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EDIG CES attendees take note..Dataplay to speak day before CES...
courtesy of EDIGLady
First Conference On Entertainment and Storage
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2001--On Jan. 7, 2002, in Las Vegas, be sure to attend the first
conference focusing on the intersection of content creation, content distribution, consumer electronics, and
data storage -- Storage Visions 2002.
This one-day event the day before the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show features noted industry speakers:
-- Gordon Castle of CNN
-- Steve Canepa of IBM
-- Ken Lipscomb of Zap Media
The conference is sponsored by:
-- Gerald Klauer Mattison & Co. Inc.
-- Seagate Technology
-- Maxtor QuickView
-- Storage Vision Conferences
-- Broadcast Engineering Magazine
-- Infostor Magazine
-- Data Storage Magazine
-- Computer Technology Review
-- Davis Consultants Asia
-- Storage Management Solutions
-- MultiMedia Research Group Inc.
-- DataStorex.com
-- Data Storage Review
The day's six sessions and two panels will include speakers from Avid, Ciprico, Qualcomm, Speedera,
Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, MultiMedia Research Group, DataPlay, SanDisk, ATL/Quantum, Data Direct,
EMC, Imperial Technologies, IBM, MarQlin, Iomega, Ultracard, Warp-1, In-Phase, and other companies. Many
other companies will be attending and exhibiting.
Following the day's speakers and panels will be an evening combined Storage Visions reception and exhibit
that will be free and open to all. Be sure to attend!
Space is limited so sign up today. For more information, or to sign up call 805/898-3845 or print out and send
in the registration form from our Web site: www.storagevisions.com.
CONTACT:
Storage Visions
Tom Coughlin, 408/978-8184
KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA NEVADA
BW0193 DEC 12,2001
7:00 PACIFIC
10:00 EASTERN
Penton Media Announces Special Events At Internet World Fall 2001 and Streaming Media East for Tuesday, December 11th
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2001--Penton Media's (NYSE: PME, http://www.penton.com) Internet World Fall 2001 and Streaming Media East opened its doors today as the conference sessions got underway at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, where the events will run through this Friday, December 14th. There are a number of special events planned for the opening of the keynote hall tomorrow, including:
Keynote Addresses - Larry Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Oracle, and Robert Pittman, COO of AOL Time Warner, have seen their companies make news in the past week. Both of these business leaders will be presenting keynote addresses at Internet World tomorrow, as will Michael Capellas of Compaq.
In addition, Streaming Media East is featuring a special keynote by Will Poole, VP, Windows Digital Media Division, Microsoft Corporation, who will be announcing new developments regarding Microsoft's digital media initiatives.
Workplace Evolution - This new Internet World exhibit hall showcase is designed to highlight emerging technology and design in the changing office environment, and will make its debut on Tuesday. AT&T Labs and WorldNet will be unveiling a new product, and participants include ViewSonic Corp., EGG Solution and Bulo Office Furniture.
Penton Media (NYSE: PME) is a leading, global business-to-business media company that produces market-focused magazines, trade shows and conferences, and Web sites. Penton's integrated media portfolio serves the following industries: Internet/broadband; information technology; electronics; natural products; food/retail; manufacturing; design/engineering; supply chain; aviation; government/compliance; mechanical systems/construction; and leisure/hospitality. For more information, visit www.penton.com.
--30--kam/ny*
CONTACT: Internet World and Streaming Media Press Center
Steven Wright-Mark, 212-624-6126
steven@schwartzpr.com
TI Delivers Two System-Level DSPs Integrating a Power-Efficient Programmable TMS320(TM) DSP, RISC
Processor and Support for Embedded Operating Systems
Immediate Availability of Application Software, Development Tools and New
System-Level DSPs Reduce Cost/Size By 40 Percent and Power Consumption
By 30 Percent While Accelerating Time to Market
HOUSTON, Dec. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Designers of real-time applications can immediately realize a 40
percent reduction in cost and size while reducing power consumption nearly 30 percent with the
introduction of two new highly integrated, system-level digital signal processors (DSPs) from Texas
Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN - news; TI). The devices combine the world's most popular
programmable TMS320C5000(TM) DSP with the ARM7 Thumb reduced-instruction-set-computing (RISC)
processor and support for some of the most prolific embedded operating systems. The synergy of these
technologies will speed to market real-time applications including text-to-speech, wireless data, voice
recognition and networked security. For more information see (www.dspvillage.ti.com/c547x ) .
The new programmable TI TMS320C5470 and TMS320C5471 DSPs are in production today and are
supported by the eXpressDSP(TM) suite of easy-to-use development tools, including the DSP/BIOS(TM)
real-time scalable kernel. In addition, RidgeRun(TM)'s embedded RISC operating system, DSPLinux(TM),
supports the devices. Designers can anticipate the release of Accelerated Technology's Nucleus PLUS
and Wind River VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS) support to be added in 2002.
System-level integration provides for significant savings in board space, power consumption and cost over
embedded solutions that use a discrete DSP and RISC. For example, in a typical application, a discrete
solution employing a DSP, RISC processor, glue logic and memory would require about 440 mm2 of
board space, consume 240 mW of power and cost about $32. The same application employing the C5471
DSP would require only 256 mm2 of board space, consume 175 mW of power and cost less than $18.
These savings are complemented by a reduction in design complexity and increased production
throughput due to a reduction in parts.
Both system-level devices are based on a TI TMS320C54x(TM) DSP operating at 100 megahertz (MHz)
with 100 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) processing power, 72 Kwords of RAM, (8 Kwords of
RAM shared with the ARM7) and two multichannel buffered serial ports. The ARM7 provides processing
power of 47.5 MHz, single-port 10/100 Base-T Ethernet, general-purpose I/O, two universal asynchronous
receiver/transmitters (UART), a serial port interface, I2C interface, and 16 Kbytes of zero-wait-state
synchronous random access memory (SRAM).
Integrated Peripheral and O/S Communication Stack Accelerate Time to Market
The C5470 and C5471 DSPs offer a rich set of communication peripherals and readily available
communications stacks for 10/100 Ethernet, home phone line network alliance (HPNA), Bluetooth and
802.11b wireless LAN, allowing designers to rapidly bring new products to market that serve many
applications. The C5470 or C5471 DSP can seamlessly interface to TI's BNS6030 Bluetooth chip, or TI's
ACX100 802.11b chipset for wireless connectivity. And the integrated 10/100 Ethernet media access
controller (MAC) and media independent interface (MII) provide connectivity to Ethernet or HPNA
networks.
``With TI's TMS320C54x DSP now available with a RISC processor on a single chip, significant benefits
are immediately recognized,'' said Dennis Barrett, TI product marketing manager. ``In a given application,
each task required can be targeted toward the right processing engine for increased system performance.''
In a text-to-speech system, this means that the DSP is dedicated to text-to-speech synthesis, while the RISC processor performs linguistic
processing functions. In a client networking application, the DSP performs real-time signal processing, while the RISC processor
orchestrates system control.
Combination of silicon, software tools and support enable fast, robust system development
TI's eXpressDSP real-time software and tools offers full heterogeneous code development and debug for the ARM7 and TMS320C5000
DSP in the recently-announced Code Composer Studio(TM) IDEv2 for the OMAP(TM) platform. In addition to Code Composer Studio IDE
v2 for OMAP, eXpressDSP also includes integrated support for DSP/BIOS running on the DSP, a real-time operating system with a
multithreading kernel, real-time analysis and peripheral configuration libraries. Evaluation modules are also available for the C5470 and
C5471 DSPs from Spectrum Digital.
A fully integrated GDB Linux development environment for the C5471 DSP is provided by RidgeRun's DSPLinux. RidgeRun's DSPLinux
operating system and board support package fully bundled with emulation technology and hardware target evaluation modules (EVM) is
available through Spectrum Digital. Board support packages (BSPs) for Accelerated Technology's Nucleus operating system as well as
for the Wind River Tornado® integrated development environment and VxWorks RTOS will be made available in 2002.
The system-level integration of the C5470 and C5471 DSPs accelerate time-to-market for embedded and connected applications by
providing robust silicon with a rich peripheral set, support for Linux, VxWorks and Nucleus operating systems for the ARM7, and DSP/BIOS
from TI for the C54x(TM) DSP. These choices of operating systems provide designers instant availability to more than 400
eXpressDSP-compliant algorithms from TI's third-party network and over 1000 existing operating system middleware software packages.
Availability
The C5470 and C5471 DSPs are available today in production quantities. The C5470 DSP is priced at $15.50 and the C5471 DSP at
$17.57 (10,000-unit quantities). The C5470/C5471 DSP development board with DSPLinux is also available today from Spectrum Digital.
www.spectrumdigital.com .
Texas Instruments Incorporated is the world leader in digital signal processing and analog technologies, the semiconductor engines of the
Internet age. The company's businesses also include sensors and controls, and educational and productivity solutions. TI is
headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has manufacturing or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web
at www.ti.com .
TRADEMARKS
All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: Texas Instruments Incorporated
Ahead of the curve, I think so...Speech Technology Magazine
The Voice of Speech Technology.
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2001
Powering Up the Mobile Phone
The Challenges of Implementing High-quality Speech Technology into Low-power, Portable Devices
By Hans Baaker
Speech technology products, today range from dictation software for the PC to automated directory assistance products to automated customer service call centers and system-based voice dialing for mobile phones. These applications have virtually unlimited vocabularies, possessing the ability to accept continuous speech input for the most important features.
All these applications are primarily software-driven. They include complex algorithms for echo cancellation, noise cancellation, beam forming, fine and coarse word boundary detection, etc. The recognition programs run on high-end processors that provide sufficient throughput to execute complex speech recognition algorithms virtually instantaneously.
The recent proliferation of portable, mobile, hand held devices has opened a new challenge for speech technology providers. Mobile telephones, for example, have limited vocabularies, require halting speech or single-word commands and are sometimes speaker-dependent, meaning users must spend a great deal of time "training" their devices to recognize their speech.
Is there a way to incorporate complex speech technology into these smaller portable devices? To answer that, the barriers to the implementation must first be addressed.
Mobile phones constrained by limited processing power
The advanced speech recognition available on PC-based products today is primarily due to huge increases in processor clock speed. Increasing the clock from 500 MHz to 1 GHz doubles the throughput, allowing a larger number of increasingly complex algorithms to be executed on a larger number of samples very quickly. A side effect of this increased speed, however, is increased power consumption and heat: For instance, a Pentium III running at 1 GHz consumes about 27 watts of power and dissipates a great deal of heat.
Battery life is critical for any portable product. Cell phones, for example, commonly have standby battery life of more than 100 hours per charge, and talk time of 10 hours or more. Even without speech recognition capability, the maximum allowable power consumption in a mobile phone is only about 5 watts. A cell phone is simply too small to allow space for cooling ribs or a ventilator that would dissipate the heat. Because of the heat, a mobile phone outfitted with a 1 GHz processor would have a battery life of only a few seconds, assuming the phone didn't melt first.
Drivers of High-quality Speech Recognition
Creating a limited vocabulary product that recognizes a small variety of words ("Open," "Close," "Yes," etc) is fairly simple, as long as the speaker is in a reasonably quiet environment. Creating a product that, without any training, understands the context of complex sentences in which the words are slurred together along with a high level of ambient noise, is much more difficult.
Three basic elements determine the quality of a speech recognition application:
user interface
robustness (ability to accurately operate in a variety of environments with background noise)
quality and accuracy of the speech recognition itself.
The user interface of a speech recognition product controls how the speech recognition engine is turned on as well as complexity of the speech it can recognize. The simplest speech recognition technologies are triggered manually, by pushing a button, for example. Most mobile phones with speech recognition engines fit this manual trigger profile.
The more sophisticated speech recognition applications work continuously and evaluate every sound they hear, searching for ones they can use. These applications must have word-spotting technology that allows them to recognize sounds within phrases. These recognized sounds or key words trigger actions.
The flexibility of the user interface is dependent on which of three types of word-spotting algorithms is used: isolated word technology, robustness or recognition.
Isolated word technology requires the user to pronounce words distinctly and separately with at least 0.3 seconds between each one. Near connected word technology allows a few words at a time to be spoken without a lengthy silence between. Connected word technology is the most advanced and allows the user to use normal speech with words slurred together.
The ability of the system to run a particular word-spotting algorithm is dependent on its processing ability. Connected word technology requires about 50 million operations per second for a 100-word vocabulary. Near connected word technology takes about 40 MOPS, and isolated word technology requires about 24 MOPS. If the system does not include word spotting, no additional operations are required.
Robustness, the second basic element describes the speech engine's ability to recognize speech accurately in various environments. The most robust speech recognition engines can filter out irrelevant background noise such as traffic sounds, coughing, sirens, engine noise, etc. The least robust systems require absolute silence in the background. Acoustic processing that includes noise subtraction, feature extraction and voice activity detection determines the robustness of the system.
Noise subtraction identifies the background noise and literally subtracts it from the signal, using continuously operating noise level estimation routines that adapt to variations in the level of the background noise. This process uses multiple noise estimates and a selection algorithm that identifies and eliminates background sounds and speech artifacts (e.g. breathing, saying "uh").
Alternatively, feature extraction identifies and extracts the relevant speech vectors from the sound samples by transforming the input samples to acoustical feature vectors. Then feature extraction maximizes the sensitivity of those vectors to the speech portion of the audio signal.
The first step in feature extraction is framing, which is sampling a specified amount of data from the signal. Overlapping frames are then hamming windowed (spectral resolution transformation, to reduce second and third harmonics) and a Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient algorithm is applied to them. The Mel scale is a frequency scale in which the sensitivity of the human ear to frequency variations is equal across the spectrum. The MFCC algorithm consists of the calculation of a Fast Fourier Transforms power spectrum, followed by Mel scaling, log ii and an inverse cosine transform (DCT) to compute the cepstral coefficients. The Mel scaling reduces frequency sensitivity at high frequencies.
In addition to framing, windowing, Mel scaling and applying the MFCC algorithm, feature extraction involves Fast Fourier Transforms to compute the frame power spectrum, trajectory filtering, plus filtering normalization and saturation of the feature vector. Applying these complex calculations to thousands of samples requires about five MOPS of processor throughput.
Voice activity detection determines when a word begins and when it ends. This is done using a fine word boundary detection algorithm that separates irrelevant sounds (e.g. mouth clicks, breath noise and background noise) from the word by performing a detailed analysis of the energy levels before, during and after the word has been spoken.
Quality, the third component, along with accuracy of speech recognition actually identifies the word and is accomplished using one of two technologies:
speaker dependent and
speaker independent.
Speaker dependent speech recognition technology requires that the system be trained by the user to recognize a vocabulary of words. It can require quite a bit of effort for the user to train the system and, once trained, it can only be used by a single individual. Speaker independent speech recognition technology does not require the user to train the system and can be used by multiple users because it is trained at the factory using either corpus databases or phonemes.
Corpus databases are often used for systems with small-to-medium vocabularies (up to 100 words). The database contains data from a number of different people pronouncing the same words. Based on this training set, the system can make word models general enough to recognize almost any user. On the other hand, phonemes are specific sounds in a language that, when combined, form words. These are used for larger vocabulary systems. English, for example, contains about 40 phonemes. This technology identifies words by matching and creating a unique sequence of phonemes.
DTW and HMM
The actual identification of words is accomplished using either the Dynamic Time Warp algorithm or the Hidden Markov Modeling algorithm, regardless of the type of training used.
The DTW algorithm compares of series of vectors of unequal length and duration variations within the series and computes a weighted average difference between the feature vectors of the compared utterances that is stored in a template. The weighted average is independent of the absolute time position in the energy pulse. Rather, it depends on the relative position of acoustical variations within the energy pulse, allowing them to be compared based only on their acoustical features. The DTW distances for all stored templates are simultaneously compared to the utterance in a single forward pass. The unknown word is identified as the template with the closest length to it and based on the smallest calculated DTW distance. If the DTW distance is too high or if the first and second-best matches are too close to each other, the recognition quality will be poor.
The HMM algorithm is based on statistical modeling as opposed to templates. This algorithm calculates a matching score between a word model and the sequence of feature vectors of the captured word. This is done using a Viterbi decoding procedure. Starting with the first feature vector, each feature vector in the sequence is compared to all individual states (segments) of a word model, resulting in number of distance metrics per feature vector, per word model. The distances are calculated using a probability distribution function. The Viterbi decoder uses these distance metrics to find an alignment of the feature vector sequence against the individual states of a word model, called a "path." The individual distance metrics along the path are accumulated, resulting in the desired matching score. After comparing this score to a number of thresholds, to verify that the word score is high enough and is sufficiently different from other word scores, the recognition result can be given.
The DTW algorithm performs well for both speaker dependent and corpus database driven speaker independent recognition systems with small-to-medium vocabularies. The HMM algorithm is a popular choice, however, because its strengths are based on its large database; it can handle triphones (making it possible to put phonemes in context); and a number of tools are available.
While phoneme-based speaker independent systems provide the greatest ease of use, accuracy and flexibility, applying the more complex HMM algorithm to all the combinations and permutations of 40 phonemes to identify each and every word is very computationally intensive, requiring as many as 150 millions of operations per second. The typical RISC plus DSP processor combination used in most mobile phones is rarely capable of processing more than 140 MOPS. As a result, phoneme-based speech recognition is difficult to achieve on mobile phones.
Even corpus database systems are too processing-intensive for most portable systems. Therefore, portable systems, such as toys or mobile phones, tend to be limited to using speaker dependent technologies and the DTW algorithm because they require the least amount of memory and processing throughput and, therefore, consume less power. Unfortunately, these systems can only handle a small set of single-word commands. If the user trained them using a different voice than is used in everyday speech, they will not work very well.
A Possible Solution
The digital signal processors that are the brains of most mobile phones, global positioning systems and other portable products cannot consume more than 5 watts peak and are limited to a clock speed of between 20 MHz and 80 MHz. Taking into account the basic operations of the end product, a typical mobile phone has only 4 million to 10 million instructions per second of extra processing capability. This is enough excess processing power to implement speaker dependent speech recognition with a small vocabulary. It not nearly enough processing power to accommodate the 150 MOPS required for high-end speaker independent speech recognition with word spotting, voice activity detection, phoneme-based word recognition and HMM algorithms.
In order to get really useful speech recognition technology into mobile phones, a solution is required that can provide the processing throughput without increasing the power consumption or heat dissipation in the portable device.
One solution currently being explored is to use a digital signal processor core with an embedded accelerator for the most computationally intensive speech recognition functions. The processors under development would possess an extensible instruction set that accommodates application specific hardware accelerators for speech recognition, JPEG, MEPG and other computationally intensive digital signal processing applications. Because the speech recognition component of the processor is so highly optimized, it can deliver the 50 MOPS to 200 MOPS required for very sophisticated speaker independent continuous speech recognition, with a clock of only 40 MHz.
Since the power consumption of these cores will be in the 0.5-watt to 1-watt range, battery life will not have to be sacrificed to achieve the required processing power, thus enabling mobile phones and other portable devices to incorporate speech technology on a par with their larger, PC-based systems.
This is a solution to high-quality speech recognition becoming available to portable products.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hans Baaker is the IP development manager for Adelante Technologies Inc. He can be reached at +011 31 344 632 838
Treo 10- The apple iPod alternative...
eDigital offers the Treo 10 MP3 player with a built in 10GB Hard-drive. With 249USD its considerably cheaper than the apple iPod. It can store over 3000 songs and the battery holds for 6 hours. The upload software runs on Windows.
http://www.i4u.com/
e Digital Product Page
Compressed CD-ROM to flash in 6 seconds...
Hitachi fashions multibit cell for 1-Gbit flash chip
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(12/07/01, 11:01 p.m. EST)
TOKYO — Hitachi Ltd. has developed a flash memory cell that overcomes the slow write speeds of other cells able to store multiple bits. The company said it will apply the technology to create 1-Gbit flash chips and a 1-Gbyte card with a 10-Mbyte per second writing speed that it will bring to market within a year.
Hitachi described the Assist Gate-AND cell structure at the 2001 International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington this past week.
"To offer a gigabit-level flash memory at a sellable price, we aim to make a chip less than 100 square millimeters in size," said Katsuhiro Shimohigashi, corporate chief engineer for Hitachi. "If the 1-Gbit chip is that small, eight to nine chips and a controller can be stacked and packaged in one Multimedia Card. This means a tiny MMC card will have 1-Gbyte capacity, which can store about one hour of an MPEG-2 video program."
Hitachi intends to promote AG-AND flash memory for file storage applications, which require high-speed writing when used to store downloaded content.
"Thus far, it has been difficult to realize high-speed writing with multilevel memory," said Takashi Totsuka, senior manager of Hitachi's System Memory Business Unit. "With this AG-AND cell, we have realized a fast multilevel memory, which is fast enough to be used with IEEE 802.11a communications."
In its IEDM presentation, Hitachi reported that a four-bank memory achieved 20-Mbyte per second programming throughput. That speed is halves to 10 Mbytes/s when the technology is applied to a chip that stores multiple bits per cell.
Rather than using shallow groove isolation or shallow trench isolation structures in the AG-AND cell to prevent inter-cell interference, Hitachi employed assist gates. When no voltage is applied to an assist gate, the gate shut off current and isolates adjacent floating gates.
Assist gates occupy less space than conventional groove type isolation structures, and like floating gates, they are polysilicon. "Poly silicon gates are closely arrayed on the silicon substrate. Such a structure is new to commercial products," said Katsutaka Kimura, department manager of the ULSI research department at Hitachi's Central Research Laboratory. "But we don't think that the new structure will cause trouble in volume production."
The assist gate creates a cell size in a 0.13-micron process that is less than half the size of a cell created with a shallow groove isolation structure in a 0.18-micron process, Hitachi said.
Speed reading course
To quicken the write speed of the multilevel cell, Hitachi changed the writing method from the conventional Fowler-Nordheim tunneling of electrons to hot electron injection, widely employed in NOR-type flash memory.
A unique feature of Hitachi's hot electron injection approach is that electrons are injected from the source side, not from drain side like in NOR memory. The writing time to one cell, normally about 10-4 seconds in a Fowler-Nordheim tunneling cell, is reduced to 10-5 seconds in the AG-AND cell, said Totsuka.
To further speed up the write time, the commercial flash chip with the AG-AND cell will have a four-bank configuration. The write speed in a chip with a one-bank configuration is about 3 Mbytes/s, but the write speed on a four-bank chip reaches 10 Mbytes/s.
With such a write speed, a standard music CD with its content compressed to about 64 Mbytes can be downloaded to an AG-AND flash card in approximately 6 seconds, Totsuka said.
An AG-AND flash memory recording system would also support the 20-Mbit/s data rate required by a digital HDTV system, the company said.
Hitachi engineers have verified the estimated performance of a 1-Gbit device with the AG-AND cell with an 8-Mbit prototype. "The technology has been completed. Volume production technology will be ready within one year," Totsuka said.
Hitachi intends to begin sampling 1-Gbit flash chips in the third quarter of next year, and to begin volume production in the fourth quarter.
Network Commerce sues Liquid Audio in patent dispute
SEATTLE, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Network Commerce Inc. (Nasdaq:NWKC - news), a provider of Internet commerce tools and services, said on Wednesday it is suing digital music firm Liquid Audio Inc. (NasdaqNM:LQID - news) for allegedly infringing its patent on a way to conduct online transactions.
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Network Commerce, which was delisted from the Nasdaq in August, said the patent covered a method for online shopping that uses separate servers and a piece of downloaded software to coordinate purchase information.
``Despite our notifying Liquid Audio and offering to license the patent, Liquid Audio would not cease its unauthorized use of the patented system,'' Network Commerce Chief Executive Dwayne Walker said in a statement.
Seattle-based Network Commerce said the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, sought to make Liquid Audio stop infringing the patent.
Liquid Audio makes software for playing music downloaded from the Internet, sells a set of software tools for converting music into Web-ready digital form, and also operates a network selling songs online.
The Redwood City, California company has been grappling with dissident shareholder Steel Partners, which has criticized management for burning through cash too quickly and has offered to buy Liquid for $3 a share, or about $68 million.
Shares in Liquid fell 2 percent to $2.35 in Nasdaq trading on Wedneday. Network Commerce, which now trades on the over-the-counter after its Nasdaq delisting, was valued at 15 cents a share.
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Rap groups release songs to cell phones before stores
Posted at 3:59 p.m. PST Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2001
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rap groups Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep said on Wednesday they were releasing songs from upcoming albums for use on cellphones before releasing them to stores.
The unsual move comes as a result of an agreement between the bands' label, Loud Records, and mobile entertainment company Zingy, which provides thousands of downloadable ringtones and logos and allows users to send text messages to virtually any wireless phone.
More and more companies and artists are beginning to take note of the growing market for jingles that play on cell phones, which is expected to grow into a multibillion dollar market.
Ringtones - digitally delivered music files that play melodies for up to 30 seconds in length when users receive incoming calls on cell phones -- allow users to personalize their phones with their favorite songs and are already hugely popular in Europe and Asia.
In October, the Harry Fox Agency, a licensing agent for more than 27,000 music publishers who represent more than 160,000 songwriters, created an easy system for instant or one-stop electronic licensing for ringtone providers after some 20 providers approached it to license its works.
``Technology is advancing so fast in this day and age, there's no better way to get involved than through the wireless networks. Cell phones are so widely used that ringtones are one of the best ways to promote our music,'' said Steven Rifkind, Chairman of Loud Records.
The singles ``Hey Luv'' and ``Burn'' from Mobb Deep's upcoming album ``Infamy'' in stores on December 11 are available now at Zingy.com. Before the album is available in stores on December 18, Wu-Tang's ringtones for ``(Uzi) Pinky Ring,'' ``Rules'' and ''Ya'll Been Warned'' from the album ``Iron Flag'' will be available for free from the Zingy web site.
Industry experts said ringtones represent a potential multibillion dollar industry. Revenues for such services in Japan alone hit an estimated $300 million, they said.
EMI Music sued Santa Monica, Calif-based YourMobile.com, a ringtone provider, last year, claiming the company did not obtain the proper licenses to distribute its songs in the form of ringtones. The suit was settled and YourMobile recently signed an agreement with several music publishing companies.
The online service allows users to choose from a catalog of ring tones, everything from Frank Sinatra's ``I've Got You Under My Skin'' to ``Get Ur Freak On'' by Missy ``Misdemeanor'' Elliott.
Lean Mean R&D Machines
By Wade Roush
The pharmaceutical industry has a drug problem: it can't find enough new ones. Companies are under pressure to invent the next Prozac or Viagra, but without more efficient and cost-effective ways to develop new drugs, those kinds of blockbuster medications will remain once-in-a-decade discoveries. "It costs too much, it takes too long and it produces too little," says Rod MacKenzie, a vice president in Pfizer's Global Research and Development division, of the industry's traditional method of drug discovery. "The problem is, how do you change the engine while the vehicle is still moving?"
One solution to the problem of retooling Pfizer's $4.4 billion R&D engine is its Discovery Technology Center, a gleaming two-and-a-half-year-old facility in Cambridge, MA, where the company's scientists team up with academic researchers and small biotech firms to develop computerized methods for screening thousands of potential drug molecules per day. Key to the lab's strategy are its small size (just 70 researchers out of the 3,000 involved in drug discovery across Pfizer) and its location, at the center of the Boston-area biotech hothouse and a healthy distance from Pfizer's main R&D facility in New London, CT. "We're small and we're offline in the sense that we don't have the same day-to-day pressures of productivity that the other sites do," says MacKenzie, who directs the center. "And what happens here in Cambridge is that people beat a path to our door," including researchers from some of the area's top academic institutions.
The pharmaceuticals industry is hardly the only sector where researchers are under increasing pressure to find new ways of zeroing in on high-growth products and technologies. MacKenzie's critique of conventional research methods in the drug industry could be applied equally well to the chemical, aerospace, transportation, telecommunications and information technology sectors. And in each of these sectors, leading companies are looking for new ways to make their research groups nimble enough to react to ever changing technologies—and market opportunities.
For many, that means getting their researchers more connected—with each other, with their firms' customers and, as at the Discovery Technology Center, with their peers in academia. It can also mean looking more closely than ever before at their portfolios of research projects, personnel and capabilities, and loading this information into so-called knowledge management databases that guide decisions about which potential products and technologies to pursue. These approaches and other new strategies are gaining urgency as growing economic uncertainty—coming after years of good times and loose wallets—reminds chief technology officers of the need to prove the value of their companies' R&D spending.
Technology Review's second annual Corporate Research and Development Scorecard shows respectable increases in R&D spending in the 2001 fiscal year at the majority of companies. But the scorecard does hint at stormy financial days ahead. Spending is flat or declining at some of the United States' most notable technology firms, including Exxon Mobil and computer and telecommunications giants such as Compaq Computer, Silicon Graphics, Computer Associates, 3Com, Qualcomm and AT&T. And while most firms' R&D spending has remained steady this year when measured as a percentage of revenues, forecasts for plummeting revenues as the economy heads into a recession are likely to translate into less money for research next year. "We have seen over the last several years a tremendous increase in the rate of growth of industry R&D spending, but you can't sustain that rate of growth economically," says Jules Duga of Battelle, a nonprofit research institute in Columbus, OH. What's more, he says, "The cost of doing R&D keeps going up, so you have to spend more and more to gain less."
What the scorecard data don't show is the growing collection of industry R&D collaborations and new management approaches designed to counter just these challenges. Technology companies, in essence, are looking for ways to get a bigger bang for their R&D buck.
Making Connections
In the pharmaceuticals industry, where R&D costs have been rising for years without any commensurate rise in the number of new drugs reaching the market, it's long been clear that old research models needed revision, says MacKenzie. Implementing a discovery process that produces more drugs over less time requires freeing researchers from the "pressures of productivity" that can keep them from experimenting with risky new technologies. At the same time, even a state-of-the-art research center needs to keep its work aligned with business needs. To that end, Pfizer's Discovery Technology Center hires only researchers who "have scientific degrees but are also outstanding data miners or statisticians on the side," says MacKenzie. Such people tend to be "totally immersed in the business of drug discovery, not off to one side of it, which is incredibly important to what we do."
To guarantee a supply of such researchers, Pfizer cultivates close ties with the local academic community. Last year, for example, the company created a three-year fellowship program in computational biology at Cambridge's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Fellows are expected to work inside the center for part of that time, examining gene sequences or protein structures relevant to drug discovery, but are also encouraged to do independent research. And for more great ideas, the center isn't opposed to turning to smaller companies and technology suppliers. Cambridge, MA-based BioTrove, whose nanoscale liquid-handling technology allows researchers to mix tiny quantities of reagents with 10,000 or more separate drug targets on a single chip, is conveniently headquartered right inside the Pfizer center's facility.
One of the basic tenets of the Pfizer center is that research is more effective—and more profitable—if it's more connected to the world outside the company. And Pfizer is hardly the only high-tech company testing this hypothesis. Chip-making giant Intel, for example, is spending part of its $4 billion R&D budget this year to support a series of "lablets" adjacent to top universities, each directed by a faculty member who has taken a leave of absence for a year or more. Each of the 20- to 30-person lablets will focus on a promising young technology (see "Intel Revamps R&D," TR October 2001). For example, computer scientist David Culler, the founding director of an Intel lablet at the University of California, Berkeley, is developing the software infrastructure for networks of tiny sensing and communication devices. If such devices eventually permeate our surroundings—gathering and wirelessly sharing information that could be used in surveillance, environmental control or scientific measurement—Intel wants to be the firm that builds them.
Key to this program, says Intel's director of research David Tennenhouse, is the fact that the academic researchers heading the lablets have a strong desire to see their ideas applied in the real world. Intel, however, is discouraging the researchers from taking their technologies all the way to the commercialization stage or becoming business unit managers, which might keep them from doing what they do best—innovate. "We're saying, 'Work on this strategic research project for a few years, and if it succeeds keep moving downstream [toward the market] for a few years, but then cycle back to the lab until you have another idea that you want to foist on the world,'" says Tennenhouse.
Foot in the Door
If Intel and Pfizer are dismantling the old walls between corporate and university research, IBM is blurring another traditional boundary—that between corporate research labs and the company's own customers. The idea behind Big Blue's new Emerging Business Group is to offer small startup firms access to IBM's extensive research in information technology. In return, IBM may get a small amount of cash or equity, but the main point is to encourage the smaller firms to build their own new technologies on top of IBM software and services. "Basically, we get IBM platforms into those companies so that when they succeed, we have a growth market for our products," explains Dave McQueeney, IBM's vice president of emerging business. "If we pick the startup companies that will grow up to dominate new spaces, it could be very smart for us."
As an example, McQueeney points to work on online auctions at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. A team there is developing "combinatorial optimization" software that compares bids in Internet-based auctions where the bidders seek to buy distinct but overlapping sets of items. One bidder—say, an electronics manufacturer—may need components A, B and C to build a CD player, while another may need B, C and D to build a VCR. The software solves the surprisingly complex problem of knowing who, from the seller's point of view, has placed the most lucrative bid.
IBM could commercialize the auction software on its own, but it might actually be wiser to hand the technology over to a startup. "Say you are an auction company," explains McQueeney. "We say to you, here is this capability that we've had five PhD mathematicians working on for three years. We'll make it available to you now, but it's useless to you unless you run it on our infrastructure," meaning IBM's software and servers. Not only does the auction company get a big bang out of being first to market with the new software, but once other companies start adopting the technology, IBM gets to sell more infrastructure software. Just as important, IBM researchers are involved throughout the process, meaning they stay plugged into the latest trends and opportunities in their customer communities.
Cutting the Fat
The profusion of new, more fluid corporate research models can create a new problem: monitoring the results. If managers don't have a good real-time picture of what their researchers are up to, it's easy to wind up wasting money on redundant studies, underfunding promising technologies or letting moribund projects linger too long. But lately companies such as 3M have been getting serious about knowledge management, the use of searchable databases or intranets to archive what individuals and groups in an organization know and describe what they can do. Not only can that information foster creativity and new collaborations, it can also help chief technology officers decide whether to increase spending in areas of research viable in the current market or cut the fat where it's unlikely the company would be able to compete well.
3M managers companywide have strapped on their seat belts for a comprehensive spending review of R&D efforts instigated by new CEO W. James McNerney, who started last January. The first step was to build a database showing "where all of our [R&D] money was going in great detail, which was not something 3M had done before," says Steve Webster, vice president for research and development in 3M's corporate technology and transportation division. The database allowed "some very specific discussions about which opportunities are likely to have the biggest payoff, some that may not be so interesting and some that no one may be working on but which actually may be better opportunities than what other parts of the company are working on," says Webster.
As one result, 3M has decided to put even more money into building new electronic displays based on organic light-emitting diodes, already identified as a potential successor to the company's liquid-crystal display technology. The company also discovered it had underestimated its expertise in an important area: software design. In developing its knowledge database, the company surveyed each business unit about the R&D programs it depended upon. One of the technologies mentioned again and again in the survey belonged to a category called "Other." "We had to open the box and ask, what is it about 'Other' that provides so much growth?" recounts Webster. "In this case it was software and electronics," such as the technologies 3M sells to libraries to catalogue and track their books and deter theft. In fact, so many of 3M's products now depend on computers and software that the company realized it needed to shore up research spending on information technology. "When you think of 3M you think of films and coatings, but our systems integration is actually very important," Webster says. "Now we can quantify that"—and allot R&D resources accordingly.
Balancing an increased market focus—and closer ties to customers—with the pursuit of world-class science is now the trick for many corporate R&D groups. Gone forever are the days when large industrial labs churned out scientific papers and conducted long-term research far removed from business pressures. But while R&D groups have clearly gotten more business friendly over the last decade, they are also feeling pressures to come up with tomorrow's high-growth opportunities.
Indeed, industrial-R&D expert Richard Rosenbloom, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, is convinced that most high-tech firms—especially in the information technology sector—"still aren't doing enough to invest in the future technologies that will be the next big revolutionary business. They've been experimenting with new venture units, spinoffs, joint ventures and the like, but I don't know of a single big corporation that has a track record that is exceptional in any of those initiatives."
But if innovative efforts at doing research, like those being implemented at Pfizer, Intel and 3M, do ultimately help their companies pull ahead of the pack—and do so cost-effectively—other corporate R&D teams may soon be looking to turbocharge their own technology engines.
Wade Roush is a contributing writer for Technology Review
Copyright Control
By David J. Wallace
Publishers of newspapers, magazines and other written media all face a common dilemma: how can they distribute—and profit from—copyrighted material online without opening their content to piracy? A new system from an old player in the copyright management arena, Danvers, MA-based Copyright Clearance Center, might offer an answer.
The Copyright Clearance Center manages conventional copyrights for thousands of publishers (including Technology Review). Its new online system uses a plug-in—software that works in concert with a Web browser—to let users view, copy, save and print specific content, or to prevent any of those actions, based on fees paid online or over the phone. Without such software, most publishers have had few options: granting readers free, unlimited online access to their content; granting access based on a subscription system where users pay whether or not they use materials; or charging one-time fees for archived articles. But unlike the Copyright Clearance Center’s technology, none of these schemes can prevent a user from illegally copying or distributing the content once he or she has paid any relevant fees.
Other companies, like Renton, WA’s iCopyright.com, are also introducing technological cures for online publishing woes. But decades of experience in the paper world could give the Copyright Clearance Center a leg up.
Still, while the company’s system is an important first step, says Bill Rosenblatt, president of New York-based management consultancy GiantSteps/Media Technology Strategies, it might already be behind the curve. That’s because the sort of documents the software manages, such as newspaper and magazine articles, are already moving from laptops and desktops to mobile devices such as handheld computers and cell phones, and these devices are currently beyond the reach of the Copyright Clearance Center’s software. All of which could spell new trouble for beleaguered publishers.
David Wallace covers business and technology issues from Boston for the New York Times and several magazines.
Motorola's New Wireless Chips Destined for Home Appliances
Knight Ridder/Tribune
December 5, 2001
Dec. 3--An Internet future in which home appliances can be fixed from remote control sites, business can be conducted from the golf course and the home air conditioner can be controlled from a computer at work is moving closer to reality with the introduction this week of new microchips by Motorola.
The new family of chips, called the 5685X series, can perform the functions of microcontrollers and digital signal processors on one piece of silicon, greatly reducing the cost of connecting a wide range of wired and wireless products to the Internet, Michael Ponzo, director of marketing for the company's Digital Signal Processor division in Tempe, Ariz., told the East Valley Tribune.
In the world of microelectronics, microcontrollers typically handle control functions such as connecting a wireless telephone to the switching station, while digital signal processors handle the flow of audio and video -- functions that require continuous, rapid processing of signals.
By merging those functions onto one hybrid chip designed specifically for Internet appliances, a lot of Internet-related activities will become cheaper and more practical, Ponzo said.
The DSP division responsible for the new chips is located at Motorola's semiconductor complex at Price and Elliot roads in Tempe, where the chips were designed and engineered. Actual manufacturing will take place at Motorola plants around the world.
Production of the processors has already started in limited quantity. They are expected to be widely available beginning in the first quarter of next year, with full production by the second quarter.
The development of improved chips to process Internet traffic will help to move most communications to the Internet in the next few years and away from the traditional telephone system, Ponzo said. Because the Internet's fiber optic lines and switching equipment have a much greater capacity to transmit data, voice and video /information, it will change the way people live, he predicted.
"Companies will be able to do things like remote servicing of appliances. They won't have to roll a truck to your house because your appliances will be connected to them through the Internet."
Using the new chips and Internet connections, manufacturing companies will be able in the coming years to add other innovative features to their products, he said.
Some examples:
-- Refrigerators could be operated with more efficient motors to save energy and have optical sensors to detect what is in the refrigerator and what needs to be replaced.
-- Through a home security system connected to the Internet, a vacationer could monitor his home while on vacation in Hawaii.
-- Water faucets could turn on or off on voice command, and smart water heaters could be placed under the sink to provide hot water only as needed, saving energy and money. -- Golf carts could be wirelessly connected to the Internet to allow the player to receive e-mail and conduct other business from the office while on the course.
-- Meter and power monitoring could be done from remote locations with no need for the utility to send a meter reader to the house.
The development of improved chips such as Motorola's will help stimulate the growth of Internet-enabled products beyond the wide adoption of the Internet as a communications and entertainment medium, said Michael Wolf, group manager of enterprise and residential communications for Cahners In-Stat Group, a high-tech research firm.
"The introduction of fat pipes that enable high-speed bandwidth to the home is experiencing growth greater than 50 percent year-over-year, while the Internet appliance and control market is also expected to grow at an impressive rate," he said. "As a result of these trends, there is opportunity for hundreds of millions of entertainment, information and automation end products to utilize the Internet for monitoring, services and content delivery."
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To see more of The Arizona Daily Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.azstarnet.com
Startup shows personal gateway for wireless devices
By Patrick Mannion
EE Times
(12/05/01, 4:38 p.m. EST)
MANHASSET, N.Y. — Taking its marketing cues from the residential gateway business model, startup IXI Mobile has launched an approach to wireless connectivity that uses a single device as a bridge to a wide-area network of multiple devices. IXI believes its approach will let wireless carriers and end-equipment makers present a broader, less expensive range of devices and services to customers.
The Palo Alto, Calif. company has also announced a second round of financing to the tune of $12.5 million.
IXI's personal mobile gateway (PMG) is especially attractive to the mobile market, said co-founder, president and chief executive officer Amit Haller. The PMG puts all the intelligence needed for a personal-area network into one small box that fits in someone's wallet or pocket. The personal gateway then forms the connection that bridges the personal-area network to a wide-area, cellular network over one cellular account. Since the IXI solution is software-based, it is air-interface-agnostic, though the company will first target Bluetooth-enabled devices that will connect over a General Packet Radio Service network.
"The big difference here is the point of view," said Haller. "We've taken a thin-client approach, where all the Bluetooth devices around the gateway are very slim with minimum hardware — all they have to do is act as the user interface to the PMG, which is running the application." The Bluetooth-enabled clients could be anything from a slim calendar watch to an ultrathin cell phone to a short-message keyboard that will act like a RIM Blackberry but be a fraction of the size.
"All are actually serving as multiple clients of one mobile gateway," said Haller. "This disassociation of the intelligence from the client devices greatly reduces their size and cost, while also solving the application interoperability issues."
In IXI's scheme, an operator will supply or subsidize the PMG. IXI will supply the operator with remote management tools for fully automatic configuration and IP-address setup.
"We're supplying an end-to-end solution for operators and eliminating the need for users to become their own IT managers," said Haller. The scheme will bring the cost of mobile devices down from more than $150 to under $30 each, he said, though pricing for the PMG is not yet available. "We believe it must be under $200, instead of the $500 or more for smart phones [with multiple applications]," said Haller. The cost per mobile client device might drop even more, since disconnecting the intelligence from the client allows even more device vendors to come to market faster, said Haller.
The gateway itself comprises a Bluetooth radio and a cellular-network radio, with an ARM7 and memory on board to perform interfacing between the two networks as well as applications processing. IXI will license its software and do a hardware reference design but will not be the gateway manufacturer. It plans to demonstrate its technology at the GSM World Congress in February.
Founded in August 2000 by former Texas Instruments Inc. executives and the founders of Butterfly VLSI Ltd. and DSP Communications Inc., IXI got its seed funding from Gemini Funds. Its recent $12.5 million second-round funding came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures and Gemini Funds.
AOL Retreats From Big Push for E-Books
December 5, 2001
[Fools...They have no patience and can't recognize NOW is the time...for shame]
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
In the latest setback to the once- promising future of electronic books, the books division of AOL Time Warner (news/quote) said yesterday that it was cutting back its expensive line of digital books and laying off almost all 29 employees, citing a slump in sales of all books and especially digital ones.
"Perhaps Mr. Gutenberg has the last laugh here," said Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of the books division. He said the remaining electronic book publishing would be consolidated with the company's Warner Books and Little, Brown units.
The cutbacks are an abrupt turnaround for Mr. Kirshbaum. He was among the industry's biggest champions of the idea that consumers would pay to read books on digital screens. In an interview last August about the lackluster demand thus far, he said, "It is taking longer than expected, but everything in my gut says now is the time to push harder rather than slow down."
At the time, he said AOL Time Warner's top executives concurred, based mainly on a philosophical belief in digital media.
Yesterday, however, Mr. Kirshbaum said that unexpectedly low sales of all books this fall necessitated a change in course.
"At some point reality sets in and one has to be realistic about how much of an uphill climb this is going to be," he said, "I have been wrong so far — I have been overoptimistic from the beginning, so at a certain point you have to question whether your logic is sound."
The books division of AOL was the first publisher to announce the creation of a special imprint of electronic books, called iPublish. It was also the first publisher to begin selling copies of its electronic books directly to consumers from its own Web site.
Its most innovative project was a kind of online writing workshop, inviting mostly unpublished writers to submit samples and evaluate one another's work. The company published some of the most popular works in electronic and printed form.
But the proceeds were slim. Mr. Kirschbaum said the division had lost about $13 million on electronic publishing so far, a considerable sum against the division's total annual revenue of about $400 million.
Then Reciprocal, the company that provided much of AOL Time Warner's technology for selling digital books, went out of business this fall.
AOL Time Warner follows the Random House Trade Group of Bertelsmann's Random House division, which recently consolidated its specialized program for digital books into its other lines. But the Simon & Schuster division of Viacom (news/quote) recently began selling electronic editions from its Web site for the first time.
***Cheap new memory/storage medium coming
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posted 9:31am EST Wed Dec 05 2001
NEWS
Matrix Semiconductor plans to bring us memory that's as cheap and convenient as 35mm camera film, CD-Rs, and audiotape. Using the Santa Clara, California, three-year-old company's patented three-dimensional semiconductor design and TSMC's mass production capabilities (the Taiwanese manufacturer co-developed the manufacturing process), Matrix hopes to have 3-D Memory chips, which will be write-once and can hold data "for more than 100 years," out next year. The company claims 3-D Memory is 10 times cheaper to produce than other memory types, and a 64 MB card could sell for US$3-10. Matrix also hopes to have 3-D Memory available "in multi-packs at local retail outlets" for myriad uses: prerecorded content (e.g., music, maps, reference guides), MP3 players, cellphones, PDAs, digital cameras, and more. 3-D Memory's low cost could also lower device costs, since an MP3 player bundled with the new memory could be $50 less than flash memory-using models. Matrix also promises that its memory will appear in devices from "some of the best-known and respected consumer brands."
The key to 3-D Memory's affordability is Matrix's 3-D semiconductor design, which already has two U.S. patents (60 more applications are pending). Instead of spreading memory arrays horizontally on a silicon layer, Matrix stacks them vertically. This means a silicon wafer can produce more chips than other memory designs, thus lowering production costs. While the concept of 3-D memory chips isn't new, Matrix claims to be "the first to devise and implement practical methods for producing them in high volume." 3-D Memory is also hardware-compatible with NAND-type flash memory (the most common) and will come in existing flash sizes/formats, including SD Cards, SmartMedia, Sony Memory Stick, and CF. And since the tech uses standard materials and works on existing CMOS fab set-ups, there are no additional manufacturing costs and the technology can scale as fab production techniques get faster, better, and smaller.
TSMC has apparently been making 3-D Memory since July and is just about ready to increase production yields and per-ship densities. Backed by over $80 million in funding from companies like Microsoft, Sony, Kodak, and Benchmark Capital, Matrix Semiconductor hopes to revolutionize memory use in consumer devices before applying the 3-D tech to other kinds of chips.
For more information, please see InfoWorld, Electronic News and Matrix's 3-D Memory webpage. Also, check out our ChipGeek item from yesterday.
SAM'S OPINION
Well, this technology sounds like a 100% winner: it's much cheaper, it uses existing fabrication techniques and facilities and materials, it will fit in existing devices' memory slots, and it's (apparently) endorsed by device manufacturers (including Sony, whose Memory Stick will no doubt lose some sales to 3-D Memory chips).
While Palm OS and Pocket PC and digital camera makers are all equipping their devices with additional memory slots of varying sizes, I think a lot of folks don't really buy additional memory cards because they're too expensive. If you can get 64 MB for under $10 how could you say no? And I don't really think it's a disadvantage for most people that these new chips are write-once only ... if you go to Palm's Store and check out the SD cards you'll see that almost all of them are WORM (Write Once Read Many) content. Snap one of these things into your digicam, fire off a ton of pics, and store the card somewhere for later viewing. Sounds pretty good to me.
I just wonder if there's a catch in this 3-D Memory tech that I'm missing, since it almost does sound too good to be true. Matrix claims the cards will hold data reliably for a century, so no obvious lower-quality troubles come to mind ... I guess I won't worry about it until they actually do hit local retail stores. But if it's just a matter of slightly lower quality, I'm thinking that a 10-pack of 64 MB cards for under $50 would be enough to convince me to not care so much about a small amount of picture fuzziness, say. :)
INSIDER'S VIEW: EXTEND, EXTEND, EXTEND!
By David Bunnell, Editorial Director, Upside
No big surprise, Microsoft wants to extend the PC so that it is a part of each and every moment of everyone's average day. They even have a whole new division of the company called eHomes that was specifically set up to accomplish this goal. The Division which tellingly reports into the "Windows Platform Group" is head by Distinguished Microsoft Engineer Mike Toutonghi.
Toutonghi is one of those highly focused, loyal and intensely intelligent guys that Microsoft seems to clone regularly in Bill Gates' secret basement laboratory. With much fanfare, Toutonghi, held court recently at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus to explain the eHome "vision" and hint at but not announce a slew of new products to attach to this vision. The Upsideinsider was there, palling around with some of his media buddies including LA Times technology writer Larry Magid and Fred Davis, former Editor-in-Chief of PCWeek who nows heads up some mysterious new company called Consumertronics.
Citing statistics that of over 20% of consumer Internet users already view photos and listen to music online, Toutonghi thinks there is a "super great" future in digital media and he knows what exactly what people want because Microsoft spends the bucks to ask them questions in surveys and focus groups.
If you believe that people actually "know" what they want out of the future world cluttered with digital devices the feedback Microsoft is getting seems to fit nicely into the Vision. According to Toutonghi, people want to receive entertainment "when and where they want it" and they want all their digital devices to work together without having to think about it. According to Toutonghi, People want Windows everywhere, all the time, built into each and every electronically powered object on the planet. They need Windows to control their "digital ecosystem".
To illustrate how this might work Microsoft has produced a Video which is sort of a day in the life of a average white suburban teenage girl, whose name is Jeannie or Jenna, I forget, as imaged by software nerds living in Redmond.
The scenario goes like this:
Jeannie or Jenna or whatever returns home from school, goes immediately to her room, and starts talking to her voice-activated computer which informs her "oh cool" that Fat Boy Slim tickets are on sale for the concert she wants to go to so she buys the tickets online and asks the computer to call her friend Cindy or whoever so they can share some home videos which are slipped into the computer on a PC card and then after gossiping a bit as girls we all know are prone to do they collaborate online jointly editing a project they are doing together on Amazon butterflies which mostly involves clipping and pasting video segments together very little reading required and then for some reason Jeannie or Jenna or whatever is asleep and it is the next morning and low and behold her computer wakes her with music just like one of those old fashioned clock radios and the computer reminds her she is suppose to be able to discuss a current environmental issue in one of her classes so it h!
as intelligently gone out and collected a whole bunch of video and audio news clips which it plays to her while she brushes her teeth. I don't recall if there is any parents or siblings in poor Jeannie or Jenna or whatever's life or not, I think actually not. She doesn't need parents really. Just her and her computer, which goes everywhere with her, the clips are played through her car stereo on the way to school. Oh wow! Windows everywhere. Of course she also has a laptop computer with her at all times, one with a persistent Internet connection, of course, of course. Lucky Jeannie or Jenna or whatever, she is just so plugged in which makes her life truly exciting thanks to Microsoft.
Now wouldn't it be fun if we could take a look at how teenagers might actually interact in this Windows everywhere, all-the-time, always-on World. Imagine if you dare Windows build into a Beer Keg (many of today's inert products will become Internet enabled including this one). Using photo recognition technology, Window's built into a Beer Keg will be able to automatically keep track of just how much beer each and every student consumers during the course of a party. Certain boys at the party will try to drink the most beer and unlike today's beer parties they will be able to validate their claims thanks to the Intelligent Beer Keg. Girls who don't want to end up with an alcoholic and check to see which of the boys drink the least.
You see, Mike Toutonghi is not just talking about computers, laptops and handhelds, he's talking about embedding Windows just about anywhere. Windows built into bicycles could be interesting. Windows built into dildos is unfortunately inevitable. Windows embedded into golf clubs could change the game of gold forever and make it much more enjoyable and error free. The mind boggles.
Actually, I can understand why Microsoft wants to "extend" its products as much as possible because it makes good economic sense and they do have to keep those shareholders happy. And it just might solve a couple real world problems along the way. I'll be thinking about this and about new ways to embed Windows into things while I fiddle with the three remote controls it takes to use my WebTV.
Mike's presentation was part of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Speaker Series, which is held regularly at the Mountain View Campus just down the street from the formerly great Silicon Graphics Corporation.
The next Valley Speaker event is on Monday, Dec 3. Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research and inventor, will discuss the future of computing. I bet it involves Windows, don't you? For more information on the Speaker Series you can email Alyson Clemens at Microsoft's PR firm, Alysonc@wagged.com
The Upside Insider will be there!
NDS, SAGEM and IBM Plan to Develop Next Generation Set Top Box to Drive PVR Technology
LONDON & PARIS & EAST FISHKILL, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 2001--
Highlights:
NDS's XTV Personal Video Recorder (PVR) and Open VideoGuard Technologies and Personal Video Recorder (PVR) applications to be integrated into SAGEM set-top boxes (STB) using IBM's latest PowerPC integrated STB Controller
SAGEM to bring digital STB expertise to wider market incorporating advanced functions as standard features
TV operators and viewers to benefit from new levels of innovative STB technologies and functions.
NDS Group plc (NASDAQ/NASDAQ Europe: NNDS), a News Corporation (NYSE: NWS - news, NWS.A - news) company, SAGEM and IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) today announced that they intend to develop an advanced digital set-top box (STB) through which TV operators can deliver improved services to viewers and run their businesses more effectively.
Under the proposed agreement, IBM would integrate NDS's conditional access and XTV(TM) technology into its latest PowerPC integrated controller chips, which SAGEM will incorporate into its next-generation set-top boxes. SAGEM anticipates that products based on these technologies would be available in mid-2002. Development platforms are available immediately.
NDS's XTV PVR software gives operators a platform from which they can deliver to consumers digital reception and content protection, encrypted and personalized in a single, secure digital set-top box. IBM's new PowerPC-based set-top box controller provides the performance levels necessary for operators to handle delivery and management of new interactive digital services, such as PVR, video-on-demand and e-commerce.
Commenting on the proposed agreement, Dr. Jas Saini, Vice President Consumer Devices, NDS Group plc, said ``Set-top boxes are dramatically changing the way people are able to be entertained and informed. The level of sophisticated, open technologies being developed by companies like IBM, NDS and SAGEM means that viewers are able to access the latest digital services in rapid time.''
``With the arrival of digital broadcasting, TV is no longer just a source of passive entertainment,'' said Eric Tsou, director, Digital Video Products Group, IBM Microelectronics. ``It is migrating into home networking and e-commerce arenas and set-top boxes are central to this movement. Working with companies such as NDS and SAGEM to provide innovative, interactive TV applications for existing and future customer engagements is key to our long-term strategy in the digital TV space.''
``Co-operation with IBM and NDS is for us the opportunity to go forward and to further develop our STB offer; our objective being to meet our clients' future needs,'' commented SAGEM.
Earlier this year, IBM and NDS signed an agreement to integrate NDS's Random Access to Scrambled Content Process (RASP) technologies to enable both viewers and operators to benefit from the arrival in the set-top box of the hard disk and applications such as Personal Video Recorder (PVR).
RASP enables ease of access to encrypted content on a PVR by inserting access points into the encrypted content to allow viewers using the recorder to perform certain modes like fast forward, rewind and record more efficiently and quickly.
With revenue a key factor in content provision, XTV allows broadcast operators the opportunity to exploit more effectively content that may be stored on the hard disk in the STB. For example, different Pay-Per-View and rental models may be proposed, while viewers will have a greater choice of valuable content, stored and encrypted on the disk.
About NDS
NDS Group plc is a leading supplier of open conditional access software and interactive systems for the secure delivery of entertainment and information to television set-top boxes and personal computers. The company also develops secure datacasting solutions for the distribution of data and multimedia. See www.nds.com for more information.
About Groupe SAGEM
SAGEM is an internationally based high-technology company that maintains a presence in more than 20 countries. It is the second largest French group in the field of telecommunications and the third largest European company in electronics for defence and security. See www.sagem.com for more information
About IBM Microelectronics
IBM Microelectronics is a key contributor to IBM's role as the world's premier information technology supplier. IBM Microelectronics develops, manufactures and markets state-of-the-art semiconductor and interconnect technologies, products and services. IBM makes chips for a wide range of devices from the world's most powerful computers to the smallest cell phones. Its superior integrated solutions can be found in many of the world's best-known electronic brands. More information about IBM Microelectronics can be found at: http://www.chips.ibm.com.
Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
The statements contained in this release which are not historical facts may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements relate to the plans, projections or future performance of the companies referenced, which involve certain risks and uncertainties, including risk of market acceptance, the effect of economic conditions, possible regulatory changes, technological developments, the impact of competitive pricing and the ability of the companies and their commercial partners to develop systems and solutions which meet the needs of the broadcasting industry in a timely and cost-efficient manner, as well as certain other risks and uncertainties which are detailed in the companies' filings with the SEC. Company or product names have been used for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact:
IBM Microelectronics
Michael Loughran, 845/892-5463
mloughra@us.ibm.com
or
NDS Group plc
Margot Field, Head of Public Relations
+44 (20) 8476 8158
Mfield@ndsuk.com
or
Groupe SAGEM
Herve Philippe, Senior VP, Chief Financial Officer
+33 1 40 70 62 57
herve.philippe@sagem.com
Radio 538 And BMG To Deliver Mobile Music Service
Label News [12-04-2001]
The Netherlands, November 15, 2001 - The popular radio station Radio 538 and BMG Entertainment, the worldwide music and entertainment division of Bertelsmann AG, will offer from November until the end of this year downloadable singles of BMG artists using SMS.
The singles are part of the top 5 hit list of BMG and may be ordered by means of sending a widely broadcasted keyword via SMS to 5380, the short number of Radio 538. Such a key word is for example 'ALICIA' for the new single of Alicia Keys and 'WESTLIFE' for the one from Westlife. Listeners ordering a track via SMS will get the encrypted track and the licence with the key to decrypt it delivered in their e-mail box. This license contains the usage rights to listen to the song and transfer it to a portable music player using Windows Media Player 7.x or compatible. For this project, Radio 538 and BMG decided to use DMDsecure's flagship product DMDfusion, a flexible software application that manages the protection, delivery and licensing of digital content. In case the listener forwards the track to a friend, the receiver will be requested to SMS the same keyword to 5380 in order to obtain his own license.
Payment for the rights of a track will be realised via the mobile phone bill and is enabled by Golden Bytes, specialised in the development, exploitation and implementation of SMS related mobile services. In addition, Radio 538 provides its end users a service to subscribe at www.radio538.nl in order to send the rights to their e-mail address after registration. End users may also subscribe via SMS. Erik de Zwart CEO from Radio 538 states: "This campaign is a break through for the radio industry. Radio 538 is the first radio station in Europe using this new distribution method. In this way we can service our listeners even better than before, by sending the music directly to their e-mail boxes."
Plans Unveiled to Develop 6 Core IT Technologies
By Kim Sung-jin
Staff Reporter
The government has decided to foster six promising high-end innovative information and science technologies to make sure that the country doesn't miss out on the next generation billion-dollar global information technology market.
The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE) announced yesterday that it has selected six next-generation technology sectors _ Post-PC, speech information technology (SIT), digital testing machines, organic electro-luminescence, personal robot technology and medical check up equipment that uses bio-magnetism diagnosis technology _ as official national technology development projects.
MOCIE said that the government, after conducting research and evaluation into those projects since last March, will first invest a total of 53.4 billion won into developing those six technologies by 2003, and a total of 138.4 billion won by 2011, the ultimate point for the completion of technologies development project.
One area of concentration is post-PC technologies. These are specialized next generation intelligent personal computers with real-time embedded operating systems that work reliably and optimally with underlying processor chips, such as personal digital assistants (PDA), pocket PCs, Web TV and smart phones.
The government will inject a total of 49 billion won into post-PCs until 2006. It will shoulder 24.7 billion won of the bill and seven private organizations, including Samsung Electronics, will invest the remaining 24.3 billion won.
MOCIE expects the global post-PC market to reach $44.4 billion, and the domestic market to grow to $1.4 billion.
Believing that speech will drive growth for the entire computer and auto industries, and that the automobile will become a mobile office, MOCIE plans to pour a total of 21.7 billion won into developing SITs by 2006. The government will invest 14 billion won and the private sector, nine institutions led by Sogang University, will supply 7.7 billion won.
SITs are voice-automated computer systems that enable users to address commands to computers without punching any keys or clicking any mouse. Via a voice-controlled Web-browsing program, drivers will be able to search for maps from the geographical information system (GIS), traffic information, road conditions as well as checking their e-mails while on the move.
Moreover, over the next five years, a total of 14.3 billion won will be allotted to developing digital test equipment, a type of state-of-the-art digital system-checking machine that examines normal functions of products before their release onto the market. The government will bear 9.2 billion won of the burden and 15 institutions directed by the Korea Measuring Instruments Research Association will take on the remaining bill of 5.1 billion won.
MOCIE said that Korea currently imports nearly half of such testing machines, used in the high-end IT and electronics sectors such as semiconductors and 3G telephony. The development of domestic technology would generate some 90 billion won of import replacement effects and exports of $100 million by 2005. Korea is presently seeing a trade deficit of $2.4 billion in the sector.
Korea will put in a total of 26.1 billion won into developing organic electro-luminescence (EL), a next-generation, high definition monitor technology that would replace the current liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors, up until 2006. The government will invest 14.2 billion won and 15 private institutions including Seoul National University and Samsung SDI, will supply 11.9 billion won.
The government plans to develop unprecedented 7 and 8.4-inch active organic EL monitors and grab 15-20 percent of the global market. It expects organic EL exports to reach $500 million by 2005.
In the case of developing home-use personal robots, 67.4 billion won will be injected with the government spending 45.7 billion won and the private sector led by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) will undertake 21.7 billion.
Personal robot development includes robots for games and entertainment, household-use robots for laundry and cleaning, and educational robots and intelligent robots that act as friends.
MOCIE expects the domestic robot market to develop to a 300 billion won market by 2005, and it hopes the nation will win 10 percent of the global robot market with exports of over $2 billion by 2010.
Lastly, until 2011 the government will inject a total of 61 billion won into developing bio-magnetism technologies for use in medical equipment.
The government will invest 30.6 billion won and seven bodies including leading private medical centers, companies and research centers will shoulder 30.4 billion won of the cost.
Bio-magnetic medical equipment is an evolved form of current machines like MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and CT (computerized tomography) technologies. This new technology allows patients to easily receive check ups without going through the complicated testing procedures that are required by MRI or CT. MOCIE predicts top-notch medical equipment exports to reach 60 billion won.
sjkim@koreatimes.co.kr
ÀԷ½ð£ 2001/12/03 16:57
Exec sees home nets as future cornerstone of cable services
By David Benjamin and Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(11/30/01, 12:38 p.m. EST)
ANAHEIM, Calif. — In stronger terms than most leaders in the cable industry usually dare, AOL Time Warner co-chief operating officer Robert Pittman used the Western Show Thursday (Nov. 29) to herald home networking as the key platform to extend the reach of cable beyond the set-top box, beyond cable modems, and beyond the transmission of TV shows to couch potatoes.
In trumpeting the potential for home networking to feed simultaneous streams of television signals, data and other services like music and telephony, Pittman — an inductee of the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame for his pioneering work with MTV and AOL — noted that today's consumers spend $60 billion for television. "But it won't be long before they're paying more for data from cable companies than for TV," he said.
Pittman also suggested the potential for cable operators to offer a huge library of music through a CD player-like box hooked to cable, which could make the stereos in consumers' living rooms obsolete.
Pittman's bullish outlook for home networking flies in the face of the technical difficulties and costs that have hobbled the movement for the past three years. It also defies the resistance that consumers have expressed toward the extra charges associated with the bundled services that seem synonymous with home networking. "Consumers have an allergic reaction to the word 'bundling,' " Pittman admitted.
However, Pittman insisted that the steady growth of the Internet — and the vast amounts of money consumers continue to spend on Internet-related goods and services — is the bellwether of home networking's success.
"We're seeing a big change in the Internet business that's beginning to look a lot like the TV business," he said. Pittman noted that households today are moving toward several personal computers rather than just one, just as homes 25 years ago began to accumulate televisions. Today, he noted, the average number of TVs per U.S. household is 2.4.
As this trend repeats itself with PCs, "that's great for the cable industry," Pittman said, "because it proves the need for home networking." A home with two or three PCs but only one narrow-band phone line will create conflicts that cry out for broadband, multichannel, cable-based solutions, he said.
Foot in the door
Throwing another long-delayed promise into the mix, Pittman noted that home networking will accelerate with the widespread introduction of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD). SVOD is envisioned as a monthly flat-fee service that would provide access to all programming channels like HBO in a given month. This service will be available, Pittman said, through a personal video recorder (PVR) inside a set-top box, or — in perhaps 5-to-10 years — through a connection to a cable system's "smart" headend.
With home networking and PVR, consumers within the same household could watch different movies or prerecorded TV programs on different TV sets with the power to pause, rewind and manipulate each video, Pittman said. By eliminating the unit-pricing model that has hindered the growth of pay-per-view video-on-demand, Pittman said SVOD will make such services more appealing to consumers, and far more lucrative for cable providers.
Pittman emphasized that by using home networking "to drag the broadband connection into the home," cable systems have their foot in the door to pitch many more "incremental" products. "Since we're already hooked through the cable, for small increments we can provide more services," he said. "For small increments, we can market [each service]."
He went on, "The key for us is thinking about: I've got the basic relationship with the consumer, what can I add?"
Pittman answered his own question with a list. He said that today's typical consumer is paying $50 to $60 a month for basic cable, including a few premium add-ons like HBO or digital cable. Pittman estimated that this consumer might be willing to tack on $10 to $20 for SVOD, and perhaps $10 to $20 beyond that for a "digital jukebox" music service that places thousands of CD titles at his or her fingertips. To these increments, Pittman said a cable system could add home networking — to organize all these new services — $10 to $20 a month, with maybe $30 to $40 more for cable-based phone service, and $15 to $20 for access to multiple Internet service providers.
"Pretty soon, you've got a model where you're tripling the revenue out of the home, and moving from TV and entertainment to data." Added up, Pittman's new bill, piled up incrementally, totals from $115 to $160 a month.
The bottom line is whether consumers — even for the opportunity to sample 10,000 CDs a month, or watch 12 straight episodes of "Sex and the City," or call Mom in Milwaukee on the TV set — are willing to cough up $160 a month for cable. As another cable leader, Charter Communications president Carl Vogel, cautioned at the opening of the Western Show Wednesday, "We're a great industry and we sell a great product. But at the end of the day, it's only television."
CEA To FCC: Force Cable/CE Compatibility
By Greg Tarr
TWICE
12/3/01
ARLINGTON, VA. — The Consumer Electronics Association recently asked the Federal Communications Commission to actively ensure compatibility between digital cable equipment and consumer electronics devices.
The comments were filed in response to a required status report on implementing Feb. 22, 2000, agreements between CEA and the National Cable Television Association. CEA said individual cable companies have shown a lack of commitment to standardized cable/CE compatible systems and that only "nominal" progress has been made.
In the filing, CEA reported members, "Remain unable to design or build any products with minimum competitive functionality for direct operation on a cable system."
CEA charged that certain cable operators have failed to support an open standards process and continue to make major infrastructure investments in proprietary digital cable equipment and systems, including their own enhanced electronic program guides.
The cable industry, CEA said, has failed to sign off on middleware and other systems needed to complete a standardized point-of-deployment (POD) host device, which consumer electronics manufacturers must have to develop cable-compatible consumer electronics products for retail.
"Manufacturers are unable to build compatible products for sale in a competitive marketplace," CEA's statement reads.
Cable operators must agree to carry Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) DTV channel guide data to ensure consumers will be able to channel surf with a television set's remote, instead of being locked into the program guide supplied by individual cable companies, according to CEA.
Another issue of concern to CEA is the cable industry's support of "onerous copyright provisions" in the POD-Host interface license that manufacturers are required to sign in order to manufacture cable-compatible products.
CEA said the provision limits home recording rights, controls market entry of new CE equipment and functions, compromises manufacturers' intellectual property rights and threatens the continued interoperability of legacy equipment in homes.
New Set Top Box Runs with XP
Embedded
By Veronica Hendricks
iApplianceWeb
(11/28/01, 11:18:03 PM EDT)
Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Stellar One, Fujitsu Siemens Computers'
middleware provider and value added reseller, have demonstrated a
broadband set-top device running ConnectTV on the Windows XP
Embedded operating system at the Microsoft Embedded Developers
Conference.
"Fujitsu Siemens and Stellar One have used Windows XP Embedded's rich
multimedia functionality, such as Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows Media
Technologies, to create their new home entertainment center," said Jim
Allchin, group vice president of Platforms at Microsoft Corp. "ConnectTV
3000/ACTIVY 300 is an example of the type of next-generation smart
device that can be built with Windows XP Embedded to provide users with a
truly interactive TV experience."
The Fujitsu Siemens Computers' ACTIVY 300 Media Center when combined
with Stellar One's ConnectTV middleware is branded and sold as ConnectTV
3000 in the US and the rest of world excluding Europe where it is branded
as the ACTIVY 300.
ACTIVY is a home entertainment center for people who want more
versatility. The ACTIVY 300 is a home gateway designed to receive virtually
all kinds of digital information: video on demand, pay-per-view, data/IP
distribution and videoconferencing.
ACTIVY combines:
Set-Top Box, the receiver and decoder for digital TV and digital
radio
Web box for Internet, online banking, MP3, and email
Satellite receiver
Digital video recorder equipped with hard disk
DVD and CD player.
Microsoft Introduces e-Hospital in Korea
By Seo Jee-yeon
Staff Reporter
Software giant Microsoft launched the Healthcare.NET consortium to establish
the information technology infrastructure needed to make hospitals go online,
aimed at accelerating the ``open hospital'' system earlier than planned.
Chipmaker Intel, medical information portal site Mdsave, solution provider Insoft
and medical consultancy Unionhealth all joined the consortium, Microsoft Korea
said yesterday.
The ``open hospital'', a hot issue in the local healthcare industry, describes a
system whereby small hospitals can co-utilize medical equipment, facilities and
human resource from larger hospitals. Small hospitals will then be able to
provide continuous healthcare services without losing patients due to a lack of
resources. Larger hospitals can also expand profits, getting payment in return
for renting their resources.
It was designed by the Ministry of Health last year to maximize the limited
resources in the industry by reducing overlapping investment among medical
organizations, as well as provide developed healthcare services to customers.
As of now, 30 large healthcare entities across the nation tentatively run the
system, with a larger launch in the near future.
If such cooperation among hospitals makes synergy effects, building the
information technology network linking co-operated hospitals is also necessary.
The Microsoft-led Healthcare.NET consortium will take such a role, bringing .NET,
Microsoft's vision of the next generation Internet, to the local healthcare
industry. .Net, Microsoft described, lets customers connect to the Internet
anytime and any place through any Internet-enabled device.
.NET for healthcare, Microsoft explained, will enable every industry player,
including patients and hospitals, to be linked in a single environment through
the Internet where they can share information, reduce errors and inefficiencies
and ultimately improve quality of care.
If an open healthcare system is built linking hospitals with consumers and other
industry players, each person can create their own healthcare plan and keep
their own medical records, or keep their schedule for taking prescription
medicine.
The Healthcare.NET project focuses on building such a system in the local
medical industry, taking advantage of the upcoming ``open hospital'' system.
The consortium hit the road to promote the ``open hospital'' system in Seoul
today, and will visit five major cities, including Pusan, Taejon and Taegu to
present success stories of building e-hospitals.
Strong Growth Forecast In Internet Audio Hardware
By Joseph Palenchar
TWICE
12/3/2001
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.— Portable Internet audio players have been the best-selling Internet audio application to date, but other Internet audio products such as console-style hard-drive jukeboxes and MP3-equipped car stereos, cellular phones, and PDAs will drive future product sales, according to Cahners In-Stat Group.
The market research company, a unit of TWICE parent Cahners Business Information, forecasts worldwide portable unit shipments will grow from 2.4 million in 2000 to more than 9 million in 2005. The U.S. accounts for about 92 to 95 percent of worldwide sales, Cahners said.
In-Stat also said demand for new console-type digital music products, such as digital audio receivers and digital audio jukeboxes, has been low but will grow significantly through 2005.
"The increased use of the Internet has spurred the development of new digital audio business models and products," said senior analyst Mike Paxton. "From portable players to digital audio jukeboxes, today's audiophiles and digital music consumers have more choices than ever before,"
In-Stat has also found that:
SONICblue, the marketer of Rio portable players, is forecast to be the 2001 world leader in portable digital music player unit shipments, followed by Creative Labs, D-Link, Nike, Intel, and Compaq. Significantly, RCA held second or third place in 2000, Paxton said.
Brick-and-mortar retailers significantly increased their share of portable sales in 2001. In May 2000, In-Stat surveyed 901 U.S. and Canadian consumers and found that 38 percent owned a portable. Of those consumers, 58% said they had purchased theirs on-line, while only 32 percent cited retail.
In September 2001, a Cahners survey of manufacturers concluded that consumers were buying 70 percent of portables at retail, Paxton said.
The report can be purchased at www.instat.com/catalog/cat-mm.htm or by contacting Matthew Woods at 617.630.2139 (mwoods@instat.com).
Full Audio Inks Universal Deal
By Joseph Palenchar
TWICE
12/3/2001
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Chicago— Full Audio has signed a two-year nonexclusive deal with Universal Music to add select songs from the Universal catalog to its planned cache-download music-subscription service, which will initially be delivered to PCs but might be expanded to home CE devices.
Full previously signed a deal with EMI for its full catalog of titles.
In its first distribution-partner agreement, FullAudio will deliver its service beginning in January through websites operated by Clear Channel-owned radio stations in five markets: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. Monthly fees will range from $5 to $15/month, depending on the service level.
Clear Channel will use the service to let listeners of its stations download music in the format played by the stations. The service will also give listeners access to other music formats.
To eliminate music-quality problems caused by poor Internet connections, the service doesn't stream music to a PC. Instead, it lets users download music for storage on, and playback from, their PC's hard drive. Listeners have full access to the music as long as their subscription is paid up.
For now, music can't be transferred to an Internet audio portable, but down the road, Full hopes to allow for transfer to portables that use Microsoft's WMA codec and DRM, a spokeswoman said. "The portable device would have to understand all the rules supported by the DRM," she said.
Demand for Flash Memory Chips in 2005 to Reach 40 Pct.of DRAMs
November 28, 2001 (TOKYO) -- The global demand for flash memory chips
will reach 445 peta bits (445 x 1015bits) in 2005, which will be about 40
percent of the DRAM market in terms of bits, according to a forecast made
by Nikkei Market Access.
The flash-memory market size is now about a tenth of that of DRAMs. The
DRAM market has been sluggish, and the demand for NAND-type
flash-memories (including AND type) used in cellular phones is
increasing.
One of the reasons for the decreasing demand for DRAMs is the sluggish
PC market. Production of PCs is expected to be lackluster and the memory
per PC should not expand much more. Consequently, in terms of units,
128Mb DRAMs and later chips will experience lower demand than the
previous high-end DRAM market; 256Mb DRAMs will reach a peak in 2003 at
1.4 billion units, 512Mb DRAMs in 2005 at a predicted 1.2 billion units, and
1Gb DRAMs in 2007 at 900 million units. If the total demand is less than 1
billion units, only two or three manufacturers of DRAMs could fill the
demand.
On the other hand, NAND-type flash-memories are mostly used in digital
still cameras.
However, it is expected that the demand for NAND flash-memory for
cellular phones will increase, as the trend toward lower prices continues.
The next cellular phones will be equipped with a card slot, for NAND
flash-memory units. As cellular phone capabilities expand for e-mail and
Web browsing, the NAND market will grow.
However, the NOR-type flash-memory (including DINOR-type) market will
be lackluster and will hit a ceiling around 2005. By that time the memory
capacity per cellular phone will reach a maximum level and also the
sales of cellular phone handsets will be sluggish. If no driving
commodities other than cellular phones arise by 2005, it will be
impossible to maintain the high growth rate.
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products Announces the Sale of Remaining Speech and Language Technology
Assets
IEPER, Belgium and BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 28, 2001--Lernout & Hauspie Speech
Products N.V. (OTC: LHSPQ), L&H Holdings USA, Inc., and certain of their subsidiaries (collectively, "L&H" or
"the Company"), world leaders in speech and language technology, products, and services, today announced
the sale of remaining speech and language technology assets through a court-approved, public auction held
on the 26th of November. The sales of the Company's individual assets are subject to final approval by the
U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and the Ieper Commercial Court of Belgium.
The major portion of L&H's core speech and language technology business, including its text-to-speech (TTS)
technologies, including L&H(TM) RealSpeak(TM), and certain of its automatic speech recognition (ASR)
technologies, including the Dragon Naturally Speaking(R) line of products, will be acquired by
Massachusetts-based ScanSoft, Inc. (NASDAQ: SSFT) in exchange for $10 million in cash, a $3.5 million note,
and 7.4 million common shares of ScanSoft, Inc. stock with a market value of $26 million based on the
November 26th closing price of $3.52 per share.
ScanSoft's chairman and chief executive officer, Paul Ricci, said "The technology and intellectual property
included in these assets are widely considered the finest in the industry and represent a strategic growth
opportunity for Scansoft. We are especially enthusiastic about L&H's talented research, engineering, sales
and marketing employees in both the U.S. and Belgium, its prestigious customer base, and the added
strength it brings to our software distribution channels." ScanSoft expects to retain at least 150 L&H
employees worldwide.
Additional assets were also sold at the auction:
-- The ASR technologies of L&H's ISI division will be acquired by Pennsylvania-based Multimodal
Technologies, Inc., a company headed by Michael Finke, one of ISI's founders, for $2 million in cash and the
assumption of a $2 million earnout.
-- L&H's Intelligent Content Management (ICM) assets and its Knexys division, which develops next-generation
ICM technologies will be acquired by Pennsylvania-based Vantage Technology Holding for $2 million in cash.
-- The Company's Audiomining(TM)assets (audio search engine technology pioneered by Dragon Systems
Inc.) will be acquired for $0.75 million in cash to Dragon Catalyst LLC, a newly formed company headed by Dr.
James Baker.
John Shagoury, President of L&H's SLT Group said: "We are excited that ScanSoft and the other buyers are
committed to enhancing the technologies that we have built and furthering the strong relationships that we
have established with our broad customer base."
About Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products
L&H is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers,
automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods, and the Internet. The company is
making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and
technology. The company provides a wide range of offerings, including: customized solutions for corporations;
core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user applications for continuous speech products in vertical
markets; and document creation and linguistic tools. L&H's products and services originate in the following
basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), search and retrieval and audio mining.
For more information, please visit L&H on the World Wide Web at www.lhsl.com.
This Press Release contains forward-looking information that involves risks and uncertainties, including
statements about L&H's plans, objectives, expectations, and intentions. Readers are cautioned that forward
looking statements include known and unknown risks, including uncertainty of new product development, the
risk that newly introduced products may contain undetected errors or defects or otherwise not perform as
anticipated, early state of development of the speech, language and medical information technology markets,
the ability of L&H's customers to successfully integrate and commercialize L&H's technology, the uncertainties
associated with the Company's Chapter 11 filings in the US and related proceedings in Belgium, the retention
of key technical and other personnel, currency and other risks related to international operations, rapid
technological change and intense competition, as well as other risks set forth in L&H's filings with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the
date of this Press Release.
L&H, the L&H logo, RealSpeak, Nothing But Speech (NBS), Say It Your Way and Dragon NaturallySpeaking are
either registered trademarks or trademarks of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. or its affiliates, in the
United States and/or other countries. All other product names or trademarks referenced herein are trademarks
of their respective owners.
CONTACT:
L&H Speech and Language Technologies Division
Media Contact US
Catherine Van Evans, Lernout & Hauspie
1 (781) 203-5286,
catherine.van.evans@lhsl.com
or
Jonna Schuyler, FitzGerald Communications
617-488-9500 ext. 263,
jschuyler@fitzgerald.com
or
Media Contact EMEA
Vanessa Richter, Lernout & Hauspie
32 57-2295-18
vanessa.richter@lhs.be
or
L&H Corporate Contact Info
Investor Relations
Allan Forsey, Lernout & Hauspie
1 (781) 203-5233
aforsey@lhsl.com
KEYWORD: MASSACHUSETTS INTERNATIONAL EUROPE
Why Goliath won't win the MP3 player battle
From: CNET Music Center Newsletter <CNET_Music_Center@two.digital.cnet.com>
To: XXXXXXX
Subject: Why David makes a better MP3 player than Goliath
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 21:02:52 -0500 (EST)
My email from cNet contained this header:
MP3 Insider: Why David makes better MP3 players than Goliath
For some people, hard drive-based MP3 players are too bulky and breakable, but flash-based models don't hold enough music. Enter the eDigital MXP-100, a solid device that uses a 340MB IBM Microdrive to store five hours of MP3 music. Bonus: You can control it with your voice.
<http://two.digital.cnet.com/cgi-bin2/flo?y=hCFi03Ajf0X30fLa0Al>
Here is the article:
In this era of corporate consolidation and global multinationals, massive companies with scads of
subsidiaries run the show. Most of the time, these behemoths strangle their smaller competitors, just as
tall, dense trees in the forest tend to eliminate undergrowth. But the portable digital audio market stands
out as a shining exception to this rule.
Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba play second fiddle to lesser-known upstarts, such as Sonicblue, Creative
Labs, and D-Link. Out of the 2.4 million MP3 players that were sold in the year 2000, those three
companies were ranked numbers one, two, and three in sales, according to research firm Cahners
In-Stat. Other big-name makers such as Intel have been forced to withdraw their entries into the market.
That's not to say that a number of smaller manufacturers making MP3 players haven't gone out of
business, but the companies that have risen to the top of this still-accelerating market are inevitably
small. I think I've figured out why David beats Goliath when it comes to MP3 players.
The Korean angle
These days, MP3 players use three types of storage: flash memory, MP3 CDs, and hard drives. But when
the first MP3 player (the Eiger Labs/Saehan F10--not the Diamond Rio, incidentally) hit the market back in
'98, flash memory was the only medium used. Today, it remains by far the most expensive part of any
flash memory-based MP3 player. Since Korea is the top manufacturer of flash memory cards, the first
MP3 player manufacturer and many subsequent ones have been Korean. They simply have easier
access to the most crucial part of the devices. For this reason, European, American, and Japanese
consumer electronics manufacturers were left behind or undercut by companies with ties to Korean flash
memory manufacturers.
A coalition adrift
In February 1999, representatives from more than 200 consumer electronic and music labels met in Los
Angeles to found the SDMI, or Secure Digital Music Initiative. Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director,
waxed optimistically, "SDMI is an exciting endeavor because it will build upon...technologies to create a
new infrastructure for the secure delivery of music to consumers."
The prevalent thinking among SDMI members was that if the major players in consumer electronics
banded together and created a secure specification for MP3 players, people would continue buying music
rather than downloading it over the Internet. Manufacturers would be safe from contributory infringement
lawsuits, and music labels would remain in business. Hopefully, the new specification would be ready in
time for the important holiday shopping season.
Well, two shopping seasons have passed since then, we're on our way into a third, and secure MP3
players are still the exception rather than the rule. Who knows how long manufacturers such as
Panasonic, Toshiba, Aiwa, and Sony held off on releasing MP3 players in hopes of using the SDMI spec?
Meanwhile, smaller companies with less to lose were gobbling up market share and releasing their
second and third models, improving their sometimes shoddy designs until it was up to name-brand
standards.
A giant on the fence
Sony, which dominates many areas of consumer electronics, is a special case when it comes to MP3
players. Unlike the other major players, Sony owns music copyrights and manufactures consumer
electronics. Even though there has always been a palpable division between those two branches, the fact
remains that the electronics side has been handcuffed by trying to keep the content side's interests in
mind. If Sony were to come out with an MP3 player that played unrestricted MP3 files, the people in the
music division would blow their collective top.
So what did this giant do? Since SDMI has been so glacially slow at releasing a standard for secure
music files, Sony did the only thing it could: create its own proprietary system, called OpenMG. Use of the
word open is particularly ironic since OpenMG is about as closed and proprietary as it gets. Sony started
with the ATRAC codec it developed for MiniDiscs, then compressed it, calling the end result ATRAC3.
Sony's OpenMG software turns MP3s into ATRAC3 files and wraps those in a secure OpenMG layer.
Using this technology, Sony released some of the most excellently designed players I've ever seen.
Unfortunately, they were so crippled by the OpenMG software that I couldn't recommend them to CNET
users. I suspect that a few people bought them without reading the reviews, and I imagine that most of
those people became frustrated when they realized they had to waste time and disk space by making an
additional secure copy of every MP3 in their collection.
Anyone's game
We're far from reaching the ceiling in terms of the advances to be made with these devices. Sure, they're
maturing--today's devices often come standard with voice recording, remote controls, and FM radio. Better
ones offer bonus functionality, such as address books, changeable faceplates, and even more whimsical
features, such as karaoke. Expandable memory, tons of storage space, and slick designs are pretty
much a given. But new products such as the Apple iPod and the Terapin Mine (CNET review coming
soon), as well as new mini-MP3 CD players such as the CMC Magnetics ShellStar show that there are
still new ideas out there. Notice how you've (probably) never heard of CMC Magnetics or Terapin and that
the iPod comes from a certain desktop manufacturer with a tiny slice of market share? Exactly. For once,
the little guys are winning.
Combined Luck bits...
review from dmusic
CDM193 by AudioLogic 2000-12-22
Company Profile:
Truth be known, the CDM193 isn’t actually made by AudioLogic, but rather Starlite Marketing Ltd. Starlite is a Hong Kong company and AudioLogic is a brand name that Starlite owns. Starlite is a 31-year-old company that began manufacturing transistor radios in 1969, now manufacturing a wide range of products including CD & MP3 players, televisions, and telephones. Starlite has manufactured or currently manufactures products for large companies such as Philips, Sony, Sharp, Hitachi, Thompson, Grundig, and Daewoo.
When I called the number in the instruction pamphlet to find out more about Starlite, I got a message to call another number. In an odd twist of fate when I called the familiar looking second number, it turned out to be Executive Marketing (the U.S. front for Combined Luck Industries LTD, makers of the Classic CM 415 of my last review) and I even talked to the same representative I talked to for the Classic mp3-CD player. It turns out Executive Marketing manages U.S. affairs for AudioLogic.
Duke, Sentinel, good posts from both of you and strong points by each of you. I have to say that e.Digital stands to benefit from the feedback that all the shareholders can provide to them. While many are perhaps too close to this investment, on the whole it is invaluable to have "secret shoppers" in retail stores across the country. Many national chains pay a lot of money to obtain this type of feedback. I'm more concerned about calling Combined Luck Industries but since they are on the packaging of the XP3 it seems fair game. An internet search would, however, be less intrusive. Even the benevolent barracuda can be seen as a nuisance fish though; attacking the prize gamefish as it is about to be landed.
cheers
Making the Best of a Bad Situation
This week marks the beginning of the holiday shopping frenzy.
Although fear, economic uncertainty and grief grip much of the
nation, two groups stand to benefit from the convergence of
unfortunate circumstances: consumer electronics makers and
retailers.
According to two biased, yet believable, market studies,
consumers hope to spend more time in the coming months cocooning
with new DVD players, video game consoles and digital audio
devices. The research was put out separately by Philips Consumer
Electronics and Sony Computer Entertainment America, who of
course hype their respective products as answers to consumers'
prayers.
Those with new audio devices in particular are going to look for
content from sources both legal and illegal. Major labels won't
see any benefit from the growing market unless they satisfy the
growing desire for digital media.
BMG to replace anti-rip Natalie Imbruglia CDs
New stock, free replacements
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22917.html
Video, music delivery to cell phones set to begin in Japan
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(11/16/01, 5:27 p.m. EST)
TOKYO — NTT Docomo will begin delivery of music and full-motion video Monday (Nov. 19) on its third-generation cellular network, and rival KDDI will start similar deliveries over its EZweb service on Dec. 1.
The services will make the distribution of audio-visual content that demonstrates the advantages of high-speed networks a practical reality to Japanese consumers, the companies said. But each carrier is starting its service with the support of only one cell phone supplier.
Docomo launched its 3G service Oct. 1 with a top transmission rate of 384 kilobits/second, and handsets were only able to exchange data and browse text. The company's new service, called i-Motion, sends video clips using packet transmission at a top rate of 384 kbits/s. Video content is compressed in the MPEG-4 format and audio in the Adaptive Multi-Rate format. NEC Corp. is the initial supplier of the cell phones able to receive the video service. The NEC handset can store up to 100 kbytes of downloaded content.
Twenty-eight companies will provide audio-visual content from 37 sites as the Docomo service commences in central Tokyo. The service will eventually expand into other populated areas within a year.
KDDI, Japan's second-largest cell phone network carrier, will upgrade its cdmaOne packet communication network to increase transmission rates from 14,400 bits/s at present to 64 kbits/s in December, when it plans to launch new services including video distribution and GPS navigation.
The video distribution service, named EZmovie, employs MPEG-4 compression for video and MP3 and QCELP (Qualcomm code excited linear prediction) for audio compression and decompression.
Toshiba is at present the sole supplier of handsets able to receive GPS data and video content on the KDDI network. The terminal has 800 kbytes of memory to store data and 150 kbytes of memory to store streaming data.
About 60 sites will offer video content as the service begins, but KDDI intends to increase the number of video contents providers by distributing authoring tools on its Web site.
"The high-speed cell phone networks will stimulate audio-video content distribution,"said Masakatsu Ueda, director of Avex Networks Inc., the multimedia business division of a major Japanese record company. "It is not yet a business but a kind of field experiment for providers because the number of subscribers is still too small. The challenge to content providers like us is to find enough attractive content that subscribers would willingly pay for, even if played in a limited hardware environment like a cell phone."
More complete cNet review?? http://music.cnet.com/electronics/0-6342420-1305-7820490.html
Webnoize: E.Digital Posts Drastic Q2 Revenue Drop
E.Digital, which develops digital audio player
reference designs, Wednesday reported drastically
decreased second-quarter revenues and a
significantly increased operating loss. For the
quarter ended September 30, E.Digital recorded
revenues of $506,996, compared to $1.1 million for
the same period a year ago. The company said the
decline was due to the decrease in digital voice
recorder product shipments to Lanier Healthcare.
Lanier's agreement with E.Digital expires December
31, 2001; the healthcare company has not renewed
the agreement. Earlier this month, however,
E.Digital released its first branded digital audio
player. The company said it has begun generating
revenue from the player, called MXP 100, but the
revenue is not yet material. E.Digital plans to market
the device through its new online store and other
outlets for the coming holiday season. E.Digital also
earns revenue through product design licenses with
consumer electronics companies including Maycom
and Eastech. For the quarter, E.Digital reported an
operating loss of $1.08 million, nearly double the
operating loss of $581,970 for the year-ago quarter.
At press time, E.Digital's shares were trading up
1.47% to $1.38.
eDigital MXP-100 (340 MB Microdrive) CNET Rating: 7 out of 10
HELLO!!! IT HAS VOICE RECOGNITION
The good: Lots of expandable memory; long-lasting rechargeable battery; voice recording; smaller
and more rugged than hard drive-based players.
The bad: Somewhat expensive; slow transfer times; bulkier than flash memory-based MP3 players.
The bottom line: The eDigital MXP-100 impressed us with its 340MB of storage, but we wish that it
were a bit cheaper, smaller, and lighter.
By Ken Feinstein
(11/14/01)
With a 340MB Microdrive for storage and the ability to react to your voice commands , eDigital's
MXP-100 is an ambitious entry into the portable MP3 player market. While it's a very solid player with
good features and strong performance, the MXP-100 has a couple of drawbacks that make it hard to
enthusiastically recommend at its current price. Still, it's a good choice for people who want to carry
lots of tunes but don't have the CD burner required for an MP3 CD player or don't like the idea of a
device with a somewhat fragile hard drive inside.
Microsoft gathers partners for home-network initiative
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
(11/14/01, 12:14 p.m. EST)
LAS VEGAS — Microsoft Corp. will take a deeper step into consumer electronics this January when it launches a so-called e-Home initiative at the Consumer Electronics Show, where it will roll out new technology to connect PCs and digital consumer devices using emerging home networking technologies, EE Times has learned. The company will also introduce partner companies at CES that are adopting the technology.
The technology will make it easier to share digital music across different devices such as PCs, stereos and handheld music players, even if they are linked by diverse networks. Key to the technology will be a kind of intelligent routing that automatically scales multimedia files to the bandwidth of the receiving device's network. Future versions of the technology will focus on more difficult problems, like sharing video files across diverse devices and networks.
While much of the work will likely involve software innovations, hardware and OEM partners will also be a part of the CES announcement. "Microsoft is interested in a lot of new device types," said one source close to the company. "I think you will see the usual suspects like Philips, Sony and others involved in this."
One new device expected to be part of the announcement, code-named Mira, is believed to be based on a Geode processor from National Semiconductor Corp.
"My problem is I have a great stereo in my living room with 600 CDs in a jukebox, but I have a lot of other great audio files I have downloaded off the Net on my PC in another room," said Aaron Woodman, lead program manager for the e-Home initiative at Microsoft. "I want to bridge those two systems together and create a better experience."
The effort extends to the mobile world as well. "How does that music follow you when you leave the house? That's going to involve networks with very different bandwidths," Woodman said.
The initiative will encompass a number of emerging wireless networks, ranging from kilobit-per-second nets such as Bluetooth to multimegabit networks such as 802.11b
, as well as several home networking technologies such as Home Phoneline and Powerline. "We're trying to be agnostic about standards," said Woodman.
Microsoft's work with the OEM community is similarly broad. "We will be working with a number of hardware makers on this going forward," Woodman said.
The networking initiative marks a new front for Microsoft's push into consumer electronics, which is building to the official rollout of the Xbox videogame console on Thursday (Nov 15).
In advance of the launch, the Comdex show floor is abuzz with excitement about the new platform. Microsoft set up a large pavilion in the Comdex entryway where users can try out the console, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gave away four of the systems at his Sunday keynote where Xbox was demonstrated to howls of approval from a packed crowd at the MGM Grand Hotel theater.
"The word around the water cooler here is Xbox will be the big thing for 2002," said a manager at Midway, a company developing games for all three major consoles — Microsoft's Xbox, Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's Playstation 2.
While the Xbox is likely to give Microsoft an important beachhead in the living room, the company's upcoming networking technology could be key to a wider expansion of its sway in the consumer world.
Interesting..Interview with Stuart Patterson, CEO, SpeechWorks
Stuart Patterson talks to Telematics Update magazine about the SpeechWorks/Visteon partnership (9/27/2001)
This interview was first published in the September issue of Telematics Update magazine. Click Here for your Free subscription to future issues.
In this interview Telematics Update magazine talk to Stuart Patterson about their recent partnership with Tier1 supplier Visteon
First, here is a quick run down of his present role at SpeechWorks and previous roles in technology companies.
Among a number of responsibilities as CEO, Stu's aim to direct the company toward continued growth in our assets, - which are our people, products, services and technology to surpass standards and maintain/strengthen leadership in the industry around the world.
Stu has worked in the online services market for nearly 20 years and joined SpeechWorks as President in September 1997 and became CEO in May 1998. >From May 1996 to March 1997, he served as Vice President and Line of Business Manager at Voxware Inc., a developer of digital speech and audio technologies and solutions. While at Voxware he managed software products and partnerships in the Internet telephony market and also supported its initial public offering in October 1996.
Between his tenures at SpeechWorks and Voxware, he served on the Board of Boston Business Graphics, Inc., a developer of high-end websites, which was bought by Think New Ideas, Inc., now answerthink, and inc. From September 1987 to April 1996, he co-founded and served as the CEO of Vicorp Interactive Systems, a developer of large-scale voice and data applications based on open system tools and platforms.
How long has SpeechWorks been in business? Can you give us a few examples of your clients apart from Visteon?
SpeeechWorks has been in business since 1996.
Here is a glimpse of some additional key customers:
United Airlines: United introduced the first speech-enabled airline reservation system for its 95,000 employees, and also has a customer-facing flight information line powered by SpeechWorks. Customers can call 1.800.824.6200 anytime to check the status of any of the airline's 2,400 daily flights. Over 100,000 people use the flight information system each day and it has been lauded publicly as one of the most user-friendly systems in the world.
Federal Express: Along with its partner Nextlink, SpeechWorks has created one of the largest installations in the world of interactive voice response and natural language speech recognition applications for Federal Express Corp. As part of its Customer Relationship Management Initiative, FedEx Express uses the application to improve productivity and enhance the service provided to customers who call 1.800.Go.FEDEX.
SpeechWorks has over 250 other customers including AmericaOnline, Credit Suisse First Boston, Thrifty Car Rental, Continental Airlines and OnStar.
Just how big is this deal with Visteon for SpeechWorks? Is Visteon now your largest client?
Visteon will be SpeechWorks' primary partner to go into the auto industry. They supply $20 billion worth of services/ products to the auto industry. The partnership is not exclusive, but we'll work very closely.
Visteon is licensing SpeechWorks' text-to-speech (TTS) technology, known as ETI-Eloquence, to bring more functionality and personality to speech-enabled cars. With TTS, drivers might hear, "The current traffic conditions for the area are…," "The nearest Italian restaurant is Luigi's at the corner of East and Main." "The current share price for Rock Solid Technologies is $24, do you want to buy?" "Now Playing, The Beach Boys CD," in a hands free environment, while driving. In addition, the technology will allow emails, directions, news, weather, traffic reports and other dynamic information read to them in an intelligible voice.
What does this mean for Lernout & Hauspie now? As far as Telematics Update Magazine is aware, Visteon recently acquired some $10-15 million of L & H technology - will you be sharing this technology?
Visteon acquired the CREC embedded voice recognition engine from L&H. Visteon has been using this engine for some time and it is currently deployed in several production automotive applications including Jaguar and Infiniti. This engine has proven to be robust in high noise environments. Through this relationship SpeechWorks will license the CREC technology from Visteon for deployments in PDA, mobile handsets, and automotive markets. The technology will also be used as part of SpeechWorks deployment of distributed speech recognition systems.
What about Cellport systems? Does their recent Ford deal give you an opportunity as Visteon supplies so much technology to Ford vehicles?
The recent Cellport announcement indicates the need expressed by every major automotive OEM for an in-vehicle system that provides hands free control for the phone. Visteon currently has several deployments in production that also provide this control. We believe that the capabilities of the CREC technology allow for a more natural way to interact with the devices in the vehicle environment. CREC is also deployed in multiple languages to support North American as well as Pan European deployments. We believe that Ford as well as every other automotive OEM presents significant opportunities for Visteon and SpeechWorks to deploy this technology.
Just how good is speech recognition technology now? Can I drive at 70MPH with the windows open, the stereo on and have a system that works effectively?
SpeechWorks is working very closely with Visteon and its partners to provide an optimal experience for people using speech applications in the car. While the recognition will not be correct 100% of the time in this scenario, with certain noise cancellation technologies and refining the algorithms that make speech technology work, SpeechWorks is optimistic that the user experience in cars will be successful. Many of SpeechWorks deployed systems, including mainstream customer facing ones at United Airlines and America Online, are used by people calling from noisy environments such as in a restaurant on a cell phone. Typical SpeechWorks applications run at about a 98% accuracy rate.
What about accents, we heard that some speech systems were unable to pick up anyone who did not have a 'standard' accent - what technical adaptations have you been able to make to counter these claims?
With the recent launch of the OpenSpeech product line, SpeechWorks has set new standards for performance with advanced accuracy, scalability and learning capabilities. SpeechWorks can understand 18 different languages, and the myriad of accents associated with them.
Where's next for SpeechWorks? - and in what model year will the consumer be using your products after your recent contracts? What else is on the horizon that you can tell us about in terms of clients and technology?
The SpeechWorks/Visteon partnership is expected to deliver products to consumers in 12-16 months.
In terms of what is next for SpeechWorks, the Company is currently doing R&D work in the areas of user experience for multimodal access on mobile devices. With cell phones and devices proliferating, sometimes it is more convenient for users to speak a command in, and receive text out, such as when asking for directions or wanting to see what a particular restaurant looks like. SpeechWorks received a DARPA Government grant to do this research with its partners America Online, Compaq and Lobby7, a wireless protocol company in Boston.
In addition, SpeechWorks is striving to make people's interaction with wireless devices and phones more personalized. So, for example, if ordering tickets on the phone with United Airlines, there may be a day when the speech system says, "Hello Toby. Would you like me to book your regular trip to New York on the nonstop shuttle?" Finally, SpeechWorks envisions a day not too far out where you can hop from speech service to speech service, much like you can do with hyperlinks on the web today.
SpeechWorks participated in the EyeforAuto Telematics Germany conference in Frankfurt in September.
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Thanks for the excellent update JB.eom
All set w. cnet.com review pending..see link
http://www.cnet.com/electronics/search/1,10126,0-3622-1301-0,00.html?qt=e.digital&cn=&ca=362...
Firms flock to voice-command future
Building on the dramatic improvements in voice-recognition technology, software development companies are competing to create voice-activated products and services.
A woman demonstrates voice-activated computer software developed by Media Drive Corp. that can search for music tracks the user hums.
Internet services using voice-recognition technology are already online, and software that allows people to control machines with their vocal chords are on the way.
Software developed by Advanced Media Inc. can recognize full-sentence voice commands. Installed in a train station ticketing machine, for example, the software could recognize a command such as, "I'd like two tickets for Shin Osaka Station from Tokyo. Give me non-smoking seats please," and ensure the correct tickets are printed out.
GF Ltd., which markets communications equipment, will sell telephone software beginning this month with voice-recognition technology.
Using this system, telephone orders are automatically input into a computer.
The software is cheaper than hiring telephone operators, according to GF officials.
And Japan Telecom Co. has entered the ring with a voice-controlled Web site.
Voizi Lab, which went online during the summer, offers news and entertainment information that can be accessed and controlled with voice commands via telephone.
"We hope that more people can use the Internet just by using their voice instead of the keyboard," an official of Japan Telecom said.
Tokyo-based Media Drive Corp. has created music and video management software that can search for a song by recognizing a snippet sung by the user into a microphone attached to the computer.
The software can also search for a particular scene in a video.
If a user wanted to search for a goal in a soccer game, for example, they could say the key word into the microphone.
The computer would then list scenes in which the game commentator said "goal," leaving the user to manually click on the list to play the scene.
A Media Drive official said the system also allows users to search for karaoke music by humming the tune of the track they want to call up.
"It is probably the world's first product that can search video recordings by just humming or saying a key word," the official said.
The Japan Times: Oct. 4, 2001