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OT RadioScape to roll out a digital radio module
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
March 11, 2003 (10:25 a.m. EST)
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ArchivesLONDON — Radioscape, a developer of software-defined radio technology, is rolling out a radio module this week in hopes of building momentum for the service during the Christmas holidays.
The company said the small module based on the decade-old Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) spec will be available for licensing to consumer OEMs and can be plugged into a variety of consumer products.
DAB is based on Europe's Eureka-147 standard, which observers said is showing renewed promise after languishing for several years.
The question about DAB is no longer "whether there will be a market, but rather how big it will become" one, said John Hall, RadioScape's chief executive. "Big brand-name consumer electronics companies which have been sitting around the ring and watching others test the water are finally coming into the market now."
Hall said Radioscape's ready-made module is designed with enough flexibility to allow OEMs to differentiate their products both in terms of feature sets and user interface.
The launch of the DAB module represents a new business model for RadioScape, whose main engineering focus on DAB receivers so far has been the development of a software-based DAB radio baseband stack and its porting to a Texas Instruments DSP.
Hall, who joined RadioScape in mid-2002 after having worked for Cadence and MIPS Technologies, said, "We are moving up a notch in a food chain." But, he added, "The end game for us is the rapid market deployment of DAB. This is a means to an end."
Taiwan-based Gyro Signal is one of the first companies to license RadioScape's design. It plans to manufacture modules in mass quantity.
RadioScape's DAB module is integrated with an analog FM radio capability. It also includes an RF front-end, A-to-D converter, TI's DSP, flash memory and D-to-A converter, all hand picked by RadioScape to assure quality and availability in mass volume.
The module also comes with RadioScape-designed user interface software with enough flexibility to allow OEMs to customize the interface. Its core software runs real-time DAB demodulation and decoding.
Modules, produced by companies such as Gyro, could be sold to digital radio manufacturers at "less than $40 in volume," according to David Hawkins, digital radio business manager at RadioScape.
RadioScape predicts that sales of DAB radio units, which the industry sold in "high tens of thousand units" last year in the U.K., will grow to nearly 1 million worldwide in 2003. "But the real mass adoption of digital radios, in huge volume, will happen in Christmas, 2004," Hall said.
Radioscape's bullish predictions for DAB are based on hot digital radio sales last Christmas, particularly in the U.K. Hall said retailers sold out of digital radios almost as soon as the units came in. Calling last December "a turning point," Hall said, "That was the first positive demand we've ever seen on the market for digital radios."
In January, unidentified consumer electronics companies approached RadioScape about its products, he added. "We are at a critical point, as many of these major CE companies are about to make decisions within the next few months.
OT McDonald's to Offer Wireless Internet
27 minutes ago Add Technology - AP to My Yahoo!
By JIM KRANE, AP Technology Writer
NEW YORK - Would you like super-sized Internet access with that burger and fries?
In a further sign of the spread of wireless Internet technology, McDonald's restaurants in three U.S. cities will offer one hour of free high-speed access to anyone who buys a combination meal.
Ten McDonald's in Manhattan will begin offering wireless WiFi, or 802.11b, Internet access on Wednesday, McDonald's spokeswoman Lisa Howard said.
By year's end, McDonald's will extend the access to 300 McDonald restaurants in New York City, Chicago and a yet-unannounced California town, Howard said.
"You can come in and have an extra value meal and send some e-mail," Howard said. Window signs will alert customers to the restaurants with WiFi access, she said.
Besides McDonald's, Internet surfers will also be able to tote their laptops to 400 U.S. Borders book stores, hundreds of hotels and a pair of U.S. airports where WiFi access will be available by summer, companies announced Monday.
And computer maker Toshiba and chipmaker Intel say they'll set up wireless "hot spots" in coffee shops, hotels and convenience stores across the United States.
For those who roost with their laptops in McDonald's, Internet surfing could affect the waistline.
After using the hour of free access that comes with a meal, customers can pay $3 for another hour online — or simply buy another extra value meal, Howard said. The pilot program lasts for three months, she said.
Cometa Networks, a startup working to offer WiFi connections in businesses across the country, will provide the Internet bandwidth for the offer.
Sounds like royalties to us here..ATLMultimedia / Eastern Asia Technology Limited (EAETECH) et701. WMA support, 10hr internal battery, 142 x
135 x 31 mm, output 10mw/ch, WOW effect, 132 x 64 LCD
Light Weight Digital Rights Management LWDRM
03-09-2003] more news
Digital Rights Management (DRM) Systems are expected to become an integral part of future electronic music distribution. To meet the increasing requirements the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Telecooperation SIT in Darmstadt and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen and Ilmenau developed the so-called Light Weight Digital Rights Management System (LWDRM). The system provides the environment to meet the consumer needs for easy system handling with little restriction as well as the demands of the content providers for security.
Most current DRM systems constrict consumer-friendly handling of audio-visual content thus impeding an introduction of DRM systems into the mass market. The basic idea of LWDRM is to allow content copying if the user is willing to autograph the purchased content with his personal digital signature. Therefore, the user's identity must once be registered with a Certification Authority (CA). The personal signature has been common and accepted practice in the area of print media for years, now being adapted to LWDRM for the handling of audio-visual content data.
The user is allowed to transfer content to portable devices or to family and friends, adhering to the prevalent legislation and the rules of fair use.
However, if content leaks out to the general public, e.g. through open file sharing systems, it can easily be traced back to its origin by analyzing the embedded digital signature. Adequate security is guaranteed by state-of-the-art encryption methods like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and the Fraunhofer IIS watermarking technology.
It is well known that the majority of users are reluctant to register with an electronic system trying to avoid persistent surveillance. For this reason LWDRM offers a step-by-step approach, which allows the user to benefit from the system even without registration. These benefits include excellent audio and video quality, streaming capabilities and new multimedia features. Once contents are transferred to a third party prior registration is required. Our implementation enables DRM-protected MPEG-4 streaming using MPEG-4 Video Simple Profile and MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding. First implementations have been available since 2002.
Officials to probe use of aviation contractors
Posted 3/9/2003 11:02 PM
By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY
The General Accounting Office is launching an investigation into the federal government's use of thousands of private companies to inspect and certify airlines' planes and aircraft alterations.
GAO officials say the new probe was triggered by a Feb. 17 USA TODAY article and a letter Friday from Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. He said that the Federal Aviation Administration's use of private companies has been criticized and that the newspaper story suggested "the aviation industry was supervising itself without adequate controls and oversight by FAA." (Related story: Doomed plane's gaming system exposes holes in FAA oversight)
The article documented how a faulty interactive entertainment system on a Swissair jet that crashed in September 1998 was incorrectly installed and improperly certified by private companies. All 229 people aboard Flight 111, which left New York and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia, were killed.
Canada's Transportation Safety Board will announce the findings of its investigation on March 27. The board, which has been assisted by the FAA, found early on that wires in the system and other wires short-circuited and could have led to a fire.
The system was made by a small Las Vegas company, Interactive Flight Technologies.
An FAA-approved contractor, Santa Barbara Aerospace, was hired to certify that the system met FAA safety standards and oversee its installation on Swissair jets. SBA's certification violated FAA procedures, according to the FAA's post-crash review.
The FAA did not oversee SBA's work on the project aggressively, even though it had criticized the company's work in the past, USA TODAY reported, based on a review of FAA documents.
After the Swissair crash, the FAA found problems with the design, installation and certification of IFT's systems and banned them. SBA lost operating authority and went bankrupt.
Unknown to much of the traveling public, thousands of individuals and companies like SBA have been increasingly used in the past few decades to do the FAA's inspection and certification work. The FAA relies on designees because it doesn't have enough staff or expertise to monitor the large number of planes flying today. Critics charge that designees may not be impartial certifiers, because they are hired and paid by the companies that want their products certified.
The GAO has not yet set a timetable for completing its investigation of the designee program, says Gerald Dillingham, the agency's director of civil aviation issues.
The program and other issues raised by USA TODAY's article also concern the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General. Deputy IG Todd Zinser says the office is "evaluating the information to determine whether further investigation is warranted."
FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto says the agency is "ready to assist in any review" of its programs. He wouldn't comment further.
TI Leans on Digital Video, Wireless for 720MHz DSPs
Message 759 of 762 / Previous / Next [ Up Thread ] Message Index
Msg # Go
From: "doncheri" <doncheri@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Mar 10, 2003 11:00 am
Subject: TI takes high-end DSPs to 720 MHz
ADVERTISEMENT
TI Leans on Digital Video, Wireless for 720MHz DSPs
By Suzanne Deffree -- Electronic News, 3/10/2003
Texas Instruments Inc. today announced three DSPs running at 720MHz,
breaking its own 600MHz speed record.
Following TI's code-compatible mantra, the chips, TMS320C6416,
TMS320C6415 and TMS320C6414, are based on TI's TMS320C64x DSP core
and produced on 130nm process technology.
"There's instant gratification with this chip," noted Will Strauss,
an analyst at Forward Concepts. "For example, it's exactly the same
pin out, exactly the same programming as the earlier 600MHz versions
and 300MHz versions. So in essence, it's a no brainer for [customers]
to just drop it in and improve the performance."
Still, while Leon Adams, manager of TI's worldwide DSP product
marketing, says the supped up DSPs easily out do TI competitors like
Analog Devices Inc. that have DSP clocking out in the 300MHz range,
he recognizes that acceptance will be determined by a customer's
production cycle.
TI won't hold the speed lead forever, though, noted Strauss. "They're
not yet at 720MHz. Certainly [ADI and others] have worthy products,
too, and are on a roadmap to get them there. The question is when."
Adams says the DSPs are designed to boost multi-channel density,
enhance multi-function flexibility and increase bandwidth for higher
frame rates and better resolution. The speed makes the DSPs prime for
four markets, according to Adams, who leaned more heavily on wireless
infrastructure and digital video than telecom infrastructure and
imaging customers when discussing the new chips.
"Especially as 3G starts to catch on, and you start to get these
video phones, the stuff you're starting to see advertised now. All of
this increased media content that is going through that
infrastructure, you'll have to deal with that, and that's what this
high performance DSP does," Adams said.
Meanwhile, digital video -- a young market that sends voice and
streaming video for the likes of network video surveillance and multi-
user video conferencing -- is what Adams calls the "most exciting new
area" for the 720MHz technology.
"It's an important area that we're focused on. In fact, the
architecture of these devices were kind of designed as an extension
to really be well-fitted to digital video processing," he said. "It
will be an increasing part of our digital signal processing
future."
Targeted to the growing market, the C6415 features 33MHz, 32-bit
peripheral component interconnect (PCI) and host port interface (HPI)
connectivity for interprocessor communications. In addition, the
processor supports 50MHz Utopia Level II ATM connectivity. For
digital video head-end infrastructure systems, HD MPEG-2 video
translating can be achieved on a single 720MHz C6415.
Meanwhile, the C6416, the most highly integrated of all three, also
features the on-board Viterbi and Turbo coprocessors to improve
channel capacity of 3G wireless basestations, TI said.
All of the DSPs include 1Mbyte of on-chip memory, peripherals that
accelerate applications and processing of real-time data, and a 64-
channel enhanced direct memory access (EDMA) controller to deliver
input/output efficiency that manages data transfer from system memory
at gigabytes per second. In addition, three multi-channel buffered
serial ports each support 128 time-division multiplex channels, as
well as AC97 and IIS audio interfaces, TI said.
Production quantities starting at $199 in units of 10,000 are
available today.
Software makers vie to dominate multimedia's use in mobile devices
By Kim Peterson
Seattle Times technology reporter
You might not think much about the software in your car stereo, but Microsoft does.
You're probably not watching television shows on your Palm yet, but RealNetworks is preparing for when you do.
Mobile gadgets are becoming new hubs for digital music and video and, with them, people can access entertainment without being tethered to the television or desktop computer.
The developments have sent some of the top names in software scurrying to make sure the market forms according to their visions, leaving a line of competitive tangles in their wake.
The reason for their keen interest is that these devices, with operating systems and media players, essentially are miniature computers. And with 425 million cellphones and hundreds of millions of personal digital assistants, car stereos, DVD players and other gadgets sold just last year, these companies see opportunity — lots of it — to build business in ways they can't in the persistently sluggish personal-computer market.
The competition to get software in these and other devices is intense, and much of it is playing out in the Seattle area between RealNetworks and Microsoft. Also vying for business is a consortium of other tech companies holding digital media patents.
A winner in this contest hits the entertainment jackpot in some ways. It gets to sell more software licenses, and its format becomes recognized as the standard in the business. It also gets the enviable position of partnering with Hollywood to broadcast movies, television shows and music.
It's hard to tell if there will be a single winner, and so far there isn't even a front-runner, analysts say.
"I don't think the landscape has gotten any less complicated, and no clear winner has yet emerged," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with IDC.
Deciphering the formats
Shopping for digital media players these days is like swimming in alphabet soup. You may have heard of MP3 before, but there's also WMA, MPEG and other file formats. Here's a guide to what some of the letters mean:
MP3: This format is probably the most familiar to digital music fans. It was the preferred format during the explosion of illegally traded musical files on the Internet. Most of the tunes on such peer-to-peer song swapping programs as Kazaa are in MP3 form. MP3 files are compressed to a manageable size without noticeably interfering with sound quality. The name came from the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which develops compression systems for data. One MPEG system to compress sound is called MPEG-1 audio Layer-3, also known as MP3.
WMA: The name stands for Windows Media Audio files, and this is Microsoft's horse in the format race. Microsoft claims the WMA format delivers CD-quality sound at half the size of MP3 files. A growing number of devices are supporting WMA playback in addition to MP3.
MPEG: The MPEG group also built several other compression standards used for digital video. The MPEG-2 format is commonly used for encoding movies on DVDs, and it enabled digital television set-top boxes. Its successor, MPEG-4, is designed to deliver DVD-quality video in smaller file sizes that can be sent over the Internet. Many companies, including Microsoft, contributed to the MPEG-4 standard and collectively own the patents to the technology.
QuickTime: Apple Computer's QuickTime format acts like a container that can hold a variety of media types, and it is regarded as one of the main formats for MPEG-4 video.
Sources: HowStuffWorks.com, Microsoft, Apple Computer
Microsoft makes its profit from selling its Office software and its Windows operating system, not digital media technology. But workers in that division bristle at the suggestion that digital media is a money loser at the company.
"From our perspective, 60 percent of PC users are using digital media," said Michael Aldridge, a lead product manager at the company. "It will be the main driver of consumer PC sales."
People who use their computers just for e-mail, letter writing and Web browsing are probably not going to buy new systems. But it's common for people to buy a new digital video camera, for example, and then upgrade their computer to handle the technology.
With this in mind, Microsoft is aggressively promoting software that could spur computer sales, including digital movie makers, cutesy instant messengers and digital music jukeboxes.
But those alone would not give Microsoft the kind of impact it seeks from the consumer-electronics industry. In January the company began licensing its Windows Media file formats for use on devices and personal computers that don't use the Windows operating system.
More than 200 devices already play Windows Media files, including DVD players from Panasonic and Pioneer and car stereos from Alpine Electronics. With the licensing change, a software company can now create a video player for the Macintosh, for example, that could play back music and movies in the Windows Media format.
"There were some things in our licensing that were holding us back unnecessarily from deeper and broader adoption in the consumer electronics industry," Aldridge said. "We felt this was a good time to make a clear statement."
The company also set the license price for its Windows Media technology at levels lower than competitors. Device makers can now license the video encoding and decoding software for 25 cents for each unit.
The pricing slash was directly aimed at undercutting MPEG-4 video, the next generation of the MPEG-2 video format used on DVD movies. The encoding and decoding cost for MPEG-4 is 50 cents per unit, twice that of Windows Media video.
"It's a strategic move on the part of Microsoft," said Kevorkian at IDC. "It's making no bones about competing for adoption of its technology over MPEG-4."
The move could trigger a technology price war, but the consortium of companies that own the patents to the MPEG-4 technology hasn't dropped its prices yet.
"So far, most people are telling us that the licensing terms are not going to be the determining factor," said Larry Horn, spokesman for the consortium, called MPEG LA. "Nobody likes to pay one cent more than they have to for anything, but it's fair to say the licensing terms for MPEG-4 are acceptable in the marketplace."
Horn said device makers are still interested in MPEG-4 because it is an open standard with patents held by 20 companies, including Sony and Mitsubishi. Microsoft, surprisingly, is also a patent holder. Any changes to the format would be made only after broad deliberation.
"The issue is whether (the market) wants to be married to a product that is subject to the decision-making of one party or a product which is the subject of an open standard," he said, referring to Microsoft's proprietary hold over its digital media software.
The Helix gamble
RealNetworks is also in the middle of the fray and has perhaps made a bigger gamble than anyone else after overhauling its business model last year.
The Seattle company introduced the Helix platform, designed to play music and video files stored in just about any format, including Windows Media and MPEG-4. The company also made pieces of its source code — the secret sauce behind the software — freely available to developers.
The move is clearly designed to entice device makers and other developers to give RealNetworks' software a try. Companies pay RealNetworks once they launch commercial products that use the software.
It's too early to tell whether the move will pay off for RealNetworks. Products are in development, but nothing will ship until the second half of this year, said Dan Sheeran, vice president for marketing at the company.
RealNetworks' RealOne Mobile Player is already being used in Nokia phones and on the new Tungsten T personal digital assistant from Palm.
There is no easy way to compare the license pricing strategies for RealNetworks, Microsoft and MPEG-4. There are different caps on costs, separate pricing for audio and video playback, and price differences for encoding and decoding technologies.
Dividing into camps
Deciding whom to align with is becoming a strategic move for device makers and other companies, analysts say, particularly as the field divides into the Microsoft and non-Microsoft camps.
"It's a giant chessboard right now when you're looking at the different camps that are trying to position themselves in opposition to Microsoft," said Steve Vonder Haar, an analyst with Interactive Media Strategies.
Software developers have a huge influence on that chessboard through their choice of technology, Vonder Haar said.
Digital media consumption is still in its early stages, analysts say. Watching video on a handheld computer is still considered a luxury, and companies like RealNetworks and Microsoft are still developing their media business strategies.
"You can see the road map for the future," Vonder Haar said. "You can see the potential for technology to do some pretty nifty things, but at the end of the day the business models are still a work in progress."
Kim Peterson: 206-464-2360 or kpeterson@seattletimes.com
I want my MP3 (and PDA and other hi-tech gadgets)
'Must-have' technology is a hit with young professionals
BY MY-LY NGUYEN
Press & Sun-Bulletin
Sunday, March 9, 2003
The image of Robert LaFave, a Staples sales associate, appears on the screen of a Sony portable computer that has a built-in camera.
WAYNE HANSEN / Press & Sun-Bulletin
The moment Raphael Web of Oneonta saw it, he knew he had to have it.
The Sony Clie personal digital assistant, or PDA, sitting on the shelf of an electronics store last August was calling Web's name, beckoning him to buy it and take it home.
"It's like when you see a puppy in a store and you don't think you'll take it home, but it's so cute you have to," said the 35-year-old academic computer support technician.
Whether it's to upgrade current technology or fulfill a need to buy the latest gizmo on the market, consumers are spending hundreds of dollars or more on electronic gadgets to enhance their personal and professional lives, with young people leading the way.
"We've crossed the technology chasm for products like PDAs," said George Belch, chairman of the marketing department at San Diego State University. "But from a market penetration perspective, we still haven't penetrated the mass market."
"It's the young professional who will drive the adoption and innovation of these types of products," he added. Young people are used to constant and often instant electronic communication, are generally more technologically savvy and more accustomed and open to using electronic gadgetry to manage and enhance their lives, he said.
As electronic product sales increase, so do manufacturers' economies of scale. Product makers are then able to reach more of the mass market through lowered prices and increased product visibility.
Consumer electronics sales nationwide are expected to total a record $99.5 billion this year, exceeding last year's figure by 3.5 percent, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The Arlington, Va.-based trade association represents more than 1,000 members responsible for the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products.
For Web, and others like him, the money is well spent. Electronic gadgets have become a necessary part of life.
"I couldn't do my job without (my PDA)," he said. "I consider it my short-term memory."
Web takes advantage of many of the PDA's functions, but mostly uses the hand-held device to manage his hectic work schedule. He's even programmed it to remind him of upcoming appointments by beeping five minutes prior to his next scheduled engagement.
"I could never use those paper appointment books," he said. "They never worked out for me."
Technology has enhanced the lives of many Americans, according to a November 2002 study conducted by the CEA. The survey shows 61 percent of U.S. consumers polled reported technology has made their lives easier and made them more efficient. Technology also helps 47 percent of respondents juggle their careers and personal lives. A random sample of 1,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and up participated in the study.
Nirav Patel, 22, of Johnson City uses a compact personal computer to manage both the personal and professional aspects of his life. As a computer science graduate student at Binghamton University, Patel is usually on-the-go and juggling many responsibilities.
The Hewlett-Packard iPAQ Pocket PC he bought last October has software applications that enable him to jot down ideas, record notes orally and even draw diagrams.
"I come up with ideas everywhere, and paper isn't always handy or convenient," he said. "I needed something mobile, powerful and able to be customized."
The product's features include a color screen, voice command program and transcriber software that recognizes Patel's handwriting and converts it to computerized text.
"Some of my colleagues think it's fancy," he said. "I just think it's useful."
Others, like Roman Koshykar of Johnson City, find some electronic gizmos just plain fun.
"I'm not ordinarily the kind of person who goes out and buys the latest technology," he said. "I don't even own a cell phone."
Still, the 26-year-old librarian couldn't help but buy an Apple iPod last month to satisfy his audio needs.
"It's a more convenient way for me to take music with me when I'm not at home," said the avid music listener.
The MP3 player can store about 10 hours of digital music files, depending on model, and allows users to swiftly organize song lists using a touch-sensitive scroll wheel, pinpointing favorite songs in seconds.
But electronic devices aren't just boy's toys or gadgets for guys, said Anne-Taylor Griffith, CEA communications specialist.
An increasing number of women are describing themselves as technologically savvy, she said. The CEA study shows 58 percent of female respondents would rather have a high-definition television than a one-karat diamond ring, if given the option. Sixty-four percent would rather have a digital camera than half-karat diamond-stud earrings.
No matter what the person's gender, consumer electronics manufacturers are doing what they can to market their products with convenience in mind, she said.
"Manufacturers are really paying attention to how consumers use products and are designing products with features designed to make life easier," she said.
"Technology is not controlling the way we live," she added. "If anything, it's allowing us to live the way we want to."
^^ Back to top / E-mail
So it pays to listen
09mar03
FOR years the mere idea of an Internet music service you would pay for was enough to make users of free services such as Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella break out laughing.
It wasn't merely the absurdity of paying for something that they could get for free.
Rather it was the fact the subscription sites set up by the major record labels were so woefully put together that, even if they were the only source of music on the planet, people would prefer to hum tunes rather than use them.
The song selection was awful, prices were astronomically high, there were strict limits on how many times you could listen to the songs, and on what machines you could play them, and you were usually banned from burning copies of the music on to your own compilation CDs.
The awfulness of the offerings provided ample justification for members of the Net generation to swap their music over the legally challenged file-sharing networks, which the music companies -- despite an aggressive legal onslaught -- have failed to shut down.
Online fans argued music companies were drastically over-charging for CDs and failing to offer any viable alternatives for the millions of users for whom music was something they listened to via a computer rather than a hi-fi system.
That argument now rings hollow. Internet giant AOL recently began offering its 27 million US subscribers the MusicNet service for the first time. AOL Australia says it is also looking to provide a similar subscription music service to Australian users, but that they must first sort out how to protect the artists' digital rights.
"We need to resolve the issue of artists' rights before we could launch a local service," says AOL's Australian corporate affairs managers.
"We are definitely looking at the opportunities at the moment, but need to sort out these issues first."
Previously, AOL had judged that the catalogues offered were too stingy and expensive. Now subscribers to MusicNet can pay a sliding scale to access more than 250,000 tracks for download and streaming. The service offers CD quality tracks from all five major record companies.
More tracks are being added each week and soon the service will unveil a pay-to-burn feature which will allow users to copy music on to MP3 players and other devices.
MusicNet, part owned by Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI and Warners, is one of six comprehensive online music services making rapid advances. Together with MusicMatch, pressplay , Rhapsody and Streamwaves, these revamped download sites offer a credible alternative to Kazaa and other free sites.
While the pooled musical resources of Kazaa's millions of members still offer an unrivalled collection of songs, many are of dubious quality, searchers often experience difficulty finding what they want and music companies are increasingly using spoof files that appear to be genuine songs, but merely waste the user's bandwidth and time.
It's still early days yet, but the quality of the new services means the writing's on the wall for free music on the Internet, according to many experts.
"It's time for all you pirates to haul down the skull and crossbone flying over your PC's and give legal music a chance," said tech reviewer Mike Langberg writing in Silicon Valley's San Jose Mercury News. "All six services offer some form of free trial, so there's no excuse for not at least trying to go legit."
Internet analyst Phil Leigh compared the situation to that of bootleggers during the prohibition era of the 1920s.
"Once alcoholic drinks were legalised, outlaw activities became fringe activities. I think we'll see the same thing," he said.
Have to agree berge. The firmware for Treo 10 gives it a much more pleasurable user interface. Kudos to the engineering/software guys/gals on this one. Really fascinating and exciting to envision all our consumer electronics having this type of functionality.
Looks like a digitalway product.eom
JazPiper Press Release : JazPiper XS mp3 player
Posted on Friday, March 07 @ 19:16:43 EST by LSDsmurf
07 March 2003 - JazPiper, one of the firsts pioneers of mp3 players in the world, releases the JazPiper XS mp3 player (XS64). The new player is seen as a lead-in to the JazPiper Spring season. A new look, a new feel and a new sound, the JazPiper XS is the world's smallest and lightest mp3 player with a large display.
Taking up the trend of consumer demand for smaller sizes, JazPiper XS is a small player that is still packed with an array of features that is expected from a new MP3 player of today (standard as well as extras) such as voice-recording, id3tag display, bluebacklight, adjustable playback speed, bookmark. However, great features are not all there is to JazPiper® XS.
"In the JazPiper XS, we have taken a new approach - we have started with a large display and built everything else around it, everything is small but the LCD." says Ken Lee, Product Marketing Executive. "Today's user looks for more than simply the ability to playback MP3. That has been more than well accomplished by JazPiper in the pioneer days of 1999. They now want small and more."
In JazPiper XS, the display takes centerstage. Blue-backlighted, with an advanced graphical LCD that displays customised logos, song titles-artists, menu-system, the JazPiper XS can also function as a clock when not in use - with large time digits and even sleep and alarm functions. The display has become the soul of the player.
Equipped with a click-on strap and an antislip grip-rubber body, the small player with a large display becomes an extremely sporty lifestyle "bring-along" device. Slip it in the jeans, strap it to the belt, wear it round the neck, tie it to the wrist, the 30g lightweight player goes wherever you go carrying your music and your digital life(file) with you.
In line with the lifestyle character of JazPiper XS, you can now make your own logo with the logo software delivered and JazPiper XS will proudly display it. No time to make your own? Then just download the many logos from JazPiper.com - zodiac signs, bands & artistes, birthdays, celebrations.
The JazPiper XS ships in end March pre-loaded with Brand New Day - a refreshing song by poprock band Yukka.
The Honest Thief's ThankYou Software: Free Music Downloads AND Money For Musicians
Tech News [03-07-2003] more news
The Honest Thief, a new file sharing service based in the Netherlands and a division of PGR BV, today announced that ThankYou 1.0, new business software engineered for file sharing providers, is available for evaluation. In a joint effort with a consortium of legal experts, The Honest Thief has developed a suite of business solutions that enables file sharing providers to capitalize on their growing number of users, while in turn compensating the musicians for their creations. ThankYou 2.0 will be available in Q2 through The Honest Thief company website recently launched at www.thehonestthief.com.
ThankYou 2.0 is a hybrid business solution that enables a P2P file sharing client to profit off of its users' untapped processing cycles in individual PCs, turning each digital music fan into distributed computing node. Customer/Vendor P2P (CV-P2P) software creates supercomputing clusters and this solution allows Windows users to lease their computers' otherwise unused processing power to research facilities. Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) technology enables monies raised from processor leasing to be collected from research facilities and distributed in turn back to the musicians. The file sharing client can take a small percentage of each transaction, much like the Amazon.com model.
"The launch of The Honest Thief and our ThankYou software sets quite a few historic precedents," said company founder Pieter Plass. "We are the first to figure out a way for both file sharing providers and musicians to earn an honest EURO. We are the first, but certainly not the last, to eliminate the record companies from the equation. Behind the 'Windmill Curtain' we are the first Dutch company operating in the Netherlands, the world's first legal haven for file sharing. The record companies are not dead yet, but they're certainly on life support. And The Honest Thief pulls the plug."
On March 28, 2002 judges Coeterier, Cornelissen and Sorgdrager from the Gerechtshof in Amsterdam, an appeals court, ruled that the users of internationally popular Kazaa are illegally infringing upon copyrights, not Kazaa itself. This ruling paved the way for the Netherlands to become a legal haven for file sharing companies.
The Honest Thief's ThankYou 2.0 intends to set the standard for file sharing software, similar to what Windows is for operating systems. Services will include:
* Easy-to-use, state-of-the-art, peer-to-peer file sharing software
* Supercomputing clusters that link research facilities with music fans
* Customer/Vendor P2P (CV-P2P) solution that lets Windows users lease their computers' otherwise unused processing power to research facilities
* Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) technology that operates seamlessly, enabling monies raised from processor leasing to be collected from research facilities and distributed in turn back to the musicians
* Multiple currency functionality
* Built-in upload accelerator
* Seven different language packs
* Built-in virus protection
* The biggest selection of works in the public domain anywhere on the Internet
* Email services
HP to introduce new version of popular media PC
Herald News Services
Monday, March 03, 2003
ADVERTISEMENT
Computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. will introduce a new
version of its popular media-centre personal computer in the next few
weeks, an HP executive said last week.
Duane Zitzner, who runs Hewlett-Packard's personal-systems group (its
PC and consumer business) also said its tablet PC has been a hit in
the medical and insurance industries. And he said PC pricing remains
aggressive, with HP and Dell Computer Corp., the two biggest PC
makers, jockeying for No. 1 market share.
Hewlett-Packard's media-centre PC, which costs about $2,000 US, lets
users watch and record television programs, make their own DVDs and
CDs, and edit digital video. Hewlett-Packard has said it was unable
to keep up with demand during the holidays.
HP's personal-system group had revenue in its fiscal first quarter of
$5.1 billion, up two per cent from the previous quarter, and an
operating profit of $33 million, compared with a loss of $68 million
in the previous quarter.
Zitzner said more details about the new version of the media-centre
PC would be announced by Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP in a few weeks.
He declined to comment when asked if PSG would be profitable for the
remaining quarters of its fiscal year ending in October.
However, he said pricing was aggressive in the just-completed
quarter, but "our margins went up and we expect to continue to do
that."
He also reiterated HP's goal of reaching operating margins of two per
cent to three per cent sometime in 2004.
© Copyright 2003 Calgary Herald
THE FUTURE SOUND OF MUSIC
Thu 6 Mar 2003 10:00
dotmusic is today taking online music to the next level with the launch of unlimited downloads and streams for users of the on demand service.
This is an unprecedented step forward into the future of online music for Europe.
Where other legal music services offer a restricted number of downloads on a monthly basis, subscribers to 'dotmusic unlimited' can get busy with the entire catalogue of more than 150,000 tunes at will.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DOTMUSIC ON DEMAND'S UNLIMITED OFFER HERE
In addition, users can take advantage of an introductory offer of 10 free burns with the capacity to pay-per-burn thereafter.
At only £9.99 that means unlimited access to music on your computer and an album of music on CD for just the price of a CD.
Unlike illegal services like KaZaa, dotmusic on demand offers CD quality music every time and downloads that are guaranteed to be free of computer viruses.
It is also a complete music environment: your magazine and record shop in one with authoritative and completely independent views on music past and present alongside the music itself at your fingertips.
Users can create and share playlists and in this way discover new music through each other. Also, the ever-changing download chart records what dotmusic is listening to.
BPI Chairman, Peter Jamieson, says of the service: "dotmusic on demand is a trailblazer in a market, which I believe gives cause for new optimism for the music industry."
Thanks Tin. I am really glad to see EDIG continue to support the Treo line with firmware upgrades.
Have we seen this dual 20gB HDD Fujitsu Ten model before?
very sexy....
http://www.fujitsu-ten.co.jp/eclipse/9902/index_f.html
Morphing the music business
CD sales are slumping. Everyone's a song pirate. The music industry must go digital or die
Peter Hum
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, March 06, 2003
CREDIT: Wayne Cuddington, The Ottawa Citizen
Mike Burns and Jeff Doiron run Ottawa's Fuel Industries, which recently created an anti-music piracy Web site for the Canadian Recording Industry Association. They are standing in front of a projection of a demo of Fantom, a downloadable application for music lovers, which Fuel also built.
Dear tech-empowered music fan: If only you had left your computer last week and refrained from downloading that 10,000th MP3 file, you no doubt would have enjoyed a jaunt to Toronto for Canadian Music Week. Night after night, you could have crawled from tavern to tavern and set your ears a-ringing to a cavalcade of bands, from the punishing hip-hop/hardcore of Ottawa's 54stance to the too-cool bossa nova of Montreal's Bet.e & Stef to the foul-mouthed, femme fatale rap of Surrey's Stink Mitt.
The acts pretty much covered the musical gamut -- except for the sounds of dread and anxiety regarding the music industry's uncertain future. For that, you would have had to attend some of the panel discussions during the event's daytime conference, when music industry types discussed the technological revolution that, download by download, is rendering their business model obsolete. One panel, titled The 10 Most Influential People in the Music Business, was composed of young people between the ages of 15 and 21, telling the audience what was what (they are big fans of illegal music downloading, and wonder why they should buy music when they can get it free on their computers). Canadians have downloaded an estimated one billion songs illegally, allegedly causing a seven-per-cent drop in sales each year over the last three years, equal to roughly $80 million in yearly lost revenue. These are the kind of numbers that prompted Don Tapscott, a University of Toronto professor and author of Paradigm Shift and Growing Up Digital, to proclaim last week: "The CD is dead.''
Like many music-industry watchers and insiders, Tapscott says the business is at critical fork in the road. "One route spells disaster for the incumbents and the rebirth of a whole new industry,'' he said. "The other route sees the incumbents doing an 11th-hour re-invention and the creation of a whole new paradigm of music production, distribution, marketing and enjoyment.''
Or as Tony MacDonnell, the lead singer of 54stance, succinctly puts it: "Step into the new school. If not, you're wiping yourself out.''
Get ready, then, for the music industry's Hail-Mary pass. As early as this month, in the weeks leading to the Juno awards extravaganza in Ottawa April 6, expect to see the Canadian music industry's first forays into a new, Net-savvy paradigm. This revolution will be preceded by publicity -- the music-biz equivalent of dropping leaflets on Iraq. Radio and TV advertising, combined with a snazzy, made-in-Ottawa Web site, are intended to convince downloaders that a fundamental law of the Internet -- "I can get it for free'' -- is wrong in the case of copyrighted music.
Also this spring, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, whose members include the five major record companies, leading independent labels and CD and tape manufacturers, is to send promotional videos and information kits to Canada's high schools, enlisting teachers as emissaries spreading the anti-piracy message.
More importantly, Canadian music companies realize they cannot get the genie that is MP3 technology back in the bottle. They plan to go to the Net with what they hope are attractive, value-added alternatives to the free MP3 menace. Later this year, perhaps by early summer, subscription-based online music services will be up and running in Canada, including three now operating in the U.S. and two Canadian debuts.
Nor has the industry given up on selling CDs. It's just that the CDs may have to be different, with fewer songs and at a lower price, or with extra features including even bonus DVDs -- anything to earn some value-added caché.
"It's been three years of going backwards and really running behind the technology,'' says Canadian Recording Industry Association president Brian Robertson. "The problem is that the illegal elements of it have far overwhelmed the industry's ability to control it to date,'' he contends. "We're at the crossroads of controlling the illegal elements, and then embracing it (technology) in a very positive way.''
Robertson sounds optimistic. But is he realistic? If U.S. experience provides any hints, then the industry should temper any cheery anticipation with a big dose of patience. American online music services have yet to catch on. Anti-piracy publicity campaigns with Britney Spears and Nelly have apparently done little to turn the tide.
But in a do-or-die situation, optimism may be a must. What choice does the Canadian industry have but to go down this digital road? "There isn't any,'' Robertson says.
Business Fights Back
Don't think, however, that the Canadian music business sat back while it suffered at the hands of file-sharing services such as Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella. While those applications allowed millions of netizens to embrace peer-to-peer networking, in effect massing all the tidily compressed MP3 files on their collective hard drives into a gargantuan, easily accessible collection, CRIA was fighting back like an outnumbered sherriff in a crime-ridden, Wild-West town.
CRIA's budget includes more than a million dollars for fighting online music piracy. It has several staffers scouring the Internet with sophisticated Web crawling software to identify Canadian Web sites offering illegal music downloads, fixing their crosshairs on dozens of such sites each week. CRIA follows up by sending "notice and takedown'' letters to the Internet service providers behind the pirates' Web pages, asking for it to investigate and deny service, based on conditions of use prohibiting users from breaking Canadian laws, including copyright law.
"It's a bit lumbering, but there is some measure of co-operation,'' says Robertson. "We've taken down millions of songs.''
CRIA would have gone further as an enforcer if it thought it could. If only it could emulate its sister organization in the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America, which is notoriously litigious. In 2000, the RIAA used the courts to shut down Napster. It is now playing legal hardball with U.S. Internet service provider Verizon, attempting to get the ISP to divulge the name of a customer suspected of sharing hundreds of music files. Ultimately, an RIAA success could lead to a wave of subpoenas targeting suspected pirates. The RIAA sends roughly 2,500 copyright-violation notices each month to colleges and universities and last week, its CEO Hilary B. Rosen said prosecuting individual students is possible.
CRIA, however, has not launched a single lawsuit. It has steered clear of courtroom action, in part because it figures that Canada's copyright laws are, for its purposes, toothless.
Robertson complains that Canada has yet to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization's 1996 copyright treaty, while the U.S. has. "It's a very frustrating process to see the industry lose $250 million (over the last three years) in Canada and the bureaucrats moving so slowly,'' he says. "The very treaty that was created to help control the problem is still sitting on someone's desk, gathering dust... We're as aggressive as we can be, given out constraints.''
In any event, flat-out aggression has its drawbacks. The RIAA has been reviled in some techie and youth quarters for its crackdown's invasive measures and for effectively criminalizing its likely customers.
CRIA, in contrast, plays the good cop in its upcoming PR blitz. The message-track Web site, www.keepmusiccoming.com, was launched this week, replete with dynamic Flash animation, to win back music fans with honey rather than vinegar. The site, a contract job created by the Ottawa Web-based marketing shop Fuel Industries, seeks to convert downloaders with behind-the-scenes stories from the music business stressing the value of music, online chatting, streaming audio and video, and a game that "speaks to the economics of the music industry,'' says Fuel's president Jeff Doiron. The site also features a limited giveaway of tickets to the Juno awards, links to legit music-download sites and a bit of fear-mongering. "Warning: file-sharing programs can leave your computer vulnerable to viruses,'' reads one of the site's pages.
To help refine the Web site's message, Fuel Industries staff in December interviewed dozens of Ottawa teenagers about their music-listening habits, receiving responses that supported the industry's misgivings. "Almost every single kid out there that we interviewed downloads music, to some degree,'' Doiron says. "When they go online, the first thing they do is talk on MSN Messenger, and they check their e-mail and they go to either a sports site or a music site to download music. They then obviously burn CDs.''
Naturally, Fuel executives think that the company has done a good job. Just the same, they don't think the Web site will be a magic bullet against pirates. "MP3 piracy is here to stay. I don't think it's ever going to go away,'' says Fuel's creative director Mike Burns.
Playing Catch-Up
The music industry knows that anti-piracy propaganda aside, it must compete with an online alternative that can somehow top Kazaa and the like. If only it had taken sooner to the task. Had the music industry been more visionary in the Internet's early days, perhaps it would have acquired its online competition instead of trying to kill it.
"Ten years ago," recalls jazz pianist Herbie Hancock in an interview published at www.allaboutjazz.com, "I asked some of the executives if they had anybody at the label that was looking into the new technologies... and new ways to distribute music. They looked at me if I was crazy. The answer is 'No.'
"If they had paid attention to it (new technologies), the whole business that we are embarking on, this new scene for the record industry would be totally different," says Hancock, an enthusiastic tech advocate. "The record industry would have been the Napster."
MacDonnell agrees. "The large labels should have bought the system, implemented it and honestly turned it into a business... They empowered the hackers by shutting it down... all the hackers, all the people who are against that sort of mentality said, 'Oh yeah? We're going to make it even crazier.'"
With nothing to do but play catch-up, three U.S. services -- MusicMatch, MusicNet and pressplay -- are to launch in Canada as soon as the music industry can strike a deal for remuneration with the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency, which represents songwriters, music publishers and artists.
"It's not as though there's any sort of confrontation or disagreement,'' Robertson explains. "It's just the complexity of tracking hundreds of thousands (of songs) that are going to be up on the Internet and are going to be streamed (played in real time as if the computer were a radio) and downloaded.''
In addition, two Canadian online music services, Moontaxi and Galaxie, are poised to launch. Like the other services, the Canadian offerings are expected to charge users a monthly subscription or a per-song cost. In the U.S. the services typically charge customers $9 or $10 a month to listen to streamed music. Customers can usually download a song and copy it to a CD for 99 cents.
The latter scheme, as well as the forthcoming re-introduction of CD singles (discs with perhaps two or three songs retailing for just a few dollars), demonstrate that music on the Net has re-established the song, rather than the multi-song album, as music's basic unit of music. The industry knows that young customers are far more keen and able to fork out $3.99 rather than $19.99. As well, there's the issue of artistic consistency. "You know what really bugs me?" asks MacDonnell. "Let's say I've heard one song on the radio... and I buy the album and the rest of the album sucks. I feel like I've paid 28 bucks for one song."
Robertson is optimistic that the music industry can turn a buck by distributing songs online. However, the U.S. music-lovers have been slow to play along. The U.S. services have, all told, about 300,000 customers, while free music-sharing services have users in the millions. As well, the free services offer much greater selection. Since peer-to-peer networking links the collections of every file-sharer when they are online and active, millions of songs can be accessed. Legit services typically offer far fewer tracks -- several hundred thousand or so -- because of their need to obtain rights for reproduction.
There has been a glimmer of hope for the labels in Europe, where the music industry has made online inroads with classic drug-dealer marketing, by giving away free high-quality samples. OD2, a United Kingdom-based company founded by musician Peter Gabriel, is behind Digital Download Day, a scheme that will allow Internet users in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands to download as many as 30 tracks for free from a 150,000-song playlist on March 21. A pilot version in October, limited to the U.K., drew about 500,000 users and crippled Internet servers. OD2, reported NME.com, has increased its server capacity tenfold this time around.
Digital-Kiosk System
Bricks-and-mortar CD stores, however, will not be left behind. Of course, the HMVs and CD Warehouses of the world already have online presences. But Robertson says that a conglomerate of retailers is developing a digital-kiosk system so that a visit to the CD store could more closely resemble going online. Later this year, in-store shoppers will be able to go online at a kiosk, surf through selections and download in the store. "It could be a huge boost with respect to choice," Robertson says. "Obviously you're fairly limited in what you could put on the shelves. Instead of having a few hundred titles, you're going to have potentially hundreds of thousands. The retail opportunity is certainly enhanced."
Meanwhile, third parties such as Fuel Industries in Ottawa are devising applications and new technologies to bolster what the record labels can offer customers.
Doiron and Burns are hot on a Fuel product which they call CD Gateway. The technology effectively turns a legitimate CD into a "Opem Sesame" passkey to an otherwise inaccessible Web site. The Web site, Doiron says, could offer additional songs, video footage of the band on tour, contests and other content.
Fuel staff are to show this technology to BMG Records representatives in New York next week, along with an downloadable application that they call a Windows information manager.
A demo of the application allows for a user to program his or her musical preferences into the application, which then would receive news updates such as tour information and musical samples. The application would also incorporate streaming video, photo galleries and an online store.
Fuel's discussions with young music fans found that they were, in a word, fickle. "Kids have a disconnect between the music and the artist," Doiron says. "If Eminem is the biggest artist out there right now, kids don't really care if he goes out of business because they don't buy his CD. As far as they're concerned, there's a thousand Eminems waiting in the wings for the record labels to push to be the next big thing." He contends that Fuel's information manager could "help to start build that relationship again between the artist and the fan."
Says Burns: "You want to build something so that the kids can go on there, get the information they want to get, build that relationship up, let them sample music and let them choose if they want to buy it or download it or make their own mix CDs."
"There's a way to hit the business model so it's bang-on," Burns asserts.
The shake-out, then, is coming, with little certain about the outcome -- except that until a bang-on business model establishes itself, there will be more reprises of songs of anxiety and dread.
"Something's going to have to change," says MacDonnell. "And somebody's going to have to hurt for awhile until a solution is found."
Music Sites
Industry Sites
keepmusiccoming.com
cria.ca
Alternate Views
fairtunes.com
janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
Artist-Driven Download Sites
garageband.com
mp3.com
Ottawa-Based Sites
theottawamusician.com
54stance.com
robertfarrell.com
terrytufts.com
Consumer devices selling briskly as prices plunge
By Jennifer Baljko
EBN
March 6, 2003 (12:05 p.m. EST)
SAN MATEO, Calif. — Suppliers of hardware to the consumer electronics market are enjoying growing demand for their products, but also are under intense competition that is squeezing profit margins, according to analysts at iSuppli Corp.
As with other segments in the high-tech sector, consumer electronics manufacturers continue to deal with a weak economy, low consumer confidence and the threat of war with Iraq. Four key areas — DVD players and recorders, digital cameras, set-top boxes and video game consoles — are experiencing good unit growth but are struggling to preserve profits, said analyst Jay Srivatsa.
With Japanese OEMs losing market share, Taiwanese and Chinese ODMs, as well as traditional PC makers such as Gateway and Dell, are expected to more aggressively play in the market, he said. That will bring with it some changes among supplier and semiconductor relationships.
"The domination of the Japanese OEM is starting to wane. We expect to see Chinese and Taiwanese ODMs play a stronger part in this market," Srivatsa said. "In the past, many semiconductor companies had to work with the Japanese OEMs. With the advent of the Chinese and Taiwanese companies, semiconductor companies can participate directly with those companies and bypass the Japanese OEMs."
In the DVD area, even though consumer demand remains robust, profits margins continue to come under pressure, said Srivatsa. In many stores, DVDs are selling below $90. "I saw a DVD player over Christmas that was selling for $38. At that price no one is making money," he said.
However, the low selling price will continue to attract consumers for the time being; iSuppli forecasts that 55 million units will be sold this year.
By 2004 or 2005, though, DVD recorders, which are selling for $700 to $800, will drop in price and eventually replace DVD players, Srivatsa said.
"There is real opportunity for digital cameras to replace traditional film camera over next few years," he said. Srivatsa is forecasting that digital camera unit sales will rise from 30 million this year to 55 million by 2007.
Digital set-top boxes will also come under pressure as hardware brand awareness fades and services around digital cable, direct TV and other multi-media devices gain importance.
"When people say they have DirectTV, they don't often say they have a Philips box," he said. "It's becoming more of a software business and the value of the hardware brand is going away."
In the video game console segment, Srivatsa expects to see more outsourcing of manufacturing, driven by the need to deliver lower-cost devices to the broader consumer market.
No it's called undercapitalization.eom
HearItAgain.net to Sell MP3 Downloads of Live Concerts; Fans to Order Digital Recordings Within 48 Hours of Performance
Wednesday March 5, 7:45 am ET
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y., March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- HearItAgain.net (www.hearitagain.net) today announced the development of a unique Web-based service that will allow music fans an opportunity to order digital downloads of live concert performances.
HearItAgain.net was conceived of by 16-year music and new media veteran Mike Corso (known for pioneering music promotion on the Internet in 1993). According to Corso, "One of the most compelling things about what we're doing is delivering a product to an already existing, willing market." Corso added, "Fans will adore this concept because, better than a commercially available live release, it enables them to own `MY' show (`THIS is the show I SAW!')."
HearItAgain.net gives fans much more than a baseball cap, t-shirt or other merchandise -- they get something that will become an invaluable addition to their music collection.
"HearItAgain.net was inspired by my own personal experience with Apple's iPod MP3 player," said Corso. "Every day I travel with 1,800 songs that are stored on my iPod. Regardless of where I am, I can listen to ANY song in my music collection....and I can (and do) play it through many sources (home stereo, car stereo, boom box, etc.). To me, the message is simple: the CD is dying and portability of one's own music tonnage will be commonplace for millions of music lovers. For this reason, HearItAgain.net is devoting all of its energy to digital delivery (MP3, Shorten, a better compression format...whatever) of live concerts." Corso added, "The other inspiration for HearItAgain.net is my love of live performances and my belief that huge numbers of concert-going fans would love to own recordings of shows they attended or heard about."
Corso further added: "I firmly believe that we have entered a period where EVERY concert performance should be uploaded for fans to purchase and download the next day. The time has come for artists to do this regularly and HearItAgain.net was created to facilitate the process for artists and labels and centralize the offerings of all live recordings not commercially available online or at retail. We do not believe in selling one or two performances from a tour but EVERY performance. Know this: every city has fans that would like to walk away with an audio file of the concert THEY attended. In addition, there will be many fans (that were unable to attend a live performance) who will order a particular show because they heard it was AWESOME!"
HearItAgain.net's mission is to give fans what they want at an attractive price while, at the same time, putting found money into the hands of the music industry. With its production offices and studios based in New York, HearItAgain.net will rely on its network of freelance audio engineers to record shows throughout the country.
The process is as follows:
1) Artists overnight a DAT/ADAT to the hearitagain.net production
office. (If Artist does not record their performances, HearItAgain.net
engineers will do so)
2) Within 24-48 hours, HearItAgain.net will master and encode files to
MP3 and store on the HearItAgain.net servers.
3) HearItAgain.net will be responsible for all marketing, e-commerce,
and accounting (including payment of mechanical licenses).
4) Sale price per concert will average $11.95.
HearItAgain.net will work with artists who perform, on average, 60 times per year before audiences of at least 500/show.
Artists and bands are encouraged to contact HearItAgain.net to discuss terms.
CONTACT:
Mike Corso of HearItAgain.net
Tel: 914.238.6874
mike@hearitagain.net
http://www.hearitagain.net
This release was issued through eReleases.com - Your Source for Affordable PR. For more information, visit http://www.ereleases.com.
TI video processor provides VGA resolution
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
March 5, 2003 (9:06 a.m. EST)
ArchivesPARIS — Edging into the stronghold of ASICs traditionally favored by big-name consumer electronics manufacturers, Texas Instruments Inc. has rolled a DSP-based digital media processor targeting high-resolution digital still cameras, video camcorders and a host of portable multimedia products.
The TMS320DM270 integrates TI's low-power TM320-C54x digital signal processor with an ARM7 RISC core and video and imaging coprocessors. The DM270 is "the only processor slated for portable devices capable of VGA-resolution video encoding at 30 frames per second," said Kanika Ferrell, U.S. marketing manager for digital still/video cameras at TI (Dallas).
With hardware blocks specifically designed for auto focus, auto exposure and auto white balance, the DM270 also minimizes shot-to-shot delays that result from changes in light conditions, Ferrell said.
As digital still cameras become mainstream consumer devices, chip makers are waging a "heated battle" for the market, she said, adding that camera makers are looking for better image quality and new features such as video. "This is a market that's really moving quickly," Ferrell said, and camera makers will find it "hard to keep up with the market and make money on their products if they purely depend on a whole new ASIC they'd have to develop for every new product."
Market share doubled
Although acknowledging TI's uphill battle against internally developed ASICs, Ferrell pointed out that TI's family of DSP-based imaging processors has already been designed into prod-
ucts by Kodak, Panasonic, JVC, Sharp and Archos. "We doubled our market share [in digital-camera silicon] to 10 percent in 2002," she said. TI expects to double its share again, to 20 percent, this year.
TI will make the DM270 available in volume at the end of this month. Fabricated in a 0.13-micron process, it will be priced under $15 in quantities of 25,000 units.
With the DM270, TI offers software support for all major video, imaging, audio and voice compression standards, including JPEG, motion-JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, H.263, DivX and Windows Media Video, as well as audio standards such as MP3, Advanced Audio Coding and Windows Media Audio.
Supported voice standards include G711, G.723.1 and G.726. TI's R&D team is in the process of converting the new H.264 encoding/decoding algorithms for use in the DM270, said Ferrell.
The DM270 can run various operating systems, including Nucleus, Linux, ulTron and VxWorks. It is upwardly code-compatible with Texas Instruments' DSC2x platform.
I wouldn't give us up for dead yet. We have a history now of piggybacking on Apple's marketing efforts. Let's hope that wedigmusic.com is readying for it's next iteration that will play off the launch of the Apple site.
imitation is the highest form of flattery....
Apple readying music download service
11:36 Wednesday 5th March 2003
Ian Fried and John Borland, CNET News.com
Apple users may soon have access to a legal online music service designed specifically for them
Apple is preparing an online music-buying service for Macintosh and iPod users and is close to winning many of the licences it needs from major record labels, sources familiar with the negotiations said.
The service, first reported by The Los Angeles Times, would be the first legal online music service targeted specifically at Apple owners. Most of the other authorised subscription plans, including Pressplay, MusicNet, and Listen.com's Rhapsody, still lack support for Macintosh computers. Apple users have long had access to an assortment of file-swapping services, however.
The service could also go a long way toward repairing Apple's strained relationships with content owners, stemming from the company's high-profile advertising campaign, which touted the arrival of Macs with CD burners with the slogan: "Rip. Mix. Burn."
No details on pricing or possible content-protection technology were immediately available. Apple declined to comment on the service.
Apple has previously found itself snubbed by most of the early movie and music subscription services, in part because of its refusal to build strict digital rights management tools into its products.
The company has tried to stake what it sees as a middle ground in the digital copyright arena, supporting the position of copyright holders while ultimately leaving the decisions in the hands of its customers. With the iPod, for example, Apple has a synching feature that, when enabled, limits the digital music player to sharing music with one computer. By disabling that feature, an iPod user can allow the device to swap tunes with any number of Macs.
"Piracy is not a technological issue. It's a behaviour issue," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said when the iPod was introduced in October 2001.
As for copy protection, Apple includes none with the iPod currently, though the device does come in a plastic wrap that admonishes in English, French, German and Japanese: "Don't steal music."
Jobs said that all the encryption schemes that have been developed can also be cracked, and he made the case that Apple understands where the record companies are coming from. "We own a lot of intellectual property ourselves. We're one of the few companies in the industry that does," Jobs said.
austonia our resident doubting thomas. Lexan is plastic but it stops bullets...
Been using a Treo hd player for over a year...what do I need an id3 tag for again??...
If people want the tiny LCD on the Zen then more power to them (pun intended- hey mayBE that's where the zen came up with it's extra two hours of battery life...the tiny LCD.
CHEERS
OT MusicMoz.org Aims to be the Open Directory For Music Sites
.
Based around the Open Directory editing model, MusicMoz aims to be a comprehensive directory of music, built by volunteers around the world, with contributions from the web public.
MusicMoz only offers volunteer editing positions. There is no money involved, only the satisfaction and enjoyment of building a useful resource for the web public, and participating in an international community of editors.
Search URLwire archives since 1994
MusicMoz, aka The Open Music Project, was created because music information is one of the most searched topics online, and a very important application of the internet. Commercial and fan websites offer an abundance of information on thousands of bands, artists, orchestras, composers and just about every other aspect of music. One of the biggest drawbacks to this wealth of information is that it can be very disorganized and can often disappear as websites continually shut their doors.
MusicMoz and many of its features were inspired by the Open Directory Project. MusicMoz also uses Open Directory Project data, which any site may do providing they display the correct attribution. MusicMoz is not affiliated with Netscape, although many of their volunteer editors also edit at the Open Directory Project.
If you are interested in music and would like to maintain a category in the Open Music Project, It's simple to join. First, find a category you would like to maintain. Choose "become an editor" at the top of the category page. Fill in the simple application form. Note that some categories do not have a "become an editor" link; you should find a more specific category which interests you, and apply there. Once you have joined, and gained some experience, you can apply for more general categories. Editors are free to spend as little or as much time on the project as they wish to, there are no minimum requirements.
If you want to help, but don't have the time or inclination to become an editor, you can still help by submitting a website, review, or other information, which one of our editors will review for inclusion in the directory. Simply find the right category and choose the 'submit item' option at the top of the category page.
MusicMoz only offers volunteer editing positions. There is no money involved, only the satisfaction and enjoyment of building a useful resource for the web public, and participating in an international community of editors.
For more information about the Open Music Project, please visit http://www.musicmoz.org/ and/or read their FAQ.
Apple gears up to sell music online
By Tony Smith
Posted: 04/03/2003 at 18:18 GMT
Apple is to launch an online music service, perhaps as early as next month, sources cited by the LA Times have claimed.
According to the sources, a new version of Apple's iTunes jukebox software will download tracks from the service which simplifies buying, almost certainlt using the 1-Click technology Apple has already licensed from Amazon.
Eschewing the MP3 format, Apple's service will be based on Dolby's AAC (Advanced Audio Coding not Codec, as the LA Times report mistakenly states) in order to tie each track to a specific Mac and thus prevent unauthorised duplication. Users will be able to copy tracks to an iPod, suggesting that an update to the music player's software is in the works too.
Apple's spin, relayed by the LA Times' over-enthusiastic and, we suspect, quasi-official deep throat, is that music executives are excited over how easy to use the new service is. The irony is that Apple has had such a move forced on it by an industry increasingly employing copy protection schemes, almost all of which support only PC playback. The major labels' online music sales sites are Windows only.
If the majors won't bring music to the Mac, Apple has to, or risk its platform looking increasingly unattractive as a digital media hub.
And at the same time, Apple builds for itself yet another revenue stream designed to exploit its user base, just as has with its .mac email service. Mac OS X is full of 'click here to buy' links that, as yet, Apple has not fully exploited.
Indeed, the music industry lack of interest in the Mac community actually provides Apple with a potential monopoly over online music sales to Mac users. The LA Times source claims the service will be "competitive", but where else can most Mac punters get music online?
Illegal file sharing remains a possibility, but copy-protected CDs and file-sharing poisoners may one day limit that option.
Disabled war veteran hosts Disabled RIAA website
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 01/03/2003 at 22:11 GMT
Ciarán Tannam reports that the Recording Industry Association of America's website has been down for a week, again, and did we know why? I think we can help.
At the end of January, the RIAA gave responsibilities for the site to a hitherto little-heard-of operation in Rockville, MD called Tomorrow's Solutions Today, or TST Inc.
The site is run by one Kevin Dziekonski, and the RIAA appears to be his very first live customer.
In this directory listing, Dziekonski describes himself as a "Service Disabled Veteran" and TST as a "Small Disadvantaged Business".
Before the latest denial of service attack took down the site, TST was running an out-of-the-box edition of Internet Information Server 5.0. It also appears to be run from a residential address - Dziekonski's home.
After an RIAA outage earlier this month, Dziekonski responded to reporters' queries by explaining that "the site is hosted in a couple locations and need to have redundant communications between them. The one thing in common they share that cannot be avoided is Verizon." So the redundancy does, er... not extend to having two hosting companies.
It's a pleasure to see veterans finding a rewarding life outside the service. The brown cardboard signs at many an urban intersection here show that life outside the service can be tough, and discrimination abounds.
And it's particularly gratifying to see the RIAA extending the working life of service personnel at one end of the age scale, when it's doing all it can to truncate the careers of service personnel at the other end. Those Navy cadets found guilty of pirating MP3s face a military trial, and in all likelihood, will be dismissed from the service.
But the puzzle remains:
How did one of the most reviled, and therefore attacked web sites in the world end up in the hands of an apparently inexperienced operator?
Calls from The Register to Dziekonski had not been returned at time of publication. And if the RIAA's VP of Corporate Subtlety, Amy Weiss, would like to provide an explanation, we will of course print it.
In this case, to paraphrase Ms.Weiss, the truth promises to be even more interesting than the facts.®
A Real Hollywood Horror Story
MARCH 10, 2003
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
New technologies may do to movies what MP3 did to music
Picture a fellow named George sitting in his living room on Sunday evening. He's watching a digital playback of the latest episode of The West Wing. Zapping through commercials, he starts yawning and decides to finish watching it in bed. With a flick of his remote, he wirelessly dispatches the show to the bedroom TV. He also sends a copy via the Internet to his sister and asks her in an e-mail to make a DVD of the show to pass along to their mom.
Story Continues Below Ad
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This vision of the future is closer than you think. To date, Napster and its music-sharing offspring have reigned supreme as Hollywood's biggest headache. But four insurgent technologies that will make George's Sunday possible are fast picking up steam. Together, they promise to turn the gamut of copyrighted programming into convenient files that can be downloaded, stored, and shared almost as easily as e-mail. And this shift could happen quickly--within 18 months--because early forms of these technologies are here now.
The insurgency starts with compression, a new system to shrink digital files into smaller packages that are easier to send through networks. Step two is storage: Advances there put enough memory for shelves of movies into laptops or even handheld gizmos. The third technology is digital recording, such as the one used by TiVo Inc. (TIVO ), which is now being jammed into a host of devices and computers. And to link all of this programming, whether in a house or on campus, a new high-speed wireless system is emerging that can zap an episode of The Simpsons between laptops 50 times faster than most broadband connections. Add it all together, and Hollywood will be reaching for a bigger dose of aspirin.
The danger is evident. Unchecked, these advances spell the Napsterization of movies and the scorching of TV ad revenues. The threat already is pushing Tinseltown to raise two levels of defenses. The industry is hurrying to build safeguards into networks and computers to limit copying or transmission of copyrighted fare. And entertainment companies are pressing cases in court, suing companies, and pursuing individuals. "It's not just one fight," says Clay Shirky, a tech consultant and professor at New York University. "The entire [technology industry] is playing against music and movie companies."
It's easy to understand why. With a weak economy dragging down sales and earnings, tech companies are pulling out all stops to entice consumers to buy new products. And what's more alluring than entertainment? So it's little wonder that all four technologies--wireless networking, massive data storage, faster compression speeds, and powerful recording technologies--are showing up everywhere, from Toshiba home media centers and Apple Computer laptops to Samsung Group handhelds. "The next wave of the personal computer is the digital lifestyle," says Philip W. Schiller, Apple's (AAPL ) senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing.
It was a compression innovation called MP3 that opened the Internet to music-sharing in the late '90s. That technology transformed songs into files small enough to send over a dial-up connection. Now comes MPEG4. This compression standard shrinks audio and video by a factor of two to three, and it will be programmed into most computers, stereos, and DVD players by yearend. "It's the MP3 of video," says analyst Lou Latham of Gartner Inc.
Thanks to breakthroughs in high-density storage, there will be loads of room to warehouse those videos. When Napster surfaced in 1999, a gigabyte of storage--enough to hold around 250 MP3 songs--cost $12.27 wholesale. Now, it's down to $1.15, according to IDC. With storage this cheap, it's easy for RCA to stuff 20 gigabytes into its $400 handheld personal video recorder, which can handle 80 hours of video.
Such recording machines are at the heart of Hollywood's vulnerability. Pioneered by startups TiVo and ReplayTV Inc. (SBLU ), PVRs make it a snap to digitally record any TV show--and it's just as easy to skip through commercials. Now, PVR technology is starting to pop up in Toshiba laptops, Panasonic's $1,000 DVD machines, and Hewlett-Packard's $1,600 entertainment PCs. These devices all connect to networks, and they can make movie-length copies on DVDs. This makes it ever easier for viewers to own, and to share, nearly everything they see.
In time, most entertainment systems will sport their own PVRs, with gobs of storage and connections to the Net. At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic, Royal Philips Electronics, and Sony (SNE ) unveiled their new media centers. These machines, costing from $1,000 to $2,000, offer next-generation remote controls and servers that link virtually every home-entertainment device in the house. Meantime, RCA, Samsung, and others are rolling out mobile video players to let consumers take all this content on the road. "The threat that the mobile MP3 players was for music, this is for movies," says Tim Bajarin, president of consulting firm Creative Strategies. "It's video on the go."
The final piece of the puzzle is wireless. In the past year, networking in homes, campuses, and cafes using low-cost Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, has taken off. This summer, a high-speed cousin, compatible with the previous version, is coming out. Known as 802.11g, it's five times faster than its predecessor.
The implications are huge. One example: Even as universities battle piracy by monitoring mega data transfers on their networks, students will soon be able to set up their own high-speed networks in dorms or labs and trade files willy-nilly. That will be easier with the new standard, whose 150-foot range is about twice the length of old Wi-Fi.
These advances are setting the stage for a new round of conflict among tech companies, consumers, and Hollywood. The technology industry is working with music and movie studios to create new services, digital locks, and filters that can balance consumer rights and copyrights. But they'd better hurry. Once consumers get their hands on the power these new technologies deliver, Hollywood will have a tough time getting it back.
By Heather Green in New York
A Real Hollywood Horror Story
MARCH 10, 2003
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
New technologies may do to movies what MP3 did to music
Picture a fellow named George sitting in his living room on Sunday evening. He's watching a digital playback of the latest episode of The West Wing. Zapping through commercials, he starts yawning and decides to finish watching it in bed. With a flick of his remote, he wirelessly dispatches the show to the bedroom TV. He also sends a copy via the Internet to his sister and asks her in an e-mail to make a DVD of the show to pass along to their mom.
Story Continues Below Ad
Are you paying too much for auto insurance?
Yes
No
submit
This vision of the future is closer than you think. To date, Napster and its music-sharing offspring have reigned supreme as Hollywood's biggest headache. But four insurgent technologies that will make George's Sunday possible are fast picking up steam. Together, they promise to turn the gamut of copyrighted programming into convenient files that can be downloaded, stored, and shared almost as easily as e-mail. And this shift could happen quickly--within 18 months--because early forms of these technologies are here now.
The insurgency starts with compression, a new system to shrink digital files into smaller packages that are easier to send through networks. Step two is storage: Advances there put enough memory for shelves of movies into laptops or even handheld gizmos. The third technology is digital recording, such as the one used by TiVo Inc. (TIVO ), which is now being jammed into a host of devices and computers. And to link all of this programming, whether in a house or on campus, a new high-speed wireless system is emerging that can zap an episode of The Simpsons between laptops 50 times faster than most broadband connections. Add it all together, and Hollywood will be reaching for a bigger dose of aspirin.
The danger is evident. Unchecked, these advances spell the Napsterization of movies and the scorching of TV ad revenues. The threat already is pushing Tinseltown to raise two levels of defenses. The industry is hurrying to build safeguards into networks and computers to limit copying or transmission of copyrighted fare. And entertainment companies are pressing cases in court, suing companies, and pursuing individuals. "It's not just one fight," says Clay Shirky, a tech consultant and professor at New York University. "The entire [technology industry] is playing against music and movie companies."
It's easy to understand why. With a weak economy dragging down sales and earnings, tech companies are pulling out all stops to entice consumers to buy new products. And what's more alluring than entertainment? So it's little wonder that all four technologies--wireless networking, massive data storage, faster compression speeds, and powerful recording technologies--are showing up everywhere, from Toshiba home media centers and Apple Computer laptops to Samsung Group handhelds. "The next wave of the personal computer is the digital lifestyle," says Philip W. Schiller, Apple's (AAPL ) senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing.
It was a compression innovation called MP3 that opened the Internet to music-sharing in the late '90s. That technology transformed songs into files small enough to send over a dial-up connection. Now comes MPEG4. This compression standard shrinks audio and video by a factor of two to three, and it will be programmed into most computers, stereos, and DVD players by yearend. "It's the MP3 of video," says analyst Lou Latham of Gartner Inc.
Thanks to breakthroughs in high-density storage, there will be loads of room to warehouse those videos. When Napster surfaced in 1999, a gigabyte of storage--enough to hold around 250 MP3 songs--cost $12.27 wholesale. Now, it's down to $1.15, according to IDC. With storage this cheap, it's easy for RCA to stuff 20 gigabytes into its $400 handheld personal video recorder, which can handle 80 hours of video.
Such recording machines are at the heart of Hollywood's vulnerability. Pioneered by startups TiVo and ReplayTV Inc. (SBLU ), PVRs make it a snap to digitally record any TV show--and it's just as easy to skip through commercials. Now, PVR technology is starting to pop up in Toshiba laptops, Panasonic's $1,000 DVD machines, and Hewlett-Packard's $1,600 entertainment PCs. These devices all connect to networks, and they can make movie-length copies on DVDs. This makes it ever easier for viewers to own, and to share, nearly everything they see.
In time, most entertainment systems will sport their own PVRs, with gobs of storage and connections to the Net. At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic, Royal Philips Electronics, and Sony (SNE ) unveiled their new media centers. These machines, costing from $1,000 to $2,000, offer next-generation remote controls and servers that link virtually every home-entertainment device in the house. Meantime, RCA, Samsung, and others are rolling out mobile video players to let consumers take all this content on the road. "The threat that the mobile MP3 players was for music, this is for movies," says Tim Bajarin, president of consulting firm Creative Strategies. "It's video on the go."
The final piece of the puzzle is wireless. In the past year, networking in homes, campuses, and cafes using low-cost Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, has taken off. This summer, a high-speed cousin, compatible with the previous version, is coming out. Known as 802.11g, it's five times faster than its predecessor.
The implications are huge. One example: Even as universities battle piracy by monitoring mega data transfers on their networks, students will soon be able to set up their own high-speed networks in dorms or labs and trade files willy-nilly. That will be easier with the new standard, whose 150-foot range is about twice the length of old Wi-Fi.
These advances are setting the stage for a new round of conflict among tech companies, consumers, and Hollywood. The technology industry is working with music and movie studios to create new services, digital locks, and filters that can balance consumer rights and copyrights. But they'd better hurry. Once consumers get their hands on the power these new technologies deliver, Hollywood will have a tough time getting it back.
By Heather Green in New York
No guilt for cheating Big Music
Most of the artists have money to spare, but college students don't
EMILY BRILL
Knight Ridder
Posted on Sat, Mar. 01, 2003
PHILADELPHIA - There's a revolution afoot. According to a recent study conducted by research firm Ipsos-Reid, 28 percent of Americans 12 and older have downloaded a music file off the Internet. That translates to 60 million downloaders.
So here's a news flash for Big Music: It's over. We have cut you off, and guess what? We don't feel the least bit guilty.
Why? Because the overwhelming majority of the artists who fill our hard drives are considerably well off, as are the people and companies who manage them.
"Why should I feel guilty?" asks Princeton University freshman Molly Fay. "Most of the artists I download make more money than I ever will. Who am I to care if I cheat them out of a couple of bucks?"
But money isn't all of it. There's a big difference between stealing a hot dog from a street vendor and downloading an MP3. We don't have to look anyone in the eye, and when we "take" a file, we're not removing it; we're copying it.
Another reason there's no chance of us returning to the music stores: making our own CDs is just way too convenient.
"The majority of my CDs are definitely my own mixes," says University of Pennsylvania freshman Merrill McDermott, adding that since she likes a lot of different genres of music, "downloading is the only way to obtain that eclectic mix" she's after. None of us want to have a decision as important as what to put on a CD made for us by a bunch of executives in a California conference room. We aren't revolting against the artists. We are revolting against the nonartists, the people who take art and make it fit into a Doritos commercial.
Music industry efforts to curtail our use of file-sharing programs will be futile. Kids are always one step ahead and can defeat almost any technology with another. More important, the music industry gives us too great a reason not to buy music. They charge us $20 for albums that cost about 13 cents to make -- albums that have, perhaps, two songs we actually want. That's a whopping 15,385 percent gross profit -- and I mean gross.
Fay captures a prevailing sentiment: "If having MP3s means that some suit won't be able to buy that third BMW he was craving, along with the house in the Hamptons, because the rest of the population saves necessary money by not purchasing music from a store, then I'm all for it."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emily Brill is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.
In Brief - RIAA
Topping the list of Recording Industry Association of America’s recent announced victories is a federal jury’s unprecedented $136 million damage award against Media Group and its former CEO. The verdict follows a bench ruling that the CD manufacturing plant and its former CEO, Jimmy Chan, were liable for copyright infringement. The size of the award arose from the jury’s damage calculation of $90,000 per infringed song. RIAA, representing 23 record companies, claimed that more than 1,500 works were infringed. Collection of the multi-million dollar award may be difficult in that Media Group filed bankruptcy prior to entry of the jury’s verdict. The RIAA also announced a $10.1 million settlement of copyright infringement claims by Toronto-based CD manufacturer Cinram International Inc., a $3.2 million settlement by CD manufacturer DOCdata USA and a $1 million settlement with Integrated Information Systems, Inc., a technology company one of whose internal servers allowed employees to retrieve and share copyrighted MP3 files. The RIAA also joined the National Music Publishers’ Association and The Harry Fox Agency in reaching an agreement, financial terms undisclosed, with peer-to-peer network Audiogalaxy.com, as part of which Audiogalaxy will now require copyright owner permission before music can be shared.
OT Hope they are as witty in our IFE demos...Safety Info Demo
Totally off the record... I was flying to San Francisco this weekend, and the stewardess reading the flight safety information had the whole plane looking at each other like "what the heck?".
So once we got airborne, I took out my laptop and typed up what she said so I wouldn't forget. I've left out a few parts I'm sure, but this is most of it.
Before Takeoff....
Hello and welcome to Alaska flight 438 to San Francisco. If you're going to San Fransisco, you're in the right place. If you're not going to San Francisco, you're about to have a really long evening.
We'd like to tell you now about some important safety features of this aircraft. The most important safety feature we have aboard this plane is... The Flight Attendants. Please look at one now.
There are 5 exits aboard this plane, 2 at the front, 2 over the wings, and one out the plane's rear end. If you're seated in one of the exit rows, please do not store your bags by your feet. That would be a really bad idea.
Please take a moment and look around and find the nearest exit. Count the rows of seats between you and the exit. In the event that the need arises to find one, trust me, you'll be glad you did. We have pretty blinking lights on the floor that will blink in the direction of the exits. White ones along the normal rows, and pretty red ones at the exit rows.
In the event of a loss of cabin pressure these baggy things will drop down over your head. You stick it over your nose and mouth like the flight attendant is doing now. The bag won't inflate, but there's oxygen there, I promise.
If you are sitting next to a small child, or someone who is acting like a small child, please do us all a favor and put on your mask first. If you are travelling with two or more children, please take a moment now to decide which one is your favorite. Help that one first, and then work your way down.
In the seat pocket in front of you is a pamphlet about the safety features of this plane. I usually use it as a fan when I'm having my own personal summer. It makes a very good fan. It also has pretty pictures. Please take it out and play with it now.
Please take a moment now to make sure your seat belts are fastened low and tight about your waist. To fasten the belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle. To release, it's a pully thing - not a pushy thing like you're car cuz you're in an airplane, hello!
There is no smoking in the cabin on this flight. There is also no smoking in the lavatories. If we see smoke coming from the lavatories, we will assume you are on fire and put you out. This is a free service we provide.
There are two smoking sections on this flight, one outside each wing exit. We do have a movie in the smoking sections tonight, hold on, let me check what it is.......... Oh here it is, the movie tonight is 'Gone with the Wind'.
In a moment we will be turning off the cabin lights, and it's going to get really dark, really fast. If you're afraid of the dark, now would be a good time to reach up and press the yellow button. The yellow button turns on your reading light. Please don't press the orange button unless you absolutely have to. The orange button is your seat ejection button.
We're glad to have you with us on board this flight. Thank you for choosing Alaska Air, and giving us your business and your money. If there's anything we can do to make you more comfortable, please don't hesitate to ask.
If you all weren't strapped down you would have given me a standing ovation wouldn't you?
After landing...
Welcome to the San Francisco International Airport. Sorry about the bumpy landing. It's not the captian's fault. It's not the co-pilot's fault. It's the Assphault.
Please remain seated until the plane is parked at the gate. At no time in history has a passenger beaten a plane to the gate. So please don't even try. Please be careful opening the overhead bins because shift happens.
Sony Takes Stake in Rival MusicNet Service-Sources
Thu February 27, 2003 07:52 PM ET
By Sue Zeidler
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sony Music, co-owner of the Pressplay online music service, has provided funding to rival service MusicNet, sources close to the companies said, the second such financial deal linking digital music competitors to emerge in recent days.
Officials for both Sony Corp. and MusicNet declined to comment. But sources close to the situation said Sony recently took a 4 percent stake in the service in the form of a convertible note.
On Wednesday, digital media company RealNetworks Inc. said it had taken a minority stake in online music firm Listen.com, a onetime competitor.
Under the deal, RealNetworks' technology became the primary platform for Listen's Rhapsody service, replacing Microsoft Corp.'s Windows as the primary platform.
RealNetworks is a founding member of MusicNet, which competes with both Listen.com's Rhapsody and Pressplay, owned by Sony and Vivendi Universal .
All these services are struggling to gain traction at a time when young music fans are used to getting music for free from renegade peer-to-peer services like Kazaa.
MusicNet's other owners are AOL Time Warner Inc., Bertelsmann AG and EMI Group Plc .
Sony already had links to MusicNet through a licensing deal announced in November. It was one of many such deals among the major labels as they sought to ramp up the legitimate online services and provide them with more extensive content.
"There's some lucrative deals being cut because companies need cash in the absence of revenues and music companies are lining up their resources behind the services they think are going to be around," said PJ McNealy, analyst with GartnerG2.
Earlier this week, AOL Time Warner's America Online began offering a revamped version of MusicNet to its 27 million U.S. Internet customers, the biggest move yet to bring commercial online services to the mainstream as they struggle against free, unauthorized services like Kazaa
Odyssey is no iPod, but its cheaper
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/02/28/bus2.ptech.odyssey/index.html
By Shoshana Berger
Business 2.0
Friday, February 28, 2003 Posted: 3:25 PM EST (2025 GMT)
The Odyssey is covered in smudge-loving chrome and has a manual scroll wheel.
(Business 2.0) -- I have iPod envy. But every time I feel the pang and revisit the Apple (AAPL) Web site, I'm hit with the same sticker shock. Though iPod prices are finally starting to tumble, it's still hard -- even for a card-carrying early adopter -- to rationalize paying so much for an MP3 player. Sure, an iPod could store every version of every song the Rolling Stones ever recorded (the 20-gigabyte model holds as many as 4,000 tracks), and yes, the device has that satisfying, new-bar-of-soap look, but is it really worth $500?
That question takes on renewed urgency with each additional iPod clone that hits the market. Toshiba brought out its Mobilephile late last year, and two weeks ago, e.Digital released its 20GB Odyssey 1000. Like the Mobilephile, the Odyssey has an ersatz iPod form factor. But instead of the chrome back, milky front, and touch-sensitive menu wheel, the Odyssey is covered in smudge-loving chrome and has a manual scroll wheel. The two higher-end iPod models (10GB and 20GB) can talk to either PC or Mac through a FireWire adapter, while the Odyssey is a Windows-only player and transfers MP3s via a USB 2.0 connector (boasting download speeds of up to 8 megabits per second -- a rate that nearly matches that of the iPod's FireWire). I'm not on the USB 2.0 bus yet, but even without it, the transfer rate is plenty fast.
Once I've downloaded the e.Digital software and uploaded a bunch of MP3s to the player, I try it out with the bundled collapsible headphones and my own higher-end pair. The sound on both is extraordinarily rich and distortion-free (the experience is as good as or better than listening to a CD through headphones on my computer), and the volume reaches eardrum-popping levels (I fear for our children). The literature says the player has "SRS Labs' WOW audio enhancement technology for a 3-D listening experience and rich bass." Whatever that means, it's working.
Other perks: The Odyssey features a "Back" button (the operation of which is more intuitive than turning the iPod's menu wheel counterclockwise), voice memo recording, and a voice navigation technology that recognizes the spoken name of an artist or track. (I didn't find this feature to be very useful, however -- or accurate: I ask it for Rafael Toral, it gives me John Fahey.) Though it lacks the iPod's calendar and contact list functions, the Odyssey does have an FM radio.
How charmingly retro!
e.Digital Odyssey 1000 personal digital jukebox: $349; available at www.edig.com.
Odyssey is no iPod, but its cheaper
By Shoshana Berger
Business 2.0
Friday, February 28, 2003 Posted: 3:25 PM EST (2025 GMT)
The Odyssey is covered in smudge-loving chrome and has a manual scroll wheel.
Editor's note: Gizmos Weekly is produced by Business 2.0 and features gadget reviews and gift ideas
(Business 2.0) -- I have iPod envy. But every time I feel the pang and revisit the Apple (AAPL) Web site, I'm hit with the same sticker shock. Though iPod prices are finally starting to tumble, it's still hard -- even for a card-carrying early adopter -- to rationalize paying so much for an MP3 player. Sure, an iPod could store every version of every song the Rolling Stones ever recorded (the 20-gigabyte model holds as many as 4,000 tracks), and yes, the device has that satisfying, new-bar-of-soap look, but is it really worth $500?
That question takes on renewed urgency with each additional iPod clone that hits the market. Toshiba brought out its Mobilephile late last year, and two weeks ago, e.Digital released its 20GB Odyssey 1000. Like the Mobilephile, the Odyssey has an ersatz iPod form factor. But instead of the chrome back, milky front, and touch-sensitive menu wheel, the Odyssey is covered in smudge-loving chrome and has a manual scroll wheel. The two higher-end iPod models (10GB and 20GB) can talk to either PC or Mac through a FireWire adapter, while the Odyssey is a Windows-only player and transfers MP3s via a USB 2.0 connector (boasting download speeds of up to 8 megabits per second -- a rate that nearly matches that of the iPod's FireWire). I'm not on the USB 2.0 bus yet, but even without it, the transfer rate is plenty fast.
Once I've downloaded the e.Digital software and uploaded a bunch of MP3s to the player, I try it out with the bundled collapsible headphones and my own higher-end pair. The sound on both is extraordinarily rich and distortion-free (the experience is as good as or better than listening to a CD through headphones on my computer), and the volume reaches eardrum-popping levels (I fear for our children). The literature says the player has "SRS Labs' WOW audio enhancement technology for a 3-D listening experience and rich bass." Whatever that means, it's working.
Other perks: The Odyssey features a "Back" button (the operation of which is more intuitive than turning the iPod's menu wheel counterclockwise), voice memo recording, and a voice navigation technology that recognizes the spoken name of an artist or track. (I didn't find this feature to be very useful, however -- or accurate: I ask it for Rafael Toral, it gives me John Fahey.) Though it lacks the iPod's calendar and contact list functions, the Odyssey does have an FM radio.
How charmingly retro!
e.Digital Odyssey 1000 personal digital jukebox: $349; available at www.edig.com.
Can AOL, Napster Make Music Downloads Legit?
Mark Glaser
posted: 2003-02-27
Pay services high on promises
A Napster revival with a paid service? AOL pushing legitimate music downloads? What do these two widely reported stories have in common (other than their lack of hard news)? It must be the week when the music-stealing public finally has its chance for redemption.
After what feels like a million years (probably only six) of downloading copyrighted music through services such as the old Napster and its evil spawn of peer-to-peer networks, digital music aficionados now have many pay services at their disposal, with the attendant promises that the artist will be paid. You've got MusicNet, a service from RealNetworks, BMG, and Warner Music now being pushed by AOL. Then there's PressPlay, from Sony and Universal. And don't forget Listen.com's Rhapsody. All of which have deals with the major labels and indies for a wider selection of music.
Now up steps Napster, revived from the dead by Roxio, which gobbled up its assets -- without the liability aftertaste. The "news" is that Roxio will re-launch Napster by the end of the year as a similar pay service to the above, with founder/icon Shawn Fanning as consultant. Yippidy-do-dah. InternetNews.com's Ryan Naraine does the best job summing up the mega-hurdles for the reborn Napster: "Listen.com's Rhapsody, MusicNet, Pressplay have all gotten a head start in the race to hawk digital music files online and, even those companies have found it tough to sign up enough subscribers to justify the set-up costs."
One of the steepest setup costs is the licensing fees from the major labels, who demand 50 cents on the dollar download. "When overheads and bandwidth costs are calculated," Naraine writes, "the music services end up making next to nothing." Oh joy. The music industry still doesn't get it.
AOL to the rescue?
Maybe America Online, the service America loves to hate, can make some hay with this whole pay-music scheme. For a mere $8.95 per month, you'll be able to listen to 250,000 songs via MusicNet. The catch? If you want to burn 10 songs onto a CD, it will cost $17.95. Sound like a familiar number? Yup, it's close to the sky-high retail price of CD albums these days.
The New York Times' Saul Hansell looks oh-so-deeply into AOL's big announcement, does a great job of explaining how the pay services have struggled, and finally hits on just how AOL will be the white knight for the music biz: AOL's version of MusicNet "would be far more popular because it would be integrated into the AOL service," says one exec. One analyst tries to work up excitement: "This is close to what people will find palatable." Oops, one caveat: The limitations are still significant, he admits.
So we've got a me-too service from AOL that will really break through because it's on AOL, and it's close to palatable!
Better that the music industry execs avoid the latest media column from Michael Wolff in New York magazine, in which he warns that all the screaming and bulging veins in their necks isn't going to stop the dropping value of content. He says the Internet is partly to blame for undermining content value, along with music licensed everywhere, and freebie magazine subscriptions. The fact that music, "on a unit basis, has continued to go up instead of down is, in fact, an odd and exceptional business model -- which a prudent person should have logically assumed would never last," he writes.
As entertainment becomes closer and closer to free, will the music companies finally wise up and lower the cost of digital downloads to something actually palatable for consumers? Let's hope they find the "tipping point" that will bring consumers back from their pirating ways. That's going to mean less money for the label chiefs, the promo folks, the production types, and yes, even the artists. But much, much more for the public.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Glaser currently writes technology features for TechWeb, occasional features for The New York Times' Circuits section, marketing material for Comcast Online, and a bi-weekly e-mail newsletter for the Online Publishers Association, whose membership includes most major media companies online. That won't stop him from taking cheap potshots at these outlets, when necessary. You can contact him with any juicy tidbits about online journalism at glaze@sprintmail.com.
Can AOL, Napster Make Music Downloads Legit?
Mark Glaser
posted: 2003-02-27
Pay services high on promises
A Napster revival with a paid service? AOL pushing legitimate music downloads? What do these two widely reported stories have in common (other than their lack of hard news)? It must be the week when the music-stealing public finally has its chance for redemption.
After what feels like a million years (probably only six) of downloading copyrighted music through services such as the old Napster and its evil spawn of peer-to-peer networks, digital music aficionados now have many pay services at their disposal, with the attendant promises that the artist will be paid. You've got MusicNet, a service from RealNetworks, BMG, and Warner Music now being pushed by AOL. Then there's PressPlay, from Sony and Universal. And don't forget Listen.com's Rhapsody. All of which have deals with the major labels and indies for a wider selection of music.
Now up steps Napster, revived from the dead by Roxio, which gobbled up its assets -- without the liability aftertaste. The "news" is that Roxio will re-launch Napster by the end of the year as a similar pay service to the above, with founder/icon Shawn Fanning as consultant. Yippidy-do-dah. InternetNews.com's Ryan Naraine does the best job summing up the mega-hurdles for the reborn Napster: "Listen.com's Rhapsody, MusicNet, Pressplay have all gotten a head start in the race to hawk digital music files online and, even those companies have found it tough to sign up enough subscribers to justify the set-up costs."
One of the steepest setup costs is the licensing fees from the major labels, who demand 50 cents on the dollar download. "When overheads and bandwidth costs are calculated," Naraine writes, "the music services end up making next to nothing." Oh joy. The music industry still doesn't get it.
AOL to the rescue?
Maybe America Online, the service America loves to hate, can make some hay with this whole pay-music scheme. For a mere $8.95 per month, you'll be able to listen to 250,000 songs via MusicNet. The catch? If you want to burn 10 songs onto a CD, it will cost $17.95. Sound like a familiar number? Yup, it's close to the sky-high retail price of CD albums these days.
The New York Times' Saul Hansell looks oh-so-deeply into AOL's big announcement, does a great job of explaining how the pay services have struggled, and finally hits on just how AOL will be the white knight for the music biz: AOL's version of MusicNet "would be far more popular because it would be integrated into the AOL service," says one exec. One analyst tries to work up excitement: "This is close to what people will find palatable." Oops, one caveat: The limitations are still significant, he admits.
So we've got a me-too service from AOL that will really break through because it's on AOL, and it's close to palatable!
Better that the music industry execs avoid the latest media column from Michael Wolff in New York magazine, in which he warns that all the screaming and bulging veins in their necks isn't going to stop the dropping value of content. He says the Internet is partly to blame for undermining content value, along with music licensed everywhere, and freebie magazine subscriptions. The fact that music, "on a unit basis, has continued to go up instead of down is, in fact, an odd and exceptional business model -- which a prudent person should have logically assumed would never last," he writes.
As entertainment becomes closer and closer to free, will the music companies finally wise up and lower the cost of digital downloads to something actually palatable for consumers? Let's hope they find the "tipping point" that will bring consumers back from their pirating ways. That's going to mean less money for the label chiefs, the promo folks, the production types, and yes, even the artists. But much, much more for the public.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Glaser currently writes technology features for TechWeb, occasional features for The New York Times' Circuits section, marketing material for Comcast Online, and a bi-weekly e-mail newsletter for the Online Publishers Association, whose membership includes most major media companies online. That won't stop him from taking cheap potshots at these outlets, when necessary. You can contact him with any juicy tidbits about online journalism at glaze@sprintmail.com.
Telematics spec delivered amidst growing doubts
By Charles J. Murray
EE Times
February 27, 2003 (2:21 p.m. EST)
PARK RIDGE, Ill. — Capping an intense four-year effort, the Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration (AMI-C) introduced a hefty new multimedia standard Wednesday (Feb. 26) to a global auto industry that has begun to question the value of telematics.
Release 2 of the automotive interface specification, which is more than 2,000 pages long, describes common interfaces for the addition of hands-free cell phones, navigation systems, CD players, DVD systems, video screens, digital radios and a host of other electronic products.
"This gives a common baseline for everyone to design their products to," said Pom Malhotra, program manager for AMI-C. "Up to now, there hasn't been a common standard for automakers that wanted to introduce Bluetooth or gateway technologies into a vehicle."
Automakers and first-tier electronics suppliers have long believed the presence of such a standard would be a huge benefit to them. Up until recently, car manufacturers typically had to reengineer vendor products, which were not built to any specific standard. In the process, they lost valuable time and fell behind the electronic industry's rate of innovation. As a result, many automotive components still are several years behind their desktop counterparts in terms of electronic performance capabilities.
Automakers wanted the multimedia standard in preparation for the emergence of telematics, which is defined as the linking of data communications and computers. They formed AMI-C four years ago as part of an effort to standardize the technology for what they assumed would be a multi-billion-dollar-a-year market. Eight automakers — Fiat, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Honda, Nissan, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Renault and Toyota — are currently members.
However, many analysts have backed off earlier forecasts of a booming telematics business. The auto industry, which seemingly could not create a standard fast enough, is now putting many of its telematics projects on hold.
"Companies aren't pressing terribly hard for this [standard] anymore," said Paul Hansen, publisher of The Hansen Report on Automotive Electronics. "Investment in telematics has cooled."
Building on the specs
Still, electronics vendors are hoping interest in telematics will increase if the economy picks up, and they say they'll need the standard when that happens.
The AMI-C Release 2 specifications differ from the initial version in that they provide a validated standard spec product developers can use, while Release 1 was considered a conceptual vision statement. "It's not just a set of requirements," Malhotra said. "It's a set of specifications you can build to."
The new release defines a common architecture and standardized interfaces, making it possible for all vehicle manufacturers to take advantage of emerging multimedia products. The specifications include an architectural overview, system requirements, vehicle interface requirements and AMI-C use cases. Those documents can be downloaded from AMI-C's web site. Additional documents, including specifications for application interfaces, will be published over the next few months as legal and technical reviews are completed.
AMI-C representatives said the standards group is moving to a third phase in which it will focus on "sponsored projects." That means automakers will use the revised specs to build devices for production, or they will add to the existing spec and take it in different direction. Much of that work will be proprietary to each automaker, Malhotra said.
"In the next phase, a lot of the work will be specific to each company's applications," Malhotra said. "If those applications are tied to an automaker's particular platform or vehicle, then AMI-C doesn't need to get involved."
The organization said it wants to lower membership fees will serve as an enticement to bring back three key automakers, DaimlerChrysler, BMW and Volkswagen, that left two years ago because they felt the organization was moving too slowly toward standardization. "If you're DaimlerChrysler, BMW or Volkswagen, you now have the opportunity to join AMI-C at bargain basement prices," said Scott McCormick, assistant vice president of AMI-C.
AMI-C repesentatives also said economic slump has not changed the urgent need for telematics standards. "The sense of urgency is still there," said Malhotra. "The members feel that they need the standards in order to accelerate the pace of telematics."
Analysts, however, said telematics is less of a priority for most automakers. Earlier estimates had telematics growth soaring by now, ultimately reaching revenues of $40 billion per year by 2010. Most analysts are cutting that estimate by more than half. "The growth of telematics is inevitable," said Hansen. "But there's not a lot of money available right now for risky investments. Until that changes, we're not going to see many major telematics projects."
Fedtec today announced the launch of a 'Global Tender Program'
Added : (Mon Feb 24 2003)
Fedtec today announced the launch of a 'Global Tender Program' to market its DivX ® certified reference designs of next generation portable video players based on Texas Instruments TMS320DMxx platform. The objective of the Program is to enable consumer electronics manufacturers worldwide to license at optimum cost a ready-to-manufacture reference design including Hardware, Software and Industrial Design, with modular and optional customisation in display, power/battery, network, storage and housing.
In order to offer the lowest cost bill-of-material option to the OEMs, Fedtec invites vendors/manufacturers to participate in this Global Tender Program for various components/parts/modules of the reference design, particularly with regard to display, battery and storage. If selected by Fedtec and/or OEM, as part of the reference design/final product, the vendor/manufacturer shall finalize business terms directly with the OEM, based on mutual interests. The criterion for selection will take into account product quality, global availability and reliability apart from pricing.
"Based on the tremendous response from our prospects, we plan to license manufacture of a minimum of 500K units of portable video players across Tier-I/II manufacturers, in the first year", said Rathan Kumar, Chairman & CEO of Fedtec. "Fedtec would create reference designs for fully DivX Certified portable video players scheduled to hit the market mid 2003."
"We're excited to work closely with Fedtec as they bring DivX Certified reference designs to key consumer electronics manufacturers around the world," said Shahi Ghanem, President and COO of DivXNetworks, Inc. "There is an enormous global demand from both consumers and manufacturers for DivX powered devices. Fedtec is an ideal partner to help us meet this demand by bringing high-powered and fully-certified DivX reference designs to market in a timely manner."
About Fedtec: Federal Technologies Limited (Fedtec) is a design house in streaming media technologies for creation, delivery, reception, storage, management and presentation of multimedia content over a wide spectrum of embedded multimedia products. Having contributed significantly to the consumer electronic OEM's in APAC with reference designs in set-top technologies, Fedtec's current design focus include portable/handheld multimedia recorders, multi-mode cameras, videophones, video security and surveillance systems apart from residential gateway products and solutions. Fedtec's core value comes from its ability to leverage speech, audio, image and video standards compliant software (encoder/decoder) suites, streaming, communication, network and internet access protocols and engines together with system design expertise to deliver 'ready-to-manufacture solutions' and/or modules, with warranty & support to manufacturers, pre/post production. For more information, visit http://www.fedtec.com
About DivXNetworks: DivXNetworks Inc., is a consumer-focused video technology company positioned at the center of multimedia convergence. The company's core offering is the DivX ™ video codec, the world's most popular MPEG-4 compatible video compression technology with over 75 million users worldwide. Often called "the MP3 of video," the patent-pending DivX video technology offers DVD-quality at 10 times greater compression than MPEG-2 files, enabling full length films to easily fit on a CD or be delivered over broadband connections. DivX video technology powers a range of applications that span the convergence value chain, from a secure IP-based video-on-demand solution to next-generation consumer electronics products and video software applications. For more information, visit http://www.divxnetworks.com
Submitted by: Santosh Kumar