consumers as well. Unlike traditional CDs, consumers can record onto a blank disc that sells for $5 to $12 depending on its size. But due to copying concerns, discs can only be recorded once and can't be erased. It's still hasn't been decided whether to place a limit on each copied disc as to how far the chain of copying can go. 'Guys are thinking that you could make four to five copies of the original and maybe even copies of those,' says Volk. 'But there will be some form of digital-rights management. The average user won't be replicating thousands of copies in the basement.'
There are a few problems to be solved before DataPlay discs become as ubiquitous as CDs. To begin with, DataPlay is challenged by other competing formats trying to go well beyond the storage capacity of today's CDs. Kodak is developing a CDPROM, a hybrid format that has protected and recordable content like DataPlay. It's compatible with today's CD and DVD Players. Sony has created a tiny but pricey item called Memory Stick that go into laptops, digital music players and Palm Pilots. Sony also is pitching something called the Super Audio Compact Disc format, with superior sound quality designed for audio buffs. Warner Music, which also has yet to sign with DataPlay, has been among the most aggressive labels in releasing music in DVD-audio format, which offers surround-sound for home theaters, longer playing time and some extra video content like artist interviews. Volk says he's approached both Sony and Warner about DataPlay and is hoping to sign them up as well.
It's worth noting that, thus far, consumers have shown little sign of abandoning the CD. In fact, the introduction of recordable CDs has solidified the CD-centric universe. More than one billion blank recordable CDs were sold last year worldwide, more than double the amount sold in 1999. Such figures indicate that despite the hubbub about digital music, many consumers are simply transferring digital files onto an old-fashioned physical product that can be played in the home, car or on a portable device. DataPlay has to convince consumers that its smaller size and larger memory make buying new equipment worthwhile.
The final hurdle could involve DataPlay's small size. Laser Discs, big and round as a vinyl platter, never caught fire while today's DVDs, essentially the same product, are rapid sellers. But could DataPlay discs be too small for their own good? Retailers balked back when the CDs were introduced because they had to retrofit all existing bins to accommodate the slimmer CDs.
That's only one issue. Consumers buy music not only to hear it, but also to display it in cases and pore over liner notes and photos. Tiny DataPlay lessens the brag value. And while DataPlay's pint size is great for fitting in portable devices and cars, it may not be so good if the discs get lost behind bookshelves and under couch cushions. That may be a classic manufacturing problem for which innovative DataPlay may not have already devised a solution.
http://www.inside.com/product/product.asp?ACTION=MEDIAPASS&PF_ID=DF57ACE7-8EDF-404A-8532-2E658AE...
culater
OT-Aural arguments (found by funnyface on fonix bd.)
Margot Suydam, Technology Editor -- 4/1/2002
CommVerge
The concept of speech recognition conjures up disparate images. On one extreme, we see future humans conversing with computers that respond in a life-like manner. At the other extreme, we see today's frustrated cell-phone user repeatedly yelling at his or her handset in an attempt to get it to "call home."
Putting both fantasy and bad rap aside, the fact is that as the technology improves, voice recognition is making inroads on a number of fronts. Today, for example, consumers increasingly encounter advanced instant-voice-response (IVR) systems when they call the federal government, their bank, or an airline. Wireless carriers such as Sprint PCS and AT&T Wireless have deployed speech input to give subscribers access to driving directions, stock quotes, and other information. Meanwhile, standards such as VoiceXML are emerging to make Internet content and information accessible via voice and telephones.
According to the most vocal proponents of speech recognition (pun intended), the technology is poised to enter every walk of life. Jaded observers might respond that they've heard that one before. However, when the potential payoffs are so big, convergence product teams can't afford to ignore the most natural of all user interfaces.
Some market analysts see speech recognition as a technology on the brink of a surge. Reed Business Information In-Stat Group, for example, predicts that in 2005, sales of speech-recognition software engines—the basis for all speech-recognition products—will reach $2.7 billion. Meanwhile the Kelsey Group estimates that global expenditures on speech-related services will reach $41 billion by 2005.
"The explosion of this market is due to several factors," says Brian Strachman, senior analyst with In-Stat's Voice Applications Service. "First, microprocessor technology is advancing to the point where speech-recognition products are made faster, better, and cheaper. Secondly, demand from service providers and voice portals is creating new markets for speech-recognition products."
If one had to identify a major engine behind the spread of voice recognition, it could be the emergence of pervasive computing, as users require more intuitive ways to interact with convergence devices. "The market driver for voice-enabled services is our increasingly fast-paced lifestyle," says Greg Stone, senior product marketing manager at Sound Advantage, a provider of voice user interface software. "We live in a very fast-paced world, and so everyone has cell phones. Moreover, younger people are more apt to use new services such as SMS [short message service] and other technologies, so they will accept voice very quickly."
Voice-activated dialing, for example, is becoming standard on more high-end cell phones because it makes dialing easier on increasingly miniaturized mobile handsets, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road and comply with hands-free legislation. A voice interface can also flatten complex application menus. An example would be allowing a user to call out a song name instead of scrolling through a long list on an MP3 player.
All ears
Product teams looking at voice input and speech recognition must begin by understanding the different implementation options. These range from embedding speech technology in standalone devices to hosting it on networked servers. In addition, speech applications cover a wide range of complexity. There's a big difference between voice-activated dialing, which merely compares a stored recording of a voice command to the live voice input, and a full-fledged speaker-independent system, which aims to recognize any speaker and has a large working vocabulary.
Despite the market potential, speech-recognition technology continues to face technical and market hurdles. "One of the problems is that we watch TV shows like Star Trek, which sees us interacting with computers in a very natural dialogue, and people want to do that," Stone says. "For decades now, the application level has been over-marketed to people, and unfortunately the technology is not quite there yet. But it's getting there. The improvements just over the last three to five years have been tremendous."
“The key issue is carriers’ ability to have services that are available to all of their users. There are 130 million people with cell phones, and many of them have very limited capability.”
Mike Isgrig, One Voice Technologies
While companies like Nuance, SpeechWorks, IBM, and Lucent have been improving their speech-recognition engines, it is compelling applications that will drive voice technology acceptance, Stone contends. His company, for example, offers SANDi (Sound Advantage Natural Dialog Interface), a software-based unified communications system that speech-enables PBX, voicemail, fax, email, and CRM (customer relationship management) applications, with versions available for small, medium, and large businesses. In addition, the company offers network products that can support hundreds of thousands of users.
"Our job is to take the technology and deploy our application to make it have a pleasant human interface," Stone says. "In the late '80s and early '90s, everybody talked about the graphical user interface of Windows. Now it's the speech user interface. It is a whole new world, because you cannot touch it or see it; you can only hear it and talk about it. So it has to very flexible to user demands. It has to adapt to different situations. And it has to be easy to use. That is our challenge when we build software."
Because post-PC computing devices, such as handhelds, set-top boxes, and telematics products, are limited in processing power and memory footprint, however, they cannot deliver more than a command-and-control type of voice interface. More complex applications and larger vocabulary engines require higher processing power and memory, making server-based systems a necessity. The future, however, might bring distributed computing approaches, in which the device and server interact in a manner that is seamless to the user.
"In the near term, a lot of the activity is primarily on the network side," says Marcello Typrin, senior product marketing manager at Nuance, a provider of engines for both speech-recognition and text-to-speech. "In the network, you can more effectively scale and manage the implementation, as opposed to having software running on a device that is massively distributed in the market."
Embedded recognition software also presents a number of issues that make network implementations more realistic, Typrin argues. "If you look at the price point of the various devices, such as cell phones and PDAs, what consumers are willing to pay is pretty low," he says. "There are also issues around performance. You are really constrained by the footprint and processing power of the device. On cell phones, there is very little room that can be afforded to a recognizer. So you are very limited in what you can run on the device, if you are looking at a very large application, such as a voice portal or voice-automated directory assistance."
What today's network-based applications require, however, is the ability to automate more complex operations. To that end, Nuance's offers SayAnything, a technology that provides a user-centric approach to building voice applications. It supports a wider variety of questions from callers than simple command-and-control, vocabulary-based systems. "Historically, voice applications involved having an application developer trying to anticipate every possible thing that a user could say to a system," Typrin explains. "Today, we actually eavesdrop on what callers are saying and then apply some statistical modeling to what is said and not said. We take information based on real user inputs and so not only support a much broader vocabulary but also a much more natural interface."
Talk to the handheld
Other companies take the position that mobile devices can accommodate enough speech technology to bring large benefits. "When we talk about mobile devices, this is where the market will grow the fastest," says Eran Aharonson, president of Advanced Recognition Technologies (ART), a provider of speech- and handwriting-recognition technologies for mobile devices. "The issue is that the user interface is very bad, mostly because of the small size of the display. But speech provides users more control, and a better way to do dialing with handsets, especially when you're in a car, and need to keep your hands on the wheel."
Combining voice dialing and control functions for speaker-independent and speaker-dependent systems, ART's smARTspeak NG offers voice-enabled features such as name dialing, continuous digit dialing, menu navigation, and device control. "In order to offer a compelling user experience while operating in constrained environments, voice-recognition technology has to be very well integrated with the user interface of the machine," Aharonson explains.
“The improvements just over the last three to five years have been tremendous.”
Greg Stone, Sound Advantage
At embedded speech technologies provider Sensory, director of marketing Eric Soule maintains that today there are growing applications for embedded voice recognition in a wide variety of convergence products. Sensory's technologies, including speech recognition, speaker verification, speech synthesis, and animated speech, are used in consumer electronics, cell phones, PDAs, Internet appliances, interactive toys, and automobiles.
"Our specialty is running on systems that are highly constrained in terms of processing power and where memory is always premium," Soule says. "That is what's driving how much speech recognition you can do on device. There is a huge need for that, and that need will continue. We are a long way away from being 100 percent connected to some type of network. Also, a lot more computing horsepower is becoming available cheaply in portable products. There are more MIPS [millions of instructions per second] and memory, both of which you need for voice recognition. This makes voice an excellent complementary interface for a sporadically connected device."
Using a voice user interface can make it easier to interact with increasingly complicated convergence devices, notes D Lynn Shepherd, vice president of the Mobile/Wireless business unit at Fonix. "In the automotive market, the telematics and entertainment systems are becoming more and more complex, and speech is a way to simplify that," he says. "We use voice only for noncritical functions, such as communicating with phone, navigation, climate-control, and infotainment systems."
While most vendors of speech-recognition technology are focused on either supporting network- or device-based applications, Fonix offers product for both sides of the fence.
Fonix supplies ASR (automated speech response) and TTS (text to speech) engines, focusing on helping customers get to market quickly. "For example, we have an automotive platform that our customers can use to get their products created and implemented faster than if we were just selling an engine by itself," Shepherd says. "What we've also found is that people don't want to add extra hardware for speech. So our goal is to run right on the processor in the system."
The biggest technical challenge, according to Shepherd, is the limited processing power and memory footprint in handheld devices. "That's not quite as true with things like Pocket PC, where you have a StrongARM 200-MHz running," he says. "Still, to do larger speech tasks, memory is an important factor. You must minimize memory usage, CPU usage, and be able to work in very dynamic and noisy environments. To address this, we've taken the approach of using neural network technology, which uses a small memory footprint, and which we have designed in a way that it performs very well in noisy conditions."
On the server side, Fonix acts as a technology integrator for companies and service providers looking to voice-enable their applications. "We are offering a framework, which provides the ability though a single interface to interface any ASR and TTS system on the market today," says Dave Nelson, marketing manager for Fonix's CT/Server business unit. "Our target is system integrators who build a whole system for an enterprise or even telematics service providers. An OnStar, for example, is not doing in-vehicle telematics, but is server based and hosted on the back-end."
Open to all
Even if new mobile devices can carry ample speech-recognition technology, not everybody has a new mobile device. For that reason, network-based speech-recognition constitutes a burgeoning market, according to Mike Isgrig, vice president of marketing and sales at One Voice Technologies. The company offers the MobileVoice family of messaging, email, and activated-dialing applications.
"The key issue is carriers' ability to have services that are available to all of their users," Isgrig says. "There are 130 million people with cell phones, and many of them have very limited capability. Around 20 percent of the phones in the market in North America are analog, with no WAP [wireless application protocol] or email. Also, a lot of the phones that are digital have no SMS sending capabilities."
“Speech is a very natural interface when it comes to input and query. And it’s just an OK interface for other kinds of information.”
Paul LePage, InfoSpace
What it comes down to is the economic feasibility of carriers subsidizing new handsets for users. "If you look at the industry numbers right now, the cost per gross add for a carrier for a new subscriber is $340, and most of that is the handset," Isgrig says. "The economics are just really poor. There is a lot of chatter about high-end handsets, but this market is a Toyota market, not a Lamborghini market. While Lamborghinis are sexy, most of the people are driving Toyotas."
As a result, carriers can only provide advanced services to 20 percent of their consumers. But they can get around that limit with server-based applications. "That way the carrier can control the application, and it doesn't need to be burned into a handset and distributed," Isgrig says. "It doesn't require all of this new stuff, and they can roll it out to anyone, even if they only have an analog handset."
According to Isgrig, One Voice provides fourth-generation speech-recognition technology, which means the delivery of a large-vocabulary system over a mobile network, with the inherent data-channel limitations and environmental background noise. Isgrig also says the company's voice engine has reduced user training time to seven minutes. "The carriers have been ecstatic about this because it meets the hurdle of the mass-market being able to do it," he says. Moreover, such training is only required if users want to be able to dictate SMS messages to send; functions such as voice-activated dialing and having incoming messages read out requires no training at all.
William Yapp, director of worldwide business development for NMS Communications' Network Solutions Business, agrees that the emerging market is enabling wireless carriers to provide voice-enabled services, simply because of the limitations of most phones in use today. NMS recently announced NMS HearSay, an open system that enables wireless operators worldwide to provide communications services, including voice-activated dialing, personalized voice portals, short message services, unified messaging, chat, and conferencing.
"You can do voice dialing for a limited directory, but anything that is complicated just can't fit in the phone because of memory," Yapp says. "Certainly voice dialing may belong in the phone, but more complicated services—voicemail navigation, instant conferencing, and voice access to data—will have to be network-based so they can be ubiquitous across different devices."
Cooperative effort
Yapp also foresees a future where handset- and network-based voice technologies will work together. "There has to be a convergence of what's in the phone and what's in the network," he says. "There has to be similarities, and seamlessness, between those two to be successful. It will always be a hybrid approach because you can't even get a handset to work in different networks, never mind loading it up with a bunch of voice services."
Sensory's Soule agrees that there is a place for voice technology on both the device and network side. "Voice recognition will be driven on both sides, because you can do a whole lot more on the network," he says. "However, you need to be careful as to what you mean by distributed. I subscribe to the view where engines are actually distributed on both sides, and where you do feature extraction, taking key elements out of the speech on the device. And then most of the processing and dictionary search is done back on the server."
"We are starting to see the interest in systems that combine speech running on servers and embedded platforms," echoes Fonix's Shepherd. "This is where you may be able to have some speech tasks running on a device when you are not connected up to a network, and then other times the same application may run speech tasks on the network or server side. This distributed concept is starting to gain some momentum."
“On cell phones, there is very little room that can be afforded to a recognizer. So you are very limited in what you can run on the device.”
Marcello Typrin, Nuance
With the goal of leveling out the playing field and enabling carriers to offer service to more mainstream consumers, wireless Web portal applications provider Infospace, has hung its hat on VoiceXML, a markup language that makes Web-based information and services accessible via voice. "We provide a combination of messaging and content applications, which we serve up with different presentation layers to users, either with WAP, WindowsCE or SMS," says Paul LePage, senior vice president of speech solutions. "So when we go get speech, we are just adding another presentation layer to that mix, which is VoiceXML."
Infospace's applications run on a VoiceXML gateway, which is made up of a VoiceXML browser, a server that connects the gateway to the telephony infrastructure, and speech technology. "Speech is a very natural interface when it comes to input and query," LePage says. "And it's just an OK interface for other kinds of information. So our initial applications fall under the category of what I call asynchronous multimodality, where I am using speech input to provision SMS alerts, and then I'm using SMS as the presentation layer."
The goal is to provide an easy interface so that a wireless user can set up such events as SMS alerts of incoming news, stock quotes, or sport scores—without ever having to use a Web interface. "When we focus on North America, we focus on the penetration of the Web," LePage says. "But in other parts of the world, Web penetration is not as great, and so using another way to access SMS is a good thing."
Moreover, LePage contends, voice-enabled wireless applications can bridge the gap between consumer usage of voice services today with the emerging 2.5G and 3G data services. "If you look at the penetration of data services in the wireless subscriber base between now and 2006, speech is one of the ways to pull data services along," he says. "What's the killer app for wireless? It's making a phone call. If you look at some of the data applications that speech enables, they are along the same lines. Voice-activated dialing is using speech to find something and place a phone call. So it fits nicely in that intersection of pure data and voice services, and helps pull some of the data services forward as an option."
ART's Aharonson is more circumspect on how quickly consumers will take to voice-input technologies. "The biggest challenge will be marketing," he says. "Our technology today is good enough for production, but the main issue is education in how to make the whole thing right. There will be a lot of voice-enabled handsets coming this year and the next year, and it will just take time. In the past, people have had an over-expectation of speech. But this time we can actually deliver."
Author information
Technology Editor Margot Suydam (msuydam@cahners.com) has given up on yelling voice commands at her cell phone and reverted to using the keypad.
Let your mouth do the walking
Speech-technology vendors have their sights set on extending voice input to some of the more mainstream applications, including directory assistance and even Internet access.
With the market for public directory assistance estimated at $54.7 billion worldwide and 7 billion calls per year, Phonetic Systems wants to serve up voice recognition to the major carriers. Today, 411 inquiries are handled using voice input, but the system still requires that an operator manually look up the listing. What carrier directory assistance requires is a flexible speech system that can address price pressures, competition, labor costs, Internet accessibility, and the need to offer a wide range of information services, according to the company.
Phonetics' Voice Search Engine (VSE) technology supports large and dynamic directories, allowing it to recognize names from a list greater than 1 million listings. The Phonetic Systems voice-driven directory assistance system also provides carriers with technology that supports new applications, such as voice-automated white and yellow pages. Finnish carrier Sonera recently deployed the system.
Meanwhile, InternetSpeech aims to let users go online to surf the entire Internet, check and send email, and find specific information using their own voice and any telephone. Targeted at service providers for rollout to consumers and businesses, the netECHO technology lets users give simple voice commands like "Yahoo" or "email" to get Web-based information, and uses text-to-speech to read information aloud over the telephone. The company plans to allow applications such as stock trading and e-commerce with future versions of netECHO.
Q Comm International, a prepaid wireless technology and information services company, has signed an agreement with InternetSpeech to distribute voice-activated Internet service through Qxpress point-of-sale activation terminals. The new prepaid service enables those who purchase an InternetSpeech personal identification number through Qxpress to dial a number and connect to the Internet using any phone.
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA203873&pubdate=4/1...
culater
OT Teaching Flash for mobile devices
Publisher: Jørgen Sundgot, 28.03.02 12:48Albeit a relatively new possibility, that hasn't stopped 11 authors from teaming up to create the very first book on designing Flash for mobile devices such as Pocket PCs.
The most powerful mobile devices of today's day and age can pull off amazing features despite their small size. What was possible on the desktop some four to five years ago is now possible in your pocket, and just like that point in time was when the foundation for the success of Macromedia's Flash format on the desktop was laid, now is the point in time when the company is working to ensure that Flash will also be a success on mobile platforms.
The cover of Flash Enabled, a book for those who want to learn how to design Flash content for mobile devices
For now, mobile platforms such as Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 and Smartphone 2002 support Flash natively, while others support it through 3rd party software - both solutions which open up a new world of possibilities for animation and interactivity on mobile platforms as Flash in its time did on the desktop. As with Flash on the desktop, though, there are a few things that need to be learned and a great variety of tricks to be mastered, which is why 11 writers teamed up to write a new book called Flash Enabled, that aims to provide a guide to developing Flash content for mobile devices.
Several well-known profiles in the handheld community that have experimented with Flash for mobile platforms since the possibility arrived, such as Mike Chambers, Phillip Torrone and Bill Perry have written the book to guide Flash designers & developers in creating content and applications for multiple devices with Flash and other tools. The book focuses on the Pocket PC platform, but also discusses considerations in developing Flash for set-top box systems, cell phones, and lays the foundation for devices such as the Palm according to its authors.
Flash Enabled targets four main concepts including design/development considerations, creating content once & deploying to many platforms, creating Flash content for Pocket PC, and application development using Flash integrated with middle-ware. Throughout the book the authors provide guidelines, step-by-step tutorials, workflow, best practices, and case studies. Additionally, the website provides full source code, online resources, demo versions of relevant software and tips and tricks from the book.
http://www.infosync.no/show.php?id=1628
culater
Multiplatform iPod on the Horizon
Kelly McNeill
March 29, 2002
Media Four's XPlay is among a handful of compatibility products meant to bring Apple's iPod to the x86 PC.
Since its release, Apple's iPod MP3 player has been an anomaly like no other. Despite the fact that it is aimed at just 5 percent of the computing demographic, the device has managed to draw more media attention and consumer awareness than any competing MP3 player on the market.
While many hope that Apple eventually will release a palmtop device, margins on such products have been exceptionally low. Therefore, it is undesirable for companies to produce them unless they stand to gain immediate market share.
The Right Idea
Apple's decision to enter the alternative computer accessory market with the iPod appears to have been the right one. Digital cameras, Webcams and MP3 players are in high demand relative to other consumer accessories.
Explosive demand for the iPod has resulted in significant sales for Apple, despite the fact that it only makes iPod software for its own Macintosh operating system.
While Apple has said it does not have any immediate plans to introduce a Windows (or any other OS) compatible version of its high-profile MP3 player, that hasn't stopped others from making their own compatibility solutions for the device.
You Can Do It
Media Four's XPlay, for example, is among a handful of compatibility solutions meant to bring Apple's iPod to the x86 PC.
There is a common misconception among technology enthusiasts that Apple is somehow at odds with companies that offer these compatibility products. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Greg Joswiak, senior director of hardware product marketing at Apple, said, "We're always happy to see people use our products in innovative ways ... and if those innovative ways are to extend the iPod, we're happy with that."
For those hoping to use Apple's iTunes software instead of Windows Media Player (or other media player programs), there is a glimmer of hope. "We haven't closed the door on whether we'll do a Windows version or not," Joswiak noted.
Jeff Jorgensen, Media Four's director of business development, told NewsFactor that Apple employees were extremely receptive to XPlay when it was displayed at Macworld expos, and that the company plans to sell the software on its Web site at a later date.
Media Four made its XPlay iPod compatibility software available to the public for free during its alpha and beta stages, but the company will release a finished product in the next few days at a price of less than US$40.
How It Works
When an iPod is connected to a Macintosh, the hardware syncs with Apple's iTunes MP3 player software -- the aspect of Apple's product that is not compatible with PCs -- through the iPod's FireWire port, then copies any songs in iTunes' playlist into the iPod.
Without compatibility software, when an iPod is connected to an x86 PC the device behaves like a 5 or 10 GB hard drive (depending on which iPod you get) -- but songs aren't automatically synced into the iPod. In fact, songs are not accessible from the device, even if transferred manually.
XPlay changes all that. Media Four's software not only will provide the automatic synchronization capability that is currently only available on the Mac, but also will make MP3s retrievable via software plug-ins using Microsoft's Windows Media Player as its interface.
The company said it is also talking with other media player software companies about ways to offer similar functionality.
Options Available
As we all know, the world does not revolve around the Windows or Macintosh platforms; there are other operating systems that many of us use on a daily basis for work and play. This is why there is an effort in progress to create a way for Linux users to use Apple's iPod. (Such an effort means BSD support probably will follow soon.)
If you've hesitated to purchase an iPod in the past because your OS was not compatible with it, you might want to take another look. If a solution isn't currently available, it appears that one might hit the market in the near future.
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/17005.html
culater
Electronics Will Spark Drastic Changes in Car Designs
Jay Lyman
March 29, 2002
Drivers may soon be taking their cars in for software upgrades or tweaks. Automakers must be sure that 'all these things work the right way at the right time, all the time,' IEEE associate editor Elizabeth Bretz told NewsFactor.
An automobile equipped with joystick steering and an on-screen display of current speed and road conditions could become more than the stuff of video games in the near future, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The IEEE, a global tech professional society, reported that on-board electronics are being installed in more cars and are increasing in significance and reliability. In particular, the group said, systems that control brakes and steering have improved vastly.
Electronics likely will bring drastic changes to both high-end luxury models and mainstream cars, IEEE associate editor Elizabeth Bretz told NewsFactor.
Down the Road
According to Bretz, electronics could fuel drastic design changes, such as the replacement of steering wheels with joysticks or the replacement of dashboard gauges with windshield projections of speedometers and tachometers.
She also said there will be more integration of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other electronics that can connect to cars to store phone numbers, read e-mail or other functions.
"There's talk of a lot of that kind of stuff -- just demos and concept cars now," Bretz said.
Silicon Ride
The IEEE said that automakers are spending more on silicon and software as electronics gain a larger share of the cost of automobile systems, including under-the-hood controls, driver data systems and entertainment gear.
"It is now estimated that the cost of the electronics in a new car rises by 9 to 16 percent each year," the IEEE said. According to the group, the electronics share of the total cost for a mid-sized 2001 car was 19 percent.
The IEEE projects that by 2005, electronics will account for 25 percent of the cost of a mid-size vehicle and perhaps half the cost of a luxury model.
Wired Drive
Bretz told NewsFactor the "bells and whistles" of the latest cars -- individual seat movement and climate controls, sensors for belts and airbags, removable cell phones and other devices -- are all dependent on electronics.
Bretz, who said it is feasible drivers will soon be taking their cars in for software upgrades or tweaks, said automakers must be sure that "all these things work the right way at the right time, all the time."
Reliability Required
IEEE electronics writer Ivan Berger reported that automakers are going to great lengths to make sure that the electronics in cars can perform under extreme conditions, whether they occur under the hood or in the outside environment.
Warning that a 10-cent part can ruin a US$30,000 car purchase, Berger said automakers must deal with system access to keep service costs down and make cars for users who "give the product almost zero maintenance."
Berger is the author of a recent IEEE article, "Can You Trust Your Car?" published in the society's journal Spectrum.
Despite Berger's cautions, Bretz told NewsFactor, "I feel like you can trust your car now. No car company wants a tremendous liability issue."
http://techextreme.com/perl/printer/17012/
culater
Intel takes 'mercenary' approach on voice
by Steve Coplan
Thu, 28 Mar 2002
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Intel has taken a 'mercenary' approach to voice technology – spreading its bets between its proprietary telephony card business, voice over IP (VOIP) and potentially competing application protocols and development environments – in hopes that new applications will rekindle growth in its core PC and server markets. Although Intel isn't backing away from VoiceXML, the standard that has been two years in the making, its tangled relationship with Microsoft may mean that attention is shifted toward the Speech Applications Language Tags (SALT) Forum that is driven by Microsoft and focused on multimodality.
Strategy Intel has taken positions that could easily be interpreted as contradictory. The chipmaker is a major player in the VoiceXML Forum, and its engineers have helped draft and edit specifications in the VoiceXML W3C working group. It is also a founding member of the SALT Forum, a Microsoft-led initiative that is viewed by its political opponents, IBM and Nuance, as an attempt to sideline VoiceXML. Intel engineers, along with Voxeo's RJ Auburn, have edited drafts for Call Control XML (CCXML) protocols submitted to the W3C, and incorporated the same technology in SALT's 0.9 draft specification. In 1999, the company bought telephony card maker Dialogic, but it is also working on extending session initiation protocol (SIP) to the desktop through consumer products like Windows XP that will eventually render its telephony hardware obsolete.
Those contradictions can only be understood in terms of Intel's broader strategy, argues Intel Research Labs director Kamal Shah. Intel sees speech as the "killer app" to reignite desktop PC sales and foster sales of servers, which also happen to use Intel chips. Since speech recognition requires plenty of processing power, speech-based applications running over VOIP could prompt enterprises and consumers to reconsider whether a Pentium III PC is powerful enough for most applications. Since Microsoft has integrated SIP into Windows XP, effectively making the PC a SIP client, and is acting as a clearinghouse for VOIP service providers, there's a potential for applications to lead hardware upgrades.
However, as Microsoft gets more aggressive in pushing SALT for multimodal applications and its device operating systems, Intel may find it increasingly difficult to spread its bets around.
Context The first indication of Intel's intention to play a more significant role in the speech applications market was its acquisition of Dialogic, a maker of low-end telephony cards, for $780m. That business appears increasingly precarious as the telecom industry moves away from proprietary platforms and evolves to platforms that separate application logic and media processing.
Dialogic rival NMS is in the midst of a strategic shift away from being a supplier of component-level boards in favor of leveraging its signaling processing expertise in what could be described as media servers. That's not only because the interactive voice response market is suffering with the rest of the telecom equipment sector, but also because VoiceXML separates the application logic and telephony control, creating a far more economical platform for speech technology.
Technology Intel's aim is to provide "the building blocks for Internet infrastructure," notes Shah. In reality, that means the company wants to ensure that "network-centered devices," ranging from PCs to servers to handheld devices, are based on silicon. Since IP will likely be the common transport protocol on most, Intel wants to be involved in the development of multimodal server-based technology like SALT, noted Jim Trethewey, the Intel staff software engineer working on VoiceXML and CCXML, although it would be premature to predict the death of telephony hardware.
Intel concurs with Microsoft that SALT, rather than extension of VoiceXML, is best for multimodal applications since it extends the Web paradigm familiar to many developers. "But it's not true to say that SALT is an enemy of VoiceXML," Tretheway added.
Another area where Intel is dedicating resources that could bypass its telephony card business is in optimizing speech technology for its XScale processor used in handhelds, primarily Windows CE devices. Much of the traffic generated on handheld devices is unlikely to go through the public switched telephone network, where those cards are traditionally used. Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives program analyzes code traces for signaling, speech and audio processing in order to simplify the algorithms that control the functions and to reduce their footprint. Reducing the footprint of embedded applications is not only key because memory is a scarce resource on handheld devices, but also because there is a direct relationship between cost and density. So far, Fonix and SpeechWorks, both of which happen to be Microsoft partners, have worked with Intel on optimizing their software. IBM is doing similar work for its 405 low-power processor.
Conclusion Seen in a broader context, Intel's seemingly scattershot investment strategy in voice applications starts to make sense. The question is how long the company can sustain its inconsistent bets. Eventually, its relationship with Microsoft may prove to be decisive.http://www.the451.com/view/news_analysis.php?entity_id=15159&version=1§or_id=11&enti...
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IBM turns speech recognition 'super human'
by Steve Coplan
Wed, 27 Mar 2002
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IBM has found a catchy name for its efforts to convert its R&D in voice technology into a more substantive market presence. The company's 'super human speech recognition' initiative is aimed at developing software that performs tasks like transcription faster and cheaper than humans. The initiative extends from transcription applications to call center automation, embedded recognizers on handheld devices, multimodal applications and telematics. IBM remains a small player in speech recognition, but by aligning its research efforts with other divisions in the company, such as middleware and processors, prospects are sure to improve.
Since speech recognition technology in transcription services performs anywhere from three to 10 times worse than humans, IBM has set a realistic goal of closing the gap by the end of the decade. But because the improvements will be made incrementally, IBM expects to transfer the enhanced technology to its commercial division. Partners with specific expertise in vertical industries will create applications using its underlying software, rather than IBM relying on internal resources.
Context Despite its heft elsewhere in the software world, IBM trails behind smaller players like Nuance and SpeechWorks in commercial deployments of speech recognition. Aside from a natural language deployment at T. Rowe Price announced in June, the company has not penetrated into the call center market, the most promising market right now for speech recognition. Nuance and partners like Tellme have launched natural language services for millions of customers at carriers, illustrating the ability to deliver similar services at a substantial scale.
New challenges to IBM's ambitions in the realm of speech technology have emerged. The VoiceXML patent royalty dispute with Motorola delayed progress on the next version of the standard in the W3C, and created an opening for Microsoft to stake its own claim to the development environment for multimodal applications.
The Microsoft-led Speech Applications Language Tags (SALT) Forum aimed at developing a multimodal markup language has put IBM on the defensive. Other members of the forum, such as Intel, SpeechWorks and Cisco, have varying degrees of commitment to and investment in VoiceXML, and whether SALT will eclipse VoiceXML or supplement it remains a point of contention. Nevertheless, IBM has felt compelled to respond to the development with a plan for implementing VoiceXML modules in XHTML. At stake is the development environment for a crucial interface for Web services, and by extension, the success of either .NET or IBM's WebSphere and Eclipse open source initiatives.
Technology The initial focus of IBM's development efforts is 'audio-visual' speech recognition to improve accuracy in noisy environments like trading floors or inside a moving vehicle. The technology combines information gained from facial movements collected by a camera on a PC with results from a speech recognition engine. Facial movements are clues about what sounds the speaker is articulating. According to senior manager of human language technologies at IBM's research division David Nahamoo, the visual cues become "feature vectors" that in combination with speech recognition can reduce errors by a factor of three. For the moment, the technology is restricted to laptops because of demands on processing power, but IBM is investigating extracting the features for a distributed version that can be used on a handheld. The alternative is expensive microphone arrays, which consume far more processing power.
IBM sells both server-based recognizers and embedded versions of the technology. So, as director of the service provider segment at IBM's pervasive computing division Nigel Beck points out, IBM has more interest in creating the plumbing for effective applications than in either architecture taking off.
Still, another area of research at IBM is the optimization of its 405 low-power processor, code-named Earl, for speech recognition applications so that recognizers are smaller, and consequently cheaper, for inclusion with handheld devices. By adding another 5% in silicon for signaling processing to the processor, recognition could be sped up by a factor of 10. The company is also working with Intel on improving density and on reducing memory requirements for embedded concatenative text-to-speech engines to fit on the XScale processor. The low-power 405 will initially go into handheld games, Nahamoo said, but could potentially be used with PDAs and cell phones, in which case IBM would work alongside operating system manufacturers.
Competition While Nuance and SpeechWorks are direct competitors in speech recognition, Microsoft is more of a threat across the IBM software stack. The SALT versus VoiceXML debate will continue to rage, and IBM is now the chief proponent of the protocol it developed with Motorola and Lucent.Nahamoo and Beck contend that the debate over whether or not the SALT object programming model is more familiar to Web developers is a non-issue, and that some voice expertise is inevitably needed for multimodal applications.
Conclusion With its resources and strategic interest, IBM should have far more of a presence in the voice technology space. Parlaying its influence from other spheres could help, but as the SALT dispute illustrates, its position in speech technology remains vulnerable.http://www.the451.com/view/news_analysis.php?entity_id=15134&version=1§or_id=11&enti...
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OT-OSs target handhelds and smart phones
Richard Nass, Editor-in-Chief
As the move to 2.5G and 3G continues, OS vendors look to add the necessary features and functions.
When you look at the reliability of a portable, the first place you should look is the operating system. This is usually the place where a system will encounter a bug. Hence, the OS is the most logical and effective place to attack the reliability problem.
OSs in general can be catogorized into three groups. The first group is those OSs that are wide open and simple and don't really offer any protection mechanisms or reliability features. They're just flat address models, designed for simple applications that require low cost, minimum overhead.
This type of OS puts a heavy burden on the application developer to ensure that every line of code in that application is perfect. Unfortunately, this isn't practical in most cases. That's why systems freeze more often than users would like.
Click here to enlarge image
Fig. 1. VxWorks 5.x is the run-time component of the Tornado II embedded development platform, which includes a suite of core and optional cross-development tools and utilities.
"The operating system is in a unique position to deliver reliability in a device," says John Carbone vice-president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "There's only so much you can do in the application or the hardware."
The second group includes those that employ memory protection, using the memory-management unit (MMU). This protects some regions in a program from impact by other regions. OSs that operate in this fashion include Unix derivatives like Linux, OSE, VxWorks, QNX, and LynxOS.
Shipshape
Carbone continues, "The analogy that we like to use is the Titanic, a big boat that hit an iceberg and sank. The hole that the iceberg put in its hull was relatively small. But the water poured in, it flooded the whole ship, and the ship went down. Since then, ships have been built with water-tight compartments, so that if there's a hole anywhere in the hull, only that one compartment will get flooded and everything else remains buoyant and the ship continues."
Water-tight compartments for ships are similar to what the MMU does for systems on a microprocessor. An MMU enables you to contain any activity to within an arbitrary number of regions, which the developer can define, so that if something goes wrong in one area of the program, it won't (or shouldn't) affect other areas of the program.
There are some benefits of memory management, depending on how it's implemented. But in its simplest form, it puts up walls around individual components of a program to prevent other programs from writing into those components.
An offering from OSE Systems, the OSE real-time kernel, combines rich functionality with high performance and true real-time behavior. It's a fully preemptive kernel that's optimized to provide low latency and high data throughput. But it accomplishes this feat in a footprint that's compact enough for use in most embedded systems.
The OSE kernel allows for run-time reconfiguration. In addition, it supports advanced memory management that allows application code to execute in protected areas of memory. It also includes comprehensive error handling, and powerful source and application add device-level debugging features.
Without this level of protection, any bug that's encountered will eventually propagate. Anything that goes wrong in one part of the program could overwrite the kernel or other data that causes the program to behave in an unpredictable manner. This type of bug is difficult to find because it doesn't manifest itself directly. It's a third- or fourth-order effect that ends up causing the wrong event to occur. The memory-management protection bounds the bugs, hopefully ensuring that they can't run rampant and cause a product failure.
CPU bugs
The same type of bug can affect the CPU as well as the memory. For example, if a bug causes a subroutine to run, that would take some percentage of the CPU's bandwidth—half. If the bug continues to call that subroutine, each time equally dividing the CPU bandwidth, eventually the system would be brought to its knees.
Operating systems like Green Hills's Integrity is built with a feature called guaranteed resource availability. The OS enables the designer to guarantee a certain percentage of CPU time to whichever program he deems necessary. OSs with this level of protection fit into the third group.
Developers must look closely at the cost of an OS, which can sometimes be a tricky endeavor. There can be various costs involved, such as the royalties that need to be paid for every end product sold, a one-time price for the kernel, the cost of development tools, and the cost of support.
There are probably more pricing models than there are operating systems, depending on the number of systems you intend to produce, the amount of support that's required, the tools that need to be purchased, and so on. For example, Integrity is royalty free. For the most part, there's just a one-time fee that must be paid, then a charge per developer. Some OSs, like Linux, are in the public domain, but you're on your own if you need support, although there are some good outlets for support, albeit at a price.
Then there's the hardware cost that's brought down by the operating system. In other words, different OSs demand different levels of hardware, mainly in terms of the CPU that's required to run the OS and the memory footprint needed to store the OS.
These hardware-related costs have changed dramatically over the last few years. For example, the price of memory has dropped so significantly that many developers don't go too far out of their way to reduce the code size. The exception to this is the system that's at the low end, where designers are more concerned with watching every penny.
On the processor side, the increased performance offered by the latest microprocessors eases the burden on CPU allocation. Five years ago, the total bandwidth in a high-end embedded processor might have been 30 MHz; today it's up in the hundreds of megahertz.
One Linux provider that offers the necessary support, is MontaVista Software. The company released version 2.1 of its product, which increases the hardware and software support, as well as the tools and real-time capabilities. For example, the OS supports more than 20 processors, including x86/IA-32, PowerPC, StrongARM, XScale, ARM, MIPS, and SH.
MontaVista Linux 2.1 is based on the latest Linux kernel, 2.4.17. It also offers the company's real-time enhancements to the Linux kernel, including preemptibility on the x86, MIPS, SH, and PowerPC architectures.
Host-based tools and embedded target-based deployment components comprise more than 215 software packages in the release. Linux 2.1 enables 15 new embedded applications packages, and offers support for the 802.11b wireless communications standard.
Accelerated Technology also offers a non-royalty based RTOS, Nucleus. The company recently announced that it has partnered with NetSilicon to integrate Nucleus and its CodeLab software into the NetSilicon's NET+ARM Ethernet-ready system-on-chip (SoC). The combined product is aimed at intelligent networked devices and Internet appliances.
The heart of the SoC is an ARM7TDMI RISC processor and NetSilicon's NET+50 32-bit SoC. The integrated software includes the CodeLab embedded development environment, Nucleus, a TCP/IP protocol stack, client-server package, and an Ethernet driver. The result is an out-of-box solution that can reduce development costs, as well as time to market.
Fig. 2. In the RTXC Quadros RTOS, developed by Lineo, application operations occur in three zones?one for interrupt servicing, one for thread operations, and one for start-up and initialization code, and task operation.
One operating system that gets a lot of attention in the portable market is Microsoft's Windows CE. The latest version, dubbed Windows CE .NET, is aimed squarely at next-generation smart mobile and small-footprint devices. CE .NET is the successor to CE 3.0. Designed from the ground up for embedded devices, Microsoft claims that CE .NET offers real-time OS performance for devices that require networking, hard real-time, a small footprint, and multimedia and Web-browsing capabilities.
Windows CE .NET includes scalable wireless technologies that simplify the connection to existing infrastructures. Supported wireless technologies include Bluetooth, 802.11, the Object Exchange (OBEX) binary protocol, and MediaSense for roaming capabilities.
The CE .NET OS supports a host of microprocessors and emulation technologies, including ARM (ARM720T, ARM920T, ARM1020T, StrongARM, and XScale), MIPS, SH-3, SH-3 DSP, and SH-4, and x86 (486, 586, Geode, and Pentium I/II/III/IV).
Another OS that offers a streamlined Web-browsing capability is QNX, with its Voyager browser. Voyager is a component that's full-featured yet highly modular. Hence, it can run in a compact or full mode. For systems that need core browser functionality in a minimal memory footprint, designers can scale down Voyager to a basic browser. Or, for a more advanced system, it can be scaled up to include support for different languages, a dial-up connector, etc. Voyager ships with an Internet dial-up point-to-point (PPP) connector with dialogs and a script editor for automatic log-in.
VxWorks 5.x, the latest in the family, is the run-time component of the Tornado II embedded development platform. Tornado II includes a suite of core and optional cross-development tools and utilities, as well as a series of communications options for the target connection to the host (Fig. 1).
Because of its history, VxWorks offers more than scalable and reliable 1800 APIs, from simple to complex variations. The VxWorks RTOS comprises the core capabilities of the Wind microkernel along with advanced networking support, a file system, I/O management, and C++ and other standard run-time support. These core capabilities can be combined with add-on components available from Wind River or one of the company's WindLink partner companies.
The VxWorks run-time environment's inter-task communications mechanisms permit independent tasks to coordinate their actions within a real-time system. The developer can design applications using shared memory (for simple sharing of data), message queues and pipes (for inter-task messaging within a CPU), sockets and remote procedure calls (for network-transparent communication), and signals (for exception handling). For controlling critical system resources, several types of semaphores are provided, such as binary, counting, and mutual exclusion with priority inheritance.
Lineo's RTXC Quadros second-generation RTOS is composed of two architectural modules: a single-stack kernel and a multi-stack kernel. This results in a flexible configuration that can be scaled to match the application. In RTXC Quadros applications, all operations occur in three zones (Fig. 2); Zone 1 is for interrupt servicing; Zone 2 is for all thread operations, the RTXC/ss kernel, and the RTXC/ms kernel; and Zone 3 is for start-up and initialization code, and task operation.
In the Palm
The latest version of the Palm OS, version 4.0, adds some features that both designers and end users have been looking for. These include enhanced security, the ability to view and clear multiple alarms and to set silent alarms, support for 65,000 colors, an easier data-entry method, and wireless Internet and e-mail access.
The security feature puts an automatic lock on the handheld computer with password protection. Sensitive data can be encrypted for additional security. The silent-alarm feature can set vibrating or LED/flashing light alarms. Or, users can use the more traditional tune playing. The 65,000-color support opens the device to new applications, such as enhanced e-mail and spreadsheets, electronic books, video clips, and photos.
Easier data entry is enabled by allowing simultaneous use of the on-screen keyboard with Graffiti writing. By installing the included Mobile Connectivity Software on a PDA, users can employ the PDA in concert with a data-enabled mobile phone (which acts as a wireless modem) to send/receive e-mail or access the Internet.
While many OSs target multiple applications, the Symbios OS is aimed squarely at the handheld, PDA, smart phone markets. The company is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, and Psion, and the OS is licensed by some of the key mobile phone makers. As such, the OS simplifies the process of integrating telephony with advanced data services, as it incorporates a common core of APIs desired by the phone manufacturers.
Accelerated Technology
Mobile, AL
(800) 468-6853 or (251) 661-5770
www.acceleratedtechnology.com
Green Hills Software
Santa Barbara, CA
(805) 965-6044
www.ghs.com
Lineo
Lindon, UT
(800) 490-9448
www.lineo.com
MontaVista Software
Sunnyvale, CA
(408) 328-9200
www.mvista.com
Microsoft
Redmond, WA
(425) 882-8080
www.microsoft.com
OSE Systems
San Jose, CA
(866) 844-7867 or (408) 392-9300
www.enea.com
Palm
Santa Clara, CA
(408) 878-9000
www.palm.com
QNX Software Systems
Kanata, Ontario
(613) 591-0931 or (800) 676-0566
www.qnx.com
Symbian
London, England
+44 20 7563 2000
www.symbian.com
Wind River Systems
Alameda, CA
(510) 748-4100 or (800) 872-4977
www.wrs.com
Portable Design March, 2002
Author(s) : Richard Nass
http://pd.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTIC...
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OT-Taking The Lead For IBM
By Craig Zarley
Sam Palmisano is already writing himself a new headline
Just an hour earlier, the man who will become IBM's eighth CEO on March 1 had finished addressing 5,000 IBM employees and business partners attending the company's PartnerWorld 2002 show in San Francisco.
Now, in a private conference room off a secluded hallway in the Moscone Center, Palmisano sheds his blue blazer and prepares to discuss with CRN editors his channel game plan for a new IBM that he helped grow from a hardware goliath to the global leader in IT services.
CEO-to-be Sam Palmisano says Big Blue will get closer to partners that go to bat for its products and services.
"Everybody wants to dwell on the fact that [IBM] Global Services is $37 billion and when I got there 10 years ago it was $350 million," he said. "Those are wonderful headlines. But the fact is, we're really small, and there is so much opportunity that we can't get to."
Palmisano pegs today's IT services market at $450 billion and calls IBM Global Services (IGS) a "niche player" with roughly a 10 percent market share. IGS now has about 155,000 employees, but to get to 20 percent market share it would need to hire almost 100,000 additional employees, he said.
Instead, Palmisano has the channel in his crosshairs. In his PartnerWorld keynote, he said that about one-third of IBM's 2001 revenue,or nearly $29 billion, more than the combined 2001 sales of key rivals Sun Microsystems and EMC,was generated by solution providers.
"Customers are going to want more solutions and more integration services. The key to us being successful in that market is a partnering strategy," he said.
At the same time, however, Palmisano wants solution providers to have faith in IBM. To build what he calls "horizontal digital integration" across the enterprise, IBM and its partners must trust one another and share opportunities, he said. To that end, Ralph Martino, vice president of strategy and marketing at IGS, said at PartnerWorld last week that IBM would let partners take the lead on consulting and systems integration services in enterprises with $100 million or less in annual revenue.
With that line drawn, IBM will pass leads to partners in the less-than-$100 million market and, in turn, expect partners to feed IBM leads for larger enterprises.
"The proof is in the pudding," Palmisano said. "If we actually see demand passed back and forth, then people are trusting each other. I don't know if we're there yet, on either side. We don't see a lot [of leads] coming our way, either," he laughed.
Channel executives who met privately with Palmisano in San Francisco said he made it clear that if solution providers want more from IBM, they will have to grow their IBM business. Rick Hamada, president of Phoenix-based Avnet Computer Marketing, one of IBM's largest business partners, said Palmisano is "going to task partners more."
"He wants more growth in the SMB market, and he wants to get through any issues with the channel on services," Hamada said. "But I'm very enthusiastic [about Palmisano taking over as CEO]."
Solution providers say IBM has already made progress in forging tighter partnerships between IGS and the channel.
Dave Lavanty, managing director at Miami-based solution provider Answerthink, said his company boosted its business with IBM by 300 percent last year in part because it developed tight relationships with local IGS reps. "We do a lot of planning at the local level so we're not stepping all over each other in the account," he said.
'[Palmisano] wants more growth in the SMB market, and he wants to get through any issues with the channel on services.' --Rick Hamada, Avnet Computer Marketing
Still, constant communication with IGS is necessary to maintain the relationship, Lavanty noted. "It's like herding cats," he said.
Palmisano said he knows that partnering isn't easy, but IBM and its solution providers must recognize that the changing nature of the IT landscape demands that they get the job done.
"The relationship is about sharing, not 'We give, you take,' " he said. "I know it's been a sore point for years, but we don't in any way intend to disintermediate the channel. It's a huge opportunity, and IBM can't get at all of it [alone]."
By the middle of next month, IGS plans to identify its IT services capabilities in each of its 16 regions worldwide. "ISVs have been looking for help from us to declare where we are going to have service delivery capabilities and where we are not," Martino said. And by spelling out IGS' capabilities, business partners will get a better grasp of where they can step in and fill gaps with their solutions, he added.
The clearer rules and improved communication are beginning to resolve conflicts with IGS, some solution providers said.
"A year ago, I would rate my relationship with IGS as a 6 [on a scale of 10]. Today, I'd give them an 8," said Mike Henry, CEO of Jack Henry & Associates, a Monett, Mo.-based systems integrator. "They are sitting down and listening to us and not competing against us. Clients will pick up in a hurry if you're working together or if you are competing."
But in his quest for closer channel relationships, Palmisano knows he is asking solution providers to forgo some of their multivendor product tendencies in favor of IBM's offerings.
"What I would love to see over time is that the channel will help us gain share. I respect the fact that they are going to always be able to offer multiple platforms," he said. "But I'd like to be pragmatic and say that there are some IBM partners that are really with us and are going to go for [market] share with us, and we should really have a relationship that helps us accomplish that goal. In an industry that's solution-based, it's going to be a white-knuckle battle for share, and we need to have some key partners that work with us and drive that."
And solution providers that partner with IBM can expect greater rewards from the vendor, Palmisano and other IBM executives said.
For instance, at PartnerWorld, the IBM Software Group revealed that it would extend its Top Contributor Initiative rebate program to consultants and integrators that have influenced IBM software sales in the midmarket space, said Anne Smith, vice president of consultants and integrators for IBM global business partners. IBM and its integrators jointly set partner sales objectives for IBM software, and solution providers that reach 100 percent of their sales goal will receive a 4 percent rebate. Partners that top 100 percent up to 150 percent of their goal get an 8 percent rebate, and those topping 150 percent of their goal receive a 12 percent rebate.
IBM also is encouraging partners that build tighter relationships with it to expand their certifications and skills. Harvey Najim, president and CEO of San Antonio-based Sirius Computer Solutions, one of IBM's largest North American business partners, said his company is taking the leap into Linux, which IBM declared a major initiative last year.
"IBM has raised the noise level so loud that if you are not involved [with Linux], you are missing the boat," Najim said. "If IBM says Linux is important, it is. When they talk, we listen. When they have a cold, we almost die."
Palmisano said the stability of IBM's strategy and the breadth of its offerings minimize the risks for solution providers that align their businesses closely with the vendor. "We have no need for a major strategy shift, unlike our competitors," he said.
Such stability is largely responsible for the more than 210 new business partners that have entered the IBM fold from competing vendors over the past year, Palmisano said. Though realizing that the widening scope of IBM's business could make partnering even more complex, he said that he remains committed to creating strong, long-term relationships with solution providers.
"It's starts with accepting the fact that the channel is fundamental to IBM's long-term success. And this relationship will have to evolve because this industry will have to evolve," Palmisano said.
"The model that existed, a hardware fulfillment model, has evolved to a solution provider model that is pulling through the infrastructure," he said. "As the industry evolves, we will have to evolve together. But IBM is not going to evolve in such a way that we leave the channel behind."
JOSEPH F. KOVAR & KELLEY DAMORE contributed to this story.
http://www.crn.com/sections/coverstory/coverstory.asp?ArticleID=33525
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OT-Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing
Computer scientists are developing systems that can enhance and enrich a user's view of the world
By Steven K. Feiner
What will computer user interfaces look like 10 years from now?
...
http://www.sciam.com/2002/0402issue/0402feiner.html
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OT-Digital Piracy Burden Falling on Industry
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By Bob Keefe
March 15, 2002
Consumer advocates argue that the DMA and moves by companies are constraining everyday consumers, who are allowed by law to make recordings for their own use.
As the widespread availability of copyrighted music and movies over the Internet has proved, once content is available for free on the Web, it's impossible to stop it from being widely shared.
So entertainment and technology companies, lawmakers and others are starting to change their strategy in the war against online pirates: to protect what they have, instead of going after those who take it.
Their latest weapons include digital "watermarks'' that prevent the illegal transfer of copyrighted music or movies over the Internet, software that limits the time a user can use downloaded material, and other technologies.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
Out of the Barn
"Virtually all the music in the world is now available in the digital space,'' Richard Parsons, the incoming chief executive of entertainment giant AOL Time Warner Inc. told a congressional panel Thursday.
"You can't get that horse back in the barn. But going forward, we as an industry need to come up with a standard for protecting (copyrighted works) at the source,'' he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
While the music industry has won legal fights against online swapping service Napster Inc. and others, sharing copyrighted music for free over the Internet is more popular than ever. Computer users exchange millions of songs each day, by some estimates.
Copying on Rise
With high-speed Internet service now widely available, illegal downloading of copyrighted movies is also on the rise - some stolen from production houses, others uploaded to the Web from DVDs or videotapes.
Copyright owners seem unsure how to proceed.
One proposal, being drafted by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., would require virtually any interactive device - computers, video recorders or music players - to include hardware or software that prohibits making multiple copies of copyrighted material.
Another idea floating around Hollywood and elsewhere is to monitor the movies and music that flow through the Internet, match their digital code to databases of copyrighted material, and prohibit the transfer of illegal files.
Tech Challenges
Craig Barrett, the chief executive of semiconductor maker Intel Corp., said that would be impossible today.
"There are huge technological challenges to doing that. I don't know how to do it. And I think there are also some huge privacy challenges when you're effectively listening in on someone's Internet traffic,'' Barrett told the Judiciary Committee.
Congress has wrestled with the issue of digital copyright management for years. In 1998, it passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits unauthorized copying of digitized copyrighted works, or the use or creation of software to do so.
Consumer advocates argue that the act and other moves by companies are constraining everyday consumers, who are allowed by law to make recordings for their own use. New rules could be more harmful than helpful for most people, some say.
Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Internet search engine Excite.com who now runs an organization called digitalconsumer.org, used his parents as examples.
Personal Use Rights
Kraus said his father was recently perplexed and angry when he discovered he couldn't skip over movie promotions using his new DVD player like he could with his old VCR. His mother, meanwhile, can't record some of her CDs onto her MP3 music player because they're encrypted to prevent copying.
"In the debate over how we prevent illegal copying, my parents, unbeknownst to them, are losing their historic personal use rights,'' Kraus said. "This is wrong and cannot be allowed to continue unabated.''
But the failure of the 1998 law to curtail illegal swapping has lawmakers focusing on the problem once again.
"Unless something is done, cooperatively and inclusively with all the industries involved, I think we're going to be simply forced to watch the massive theft of all kinds of creative content around the world,'' said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Better Safeguards
To illustrate how common digital theft is, Feinstein and others showed off copies of "Shrek,'' "Lord of the Rings'' and other movies - some still in theaters - that were downloaded from the Internet.
Many come from decentralized file sharing services with no central server, and often no office or trackable location. Many are operated from overseas.
"As I see it, this is Napster times ten, because nobody can shut these services down,'' said Feinstein.
Lawmakers and industry executives agreed Thursday that the best approach to the problem, at least for now, is to let the technology industry develop better safeguards for digital recordings before they are available on the Internet - and without intervention from Congress.
"I think it would be a disaster to have legislation go through now,'' said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16788.html
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OT-The Worldwide Computer
An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips
By David P. Anderson and John Kubiatowicz
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SUBTOPICS
Internet-Scale Applications
What's Mine Is Yours
Who Gets What?
A Basic Architecture
An Application Toolkit
SIDEBARS
Existing Distributed Systems
Primes and Crimes
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
RELATED LINKS
PHILIP HOWE
When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn't just sitting there. It's working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers.
This sharing of resources doesn't stop at her desktop computer. The laptop computer in her satchel is turned off, but its disk is filled with bits and pieces of other people's files, as part of a distributed backup system. Mary's critical files are backed up in the same way, saved on dozens of disks around the world.
Later, Mary watches an independent film on her Internet-connected digital television, using a pay-per-view system. The movie is assembled on the fly from fragments on several hundred computers belonging to people like her.
Mary's computers are moonlighting for other people. But they're not giving anything away for free. As her PC works, pennies trickle into her virtual bank account. The payments come from the biotech company, the movie system and the backup service. Instead of buying expensive "server farms," these companies are renting time and space, not just on Mary's two computers but on millions of others as well. It's a win-win situation. The companies save money on hardware, which enables, for instance, the movie-viewing service to offer obscure movies. Mary earns a little cash, her files are backed up, and she gets to watch an indie film. All this could happen with an Internet-scale operating system (ISOS) to provide the necessary "glue" to link the processing and storage capabilities of millions of independent computers.
Internet-Scale Applications
Although Mary's world is fictional--and an Internet-scale operating system does not yet exist--developers have already produced a number of Internet-scale, or peer-to-peer, applications that attempt to tap the vast array of underutilized machines available through the Internet [see box]. These applications accomplish goals that would be difficult, unaffordable or impossible to attain using dedicated computers. Further, today's systems are just the beginning: we can easily conceive of archival services that could be relied on for hundreds of years and intelligent search engines for tomorrow's Semantic Web [see "The Semantic Web," by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila; Scientific American, May 2001]. Unfortunately, the creation of Internet-scale applications remains an imposing challenge. Developers must build each new application from the ground up, with much effort spent on technical matters, such as maintaining a database of users, that have little to do with the application itself. If Internet-scale applications are to become mainstream, these infrastructure issues must be dealt with once and for all.
We can gain inspiration for eliminating this duplicate effort from operating systems such as Unix and Microsoft Windows. An operating system provides a virtual computing environment in which programs operate as if they were in sole possession of the computer. It shields programmers from the painful details of memory and disk allocation, communication protocols, scheduling of myriad processes, and interfaces to devices for data input and output. An operating system greatly simplifies the development of new computer programs. Similarly, an Internet-scale operating system would simplify the development of new distributed applications.
MOONLIGHTING COMPUTERS
XPLANE
An ISOS consists of a thin layer of software (an ISOS agent) that runs on each "host" computer (such as Mary's) and a central coordinating system that runs on one or more ISOS server complexes. This veneer of software would provide only the core functions of allocating and scheduling resources for each task, handling communication among host computers and determining the reimbursement required for each machine. This type of operating system, called a microkernel, relegates higher-level functions to programs that make use of the operating system but are not a part of it. For instance, Mary would not use the ISOS directly to save her files as pieces distributed across the Internet. She might run a backup application that used ISOS functions to do that for her. The ISOS would use principles borrowed from economics to apportion computing resources to different users efficiently and fairly and to compensate the owners of the resources.
Two broad types of applications might benefit from an ISOS. The first is distributed data processing, such as physical simulations, radio signal analysis, genetic analysis, computer graphics rendering and financial modeling. The second is distributed online services, such as file storage systems, databases, hosting of Web sites, streaming media (such as online video) and advanced Web search engines.
What's Mine Is Yours
Computing today operates predominantly as a private resource; organizations and individuals own the systems that they use. An ISOS would facilitate a new paradigm in which it would be routine to make use of resources all across the Internet. The resource pool--hosts able to compute or store data and networks able to transfer data between hosts--would still be individually owned, but they could work for anyone. Hosts would include desktops, laptops, server computers, network-attached storage devices and maybe handheld devices.
The Internet resource pool differs from private resource pools in several important ways. More than 150 million hosts are connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially. Consequently, an ISOS could provide a virtual computer with potentially 150 million times the processing speed and storage capacity of a typical single computer. Even when this virtual computer is divided up among many users, and after one allows for the overhead of running the network, the result is a bigger, faster and cheaper computer than the users could own privately. Continual upgrading of the resource pool's hardware causes the total speed and capacity of this über-computer to increase even faster than the number of connected hosts. Also, the pool is self-maintaining: when a computer breaks down, its owner eventually fixes or replaces it.
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More than 150 MILLION hosts are connected to the Internet, and the number is GROWING exponentially.
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Extraordinary parallel data transmission is possible with the Internet resource pool. Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem. Data stored in a distributed system are available from any location (with appropriate security safeguards) and can survive disasters that knock out sections of the resource pool. Great security is also possible, with systems that could not be compromised without breaking into, say, 10,000 computers.
In this way, the Internet-resource paradigm can increase the bounds of what is possible (such as higher speeds or larger data sets) for some applications, whereas for others it can lower the cost. For certain applications it may do neither--it's a paradigm, not a panacea. And designing an ISOS also presents a number of obstacles.
Some characteristics of the resource pool create difficulties that an ISOS must deal with. The resource pool is heterogeneous: Hosts have different processor types and operating systems. They have varying amounts of memory and disk space and a wide range of Internet connection speeds. Some hosts are behind firewalls or other similar layers of software that prohibit or hinder incoming connections. Many hosts in the pool are available only sporadically; desktop PCs are turned off at night, and laptops and systems using modems are frequently not connected. Hosts disappear unpredictably--sometimes permanently--and new hosts appear.
The ISOS must also take care not to antagonize the owners of hosts. It must have a minimal impact on the non-ISOS uses of the hosts, and it must respect limitations that owners may impose, such as allowing a host to be used only at night or only for specific types of applications. Yet the ISOS cannot trust every host to play by the rules in return for its own good behavior. Owners can inspect and modify the activities of their hosts. Curious and malicious users may attempt to disrupt, cheat or spoof the system. All these problems have a major influence on the design of an ISOS.
Who Gets What?
An internet-scale operating system must address two fundamental issues--how to allocate resources and how to compensate resource suppliers. A model based on economic principles in which suppliers lease resources to consumers can deal with both issues at once. In the 1980s researchers at Xerox PARC proposed and analyzed economic approaches to apportioning computer resources. More recently, Mojo Nation developed a file-sharing system in which users are paid in a virtual currency ("mojo") for use of their resources and they in turn must pay mojo to use the system. Such economic models encourage owners to allow their resources to be used by other organizations, and theory shows that they lead to optimal allocation of resources.
Even with 150 million hosts at its disposal, the ISOS will be dealing in "scarce" resources, because some tasks will request and be capable of using essentially unlimited resources. As it constantly decides where to run data-processing jobs and how to allocate storage space, the ISOS must try to perform tasks as cheaply as possible. It must also be fair, not allowing one task to run efficiently at the expense of another. Making these criteria precise--and devising scheduling algorithms to achieve them, even approximately--are areas of active research. The economic system for a shared network must define the basic units of a resource, such as the use of a megabyte of disk space for a day, and assign values that take into account properties such as the rate, or bandwidth, at which the storage can be accessed and how frequently it is available to the network. The system must also define how resources are bought and sold (whether they are paid for in advance, for instance) and how prices are determined (by auction or by a price-setting middleman).
Within this framework, the ISOS must accurately and securely keep track of resource usage. The ISOS would have an internal bank with accounts for suppliers and consumers that it must credit or debit according to resource usage. Participants can convert between ISOS currency and real money. The ISOS must also ensure that any guarantees of resource availability can be met: Mary doesn't want her movie to grind to a halt partway through. The economic system lets resource suppliers control how their resources are used. For example, a PC owner might specify that her computer's processor can't be used between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M. unless a very high price is paid.
Money, of course, encourages fraud, and ISOS participants have many ways to try to defraud one another. For instance, resource sellers, by modifying or fooling the ISOS agent program running on their computer, may return fictitious results without doing any computation. Researchers have explored statistical methods for detecting malicious or malfunctioning hosts. A recent idea for preventing unearned computation credit is to ensure that each work unit has a number of intermediate results that the server can quickly check and that can be obtained only by performing the entire computation. Other approaches are needed to prevent fraud in data storage and service provision.
The cost of ISOS resources to end users will converge to a fraction of the cost of owning the hardware. Ideally, this fraction will be large enough to encourage owners to participate and small enough to make many Internet-scale applications economically feasible. A typical PC owner might see the system as a barter economy in which he gets free services, such as file backup and Web hosting, in exchange for the use of his otherwise idle processor time and disk space.
A Basic Architecture
We advocate two basic principles in our ISOS design: a minimal core operating system and control by central servers. A computer operating system that provides only core functions is called a microkernel. Higher-level functions are built on top of it as user programs, allowing them to be debugged and replaced more easily. This approach was pioneered in academic research systems and has influenced some commercial systems, such as Windows NT. Most well-known operating systems, however, are not microkernels.
The core facilities of an ISOS include resource allocation (long-term assignment of hosts' processing power and storage), scheduling (putting jobs into queues, both across the system and within individual hosts), accounting of resource usage, and the basic mechanisms for distributing and executing application programs. The ISOS should not duplicate features of local operating systems running on hosts.
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Curious and malicious USERS may attempt to DISRUPT, CHEAT or spoof the system.
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The system should be coordinated by servers operated by the ISOS provider, which could be a government-funded organization or a consortium of companies that are major resource sellers and buyers. (One can imagine competing ISOS providers, but we will keep things simple and assume a unique provider.) Centralization runs against the egalitarian approach popular in some peer-to-peer systems, but central servers are needed to ensure privacy of sensitive data, such as accounting data and other information about the resource hosts. Centralization might seem to require a control system that will become excessively large and unwieldy as the number of ISOS-connected hosts increases, and it appears to introduce a bottleneck that will choke the system anytime it is unavailable. These fears are unfounded: a reasonable number of servers can easily store information about every Internet-connected host and communicate with them regularly. Napster, for example, handled almost 60 million clients using a central server. Redundancy can be built into the server complex, and most ISOS online services can continue operating even with the servers temporarily unavailable.
The ISOS server complex would maintain databases of resource descriptions, usage policies and task descriptions. The resource descriptions include, for example, the host's operating system, processor type and speed, total and free disk space, memory space, performance statistics of its network connections, and statistical descriptions of when it is powered on and connected to the network. Usage policies spell out the rules an owner has dictated for using her resources. Task descriptions include the resources assigned to an online service and the queued jobs of a data-processing task.
To make their computers available to the network, resource sellers contact the server complex (for instance, through a Web site) to download and install an ISOS agent program, to link resources to their ISOS account, and so on. The ISOS agent manages the host's resource usage. Periodically it obtains from the ISOS server complex a list of tasks to perform.
Resource buyers send the servers task requests and application agent programs (to be run on hosts). An online service provider can ask the ISOS for a set of hosts on which to run, specifying its resource requirements (for example, a distributed backup service could use sporadically connected resource hosts--Mary's laptop--which would cost less than constantly connected hosts). The ISOS supplies the service with addresses and descriptions of the granted hosts and allows the application agent program to communicate directly between hosts on which it is running. The service can request new hosts when some become unavailable. The ISOS does not dictate how clients make use of an online service, how the service responds or how clients are charged by the service (unlike the ISOS-controlled payments flowing from resource users to host owners).
An Application Toolkit
In principle, the basic facilities of the ISOS--resource allocation, scheduling and communication--are sufficient to construct a wide variety of applications. Most applications, however, will have important subcomponents in common. It is useful, therefore, to have a software toolkit to further assist programmers in building new applications. Code for these facilities will be incorporated into applications on resource hosts. Examples of these facilities include:
Location independent routing. Applications running with the ISOS can spread copies of information and instances of computation among millions of resource hosts. They have to be able to access them again. To facilitate this, applications name objects under their purview with Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). These names enable "location independent routing," which is the ability to send queries to objects without knowing their location. A simplistic approach to location independent routing could involve a database of GUIDs on a single machine, but that system is not amenable to handling queries from millions of hosts. Instead the ISOS toolkit distributes the database of GUIDs among resource hosts. This kind of distributed system is being explored in research projects such as the OceanStore persistent data storage project at the University of California at Berkeley.
Persistent data storage. Information stored by the ISOS must be able to survive a variety of mishaps. The persistent data facility aids in this task with mechanisms for encoding, reconstructing and repairing data. For maximum survivability, data are encoded with an "m-of-n" code. An m-of-n code is similar in principle to a hologram, from which a small piece suffices for reconstructing the whole image. The encoding spreads information over n fragments (on n resource hosts), any m of which are sufficient to reconstruct the data. For instance, the facility might encode a document into 64 fragments, any 16 of which suffice to reconstruct it. Continuous repair is also important. As fragments fail, the repair facility would regenerate them. If properly constructed, a persistent data facility could preserve information for hundreds of years.
Secure update. New problems arise when applications need to update stored information. For example, all copies of the information must be updated, and the object's GUID must point to its latest copy. An access control mechanism must prevent unauthorized persons from updating information. The secure update facility relies on Byzantine agreement protocols, in which a set of resource hosts come to a correct decision, even if a third of them are trying to lead the process astray.
Other facilities. The toolkit also assists by providing additional facilities, such as format conversion (to handle the heterogeneous nature of hosts) and synchronization libraries (to aid in cooperation among hosts).
An isos suffers from a familiar catch-22 that slows the adoption of many new technologies: Until a wide user base exists, only a limited set of applications will be feasible on the ISOS. Conversely, as long as the applications are few, the user base will remain small. But if a critical mass can be achieved by convincing enough developers and users of the intrinsic usefulness of an ISOS, the system should grow rapidly.
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Further Information:
The Ecology of Computation. B. A. Huberman. North-Holland, 1988.
The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1998.
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Edited by Andy Oram. O'Reilly & Associates, 2001.
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Related Links:
Many research projects are working toward an Internet-scale operating system, including:
Chord: www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/
Cosm: www.mithral.com/projects/cosm/
Eurogrid: www.eurogrid.org/
Farsite: http://research.microsoft.com/sn/farsite/
Grid Physics Network (Griphyn): www.griphyn.org/
OceanStore: http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/
Particle Physics Data Grid: www.ppdg.net/
Pastry: www.research.microsoft.com/~antr/pastry/
Tapestry: www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravenben/tapestry/
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The Authors
DAVID P. ANDERSON and JOHN KUBIATOWICZ are both associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Anderson was on the faculty of the computer science department from 1985 to 1991. He is now director of the SETI@home project and chief science officer of United Devices, a provider of distributed computing software that is allied with the distributed.net project. Kubiatowicz is an assistant professor of computer science at Berkeley and is chief architect of OceanStore, a distributed storage system under development with many of the properties required for an ISOS.
http://www.sciam.com/2002/0302issue/0302anderson.html#an3
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