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We make ref designs for the odm/oem mass consumer market. That market currently sucks. What's not to understand??
Worth a look...thebug.com
Posted by michael on Friday August 13, @12:35PM
from the sweetness dept.
Billy69 writes "In a comment in a story yesterday about TiVo and MS Media Centre, somebody made a comment about being able to store Digital radio straight to a format to use on a MP3 player. Ladies and Gentlemen (and geeks) I give you The Bug. It is a DAB digital radio that can timeshift, store as MP2 or MP3 straight to an SD card, and can connect out via USB or SPDIF. Oh, and it is sexy as hell."
Hacker Cracks Apple's Streaming Technology
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Aug 12, 4:37 PM (ET)
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - The Norwegian hacker famed for developing DVD encryption-cracking software has apparently struck again - this time breaking the locks on Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL)'s wireless music streaming technolog'y.
Jon Lech Johansen released on his Web site - defiantly named "So Sue Me" - a software key that helps to unlock the encryption Apple uses for its AirPort Express, a device that lets users broadcast digital music from Apple's online iTunes Music Store on a stereo that's not plugged into a computer.
Some security consultants say that with the key and another program he released, Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, has helped pave the way for other software applications other than Apple iTunes to work with AirPort Express.
Johansen, an open source advocate, has been critical of Apple's proprietary system, which largely restricts Apple's hardware and software products to work only with each other.
On his Web site, for instance, Johansen praised a newly developed technology by RealNetworks Inc. (RNWK) that will make songs from its online music service compatible with the market-dominating Apple iPod portable music player.
Johansen's latest endeavors, which he posted Wednesday, mark the third instance he's circumvented Apple's music copy-protection technologies this year.
Apple officials did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday.
Johansen, now 20, was 15 when he posted on the Internet software that unlocked the codes the film industry used on DVD movies to prevent illegal copying. The act made Johansen a folk hero among hackers.
After the film industry complained, Norwegian authorities charged him with data break-in, but Johansen was acquitted at trial and on appeal.
Dutch Company Launches Music Download Site
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Aug 11, 11:47 AM (ET)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Hoping to keep up with Apple's iTunes digital music downloading service in Europe, a Dutch record company has launched a Web site offering 250,000 tracks from five major record labels.
Free Record Shop Holding NV, which traditionally sells music, films and games at retail stores around northwest Europe, put Dutch and French-language Web sites online Tuesday as part of the new Internet service.
The sites got more than 500,000 hits in the first 24 hours, beating previous weekly records for all the company's sites together, said Olaf Zwijnenburg, who is overseeing the introduction.
"We went live yesterday and our visitor records were almost immediately smashed," he said in an interview. "We expect that after years of declines, music sales are on a comeback. About 5-10 percent of the market is going to be in downloads."
The service will compete with popular licensed music download services such as iTunes. Its competitors will not have the legal rights to sell the same selection being offered by the Free Record Shop in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.
The new service will also have to compete with file-sharing programs, which hundreds of millions of people use to share copyrighted music for free over the Internet - a practice being fought in courts by the music industry.
Later this year, Free Record Shop plans to offer the download services in Finnish and Norwegian and will expand its digital music selection to 500,000 tracks, Zwijnenburg said.
"We differ from Apple's iTunes in that we offer both physical (compact discs) and digital music. We also have a selection of local artists which Apple doesn't have and that gives us a unique market position," he said.
So far, users can purchase downloads from the Web sites freedownloadshop.nl or freedownloadshop.be. Costs can range from euro0.89 (US$1.09) for a single song to euro22 (US$26.80) for a popular new double album.
The service was delayed by more than four years of negotiations with five major record labels - Sony, EMI, Universal, BMG and Warner - that own the rights to music the company is selling. The bulk of the profits from the online sales will go to them, Zwijnenburg said.
Most of the tracks initially offered on the sites are hit singles and albums, but the selection will later be expanded to include independent record labels, Free Record Shop said.
Free Record Shop Holding is a privately held company with 1,200 employees and 350 stores in Europe. It booked sales of more than euro350 million (US$440 million) in its split 2002-2003 book year.
Imagine the kind of video player these cards would allow..6 ounces, 100 movies, 20,000 songs, 20 hr battery life...
Taiwan firms to launch 2TB memory card
By Tony Smith
Published Friday 6th August 2004 14:43 GMT
Taiwanese technology companies will this autumn unveil what they hope will be the next solid-state memory card format.
Dubbed 'µcard', the format will support up to 2TB of storage capacity within a 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm card - the same size as a standard MMC unit. The new cards are said to be connector-compatible with the older format.
The new cards will have a data transfer rate of 120MBps, ten times that of SD memory cards. Like the Secure Digital format, µcard will support I/O devices, such as Bluetooth and 802.11 adaptors.
According to a DigiTimes report, the new format will be formally launched at the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) on 8 October. Mass production is expected to commence early next year. ®
Related stories
Tivo Gets Nod for Users to Share Digital Shows
Wed Aug 4, 1:05 PM ET Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Jeremy Pelofsky
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - TiVo (news - web sites) Inc. (Nasdaq:TIVO - news), maker of popular digital television recording devices, on Wednesday received approval for technology that would permit users to send copies of digital broadcast shows over the Internet to a few friends.
The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) voted to certify digital protections on TiVoToGo, which is not yet available but would enable a user to record and send a digital broadcast television show to up to nine other registered people who have a key allowing them to see it.
The approval came despite concerns by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Football League about the risks of unfettered distribution of copyrighted shows and illegally airing sports games outside of authorized markets.
The FCC (news - web sites) last year adopted rules to limit distribution of digital, over-the-air television programs over the Internet in an effort to prevent mass illegal copying and sharing, a problem plaguing the music industry.
Most current television shows are shown in an analog format and can lose some quality when recorded. But recorded digital programs do not suffer from that problem, leading to industry concerns about unfettered mass redistribution on the Internet.
The FCC last November required companies to develop measures to prevent consumers from indiscriminately distributing the higher quality digital television shows over the Web.
In addition to approving TiVo's application, the FCC certified 12 other technologies proposed, including ones by software giant Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), Sony Corp (news - web sites). (6758.T), and RealNetworks Inc. (Nasdaq:RNWK - news) for protecting distribution of digital television broadcasts.
The agency said it did not adopt limits on where the content could be sent because the proposed technologies "employ different combinations of device limits, interactive authentication and affinity-based mechanisms to restrict distribution."
TiVo plans to launch a version of TiVoToGo this fall that would allow users to transfer recorded shows to a home computer but has not said when it would launch its version that would allow shows to be shared outside the home.
TiVo shares jumped on the news as much as 11 percent and at midday on Nasdaq it was trading up 15 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $5.26.
Real slams Apple's iPod 'hacker' attack
Robert Jaques, 07.30.04, 4:25 PM ET
RealNetworks has hit back at Apple's accusation that it resorted to "hacker tactics" by developing software to allow iPod customers to download music from the RealPlayer site.
The company insisted that consumers should be allowed to make up their own minds about what they play on their iPod devices.
RealNetwork's Harmony tool allows music from the RealPlayer Music Store to be transferred to any music player, including Apple iPods. Currently, iPod owners can only buy music online from Apple's own iTunes Music Store.
"Compatibility, choice and quality are critically important to consumers and Harmony provides all of these to users of the iPod and over 70 other music devices including those from Creative, Rio, iRiver and others," stated RealNetworks.
"That is why so many consumers have welcomed the news of Harmony. Consumers, and not Apple, should be the ones choosing what music goes on their iPod."
RealNetworks went on to claim that Harmony follows a well-established tradition of legal, independent development that bypasses proprietary formats to achieve compatibility.
The firm maintained that there is ample and clear precedent for this activity, citing the first IBM compatible PCs from Compaq.
"Harmony creates a way to lock content from Real's Music Store in a way that is compatible with the iPod, Windows Media digital rights management [DRM] devices and Helix DRM devices," RealNetworks said in a statement.
"Harmony technology does not remove or disable any DRM system. Apple has suggested that new laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA] are relevant to this dispute.
"In fact, the DMCA is not designed to prevent the creation of new methods of locking content, and explicitly allows the creation of interoperable software.
"We remain fully committed to Harmony and to giving millions of consumers who own portable music devices, including the Apple iPod, choice and compatibility."
To see more of VNUNet go to http://www.vnunet.com
VNUNet.com
iPods at Duke Will Contain Curriculum
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Jul 27, 3:32 PM (ET)
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) - Incoming freshmen at Duke will be getting a special gift from the university - an iPod.
Duke has agreed to purchase 1,800 iPods, usually used to store and play music, from Apple Computers Inc.
The Duke-issued version, however, will include school-related information, including information for freshman orientation and the academic calendar.
The university also will create a Web site, modeled on the Apple iTunes site, from which students can download music and course content from faculty.
After the first year, Duke will study the effect of iPods on academics.
The 20-gigabyte iPods will be bought at a cheaper rate than the $299 retail price. The university will distribute 1,650 iPods to freshmen and have 150 others to loan other students in classes where the devices are used.
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Yeah...see ya soon George.eom
Compressed Music To Continue Expansion
By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 7/12/2004
In portable audio, the music might be compressed, but the sales won't be. Sales of MP3-type headset portables, including flash- and HDD-based models, will grow at double-digit rates, while sales of portable audio's mainstay, the headphone CD player, will continue to slide, suppliers said.
Volume leaders in the second half and fourth quarter will be 128MB flash-memory portables and 20GB HDD portables, although 5GB HDD models will post more rapid gains than their higher capacity counterparts simply because 5GB models weren't available in 2003, suppliers said.
Headphone CDs that play compressed-music formats will continue to increase their share of the declining headphone CD market, and the planned launch of Sony's first two HDD portables during the summer will help drive HDD sales and stimulate competition with market-share leader Apple in this segment, suppliers noted.
For the full year, CEA projects a 34 percent gain in factory-level MP3 unit sales to 4.06 million and a 26.9 percent gain in dollar volume to $538 million. Headset MP3 dollar volume will get close to exceeding dollar sales of headphone CD players, which will post a 9.8 percent decline to $686 million on 15.6 million units, CEA forecasts show.
Headphone CDs that play MP3 or other compressed-music files will account for up to 40 percent of headphone-CD unit sales, Panasonic projects, up from 35 percent in 2003. Models from less-known brands start at $29, said Panasonic product specialist Yong Lee, but models from major brands start at $49, she said.
In flash-memory portables, Lee believes the $79 to $89 128MB models will be the key volume sellers in the fourth quarter, compared to the year-ago period when 64MB models were going for that price. At $99, added RCA's business development director Rich Phipps, consumers will get at least 128MB of memory.
Although flash-memory models will continue to post gains, they will lose share to HDD models, whose dollar share hit 35 to 40 percent at the factory level in 2003 and will get "very close" to accounting for a majority of compressed-music portable sales in 2004, Phipps said. Panasonic's Lee sees HDD dollar volume doubling in 2004.
Of that volume, 20GB models will be the top sellers in the fourth quarter, but the 5GB minidrive "is the direction," Lee said. "A thousand songs is the hot spot.' Apple, Rio and Creative play in this segment.
Gains in flash-memory and HDD unit gains would be even greater, suppliers lamented, if it weren't for shortages of flash memory and other components.
Also in the second half, consumers could find more HDD models that store both audio and video if supporters of Microsoft's Portable Media Center platform get their products off the ground as planned. In the meantime, however, at least two companies — Philips and Archos — will play in this segment in the fourth quarter. Both companies' models record and display video transferred from a PC or recorded from a TV or other video source, but next-generation Archos 20GB and 80GB models due in July add the ability to time shift TV programming from a home entertainment system. They will retail at a suggested $549 and $799, respectively.
Samsung Alters HTiB, Portable Audio Lineups
By Joseph Palenchar & Greg Tarr -- TWICE, 7/26/2004
NEW YORK— Samsung altered its 2004 audio plans, namely by shortening its previously planned selection of HDD music portables, expanding its HTiB selection more than previously announced, and adding DVD-Audio to all HTiBs.
The company also unveiled its first flash-memory portables to support protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files.
One of the new HDD portables will be an audio/video portable based on Microsoft's Portable Media Center (PMC) platform, intended to store and play back audio, video and images transferred from a PC. It will be among the first three PMCs available later this year, beginning with a Creative Labs version in August, Samsung's model in September and an iRiver model soon after, said Mark Farish, Samsung digital audio marketing manager.
Here are the details on Samsung's plans:
Portable HDD players: Citing dealer interest in larger memory capacity, the company dropped plans for the 1.5GB $279-street-priced YH-800, which was to be Napster co-branded, and for its first sports-style HDD model, a 2GB model at $299. The company also dropped plans for a 40GB $299 YH-1030 because dealers considered it too large.
This year's HDD selection will consist of the 20GB $349-suggested YH-920, due in July; the 4GB $279-suggested YH-820 with 1-inch HDD, due in July; and the $549-suggested YH-999 A/V portable, due in September with 20GB memory, down from an originally planned 30GB.
Like its predecessor 910GS, the YH-920 will be Napster co-branded, and it will be packaged with two free months of Napster service. It features 20GB 1.8-inch HDD, FM tuner, MP3 encoder and playback of a variety of codecs.
The 4GB YH-820 adds picture viewer and 1.6-inch color LCD display.
The PMC model, the 20GB YH-999 with 1.8-inch HDD, supports MP3; protected WMA; Windows Media Video; jpeg images; and MPEG, MPEG-2, MS-DVR, ASF, AVI, WAV, and MIDI files. Visual content is displayed on a 3.5-inch color LCD screen. Compatible with Windows XP PCs, it features USB 2.0 and composite-video output.
Flash-memory portables: The company is shipping three new flash-memory players. All three are the company's first to support protected WMA files and first to feature SRS WOW 3-D processing, which widens the image, moves the image to the front of a listener from the inside of the head, and enhances bass.
All three offer line-in MP3 encoding, a feature offered last year on only one flash-memory player.
The three models, said to be the industry's smallest with LCD display and FM tuner, are the 128MB YP-T5H at a suggested $129; the 256MB YP-T5V at a suggested $179; and the $179-suggested sports-style 256MB YP-60V with heart-rate monitor, calorie-burning counter, stopwatch and supplied fitness-tracking software for a PC.
HTiB systems: The company's selection expands from two SKUs to nine SKUs, rather than to the six SKUs previously planned.
Citing lack of dealer interest, the company dropped plans for a system equipped with HDD to store music and serve as a PVR.
First-time features include DVD-Audio, available in all nine SKUs, plasma-friendly designs in select models and a suite of audio technologies called Super Digital Sound Master (SDSM). The suite includes proprietary Virtual Headphone, 10 digital soundfield modes, automatic set-up of channel levels and delay times, room-acoustics correction and up-conversion of stereo sources to 5.1 channels.
Among the changes, Samsung added a new entry-level price point of a suggested $229 for the slim HT-DS100 with single-disc DVD-Audio player. The step-up $349-suggested HT-DB610, as previously announced, adds five-disc DVD-Audio/Video changer.
DVD players: Samsung reiterated plans for its second-generation DVD players with HD up-conversion capability. As with last year's models, the new units will up-convert standard-definition DVD videos to the high-definition 1,080i and 720p formats. In addition, the new models will also output up-converted material to 768p to match the native resolution of many LCD and plasma display panels.
Both models also play back DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD discs and feature both DVI and HDMI digital outputs. Samsung will also offer three DVD recorders capable of recording and playing back on DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD-R media. The DVD+RW/+R format was left out due to high licensing fees, said Claude Frank, Samsung digital audio/video director.
TiVo's plans lead to copyright fight
Technology would allow transfer of programsBy Jonathan Krim
Updated: 12:22 a.m. ET July 22, 2004Hollywood studios and the National Football League are seeking to block the maker of the popular TiVo television recorder from expanding its service so that users could watch copies of shows and movies on devices outside their homes.
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In filings with the Federal Communications Commission, the organizations say the new technology could compromise the copyrights of shows that broadcasters send over the airwaves in digital form, which offers much higher sound and video quality than what viewers typically get today.
The organizations fear that computer enthusiasts would capture those programs and begin trading them online in the same way that millions of music files are shared daily, which record companies have said has cut into their profit. TiVo Inc. insists its system will not allow such mass Internet distribution.
The battle is one of several being waged in federal agencies and on Capitol Hill this summer, as content companies such as the movie and music companies seek to keep control of copyrighted works that increasingly can be digitally stored, copied, manipulated and distributed by users. In turn, several public advocacy groups and technology companies warn that the content companies are trying to revoke long-standing consumer rights to "fair use" of artistic works.
With 1.6 million subscribers, TiVo is the leading provider of the digital recorders that are revolutionizing television viewing. In addition to copying shows for later viewing, consumers can pause live shows, skip commercials and use other features to control the TV experience.
To date, users generally have been unable to send copied programs to another device, although some digital recorders include "burners" that allow programs to be copied to a DVD and played elsewhere.
TiVo wants to make copies more portable, in stages. Sometime this fall, the company plans to roll out a system that will allow programs to be transferred from the TiVo box to a computer via a small device attached to the PC.
The program could then be sent to other devices within the home and viewed on them. Such devices, including laptops or desktop computers, would be registered with the company and would share encoding and decoding technology that prevents viewing by nonregistered devices.
'Bring innovation'
Next year, TiVo plans to expand the system to allow programs to be transferred to registered devices outside the home, such as at an office, vacation cabin or even a friend's house across the country. A maximum of 10 devices could be registered by the subscriber.
"TiVo has an interest in keeping everything secure," said its Washington attorney, James M. Burger. "We are trying to bring innovation to consumers."
But the system alarms the content industry, which promised to roll out more digital programming over free television networks only after insisting that the FCC adopt rules requiring makers of recording devices to certify that they have technologies to prevent mass Internet distribution.
Digital programming is far more appealing for online distribution because the quality does not degrade as it is copied over and over.
TiVo was one of 13 companies that asked the FCC for approval, arguing that its copy-protection system met the requirements. The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's lobbying arm, and the NFL then filed objections to TiVo's plan.
"Our concern is grounded in the fact that the remote access is not limited to the recipient's summer home or boat or office," said Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's Washington legal counsel. "The people that can receive the programming can be totally unrelated in any place on the globe."
Attaway said that even if TiVo's system prevents mass Internet distribution, if each of TiVo's customers add 10 devices to a registered group, many potentially unrelated users would be able to see the copied show.
Bridging time zones
The NFL, meanwhile, is concerned that a user could send a copy of a game to someone in another time zone, where the game is blacked out. Burger responded that at current bandwidth, such a transfer would take 144 hours.
Burger would not say what would happen if the FCC rules against TiVo's system, saying the company respects the content owners' concerns and wants to work with them. But TiVo would be at a significant disadvantage if its device is not certified for the coming increase in digital programming.
Mike Godwin, policy counsel for Public Knowledge, an advocacy group for consumer digital rights, said the fight highlights the danger of requiring technologies to be approved by government agencies.
"We've always thought that once the FCC got into the role of approving content protection technologies that the content companies would leverage this to use the agency to throttle various technologies," he said.
An FCC official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the commission, said a decision on approved technologies is scheduled to be made in the next couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would significantly broaden user rights. The bill would exempt from copyright law technologies enabling users to zap objectionable parts of shows and movies so the programming can be viewed by children.
Directors and studios oppose the bill as giving people the right to alter copyrighted material.
On the flip side, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony today on a bill that would ban any technology that "induces" a copyright violation, in a direct attack on file-trading services.
One of those scheduled to testify is Marybeth Peters, the government's register of copyrights, who will endorse the bill, according to prepared testimony obtained by The Washington Post. Peters plans to testify that Congress might need to change the law to invalidate a Supreme Court decision that established a key underpinning of fair-use rights, which is that developers of technologies cannot be held responsible for the actions of those who might use them to violate copyright.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
You know what they say about opinions...
Posted by: London
In reply to: Cassandra who wrote msg# 63968 Date:6/24/2004 2:54:59 PM
Post #of 64630
Hello Cassandra,
I just wanted to correct a couple of things...
My name is Vannin Gale, and I hail from jolly old England, not as you thought the USA.
I'm rather partial to the Kings English, and one would hope that we truly "are a common people, separated by a common language". Only.
I've enjoyed your dialog on the board, and I'm impressed with your insight of the facts, and highly accurate assessment of the situation we find ourselves in.
Very impressive deductive work on your part I might add.
Keep up the good work, look forward to seeing more postings from you...
London
FASCINATING..Inside Look at Birth of the IPod
By Leander Kahney / Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »
02:00 AM Jul. 21, 2004 PT
Ben Knauss is a former senior manager at PortalPlayer, the company Apple Computer approached to help develop an MP3 player that would eventually become the wildly popular iPod.
Knauss shared his firsthand knowledge of the device's development, the glitches that almost killed it, and the extraordinary steps Apple took to keep the iPod a secret.
Knauss, who acted as the primary liaison between Apple and PortalPlayer, quit the company in 2001. According to Knauss, the iPod originated with a business idea dreamed up by Tony Fadell, an independent contractor and hardware expert who'd helped develop handheld devices at General Magic and Philips.
"Tony's idea was to take an MP3 player, build a Napster music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it," Knauss said. "Tony had the business idea."
Knauss said Fadell left Philips and set himself up as an independent contractor to shop the idea around. Knauss said Fadell approached several companies and was turned away by all of them, except for Apple.
Apple hired Fadell in early 2001 and assigned him a team of about 30 people -- "a typical industrial design team," Knauss said, including designers, programmers and hardware engineers. He's currently the senior director of iPod & Special Projects Group at Apple.
Knauss said at one of the first meetings with PortalPlayer, Fadell said, "This is the project that's going to remold Apple and 10 years from now, it's going to be a music business, not a computer business."
"Tony had an idea for a business process and Apple is transforming itself on his whim and an idea he had a few years ago," Knauss added.
Knauss said Fadell was familiar with PortalPlayer's reference designs for a couple of MP3 players, including one about the size of a cigarette packet. And though the design was unfinished, several prototypes had been built. "It was fairly ugly," he said. "It looked like an FM radio with a bunch of buttons." The interface, Knauss said, "was typical of an interface done by hardware guys."
But Knauss said Fadell recognized the design's potential. "Tony figured the product was there."
"(PortalPlayer) was attractive to Apple because we had an operating system," said Knauss. "That was a real selling point for Apple. We had the software and the hardware already done, and Apple was on a tight schedule."
Knauss said the reference design was about 80 percent complete when Apple came calling. For example, the prototype wouldn't support playlists longer than 10 songs. "Most of the time building the iPod was spent finishing our product," Knauss said.
At the time, PortalPlayer had 12 customers designing MP3 players based on the company's reference design. Most were Asian hardware manufacturers, Knauss said, but also included Teac and IBM.
Big Blue planned a small, black MP3 player, based on the company's own mini hard drives, which featured a unique circular screen and wireless Bluetooth headphones. "The design for IBM was a lot sexier," Knauss said.
But PortalPlayer went exclusively with Apple. "When Apple came to the table, we dropped all our other customers," Knauss said. For the next eight months, the company's 200 employees in the United States and 80 engineers in India worked exclusively on the iPod, Knauss said.
Apple had a list of features it wanted added to the reference design: Apple's preferred music format, AAC, as well as Audible's audio book format, and a five-band equalizer.
St Apple also wanted a new interface, which it designed in-house in about three months, Knauss said.
And while Fadell may have had the business plan, Apple CEO Steve Jobs molded the device's shape, feel and design.
"The interesting thing about the iPod, is that since it started, it had 100 percent of Steve Jobs' time," said Knauss. "Not many projects get that. He was heavily involved in every single aspect of the project."
At the beginning of the project, Jobs held meetings about the iPod every two to three weeks, but when the first iPod prototypes were built, Jobs became involved daily.
"They'd have meetings and Steve would be horribly offended he couldn't get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button," Knauss said. "We'd get orders: 'Steve doesn't think it's loud enough, the sharps aren't sharp enough, or the menu's not coming up fast enough.' Every day there were comments from Steve saying where it needed to be."
Knauss said Jobs' influence was sometimes idiosyncratic. For example, the iPod is louder than most MP3 players because Jobs is partly deaf, he said. "They drove the sound up so he could hear it," Knauss said.
Knauss noted that there were no demands to add FairPlay, Apple's copy-protection technology, which was appended to the second-generation iPod to coincide with the introduction of the iTunes music store.
"There was no discussion of (digital rights management)," Knauss said. "Their belief was DRM would hurt sales when they rolled out the music store. They specifically wanted no DRM in the original iPod."
Knauss said all the iPod prototypes -- and there were several -- were sealed tight inside a reinforced plastic box about the size of a shoebox.
"They put the buttons and the screen in creative locations all over the box so people couldn't tell what product was inside it and how small it was," Knauss said. "They always put the controls in different places -- the scroll wheel on the side, the screen on the top -- to make sure it wasn't predictable what the end design was. The only thing accessible was the jacks."
Knauss said the iPod project was nearly killed just as it drew to completion. Tests showed the iPod drained its batteries even when powered down. "It would have run three hours before going dead, and that was when it was turned off," Knauss said.
"The production lines had already been set up," Knauss said. "That was a tense part of the project: For eight weeks they thought they had a three-hour MP3 player."
Knauss said the problem was eventually fixed and shortly after, Apple bought a majority stake in the company.
Knauss stayed on until near the end of the iPod's development, but quit shortly before it was released because he had no confidence it would be a success.
"It was probably a mistake, but then you have to go with what you think at the time," he said.
Knauss, 33, is now contracting for Microsoft.
Apple, IBM and PortalPlayer did not respond to requests for comment, though PortalPlayer confirmed Knauss had been employed as a senior manager.
Duke to Give Apple iPods to First-Year Students for Educational Use
The iPods will be preloaded with such Duke-related content as information about orientation and the academic calendar; students also can download faculty-provided course content
Monday, July 19, 2004 / DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University will distribute Apple iPods to its incoming freshmen, as part of an initiative to encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life.
The pocket-sized digital devices, which can download and make use of both audio and text material, will be preloaded with Duke-related content, such as information for freshman orientation and the academic calendar. Through a special Duke Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes site, students also can download faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books. They also will be able to purchase music through the site.
Duke officials said the iPod distribution is part of a pilot program between Duke and Apple Computer, Inc. that will be evaluated after a year. Duke is paying for the project with strategic planning funds that it has set aside for one-time innovative technology purposes. The total cost of the project is expected to reach $500,000 or more, which includes hiring an academic computing specialist for the project, grant funding for faculty, associated research costs and the purchase of the iPods.
"This iPod pilot program is an exciting new component of Duke's strategic plan, which seeks to use information technology in innovative ways within the classroom and across the campus," said Provost Peter Lange, the university's senior academic officer.
"We're approaching this as an experiment, one we hope will motivate our faculty and students to think creatively about using digital audio content and a mobile computing environment to advance educational goals in the same way that iPods and similar devices have had such a big impact on music distribution," said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology. "We think the power and flexibility of these devices offer some real advantages over other media used to distribute educational content such as CD-ROMs and DVDs."
Futhey said she also expects students to develop their own content and interesting new uses for the devices. "I could easily imagine our student newspaper creating a weekly or daily audio editorial that students could listen to as they walk across campus," she said.
Lynne O'Brien, director of Duke's Center for Instructional Technology (CIT), noted that over the last two years a growing number of faculty members have shown interest in adding audio and video components to their courses.
"The iPod project will encourage faculty to experiment with adding elements such as music, foreign language and poetry to class curricula," she said. O'Brien cited as an example the elementary Spanish course taught by visiting assistant professor Lisa Merschel. Students in that course will use the iPods to listen to audio examples of textbook exercises, hear Spanish songs and record their own efforts to speak Spanish. In another course on environmental ethics, taught by adjunct professor Sally Schauman, students will use their iPods to record lectures and, while in the field, take notes and record interviews.
O'Brien said she expects other Duke faculty members to suggest ideas over the coming academic year to supplement those already slated for inclusion in the pilot program. "We will be inviting faculty to submit project ideas early in the fall semester," she said.
Lange said Duke will distribute the iPods to students Aug. 19, 2004, as part of freshman orientation. "We're limiting our distribution to this single class because it will make it easier for us to evaluate their experience relative to other students and determine whether the iPods promoted educational innovation as we hope. Duke students, like students at most universities, are already comfortable with the Internet and new technologies, and we think they'll rise to the challenge of working with their professors and others to develop new ways of learning. As with other technology innovations, we will evaluate this experiment carefully," Lange said.
The 1,650 20-GB iPods distributed to Duke freshmen are the latest-generation ipods from Apple and are compatible with both Mac and Windows systems, as are an additional 150 iPods slated for other academic and support needs. The iPods given to the first-year students will become property of the recipients. Students who do not own their own computers will also be able to participate in the project through computing laboratories on campus.
The university has developed a technical support plan for students that includes a one-year warranty on each iPod and assistance through the Duke Computer Store and the OIT help desk. Students who lose their iPods will be able to purchase a new one through the Duke Computer Store. Upperclassmen enrolled in classes utilizing iPods will be given loaners for the duration of the course.
Duke's CIT, Office of Student Affairs, Office of the Provost, Office of the Executive Vice President and Office of Information Technology (OIT) are collaborating with Apple on the iPod project.
For additional information, contact:
David Menzies / phone: (919) 684-2151 / email: david.menzies@duke.edu.
I'd bet money somebody may have spoke out of turn at Toshiba but I'd also bet that Apple will be using the 60 Gb drives in their portable media player that they are "not making" LOL....
EBay Flirts With Digital Music Downloads
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Jul 15, 8:51 PM (ET)
By RACHEL KONRAD
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Online auction giant eBay Inc. (EBAY) will allow some customers to buy and sell digital music files as part of a pilot program that could piggyback on the success of Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL)'s iTunes service.
San Jose, Calif.-based eBay said an unspecified number of "preapproved" users could conduct digital music transactions in eBay's new "Digital Downloads" category for the next 180 days. Executives will then determine whether to formally enter the market.
"We don't want to blow this out of proportion - this is a pilot program to see if there's even any demand," said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy. "Much of what happens on eBay happens because the community takes us there, and this is essentially giving the community a way to see if we should create this new venue."
The experiment, announced this week in a posting on eBay's Web site, reverses a longstanding policy at the world's largest auction company.
For years, eBay included digital music on its list of forbidden merchandise, along with human corpses, weapons and drugs. The company still forbids most digital downloads, including software, video delivered through peer-to-peer file-sharing communities and e-books.
Customer service representatives will monitor eBay's fledging music site and try to ensure that the sellers own copyrights to the songs.
EBay's venture comes the same week that Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple announced that 100 million songs had been sold at its iTunes Music Store.
Apple Profit Soars on New IPod Sales
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Jul 15, 6:48 PM (ET)
By MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL) shares surged more than 11 percent Thursday after the company announced that strong sales for its computers and "staggering" demand for iPod portable music players helped more than triple third-quarter profits.
For the three months ended June 26, Apple said after the bell Wednesday that it earned $61 million, or 16 cents per share, compared with $19 million, or 5 cents per share, in the same period last year. Revenues increased 30 percent to $2.01 billion.
Excluding an after-tax restructuring charge of $6 million, the company's net profit would have been $67 million, or 17 cents per share.
Wall Street analysts were expecting the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to earn 15 cents per share on sales of $1.94 billion, according to a survey by Thomson First Call.
"It was an outstanding quarter - our highest third-quarter revenue in eight years," said Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs. "Our Mac-based revenue grew a healthy 19 percent, and our music-based revenue grew an incredible 162 percent."
Investors responded favorably. Apple shares gained $3.35 to close at $32.93 Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Apple shipped 876,000 Macintosh computers in the quarter, up 14 percent from the year-ago period. The segment accounted for 58 percent of the quarter's revenue growth, Apple's chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said in an interview. He said most of the Mac growth was driven by higher laptop computer sales, as "the world is going more mobile."
Also, Apple shipped 860,000 iPod portable players, bringing the product's lifetime total to 3.7 million units, Oppenheimer said.
The demand for the mini version of the popular player has been "staggering" in the United States and continues to far outstrip supply even though the product's hard-disk provider has ramped up production, Apple's worldwide vice president of sales Tim Cook told analysts during a conference call. "Unprecedented" orders for European shipments, set to begin July 24, also will mean continued backlogs probably through the end of the year.
It will be difficult to predict when supply will catch up with demand, Cook said.
Earlier this week, Apple announced that 100 million songs had been sold at its iTunes Music Store - a milestone that took three months longer than the company had hoped but still a significant benchmark that proved Apple's dominance in the online music market.
The online music store eked out a "small profit" during the quarter, Oppenheimer said.
Apple announced on July 2 a delay in the release of the next-generation iMac until September. That means Apple will miss the back-to-school rush, a critical sales period for computer makers.
The new iMac faces the same microprocessor supply problem from IBM that has already delayed Apple's Power Mac G5 product shipments, Oppenheimer said Wednesday. If the problems aren't resolved, fourth-quarter results might change, he said.
Still, Apple officials gave an optimistic outlook.
For the fourth quarter, the company expects earnings of 16 cents to 17 cents per share, including a restructuring charge of 1 cent, on revenue of $2.1 billion, Oppenheimer said. For the fiscal year, the company expects to hit $8 billion in sales, a 29 percent increase from the previous year.
58 percent of Internet users in SKorea illegally download films: survey
Fri Jul 9, 1:07 PM ET Add Technology - AFP to My Yahoo!
WASHINGTON (AFP) - About one-fourth of Internet users in an eight-country survey admit to illegally downloading movies, but the percentage is more that twice as high in South Korea (news - web sites), according to an industry survey.
AFP/File Photo
The Motion Picture Association of America said its survey released this week found an average of 24 percent of Web users in the eight countries have downloaded at least one movie. But the percentage in South Korea was 58 percent.
South Korea is believed to have the highest percentage of Internet users on high-speed connections -- between 60 and 70 percent as of late last year, according to the International Telecommunications Union.
Because high-speed connections make it possible to download a full-length movie in a matter of minutes, the MPAA is concerned that piracy will grow as more Internet users boost their speed.
The association, which claims billions of dollars of losses to Internet piracy and bootlegging, said it fears that piracy will impact moviegoing as well as sales of DVDs and videocassettes.
"As one might expect, a majority (56 percent) of downloaders expect to continue downloading movies," the MPAA said.
"Downloaders say they would download more movies if it took less time to download. The time barrier should be mitigated as broadband penetration increases and compression technology improves to reduce the amount of time it will take to download the average movie."
More disturbing, the MPAA said, is that 17 percent of those surveyed said they are likely to start downloading in the future. This is likely to impact sales and cinema attendance.
"Although they profess to be active moviegoers, a large percentage of downloaders claim to be attending movies less often than they have in the past," the association said.
In South Korea, for example, the survey found that nearly one in three people who pirate movies are going to the cinema less frequently than in the past.
"Movie buying is down an even greater degree than movie-going among Internet pirates," the MPAA said
"One-fourth of professed movie downloaders claims to be buying movies on DVD/video less frequently than they have in the past. An alarming 52 percent of Korean pirates report buying less often."
After South Korea, the countries in the survey with the highest percentage of Internet users downloading films illegally were France (27 percent), followed by the United States (24 percent) and Italy and Britain (20 percent).
The others in the survey were Germany (19 percent), Australia (18 percent) and Japan (10 percent).
The survey by the research firm OTX, released Thursday, polled a total of 3,600 Internet users in the eight countries.
Close call for some competitors...
Posted on Sat, Jul. 03, 2004
Plane skids off airport's runway
DEMOCRAT STAFF REPORT
An airplane coming into Tallahassee Regional Airport on Friday skidded off the runway after a possible loss of hydraulic fluid, an airport official said. No one was hurt.
The airplane, owned by SkyWay Aircraft in Clearwater, had come from Charlotte, N.C., said airport operations supervisor Jim Durwin. The plane was carrying three SkyWay employees and three crew members, he said, and intended to pick up another employee before continuing to Clearwater.
The plane touched down on Runway 27, ran off the end of the tarmac and came to rest in some grass about 100 feet away, Durwin said. Hydraulic fluid later was found on the runway, he said.
Durwin said the incident was reported to the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, which will investigate.
Airport operations were not affected and no flights were delayed, Durwin said.
A call to SkyWay's Clearwater offices was unanswered Friday. The company focuses on commercial and private aircraft security and in-flight entertainment services, according to its Web site.
Can BMW's iDrive Pass Its Road Test Now?
After a catastrophic debut and a major makeover, BMW's iDrive infotainment system is gaining acceptance with critics, competitors, and customers.
John H. Day
ED Online ID #8246
June 21, 2004
RELATED ARTICLES:
• The iDrive: Driving A Faster Bus
BMW's 2001 introduction of iDrive, its pioneering driver information/entertainment system, was arguably the biggest corporate disaster since Coca-Cola Co. decided to tinker with the formula for its eponymous beverage.
To say that the automotive trade press and nearly every contributor to a Web discussion of the system hated iDrive is a huge understatement. How, one wonders, could anything in an automobile priced from $75,000 generate so much venom, especially considering the design objective and the fact that a driver didn't have to use it?
"The (iDrive) project started in 1998, six years ago," recalls Joe DiNucci, senior vice president of Immersion Corp. Immersion designed haptics profiles—programmable touch feedback—for the system. "BMW deserves credit for seeing over the horizon that the driver interface was becoming increasingly complex, literally overwhelming, and that adding more individual controls was not the answer."
What happens with both semiconductor chips and luxury cars is that market conditions continually force manufacturers to pack more functionality into, at best, the same space occupied by the previous version. For BMW, that meant the portion of the cabin within easy reach of the driver and/or the front-seat passenger.
Eventually, thought the Munich automotive electronics design team headed by Michael Würtenberger, there must be a limit to the number of switches, buttons, and knobs that a driver and passenger could manipulate effectively.
Würtenberger's colleague Hermann Kunzner, head of the group that designed the iDrive user interface, says the design goal was the ability to control a vehicle's climate/comfort, entertainment, and navigation systems via a single-input device that's roughly equivalent to a computer mouse. "We looked at different possibilities for the input, different screen sizes, and which functions had to be accessible through buttons," Kunzner recalls. "There always must be compromises, and iDrive for the 7 Series was the best compromise possible at that time."
A LEARNING EXPERIENCE
The iDrive system on the 7 Series features a display screen, quite large by auto dashboard standards, and a knob or dial located on the center console (Fig. 1). Here, drivers gain access to eight application menus: Climate, Communication, Navigation, and Entertainment, plus BMW Assist, Vehicle, Help, and Configuration.
Operating somewhat like a standard shift, the knob must be pushed in one of eight compass directions to access a particular menu (Fig. 2). Beneath the "hat" and the shell of the knob, which is manufactured by ALPS Electric, are an encoder and belt drive (Fig. 3). The belt wraps around the drive spindle, which is directly mounted to the motor shaft.
"I was in the BMW booth at the auto show when they first introduced iDrive," says Mike Levin, vice president of industrial solutions at Immersion. "People would walk up to kiosks where iDrive demos were set up, try to use it, and get confused. But if I spent 30 seconds with them to show them how to shift from one function to another, rotate through the menu for that function, then press for the selection they want, they were able to move between functions easily and get stuff done. If you go through a little effort, it becomes a very useful system."
The iDrive system gives drivers the ability to control hundreds of functions, far more than can be controlled on other vehicles, with less "clutter" than is typically found on a dashboard. But, the system does involve a learning curve. One showroom salesman estimated that a comfort level could be reached in as little as two weeks.
"[The iDrive] can frustrate some people who have been driving since age 15 and think they should be able to drive any car without having to take a class or read a manual," says Levin.
When the time came to port the iDrive to 5 and 6 Series BMWs, the automaker simplified the system, cutting its menu options in half (Climate, Communication, Navigation, and Entertainment). "This made it quicker to use. Tactile feedback was also changed, and speech processing was improved," says BMW's Kunzner.
"The great advantage in the 5 Series, which is the top of the art, is that the driver can use the system without looking at it," Kunzner adds. "In competing systems, the screen is in a deeper position and the driver can't look at it and look at traffic at the same time."
The circuitry supporting iDrive was a group effort and continues to be a moving target. Firms contributing electronics technology and/or design assistance to iDrive, in addition to Immersion Technology, include ALPS, Analog Devices, Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector), Harman Becker, NEC, Oasis Silicon Systems, Renesas Technology, Sharp, Siemens, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba.
"Our priority was to have a roadmap approach that would allow us to reuse chips in whole or in part," says BMW's Würtenberger. "We talked with silicon suppliers, told them what we would like to do, and did our best to align our roadmap with theirs. We wanted solutions that would allow us to change partners, if that became necessary."
BMW first deployed a communications network (ARCNET) inside a vehicle a decade ago. "We could build customized designs then, but automotive electronics systems today are much larger, more sophisticated, and more complex, and we've had to change our mindset and our culture in order to embrace industry-standard solutions," says Würtenberger.
"Automakers simply can't keep up with the pace of technology without staying on the main road in terms of system design and architecture," he continues. "We can't afford separate, dedicated solutions, so we're using standard operating systems, standard interfaces, like the I2C bus, and standard links like USB. We also have versioning systems and other automated design tools that weren't available 10 years ago."
QUARTET OF MCUs
At the heart of the second-generation (5 and 6 Series) iDrive are four microcontrollers (MCUs) located in the head unit: a main processor for navigation and MMI (multimedia interface); a companion chip for graphics; an MCU and digital signal processor (DSP) for sound management; and an interface controller that functions as a gateway and provides security.
Renasas Technology (formerly Hitachi) supplies the main processor, a 430-MIPS at 240-MHz SH775x, and the companion chip, an HD64404 Car Information System (Amanda) incorporating a 2D graphics engine, video input, and communication and networking peripherals. SH-4 Product manager Matthias Wenzel notes that Renesas recently introduced the SH7770 system-on-a-chip, which combines an SH-4A core with both 2D and 3D graphics engines in addition to GPS2 baseband processing and a plethora of peripherals.
Immersion's Levin explains that when a driver pushes or slides the controller to a section of the display screen to select a function, the screen changes and a set of commands is downloaded from the Renesas processor via a controller-area-network (CAN) bus to the processor in the control unit (a 16-bit Freelink MCU).
The commands tell the controller what haptic profile to play. "Haptic profiles contain instructions for detents, hard stops, 'hills,' and other touch-sensitive responses," according to Levin. "Speaker balance requires a detent, for example, whereas a hill is used as a permeable barrier to separate one section of the screen from another. In the case of audio, drivers can select from a list of available sources on the left side of the screen, such as AM, FM, or CD. Then they 'pop' over to the right side of the screen by turning the knob in that direction and select stations or tracks, with the touch appropriately different for each."
As the controller moves or a button is pushed, the controller feeds its position change to the system processor, an event change is registered, and new haptic commands are transmitted and initiated. "The controller doesn't know what it's controlling but knows what 'feel' is appropriate on a screen-by-screen basis," says Levin.
A communications processor interfaces with the vehicle's CAN, LIN (Local Interconnect Network), and MOST (Media Oriented System Transport) buses. "In a system like the iDrive, there are more than 5000 MOST function calls that can be combined in various ways to meet application requirements," says Oasis Silicon Systems' Christian Thiel.
"When the car is activated, all devices are awakened. They boot their hardware and operating systems and are then ready for communication," explains Thiel. "Usually, the system configuration is first checked by a central network master. If it is okay and all device addresses in the system are unique, the network master gives the start command for communication, and the devices begin to initialize their applications."
He continues, "The HMI device loads and displays status information—for example, the current CD track. Audio and video streaming are initialized if required. As the driver begins to use the system, commands are transmitted and status information is exchanged. When the car is parked, a shutdown sequence is initiated by the Network Master and the system goes to sleep."
Low power is as much a consideration in a vehicle as it is in a portable device, according to Brian Fortman, telematics marketing manager at Texas Instruments. "The electronics content of cars is growing. There are a lot of MCUs, and a lot of nodes on a MOST network, and that means there are a lot of potential places to drain the battery if they're kept active when the engine is not running. Automakers' requirements for power drain in standby mode is often less than one milliamp, which puts heavy constraints on DSP designs."
To meet those requirements, vendors are integrating DSPs and other processors on a single piece of silicon, much like Renesas did in combining its SH-4 core and companion processor on one chip. Such integrated designs are likely to find their way into future iDrive generations. Among Würtenberger's other plans for iDrive is to implement the high-bandwidth (10 Mbits/s versus 1 Mbit/s for CAN), deterministic automotive communications protocol called FlexRay. BMW is a founding member of the FlexRay Consortium (see "Driving A Faster Bus," for more information).
"The iDrive was a very brave, very revolutionary step in how to connect an operator with a vehicle," says Immersion's DiNucci. "They missed putting a $75,000 7 Series car in the hands of an automotive journalist without having a succinct way to jumpstart their knowledge."
"[The] iDrive is important not just for what BMW did in offering such a new interface, but for the other automakers that subsequently introduced or are developing something similar," notes Rob Barnicoat, director of Business Development at Harman Becker Automotive Systems, a developer of MMI (multimedia interface) software. Audi's A8 has an interface similar to iDrive, as will a new line of Mercedes S-class vehicles planned for introduction next year.
REVIEW: Sony E-Book a Revolution for Eyes
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Jul 1, 7:56 AM (ET)
By YURI KAGEYAMA
(AP) Sony Corp. employee Yuka Komatsu reads Japanese novel "Botchan" written by Soseki Natsume, one of...
Full Image
TOKYO (AP) - The text on Sony's new Librie electronic book reader doesn't quite equal ink on a page in clarity, but it comes remarkably close. It's easier on the eyes than any electronic display yet.
The Librie is the first major consumer product to feature a long-in-the-works display technology that is designed to replace printed words on paper - so-called electronic ink.
Whether such lightweight digital ink-based tablets eventually supplant newspapers, magazines, paperbacks and hardcovers, we'll have to see.
In the meantime, the Librie is a dazzling pathfinder. It could easily be the first electronic reader to catch on.
The 7-ounce gadget, at 8 inches by 5 inches, fits in your hand much like a paperback and runs on four AAA batteries that last for 10,000 page turns. Except for being slightly gray instead of white, the display has no backlight and the characters don't fade even in a bath of reflected light or with the reader tilted an angle.
The characters are a lot like newsprint, strictly black and white. Yet reading on a Librie easily beats squinting at the best liquid crystal display on the market even though the screen resolution is only 800 by 600 pixels.
Librie is now sold only in Japan, where it costs a hefty $380, with Sony saying it has no plans to offer the gadget in the United States, where the core technology originated.
Its creator is E Ink Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. The other chief partners in developing the gadget, apart from Sony, are Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Toppan Printing Co. of Japan.
E Ink's technology relies on tiny capsules, each about half the width of a strand of hair, that switch between black or white depending on whether they are positively or negatively charged.
Reading Librie isn't anything like flipping through a paperback, but it is a breeze. You just push a button on the side of the display to go to the next page, and the button above that to go back.
Skipping around a book is easy. A cursor button featuring a picture of a dog is scrolled at the bottom of the display. The Librie has a memory function that can place up to 40 bookmarks.
But you can't copy and paste passages to another computer or device. And copy protection built into the software garbles your books into useless data after two months. There's no way to digitally archive texts for later reference. That's a lot of restrictions, though the books available for this first Librie do cost only $3 per download.
Librie's features include 200 percent enlargement of the text, an installed dictionary that looks up words while you read and a voice reader. It will read texts aloud and also offers foreign language lessons.
I found Librie fascinating in the several hours I played with it, mostly for its utter lack of cool-gadget appeal. It doesn't do e-mail or show movies or pretend to do much else than be an e-book reader.
To download content, the machine connects to a personal computer via a USB link. The digital books are obtained from a service in Japan called Publishing Link that was set up with capital from Sony and major Japanese publishers. The service currently targets businessmen with a collection of 800 books whose topics range from business and sports to health and travel, mysteries and best-sellers.
The Librie ships with 10 megabytes of onboard memory, which translates to about 20 books numbering 250 pages each. It accommodates flash memory in the Sony Memory Stick format for additional storage, more than enough for anyone who likes to lug along a library on long trips.
I'm not wild about buying books that self-destruct after 60 days. But the idea behind Librie makes impeccable sense.
It's not that far-fetched to imagine receiving our morning newspaper of choice - call it the Daily Download - into an upgraded version of such a gadget. We'll save a lot of trees.
Creative's name describes CEO
40 minutes ago
By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
Sim Wong Hoo wants to make watching movies and TV on a portable device as common as listening to MP3 tunes on a jog.
Sim is founder and CEO of Singapore-based Creative Technology (news - web sites), best known for bringing quality stereo sound to the PC with its Sound Blaster audio card and popular Nomad Jukebox MP3 players.
Next up: a portable audio/video digital device that plays music and movies and displays photographs.
Later this summer, Creative will introduce the $499 Creative Zen Portable Media Center, a category that's a top priority for Microsoft. The software giant is working with Creative and others on the devices.
Similar portable audio/video products have been out since last year from RCA and France's Archos, but reviewers have complained of complicated steps to get video onto the devices.
Sim, 48, says his Zen "gets it right."
Apple CEO Steve Jobs (news - web sites) is often asked about doing a video iPod, and says there's no market for it. Sim says he was a skeptic at first, too, but has come to realize that a handheld device that can store digital photos, music and eliminate the need to carry stacks of DVDs "offers a lot of convenience."
While pricey initially, he says, the costs of a full-featured video/music player will eventually be similar to a top-of-the-line MP3 player.
"Why not get the one with video then? cell phones with color screens aren't something that people need, but they sure buy them," he says.
Starting with sound
- which included paper-and-hand tricks to amuse kids.
He built the $700 million Creative into the No. 2 player after Apple in hard drive-based MP3 players. Walk into any big-box retailer, or do an online search for "PC speakers," and you're likely to be confronted by its small speaker sets under the Creative or Cambridge SoundWorks names.
Not bad for a company that began in 1981 as a Singapore computer repair shop.
While behind the counter, Sim came up with an add-on memory box for the Apple II computer, which he started selling from the shop. Its success encouraged him to market his own PC, one that "could talk, speak and sing Chinese, play some music, all sorts of crazy things," he recalls.
Prospective buyers liked the audio aspects best. Back then, PC audio was dinky little sounds heard on video games. Sim removed his audio circuit board, and decided to come to the USA to try selling it. He rented a garage in Silicon Valley and started knocking on doors. RadioShack's Tandy division put him on the map with his first big sale.
Creative has sold about 200 million Sound Blasters since, and claims a 93% market share of sound cards - all the more impressive in that it's a product people had to install themselves by opening the back of their PCs.
"We hired good tech support to walk people through it," Sim says.
Hewlett-Packard (news - web sites) and Dell now offer the Sound Blaster as standard equipment on many PCs. Creative has solved the installation problem with an external Sound Blaster that plugs into USB ports.
For years, Creative - traded on the Nasdaq exchange - was totally dependent on Sound Blasters. At one time, it represented 70% of revenue. But across-the-board growth in MP3 player sales has helped level the field. Creative says its MP3 sales rose 151% in the most recent quarter. Sound Blaster cards now are 24% of sales, to 33% for MP3 players. Creative also makes Dell's MP3 player, the Dell DJ.
Creative competes with Apple by selling players that are less expensive and offer more storage. The $239 Nomad Zen Extra, for instance, has a 30-gigabyte hard drive, which can hold about 8,000 songs; the hot-selling entry-level $299 iPod has 15 gigabytes.
Dreaming things up
Sim spends most of his time in Asia ("China is about to explode," he says) and only comes here once a quarter. He checks in with his U.S. division President Craig McHugh at 5 p.m. California time, then they have a second chat after McHugh puts his kids to bed at home.
When meeting with Sim, "you have to stay really focused," says Ron Edgerton, CEO of Austin-based SigmaTel, which makes components for Creative's MP3 players. "He has so many thoughts coming, he's going 100 miles an hour."
Sim is on the board of THX, a spinoff of director George Lucas' Lucasfilm entertainment company that specializes in sound. "He's so technical, and I'm not," says Lucasfilm Chief Operating Officer Micheline Chau, who sits with Sim on the THX board. "He's always coming up with different ways of tackling the same issue. How do I turn this problem or issue upside down?"
Sim even thinks about such things while sleeping.
One morning, he called McHugh after waking from a dream that he could teach the world how to play the piano. He told of his idea: a computer keyboard that doubled as a piano.
"If everyone could have that for the price of a keyboard, everyone would be able to share it with kids and make music," McHugh recalls Sim saying.
A few months later, he unveiled the $99.99 combo PC/piano keyboard Prodikeys. Sales were better in the dream. The product has underperformed, but he hasn't given up on it.
Rolling with ideas
An avid bike rider in Singapore, he tired of having to wear headphones. He came up with the $69.99 TravelSound MP3 battery-powered tiny speakers. As has Prodikeys, that product has also been a tough sell.
"I know my tastes cannot be imposed on other people, but I'm always trying," he says.
The MuVo, one of Creative's biggest hits, came from a traditional office meeting in Singapore. Edgerton showed new internal MP3 circuitry SigmaTel designed that could dramatically reduce the size of an MP3 player. "His eyes lit up," Edgerton recalls. "He saw the ability to have a player 1/16th the size of the leading products of the time with four times the battery life. On the spot, he said, 'We're going to do a product with it, but we don't know what it is.' "
Four months later, Creative introduced the first of its MuVo MP3 players. The size of a pinky, it could double as an MP3 player and external storage device, something there hadn't been before. (Similar products have since been developed by other vendors.) Creative has sold nearly 1 million.
But more important, his nieces, who test all his products, approved.
"They didn't really like anything we did, until the MuVo," says Sim, who is single.
And that makes him really happy.
Microsoft to Let Partners Own CE Changes
Mon Jun 28,12:37 AM ET Add Business - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Michael Kramer
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp will for the first time permit any party that licenses its latest Windows CE operating system for electronic devices to own innovations they make to the software, the firm said on Monday.
The move is aimed at satisfying diverse customers using the Windows CE software in everything from automatic teller machines to mobile phones, and comes amid a growing challenge from the Linux (news - web sites) operating system. Linux can be shared, copied and modified freely, enabling it to run on almost any computer hardware.
While Microsoft now only allows premium partners, governments and academics access to its closely guarded source code -- the blueprints of an operating system -- the new Windows CE 5.0 to be released on July 9 throws the doors open to all comers.
"This is really the first time we offer this to everybody," said Ya-qin Zhang, vice president of Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, who estimated that some 60 to 70 percent of the total source code would be made available.
"Basically all the partners, licensees are able to innovate and differentiate. They are able to keep all the derivative work without license to anybody else, to us or to competitors," Zhang told Reuters in an interview.
Microsoft was forced to allow rivals access to key parts of Windows, known as protocols, as part of its settlement of a U.S. anti-trust suit.
It is facing similar sanctions from the European Commission (news - web sites), although the Commission suspended part of its order against Microsoft on Sunday as part of an appeal process.
CHEAP LICENSE
Because Microsoft charges fees for its proprietary software, it closely guards access to its intellectual property, which has fueled the firm's revenues of more than $100 million per day.
Developers can license one copy of Windows CE 5.0 for just US$3 to begin working on any changes they wish to make to the code, and manufacturers only start paying a fee when they begin shipping commercial products.
The Linux operating system requires no licensing fees, but any innovations to the code must also be made available for others to view and modify for free.
The U.S.-based Zhang, who was in Taiwan to attend an electronic engineering conference, declined to say if the model was being considered for Microsoft's crown jewel -- the Windows operating system for personal computers.
However, while PCs are highly standardized products, Windows CE and its derivatives can be found in broad variety of products.
"One thing we felt and we heard from our partners is really that they want to differentiate," Zhang said.
"They want to really build all kinds of devices on top of the platform. That was really the main driver of the decision."
Zhang said about two dozen companies were already developing products using Windows CE 5.0, including a portable video media player and telephones carrying voice via the Internet (news - web sites) from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Ltd.
New features include improvements in networking with other devices as well as support for 3D graphics in computer games.
OT Wireless Devices Help Police Fight Crime
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Jun 25, 10:12 AM (ET)
By MARTIN FINUCANE
(AP) A growing number of police departments now have instant access via handheld wireless devices to...
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BOSTON (AP) - A police officer stops you on the street, then taps something into a device in the palm of his hand.
The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive or boat you own, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about your life.
Science fiction? Hardly.
A growing number of police departments now have instant access via handheld wireless devices to vast commercial databases that contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat.
(AP) Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas Coffey displays a Blackberry wireless handheld device at...
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In a time of terrorism worries, the information could theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could use to solve a case.
But placing a commercial database full of personal details at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic privacy activists.
"If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily."
In recent years, police departments have been testing different handheld wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that, for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest.
At the same time, many police departments have been using desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands of law enforcement bodies now use them; five states have linked their own records with a huge commercial database in a federally funded program known as Matrix.
Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning to access the commercial databases using handheld wireless devices.
LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Mass.-based company that says it maintains more than 6 billion records and has data on 98 percent of the U.S. population, announced this week that it would provide Blackberry wireless devices to state police at Logan International Airport. Two of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, took off from Logan.
The officers can use the Blackberrys to access the LocatePlus database wherever and whenever they want, though the records don't include state and federal criminal justice databases or terrorist watch lists.
Such empowerment gains even more heft with Monday's ruling by a sharply divided Supreme Court that people who refuse to give their names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.
Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters, expressed concern that, with simply a name, officers could quickly tap into databases and learn a "broad array of information about the person."
Indeed, that's already happening.
LocatePlus now has more than 50 law enforcement agency customers that use wireless handhelds to access its database, said chief executive Jon Latorella.
Latorella said the company's database takes information from such sources as registries of motor vehicles, credit bureaus, property tax departments, telephone directories - even unlisted numbers - and courts to create computerized dossiers on people on demand.
ChoicePoint Inc. (CPS), based in Alpharetta, Ga., also offers police wireless access to its vast databases, but so far has a smaller number of clients, said James E. Lee, the company's chief marketing officer.
Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas Coffey, who works at Logan, said he felt the LocatePLUS service would be useful.
"We're in the information business, obtaining information about individuals or groups. It's an intelligence gathering tool. It just allows us to do our job better," he said.
Privacy activists argue, however, that information collected for one purpose shouldn't be used for others. They call for federal standards on the access and use of data as well as mechanisms to prevent abuse.
The ACLU's Stanley said the need for standards is even more urgent as cops on the street get wireless access to databases, and could make snap judgments based on incorrect data.
Harlin McEwen, a former police chief who chairs the technology committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said private database searching via handhelds is getting a lot of interest from police chiefs.
But he also cautioned that police should be wary about relying on information from databases not controlled and maintained by the government.
"It may be a tool for me. It may be a tip. But I'd better not rely on its accuracy without doing further investigation," McEwen said.
Privacy activists agree on the accuracy issue, and have broader concerns.
"These new services ... literally alter the balance of power between the individual and the state," giving the government more power, said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "The private sector has become Big Brother's little helper."
The Patent Profiteers
Acacia Technologies is laying claim to the innovations that move video and music through cyberspace. Could this tiny company be the next Internet powerhouse?
By Steven M. Cherry
A patent, any good patent attorney will tell you, isn't a right to do something, it's a right to keep others from doing it. If your invention is a good one, they'll pay you for the privilege of using it for the patent's 20-year life. If they don't license your patent voluntarily but apply its innovation anyway, you have two choices: back off, or sue for infringement. Which way you go depends largely on how much money you've got—if you decide to go the legalistic route, you'd better have a couple of million dollars to start you on your way.
Captain Carl Elam was an inventor with more good ideas than money. Back in 1983, repelled by what kids could watch on TV, he and another U.S. Air Force officer, Dale Leavy, designed a system that would let parents block certain types of programs. Eighteen years later, the V-chip, as such a system would come to be called, hit it big when the U.S. Congress ordered that all new televisions include content-filtering technology. By then, though, out of money, the two inventors had sold their patent. They ended up with a quarter of the fees that TV manufacturers eventually paid for licenses. Raking in most of the V-chip dough was a small band of venture capitalists at a California company called Acacia Technologies Group.
For Acacia, it was just the beginning. Today, the company has an expanded portfolio of patents, the technical and business savvy to spot other valuable patents, and a small but tenacious legal staff. Most important, it has a war chest big enough to finance legal adventures that just might have as big an impact on patent law as on the future course of a host of Internet-related technologies. And it's looking for new prospects all the time.
From the V-chip, whose key patent expired last year, Acacia has moved on to the potentially much more lucrative world of streaming media, the basic technology by which sound and video is delivered to personal computers or digital televisions via the Internet or a cable box. Acacia claims to own patents that cover virtually every aspect of transferring digitally encoded media from a server to a customer. A few examples: the downloading of songs to computers and MP3 players such as Apple's iPod, the streaming of video to a PC, the digital distribution of motion pictures to hotel rooms, even the use of a TiVo digital video recorder.
If Acacia's patents are valid and as broad as Acacia thinks they are, thousands of companies—including titans like Time Warner, Disney, Microsoft, and Sony—and maybe even hundreds of millions of users will have to pay Acacia directly or indirectly. Cable, satellite, and Internet service providers, video-on-demand companies, music sites, the new Web radio enterprises, pornographers—almost anyone delivering digital video or audio across a network will be liable.
"The breadth of their claims is stunning," says one patent attorney who has followed the Acacia case closely, Bruce D. Sunstein, of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, in Boston. "If you look at the potential targets, they include software providers like Microsoft, RealNetworks, and others, at least for contributory infringement, and possibly every cable provider and satellite provider, too. I suppose I'm a contributory infringer if I download some media content and look at it."
As a first step in testing its claims, Acacia is now pursuing a suit in the U.S. Central District Court of California against 17 small companies, all but one of them gritty little providers of what is politely called adult entertainment. These defendants eke out a living in part by streaming pornography over the Internet; none has annual revenues of more than US $1 million. Hearings began last fall, and a jury trial could start early next year.
In all likelihood, the trial will determine whether Acacia can make the jump from being an annoyance to small-time pornographers and a few other niche industries to being a force to be reckoned with in the online world. Certainly, a finding in Acacia's favor will herald the arrival of a new kind of player: a company that controls technology but doesn't create it; a firm that buys patents but that patents nothing. From its roots in venture capitalism, Acacia has morphed into something that has no real peer.
HEADQUARTERED IN A POSH SHOPPING and office complex in upscale Newport Beach, Calif., Acacia—with a staff of 3 engineers, 3 lawyers, a vice president in charge of patent acquisitions, and 13 others—plots the alchemy that turns patent claims into gold. The engineers don't develop or build things; they evaluate patents. The lawyers don't write patents; they think about licenses and lawsuits. By its own account, Acacia is the only publicly traded company in the world that does nothing but acquire and license patents, and sue other companies over the patents it acquires and licenses.
The company had 2003 revenues of just $692 000, all from the streaming media patents. (Though the V-chip patent didn't expire until midyear, its license fees were all taken in 2001.) With more and more licensees signing up, Acacia couldn't say how much it would take in for 2004. But by February, its licenses in hand were worth $2 million per year. It was only in late 2002 that Acacia began sending out glossy folders to possible infringers, with polite letters asking them to take out licenses.
Thousands of folders have been sent so far. The biggest company to acknowledge getting one is just down the road in Burbank: the mighty, albeit beleaguered, Walt Disney Co. media empire, whose diverse activities include ESPN.com and ABCnews.com. Some recipients ignore the letter, some refuse; the 17 defendants in the current suit are among the latter. But 118 companies, at last count, have agreed to take out licenses—including Disney, two large hotel video-on-demand movie enterprises, several Internet radio stations, a distance-learning service, the publishers of Playboy and Hustler magazines, and dozens of pornographers. Reportedly, many, but not all, pay relatively modest rates—between 1 and 3 percent of some or all of their gross revenues. The hotel movie services are paying a small amount per hotel room.
According to executive vice president and general counsel Robert Berman, even without a dollar in new income, its existing $2 million annual revenue from licenses, along with its V-chip royalties and other money it has in the bank, can keep Acacia Technologies going for five or more years at its current level of expenses. Its parent company, Acacia Research Corp., with which it shares a headquarters, had $50 million in cash at the end of 2003.
The parent company was formed in 1992 when R. Bruce Stewart, a longtime venture capitalist, got tired of "putting money into technology companies and watching them squander it." So, he says, "I decided to control things myself." Stewart quickly took the company public to raise additional funds.
By the mid-1990s, Acacia Research was funding companies involved in chip design, biotechnology, and the developing dot-com arena. One of those investments was in a Greenwich, Conn., company, Soundview Technologies Inc., which by then had acquired, among other technologies, the V-chip patent from Elam and Leavy, the Air Force officers. The patent was worthless until Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. One of the more minor provisions of this huge package of regulatory reforms required that TV sets sold in the United States be capable, within four years, of screening programming by content.
TV manufacturers scrambled for a way to satisfy the law. Suddenly, Soundview's patent looked pretty good, especially after the company sent letters extolling it to all the TV makers. Six months after Acacia initiated a lawsuit, Royal Philips Electronics NV, of Amsterdam, Netherlands, broke ranks and took out a license in late 2000. Almost all the others soon followed. Soon thereafter, Acacia, which had been keeping Soundview afloat for years, bought the whole company. The patent's 20-year life expired in February 2003, but in three years' time, Acacia earned $25.6 million in royalties. At least half that money went to the litigation and to Elam and Leavy, who saw almost 25 percent of it. (Rob Berman remembers the two inventors buying new cars with their first royalty payments.)
In December 2002, as the dust settled from the dot-com implosion, Acacia Research found itself with two still-viable enterprises that were utterly dissimilar: Acacia Technologies and CombiMatrix Group, a maker of biochips to test DNA for disease or unknown substances. (CombiMatrix, in Mukilteo, Wash., is actually the larger of the two, with about 60 employees; unlike Acacia Technologies, it actually develops technology.) To avoid confusing investors, Acacia Research split its own stock listing into a pair of stocks, one for each subsidiary.
FROM THE START, ACACIA TECHNOLOGIES has been an anomaly. There are plenty of other companies that don't manufacture anything based on their patents but license them instead—think Qualcomm, whose cellular telephony technologies can be found in hundreds of millions of cellphones, none of which the San Diego-based company manufactures. Then, too, there's the billion-dollar estate of inventor Jerome H. Lemelson, which exists only to enforce patents that Lemelson himself was awarded and which has thrown its weight around in patent courts for at least 20 years.
But unlike those companies, Acacia is interested in patents for technologies it did not invent or develop but which may have a future. And unlike virtually everybody else in this game, Acacia seeks to own patents outright, in contrast to the countless patent firms that exist to press other people's broad patent claims and to try to squeeze licenses out of putative infringers.
Such companies usually offer patent holders their expertise, and a few even make loans to keep them afloat. Perhaps the oldest and most successful of these is General Patent Corp., Suffern, N.Y. Founder and president Alexander Poltorak says his 15-year-old "full-service intellectual property management company" analyzes patents and assesses their value. A patent's value, Poltorak explains, is its ability to bulwark legal claims leveled against companies that are making money with a product or service that might be infringing. Like Acacia, General Patent then negotiates licenses or, if necessary, initiates lawsuits. Unlike Acacia, though, General Patent doesn't want to own or be assigned an inventor's patent; it's happy to provide services and collect fees, even a share of a litigation award. "The difference between the two companies is, we are not speculating on the patents," Poltorak says.
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"No two companies are likely to stream video in the exact same way."—Spike Goldberg, Homegrownvideo.com
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For Acacia Technologies, on the other hand, speculation is the heart of the game. When the V-chip patent expired last year, the company was left with only one active group of five patents, all covering the technology of rapidly conveying multimedia data to computers. To Acacia, these are the intellectual-property equivalent of the rights to drill the North Sea for oil. Owning them, the company's lawyers insist, gives Acacia a corner on the market for streaming media, the technology that lets computers, PDAs, or even, nowadays, cellphones play digital audio and video files stored on remote servers.
Given the size and scope of the pool of possible infringers, why is Acacia targeting pornographers? General Counsel Berman says the company chose them as the first defendants because the adult entertainment industry was the first to use cutting-edge technologies, like streaming media, to make money on the Internet.
But Lawrence G. Walters, an attorney with a number of pornography clients, is skeptical. "My guess is Acacia saw the adult industry as easy pickings," he says. No client of his firm, Weston, Garrou & DeWitt, in Los Angeles, is a defendant, but several of them are paying for licenses from Acacia. Noting that the defendants were sued separately but quickly formed a single defense group, Walters adds, "If so, it miscalculated. Acacia may not have understood how tight-knit the adult entertainment world is, how quickly they can organize. And they've gotten themselves excellent representation"—Fish & Richardson, a national law firm with a big patent practice.
The lead defendant is Homegrownvideo.com, in Aliso Viejo, Calif., not far from Acacia's headquarters. According to E. Michael ("Spike") Goldberg, who heads the company, its annual revenues are about a million dollars. Goldberg and his employees take pornography videotapes made by amateurs—typically husband-and-wife teams—and encode them for the Internet. A separate company also sells them in video stores and by mail. "Our expenses are a lot less than Acacia's," he says. But Goldberg, who, despite his punk-rock moniker, exudes conventional business respectability, with his short hair, button-down oxford shirt, and pictures of his wife and young son on his desk, also says that pornography isn't the lucrative industry it's often made out to be. "Baby food must have better margins," he complains.
THE PATENTS HANGING OVER THE HEADS of Goldberg and his colleagues defy simple analysis. The inventors H. Lee Browne and Paul Yurt envisioned a system that stored digital content for future viewing—a "Blockbuster replacement," says Rob Berman, referring to the ubiquitous video rental chain. The idea was to let people pick a movie or show from a stored library and move it to "a remote location"—their home computer, a television set-top box, or some other device. Indeed, one precious courtroom day has already been spent embroiled in just what constitutes a remote location—does it have to be merely remote from the video library or remote from the user as well? The answer will go a long way to determining how broad the patent is—and how many companies are swept up by its infringement broom.
While the press has consistently said the lawsuit is a fight over ownership of streaming media, the core patent, No. 5132992, doesn't actually distinguish between streaming and downloading. The difference is more about law than technology—in copyright law, a stream is a music "performance," while a download is a copy. Copies have additional copyright limitations, so most media-playing software makes it impossible for the casual user to permanently store streamed media. Technically, though, the difference is somewhat ephemeral.
When, for example, you want to listen to the latest Norah Jones hit, you can visit a server—a Web site such as Apple's Music Store. When you click on the link to "Feels Like Home," your browser launches a media player, such as Apple's iTunes, which then receives the bits that the server sends, uncompresses them, stores them in a buffer, and starts playing them as soon as the buffer is large enough to smooth over any transmission glitches that might occur. Or the browser grabs the bits and stores them in a local file that the media player can play whenever you want. In the first case, the music has been streamed, because you listen to the data stream more or less while it's being sent. In the second case, the song has been downloaded.
Acacia's key patent for what it calls digital media technology (DMT) see [Fig.2], granted in 1991, not only doesn't distinguish between streams and downloads, it is indifferent to the mode of telecommunication. In fact, it doesn't even mention the nascent Internet of the early 1990s, instead describing a system "wherein the transceiver means receives the information via any one of telephone, ISDN, broadband ISDN, satellite, common carrier, computer channels, cable television systems, metropolitan area networks, and microwave." (Using the term "transceiver means" instead of simply "transceiver" is typical patent-speak.)
The heart of the patent is that it takes diverse pieces of technology and puts them together in a way that Acacia claims was new at the time. It starts with a library for storing media and a unique identification code for retrieving a particular item, like a video. Then it specifies a way to format, order, and compress the item before sending it to a "remote location." In its scores of claim statements and dozen process diagrams, the patent also calls for media to be sequenced into "addressable blocks," so that if multiple movies, for example, are contained in one library file, they can be found.
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"Companies outsource their intellectual property departments to us—for small companies, it isn't practical to assemble a team of attorneys and engineers." —Paul R. Ryan, Acacia Technologies Group
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According to patent attorney Sunstein, the meaning of each of these terms is likely to be hotly disputed. Indeed, the current series of court appearances, known as Markman hearings, are devoted to these semantic questions. "If you're the patent holder, you want a broad interpretation of these terms, so it's easier to claim infringement. The defense wants a narrow interpretation. If they lose, though, the defense can turn around and take advantage of the broad interpretation of the terms, because then more preexisting technology might qualify as prior art," invalidating the patent after all.
Indeed, patents like Acacia's run the risk of being so broad that they aren't "novel, useful, and unobvious"—the three things an idea needs in order to be patentable. In particular, critics have asked whether DMT is novel or whether there isn't—in the wealth of computer networking and cable television technology up to 1991—the "prior art." "The broader the patent, the more potentially vulnerable it is to be attacked as invalid," says Sunstein. "But you have to come up with evidence that's clear and convincing to invalidate a patent. And searching for prior art can be an expensive process."
The easiest way to avoid being hoist on the petard of prior art is to interpret your patents narrowly. But then it becomes harder to catch anyone in the net of infringement. Spike Goldberg of Homegrownvideo.com thinks that's hard to do in the field of digital video anyway. "When you're up late at night figuring out the best way to compress video and encode it so that a media player can play it, it seems like no two companies are likely to stream video in the exact same way."
Can Acacia's patents be both broad and valid? That's for the courts to say. But according to one expert opinion, that of patent research service PatentRatings LLC, they are "very strong."
Last year, PatentRatings was hired by Technology Marketing magazine to evaluate Acacia's DMT patents. The service, which, by coincidence, is located in Acacia's hometown, Newport Beach, uses a regression model and a database of four million patents to rank the relative merits of a patent. CEO Jonathan Barney told IEEE Spectrum, "Acacia's looked very solid—they're in the top 10 percentile, probably in the top 5."
THOUGH THE DMT COURT CASE occupies center stage at Acacia Technologies, the company has also redoubled its search for broad new patents. Basically, the plan is simple: find other patents held by inventors or smaller companies running out of money (or just patience); buy the patents; license them out.
"Companies in effect outsource their intellectual property departments to us," says chairman and CEO Paul R. Ryan. "An IBM or GE can do it themselves, but for small or even midsized companies, it isn't practical to assemble a team of attorneys and engineers to research, write, and file patents; find potential infringers; and ask them for licenses." Indeed, large companies have known for years how lucrative patents are. The most successful is IBM, whose licensing department made over a billion dollars last year. Though that's just a fraction of the company's $89 billion revenue, licensing is a low-expense, high-margin operation. (IBM will license almost any of its technologies and rarely has to go to court.)
So far, Acacia is considering patents that have been referred by investors and lawyers it already has relationships with, such as the venerable San Francisco law firm Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP. And Acacia gets leads from its existing licensees—including one from an adult entertainment company, for a vibrating device that uses old electrotechnology in a novel way. (After examining the patent, Acacia declined to buy it.)
With its considerable assets from the V-chip and other investments, Acacia is bulking itself up with expertise. It's looking for a fourth engineer to help evaluate new patents it might buy and how they might be infringed. And in February it hired an attorney, Jennifer Hart, as a vice president whose primary responsibility is business development. In Acacia's world, that means reviewing and acquiring intellectual property.
John Roop, Acacia's senior vice president for engineering, says, "We have an almost industrial process of looking at a patent." Roop's three-man team takes the patents the business-development team finds and, he says, "sees if they make sense, whether they describe what the inventor thinks they do."
"We ask ourselves, are the claims too vague or ambiguous?" Roop continues. "Then we look at the granted claims and war-game them. If we were to assert this patent with respect to someone's business and ask them to license the patent, what would the potential licensee say? Do the claims really describe what they're doing?"
Roop's team needs to work in much the same way when Acacia considers whether to ask a company involved in streaming media, such as Hustler or Disney, to license its patents. "We start by going to the potential infringer's Web sites, seeing if they stream media," Roop says. "We need to look at the flow of information, so we might use a protocol analyzer, which is a piece of software that can look at the packets as they go from source—Hustler's Web server, say—to destination, a consumer like you or me."
"Then we look at the software the company is using, or even equipment, like a special camera—we'd look at the specs for it. We look at any hosting operations they're using and see what kind of services they offer. We compare that to the claims in our patents. With Hustler, for example, we determined they were practicing some of the claims"—that is, infringing them. "We met with them, and explained how claims in our patents describe what they do. Then comes the business and licensing discussion."
That "business and licensing discussion" is the whole point of the exercise. Critics charge that companies like Acacia cynically exploit the economics of patent infringement and defense. It can cost millions for a patent holder to press an infringement claim, especially if the putative infringer is large enough to mount a stout defense. On the other hand, the costs of defending oneself can be equally prohibitive for a mom-and-pop business, like many of the adult entertainment defendants in the current Acacia lawsuit.
Walters, the attorney who represents some of those businesses that have settled rather than fight, says, "The sole reason has been to avoid litigation. I don't think any of them have concluded the patents are valid and enforceable. This is a business decision. Patent cases are extremely expensive, some of the most expensive litigation around."
ACACIA IS FAR FROM DONE EXPLOITING the key DMT ideas—it has hundreds of new claims pending at the patent office extending those of the existing group of patents. And it has yet to write letters to the cable industry asking for licenses for video-on-demand services. "Cable is more lucrative than the Internet—several times more lucrative," says Berman.
Patenting a key technology isn't easy, and enforcing big patents is harder still. In January, a U.S. federal court invalidated 18 patents held by the Lemelson estate. In March, a patent office reexaminer ruled invalid a major Internet patent, that of Eolas Technologies Inc. of Wheaton, Ill., when it was presented with examples of prior art not considered when the patent was issued. The question of prior art lurks in the background right now for Acacia, as the DMT patent's validity will first be tested in court and perhaps eventually reexamined by the patent office.
Sunstein, the Boston patent attorney, says about Acacia's current litigation, "The claims are very broad, so the uncertainties are as well. There are lots of thrills ahead." But whatever happens in that California courthouse over the next year or so, with millions already in the bank and more and more license fees for the DMT patents rolling in, Acacia already has deep enough pockets to acquire and enforce new patents for years to come. And if the vein of gold it's striking with streaming media proves to be wide enough, Acacia could build a war chest of Midas proportions.
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To Probe Further
Acacia's main digital media patent, No. 5132992, can be found in the U.S. Patent and Trademark database at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-bool.html.
PatentRatings LLC has a description of its methodology for evaluating patents at http://www.patentratings.com/001/ratings.sv.
Some of the court documents filed in Acacia's lawsuit are online at 0604aca.zip (Zip file, 18 MB). Additional documents related to the case are at http://www.impai.org/onlineindustry.html.
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PHOTOGRAPH: TIM RUE/CORBIS/PHOTOGRAPH: TIM RUE/CORBIS;
Best Buy, Napster partner on promotions
By Dinesh C. Sharma
CNET News.com
June 24, 2004, 7:33 AM PT
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Digital music provider Napster has teamed up with Best Buy to enlist new subscribers.
Under the terms of the deal, announced Thursday, Best Buy will promote Napster through in-store marketing and media advertising. It will also launch a co-branded version of the music service to be sold online through Bestbuy.com.
In return, Best Buy will get stock of Napster parent Roxio worth up to $10 million over the term of the multiyear agreement. The two companies will finance marketing activities jointly.
The retail chain will feature Napster products in its brick-and-mortar stores and demonstrate the service through interactive kiosks throughout the nation. Napster will also support Best Buy's artist promotions.
Napster, which started as an unauthorized song-swapping Web site, has transformed into a legal service offering music downloads for a monthly fee. Recently it started giving away MP3 devices to anyone who subscribes for a full year. Other players in the field, like Apple's iTunes, have also announced marketing promotions with various consumer brands.
"Napster's compatibility across many of the digital music devices, hardware and software platforms that Best Buy offers, coupled with the exciting opportunities to offer exclusive content, will create very compelling customer solutions in digital music," Scott Young, vice president of digital entertainment for Best Buy, said in a statement.
CEA Adopts MOST Network Standard
By Amy Gilroy -- TWICE, 6/21/2004
ARLINGTON, VA.— CEA announced a new digital network standard for aftermarket car A/V components, that will allow aftermarket products of any brand to communicate with each other.
The standard, called the CEA-2012 MOST network, is based on the MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) standard — a fiber-optic network used in many luxury vehicles.
In addition to creating a digital platform by which all car A/V components can interface (for example, a Pioneer head unit with a Sony amplifier), the standard represents the first step in allowing aftermarket products to seamlessly work with factory OEM radios, telematics, video and other products.
In the future, MOST aftermarket products could plug into a gateway in a MOST automotive network, said CEA mobile electronics division staff director, Chris Cook. CEA is attempting to create this gateway. "The first effort was to create an aftermarket standard. The next step is to work with the MOST Corporation to develop a gateway between the aftermarket MOST network and the automotive MOST network," he said.
Alpine said it has begun preliminary R&D on producing MOST products, including products that could plug into the car's MOST network and work with the car's components. The earliest a MOST product could be available is 2006, said the company.
Pat Lavelle, president and CEO of Audiovox and chair of CEA's mobile electronics division board. said, "The CEA-2012 MOST standard will allow the mobile electronics aftermarket to develop products that can safely and quickly interface with the evermore sophisticated vehicles being designed today. Although this is just a first step in the process, it will ultimately prove to be the most important."
According to CEA, more than 30 vehicle models currently use the MOST network, which delivers A/V signals at data speeds of nearly 30 megabits per second. Competing car network standards include IDB-1394, an automotive-grade version of the high-speed 400-megabits-per-second IEEE-1394 standard, which is also known as Firewire.
The MOST standard is currently used in cars from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Jaguar and Saab. Other auto makers, including Ford, General Motors, Land Rover, Porsche, Volvo and Volkswagen are also expected to employ MOST in the future, said CEA.
The CEA-2012-MOST network application is available from Global Engineering Documents at http://global.ihs.com.
Apex Broadens Its Portfolio With First PMP, Cameras, DVR
By Jospeph Palenchar -- TWICE, 6/22/2004 12:48:00 PM
Ontario, Calif. — Apex Digital is broadening its CE portfolio with the launch of its first portable media player (PMP), the rollout of its second generation of digital cameras, and an expansion of its portable DVD player line.
The company also added DVR capability and TV Guide EPG to its delayed ApeXtreme DVD player/game console, an industry-first device that uses embedded Windows XP to play PC games on a TV. It will be Apex’s first DVR-equipped product.
Shipments of the $499-suggested ApeXtreme, equipped with 40GB HDD, were pushed back to August from April because "it took more work than we expected," said president Steve Brothers. "PC gaming is very demanding."
In entering the PMP market, Apex will join only two other players, RCA and Archos, although more companies are expected to join later this year. Apex’s battery-powered MP-2000, due in July at an everyday $399 price tag, can be used to play video and music transferred from a PC or copied directly from a TV, DVR, VCR, DVD player or stereo system. The device stores audio and video on a 1.8-inch 20GB HDD. Digital still images and video can be viewed on its 3.5-inch 320 by 260 color LCD screen. Audio can be heard through stereo headphones or the device’s single mono speaker.
People can use the device to view recorded video when they’re on the road, but they can also plug it into a TV to display video or still images on a friend’s TV. The device won’t play Macrovision-protected prerecorded video, but it is upgradable to support DRMs that authorized movie-download sites it might support in the future, Brothers said.
The 8.5-ounce device decodes audio in the MP3, WAV, unprotected-WMA and PCM formats; decodes video in the MPEG-4, DivX, motion JPEG and WMV9 formats; and displays JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP digital-still images. Files can be transferred from a PC via USB connection. To copy directly from the analog outputs of home electronics products, the device features built-in MP3 audio and MPEG-4 video encoders.
Other features include the ability to encode and store 640 by 480 video for playback on connected TVs. The 20GB HDD stores up to 40 hours of MPEG-4 video at 640 by 480 and 80 hours of WMV at 640 by 480. The consumer-removable 2200-milliamp lithium-ion battery delivers 12 hours of music playing time or four hours of video. The device also doubles as a voice recorder and portable data-storage drive.
In July, Apex plans an RF adapter that will stream the PMP’s music through a home or car stereo system at a possible $39.95, said Brothers. In 2005, Apex plans PMPs with higher screen sizes and HDD capacity, said national sales manager David Ficken.
In digital cameras, Apex completed the rollout of five new models, having shipped three SKUs in the first quarter and the other two in June. All are positioned as the market’s price leaders at select feature levels with availability in quantity and without sacrificing quality, said Ficken. Four models offer resolutions ranging from 1 to 4-megapixels; a fifth is a binocular/camera with 2.1-megapixel resolution. All feature built-in flash, USB port and SD memory-card slot.
One camera is a $29.99 suggested retail price 1-megapixel camera in a clamshell package. It lacks LCD viewer. Distribution targets include automotive chains, truck stops, drug chains and warehouse clubs. A second model, the 3-megapixel DSC-3000, retails for $79.99 and is "the first three-megapixel camera significantly under $100," said Ficken. Competing models start at $99, he said. It features a 4x digital zoom.
The 3-megapixel DSC-3500Z features a 3x optical zoom at $129, $20 less than other models with these features, he continued. The 4-megapixel DSC-4500Z features 3x optical zoom at $179, $20 less than competing models. The BC-2100 binocular/camera features 10 by 25 optics, 8x optical zoom, and 2.1-megapixel resolution at an everyday $99.99. Price leaders in this market, in contrast, start at $199 for a two-megapixel model, $99 for 1-megapixel models, and $59 for VGA quality, Ficken said. This model is targeted to familiar CE channels as well as to sporting-goods stores, drug stores and automotive chains.
Apex is targeting the volume segment of the digital camera market, Ficken said. "More than 50 percent of the market in units is in 3- to 4-megapixel cameras," Ficken said.
Next year, the company plans 5-megapixel cameras, he added.
In portable DVD players, the company is expanding its selection to four from two with the launch of two models with 7.1- and 8.4-inch color LCD displays. The $299-everyday PD-840 features an 8.4-inch screen, a new size for the company. It’s due in late summer. The 7-inch PD-710 ships in late July at an everyday $229. They join two carryover models: the 6.6-inch PD-660 at $190 and the 5-inch PD-500 is shipping at $149.
All new models feature playback of discs encoded with MP3, WMA, JPEG and Kodak Picture CD files.
Boeing's in-flight broadband launched in Asia
Lufthansa flight 715 from Tokyo to Munich inaugurated the service
News Story by Martyn Williams
JUNE 23, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - In-flight broadband Internet access was launched in Asia today with the takeoff of Lufthansa flight 715 from Tokyo to Munich.
The service is based on The Boeing Co.'s Connexion by Boeing offering, and its launch in Asia follows Lufthansa AG's rollout on its flight between Munich and Los Angeles last month. The service uses a wireless LAN on board the aircraft and connects through a satellite link to offer passengers a shared Internet connection with downstream capacity of 5Mbit/sec. and upstream capacity of 1Mbit/sec.
The launch of the service was announced at a Tokyo news conference, where Lufthansa and Boeing demonstrated the connectivity by holding a live video conference with Lufthansa representatives on the aircraft. "What is normal for us on the ground is becoming normal for us in the air," said Bernhardt Seiter, director of Lufthansa's Flynet service.
Lufthansa will offer the service every day on flights 714 and 715 each way between Munich and Tokyo. Users have a choice of two payment options: $29.95 for the entire flight, or $9.95 for 30 minutes of access and then a per-minute fee of 25 cents.
Passengers can also get free access to a Lufthansa portal called Flynet. The service consists of more than 1,000 pages of news and information, travel guides, Lufthansa-related content and shopping. Some parts of the portal, such as the news, are updated about once an hour during the flight.
Currently, passengers need a device such as a notebook PC or personal digital assistant to access the content, but Lufthansa is considering adding the content to the aircraft's entertainment system beginning in 2005 or 2006, Seiter said.
Later this year, the airline plans to expand the service to other flights serving Asia, including flights between Germany and Osaka, Japan, and between Germany and China, as well as on routes to India, the Middle East and Canada.
A number of other airlines are planning to begin offering the service this year. Three have signed agreements with Boeing: SAS AB's Scandinavian Airline Systems and Japan's All Nippon Airways Co. and Japan Airlines System Corp. Another four have signed preliminary agreements: British Airways PLC, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines Ltd. and Taiwan's China Airlines Ltd.
The airlines are hoping the service will provide them with a competitive advantage over rivals and say the system can help them cut costs by improving aircraft-to-ground communications. For example, aircraft maintenance information can be sent to ground crews ahead of time, reducing turnaround time for repairs.
Lufthansa said passenger take-up of the service is on target. The first route on which Lufthansa offered the service, flights 425 and 453 between Munich and Los Angeles, is seeing usage levels of about 10 to 20 passengers per flight, which is in line with the airline's expectations at this point, Seiter said.
and PDF brochure..looks like a somewhat clumsy and more difficult to implement system to me...
http://www.airfax.com/airfax/features/jun2004/pea_brochure.pdf
Copy-blocked CD tops U.S. charts
Last modified: June 17, 2004, 3:48 PM PDT
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
For the first time, the No. 1 album in the United States is loaded with anticopying protections, marking a clear step into the mainstream for the controversial technology.
According to figures released by Nielsen SoundScan, Velvet Revolver's "Contraband" was the top-selling album in America last week, despite being prominently labeled on its cover as being "protected against unauthorized duplication."
The success of the album is likely to prompt more experiments from BMG, the band's label, and other record companies, industry watchers said.
"It's too soon to tell whether the rest of the industry is going to be heartened by this," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at GartnerG2. "But clearly, there are going to be a lot of people who are very encouraged by the fact it is out on the marketplace."
The step forward is part of a slow increase in the flow of copy-protected compact discs into the American market, after several years of stalled progress. If the pace increases without substantial consumer backlash, the technology could become as commonplace as the antipiracy technology on DVDs, ultimately changing the way that consumers use their purchased music.
For several years, the big record labels have experimented with various versions of the technology, worried by the explosive popularity of CD burners and online file trading.
However, they have been wary of releasing the technology in the U.S. market on a wide scale. Early versions of copy-protected CDs had problems playing in some CD players and computers, prompting customer complaints and even recalls.
A vocal segment of the online population has been intensely critical of the copy protection plans, leading record label executives to worry about potential consumer reaction. Some artists, such as Virgin Records singer Ben Harper, have been bitterly angry at their labels' decision to include the technology without their approval.
The test with Velvet Revolver, a group made of alumni from Stone Temple Pilots, Guns N' Roses and others, was the largest yet for BMG. The test uses MediaMax copy protection from BMG partner SunnComm International. The label says it does plan a growing number of protected releases over the course of this year, but is still choosing which CDs will include the technology on a case-by-case basis.
"We're thrilled with the results we've seen and the apparent consumer acceptance," said Jordan Katz, an executive vice president in BMG's distribution arm. The company has released a total of 12 "copy managed" discs, with more than 2.5 million units now in the market, he said.
iPods still a problem
Like other recent copy-protected albums, the Velvet Revolver disc includes technology that blocks direct copying or ripping of the CD tracks to MP3 format. It also comes preloaded with songs in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which can be transferred to a computer or to many portable digital music players.
As in earlier tests by BMG and SunnComm, the copy protection on the Velvet Revolver disc can be simply disabled by pushing the "Shift" key on a computer while the CD is loading, which blocks the SunnComm software from being installed. The companies say they have long been aware of the work-around but that they were not trying to create an unhackable protection.
According to SunnComm, few purchasers have complained about the anticopying tools, although angry postings on sites such as Amazon.com are common. The sticker on the front of the Velvet Revolver CD and a link inside the software that loads automatically on a computer, once a user has given permission, points to SunnComm's Web site.
"We hear from less than half of one percent of people who have the Velvet Revolver disc," SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said. "Most of those questions are related to getting the songs onto an iPod."
However, the inability to move songs to Apple's popular digital music player, as well as to other devices that don't support Microsoft's Windows Media digital rights management services, is a serious shortcoming. Jacobs says SunnComm recognizes that--and that the company's next version will go beyond the Microsoft files and be able to create multiple kinds of digital files that will be compatible with the iPod.
But for now, iPod-owning Velvet Revolver fans don't have a direct alternative.
"We are actively working with Apple to provide a long-term solution to this issue," a posting on SunnComm's Web site reads. "We encourage you to provide feedback to Apple, requesting they implement a solution that will enable the iPod to support other secure music formats."
Also on Thursday, SunnComm announced that EMI Music would begin using its technology on advance and promotional releases. That marks the second major label, following BMG, to adopt SunnComm's tools officially, although others are also testing them.
EMI Music has "been encouraged by the success that SunnComm's MediaMax product has enjoyed," Richard Cottrell, global head of antipiracy for the record label, said in a statement. "We are pleased that SunnComm is developing a product that improves our ability to protect our artists' works, especially during the prerelease phase."
What was the question you asked Fred?eom
Apple marches to own tune in shunning video iPod
Posted 6/16/2004 4:17 AM Updated 6/16/2004 4:43 AM
By Duncan Martell, Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Computer already has a smash hit with its iPod digital music player, so it might seem a no-brainer to follow up with one that plays movies in time for Christmas.
What you see is all you'll be seeing on the iPod, at least for a while.
Image courtesy Apple
Not so fast, say analysts and even Apple's famously secretive co-founder and Chief Executive Steve Jobs himself, as such speculation has mounted in recent months on Internet bulletin boards and Apple enthusiast Web sites.
Brokering licensing deals with content distributors and creators, such as movie studios, is expensive and time-consuming. Also, there is yet to be any sign of great clamoring for portable video players by consumers. There are technical issues to consider, as well as the basic nature of immersing the senses that is required to watch a movie.
"There are already a whole bunch of perfectly capable devices out there that can play movies — and they're called notebook computers," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at market research firm GartnerG2 in Silicon Valley. "It's still an open question whether there's enough demand, and I think that's central to Apple's considerations."
To be sure, there are companies, such as Creative Labs' Creative Zen Portable Media Center and other such Windows-based devices that will be on store shelves in time for the crucial year-end shopping season. Creative sells a range of digital music players, while Apple continues to focus on music.
Breathing room
With the success of the iPod — technophiles and tech newbies have bought more than 3 million of them already — Apple deserves much of the credit for ushering in wide-scale acceptance of legal music downloading, analysts said.
Before then, piracy loomed as a crippling threat to the recording industry because of the popularity of Napster's first incarnation and other file-sharing networks.
"There's no question that the music industry was searching high and low to find a pay service in order to thwart piracy," said analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, another Silicon Valley market research company.
But, at least for now, movie studios do not face the same urgency that the five major record labels did, ultimately signing a ground-breaking pact with Apple that paved the way for its online music store. Part of the reason is that, while high-speed Internet access in the U.S. and Europe is broadening, it's not yet at the data rates necessary to support timely downloading of full-length feature films.
That gives the studios some breathing room.
"Hollywood doesn't make to want the same mistake as the music industry," Bajarin said. "While it's urgent to get it right, there's actually time to do it right."
McGuire of GartnerG2 notes: "The costs in time and money of negotiating rights to video content are substantial and you don't want to make that investment if you can't foresee the demand for it."
Stay in the background
So far, Jobs doesn't himself see that demand. A shareholder asked him about plans for a video iPod at the company's annual meeting in April. He responded by paraphrasing a campaign slogan of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential election campaign, "It's the economy, stupid."
"It's the music, stupid," Jobs said after a slight pause. Also, last week, Apple's head of hardware product marketing Greg Joswiak told Reuters that Apple has no plans yet for a video iPod.
And beyond the issues of negotiating licenses, the need for higher speed Internet connections than are now prevalent, there's the basic difference between listening to music and watching video content.
It's easy to plug a digital music player into a car stereo and listen to music while driving, using an iPod while walking to work or working out. But doing these things while watching a movie on an iPod-like, portable device is clearly not advisable.
"Music is largely a background experience and movies aren't," said Phil Leigh, an analyst at Inside Digital Media.
In addition to demand, design, licensing issues, and an adequately sized screen that consumers would expect, Apple, because of its good fortune with the iPod and iTunes, also has to worry about diluting the marketing brand of the iPod.
"Apple has good equity built up around the iPod brand," McGuire said. "They have to be careful about turning it into this digital-media Swiss Army knife that does a lot of things but none of them very well."
Audio equipment maker relies on Web tie-in
By Seth Seymour, Gannett News ServicePosted 6/14/2004 2:01 PM
As audio sales continue to decline nationwide, Klipsch Audio Technologies is adopting a new strategy to keep from singing the blues.
The Indianapolis manufacturer of high-end audio equipment is teaming with an online music site to reach what industry experts consider an untapped — and lucrative — market: young people.
By offering free music downloads on its Web site (www.klipsch.com), Klipsch officials believe they can nab themselves a new group of customers.
Beginning in August, the Klipsch Web site each week will offer 75 free downloads from GarageBand.com (www.garageband.com), which specializes in free music. Some will be from among GarageBand's most popular downloads and others will be chosen randomly.
Company officials have their fingers crossed as Klipsch jumps on the downloading bandwagon.
"Young people love music, and this is our way to get in front of new customers," said Klipsch Marketing Director Cris Pyle.
The link, Klipsch Garage, will give young folks incentives to visit the site frequently and — the company hopes — check out its products, she said.
"We're trying to give them reason to come back to the site," Pyle said.
For GarageBand, it's another way to spread the music of aspiring artists.
The deal is twofold: GarageBand.com provides free music and advertising, while Klipsch pays an undisclosed amount to the partnership and provides products to give away on the music site.
"It's mutually beneficial," said Ali Partovi, chief executive of GarageBand.com. "It'll give young people even more incentive to listen to music."
This may be the first partnership of its kind, but Klipsch believes others will follow. That prompted company officials to make sure GarageBand partnered with no other audio companies.
"It makes our relationship deeper," Pyle said. "When we signed the agreement, we wanted to go into it with an exclusivity clause so the music site can't deal with our competitors."
Though Klipsch has seen 20% annual growth yearly over the past seven years, other companies have not.
In fact, the audio industry saw a 9.6% decrease in sales last year and may experience another 3.6% drop in 2004, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
More traditional audio products such as bulky speakers have seen drop-offs, but companies now are focusing on new technology like MP3 accessories and smaller speakers, says association spokeswoman Anne-Taylor Griffith.
"It's not surprising that Klipsch is trying to make a play in that younger market," Griffith said.
A music site is a good way to do it, she said. Klipsch officials agree.
"People are consuming their music differently now," Pyle said.
GarageBand.com has more than 400,000 registered members and 250,000 artists, making it the world's largest site for independent artists.
The possibility for new customers is big, Pyle said, and her company is ready:
"Just think of the opportunity."
Alaska Air Group to Webcast Presentation at Merrill Lynch 11th Annual Global Transportation Conference
SEATTLE, Jun 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Alaska Air Group, Inc.
(NYSE: ALK) the parent company of Alaska Airlines, Inc. and Horizon Air
Industries, Inc., today announced that it will webcast a presentation by
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Ayer at the Merrill Lynch 11th
Annual Global Transportation Conference on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 in New
York, NY.
The webcast will be presented live on Wednesday, June 16 at 8:35 a.m.
(ET). Listeners may participate by accessing the "Investor Information"
portion of http://www.alaskaair.com several minutes prior to the scheduled start time
to allow sufficient time for registration.
For those unable to listen to the live broadcast, a replay will be
available at the website address for ten (10) days.
Safety in Avionics: Hazards in the Cabin
by David Evans
More avionics are being added to the cabin than in the cockpit these days, and recent regulatory actions suggest a certain slowness in reacting to a potential safety threat.
The threat is posed by improperly installed in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems. To be sure, new features are being added to cockpits, such as the windshear detection technology. But for a really massive effort, look to the IFE systems being installed in the competitive war to attract travelers. The amount of wiring in these networks can equal the linear feet of wiring in the rest of the airplane—which is to say the risk of failures, arcing and in-flight electrical fires is being doubled.
Many of these installations are done after the airplane is delivered from the manufacturer. They are approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration through the supplemental type certificate (STC) process. Right now, that process looks pretty porous.
In a recent spate of airworthiness directives (ADs), the FAA declared that IFE systems that cannot be turned off unless pilots pull circuit breakers must be modified, disconnected or removed outright. The directives, 14 as of this writing, with four more to come, stem from a wider investigative net cast by the FAA after the fiasco over the high-power interactive IFE installed in Swissair MD-11 and B747 aircraft. The Swissair IFE was among the first to feature in-flight video gambling. When one of the 16 Swissair MD-11s equipped with the system crashed at Halifax, Canada, in 1998, and burnt wires were recovered from the IFE system, Swissair officials immediately ordered the same systems on remaining aircraft to be disconnected. Circuit breakers were pulled and power cables literally were cut and capped, pursuant to complete removal at a more deliberate pace.
The FAA had approved the system’s installation via the STC process, and a U.S. company operating as a designated alteration station (DAS) performed the actual work. According to internal Swissair documents, the FAA’s imprimatur went a long way toward assuring the Swiss carrier’s top brass that the system was safe to install.
Canadian officials are nowhere close to completing their investigation of the crash, and arcing of IFE wiring is but one of many possible scenarios triggering the in-flight fire that downed the airplane. But FAA officials suspected almost immediately they may have fumbled the ball with that STC.
In a 1999 interview with sister publication Air Safety Week, Ronald Wojnar, deputy FAA director of aircraft certification, said, "We immediately, within hours of the accident, took all the clues we had. At that time, there were small pieces with evidence of wiring problems, and that’s what launched the SCR."
Wojnar was referring to the special certification review (SCR) of the IFE installed in the accident airplane. The team found glaring gaps in FAA requirements and procedures to ensure that the IFE installation did not compromise safety. So much for the agency’s bland assurances two years before the Swissair crash that all would be well with these new IFE systems.
In a March 1996 report to the U.S. Congress on interactive video gambling systems, such as the one installed on the Swissair jet, the FAA told legislators these new systems "have been certificated as safe from a technical standpoint." The FAA’s report itemized the evaluation of these systems for "electrical power loading...the potential for fire hazard, potential interference with emergency procedures...and other factors affecting safe operation of the aircraft."
The special certification review of the Swissair IFE installation found otherwise. It documented a blowout of oversight. In operation, the system generated so much heat that SR Technics engineers had to vary the range of the air-conditioning temperature controllers. This gambit was a tip-off that this system was a voracious energy parasite and a possible source of real grief.
Furthermore, the IFE was connected to a flight-essential bus, not a cabin bus, and the only way it could be turned off was by pulling circuit breakers. In other words, shutting off the cabin bus, one of the first steps in the emergency checklist for troubleshooting smoke and fire of unknown origin (the Swissair case), would not disconnect IFE power.
And since the IFE was a "passenger convenience" item, there was no requirement for changes to the pilot’s operating manual to inform the crew about the system’s functioning. In an elegant tautology, Wojnar explained that the IFE system satisfied requirements because there were no requirements. Wojnar said the arrangement "wasn’t inherently unsafe, although it wasn’t understandable to the flight crew—it wasn’t clear to them in an emergency situation."
That was a year and a half ago. In the time since, FAA officials expanded their examination to include other IFE systems installed in various aircraft. As in the Swissair case, they focused on the interface between the IFE and other aircraft systems, and whether or not documentation adequately informed flight crews of system configuration, so they could disconnect the IFE in an emergency. The basic answer to these critical safety questions: "No" on both counts.
Although the IFE installation on Swissair jets was not deemed "inherently unsafe," the ADs recently issued for installations on other jets now patently declare "an unsafe condition exits." In announcing the barrage of ADs, the FAA declared its actions were unrelated to the Swissair accident. Talk about denying the obvious. It was the heat-damaged IFE wires found in the wreckage that spurred the FAA to look first at the MD-11 installation, and then to examine IFE systems in other airplanes.
As an example of the unsafe conditions now revealed, FAA investigators found that the cockpit crews of certain Airbus A340 aircraft had no means to fully remove power from the IFE "without locating and pulling circuit breakers...which are located in the avionics compartment."
The FAA’s rationale for modifying the IFE installation on certain B737-300 and B737-700 aircraft pretty much captures the central finding for some 22 IFE systems installed in Boeing, Douglas and Airbus airliners: "The IFE system...is connected to an electrical bus that cannot be deactivated without also cutting power to airplane systems necessary for safe flight...Also, there is no means available for the flight crew to remove power from the IFE system without pulling circuit breakers...
"Furthermore, the airplane flight manual (AFM) and cabin crew manual do not provide clear instructions on how to remove power from the IFE...This condition, if not corrected, could result in...inability to control smoke or fumes in the airplane..." Imagine crawling down into the avionics bay, as in the case of the Swissair MD-11 or in that A340 installation, amidst a thickening cloud of acrid smoke (and, in a two-pilot cockpit, leaving just one pilot to aviate, navigate and communicate).
The mandated modifications include installing a master switch, or modifying cockpit switching, to cut IFE power, and adding an explanation of such switch functioning in the AFM.
In short, these STC-approved installations were incompatible with safe electrical system design practices and, with inadequate documentation, flight crews were nigh unto clueless.
It gets worse.
Service bulletins issued by various IFE contractors provided detailed instructions to operators to modify, de-activate or remove the relevant IFE systems. The ADs made these actions mandatory, but the FAA allowed 50% more time, 18 months instead of the 12 months recommended in the service bulletins, to complete the work.
Not only did the horses of hazard get out of the barn, the FAA allowed more time to round them up and close the door. To be sure, the FAA is underfunded and understaffed for the magnitude of the oversight task it must accomplish, but there are larger issues here.
Who is signing these STC documents? In many cases, employees of the companies designing and marketing them, tagged designated airworthiness or engineering representatives (DARs or DERs) by the FAA, are acting and signing approval documents on behalf of the government. Yet the documents, signed by civilians, as it were, bear the great seal of the FAA. The arrangement seems fraught with the potential for conflict of interest.
In these various IFE systems, the safety defenses putatively provided by the STC process weren’t just penetrated, they were overrun wholesale.
An oversight system prone to what might be called "incestuous approval" seems ripe for wholesale review—with canceling the arrangement outright a prominent option. The FAA’s belated experience with IFE systems provides a perfect case study of poor design practices and piecemeal corrective actions from which such a wider assessment could now proceed.
David Evans is the award-winning editor of Air Safety Week. Comments can be sent via e-mail to devans@pbimedia.com.
Back to this month's issue
don't remember...DivXNetworks, India's Ittiam in video technology pact
Posted on Thu, Jun. 26, 2003
BANGALORE, India (AP) - California video technology company DivXNetworks has entered into a software alliance with India's Ittiam Systems to bring high-quality digital video to consumer appliances such as television set-top boxes, camcorders and cell phones.
The two companies will jointly develop software to enable these gadgets to offer the quality of a digital video disc player, Srini Rajam, chairman and chief executive officer of Ittiam Systems, said Thursday in India's high-tech city of Bangalore.
The new software would be embedded into semiconductors made by Texas Instruments, whose software center in Bangalore provides design guidance and some software tools for the new alliance, Rajam said.
San Diego-based DivXNetworks offers a video compression technology called DivX Video, based on the Moving Picture Experts Group-4 standards, also called MPEG 4, which enables a complete movie to be saved on a compact disc.
Rajam said this technology is so far available for playing digital video on a computer and the alliance would extend this to portable gadgets.
He said a consumer electronics company in the Far East is designing a camcorder with a chip from Texas Instruments that will include the new software. The camcorder will hit the market before the middle of 2004, he said.
Rajam declined to name the Far East company.
Ittiam supplies embedded software to Texas Instruments and has a tie-up with Texas-based Silicon Laboratories to make versatile chips for high-speed modems.
----------
On the Net:
DivXNetworks: www.divxnetworks.com
Ittiam Systems: www.ittiam.com
Philips Changes 2004 Audio Plans
By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 6/10/2004 10:40:00 AM
New York – Philips has altered its 2004 plans for both home and portable audio products.
The company announced at a press briefing here that it has expanded its selection of 802.11b-equipped microsystems to two, reversed its plans to ship a 30GB HDD music portable in 2004, and it said new flash-memory and HDD music portables will support Microsoft’s DRM technology for compatibility with authorized Windows Media Audio (WMA) download sites.
New portables will ship with the DRM, either with the first shipments or as a running change. Consumers who buy early versions without the DRM will be able to download the DRM as an upgrade.
In updating its wireless-network plans, the company plans June shipments of two 802.11g-equipped Multimedia Links in June to stream audio and video content wirelessly from a PC’s HDD or from a broadband internet connection to a home entertainment system.
The $299-suggested SL300i and $449-suggested SL400i use wireless 802.11b and g and Microsoft’s Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) to connect to a PC equipped with Philips’ UPnP-based media-management software. The devices stream audio, video, and still-image files from the PC or Internet in the following formats: JPEG, MP3, MP3PRO, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DiVX, and XviD.
The SL400i displays menus on its front-panel display or on a connected TV. The 300i, which lacks a display, displays menus only on a connected TV. Consumers can also view menus and PC content on a new color-touchscreen IR remote with 802.11b wireless card. The $499-suggested RC9800i remote uses UPnP to view and control content on networked PCs equipped with Philips’s software or on any UPnP-equipped device. Although the preprogrammed/learning remote has no built-in speakers, its recharging/docking station features a line-level output for connection to powered speakers.
The remote’s 802.11b capability also enables remote control of PC content without having to aim the remote at a Multimedia Link, and the remote will download EPG menus through a broadband connection. The remote’s main selling point, however, is its setup wizard, which simplifies programming, said marketing manager Tracy LoPriore.
Wireless-network capability is also built into one new LCD TV and one new HTiB, both equipped with 802.11b/g, and in one new 802.11b-equipped microsystem. All three feature UPnP.
The microsystem, the MCW770, ships in June at a suggested $389. A current networked microsystem uses built-in 802.11b but lacks UPnP.
The HTiB, the 802.11b/g-equipped MX6000i, ships in July with some changes since it was announced at January’s CES. The suggested retail jumps to $799 from $699, and its color will be silver instead of black. It was previously planned for March shipment. It features five-disc progressive-scan DVD player.
In another product-lineup change, the company decided against shipping a 30GB HDD music portable in 2004 to focus on launching its new 2GB HDD model, 20GB HDD model, key ring-size flash-memory portables, and Nike/Philips-brand sports-style music portables, the company said.
In other changes made to previously announced HDD plans, Philips added the 2GB model, the hdd070. It ships in September at a suggested $199. The 20GB hdd20, already available, is priced at a suggested $349 compared to the originally announced $299.
One of the new Nike/Philips portables, the armband MP3RUN, is said to be the only flash-memory music portable with running-performance monitoring. The 256MB model used Bluetooth to communicate with an included speed sensor that clips onto a running shoe to monitor speed and distance. The information is relayed via voice to the MP3RUN’s headset for playback on demand. A display also shows a performance summary when running is finished.
In other changes, the company pushed back the shipment of its first HTiB with DVD recorder until the first quarter of 2005 from Nov. 2004.