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DivXNetworks and Equator Alliance
Market Demand for Highest Quality Digital Video Drives DivXNetworks and Equator Alliance
- High quality DivX digital video powered by Equator's BSP15 chip entices consumer video entertainment device manufacturers -
Amsterdam, Netherlands - Sept. 16, 2002 - DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary patent-pending DivX video compression technology, and Equator Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance, programmable and power-efficient system-on-a-chip processors for video streaming and image processing applications, today announced an alliance to provide best-of-class, DivX-certified solutions for next generation consumer video electronics devices. The relationship between DivXNetworks and Equator will ensure that DivX-branded products provide consumers with the highest level of video quality and performance.
With over 65 million worldwide users, DivX is the leading video compression technology compatible with the MPEG-4 standard. The global market demand for DivX video compression technology among consumer electronics manufacturers is driving the need for best-of-breed video processing. Equator's BSP-15 system-on-a-chip solution provides the ideal platform for next generation DivX-powered consumer entertainment devices. At 400MHz, the BSP-15 system-on-a-chip delivers up to 40 GOPS of image processing power and high-definition delivery.
"Equator is a natural partner to complement our focus on delivering the best DivX video experience to a wide range of consumer electronics devices and ensuring that those products reach the market in a timely manner," said Jordan Greenhall, co-founder and CEO of DivXNetworks, Inc. "Equator's BSP-15 system-on-a-chip is a leading high performance processor at a price point appropriate for a wide range of consumer-electronics appliances, and it meets our rigorous technical demands for high-quality video."
"Our fully programmable platform allows us to support market-accepted compression technologies with implementations available now for next generation consumer video entertainment device planning," said Avi Katz, president and CEO of Equator. "DivXNetworks has a broad market following and we are excited to work with DivXNetworks and jointly meet the high quality video expectations."
can we assume that divx and Windows 9 is soon to follow??
Program : Windows Media V8 encoding utility
Author : Official site
Version : 8.0.0.0343
Date : 29 March 2001
Size : 620 KB
Link : 1. wm8eutil_setup.exe
2. official site
Windows Media V8 encoding utility is a software for encoding into the new Microsoft Windows Media V8 format, which offers true VBR (variable bitrate) encoding that allows a 650MB CD to hold a high quality movie. This tool is an MS-DOS command line based utility, so you may wish to try the Windows Media V8 encoding utility GUI, WM8Enc GUI, WM8 Encoder GUI, Windows Media 8 Encoder GUI or Windows Media V8 encoding utility Frontend.
Additional information
Required software :
Windows Media Player 7.0
Recommended downloads :
Microsoft's own sample WMV V8 videos
Stigmata WMV trailer - see for yourself the quality of WMV V8
Recommended software :
WM8Enc GUI
WM8 Encoder GUI
Windows Media 8 Encoder GUI
GUI for Windows Media V8 encoding utility
Windows Media V8 encoding utility Frontend
1 DivX Codec
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/wm8eutil.html.
Beyond PDAs: How BSquare is pioneering portability
David Coursey,
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Thursday, September 12, 2002
I can imagine the designers at BSquare, sitting around a table, trying to design something that works better than a PDA but is still pocket-sized.
"To *&^#@ with this!" I can imagine them saying. Quickly realizing that, alas, a better PDA is a bigger PDA, they decide to split the difference, building a somewhat oversized device--only a bit larger than an iPaq--that works more like a portable PC than the handheld you're probably using now.
THIS PROBABLY ISN'T what really happened. But it is what BSquare came up with. And recently I got to see the first sample. (Click here for a video of the demo.) What I saw is a reference design for units that BSquare hopes to have manufactured as early as next spring. BSquare is in the business of providing technology--including reference designs--to other vendors, and the company is currently in negotiations with cellular carriers and others who might actually bring what it calls the "Power Handheld" to market.
The prototype device is both light and compact, weighing a little less than 10 ounces (with battery) and measuring 5.5 by 3.4 by .77 inches. This makes it larger than a PDA and places it in the company of so-called "modular PCs" that companies like Antelope Technologies, OQO, Xybernaut, and even IBM are working on.
BSquare's design uses Windows CE running atop a 400MHz Intel XScale processor and includes 64MB RAM and 32MB Flash memory. But what really makes it different from other PDAs and modular PCs is the screen: a backlit four-inch color LCD capable of displaying 65,000 colors with VGA resolution (640 by 480 pixels) in landscape mode.
WHAT THAT MEANS in practice is that I could bring up the ZDNet home page and actually read the text. Sure, the type was a bit small. But this is the first PDA-like device that has given me a decent Web experience. Its browser, Internet Explorer 5.5, also supports Java, Flash, Windows Media Player, and PDF viewing. The BSquare device includes an Outlook-compatible e-mail client, enhanced with the ability to view common attachment types. Windows CE also includes the same "pocket" version of Microsoft applications as Pocket PC.
These wouldn't be particularly useful except that the BSquare reference design includes a slide-out keyboard. I didn't get to spend much time playing with it and it looks both fragile and hard to use, although that can be fixed before production, presuming the model actually gets produced.
The device also includes two dedicated phone buttons (talk, end); programmable launch buttons (e-mail, Web); a five-way joystick; a dedicated button for integrated 2x zooming (for when I forget my reading glasses); and an onboard microphone and headset microphone for audio input. You can also plug in an accessory headset with microphone.
That last bit comes in handy when you take advantage of the integrated dual-band GSM cell phone (which also allows for speakerphone operation). The phone supports advanced features normally found only on multi-line desktop squawkers.
AS I KEEP SAYING about these PDA/cell phone combos, I don't really see them as useful telephones. BSquare calls it a "convenience" phone, but I don't find it all that convenient to use. I'd rather call it a backup phone, for times when I forget my phone or have loaned it to someone else.
BSquare has done better on the data side of the equation. A GPRS (2.5G) module sends and receives data through mobile telephone networks for worldwide remote connectivity. This design, while stretching the size of a PDA to the very limit, does seem to make using wireless data a decent enough experience.
If BSquare finds a wireless-carrier partner, the final price of the device is expected to be in the $600 range, depending on how much a carrier is willing to subsidize the price.
I'm not ready to make any predictions on how the market will receive BSquare's design. But it's both innovatative and different from the products we've been seeing, perhaps creating a new market for something we might call a hyper-PDA. Whether we're hyper enough to want one remains to be seen.
Behind the Files: History of MP3
By Gabriel Nijmeh
In just over a couple of years, the MP3 audio file format has caused a big stir and captured the minds and hard drives of millions of people worldwide. MP3, short for Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III is a compression format that compresses audio files with only a small sacrifice in sound quality. MP3 files can be compressed at different rates, but the higher the compression, the lower the sound quality. A typical MP3 compression ratio of 10:1 is equal to about 1 MB for each minute of an MP3 song.
It all started in the mid-1980s, at the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany, where work began on developing a high quality, low bit-rate audio format. In 1989, Fraunhofer was granted a patent for the MP3 compression format in Germany and a few years later it was submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO), and integrated into the MPEG-1 specification. Frauenhofer also developed the first MP3 player in the early 1990s, which was the first attempt at developing an MP3 player. In 1997, a developer at Advanced Multimedia Products created the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is regarded as the first mainstream MP3 player to hit the Internet. Shortly after, a couple of creative university students took the Amp engine, added a user-friendly Windows interface and called it Winamp. The turning point was in 1998, when Winamp was offered to the public as a free music player, and thus began the MP3 craze.
As the MP3 craze mushroomed, it didn't take long for other developers to start creating a whole range of MP3 software. New MP3 encoders, CD rippers, and MP3 players were being released almost every week, and the MP3 movement continued to gain momentum. Search engines made it easy to find the specific MP3 files, and portable MP3 players like the Rio and the Nomad Jukebox allowed people to copy MP3 songs onto a small portable device, no different than your Walkman or Discman.
By early 1999, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software application was released, one which shook the world overnight. Napster, the killer app that will be remembered like no other MP3-related software was developed by nineteen-year-old university student, Shawn Fanning and his idea for Napster was to allow anyone with an Internet connection to search and download their favourite songs, in minutes. By connecting people, Napster created a virtual community of music fans.
However, along came the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) which as a representative of the major record companies and owners of the sound recordings, successfully battled Napster for copyright law infringement and an injunction was issued that effectively shut down Napster. The RIAA argument is that all the free downloading is in breach of copyright laws and therefore promotes audio piracy. As a result, file sharing impacts their ability to sell CDs and make a profit. Despite the legal problems that Napster has faced and the fact that they are currently not operational, MP3 file swapping and has continued on, and for a number of reasons.
A big reason MP3s have become the de-facto audio standard is that the original patent holders made it freely available for anyone to develop MP3 software. This open source model allowed early MP3 pioneers to develop MP3 software that accelerated the acceptance of the MP3 audio format. MP3 being just one of several types digital audio formats is not necessarily the most efficient or of highest sound quality. Better compression technologies have existed for some time now, but the success of MP3 is due to the relatively open nature of the format. Companies such as Microsoft and Yamaha have developed proprietary formats, but have placed restrictions on how developers can utilize their technology. For example, Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) file format, which they claim is a higher quality audio format at smaller file sizes, is starting to gain more acceptance as it comes bundled as the standard audio format in Windows 98/2000/XP. Microsoft might be able to challenge the dominance of MP3s or at the very least offer a second, popular audio format choice.
All the downloading and swapping of MP3s has attracted the wrath of the RIAA because there are no digital security features associated with MP3, so millions of songs are freely shared everyday by millions of users. The files are small enough to be downloaded easily, or even sent to a friend as an email attachment.
Another thing that makes MP3s very exciting and compelling is that it is easy for people to become DJs by mixing their favorite songs. A lot of people have created their own compilation CDs where they take all of their favorite songs from different artists and bands and burn them to CD very quickly and easily.
Webcasting or Internet radio has also become very popular allowing listeners to "stream" audio on their computers. Unlike downloaded MP3s, streamed MP3 files aren't stored on your hard drive, but are broadcast like traditional radio through your MP3 player. Real Networks was one of the first to offer streamed audio software, which uses a proprietary format known as RealAudio. Microsoft allows offers their own proprietary streaming audio through their Windows Media Application. If you do a search for "Internet radio" or "webcasting", you will find hundreds of Internet radio stations offering every imaginable type of programming.
Of course, as exciting as MP3s are, there are some legal and business battles that are being waged. MP3 itself is not an illegal audio format, but when people offer up MP3 versions of copyrighted material that is considered a copyright infringement. The Home Recording Act allows you to make copies of your music CDs for personal use but by law, you are not allowed to distribute or share these files with friends or family if they do not own a copy of the CD.
The debate rages on as to whether or not MP3 and P2P file sharing programs are good for the music industry. MP3 proponents believe that MP3s help promote music and musicians by getting the music heard far and wide. On the other hand, MP3 critics argue that free music will kill the music industry and the artists who depend on it. Essentially, it is a battle for control of music distribution. Artists can now bypass record labels and distribute their music very easily and effectively.
A balanced and compromised solution should benefit artists and music labels. There is no doubt that artists and musicians should be compensated for their efforts, yet a lot of new and upcoming bands distribute free MP3s as way to get their music heard. As the buzz and excitement builds around the band, people are more inclined to support the bands by buying their CDs, attend concerts and purchase other band merchandise. Ultimately, bands and music labels probably don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
So, where does that leave us? Well, as we have seen many times over the years, hot technology trends come and go. However, MP3s have really captured the ears of music aficionados worldwide. With millions upon millions of MP3 audio files out there, and hundreds and maybe even thousands of MP3 related software that has been developed by software developers worldwide, there is no doubt that MP3s are here to stay.
About the author:
Gabriel Nijmeh is the software editor at MP3-CDBurner.com - http://www.mp3-cdburner.com, where we feature software reviews and downloads of MP3 software including CD rippers, MP3 CD burners, MP3 converters and more. Stay up-to-date on the latest and hottest MP3 software downloads and enjoy our MP3 tutorials, FAQs, music articles and shareware developer profiles.
NetTrends: Teens want their MP3s -- and their CDs
Wednesday September 11, 5:22 PM EDT
By Lisa Baertlein
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept 11 (Reuters) - Sure, they download free songs via the Internet, a couple of Midwestern university roommates say, but that doesn't make them crooks.
They are, nevertheless, seen as part of the MTV demographic that music company executives blame for contributing to the demise of their business.
Students Lora Michaelides and Lindsey McCollow, sophomores at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, say the executives have got it all wrong.
"I buy more CDs now. I want to keep the music business up," said Michaelides, who noted that while she has probably downloaded as many as 13,000 songs in her life, she also has lost count of how many CDS she owns.
Just last week, she says she purchased three new titles to add to her music collection.
"I was introduced to a lot of new music last year and I went to more concerts this summer than before I started downloading," said McCollow.
The 19-year-old roommates said they use free, MP3 music downloads as a way to get a taste of what's out there.
"I think it exposes more people to tons more music. I hear something, and if I like it, I want the whole CD," said McCollow, insisting she'd rather own a CD she likes than download it.
Take Dave Matthews Band, McCollow's favorite group.
While she has downloaded only a handful of the band's hard-to-find live recordings, she owns every CD the group has cut.
IS IT SHARING OR STEALING?
Music companies, who got the courts to shut down the popular free music-swapping site Napster, are now waging a copyright infringement war against its offspring Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa.
The battle also rages on other fronts.
They have hired companies to send out empty or malfunctioning "decoy" music files to thwart downloaders; prompted Washington lawmakers to propose legislation that would, among other things, allow them to sabotage Napster-style networks; and, they have not ruled out suing individual users.
The problem, entertainment executives say, is that teens don't see swapping as stealing.
Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin -- who has a 17-year-old son -- said at a recent technology conference in Aspen, Colorado, that the topic is an "ongoing source of conversation between us."
"He's got friends who do nothing but share files. He, unfortunately for him, has a cranky old man who gives him lectures," said Chernin, whose company has the No. 1 television network in the United States and is behind such movies as "Moulin Rouge" and "Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones."
While long download times have helped insulate the movie industry from online swapping, that is changing rapidly as more homes are getting plugged in to high-speed Internet services.
Another thing that has helped, Chernin said, is that film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them.
Music companies, he said, are much less flexible.
"It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.
I WANT MY MP3S!
The record industry recently said CD sales in the first half of 2002 were down 7 percent versus a year ago and blamed file-sharing Web sites for the drop.
But not everyone agrees with that assessment.
It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost, said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association.
And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.
While some would agree that swapping songs is not great for recording company revenues, there are those who say the music industry it partly to blame for its current woes.
Those critics say music companies have been playing catch-up and fighting to maintain the status quo rather than asserting themselves as leaders on the Internet, which already is altering the way they do business.
Many call on recording industry leaders -- who lately have been signing deals with fee-based music swapping sites like Listen.com -- to come up with something that's "better than free" to lure people away from file-sharing sites like Kazaa and Morpheus.
"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, said in a recent interview with Reuters. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.
Michaelides said she feels caught in between the two sides of the swapping/stealing debate.
"It's just amazing that we have this accessibility to music, but I do think its wrong that a lot of students substitute it for CD buying," she said.
Michaelides and McCollow said they won't be doing much downloading this school year. That's because Marquette blocked access to swapping sites after students clogged the school's Ethernet connection with music downloads.
Nevertheless, they said, many others still enjoy unfettered access to free music -- including their dads, who download as well as buy lots of CDs.
It's a Pack of Gum? A Lighter? Nope, an MP3 Player
By SARAH MILSTEIN
he Nomad MuVo, a digital music player and file-storage device from Creative, is a nifty gadget. Unlike most peripherals, it requires no cable to connect to a computer. Its core -- smaller than a pack of gum -- plugs directly into a U.S.B. port and acts as an additional drive. No file-transfer software is needed, and for Windows XP, 2000 and Me and Mac OS 9 and X, no drivers are needed either. (Drivers for Windows 98 are included on a CD.)
MP3 and WMA files can be copied directly to the MuVo and played on the device. Other data files can be stored on it for transfer to another computer. The MuVo holds 64 megabytes of data, which is about two hours of music in WMA format or one hour in MP3 format. A 128-megabyte version will be available in the fall.
The MuVo's core slides into a housing case that holds one AAA battery, which lasts for up to 12 hours of music play. The combined unit is about the size of a cigarette lighter and weighs less than one and a half ounces.
As a music player, the MuVo is simple. Songs must be played in the order in which they were downloaded, and there is no display screen. There are buttons for skipping, replaying and pausing tracks, and for volume. There is also a hook for a key chain or lanyard; a lanyard and earbuds are included.
The 64-megabyte MuVo is $130, and the 128-megabyte version will be $170. More information is available at www.creative.com.
Signs of 'Trustworthy Computing'
By Paul Boutin
2:00 a.m. April 4, 2002 PDT
European consumers will soon get a first taste of what Bill Gates meant by "Trustworthy Computing."
NEC Computing International has announced a trial program in which Packard Bell PCs will be equipped with keyboards that include secure smart-card readers.
The keyboards are designed to hold credit card numbers, PINs and other personal information in encrypted form, without leaking them into the rest of PC where they could be stolen by crackers, malicious programs or other users.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates launched the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative earlier this year in a widely distributed e-mail to staff.
But developers of secure systems -- a field not coincidentally known as "trusted computing" -- say Microsoft's plans will go nowhere without new hardware that addresses fundamental security problems in the PC's aging architecture.
Security experts agree the basic design of the PC is flawed: It allows data to travel around inside unencrypted, which means information can be stolen or faked by a program installed on the desktop.
"It's like your PC is the Starship Enterprise, and the Klingons are able to transport into the ship. When they do, they look just like us," said Robert Thibadeau, who teaches security at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Thibadeau said last year's Nimda virus demonstrated the vulnerability of the system by replacing the loader program that boots the Windows NT operating system at startup. "That's like replacing Captain Kirk," he said.
The entire PC doesn't have to be turned into a crypto device to prevent attacks. Thibadeau recently worked with PC software maker Phoenix Technologies to develop a secure version of the company's widely used BIOS software, which acts as the go-between to connect Windows to the PC's hardware.
Continuing his Star Trek metaphor, Thibadeau said, "What they did about the problem is put guards at the doors. There were guys at the main power room and on the bridge with guns. That's the kinds of thing we're doing."
Phoenix's BIOS is designed to prevent intruders or malicious programs from signing onto the computer or accessing it remotely.
Trusted computing technology for the PC is hardly new, but Microsoft's initiative is designed to prod the top vendors to include their hardware and software as standard equipment. "We've been a voice in the wilderness for 10 years," said John Callahan, a spokesman for Wave Systems, the Lee, Massachusetts, software and hardware company whose trusted computing system will be embedded in Packard Bell's keyboards.
The Packard Bell brand, owned by NEC Computers International, is one of Europe's largest PC brands, with just over one-tenth of the market.
Lark Allen, vice president of business development at Wave Systems, said a working digital rights management (DRM) system -- such as the one sought by the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Protection Act now before Congress -- would definitely require new hardware for home computers.
"The core problem is the PC, not that people are ripping stuff off," he said. "Until you can fix the PC problem, you're not going to fix the rest of it. (The solution) has to be hardware-based, because software security is an oxymoron."
A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that hardware vendors would play a major role in Trustworthy Computing, but declined to elaborate on specific plans or schedules.
But Mario Juarez, a group product manager at Microsoft focused on DRM issues, said, "There's no great mystery as to what the right thing to do is here. The challenge is how we're going to be able to work together. All stakeholders need to be involved -- the PC industry for software and hardware, the content providers, and it's got to be the providers of e-commerce, too -- the people actually setting up the sites. We all need to work together in ways that none of us have worked before."
Allen agreed, adding, "The industry has been so fragmented that they haven't been able to come to a unified solution. The good thing about Bill Gates' announcement is that the weekly virus attacks were finally enough to make people say 'We need to fix this.'"
Fans: Music Should Rock, Not Lock
By Brad King
2:00 a.m. June 6, 2002 PDT
Matthew Davidian loves music.
He's got 550 albums that he's bought over the years and has since ripped into digital files. He doesn't use file-sharing applications like Kazaa unless he's checking out some new music. Admittedly, Davidian, 32, doesn't buy many CDs, but it's not because he's not willing to part with the cash. It's just that nothing much on the radio interests him.
No, Davidian feeds his new love for dance music with regular visits to MP3.com, one of the plethora of sites where independent and unknown artists post their music for anyone to download legally for free.
In short, he's the type of guy the recording industry should be salivating over. He's into exploring new music, he's into legal sites, he's had a history of purchasing albums and says he has no problem with the concept of paying for music.
There's just one problem: He hates digital rights management (DRM), the security systems being used to control how consumers can listen to music they legally purchase.
Dividian's story is not unique, and his distaste for DRM is a big problem for record companies and movie studios. Without that security on CDs and DVDs, the industry thinking goes, no online business can survive. But no consumer wants to buy protected content.
The federal government is listening -- at least to the entertainment industry. The House Judiciary Committee continues its hearings to determine if there should be a mandated security system that comes with all digital content and consumer electronics products.
"There is one way to deal with information pirated and sold without DRM protection, and in concept it could be a tech mandate," said Rep. Howard Berman (D-California) before postulating that technology applied from the production stage through distribution could solve the file-sharing problem.
This is the latest in the debate over Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Holling's (D-South Carolina) Security Systems Standards and Certification Act legislation that would force electronic devices to come with copy protections built directly into the systems.
While the digital rights management companies understandably believe security is paramount to the success of online business, none want the government mandating a standard.
"Imposing broad technical measures simply to address a specific issue would stifle innovation and certainly result in higher consumer costs with few, if any, corresponding benefits," said Will Poole, Microsoft's vice president of new media platforms.
There's the rub. Entertainment companies, terrified about digital piracy, must partner with technology companies to create an open security standard that Dividian doesn't want on his product in the first place.
But piracy concerns aren't going away. Billions of music files a month are swapped using Kazaa, Morpheus and Gnutella, three of the most popular file-trading networks, while up to 500,000 films a day are shared using those same networks according to a recent report by Viant Media, which predicted movie piracy will steadily rise in the coming years.
"Spurred by this summer's blockbuster movies, we believe it may currently be undergoing a period of rapid expansion," Viant analysts conclude in The Copyright Crusade II report. "If the current capacity and interest levels remain intact, we would estimate that this represents roughly a 20 percent increase over traffic levels observed a year ago."
Despite the doomsday predictions, the entertainment industry is doing just fine. The movie industry, after a stellar summer, is on pace to shatter last year's box office record by 16 percent, reaching $9 billion in revenues despite the rise in piracy.
The music industry presents a much more murky picture. Worldwide sales dipped this year, prompting a rash of finger-pointing among executives. Some claim online piracy has killed sales, others look to sagging sales from its major stars, while others blame the economic downturn. Some point to all three.
The piracy bit took a hit when rapper Eminem's latest release, The Eminem Show, was rushed up a week after tracks began appearing on file-trading services. The album climbed to the top of the chart in four days.
"I absolutely believe that the bootlegs and downloads have a huge negative effect on sales," said Steve Berman, head of sales at Interscope, a division of the Universal Music Group.
Berman's attitude, which is prevalent within Hollywood and the music industries, has forced the entertainment industry to begin looking for ways to attract Dividian and other consumers to buy products that are so secure they offer little incentive to use them.
Centerspan Communications, which runs the multimedia-sharing network Scour, distributes a limited number of songs and movies from Vivendi Universal. The catch is that the content comes with DRM, a stark difference from the mega-popular services that allow people to exchange files without restrictions.
Even Kazaa, the single largest sharing community, has decided to get into the security business. While Davidian can still download any song he wants on that network, soon he will receive a different type of file. Kazaa will be distributing Altnet, a new service that allows entertainment companies to deliver secure content to users ahead of the free files.
"Altnet ... allows us to deliver files from content creators and owners and enables them to establish direct relationships with their end users," said Kevin Bermeister, CEO of Altnet.
The question Centerspan and Altnet -- and the entertainment industry -- is about to have answered is how willing consumers will be to use DRM. If Dividian is any gauge, the answer won't be pleasant for Hollywood.
On recent visits to the House of Blues and Liquid Audio, two sites that offer music in encrypted formats, he found much more frustration than fascination.
"Score minus one for HOB.com (for) not making it clear to downloaders that they may render music downloaded from their site unplayable at any time," Davidian wrote in an e-mail. "Score minus one for not even giving listeners an option to purchase said music to continue listening to it."
Digital Rights Outlook: Squishy
By Brad King
2:00 a.m. Sep. 12, 2002 PDT
Media companies are singing a new song that could be called "Get Squishy With It."
The long-running debate over how much digital rights management is too much has changed. Now it's about just how much copy protection files should include, and media companies believe they have the answer: squishy security.
See also: • Fans: Music Should Rock, Not Lock
• Signs of 'Trustworthy Computing'
• Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?
• Going After Tech, Not Tech Users
• Hear how MP3 Rocks the Web
"We need interoperable DRM products that allow people to never feel the walls (of security)," said Ted Cohen, vice president of new media at EMI, one of the five major music labels.
It's not a new idea, but it's starting to resonate with Congress. At a recent government hearing, Philip Bond, undersecretary of commerce for technology, opened the debate by saying that he wanted a world with "a consistent and reliable and predictable level of legitimate copyright protection."
That's a frightening turn for consumer advocates and technologists who argue that DRM fundamentally alters the way people use their computers, televisions and stereos.
It's the word "legitimate" that bugs consumer advocates because nobody is quite sure what that means. They argue that fair use rights -- which allow people to listen to a copy of a CD in their car, for example -- have eroded in the quest for security, even the squishy kind.
"Those who aren't for überprotection are being labeled as pro-piracy," said Robin Gross, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The concern has basis. Judges determine fair use case by case, but technology companies are being asked to develop DRM systems that determine ahead of time what people can and can't do with files. In many cases, there are no precedents for DRM companies to draw from.
"Technology implementers can only do what they are told to do, and technology can only do what it's programmed to do, and right now, they are defining a perverted version of the law, because that is all they can do," said John Erickson, systems program manager at Hewlett-Packard's research lab.
With no firm guidelines, technology companies have started looking for more squishy security measures.
The latest idea comes from Thomson Multimedia. It's a Super MP3 file with better sound quality. Next year, it will get a video component as well, allowing entertainment companies to encode a song along with a video, album cover, lyrics and other information.
The twist: The Super MP3 will come with a tracking signature -- a digital fingerprint -- that will identify the PC that made it.
"People will pay for better MP3s," said Henry Linde, Thomson Multimedia's vice president of new media business. "If the MP3 file that Brad King encodes shows up on a system, we will know where it comes from. We call it lightweight DRM, but it won't prevent you from doing anything."
It's radically different from Microsoft's solution, which comes with proactive restrictions.
The DRM debate has been contentious. Entertainment companies claim they've been losing their shirts, while technology companies say the restrictions prohibit them from creating new products.
Music and movies are flying across file-trading networks, available on demand for millions of Internet users worldwide. Napster brought the debate to the masses. The five major record labels sued Napster, which had 70 million users at the time. The Recording Industry Association of America claims $4 billion in losses, and the Motion Picture Association of America claims it's lost $3 billion -- though it doesn't quantify physical versus digital piracy.
Such figures are suspect, however, because they guess at potential losses, which haven't always held up to further scrutiny.
When the FBI cracked down on hackers in 1990 for snatching and posting a confidential technical 911 phone manual, the prosecutors put a price tag of $79,449 on the document, according to Bruce Sterling's account in The Hacker Crackdown. The figure was based on labor, hardware and software costs.
Defense lawyers countered that AT&T sold a similar document to the general public for $13.
It's true that millions of people are sharing files through networks like Kazaa and Gnutella and instant messenger programs like AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. But it's impossible to put an accurate dollar figure on how much -- or even if -- it's costing the entertainment business.
It's the staggeringly quick adoption of technology, and the speed with which it's improving, that has media companies searching for answers -- even squishy ones.
"As technology makes things easier to do, the concepts we grew up with -- sharing a tape with a friend, making a mixed tape -- turned from sharing an LP with a friend into plugging in an iPod and downloading 1,000 songs in eight minutes," said Cohen. "That may have to change."
Sep. 11, 2002 Nomad MuVo review
MP3-digital storage combo loses something
bylinecAssociated Press Creative Technology's new Nomad MuVo is both an MP3 music player and a digital storage device. It packs a lot into a plastic shell roughly the size and weight of a Bic lighter.
But as often happens when the features of two devices are merged into a single gadget, the MuVo lost a lot in the process.
For anyone who wants an MP3 player and storage that can be attached to a key chain, it's a better deal -- technologically if not financially -- to buy them separately.
The 64-megabyte MuVo now available online and in stores costs $130. A 128-MB version, available later this month, costs $170. By comparison, a 64-megabyte standalone storage device runs about $70. Competitive solid-state music players with far more features start at about $99.
As a storage device, the MuVo works very well. Its memory module unsnaps from a plastic sleeve that holds the battery and inserts into a Universal Serial Bus port on any computer running Windows 98 or later.
The gadget appears on the computer as another disk drive, and files can be moved onto it simply by dragging. It works without any special software in Windows 2000 and XP. New drivers must be installed in Windows 98.
What makes MuVo unique is its ability to play MP3 and Window Media music files. It's as simple as downloading the songs like any other file to the memory module, snapping the unit back together and plugging in a set of headphones.
The sound quality is very good, too. Creative, after all, is well known for its Sound Blaster audio cards and Nomad Jukebox players.
USB On-The-Go On The Move
September 11, 2002
By: Mark Hachman
SAN JOSE-USB On-The-Go appears to be…well, going.
The version of the Universal Serial Bus for portable devices was released as a finalized specification in Dec. 2001. This week, engineers at Philips said that its ISPI362 On-The-Go transceiver should enter production in one month to two, giving the market another source for the technology.
Philips has been sampling the chip for about two months, according to an OTG field engineer at Philips. The chip should enter production within two months, and would require controller logic. The ISSPI362 is part of a development kit Philips is shipping, complete with an add-on card with a single host port and one OTG port, as well as development software. USB class drivers and source code may be licensed from Philips, the company said.
USB On-The-Go allows portable devices, such as cell phones or PDAs, to connect to a PC via a USB 1.1-like connection. USB OTG's hook is that it also allows one device to act as a host when communicating with a non-PC device, allowing a digital camera to download images to a printer without benefit of a PC.
"Most of the digital handset manufacturers are evaluating this," the Philips engineer said. "Nokia will likely be first."
An OTG controller is already available; startup TransDimension Inc. said it began shipping its single-chip, dual-role On-The-Go (OTG) controller, the OTG243, to their customers in May.
But Intel, which has made USB a mainstay of the PC platform, doesn't look like a likely supporter of the technology. On the other hand, company executives didn't hold out hope that conventional USB would succeed.
'We must have given up on USB half a dozen times before it finally succeeded," said Sean Maloney, executive vice-president of Intel's Communications Group, in a press conference with reporters. Maloney expressed doubts that USB OTG would succeed, but added that including USB OTG or not might be a decision for Intel's desktop chipset architects to make.
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pam-i fully agree with all the prior comments god bless to you, your son, and your family.
GRACENOTE RAISES $9.5 MILLION IN THIRD ROUND OF FINANCING LED BY SEQUOIA CAPITAL
Funding Will Accelerate Next Generation Technologies, Strategic Initiatives
BERKELEY, CA (September 9, 2002) -- Gracenote, a leading provider of digital music infrastructure technologies, today announced the completion of $9.5 million in third round financing led by blue-chip venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. The funding will be used for working capital and for a variety of strategic initiatives. Concurrent with the investment, Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Sequoia Capital, joined Gracenote's board of directors.
Gracenote technology provides key functionality in media player software, and in revolutionary new consumer electronics products including home and car stereo products from companies including Sony, Philips, Pioneer, Kenwood, Marantz, and Imerge, which allow consumers to record CDs directly to an internal hard drive. Gracenote has been pioneering digital music technology since 1995, and specializes in music recognition and related digital music technologies. The Gracenote CDDB® Music Recognition ServiceSM is used by over 30 million people in over 140 countries each month.
"This funding will accelerate our strategic plan, and help us define the next generation of digital music technology," said David Hyman, CEO of Gracenote. "It will also speed the deployment of our new technologies, which will make digital music more accessible, more convenient, and more compelling."
"Gracenote has established itself as an instrumental participant in the new digital media infrastructure, both in consumer electronics and on the web," said Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "We believe that the company is uniquely positioned for success given its market leadership, attractive business model, and one-of-a-kind technology and intellectual property portfolio."
About Gracenote
Gracenote provides critical digital music infrastructure technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers and software developers worldwide. Gracenote specializes in music recognition and related technologies, and has the largest database of music information in the world. Gracenote delivers compelling, dynamic content customized to the music experience, and it is changing how people enjoy, explore and discover music. Over 8,000 licensees worldwide, serving more than one million consumers daily, rely on Gracenote's technology for their music information. Gracenote was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Berkeley, California. For more information about Gracenote, go to www.gracenote.com/corporate/.
About Sequoia Capital
Founded in 1972 Sequoia Capital is one of the leading venture capital firms. In the last three decades Sequoia has funded hundreds of companies, including: Apple, 3COM, Cisco, LSI, Yahoo, Redback and Flextronics. Sequoia Capital targets its investments in early stage companies in the areas of Components, Systems, Software and Services. Sequoia Capital offices are located in Menlo Park, California and Herzelia, Israel. For more information, visit www.sequoiacap.com.
# # #
For more information:
P: 510.849.2332
IBM, Philips work on broadband content delivery/Telematics Institute
By Laura Rohde
September 10, 2002 6:43 am PT
IBM INTENDS TO develop a demonstration platform for delivering secure digital broadband content to home users in partnership with the Telematics Institute and the Philips Research division of Koninklijke Philips Electronics, the companies announced Tuesday.
The aim of the group, called the Telematics Institute, IBM, Philips Secure Content Initiative (TIPSCI), is to create an integrated end-to-end service provider platform that would supply consumers with broadband content such as music, video and games through the alignment of existing content management and distribution systems, IBM, Philips and the Telematics Institute said in a joint statement.
As part of the working agreement signed in the Netherlands on Tuesday, TIPSCI will research the security of content, digital rights management, quality of service provisions as well as the speed and manageability of home communications networks. The first phase of the project is expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2003, the group said.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
IBM, of Armonk, New York, will contribute its knowledge and product base in such areas as IT networking and service provider infrastructures, content management software and digital rights management (DRM) software. Philips, headquartered in Amsterdam, will offer expertise in consumer electronics devices and home networks, including such products as set-top boxes and end-user devices for audio and video, the group said.
The Telematics Institute will bring research capabilities in the areas of content engineering, personalized services and business models, the group said.
The Telematics Institute, located in Enschede, the Netherlands, receives combined management and funding from the Dutch government and companies such as IBM, KPN and Lucent Technologies, according to the Institute's Web site.
gernb1--sorry, i am old and senile and suffer from ICRS.
Honda's Latest Auto Lets You Do the Talking
Navigation system features IBM's speech recognition tools, allowing you to keep your hands on the wheel.
Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Monday, July 29, 2002
IBM and Honda Motor have jointly developed a voice-activated car navigation system based on IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition technology and Honda will soon begin offering it as an option in some of its cars, the two companies said Monday.
The system, available as an option on 2003 model year Accord cars, will include an embedded version of ViaVoice that will enable drivers to ask for directions and hear responses from the computerized system.
Until now, interaction with car navigation systems has commonly been through a touch-panel display although operating the system while driving is considered dangerous because it means drivers must take their eyes off the road.
Hands-Free
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With the new system, drivers are required to press a 'talk' button located on the steering wheel to get directions. The system can recognize around 150 English language commands, such as 'find nearest gas station,' 'find nearest ATM,' and 'find nearest Italian restaurant,' and can also cope with a range of accents, says IBM. It can also respond to commands to find the quickest route to a specific address.
Honda plans to begin selling its 2003 Accords from early September, the company says.
IBM has been working in the field of speech and voice recognition for many years and is best known in the field for its ViaVoice range of consumer software products that allow users to interact with their personal computers using speech. As part of IBM's pervasive computing work, the company has also been researching the integration of such technology into everyday devices and the project with Honda was part of this work.
Announcement of the work with Honda comes almost a year after IBM unveiled a prototype car of the future that included ViaVoice. The car, a Ford Explorer, was unveiled at the company's Solutions conference in August 2001 and used ViaVoice to allow the driver to send and read e-mail messages and control other vehicle functions.
Pressplay Gives Early Tracks
Thu Sep 5, 3:46 AM ET
NEW YORK (Variety) - Digital-music subscription service Pressplay will offer subscribers access to exclusive new online tracks to stream or download from forthcoming albums well in advance of their release on CD, the company said Wednesday.
The first material for the program, which will offer songs from both established and developing artists, will come from upcoming work by Bon Jovi, LL Cool J, Nine Days and Natalie Cole. Once the albums are out, users will also be able to transfer the selected tracks to a portable device and burn them onto a recordable CD.
Separately, Pressplay is set to announce Thursday that its service will be offered as a preinstalled option on the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player software. Service will also adopt the newly revamped Windows Media Player 9 streaming technology, which is expected to significantly reduce buffering delays for music streams.
Pressplay, launched last year, is co-owned by Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp ( news - web sites).
New Texas Instruments USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI Bridge Provides Industry-Leading Low Power Consumption
Device Optimized for Bus Powered USB 2.0 Storage Peripherals and Portable Audio Players
Monday September 9, 10:00 am ET
DALLAS, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Delivering industry-leading low power consumption, combined with design flexibility and speed to market, Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN - News; TI) announced today a high-speed USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment/Packet Interface) bridge solution to serve the high performance PC storage peripheral market. Providing world-class throughput performance and a high level of interoperability with off-the-shelf ATA/ATAPI drives, the new solution separates itself from the competition with never-before achieved low levels of power consumption. The TUSB6250 cuts power consumption by more than half of competing devices, making the development of bus-powered USB 2.0 storage peripherals a reality. (See http://www.ti.com/sc02236 for more information.)
TI's new TUSB6250 programmable USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI bridge features a unique low-power architecture and advanced process technology, optimized for low operating and standby power consumption. This low power consumption in turn frees USB 2.0 storage peripherals from the shackles of wall-mounted power outlets and power adapter "bricks" by allowing USB 2.0 storage peripherals to draw the power they require from the USB bus alone. This saves peripheral developers money and provides the end customer with a superior user experience. Reference designs are available now from TI to aid in the development of bus powered USB 2.0 storage peripherals.
"The TUSB6250 requires less than half the power of competing devices, which leaves sufficient power for our customers to power other devices present, including the drive, exclusively from the bus," said Chris Belanger, USB peripheral product marketing manager for TI.
In addition, the programming flexibility of the TUSB6250 allows developers to make use of a wider variety of off-the-shelf ATA/ATAPI devices than would be possible using alternative bridge devices. Applications for the TUSB6250 include HDDs, ZIP drives, CD-RW, DVDs, Magneto-Optical drives as well as USB 2.0-based digital audio players.
Ideal Solution for Portable Audio Players
The same low power attributes that make the TUSB6250 an attractive solution for PC storage peripherals also make it an optimal device for USB 2.0 portable audio players. Its extremely low standby power requirements contribute to extended battery life in portable applications. The device's low operating power requirements allow the audio player's battery to be recharged using the USB cable connection to the PC. This eliminates the need for a wall-mounted "brick" recharging unit, lowering the total cost of the audio player.
A Bridge Designed for Flexible Design
The ATA/ATAPI bus standards have been interpreted differently by storage device manufacturers in terms of command modes, signal timing and protocols. As a result, a programmable and highly configurable bridge solution such as the TUSB6250 is necessary in order to interface effectively with the numerous possible ATA/ATAPI configurations.
Development Support Speeds Time to Market
To support designers using the TUSB6250 bridge, TI offers a demo board that also serves as a reference design. Using the board, developers can evaluate the device and begin working immediately in designing USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI adaptors for their mass storage PC peripheral products.
"TI aims to enable the bus-powered USB 2.0 mass storage market with the interoperability and low-power performance of the TUSB6250," said Belanger. "We worked with our customers in designing the device, and we'll continue working closely with them to ensure they can bring their USB 2.0 products to market successfully."
The TUSB6250 bridge has been certified for USB 2.0 operability and is TI's first offering compliant with version 2.0 of the specification. TI is the market leader in USB 1.1 hub solutions and has a major presence in the overall USB market.
Availability, Packaging and Pricing
The TUSB6250 programmable USB 2.0 to ATA/ATAPI bridge is available now. The TUSB6250 demo board/reference design is also available now. The device is packaged in an 80 lead thin quad flatpack (TQFP). Planned pricing is $3.95 each in quantities of 10,000.
About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at www.ti.com .
IBM, Philips in Content Delivery Project
Tuesday September 10, 9:24 am ET
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - U.S. computing giant IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) and Europe's top consumer electronics group Philips (Amsterdam:PHG.AS - News) have teamed up to jointly develop ways for the secure delivery of entertainment content to consumer households, the two said on Tuesday.
"The aim of the project... is to develop an integrated content delivery solution that will allow easier, safer and more secure exchange of consumer digital content in the home -- such as music, video and games," the companies said in a statement.
With a growing number of households gaining broadband access to the Internet, a number of companies are searching for ways to control the delivery of content and to avoid the kind of online piracy problems that have plagued music providers in recent years.
The two companies plan to develop a demonstration platform to show consumer service providers by December 2003.
tinroad--now you know.
What is the IFS?
The IFS (Installable File System) is the software component that enables Windows Explorer to copy files to and from your DataPlay device.
==========================
1Vision History
The four founding partners of Colorado Software Architects incoroporated in January 1996, to form 1Vision Software, Inc. The company's original focus was specialized software consulting services to major corporations that included Philips Electronics, Cheyenne Software, and Microsoft®.
The original partners have worked together for 16 years, beginning at Colorado Memory Systems, a PC backup solutions provider. They have continued their working relationship through the years at Hewlett-Packard, CSA, and 1Vision--all located in Loveland, Colorado. They have been involved as developers and managers for a wide variety of products.
1Vision team members have contributed to the development and release of:
The backup applicaton shipped with Windows 95
Tape drivers for Windows NT OS
Backup applications for CMS (once owned 60% of the PC backup market)
Floppy and tape drivers for Windows 2000
File systems for all Microsoft platforms, 95 through XP
1Disk and 1Safe products (300,000+ units shipped under OnStream, Iomega, and Maxtor OEM agreements)
1Disk.com product (management software for online data storage)
vNAS (File-system aggregation software for Network Attached Storage)
DataPlay (Installable File System)
Persistent File System (PFS)
PFS is breakthrough file-system technology that simplifies access to mass-storage devices. A patent for PFS was filed by 1Vision in 1997. Extensions were added in 2000 for the application of PFS to networks and the Internet. The patent was granted in 2001.
From PC utilities to mass-storage file-system aggregation, PFS has been the core of all 1Vision products. The flagship product utilizing PFS was 1Disk, a PC file-tracking utility for removable media (1996). It was followed by 1Safe, which added backup to 1Disk's file-tracking functionality (1997). PFS was adapated to the Internet in 1Disk.com, software to manage online data storage (2001).
1Vision continues to broaden the use of the already versatile PFS, changing the company's focus in mid-2001 to file-system aggregation for distributed data storage. Early 2002 will see the release of vNAS, aggregation software for Network Attached Storage.
1Vision's long-range plans are for further development of aggregation and file-system management tools for the mass-storage market.
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DataPlay Products (Finally) Near Release
Postage stamp-size drive holds 500MB, draws interest of digital music player vendors.
Eric Dahl and Richard Baguley, PCWorld.com
LAS VEGAS -- A year after its debut, the postage stamp-size but high-capacity DataPlay drive is finally near availability, in a handful of music players shown at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.
DataPlay has begun volume production of the micro-optical drives that form the heart of these players, representatives say. Among those on display is the MTV DataPlay Enabled Music Player, announced by Evolution Technologies this week in conjunction with the music channel.
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"We have placed a multimillion dollar order for parts with DataPlay and will be launching the product as soon as the partners are ready," says Jeff Degraci, vice president of sales and marketing at Digisette, another DataPlay partner eager for the technology's release. The first products are slated for launch in April, he says.
Eagerly Awaited
The DataPlay drives were greeted with enthusiasm at their debut at last year's CES. There, DataPlay demonstrated a number of prototype devices that use the tiny disks, which store up to 250MB of data on each side and can contain up to 11 hours of compressed digital music. A year later, we're still waiting for products using the DataPlay drive to ship. So what's the holdup?
"We had delays in transferring the micro-optical storage engine to high-volume production in our Far East facility," says DataPlay founder Steve Volk. "This rippled to the manufacturers and resulted in a delay." DataPlay discs slipped from their scheduled release in late 2001 to the anticipated spring 2002 introduction, he adds. "Our facility in China is now in volume production," Volk says.
With players nearing completion, new details are becoming available about how DataPlay discs will store music and data. When connected to your PC, DataPlay devices will use an Installable File System that makes them appear like any other removable storage drive. You'll be able to simply drag and drop files onto the discs.
However, when it comes to digital music files, the situation isn't quite that simple. If you copy a clean MP3 file to a DataPlay disc using Windows Explorer, you won't be able to play that file when the player is detached from your PC. However, if you copy the file through DataPlay's music manager application, it gets converted into an encrypted music file that the player will play.
New Partners
The DataPlay boosters keep lining up, both partners and potential customers. Imation has committed to selling the blank discs at between $10 and $15 each.
DataPlay is also working with record companies to release prerecorded music on DataPlay discs, Volk says. By May, Universal Music Group, EMI Recorded Music, and BMG Entertainment are expected to begin offering albums on DataPlay discs. The discs hold the digital music in encrypted form, and customers receive access after paying a fee to obtain a key to unlock it.
"We are in discussions with the other two majors, and we've also started discussions with several independent labels," Volk says. "We also have the option of putting multiple albums on a DataPlay disc: You buy one album and you can sample other albums." Those samples would be offered for sale at a discount over the standard CD price, he says. Also, activation by key will be available via the Internet. Customers will be able to make a limited number of copies of the prerecorded music, he says.
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http://emiglobal.com/dataplay/dp200.html.
Talk to the Machine
With better chips and faster algorithms, device makers are putting voice interfaces in PDAs, cellphones, and cars
BY JEAN KUMAGAI, Senior Associate Editor
Max Huang says he has something cool to show me. I'm skeptical: he's holding in his hand what looks like a PDA. It is a PDA, a Compaq 3600, to be exact, unadorned and, to my eyes, unremarkable. What's special is what's inside: this PDA understands what you say.
Huang and his colleagues at the Philips Speech Processing office in Taipei, Taiwan, have streamlined the company's standard speech recognition engine, meant for servers and PCs, to run instead on a PDA. It's just a prototype, Huang says, but the Mandarin-language recognizer can distinguish about 40 000 words and still not tax the Compaq's memory, power, or processing. With it, Huang can access his address book, schedule appointments, and dictate e-mail. Considering the alternative--poking away at the device's tiny display with a skinny stylus--I'm starting to be convinced: this does seem pretty cool.
To the extent that the average person is familiar with speech recognition, she probably thinks of dictating reports to a PC, or maybe dialing an automated call center for flight or train schedules. Indeed, the speech industry has been pushing those kinds of applications over the last decade.
But some of the most novel and most challenging work being done now involves putting speech recognition where it was previously thought infeasible: into toys and MP3 players, car navigation and entertainment systems, and cellphones and PDAs. What's enabling the migration of speech to smaller devices is, on the one hand, efficient speech recognition engines that can handle noise and variations in speech, and, on the other, faster, bigger, and cheaper processors and memory chips on which the engines can run.
The push for embedded speech comes at a time when manufacturers are trying to cram ever more functions into ever smaller devices. "There's just not enough room for all the buttons and displays," says Erik Soule, director of marketing for Sensory Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), a developer of embedded speech products. A voice interface that lets you say the name of that Beatles song you want to listen to, rather than delving through your iPod's multiple menus, offers a less frustrating alternative. "We look at voice as a great complement to the visual and touch user interfaces," Soule says.
Will consumers buy it? The Kelsey Group (Princeton, N.J.), one of the few analyst firms that track embedded speech, thinks so. In a white paper issued in July, Kelsey projected that software licenses from embedded speech will grow from US $8 million this year to $277 million in 2006, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the speech market. That said, speech is not a business where good products translate into easy profits: witness the 1999 collapse of Lernout & Hauspie, until then an industry leader and holder of some of the best technology around.
Still, a wide range of little and big companies are now getting into the embedded speech market. This includes established players, like IBM and Philips [ranked (5) and (24), respectively, among the Top 100 R&D Spenders], which both have higher-end speech recognition products and decades of research experience. It also includes smaller firms like Sensory, Advanced Recognition Technology, and Voice Signal Technologies, which focus on embedded technology [see "Who's Getting Into Embedded Speech"].
They're betting on a wide range of applications. A few, like voice dialing, have already entered the mainstream, while others, like voice-activated light switches and TV sets, remain a novelty, and still others, like composing e-mail on your cellphone and retrieving directions while driving, lie farther out on the technological horizon.
Under the hood
In a sense, this is old wine in new bottles. The basics of today's speech recognizers were first worked out in the early 1970s by researchers at IBM Corp. and Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, assorted companies and university groups have made incremental advances in the science and technology. It's a truly interdisciplinary field, cutting across computer science, applied math, electrical engineering, linguistics, and cognitive science.
Commercial developers of speech recognition engines tend to be tight-lipped about how their systems work. But speech recognition is actually quite similar across all engines, whether for PC dictation or composing e-mail on a cellphone [see "How Speech is Recognized"].
When a person speaks, a microphone converts the sound waves into an analog signal, which is then digitized and sliced up into frames of, typically, 10 or 20 ms. (Each frame is short enough so that its spectral properties are relatively fixed and long enough to capture at least one pitch period.) The engine then extracts from each frame the spectral features it needs and throws the rest away.
Recognizing speech involves matching what is said to a library of known utterances. In theory, you could compare your speech sample to some sort of acoustic database of every known word, spoken in every accent, in every setting, and so on. While you might eventually find the perfect match, the search time alone would rule out real-time applications.
Instead, speech recognition engines settle for what is most likely to have been said. First, the engine compares the spoken sample to its acoustical database of phonemes--the basic sounds that comprise a language--and their variants, called allophones. (The "d" sound in "dog," for example, differs subtly from the "d" in "and" or "address.") English has about 40 phonemes and several thousand allophones. The recognizer's lexicon tells it how these phonemes and allophones combine to form words--that is, how words are pronounced.
The speech engine may also rely on a language model, which tells how words are strung together into phrases or sentences. In the simpler variety, known as a grammar model, the speech engine only recognizes certain utterances in context. If the speaker is asked for her zip code, for example, the engine expects to hear a string of numbers. Grammar models work well for dialogs and command and control applications. But if you don't want the speaker to be quite so constrained, as in dictation, the language model instead relies on statistics about what words tend to occur together. If I say "Dow Jones Industrial," the likelihood of "Average" coming next is nearly 100 percent.
Before a speech engine starts to analyze a sample, there are many equally likely possibilities. Once a few phonemes have been recognized, the least likely possibilities--based on the acoustic and language models--start dropping off. Often, the engine can recognize a word midway through, because the probability is already so high. If, in the end, the most likely match is still poor, or if more than one match is found, the system may ask the speaker to repeat the utterance.
Marvelous Markovs
Nearly all the speech recognition engines on the market today are based on hidden Markov models (HMMs), which are used to represent how phonemes and allophones are pronounced and how fast they're spoken. Introduced three decades ago, the HMM's popularity shows no sign of waning. "The advantage of HMM is that mathematically it's extremely elegant, and it's easy to understand and implement," explains Victor Zue, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Laboratory for Computer Science.
There are other approaches, of course. Sensory and Fonix, another speech engine developer (Salt Lake City, Utah), offer neural network-based engines. Neural nets tend to be better than HMMs for picking out discrete words, but they require extensive training up front. As Sensory's Soule explains: "You tell it what words it should look for and what words it should not look for, and it keeps track of key attributes that are differentiators between the two types of words."
For recognizing continuous speech--whole sentences or strings of numbers--HMMs trump neural nets, which essentially do batch processing. Once the start and stop of a word are identified, "you send the speech off to the neural net recognizer to do its thing," Soule says. In fact, Sensory's high-end recognition engine, Fluent Speech, uses a hybrid approach of neural nets and HMMs.
HMMs also require training, to create the database of pronunciations against which the speech sample is compared. In some applications, the speaker may do the training, and the recognizer then becomes tuned to the speaker's particular style. For speaker-independent applications, the engine designers gather speech samples from many people, to create an averaged set of training data.
"If we're building a speech recognition engine for the car, we go and collect the speech sample in the car, to capture the acoustic characteristics of the chamber that the system's going to be used in," explains Fadi Kaake, general manager of voice control at the Philips Speech Processing office in Dallas, Texas. In fact, collecting good training data is just as important as writing an efficient search algorithm, and companies closely guard how they train their models.
Eventually, researchers hope to augment speech recognition with visual clues like lip-reading (think HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) or hand and arm gestures. Speech engine developers also continue to revisit language models, to embed the vocabulary with semantic relationships or include a syntactic structure that allows the engine to look at word occurrences beyond a two- or three-word span.
Getting into embedded
Given that speech recognition is so computationally intensive, how then do speech developers get their engines to run on a cellphone or a PDA?
For starters, they scale the applications to fit the device. At present, the most powerful embedded speech engines on the market--those running on a Compaq iPaq 3800, with its 200-MHz Intel Strong ARM processor and 64MB of RAM, for example--can only recognize a couple thousand words, while voice-activated cellphones with 16-bit digital signal processors (DSPs) can handle perhaps a hundred words. (For comparison, IBM's ViaVoice PC dictation software comes with a vocabulary of about 150 000 words, which the user can expand.)
Limiting the vocabulary's size cuts down the searching that the engine needs to do and the memory it takes up. So while you can't dictate War and Peace onto your Palm Pilot, you can use voice commands to jump through menus or retrieve contacts from your address book.
Embedding speech has been helped enormously by the newest microprocessors and DSPs. Early voice-activated devices relied on dedicated ICs, in which the recognition engine was embedded. Increasingly, though, speech engine software uses the device's own processor and memory. Though not specifically designed to do speech recognition, they might as well be. The single-cycle multiply-accumulate calculations that DSPs excel at, for example, are ideal for speech search algorithms. Some of the processor/DSP chips that are hitting the market, like Texas Instruments' OMAP and Intel's ARM-based XScale, are perfect for speech applications on cellphone handsets, says Sensory's Soule. "You can run your application code on the processor side, and yet you've also got a DSP on the same piece of silicon to support speech algorithms and baseband processing."
At their simplest, voice-controlled devices recognize only a few basic commands--"Lamp, on," "CD player, track 8"--spoken in a certain order and at a certain speed. Everything else they hear is garbage. (It's like the Farside cartoon in which a pet owner lectures the family dog, Ginger; what the dog hears is "Blah blah blah, Ginger, blah blah blah....") If you say the commands in the wrong order--"On, Lamp"--or too quickly, the device's limited recognizer won't understand.
For more complex tasks, you need a more forgiving interface, one that lets you speak like a human, not a robot, and doesn't require you to memorize menu structures or long lists of fixed commands. That is a much harder problem because the speech engine needs to not just recognize the speech, but understand it.
Philips' Max Huang shows how it's done. His prototype Mandarin-language speech recognizer runs on a Compaq iPaq 3600 and takes up only about 200KB of memory, and the models and tables take about 2MB; while it's recognizing, it uses an additional 1MB of RAM.
"Say I want to schedule an appointment with someone in my address book. I can, of course, type the information in, but I can also use voice," Huang explains. Typing means tapping on the miniature keyboard on the 2.3-by-3.0-inch display with a thin stylus. Entering Chinese is particularly tedious, because each character involves three or four successive taps.
Holding in the iPaq's microphone button, Huang says, in Mandarin, "Please find Y.C. Chu for me." The PDA obeys by producing the entry for Y.C. Chu (director of Philips' speech group in Taipei and also Huang's boss). Huang tries again, using a slight alteration: "Find Y.C. Chu." Again, the device brings up the correct entry.
In both cases, he explains, the speech engine first recognizes the sentence--converting it into text--and then extracts its meaning. In this application, each word in the vocabulary has been assigned an attribute--"find" is the command for looking someone up and "Y.C. Chu" is someone to be looked up. (For more straightforward dictation, where words don't need attributes, the PDA's vocabulary goes up to an impressive 40 000 words.) Huang doesn't have to speak to the PDA in any particular way, and, in fact, the PDA is not trained to Huang's, or anyone else's voice--it's speaker independent.
Huang goes next to the PDA's organizer, which allows appointments to be scheduled by filling in short forms. He first uses the simple command and control mode to fill in each field. "New appointment" pops open an empty form. "With Y.C. Chu" transcribes Y.C. Chu's name into the "who" field. "At the office" goes into the "where" field. And so on.
"Now I will encapsulate everything into one sentence," Huang says. " 'I want to see a movie with Lifen Yeh at 10 o'clock tomorrow.' " Within a second or two, the form has been filled out, except for the "where" field. "I didn't say where the movie is, so it left that blank," he explains. To confirm the appointment, Huang opens the e-mail program by simply saying "Send it to her." The recognizer understands that "her" means Lifen Yeh.
Could dictating short messages be the killer app for embedded speech? Something like a billion short message service (SMS) messages are now sent each day in Europe and Asia. This, despite the fact that "the interface for messaging on the cellphone is terrible," says Jordan Cohen, chief technology officer at Voice Signal Technologies (Woburn, Mass.), an embedded speech engine developer.
Dictation on a cellphone may seem like a stretch, but Cohen points out that SMS limits messages to just 160 characters, and the types of messages one might send on a cellphone tend to be limited. Voice Signal hopes to introduce message dictation by year's end, when a universally supported service is set to roll out in the United States.
MIT's Zue, who sits on the Voice Signal board, agrees that speech can be a more convenient interface. "It's natural, it's flexible, it's efficient," he says--but not for every setting. "Even if the system performs flawlessly, do you really want to always be talking to your machine?" Zue says. "With wireless technology, we can sit in a conference room and type to our laptops unobstrusively. But if you start talking to your machine, first of all it's obnoxious, and secondly, there's no privacy."
The art of noise
One of the most compelling places in which to embed speech is in the car. A speech interface promises safer driving through "hands-free, eyes-free" operation of the cellphone, dashboard controls, and navigation system.
But a car has lots of noise: the motor, wind, and road, as well as the CD player, radio, and other passengers. Thankfully, noise and speech frequencies travel differently, explains Chicago-based speech consultant Judith Markowitz. "You try to identify those frequencies that are moving differently from how you would expect speech to move," she explains, "and then strip out a lot of that from the signal--a lot rather than everything, because some of those frequencies are also speech frequencies." Certain noises, like the car's engine at given speeds, can be measured ahead of time, the easier to filter out later.
The microphone's position is also key. Microphone arrays--with one or more mikes pointed at the speaker and others pointed away, to measure noise--are helpful but pricey. The extra microphones, analog-to-digital converters, DSPs, and signal processing involved can add a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars to the cost.
Despite the technical challenges, several car telematics companies are making inroads. The OnStar system developed by General Motors (2) offers voice dialing and e-mail retrieval by voice. Meanwhile, DaimlerChrysler (4), which has offered a voice interface in its Mercedes Benz line since 1996, has built a prototype system that lets the driver search for and make hotel reservations. And this month, Honda Motor Co. (21) debuted a voice interface in its Accord model; the speech engine is IBM's ViaVoice.
Beyond recognition
In five year's time, will we all be talking to our machines? As with any new technology, people's attitudes will have to evolve to the point where they need or want it. There's also a generational dynamic at work: younger people tend to be more accepting of voice-controlled gadgets. Then, too, millions of kids are growing up with voice-activated games and toys.
Speech applications of all sorts are also expected to get a boost from Microsoft Corp.'s (12) entry into the field. Although the Redmond, Wash., company doesn't sell embedded speech recognition engines, it has been pushing speech just about everywhere else--its Windows XP operating system includes a voice interface, and it is spearheading standards for voice tagging on the World Wide Web. Its speech research group, with over 100 workers in Redmond and Beijing, is second only to IBM's.
The embedding of speech recognition into everyday devices is seen as the next step on the road to pervasive computing, where computing and communications are available everywhere all the time. Different people have different visions of what this will be like. MIT's three-year-old Project Oxygen, for example, has created an experimental "intelligent room," equipped with microphones, video cameras, and motion detectors. The user's movements are continuously tracked, and he can interact with the space in whatever way he feels most comfortable: speech, gesture, even drawing.
"I think of the next frontier as one in which machines are really not a device that you program, but a partner in conversation--you talk to it, it understands you, and it will try to do things for you," says Zue. "We've been the slaves of our machines, interacting with them on their terms. We want to make machines more intelligent, rather than making humans more obedient."
IBM & One Voice Technologies announce Partnership
IBM To Make Significant Investment in Testing for Deployment of One Voice's Telecom Solutions; Companies to Develop Joint Sales and Marketing Strategy for MobileVoice Platform
SAN DIEGO, Sep 9, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- One Voice Technologies, Inc. ( OTCBB:ONEV - news), developer of 4th Generation voice solutions for the Wireless, Telematics, TV/Internet appliance and Interactive Multimedia markets and IBM today announced a partnership to deliver high-performance, telco-grade solutions for carriers and enterprise customers around the world. The terms of the partnership include extensive support from IBM for One Voice's MobileVoice(TM) Platform. This support will be funded by IBM and includes rigorous IBM in-house testing of One Voice's MobileVoice Platform and optimization of the architecture for large-scale deployment in telco and enterprise environments. IBM will also offer hosting services, integration support and provide technical assistance as a core part of One Voice's services. These efforts will provide carriers and enterprise customers with One Voice's telco-ready solutions, running on IBM's latest xSeries Servers, and will help accelerate the penetration of these solutions in the carrier and enterprise markets. Additionally, the two companies will develop joint sales and marketing plans to maximize MobileVoice's impact in the market.
Gaining the support of IBM, a premier global solutions provider, is a major step toward One Voice's market objectives. IBM's extensive carrier and enterprise experience, unmatched hardware expertise and strong business relationships will accelerate penetration of the MobileVoice Platform. IBM's financial and technical commitment to this partnership will ensure the scalability, performance and reliability of MobileVoice for carriers and enterprise customers around the world.
"Our partnership with IBM will have a big impact on our efforts in the Telecom and Enterprise markets and for our company overall," said Dean Weber, chairman and CEO of One Voice. "IBM uniquely brings global resources, powerful leading-edge hardware and technical support we will need to meet our objectives in North America and around the world. Their investment in our success is a strong testament to our technology, our progress to-date and the market opportunity for our solutions. We look forward to building a strong partnership with IBM."
About IBM
With 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate, IBM is the world's largest information technology company. IBM is a leading provider of e-business solutions and is dedicated to helping companies, Business Partners and developers leverage the potential of the Internet and network computing across a wide range of businesses and industries. The company offers a host of cross-industry and industry specific solutions designed to meet the needs of companies of all sizes. For more information on IBM, please visit: ibm.com
About One Voice Technologies, Inc.
One Voice Technologies, Inc. ( OTCBB:ONEV - news) is the world's first developer of 4th Generation voice solutions for the telecom, telematics, TV/Internet appliance and Interactive Multimedia markets. Our Intelligent Voice(TM) solutions employ revolutionary, patented technology that allows people to send messages (Email, SMS, Instant Messaging and paging), purchase products, get information and control devices -- all by using their voice. The company is headquartered in San Diego, California. For more information, please visit onevoicetech.com
e.Digital Corporation: Key Developments
July 22, 2002
e.Digital Corp. introduced its new Odyssey 1000 digital jukebox and data storage device. Powered by e.Digital's MicroOS 2.0, the Odyssey 1000 has the capacity to download 4,800 songs, or 400 CDs, and it is PC and Mac compatible.
June 28, 2002
e.Digital Corp. and Bang & Olufsen, a European audio/video company, announced that the first consumer product incorporating e.Digital's technology and Bang & Olufsen's sleek industrial design is now available to consumers through Bang & Olufsen retail stores in the United States and Canada.
June 27, 2002
e.Digital Corp. announced the creation of its Broadband Entertainment Business Unit. The Company also announced the development of e.Digital's new Web-based digital music subscription service, which will feature streaming and downloadable music by a growing collection of nearly 3,000 independent artists. The site is projected to become e.Digital's one-stop entertainment destination for its users to access digital music, movies, books, and more.
June 13, 2002
e.Digital Corp. announced that it has begun shipments of its new Treo 15, a lightweight, pocket-sized digital music jukebox with the capacity to store over 300 CDs worth of digital music. Treo 15 features Smart Song Selection, allowing users to quickly and easily manage and navigate music files even as they are listening to their favorite selections.
May 30, 2002
e.Digital Corp. introduced its new Odyssey line of digital audio players. All players come with embedded flash memory, a SmartMedia card expansion slot allowing consumers to add up to 128 MB of additional storage, and e.Digital Odyssey Manager software, which is compatible with both PC and Macintosh platforms.
May 22, 2002
e.Digital Corp. and Digitalway Co. Ltd., a digital audio player manufacturer, announced a joint development and marketing partnership. The two companies are collaborating to develop and brand digital music (MP3) players and voice recorder/players for sale to end users in the United States, Europe and Asia.
May 07, 2002
e.Digital Corp. and DGN Inc. (Digital Global Network), a provider of digital audio and multimedia devices, announced a joint venture agreement to develop and market portable digital audio products under the e.Digital brand name.
April 09, 2002
e.Digital Corp. and DivXNetworks Inc., the creator of DivX MPEG-4 compatible video compression technology, announced a strategic partnership to jointly develop and market a range of consumer electronics devices that play back DivX video. The agreement will enable the creation of a number of DivX Certified hardware devices, including handheld DivX video players, DivX-enabled DVD players, home video jukeboxes, Digital Video Recorders, digital set-top boxes, digital video cameras and more. Additionally, the two companies will work together to integrate digital rights management (DRM) technology into the devices to ensure secure playback of high-quality digital video.
March 18, 2002
e.Digital Corp. announced that CompUSA, a computer superstore retailer, will add e.Digital-branded products to its selection of digital audio products in stores nationwide beginning in early April.
March 06, 2002
e.Digital Corp. announced that it has signed a development and manufacturing agreement with Eclipse by Fujitsu Ten. Under the agreement, e.Digital will receive non-recurring engineering (NRE) fees for design and development services. Additionally, e.Digital will receive revenues for the manufacture and delivery of Eclipse-branded audio products for the automotive infotainment and telematics market.
February 14, 2002
e.Digital Corp. announced that Good Guys Inc. will offer e.Digital Corp.'s branded line of digital audio players. Good Guys, who will begin carrying the products in early March, is a retailer of higher-end consumer electronics.
December 06, 2001
e.Digital Corp. announced that Maycom Co. Ltd. of Korea's MP2000 Internet music player, powered by e.Digital technology, is now available to consumers through the Company's online store.
December 04, 2001
e.Digital Corp. introduced Treo 10, a lightweight, pocket-sized digital music jukebox with the capacity to store approximately 200 CDs worth of music.
December 03, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and Musical Electronics Ltd., a major Asian OEM manufacturer, announced that the first product, the Classic XP3, created under their multi-year licensing agreement is now available on shelves at Circuit City. The e.Digital-powered jukebox product features the ability to encode music directly from a CD player into MP3 files, bypassing the need for a PC to perform digital compression. The unit is field upgradeable to support other popular formats as they become available. The Classic XP3 also ships with MusicMatch Jukebox software.
November 07, 2001
e.Digital Corp. announced that Ran Furman has been named CFO of the Company.
November 05, 2001
e.Digital Corp. introduced the MXP 100, the first wearable digital music player that gives consumers hands-free navigation using voice commands, by passing manual scrolling which is the only choice on other portable players. A digital music player/voice recorder, e.Digital's MXP 100 offers consumers the advantage of high storage capacity with the IBM Microdrive as the primary removable media.
November 05, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and Lucent Technologies announced their collaboration on a speech interface for portable electronic devices. e.Digital's VoiceNav voice navigation interface was developed utilizing a voice recognition engine from Bell Labs' Advanced Technologies, a division of Lucent's research and development arm, which pioneered speech recognition technology. VoiceNav is now available to consumers for the first time in e.Digital's new MXP 100 portable digital music and voice recorder/player, which features hands-free navigation using spoken word commands.
October 16, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and Actel Corp., a supplier of programmable logic solutions, announced a technology relationship that will allow e.Digital's proprietary design to be produced within Actel's ASIC-like (application-specific integrated circuit-like) eX field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. e.Digital's new solution is designed to increase reliability and reduce the board space required for implementation of advanced digital voice and music recorder/player functionality in small portable devices, such as portable Internet music players and personal digital jukeboxes.
September 19, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and DataPlay Inc., a developer of a universal media format, announced a broad strategic alliance and agreement to develop and deliver portable products uniting DataPlay's digital media, micro-optical engine and ContentKey technology with the Company's patented technology and design integration services. The agreement specifies that e.Digital will provide engineering and technology development, enabling worldwide application of DataPlay's digital media in a variety of portable products. DataPlay will also refer OEM customers to e.Digital for product design, technology integration and application development around DataPlay's removable digital media and micro-optical engine. In addition to non-recurring engineering fees for design and development efforts, e.Digital will collect royalties from OEM customers on certain DataPlay-enabled products.
September 05, 2001
e.Digital Corp. announced a digital audio and music player/recorder incorporating IBM's Microdrive removable hard disk media. Based on e.Digital's new MicroOS 2.0 operating system, the ultra-portable product supports VoiceNav, e.Digital's natural speech-recognition user interface for performing navigation and playback functions. e.Digital's new compact product features digital music and voice recording and playback.
June 01, 2001
e.Digital Corp. announced the resignation of Chief Financial Officer and Operations Manager Jane Rinard.
January 04, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and EASTECH, an Asian conglomerate specializing in developing and designing "Sound, Vision and Internet appliance" products for the OEM consumer electronics market, announced that they have signed a Letter of Intent. EASTECH is expected to license e.Digital's MicroCAM technology-based, DataPlay-enabled product designs created by e.Digital and incorporating removable optical storage disc technology from DataPlay Inc.
January 04, 2001
e.Digital Corp. announced that e.Digital and Toshiba are working to create, develop, and deliver to Toshiba, music player samples based on e.Digital's proprietary reference design and built to Toshiba's specifications.
January 03, 2001
e.Digital Corp. and EASTECH, an Asian conglomerate specializing in developing and designing "Sound, Vision and Internet appliance" products for the OEM consumer electronics market, announced a royalty-bearing licensing agreement under which EASTECH has licensed e.Digital's MicroOS-based portable jukebox design for use in consumer products to be marketed worldwide by name-brand consumer electronics companies. Under the licensing agreement, EASTECH will use e.Digital's portable jukebox design and custom engineering services to bring private-labeled Internet audio jukeboxes to the consumer market in early 2001.
December 06, 2000
e.Digital Corp. announced that it has hired Jane Rinard, C.P.A., as its chief financial officer and operations manager. Rinard will head the Company's accounting and finance and oversee daily operations.
October 06, 2000
e.Digital Corp. and Maycom Co., Ltd. Korea announced the launch of the MP2000 multi-codec, portable digital music player in time for the holiday shopping season. Initial shipments are now beginning and the product will be introduced into the European and Asian markets as well as in other countries and specialty markets through Maycom and other OEMs.
August 24, 2000
e.Digital Corp. announced an agreement with Remote Solution, the U.S. marketing and sales organization for HanGo Electronics, Co., Ltd., Korea. Under the agreement, Remote Solution will license e.Digital's MicroOS-based Internet music player design for a new multi-codec, SDMI-capable portable jukebox product named Cleo. Remote Solution plans to introduce the Cleo to the consumer market under its own brand name and in addition will make it available for licensing by name-brand OEM customers in the electronics, computer, and audio industries.
August 01, 2000
e.Digital Corp. announced that it has been contracted by QDesign Corporation to create and deliver special edition portable digital music players incorporating a Texas Instruments DSP and featuring the QDesign QDX scalable music compression format. The special edition QDX/MP3digital audio player is expected to be delivered to QDesign by the end of August and will be used to showcase the new QDX technology to leading members of the digital music industry.
April 13, 2000
e.Digital Corp. announced that Allen Cocumelli was appointed Chairman.
January 05, 2000
e.Digital Corp. announced that it has licensed its portable Internet music player design to Maycom Co. Ltd., manufacturer of the I-Jam digital MP3 player. Maycom will incorporate e.Digital's reference design into their music player, which will support multiple music codecs and various Digital Rights Management schemes.
http://beta.news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/sigdev.asp?Symbol=EDIG.
Intel Begins Promoting "Media Adapter" Design
September 9, 2002
By: Mark Hachman
Intel Corp. said it has begun shipping a "digital media adapter" reference design to OEMs in the hopes that they will begin funneling digital media throughout the home.
Under the auspices of Intel's "Extended Wireless PC Initiative", the chip giant will begin selling components to OEMs to enable production of the devices possibly during the second half of 2003. Intel's design is based upon its XScale PXA210 embedded processor.
"Digital media adapters are a PC peripheral that provides access to digital content on PCs from televisions and other consumer devices throughout the home," a spokeswoman for Intel said. She added that Intel has no control over the timing of the adapter's production.
The device will use standard S/PDIF A/V cables to connect the adapter and the television, while using 802.11 networking on the back end to distribute content to the PC. Intel envisions media streaming from the TV to the PC, with a user controlling the technology through a remote control like the one Microsoft has designed, and that Hewlett-Packard has bundled with its Windows Media Center PC. The PC itself would only use the network for control functions, the spokeswoman said.
Intel envisions the adapter accepting JPEG, Windows Media and MP3 content in on the front end and distributing it wirelessly throughout the home using 802.11 wireless protocols. Interestingly, Intel is proposing using the 802.11b protocol for wireless distribution, rather than the 802.11a standard that it has traditionally promoted.
Intel's example will contain 802.11b wireless technology because the standard is "available and interoperable", according to an Intel spokeswoman. Intel also feels that there is ample bandwidth for multiple streams of video, and that there are reliable services that will function with 802.11b, the spokeswoman said.
3G Phone gets new voice interface
26th August 2002
Samsung Electronics and Voice Signal Technologies announced a worldwide strategic partnership to provide users of new Samsung wireless phones with the most advanced and convenient voice activation technology ever. The first handset containing Voice Signal's new voice interface system is the A500, now available at retail stores throughout the U.S.
Samsung was the first wireless phone manufacturer to introduce voice-activated name dialing in 1998, starting a worldwide trend that other phone manufacturers followed. Through its partnership with Voice Signal, Samsung is again setting the standard by offering never before seen voice activation capabilities in a handset.
In the past, voice activation software in mobile phones allowed the user to dial by name after creating a voice tag for each entry. The new voice-activated features shipped in the A500 allow users not only to dial by name, but also to dial any phone number by voice. This feature is particularly helpful in voice dialing situations when the name and voice tag have not been stored in the phone.
The new A500 also allows users to instantly access other popular features of the phone by voice. By simply saying "voicemail" the phone will activate the voicemail functions, or by saying "phonebook," the screen immediately shows the contact list. Even commands such as "Play Games," "Browser" and others are supported.
Ease-of-Use and Convenience
"Consumers have come to love the convenience of their wireless phone regardless of where they are," said Peter Skarzynski, senior vice president of wireless terminals for Samsung Telecommunications America. "They are demanding that wireless phones be easier to use. After extensive research and testing, we concluded that speech recognition was the best way to enhance the usability for the consumer, and Voice Signal's speech recognition provided the best performance."
Voice Signal's Vision "Speech is an enabling technology that will play an increasingly central role in the way humans and computers interface," said Dan Roth, CEO of Voice Signal. "Samsung was the first to employ speech recognition in the wireless phone market, and we are pleased that our partnership has led to another first with the new A500 voice activated capabilities. We are extremely pleased that Samsung shares our vision and has chosen Voice Signal as their partner to provide enhanced voice activation capabilities for their wireless phones worldwide."
Availability
The Samsung A500 phone, with Voice Signal's speech interface software is available now through Sprint Stores, and other selected retail outlets, including Circuit City and Best Buy. The A500 has a suggested retail price of $299.00.
Voice recognition is a must-have item on next-generation portables
Portable Design, July 2001
By Richard Nass
There are different ways to implement voice recognition, either in hardware, in software, or with a combination. Choosing the right method depends on the application.
Voice recognition offers the ideal input solution for a small form-factor device--if it works properly. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. For lots of reasons, voice recognition hasn't panned out to be an end-all for input. In some cases, it adds to the cost of the system. In other cases, it changes the form factor to be something that's not as user-friendly as it could be. And in other cases, it just flat out doesn't work.
There are different types of voice-recognition solutions available. Some are software only (running on the host CPU), while others contain their own specialized hardware. For the software-only versions, some recent developments make those more attractive, for two reasons. One is that the CPUs in general have more horsepower to handle the application software, and second, some of the microprocessors are putting in special hooks to handle the recognition.
One example of the processor that had voice recognition in mind during the design process comes from Analog Devices. The company's Frio DSP was co-developed with Intel.
"Historically, we've seen 16-bit CPUs used in speech-recognition systems," says Ken Weurin, a DSP product manager at Analog Devices. "Our offering is better for a number of reasons, including a significant increase in performance, and the hardware hooks for OS support."
The Frio DSP core could be used in either speaker-dependent or -independent voice-recognition systems, with continuous- or isolated-word engines. This provides the maximum flexibility for designers (Fig. 1).
"On the performance side, there's twice the amount of computational resources on the Frio core as was included in our previous architecture," continues Weurin. "So we have the ability to more efficiently compute fast FIR FFT convolutional calculations, which are at the heart of speech-recognition algorithms."
Having a high-end CPU allows designers to move to more phonetic or phoneme syllable-based recognition models. This should provide a boost to the accuracy of the recognition.
Equally important on the hardware side is the ability to remove the microcontroller that resides alongside the DSP in most systems. Often, an 8-bit microcontroller is used to handle some of the general housekeeping and I/O functions for which the DSP isn't well suited. Higher end DSPs, like the Frio or the 55X family from Texas Instruments, have enough computational power to eliminate that component. Some features that make this possible include memory protection, MMUs, and support for user and supervisor modes.
The benefit of using a single processor (and just one programming model) is that the development doesn't require two sets of development tools. It also doesn't require the designer to have the knowledge of two different instruction sets.
IBM, one of the leaders in voice-recognition technology, developed a product that runs on a host processor. The software-only solution, called ViaVoice, requires just 5 MIPS from the processor, although if more computer performance is available, it can take advantage of that as well.
"One of our big markets is the telematics (automobile) area," says Ken Houy, a marketing manager for client systems at IBM. "From a voice perspective, it's a hot market because of government regulations and for ease of use. Voice will be a key interface for getting to any of the devices that are running in your car, whether it's a phone; the automobile monitoring and calling back to a service vendor; or being able to interface with your PDA sitting in your briefcase, maybe through a Bluetooth connection."
The folks at IBM claim that their software can be ported to any available mainstream microprocessor or operating system. This lets them "voice-enable" just about any type of portable system, which includes a long list of future Internet-enabled products, such as smart phones and cell phones with browsing capabilities.
One of the features of the ViaVoice solution is that it offers distributed technology, meaning that the processing requirements can be split between the client (portable) device and the server end. For example, some of the recognition can occur directly in the phone, like address or number look-up, or simple dial functions. At the server end, more sophisticated features can be implemented, like dictation or database features.
Another key feature of distributed technology is that if a phone connection is lost, the recognition can continue to occur within the client. When the connection is reestablished, the process can continue almost seamlessly. If it were a server-only solution, the user would have to start the process over from the beginning.
In the telematics area, Motorola is expected to release its iRadio Internet radio solution by the end of the year. The company claims that this is a complete system, including such features as phone, Internet access, directory dialer, and address book (Fig. 2). It handles the voice recognition using IBM's ViaVoice product, which adds the ability to send and receive e-mail by having it read to the user. Sony and JVC will follow shortly with similar products.
Accuracy counts
Accuracy has always been the sticking point for voice recognition, at least from the user's perspective. If the device can't accurately understand the message the user is trying to convey, the application becomes useless. In most cases, the portable system won't be used for dictation, simply because the processing power isn't available. The voice-recognition features offered on a portable device are more likely to be along the lines of command recognition, where a finite list of commands are used. Recognizing on the order of 20 words isn't difficult for the system to handle.
Used in systems where performance is limited is a tree model, where trigger words access other vocabularies. For example, a phone can offer 10 finite commands, things like dial, look-up, hang up, etc. If the look-up command is entered, this would trigger a secondary vocabulary that contains all the numbers stored in the directory to be accessed. Or if the command was "manual dial," the ten digits on the keypad become the active words. This process allows the use of relatively large vocabularies, but with a minimal use of processor power.
There are some vendors that offer hardware solutions as well, such as Sensory. The company can embed a low-power processor into a portable device that removes the recognition burden from the host (Fig. 3). If the processing power is available, Sensory can bundle a software-only platform.
"Our software-only solution subscribes to the theory that as MIPS and memory get cheaper, software-only makes more sense in embedded systems," says Todd Mozer, president and CEO of Sensory.
This is particularly true when you can maintain a small footprint for the software.
Hardware vs. software
When deciding how to partition between what's handled in hardware and what's done in software, know that it's very application dependent. For example, today's cell phones contain relatively powerful DSPs, as well as a microcontroller, a codec, and a relatively large amount of memory. This application is one that makes sense for a software-only solution, for two reasons--adding extra silicon increases both cost and size.
Using dedicated hardware could probably reduce the overall power consumption in the system, because it eliminates having to crank up the powerful DSP every time a word needs to be recognized. But the current crop of DSPs does a fairly good job of employing only the cycles that are needed. And the added cost versus the incremental savings in battery life probably wouldn't merit going with the hardware solution.
"We're excited about some of the new processors that are coming out, from Analog Devices, Intel, and TI, with their OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) architecture. All the major players are getting to lower power levels and giving us plenty of MIPS to work with," says Mozer.
The current generation of database products works in a speaker-dependent environment. This means that the user would repeat a word, such as a name to be entered into an address book, once or twice. This scenario works well in a small database, say with up to 30 entries.
With large systems, into the hundreds or thousands of listings, you wouldn't want to have to repeat each entry. In those situations, a phonemic-based recognizer is used, where individual sounds are recognized, then put together to form words. That's obviously a much more compute-intensive application, usually reserved for a desktop- or server-based architecture. Eventually, such an architecture will find its way into the portable domain.
Low-power controller
On the hardware side, Sensory offers a 2-MIPS processor that today resides in a voice-activated television remote control. For such a simple application, the designers were able to eliminate the microcontroller that had been present on previous-generation products, instead choosing to employ the Sensory part to handle the RF programming and other functionality in the remote.
"In general, our strategy is that we don't want to sell DSPs because we think there's a lot of good DSPs already on the market," offers Mozer. "So we partner with those vendors. When we do provide hardware, it contains some special-purpose features. For example, our current generation has a small digital filter that does the feature extraction for our neural-network algorithms."
The company's next-generation part will add special-purpose hardware to perform single-cycle multiply-accumulates.
As for which CPU is the most appropriate to run the voice-recognition algorithms, that depends on the intended application. In some cases, a DSP makes the most sense, where some signal processing may need to be performed at the front end of the speech-recognition algorithm. While in others, such as where some searching routines need to be performed, a RISC-based processor, such as an ARM device, makes more sense.
"One of the keys to reducing power on the portable system is to limit the bus activity," says Jordan Chen, the chief technical officer at Voice Signal Technologies. "DSPs tend to be very power efficient when crunching, particularly if the data fits into the DSP's on-chip memory. But the larger algorithms require you to bring the data in and out of the chip, using more power."
In a platform that contains both a DSP and a RISC processor, it's important to ensure that the signal processing can run independently on the DSP, so there's not a lot of bus activity consuming power.
Note that the most power-hungry application on a cell phone is the radio. So any speech recognition that can occur independently of the radio will substantially reduce power. That's why the partitioning discussed earlier becomes very important.
It's important that system developers receive the tools needed to build an intelligent user interface (UI) from the speech-recognition vendor. In most cases, it's the system vendor that provides that UI.
But if the speech technology is packaged in such a way that it provides little or no flexibility, it reduces the amount of creativity that can go into the UI. Hence, the speech-recognition engine must provide and make accessible to the application developer all the available information.
Another vendor of software-only solutions is Advanced Recognition Technologies (ART), who recently unveiled its smARTspeak NG product, voice-recognition software that combines dialing and control functions for speaker-independent or -dependent systems in cellular handsets. The software can run on an ARM 7 CPU. Features include name dialing, continuous digit dialing, menu navigation, and device control.
'Cutting Edge' Voice Activation for New Samsung Mobile Phones
By Jay Wrolstad
Wireless NewsFactor
August 23, 2002
One change from previous phones is a feature that enables callers not only to dial by name, but to dial any phone number by voice.
Mobile phone manufacturer Samsung has partnered with speech recognition software provider Voice Signal Technologies to provide users of new Samsung handsets with cutting-edge voice activation software, the companies said.
The first U.S. handset containing Voice Signal's latest voice interface system is the A500, a US$300 phone being offered by Sprint PCS (NYSE: PCS) as part of the carrier's recently launched next-generation high-speed data/voice network.
According to Voice Signal spokesperson Renee Blodgett, the interface application represents the next step in speech recognition for mobile phones with features previously unavailable. Before, voice activation software in phones allowed the user to dial by name after creating a voice tag for each entry, she told Wireless NewsFactor. The new voice-activated features enable callers not only to dial by name, but also to dial any phone number by voice.
Full Menu Access
Also, Blodgett said, callers now have voice access to all of the features of next-generation devices, including games, Web browsers and continuous dialing. "All the user has to do is say, 'play games' or 'browser' or 'voicemail,' and the phone will activate those functions," she said.
The phone either connects to a number or verifies the number by displaying it on the screen and repeating it back to the user. The caller replies "yes" to confirm the number and place the call. "This addresses safety concerns as well as the convenience factor," Blodgett said. "Phone keypads are quite small, and we are making it easier for users to access all of the menu functions of their new handsets."
The software is embedded, not server-based, which allows phone users to maintain voice-recognition capability while roaming on different networks in different parts of the country or the world, said Blodgett.
Safety, Convenience Factors
While the software is currently available in the U.S. only on the A500 phone and works only on the Sprint network, Voice Signal is in talks with other carriers and plans to offer versions for Asian and European markets within a year or two, Blodgett said.
"This is the next step in speech recognition technology , representing an intuitive interface that phone users want," Peter Skarzynski, senior vice president of Samsung Telecommunications America, told Wireless NewsFactor.
Voice-recognition apps, such as the one offered by Voice Signal, are gaining a following with carriers and device makers as companies address safety and convenience concerns, IDC analyst Keith Waryas told Wireless NewsFactor.
Challenges Remain
"Calling and accessing data, especially while driving, is tricky and dangerous," he said, "which is why speech recognition is becoming more popular. "Interaction via voice can open more doors for service providers, including telematics."
But, said Waryas, wide adoption of such applications will be a long time coming as there are bugs to be worked out of the software. "It's a difficult technology to do right," he said. "There are so many speech patterns and accents and tones that have to be recognized before it can be really useful."
SK Telecom Gears Up for Wireless Lifestyle
By Kim Deok-hyun
Staff Reporter
Next-generation mobile phone services have been revolutionizing the way people lead their daily lives.
Cellular phones are no longer merely a means through which we can communicate with each other. These mobile phones have also become a source of information, as the gadgets are rapidly being equipped with allsorts of Internet services.
The service with the tongue-twisting name CDMA2000 1X EV-DO (evolution data optimized), which SK Telecom (SKT) introduced last February, offers data transmission speeds of between 800 kilobit per second and 1000 Kbps.
Although the service is still in its infant stages, the EV-DO mobile network promises fixed-line broadband Internet connections on the move accessible on the snazzy cellular phones.
For instance, a customer can download video clips at a speed of 300 Kbps, a speed that compares favorably with the internet on personal computers, while in a vehicle traveling at 60 kilometer per hour.
In the foreseeable future, wireless e-mail services will be essential element of the lifestyles of trend-conscious teenagers. They will also be able to use their Internet-accessible cellular phones, or what may be called a ``smart'' phone, for getting personalized location-based information and sharing audio and video data with their friends.
Industry naysayers are skeptical over the levels of demand for the next-generation of mobile phones, but the nation's handset manufacturers and mobile phone operators are pinning their hopes on EV-DO services, which offers always-online capabilities and the simultaneous connection to a raft of mobile applications.
Let's look at some potentials of the EV-DO mobile phone that will soon become an integral part of life for us.
Five years ago when the current second-generation (2G) cellular phone services first gained popularity, it could deliver data at a transfer rate of 9.6 Kbps.
Interestingly enough, one of the reasons for its initial popularity was the voice dialing function, granting mischievous people the ability to set the phone respond to the users voice-prompts of derogatory words such as ``idiot'' and ``moron'' when calling people whom you would generally not refer to in such terms in their presence, such as husbands, wives or seniors.
Nowadays, mobile phones can understand a caller's voice without pre-recording one's voice prompts. Consider the latest model (SCH-X430) manufactured by Samsung Electronics. The phone is designed to automatically call when its user refers to a name in the phone's directory.
With a color liquid crystal display, the phone will soon be commercially available for individual consumers.
The phone also features a small digital camera, which can be rotated 180 degrees to facilitate picture taking from any angle, enabling users to take digital pictures and send them to other mobiles via simple messaging services, or to computers via e-mail. More than 100 still images can be stored in the phone and the photos can be used as the phone's desktop background.
What's more, the new phone supports multimedia messaging service (MMS) that allow the transmission of voice, images, text and music instead of just voice mail and e-mail, according to Samsung Electronics.
``In the foreseeable future, handset manufacturers will make the voice-recognition system a tool for users to manage their menus and information in their phones,'' said Kwon Chul-keun, an official at SKT.
As the technology takes off, the so-called ``thumb tribe,'' referring to the tech-savvy youngsters seen using two thumbs to type rapidly on the small key pads of phones, will be replaced by a ``voice tribe,'' he added.
One of the most remarkable features of the new EV-DO phones is its videoconferencing ability, until now something only seen in sci-fi movies. With data delivery speed 16 times faster than current 1X networks, people can talk and look at one another over their cellular phones.
Videoconferencing will change societies culture. For instance, a man and a woman will be able to check to see how good looking the other is via telephone before getting a wedding planner to organize their first real face-to-face meeting in a restaurant.
Stories, like the one reported about a man who nabbed the thief who stole his mobile phone and wallet by tracing the suspect with the global positioning function embedded in the phone will no make sensational news stories.
The GPS-enabled phones, which will soon evolve into allowing the provision of location-based information service, will tell users where they are and when they should be there.
Using 24 satellites in stationary orbit above the earth, GPS can help in determining where the phone is by analyzing the strength of radio waves, according to experts.
To date, GPS-enabled phone has been viewed as a difficult product to commercialize because of glitches in parts and design. But the problems have now being solved. Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are already in export mode to send their GPS-enabled handsets to the U.S.
In the aftermath of September 11, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission, a state telecom regulator, has made GPS-enabled features mandatory for all mobile communication carriers in the country. The GPS functions will help police catch up with criminal suspects by tracing their telephones.
Demand is also growing for mobile users to be able to interact with machines, and for machines to interact with other machines, over wireless connections _ reporting faults, ordering new stock or relaying location details whenever necessary.
In 2001, SKT took a major step in strengthening its leading position in the nation's wireless telecom industry by adopting new business models that will create sustained revenue growth and ensure future business perspectives for its shareholders.
As part of the plan, SKT launched the world's first CDMA2000 1X network, the first phase of CDMA2000 technology with a maximum data transmission speed of 153.6 Kbps. The nation's top mobile carrier currently said it has 8.6 million wireless Internet-enabled mobile phones in the hands of customers last year.
kdh@koreatimes.co.kr
입력시간 2002/07/25 17:50
SRS Labs Delivers Dramatic Audio Enhancement to Wireless Devices By Offering Its WOW(TM) Audio on Texas Instruments' OMAP(TM) Platform
Wednesday August 7, 9:03 am ET
SANTA ANA, Calif., Aug. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SRS Labs, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRSL - News), a leading provider of innovative audio, voice and ASIC technology solutions, announced today that it has joined Texas Instruments' (TI) OMAP Developer Network and is offering its WOW audio enhancement technology on TI's OMAP platform for the mobile phone and PDA markets. WOW also will be available on the new OMAP5910 device announced by TI on August 5 that is targeted to a broader consumer product market. WOW is a patented and award-winning technology that significantly enhances the quality of mono and stereo audio material, especially in product applications with the small speakers or headphones that are typically found in wireless devices.
SRS Labs is unveiling the WOW implementation on the OMAP platform at TI's Developer Conference in Houston from August 6-8, 2002 where software developers and the leading manufacturers of wireless applications converge to gain the latest technology advancements from TI. SRS Labs will demonstrate its WOW technology on the OMAP1510 device and on the TMS320C54x family of digital signal processors.
Using WOW and the OMAP platform, manufacturers can significantly improve the audio quality of digital audio playback devices and musical ring tones on mobile phones, PDAs and portable audio products. For devices with one speaker, two speakers, headphones or ear-buds, WOW creates a robust, panoramic sound image with enhanced bass and improved clarity of the high frequencies. WOW has already shipped in over 200 million consumer hardware and software products in the last few years from SRS licensees, including Sony, Microsoft, Olympus and Sharp.
"Offering WOW on the OMAP platform is part of our strategy to target the emerging platforms that will be used by the next generation of consumer electronics products and wireless devices," said Jennifer A. Drescher, vice president of marketing for SRS Labs. "Today's announcement reinforces our commitment to that strategy. OMAP has already gained support from many top-tier manufacturers such as Nokia, NEC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, Sendo and LG Electronics and we are pleased to be able to deliver our WOW technology to these current OMAP partners and future adopters of the OMAP platform. As a global technology provider, we will continue to proactively search for tomorrow's technology solutions to support our OEM customers as the convergence of multimedia, audio and wireless communication continues."
For manufacturers developing 2.5 and 3G wireless appliances and other mobile consumer products, only TI's OMAP platform is available today and delivers the optimal performance and power consumption required to rapidly deploy differentiated next-generation products. Applications developed for TI's DSP-based OMAP platform will perform better with lower power than applications written for other hardware platforms.
"SRS Lab's WOW advanced audio enhancement technology will allow device manufacturers the ability to provide consumers with a clear, true sound quality," said Paul Werp, worldwide director of marketing for TI's OMAP platform. "By leveraging the OMAP1510 and OMAP5910 processors' high performance, low power DSP functionality, consumers will be able to enjoy that enhanced acoustic experience for significantly longer periods of time."
In addition to the WOW demonstration on the OMAP platform, SRS will demonstrate its Voice Intelligibility Processor (VIP(TM)) and Circle Surround II(TM) technologies during the TI Developer Conference. VIP improves the intelligibility of voice while listening to a caller in a noisy environment and can be applied to mobile phones, PDA devices, hands-free telematic devices in cars and other voice-related product markets. VIP and WOW are eXpressDSP compliant on TMSC320C54x and C55x platforms in addition to the OMAP platform. Circle Surround II is a multichannel decoder technology available on TI's TMSC320C67x platform delivering up to 6.1 channels of audio from any mono, stereo and matrix surround encoded audio material. It also incorporates patented techniques to improve the clarity of center channel dialog and provide bass enhancement.
For information on licensing SRS audio technologies, contact the sales department at sales@srslabs.com or phone 949-442-1070. SRS Labs is a member of TI's OMAP Developer Network, a group of software developers writing wireless applications for mobile Internet devices. OMAP developers enjoy a variety of tools and support to enable rapid application development for leading operating systems and programming languages plus the opportunity to collaborate with a range of developers designing applications such as multimedia, security, location based services, mobile commerce and gaming. For more information about the OMAP Developer Network, please visit www.ti.com/sc/omapdevelopers .
About SRS Labs, Inc.
SRS Labs, Inc. ( www.srslabs.com ) and its subsidiaries provide advanced technology solutions for high growth consumer markets, including home theater, DVD, portable audio, wireless devices, game consoles, automotive, broadcast, Internet and personal computer software. SRS Labs, the parent company, develops the core audio and voice technologies and licenses these patented technologies to over 200 well-known manufacturers, including Sony, RCA, Philips, Kenwood, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Microsoft, and Pioneer. ValenceTech, Ltd., ( www.valencetech.com ) SRS Labs' Hong Kong-based subsidiary, is a leading fabless application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design and manufacturing company providing analog and digital ASIC solutions to the world's leading manufacturers of consumer electronics, gaming, telecommunications and computer products. SRS Labs' subsidiary, SRSWOWcast Technologies, ( www.srstechnologies.com ) focuses on the Internet and broadcast markets by developing and licensing customized hardware and software products incorporating SRS Labs' patented technologies. The information on the above-referenced websites is not incorporated by reference into this press release.
(C)2002 SRS Labs, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SRS, WOW, Circle Surround, VIP and the SRS symbol are either trademarks or registered trademarks of SRS Labs, Inc. or SRSWOWcast Technologies.
For further information please contact: Investors, Tami Yanito, ext. 3093, tami@srslabs.com, or Media, Joanna Skrdlant, ext. 5138, or mobile, +1-949-290-5321, joannas@srslabs.com, both of SRS Labs, Inc., +1-949-442-1070.
Car Makers Test Drive Voice Systems
Honda and Toyota are among the latest to offer in-car communication systems, but will consumers be sold?
Denise Dubie, Network World
Monday, September 09, 2002
Car shoppers test driving the 2003 Honda Accord this week need not worry about getting lost. If they do, all they have to do is say the word and the car will get them back on track.
The automaker will debut the 2003 EX model of the Accord, which along with new powertrain and side airbag features also includes what Honda Motor calls its Touch by Voice voice-recognition system. The Accord, 2001's best-selling car in America with about 415,000 sold, features a touch-panel display and in-car navigation system that the company upgraded to work with voice commands.
Telematics, or in-car communication technology, seems relatively new to most, and car makers around the world have made 2002 the year to unveil their network computing developments. Along with Honda's news, Toyota announced its G-Book Information Network last month. The subscription information network will offer services for PCs, PDAs and mobile phones starting October 1. The company also plans to roll out a new vehicle model featuring an on-board G-Book terminal this fall.
Voice Evolution
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Honda's voice technology is the latest development of car makers' next-generation Satellite-Linked Honda DVD Navigation Systems - with a technology contribution from IBM's Automotive and Telematics Solutions. IBM worked with Honda research and development to develop its Embedded ViaVoice technology and software to support the car dealer's online navigation system.
"Telematics is part of how the computing world is evolving," says Raj Desai, director at IBM Global Automotive and Telematics Solutions. "In the future, cars will be connected to networks, and users won't be able to distinguish the difference between connecting from their office, their home, or their car."
Telematics enables hands-free and voice-activated commands, in-car computing, wireless Internet access, and emergency location-based services. The technology used for telematics combines the electronic systems in automobiles with satellite communications systems to provide features such as emergency calling, real-time navigation, and remote car diagnoses.
Still Growing
According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, European revenue for telematics hardware and services topped $1.11 billion in 2001, and the group estimates that market will grow to $8.05 billion by 2007.
But the North American market hasn't fared so well. The revenue in 2001 for hardware and service telematics reached only $900 million, but that number is expected to increase to $6.99 billion by 2007.
Earlier this year, Ford Motor and Qualcomm ended their telematics development to cut their losses. Apparently, car buyers found the $1,300 telematics add-on feature too much to swallow on consumer vehicles.
Going Wireless
Since then, Ford has said it would consider embedding technology, such as the Bluetooth short-range wireless connectivity standard, into cars' computing systems to eliminate the need for consumers to pay for an add-on feature.
Some telematics capabilities are available now from other car manufacturers in consumer vehicles on a limited basis.
General Motor's OnStar subscription services are available in vehicles from Acura, Audi, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, and Saab, among others. Specific makes and models come equipped with OnStar OnBoard, and car owners can activate the services via a handset in the vehicle. Drivers are offered a choice of three service plans, including features such as stolen-vehicle tracking, remote car diagnostics and emergency services.
Gee-Whiz Factor
While the gee-whiz factor of telematics appeals to many, industry experts say the best way to sell such technology is with safety guarantees. According to Strategy Analytics Analyst Ian Riches, the safety benefits of GM's OnStar roadside assistance and emergency calling features are obvious, but telematics providers must find the safety angle for in-car navigation and traffic information systems to hit home with consumers.
The market for telematics in commercial vehicles is more mature, considering companies can deploy fleet management software to track the location of shipping trucks or avoid traffic to ensure timely delivery.
"This clearly could be done: Attempting to use a paper map or driving erratically, making last-minute turns while trying to find one's way are clearly not the safest ways to making progress," Riches says in a report. In addition, because some telematics systems involve the use of cell phones and PDAs, safety concerns about drivers handling them is another issue.
"Widespread bans on the use of handheld mobile devices will not stop the [telematics] market in its tracks, but they do represent a worrying development in potentially restricting the options for vendors," Riches says.
IBM Initiatives
IBM's deal with Honda is the company's latest telematics initiative, now available in consumer cars. And because the Accord's computing system can now respond to voice commands, IBM and Honda might avoid any safety concerns related to telematics. In the past, Accord drivers could access an in-vehicle navigation system by accessing data via the touch display. Now drivers can enjoy hands-free navigation.
The IBM Embedded ViaVoice technology is included in Honda's computing platform within the vehicle.
The car also includes an antenna and microphone to let the voice communications connect to a back-end system via a Global Positioning System satellite. Honda supports an IBM WebSphere Everyplace Server/Portal for Telematics download on the back end. Drivers access this system via a console in the car or by speaking.
The software recognizes about 150 English-language commands, such as "find nearest gas station" or "find nearest ATM." It also acknowledges several accents.
To activate the Touch by Voice system, drivers press a talk button on the Accord steering wheel and make a verbal request. IBM's technology is integrated into the car's audio system so the driver hears the computerized response over the car speakers.
The software will give directions to and from the specified address. The Touch by Voice voice-recognition system is designed to minimize the need for keyboard entry. The system also links to climate control systems for added driver convenience.
IBM's automotive health monitoring and remote diagnostics prototype is being showcased in the Chrysler Concorde.
IBM made news with telematics last year when the company signed on with Motorola to offer wireless and Web-based telematics services to drivers and passengers worldwide.
MP3s Are Big Music's Savior, Not Slayer
The online-music business suddenly looks a lot less bleak.
FORTUNE
Monday, September 16, 2002
By Grainger David
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The music business is trapped in a new-economy time warp. While the rest of us plod through Scandal Summer 2002, record companies are still dealing with "paradigm shifting technologies," talk of cannibalization, and provocative research reports, circa 1999.
The spate of controversial music-business research--from GartnerG2's report on online music service Pressplay 2.0 ("the most significant development in digital music in two years") to the usual harangue from the Recording Industry Association of America (sue the Internet!)--reached its zenith last month with Forrester Research's "Downloads Save the Music Business," which predicts that downloads will generate $2.1 billion for labels by 2007.
Currently, of course, downloads generate nothing but headaches for the Big Five record companies. RIAA numbers show the number of albums sold sank 10.3% in 2001 and have sagged another 7% this year, "decisively debunk[ing] the theory that stealing music online is somehow good for the music business," says the organization. It could get worse. If you believe the data from now-defunct Webnoize, pirates downloaded 3.05 billion files a month from the top four sites alone in 2001. Assuming that there are ten songs per album, that's more than the number of CDs sold worldwide in 2001 (2.5 billion). In fact, the only thing propping up the industry might be laziness. "People find it surprisingly difficult to do simple things," says professor and intellectual-property expert Stanley Liebowitz, author of the forthcoming Rethinking the Network Age. "As it gets easier to burn a CD, you could see more of a negative impact on sales."
So what's with all the savior talk? Forrester predicts that after one more year of depressing sales, labels will supply more content on the cheap; the story goes that by 2007 this will create a downloading wave of tsunamic proportions that will wash all this additional money onto the music industry.
One indication that it is starting to happen is last month's launch of Pressplay 2.0, a joint venture between Sony and Universal. The updated service offers downloads at lower prices and allows more freedom. (For 99 cents a pop, plus a monthly download fee, you can store a file wherever you'd like.)
That's a good deal, but--wait! check your calculator!--it's not free. And since Pressplay's catalog doesn't yet include BMG or Warner (owned by AOL Time Warner, parent of FORTUNE's publisher), both of which operate MusicNet, you won't find everything you're looking for either. That yawn is 70 million users of Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus not caring.
But they should. The record companies have come a long way since Napster. Says Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music's eLabs division: "Things are ready to go now much more than they were a year or two ago." He expects that Pressplay will offer music from all the major labels by year-end, and MusicNet will likely follow suit.
Even if the new wave of services are perfect, will people pay at all? Some analysts think the price needs to drop to 25 cents to draw significant traffic. But if even a portion of downloaders cough up that much, suddenly the music business doesn't look so bleak.
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209408
Sep. 08, 2002 IBM getting into movies
TECHNOLOGY WILL DELIVER FILMS ONLINE
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News
IBM will announce today a deal with five of Hollywood's major studios to provide the underlying technology to deliver motion pictures via the Internet.
The deal is a key technological milestone in the impending launch of Movielink, an online movie service created by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros.
Separately, Warner Bros. Pictures said it will put last year's blockbuster, ``Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,'' online through CinemaNow, an Internet video-on-demand service.
The moves are signs a legitimate marketplace for online movie rentals is beginning to take shape as an alternative to the rampant underground trade.
``This points to an energetic attempt by the film studios -- and movie community at large -- to try to move quickly to market with offerings that will be appealing to consumers,'' said Steve Canepa, IBM vice president of media and entertainment services.
Movielink is the most ambitious of the film industry's online ventures -- promising to put a digital film vault within a mouse click of computer users. Anyone with Internet access will be able to download a film and store it on their computer for up to 30 days. Once they begin to watch it, the rental clock starts ticking -- and the film disappears after 24 hours.
Movielink's chief executive, Jim Ramo, said the individual studios will set pricing and determine which films they'll release online. IBM will serve as the technological conduit -- distributing the movies and maintaining the network.
Big Blue is slowly gaining momentum in Tinsel Town. This spring, it struck a deal with Viacom to upgrade the media conglomerate's infrastructure and lay the foundation for digital media services that extend the reach of its entertainment divisions, which include MTV Networks, Paramount Studios, Showtime, and CBS.
Critics say services like CinemaNow and Movielink don't have a prayer of rivaling file-swapping services such as Kazaa or Morpheus; which the Motion Picture Industry Association of America estimates trade some 400,000 to 600,000 bootleg copies a day -- sometimes before the films reach movie theaters.
Not only is the content free -- but it can be converted to any one of four formats that allow the user to burn the bootleg to a CD or DVD and view it on the living room TV.
CinemaNow charges money for its mainstream films -- $3 for classics like Alfred Hitchcock's ``Dial M for Murder'' to $4 for major releases like ``Harry Potter.'' These films, once downloaded, can only be viewed on a personal computer -- and disappear 24 hours after viewing.
And the studios plan to time online releases with a cable pay-per-view availability so as not to cannibalize lucrative home video and DVD sales -- or the $10 billion global market for home video rentals.
``If the same movie is going to be available on the cable box through your home theater system, who's going to watch it on the PC?'' asked Michael Katz, senior vice president of the media and entertainment practice at the New York consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton. ``You have to be a real geek or your TV has to be broken.''
But research firm In-Stat/MDR predicts that Internet video-on-demand services will provide movie studios with a larger potential audience than traditional cable -- at least, for the time being.
Some 10 million households have high-speed Internet access via cable or DSL -- compared with 2 million cable households with access to video-on-demand services, said Gerry Kaufhold, In-Stat's principal analyst for converging markets and technologies.
``Going through cable requires multiple versions of the content, stored on multiple servers around the country,'' said Kaufhold, whose Scottsdale, Ariz., company sells research reports to the industry. ``And at the end of the month you have to work with multiple logs of who used it where. If I'm a studio, I can get a bigger market, quicker, over the Internet -- at least, for the time being.''
Kaufhold said it's no coincidence that Warner Bros. chose to release a sought-after film like ``Harry Potter'' over the Internet. It's a test to see whether the market for online movie rentals exists -- and how it stacks up against traditional cable on-demand services.
``Frankly, I hope and expect this is the first of a number of announcements,'' said CinemaNow chief executive, Curt Marvis. ``This is more than just a test. We're beginning to roll out a larger number of films. This is something that more and more of the studios feel they're willing to do.''
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Jim Collier, President and COO of e.Digital added, "DGN's team brings world-class experience to the design process, having created some of the industry's most recognizable digital audio products including the Samsung YEPP product line. With DGN, we are developing feature-rich products with sleek consumer appeal.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=360080
Digitalway, an MP3 player maker, ships most of its products to Samsung on an original equipment manufacturing basis. In fact, Samsung also used to provide its MP3 players to U.S.-based Creative Lab on an OEM basis.
==============================
Samsung's ''Yepp' and Digitalway 's ''Mpio' are in fact the same product with slight differences in design.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=362802
============================================================
Digitalway is a leader in bringing innovative digital audio and multimedia devices to the consumer market. Founded by a pioneer in the MP3 industry, Digitalway is dedicated to providing leading edge products to OEM's, distributors and end users. Since July 1998, Digitalway started MP3 player development and grew as NO.1 manufacturer in the world. The OEM to Samsung Electronics (Yepp) and RFC (Jazpiper) made it possible to be a giant manufacturer with the quality proved. Digitalway has an affiliate for US sales and marketing in San Diego, California and design and manufacturing facilities in Korea.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=363003
Posted by: Tinroad
In reply to: Tinroad who wrote msg# 12306 Date:5/18/2002 1:46:36 PM
Post #of 15241
Is EDIG sending us an oblique message re Samsung?...
DGN = Digitalway: "EX-MP has been one of the top sellers of Digitalway products."
( http://www.dgntech.com/products.html )
"Digitalway, an MP3 player maker, ships most of its products to Samsung on an original equipment manufacturing basis."
( http://www.mpman.com/e_image/news/eng_news_read.asp?num=2 )
Apple: Windows Media Player shows anti-standards behavior
Fri Sep 6, 3:53 PM ET
by Jim Dalrymple, jdalrymple@maccentral.com
Apple Computer Inc. says that Microsoft's Corp.'s release of Windows Media Player 9 yesterday, shows the software giant is still trying to catch up to QuickTime 6, Apple's content creation and media player technology. Apple said the release of Windows Media Player 9 also shows the public how anti-standards Microsoft really is.
First introduced in February 2002 at QuickTime Live, QuickTime 6 features a new technology called Instant-On. The technology eliminated one of the more frustrating things about watching streaming media on the Internet: buffer delays. Instant-On eliminates buffer delays and provides users with the ability to quickly and easily scrub through streaming media content to locate and instantly view specific sections.
With the release of Windows Media Player 9, Microsoft introduced its customers to a technology called FastStream, which like Instant-On eliminates buffer delays.
"It was flattering that they were comparing the! mselves to QuickTime and are largely following our lead," Frank Casanova, Apple's director of QuickTime product marketing, told MacCentral. "They announced what they call FastStream, which is basically our Instant-On technology -- they just released the beta version, while we have shipped tens of millions of copies of it already in QuickTime 6."
The similarities don't stop there. Microsoft introduced Auto Playlists yesterday, a feature similar to one Apple introduced in its iTunes application.
"They moved to some of the playlist management that we introduced in earlier versions of iTunes and song ratings that we released with iTunes 3 in July," said Casanova. "A lot of things they are doing clearly are following our lead."
One place that Apple wishes Microsoft would have followed their lead is making Windows Media Player a standards-based application. Instead, Microsoft made the player support its own proprietary Windows Media format.
! "There's one area that they are not following our lead, and it's too bad," said Casanova. "We wish Microsoft, like Real Networks, would follow our lead in adopting and supporting industry standards. What's become very clear is that they [Microsoft] have become anti-standards -- it's not just anti-standards, they are turning their back on standards."
Apple is a co-founder of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) -- an organization dedicated to the development of products and technologies that adhere to industry standards. The International Organization for Standards (ISO) chose QuickTime as the file format for MPEG-4, and Apple is working with other ISMA members to bring interoperable MPEG-4 products and technologies to market.
Real Networks last December said it would include support for MPEG-4 content in future versions of its media player. Theoretically, with MPEG-4, content authored in QuickTime could be dropped on Real's application and it wou! ld recognize and play the content.
"They believe they are so big that they can take away what consumers want," said Casanova. "They believe their size and momentum can drive an entire industry in a proprietary direction with technologies built by Microsoft. That direction is very much opposite to where most of the industry is going."
The MPEG standards have been around since the early 1990s with the release of MPEG-1; MPEG-2 followed in the mid-nineties, setting the stage for what Apple and standards organizations believe will be the next widely used standard, MPEG-4.
MPEG-4 features a smaller file size and improved video and audio with Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Microsoft introduced similar features in Windows Media Player 9 this week, as well as improved Digital Rights Management (DRM) in an effort to lure Hollywood from the open standards of QuickTime-based technologies currently used in the movie industry.
"Hollywood looks for ! flexibility and interoperability -- that's why standards matter. If they are pressing a DVD, they want to make sure it can play in the millions of DVD players on the market. Standards provide that level of comfort and predictability -- proprietary technologies make you guess," said Casanova.
Apple said they are also working on DRM for use with MPEG-4, but once again their solution will be standards based, not proprietary.
"We agree that rights managed assets are important to protect people's content, said Casanova. "We don't condone people stealing music, so we put in controls in our iPod, for example, that won't allow people to use it as a music shuttle. The DRM that we will pursue will be standards based. We are actively working on DRM around MPEG-4, but it will be a DRM that is open to everybody, but closed from a security standpoint."
Apple believes that working with standards makes the experience better for the consumer and the providers us! ing the technologies.
"The fundamental difference in codec technologies is that ours will play in any ISO-compliant player -- Microsoft's will only play in their own player. We're trying to make things easier on the Internet; we're trying to make things easier for content providers and consumers. Encode in one format and play it back in every ISO-compliant player. That's not Microsoft's way, they are anti-standards, so they won't adopt that philosophy -- they want to encode in Windows Media, play it back in Windows Media and they don't want anyone else to be in their food chain. We don't believe that."
Nokia Unveils New Video Phone
Fri Sep 6, 4:22 PM ET
HELSINKI, Finland (AP) - Nokia ( news - web sites), the world's largest cell phone maker, unveiled a video handset Friday, its latest gadget in the struggle to win new customers and overcome a rough patch in the highly competitive wireless market.
The Nokia 3650 is the company's first mobile phone that can take moving pictures and send them to another phone. Similar models from other companies have been launched in Japan, while other phones on the market can take and send still pictures.
The 3650 features a color screen, a camera and video player and has the possibility of an extended memory for storing pictures, games and other files. It provides users with multimedia messaging and video clips, as well as access to the Internet and e-mail.
The new phone is expected to go on sale globally early next year for $450 to $500. It can be used on networks in the United States and Europe, which use different frequencies.
Nokia's U.S. shares were up 61 cents, or almost 5 percent, closing at $13.95 on the New York Stock Exchange ( news - web sites).
Japan firm to launch smallest Web-access card
September 05, 2002 07:26 AM ET
TOKYO, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Japanese electronics parts maker Seiko Instruments said on Thursday it would launch the world's smallest Web-access cards, capable of turning digital cameras and other devices into mobile terminals for accessing the Internet.
The chewing gum stick-size wireless cards, half the size of the smallest cards currently available, would allow users of electronic devices with an SD Memory Card slot, such as hand-held game machines, to access the Internet.
"You can put it in digital cameras and send pictures directly to your friends or print shops," said a spokeswoman for unlisted Seiko Instruments, which makes watches for Seiko Corp 8050.T .
The new cards will be offered to data communication service subscribers of DDI Pocket, a unit of KDDI Corp 9433.T , by the end of the year.
The price and sales target for the new cards have not been decided.