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Napster to name new CEO
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
July 23, 2001, 6:55 p.m. PT
just in Napster is expected to name a new chief executive as early as Tuesday, according to sources close to the company, bringing current CEO Hank Barry's tumultuous term to a close.
A Napster representative refused to comment on the impending executive switch, which has been expected for some time. Neither Barry nor his replacement, whose identity was not immediately clear, could be reached for comment late Monday.
Barry joined Napster as "interim" head of the company 13 months ago, when venture capitalist firm Hummer Winblad invested $15 million in the burgeoning file-swapping firm. In that time, the company became one of the most familiar names on the Internet and the standard-bearer of what many saw as a digital revolution--and ultimately the most visible symbol of that revolution's decline.
As a venture capitalist looking to create a profitable company, Barry himself was something of an accidental revolutionary. From his first moments in the company, he began appointing other executives with experience in the record business, hoping to build bridges to the recording industry.
But with a lawsuit threatening to put Napster out of business--and render Hummer Winblad's investment worthless--Barry quickly became one of the most prominent public defenders of the legal rights of file-swappers online. Although that position has been consistently battered in the courts, his defense has helped set the terms of debate for a whole generation of companies online.
"He has helped advance the thoughts of what copyrights mean in the digital age," said P.J. McNealy, an analyst with Internet research firm GartnerG2.
Barry's appointment marked the beginning of a second age at Napster, in which it was consistently torn between the demands of a growing fan base seeking unrestricted access to music, and the need to make money.
Under Barry's predecessor, Eileen Richardson, Napster had made little progress in building bridges with the recording industry or articulating a stable business plan, although the company already had attracted millions of users. Early court documents noted few successful attempts at finding revenue sources, such as striking an affiliate agreement with Amazon.com, although the need for funds was clear.
As an entertainment lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Barry had previously served as counsel to Disney, A&M Records and Liquid Audio, among others. That gave him a better pipeline to the established record companies that were suing Napster than previous executives had held.
But initially, that led only to fruitless talks as the record industry's lawsuit against Napster gained ground. Indeed, attorney David Boies, who the company brought on board to defend the company in court not long after Barry's appointment, became as familiar a voice in the press as Barry himself.
Indeed, some former employees of the company have said that Barry and Hummer Winblad entered the game with too much confidence.
On a panel at the MP3.com summit earlier this month, former Napster marketing executive Liz Brooks joked that Napster should have been renamed "roadkill, or Hummerwinbladded. But I guess they're the same thing."
"Hummer Winblad was completely under the impression Napster would win the lawsuit," and so saw little reason to build immediate bridges to the record industry, Brooks said.
Barry's present and former peers in the industry say the job has been grueling. One current executive privately called Barry's position "the least fun" job in the industry.
"Hank fought the good fight, but the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is a tough opponent," said Travis Kalnick, the former CEO of Scour, another file-trading company sued by the recording industry. "They not only destroy the enemy, but they scorch the earth where the battlefield took place."
The search for a new CEO has been ongoing since well before the beginning of 2001, sources have said.
But with a company whose future has been in increasing doubt in that time, progress in lining up a replacement has been slow. Making matters worse has been that Barry himself was personally named in one of the lawsuits charging Napster with copyright violations, although a federal judge was critical of the legal arguments.
Despite the company's problems, Barry successfully wooed German media giant Bertelsmann AG as an ally, surprising many in the music industry. With Bertelsmann's help, Napster still plans to launch a legal subscription service that offers people paid access to as much major label and independent music as possible. That service is slated to launch later this summer.
The company's progressive moves toward the record companies--even if reluctant--have come at the expense of its users' loyalty. Recent studies from Jupiter Media Metrix and Nielsen NetRatings show a sharp decline in usage recently, as the company has taken ever more draconian steps to filter out works contested in lawsuits.
The service has been shut down since the beginning of the month, as the company works to streamline the latest version of its file-filtering system. Even when it has been operating lately, it has carried only a tiny fraction of the songs that made the Napster legend
Siemens offers mobile music in a flash
By Ben Charny
Special to CNET News.com
July 23, 2001, 5:25 p.m. PT
No. 3 handset maker Siemens on Monday started selling a device designed to quickly load music or text files into mobile phones via flash memory cards.
Siemens, a German electronics giant, has built a phone that doubles as an MP3 player. But instead of storing the music on the phone, which has very sparse memory, the music is kept on a flash memory card that is popped into the phone like a floppy disk is popped into a personal computer.
These cards, which provide removable storage for many devices, can store up to 45 minutes of music, but can take several minutes to prepare.
Using current methods, owners of these high-end handsets must connect their phones to a computer to transfer data, even if their phone has a flash memory card. But Siemens announced Monday that it will market a device built by Fremont, Calif.-based SCM Microsystems capable of loading the data onto these flash memory cards up to 20 times faster.
The announcement is another sign of the growing complexity of cell phones, as service providers have begun combining cell phones with other devices, including personal digital assistants, MP3 players or cameras. The more that cell phones are capable of, carriers believe, the more money they will make.
But analysts warn there are inherent dangers in packing too much technology onto a small device like a cell phone. The result has not been very positive so far. Software glitches in handsets have forced the delay in launching many of the high-speed phone networks meant to deliver the next generation of faster wireless telephone and Internet service.
With Monday's announcement Siemens moves further into an area that could be precarious, according to analysts, choosing to stake its claim in the market for phones that are capable of playing digital music. Recently, activity among the 40 million-plus users of digital music-swapping giant Napster has diminished substantially.
But Siemens and its partners remain upbeat.
"People are still pretty interested in getting whatever music they can over the Internet," said SCM Microsystems spokeswoman Darby Dye. "It is still an active market."
There is a market for music on cell phones, with nearly 75 percent of college students involved in a survey telling digital music industry watchers Webnoize that they'd pay extra for the right to download music onto their phones.
But with that technology still years away, Siemens may be playing it smart to try and offer a better way to make the current music loading methods more palatable, said Matt Bailey, senior analyst for Webnoize.
"It may really be more than a year before a majority of consumers can afford to download music," he said. "In the meantime, there is a large demand for getting music on cell phones."
Great find Pam..A key feature of portable MP3 players is the increasing memory that allows hundreds of musical tracks to be stored and played back.
Manually navigating through such a large number of audio selections using a small liquid crystal display (LCD) will prove tedious and
unsatisfactory to most users. With Bell Labs' voice recognition software, users of portable MP3 players would have the option of
selecting their favorite artist and musical track from an intuitive, highly accurate voice driven menu. The voice driven menu would be
setup with jukebox or audio manager PC software allowing users to efficiently customize keywords for main menu headings and
subheadings according to individual preferences.
During the setup of the voice driven menu, the jukebox or audio manager software can exploit the ID3 tag information to make the
process of entering artist and track names a simple "point and click" process for the consumer. In addition, as the various information is
entered into the voice driven menu by the user, the jukebox or audio manager software can automatically run the linguistic module of
Bell Labs' distributed Text-to-Speech (TTS) software to convert the information into speech prompts as described further below. Of
course, Bell Labs' voice recognition software can also be used to control other player functions, such as tone or equalization settings,
pause, replay, skip a track, etc., if so desired.
A significant feature of Bell Labs' distributed TTS software is that it enables appropriately processed ID3 tag (or, optionally, user
supplied) information to be converted into speech, thus giving the MP3 player a "voice" that can prompt the user by naming artists or
song titles from various categories.
This would work as follows:
The standard ID3 tag (or optional user supplied) information entered into the voice driven menu is processed by the linguistic
processing module of Bell Labs' TTS software which is an application that runs under the jukebox or audio manager PC software. This
converts the ID3 tag information into compact phonetic information-a "phonetic ID3 tag"-that is included with the standard ID3 tag
information of each MP3 file. After the MP3 files and tag information are transferred to the player, the synthesis portion of the TTS
software runs on the player's DSP and converts the ID3 phonetic information of the particular track into speech that the user would
hear over the headphones.
Voice Interaction Samples
Sample Dialog 1:
MP3 Player: "Name the artist or band or music type"
User: "Sting"
MP3 Player: "CD or song?"
User: "Song"
MP3 Player: "Which song?"
User: "Every Breath You Take"
[MP3 Player starts playing a song "Every Breath You Take" by Sting]
Sample Dialog 2:
MP3 Player: "Name the artist or band or music type"
User: "Celine Dion"
MP3 Player: "CD or song?"
User: "CD"
MP3 Player: "Which CD?"
User: "What are my choices?"
MP3 Player: "Your choices are: "Falling Into You", "Let's Talk About Love", "The Color of My Love" …
User: "Let's Talk About Love"
[MP3 Player starts playing a track from "Let's Talk About Love" CD by Celine Dion]
User: "Next Song"
[MP3 Player starts playing the next song from the CD]
Contact Information For more information, contact the Lucent Technologies Intellectual Property Business/Software Solutions Group
at 1-800-462-8146 or 1-610-992-1577 or send e-mail to mobilemedia@lucent.com, or visit www.lucentssg.com.
Platinum Acquires Two Managed Care Information Technology Organizations
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 23, 2001--
Acquisition of AMISYS 3000 and Pathways Managed Care Products From McKessonHBOC Completed in
Less Than 45 Days
Platinum Equity, LLC ("Platinum"), a private equity firm specializing in the acquisition and operation of
global, mission-critical technology companies, has acquired the AMISYS(R) 3000 and Pathways Managed
Care(TM) product groups from the Information Technology Business of McKesson HBOC, Inc.
AMISYS 3000 is a comprehensive solution that meets the information management needs of payor-based
organizations that have assumed financial risk for the delivery of health care services. Pathways Managed
Care is an information management solution that targets provider-based managed care organizations and
provides easy-to-use solutions for organizations that manage less than 250,000 people.
Platinum will combine these two product groups and create a new, independent company named AMISYS,
LLC. This most recent acquisition enables Platinum to diversify and grow its portfolio of health care technology
businesses.
Platinum already owns Synertech Health System Solutions, LLC ("Synertech"), which is a premier
application services provider (ASP) and administrative outsourcer to the health care payer industry, based in
Harrisburg, PA. Working in tandem, AMISYS, LLC and Synertech(R) will strengthen Platinum's position and
offering in the managed care technology and outsourcing market.
"Our plan is to leverage the strengths of both Synertech and AMISYS, LLC to provide complementary
solutions to health plans," said Tom T. Gores, Platinum President and CEO. "AMISYS has loyal customers and
employees and Platinum will apply its customer-focused philosophy to AMISYS to ensure continued customer
and employee satisfaction," Gores said.
Steve Rock, Senior Vice President of Health Care Operations for Platinum and CEO of Synertech will
oversee and lead AMISYS, LLC.
"Our plan is to have Synertech and AMISYS, LLC work strategically together to take advantage of the
synergies that exist between them," said Rock. "We will use our collective expertise to strengthen each
company's presence in the health care market and provide better support and service solutions to customers,
ultimately helping them meet their business goals. It's definitely a win-win scenario and a natural fit for all
involved."
"We are pleased that Platinum is committed to developing new value for AMISYS, LLC," said John
Nunnelly, McKessonHBOC Group President, financial and administrative solutions. "This acquisition allows
McKessonHBOC to focus on our core technology businesses while enabling Platinum to maximize the product
groups' potential in the managed care administrative market."
Platinum was able to close the acquisition in less than 45 days following the definitive agreement
announcement. The acquisition marks Platinum's fifth transaction for 2001 and AMISYS, LLC becomes the
20th company in the portfolio of technology entities.
This newest company will have more than 200 employees, operate as a stand-alone entity and maintain
locations in Rockville, MD, Atlanta, GA, and Dubuque, IA.
Platinum Equity, LLC
Platinum (www.peh.com) is one of the largest and fastest-growing, private equity firms in the United States,
specializing in the acquisition and operation of global, mission-critical technology companies. The Los
Angeles-based company is recognized as a hybrid financial and strategic buyer with deep financial resources
and broad operational expertise.
With a highly skilled executive management team, Platinum is able to drive enhanced value of their portfolio
companies. Since the company's founding in 1995, Platinum has completed more than 30 transactions of
global, mission-critical companies with leading Fortune 500 Corporations including WorldCom, AT&T, Viacom,
Dow Jones & Company and IBM.
Today, Platinum has a multi-billion dollar revenue base, an established infrastructure in North America,
Europe, Asia and South America and a workforce of more than 10,000 employees serving tens of thousands
of customers throughout the world.
Synertech Health System Solutions, LLC
Synertech (www.synertechsystems.com), incorporated in 1986, is a premier application services provider
(ASP) and administrative outsourcer to the health care payer industry. Synertech offers application hosting;
scanning and imaging services; claims and administrative processing; and consulting and implementation
services.
Synertech supports a multi-million-membership base through its outsourcing, application services and
system maintenance customers that do business in the commercial, Medicaid and Medicare markets,
including new delivery models such as defined contribution plans. Synertech, which is a Microsoft Certified
Partner, has offices in Harrisburg, PA, and Bloomington, MN. It is owned by Platinum.
--30--AD/ph*
CONTACT: Platinum Equity, LLC, Los Angeles
Alanna Chaffin, 310/712-1850
achaffin@peh.com
or
Bill Kobel, 717/877-5778
wkobel@peh.com
Thanks for that reminder Nobucks1.oems
Toshiba Digital Audio Player
18 Jul 2001 04:57 GMT
TOSHIBA UNVEILS ITS NEWEST ULTRA-PORTABLE DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYER, THE MEA210
Toshiba, a prime developer of SD memory card technology, is demonstrating its commitment to this breakthrough digital audio medium with the introduction of its newest ultra-portable Digital Audio Player, the MEA210.
Noted Tony Ikeda, Toshiba's Assistant Vice President, Portable Digital Products: "Thanks to its secure digital memory and unsurpassed convenience, SD memory card technology is truly the format of the future for high-quality portable music enjoyment. Many music companies have announced business plans to deliver music online, and as a co-developer and supporter of SD technology, Toshiba is committed to providing consumers with products like the MEA210 that offer the best and most convenient way to take advantage of such media."
Ultra-Thin For "Go-Anywhere" Music Enjoyment
The stylish metallic silver MEA210, which uses SD memory card technology to provide 32MB of internal Flash memory, measure just 2" x 2" x ½,' easily fitting into a shirt or coat-jacket pocket. It allows consumers to record and play back 40 minutes of 96 kbps, rights-protected AAC-encoded digital audio. With a single battery charge, the MEA210 offers users a full five hours of audio playback. A built-in SD memory card slot allows the potential for an additional 80 minutes of digital audio playback (with a 64MB SD card). Weighing just 1.5 ounces without battery, the SDMI compliant MEA210 is compatible with AAC and MP3 formats.
The MEA210 connects to Windows 98-based PCs and laptops via a USB interface. The supplied music management software, Toshiba Audio Manager Version 2.0, makes it fast and easy to download favorite tunes and organize music into play lists. A high-contrast LCD window displays title information, as well as operating mode status.
The MEA210 comes equipped with stereo headphones, one AAA alkaline battery, a USB cable and Toshiba Audio Manager 2.0 application software. The MEA210 carries a suggested retail price of $249 and is currently available.
IBM can save your life
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted 9:44am EST Fri Jul 20 2001
NEWS
Two IBM scientists are working on an "artificial passenger" that will keep you from falling asleep behind the wheel of a car. Drs. Wlodek Wlodzimierz Zadrozny and Dimitri Kanevsky of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab patented an idea for a software-based conversation planner to be run out of a modified dashboard control system. The software asks you questions, analyzes your responses, then chooses a method of making you more alert--all to keep you awake when you're driving. In the U.K. alone, estimates show that 30% of motor vehicle accidents can be attributed to drowsy drivers.
The Artificial Passenger (AP) is based on a detailed profile of a driver, with information such as what job you have and what things you're interested in. Using the car's stereo system, the AP can ask questions like, "Who was the first person you dated?" Your answer is recorded and speech-recognized, and a camera watches your lips to improve the system's speech recognition. Your answer is then voice analyzed for slow responses and lack of intonation compared to your normal profile. If you're judged alert, the questions continue along the same line; if you're judged drowsy, the AP can tell you jokes (e.g., "The stock market just fell 500 points! Oh, I am sorry, I was joking," one of the sample jokes from the patent filing), change your radio station, open your window, sound a buzzer, or even spray you with cold water. While the scientists' humor needs a bit of work, Kanevsky did say that a bad joke (i.e., one that gets no response from the driver) could be communicated via the Internet to other APs, which could then pull the joke from their repertoire.
IBM is reportedly talking to automakers about using the AP system, and Dr. Zadrozny thinks it could be done in three to 5 years.
For more information, please see New Scientist or the BBC News Online article.
SAM'S OPINION
If you've ever had a long drive by yourself at night, you can appreciate what a useful thing this AP would be. As mentioned in the New Scientist article, opening a window or getting sprayed in the face with cold water aren't the best way to make a driver more alert, but the combination of questions and all the other actions could be very effective, at least in getting the sleepy driver to pull over to the side for a quick nap or a walk or a cup of coffee.
You may have seen the magazine ads for the little buzzer thingy you can clip behind your ear that buzzes on a regular basis. I never thought that would really be effective, since you'd just get used to the little noise and keep turning it off, like we do with snooze alarms. But a computer that's changing your radio station, rolling down your window, telling you awful jokes, asking you questions, then spraying you in the face sounds pretty good--even if you're just bored :)
And this AP is not a pipe dream. Besides coming out of the IBM Research Lab and being patented by two PhDs, Doctor Zadrozny (the New Scientist article has him listed as "Dr. Wlodzimierz," though that name doesn't appear on IBM's Thomas J. Watson website; the BBC's "Dr. Zadrozny" does show up) works on IBM's Conversational Machines project and has many patents and many years of experience working on "dialog systems, theories of context, and business applications of intelligent technologies." Dr. Kanevsky (no bio on the site) has two recent patents for an "apparatus and method for forming a filtered inflected language model for automatic speech recognition" and a "system and method for compressing data in a communication channel utilizing time encoding." With these two guys and IBM's backing, it wouldn't surprise me to see Artificial Passengers in Cadillacs and such sometime before 2005.
Of course, I get a bit worried about a computer program opening my car windows and spraying me in the face with water, but I guess if I got angry enough I'd be awake enough to pull over. If the thing was messing up and spraying me even though I was fully awake, that would be a different story; however, I wouldn't want an off switch because then I could just turn it off and crash if I were sleeping at the wheel. I guess I'd rather take the chance that the AP might malfunction than not having it at all and driving my car off a bridge or into someone else.
MP3.com Goes Major Labels League
By Brad King
2:00 a.m. July 20, 2001 PDT
The digital music revolution ended on Thursday. It died, at least symbolically, when MP3.com agreed to work with two of the five major record labels to deliver songs using the Internet.
The partnership with Sony and Vivendi Universal marked a stark change from the scene that took place on March 16, 1999, the last day of the South by Southwest Music Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. On that day, Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3.com, sat and watched the revolution begin to come together.
One after another, tattooed freaks and straight-laced sorority sisters -– together in a room for probably the first time since high school English class –- rose from their seats screaming. They were voicing anger in the direction of Paula Batson, then of digital security company a2b Music, who had the audacity to defend copy protection for music files.
The moderator looked frazzled, unsure how to rein in what was quickly becoming as near to riot-like conditions as you will see at a conference. Decorum had vanished.
Andy Flynn, who books the panels for the SXSW conference, recalled a punky Robertson.
"Michael was in full-on revolutionary-defiance-of-the-major-labels mode," Flynn wrote in an e-mail.
In the months after the conference, Batson secured a new job at the digital locker service, Myplay.com. Meanwhile, Robertson –- then a relatively unknown figure to the digital music masses -- became the poster child for MP3s, the compressed computer files that people can download to listen to music on their PCs.
He was the de facto leader of the digital music revolution that would change the way consumers bought and listened to songs.
Even as Robertson's star was rising, though, Flynn had a nagging thought racing around in his head.
"My overall reaction was one of admiration of Michael for taking on hostility from many fronts with aplomb," Flynn wrote. "I was also thinking that he'd eventually get crushed or co-opted in some way."
On Thursday, Flynn's gut feeling came true in a very real way. MP3.com announced it would run the back-end services for Pressplay, a digital music subscription service owned by Vivendi Universal and Sony -– both of which own their own major labels. The service will be distributed through Yahoo, the MSN network and now through MP3.com as well.
The new subscription system will also eschew the MP3 format and use Microsoft's Windows Media and Sony's ATRAC3 to deliver music. At half the file size, the Microsoft codec provides a better downloading experience for users. However, it comes with digital rights management attached -- something Robertson had long fought against.
Analysts have been expecting this move, since the French media conglomerate Vivendi Universal is in the process of purchasing the MP3.com for nearly $400 million.
Until Thursday, nobody was quite sure how Pressplay was going to be ready to launch by the end of the summer.
"We had a working version of the service ready to roll out, but the opportunity came to work with MP3.com," said Andy Schuon, CEO and president of Pressplay. "Theoretically, all of the technology we had built should have worked, but we know that what MP3.com does already works."
MP3.com's engineering team will also allow Pressplay to implement changes in the subscription system on the fly, since they've spent several years building up their infrastructure, which stores and delivers hundreds of thousands of songs.
The standard Pressplay system will be offered to any affiliate site. That system will allow the affiliates to offer streaming music from both the Sony and Universal Music labels. The problem, of course, is figuring out what music will be available.
Quick, would Pearl Jam or the Foo Fighters be available on Pressplay?
If you signed up for Pressplay, you can expect to hear Sony's Pearl Jam, but don't count on hearing BMG's Foo Fighters. Sony and Universal are just two of the five major labels.
But to sidestep the lack of music, the Pressplay affiliates –- MP3.com, Yahoo and MSN –- will be allowed to customize the services, although Sony and Vivendi have ultimate control over what types of new services can be added to the subscription service.
Of course, these services still have to deal with the "Napster problem," despite the fact that the free file-trading service has been shuttered indefinitely.
Other music-swapping services have cropped up, including Fasttrack, the technology that powers both Kazaa and Music City.
Unlike Napster, Fasttrack doesn't offer a centralized, digital card catalog of music that can easily be shut down. Instead, the new file-trading services operate on decentralized networks, where each computer on the network operates as its own catalog. So to shut down a decentralized network, each individual user would have to be shut down.
Needless to say, that's very hard to do.
Fasttrack averages 300,000 simultaneous users who are trading 370 million files, according to a Webnoize report, which ironically means that Robertson and his MP3.com team have joined the mainstream just in time to fight the new poster children for the digital music revolution: file-trading networks.
This revolution will be much quieter, though.
"Watching the webcasts of the MP3.com Summit (Robertson's yearly music conference) last week reminded me of how toned down the rhetoric has become," said SXSW's Flynn. "Now it's a matter of business survival with only vestiges of the David vs. Goliath struggle remaining."
ot TVT Records Ceo Steve Gottlieb Joins Musicmatch Board Of Directors
Career Announcements:
- Petra Mikutta Named Vice President, Corporate Communications, BMG Entertainment
- Steven Feline Named Senior Director, Finance, BMG Entertainment
- Orban/CRL Announces Promotions Of Senior Management
SAN DIEGO - July 16, 2001 - MUSICMATCH, Inc., a recognized leader in providing personalized music software and services and inventor of the world's first digital music jukebox, today announced the appointment of Steve Gottlieb, founder, CEO and president of TVT Records, to its board of directors. Gottlieb will provide MUSICMATCH with insight and strategic counsel on the current and future suite of music services for MUSICMATCH customers worldwide.
As an avid music lover and entrepreneur behind the largest independently owned record label in the United States, Gottlieb brings an insider's view of the music industry and credibility as a pioneer in music marketing and development to MUSICMATCH.
"Steve will compliment our team with world-class expertise on music marketing and a clear vision of how technology can bring efficiencies to the music industry," said Dennis Mudd, president and CEO of MUSICMATCH. "Our success is based on understanding how people like to listen to music and giving them a way to experience music in new ways, and Steve will be a valuable advisor as we further develop our music services and business."
Steve Gottlieb, 43, holds degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School and combined his legal acumen and passion for pop culture to assemble America's best loved TV show themes in the successful "Television's Greatest Hits" album series. The series success provided him with the capital and confidence to launch TVT as a full-fledged independent record label. Today, TVT is home to such popular artists as Sevendust, Snoop Dogg & the Eastsidaz, XTC, Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz and Guided by Voices. On the Internet, TVT has led the industry, being the first significant label to offer its entire catalog of music for downloading online and the first independent label to take a stand against online piracy.
"MUSICMATCH has conclusively demonstrated that it is possible to deliver a user-friendly digital music experience with a compelling consumer value proposition," said Steve Gottlieb. "I am pleased to join their Board and look forward to contributing both a music industry and content owner perspective to MUSICMATCH's continued growth."
MUSICMATCH will build on its recently released music service, MUSICMATCH® Radio MX™, to integrate new content and services from both major and independent labels alike. MUSICMATCH will use the Radio MX infrastructure to add true on-demand music selections to Radio MX by the end of the year, and Gottlieb's extensive knowledge and background in the music industry will play a key role in helping MUSICMATCH reach music fans in new ways with high-quality music services.
Gottlieb joins the MUSICMATCH board of directors, which includes Dennis Mudd, who serves as chairman, Al Arras of Thomson multimedia, Peter Gotcher of Redpoint Ventures, and Brett Bullington, former executive vice president of Excite@Home.
Nice find Danl.eom
Battle heats up for Internet-ready car
By Charles J. Murray
EE Times
(07/20/01, 2:31 p.m. EST)
PARK RIDGE, Ill. — The OnStar Division of General Motors again raised the ante in the automotive Internet game late this week, announcing an agreement with the Walt Disney Internet Group to bring ESPN.com, Disney.com, and ABCNews.com to its subscribers. OnStar will deliver the Web content to drivers using the text-to-speech capabilities of its Virtual Advisor, a telematics service that was introduced in 2000.
The announcement is OnStar's second in a week. Previously it said it expects to be the first to offer real-time traffic and road-condition reports.
Both announcements follow on the heels of recent news that Oracle Corp. has formed an alliance with telematics company Wingcast, a joint venture of Ford Motor Co. and Qualcomm Inc. The strategic alliance is aimed at jointly developing and marketing next-generation telematics services. Wingcast plans to launch its services in 2003 models on Ford Motor Co. and Nissan vehicle lines.
The alliance is clearly aimed at unseating OnStar, which has been the leader in automotive telematics services since its inception in 1996.
"We think that the best wireless telematics technology will come from the Wingcast and Oracle coalition," said Larry Ellison, chairman and chief executive of Oracle Corp. "That's where we're placing our bet."
The competition: Controller Secures Music Distribution
Security issues concerning MP3 compressed music files are highly controversial in the
entertainment industries. The new Zenon audio controller family from Micronas AG of
Germany, however, is designed to address these issues.
"Zenon is the first programmable universal controller on the market to address the latest
security requirements for electronic music distribution," claims Hubertus von Janecek,
marketing manager for Advanced Audio at Micronas. "The highly secure
microcontroller, built around an ARM7TDMI 16/32-bit microprocessor core,
supplements the MASF product family of audio processors."
Scheduled for volume production in August 2001, the Zenon microcontroller is mainly
designed for digital audio players supporting digital rights management (DRM) and/or
secure media.
On-Chip Flash
Security sensitive data has, up until now, been stored on external memories, making
security codes vulnerable to reverse engineering. "We have addressed this security
issue with an on-chip Flash memory, allowing Micronas to offer a higher level of data
protection," says von Janecek. "All system resources are controlled by an on-chip
system protection unit, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data, such as the
device-ID, PIN-numbers, personal data, passwords or algorithms.
"Additionally, all debug interfaces can be disabled, which protects the device against
sophisticated attacks. Such robust protection will also be required for PayTV,
e-commerce devices, set-top boxes, healthcare systems and PDAs. It is impossible to
reverse engineer these devices."
The 256-Kbyte on-chip Flash memory is large enough to handle multiple digital rights
management. Zenon also incorporates the Thumb 16-bit instruction set, which offers
good code density for better use of limited memory size.
An integrated, fully programmable universal serial bus (USB) interface supports other
important security aspects on the device side. It enables the integrated circuit (IC) to
work with different proprietary protocols, such as Liquid Audio and Intertrust, and allows
virtually any DRM solution to be used for the secure exchange of music files.
Zenon has 48 (+8) Kbytes of SRAM, in addition to the embedded Flash memory, and a
system protection unit (SPU) which secures peripheral connections. As the chip
architecture does not offer memory extension, there is not possible to eavesdrop on the
data traffic on the internal bus. All processor operations work with the internal SRAM
and the embedded Flash memory only.
Manufacturers of digital audio players can, because of the Flash memory, develop
software even when the device has already gone into production. It is also possible to
change software securely in the field, even after the product has been shipped; for
example, by upgrading via the Internet.
Zenon, MASF
The Zenon processor can be connected directly to external Flash memory, such as an
SD-Card or MultiMediaCard, and to mass storage devices, such as hard disk drives or
CD-ROM drives. The two-chip Zenon/MASF solution enables audio player
manufacturers to build up an MP3 recording and playback device by adding only
content storage.
"A secure MP3 recorder system based on the Zenon and the MASF will cost less than
US$18, which is highly competitive compared to existing solutions that use an
off-the-shelf standard controller and DSP," says von Janecek. Audio data transmitted
between Zenon and MASF can only be encrypted if an SD-Card is used. Micronas
intends, however, to integrate Zenon and MASF into a single package by the end of
this year.
by Alfred Vollmer
(July 2001 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
House Approves More Cash to Fight Online Piracy
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved
an appropriations bill that gives the government an
additional $2.9 million per year to fight Internet
piracy. The money will be used to pay for an
additional 18 attorneys to track and prosecute
digital piracy under the No Electronic Theft Act of
1997, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), said in a
statement. The funding increase still requires
approval from the Senate, according to a
spokeswoman for Goodlatte, who authored the bill.
To date Congress has funded this antipiracy effort
to the tune of $6.9 million; the money is used to
investigate intellectual property crimes including
software counterfeiting. Two years ago Jeffrey
Gerard Levy of Eugene, Ore., became the first
person to be prosecuted under the act, after
pleading guilty to using the Internet to distribute
pirated music, software and games. Levy received
two years of probation. According to the
International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry, global piracy (both online and off-line) cost
music companies $4.2 billion last year.
Liquid Audio Releasing New Music Player Monday
Liquid Audio plans Monday to release the latest
version of its music player software, Liquid Player
6.0. The app's new features let users burn music to
CDs, rip CDs into music files and access album art
and other metadata. The new player incorporates a
download manager that lets users queue music
files, and resume downloading files should a
connection to the Internet fail. It also includes
support for the MP3, WAV and Windows Media
audio formats and language support for French,
German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish-speaking
users. A more sophisticated, $20 version of the new
player will burn CDs four times faster than the free
version. It's unclear how many Liquid Audio players
are in the market; RealNetworks and Microsoft each
have distributed tens of millions of their players to
consumers. Two months ago Liquid Audio cut 40%
of its staff and jettisoned a number of "non-core"
businesses, sparking speculation that the company
was preparing to be acquired.
Emerging Technologies, Reemerging Brands
By Steve Smith
TWICE
7/23/2001
Just by coincidence TWICE selected this issue, just about in the middle of summer, to review much of the emerging technology that has entered, or will soon be entering, the marketplace. When we set our editorial calendar, lo those many months ago, there was no way we could predict what the news of this week would be.
There is a common thread in the news from four leading manufacturers – Thomson, Zenith, Pioneer and Samsung — who are all repositioning their brands to consumers, in one way or another. Take a look at the lineup:
Thomson is dropping ProScan to pick up the Scenium brand from Europe. (While the demise of the decade-old ProScan brand does not have the historical impact of the departure of Philco, GTE or others, it is a major step.)
Zenith took the wraps off its first major consumer advertising campaign in decades, hoping to prove in a short time that with its new digital lineup, its "not your grandfather's Zenith anymore," according to one eager company executive.
Pioneer has changed its company credo to "sound.vision.soul" in order to reestablish with consumers worldwide the strengths of the company.
And Samsung has signed a marketing/technology deal with AOL Time Warner, in which Samsung gets plenty of visibility in the conglomerate's print, Web and television properties.
Sure these companies would probably have found the need to change the way they were perceived by consumers, but there is much more at work here than that. The emerging technologies that have entered the marketplace in the last few years, and will continue to enter for the foreseeable future, are forcing their hands.
The digital revolution that the industry has been undergoing is very wide and very deep, in terms of the amount of changes it has made and is making to existing consumer electronics categories. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the technology changes were, in comparable terms, few: 19-inch sets were "big screen," VHS fought Beta, CD fought vinyl LPs, and so on. What digital technology has done is change all of the industry's categories almost all at once.
This revolution has also helped introduce a wide variety of new product categories that we could have only dreamed about 10 or 20 years ago.
Change, initially to some, brings fear. Upon reflection, it generates opportunity. In the case of consumer electronics, the emerging technologies it is creating is also generating plenty of opportunities. The leaders of the analog industry have had to change their products and their approach to the market to keep up with the times. But the greatest opportunity is for those manufacturers who did not have a top market share in the analog world. If they make the correct changes in strategy, they possibly could leap-frog well-entrenched industry leaders.
P.S. – This phenomenon does not exclude consumer electronics retailers as you can well imagine. Retailers have had, and will have to continue to, change their approach and their image to the public, so they will be perceived as the place to shop for all of these new "high-tech" products that willreach retail shelves and Web sites.
A Chinese philosopher once said, "May you live in interesting times." Well, for the foreseeable future, anyone making a living in the consumer electronics business will experience interesting times. Or as that athlete/philosopher Yogi Berra once said in describing a dining establishment's popularity (a saying that for many has become a metaphor of the incongruities of modern life): "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
MP3-CD Spreading Through Thomson's Audio Product Lineup
By Joseph Palenchar
TWICE
7/23/2001
NEW YORK— MP3-CD playback is spreading through Thomson's audio selection, marking the company's first year of MP3-CD product availability.
The feature, which turned up earlier this year in a headphone CD player and a five-disc shelf system, will be extended later this year to a second shelf system, a second headphone portable, a CD boombox, a DVD-receiver-based home-theater-in-a-box system, and a five-disc carousel CD changer.
Shipments of the company's first two MP3-CD products, the headphone portable and shelf system, were originally targeted for late last year.
MP3 is also taking a higher profile in other RCA product segments. MP3 playback is included in six DVD players, up from last year's one, and in the three-in-one X-cam, which combines an MP3 player, digital still camera and full-motion video-clip recorder with audio recording.
During a press conference here, the company also said it plans next year to extend its new RCA Scenium series name to select audio categories. The Scenium name, already used on Thomson-brand products in Europe, will be reserved for the company's most advanced products in the United States. This year, Scenium is reserved for five top-end HDTVs. Next year it will be extended to other video products and to broadband products.
"Scenium won't be used in all our audio categories," said worldwide audio VP Mark Redmond. "We're looking at home-theater-in-a-box and possibly separate components." Dealer requirements for carrying the series will be more stringent. When asked, Redmond agreed that Scenium "could take us into new distribution, perhaps the CEDIA channel, depending on the product." The GE name will continue to be used on clock radios and kitchen products.
The first Scenium-designated audio products, he said, could include the company's set-top Digital Media Manager, whose launch has been delayed again, this time until early 2002 from the third quarter of 2001. At a suggested retail price that will be $999 or less, Digital Media Manager will stream audio from Web sites via Radio Free Virgin's streaming service, use an internal hard drive to store MP3 songs ripped via an internal CD/DVD drive, and manage A/V content through an onscreen menu. The menu will display Gemstar's TV Electronic Program Guide, streaming audio sites, local AM and FM stations, titles of songs stored on the hard drive and in 1394-connected DVD/CD changers, and DVDs stored in those changers.
In other developments, the company said:
It plans no DVD-Audio products in 2001. The company is still trying to come up with the "right cost solution" that delivers a "quality" audible benefit, Redmond said.
Its first mp3PRO-equipped headphone portable, the Lyra III, won't be available until early next year. Development of the mp3PRO codec is still underway.
It is "pretty sure" the Lyra I and II won't be upgradable to mp3PRO, despite their programmable processors, because of the lack of enough embedded RAM (see July 9, page 32). The company is "pretty sure" the Kazoo portable will be upgradable, Redmond said.
It plans later this year to ship an upgraded Kazoo MP3 player, which will get 64MB of on-board memory compared to the current model's 32MB. Its MAP will be $149, and the current model's MAP will drop to $129 from $149 in time for back-to-school promotions.
The company's new MP3-CD-equipped audio products include:
RCA's first DVD-receiver-equipped HTiB, the $499-suggested RTDVD1, due in November. A DVD-receiver-equipped HTiB intended to ship last year was cancelled.
The RCD118 boombox, due in the fall at a suggested $129 with memory buffer, digital tuner, remote, multiline LCD display and support for multiple compression rates.
The RP8079 five-disc carousel CD changer, due in the fall at a suggested $199 with CD Text and disc titling.
RS2533 shelf system with five-disc changer, biamplification and digital tuner at a suggested $199 when it ships in the fall. It joins the higher power $399-suggested five-disc RS2538, whose shipment was delayed from late 2000 to January 2001. Both feature five-disc changer and CD-R/RW compatibility. was cancelled.
The RCD118 boombox, due in the fall at a suggested $129 with memory buffer, digital tuner, remote, multiline LCD display and support for multiple compression rates.
The RP8079 five-disc carousel CD changer, due in the fall at a suggested $199 with CD Text and disc titling.
RS2533 shelf system with five-disc changer, biamplification and digital tuner at a suggested $199 when it ships in the fall. It joins the higher power $399-suggested five-disc RS2538, whose shipment was delayed from late 2000 to January 2001. Both feature five-disc changer and CD-R/RW compatibility.
the RP2415 headphone CD with car kit at a suggested $149, due later in the year. It joins the $149-suggested RP2410.
Other MP3 products include the X-cam, available in the fall with a suggested $249, and the $699-suggested portable DVD player, available in Target and Wal-Mart stores.
DVD players featuring MP3-CD playback include the RC5915P five-disc changer at a suggested $349, due in the fall, and the RC5240 at a suggested $269. It's currently available.
Flash Memory Market Muddled With Various Formats
Special Report: Emerging Technologies
By Doug Olenick
TWICE
7/23/2001
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What started out as a battle between CompactFlash and SmartMedia for dominance in the removable flash memory card market has broadened to include a host of new, non-compatible formats with none expected to become dominant in the near future.
Manufacturers have rolled out a slew of new formats in the past two years, including Sony's Memory Stick, Secure Digital (SD), and Multimedia Cards (MMC). This competition has proven to be both a positive and a negative for the industry. On the plus side, prices for all types of flash memory cards have dropped precipitously in the past year. The negative aspect is these cards are not cross-compatible, which makes it hard on consumers.
This situation is unlikely to change any time soon, but the overwhelming opinion in the industry is that some type of consolidation is needed and will take place.
"I would have to think that eventually one of the technologies will have to win," said Brad Miller, Kingston Technology, non-volatile memory manager, although he would not speculate which might disappear or survive.
Kingston produces and markets CompactFlash, SmartMedia and MMC cards.
Jack Peterson, vice president of corporate business development at Lexar Media, said, "The five media formats confuse the market and the consumer. What we need is a cross-platform solution."
A true cross-platform solution does not appear to be in the works, but several of the most prominent flash card makers have worked on joint projects. Toshiba, Matsushita and SanDisk codeveloped the newly released SD card, while still pushing their own cards.
Sony has become the odd company out with its Memory Stick. Not only does the gum-stick shaped Memory Stick eschew the other card's square shape, Sony is keeping the technology proprietary and requires other firms to pay a hefty fee to license the technology. However, this has not stopped Sony from grabbing a large chunk of the flash market.
Mark Viken, Sony's vice president for IT products, claimed Memory Stick has 25 percent of the removable flash card market. An industry source said the figure was accurate, but attributed it to the large number of Memory Stick products Sony has launched more than its popularity with consumers and other vendors. So far Sony has only convinced a few vendors to produce a Memory Stick-based product, although more than 100 have expressed interest in the flash card. Several vendors said they have declined to use Memory Stick because of Sony's licensing fee.
Memory Stick adapters, available from companies such as Imation, allow the media to be used with any USB-equipped computer.
Despite Sony's lone stand, Lexar's Peterson said, "The future of flash memory, I believe, is a cross between CF and MS both in size and operation. They have large capacities and the controllers built in. I would say that it would strictly be CF, but Sony has such a large share of the market that you can't ignore MS."
The companies backing the SD format take exception to this line of thought.
Reid Sullivan, general manager of Panasonic's entertainment group, is determined to make SD the format of the future.
Kingston's Miller said on a cost-per-megabyte basis, SD just is not competitive right now, but this price drop is a step in the right direction.
The company took a first step toward this goal with a major price reduction last week that dropped the street price of 64MB SD card to $99 from $159. SD's cost had been a major roadblock, with similar size CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards priced between $50 and $70.
"The price drop was the result of an increase in production, and more cuts can be expected," Sullivan said.
As Panasonic drives down its pricing, the company has an ambitious product road map that has a 256MB card on the market by this fall, bypassing the 128MB-size capacity. The SD format has the potential to reach 4GB, four times the capacity originally anticipated, Sullivan said. With this much memory and data transfer speeds that will touch 20MB per second, SD will become a perfect storage media for digital video, he said. Currently, SD cards have a 2MB per second transfer rate. CompactFlash and SmartMedia are available in 128MB capacity cards.
With the digital camera market and, to a lesser extent, portable digital audio player market secured, card makers see the PDA market as the next frontier for their products.
"Right now digital cameras are the No. 1 driver of sales," said Miller, "but recently handheld PCs are coming up."
To the surprise of many, digital audio players have not had the impact originally anticipated. Sales did not take off as expected during the 2000 holiday period, with the end result being fewer memory card sales, Miller said.
There has also been talk in the industry that audio player makers will move away from using cards, switching back to internal memory. Intel's Pocket Concert has 128MB of internal memory and no flash card slot. A company spokesman said at the Pocket Concert's introduction at CES in January that its research found that, since most people only used the memory cards bundled with their player, it was easier and cheaper to simply place a large amount of on board memory in the device.
"In my opinion, SmartMedia and SD will ultimately function as internal memory because of their size. They're not as functional as CompactFlash or Memory Stick because they don't have the form factor to pack on more memory nor the internal controllers to work with various devices," said Peterson.
Miller tempered Peterson's thought, saying, "I think an integration of some internal memory is possible, but the removable card offers a lot to the end user."
Sullivan also sees a long life ahead for the card. "The flexible nature of the card means it can find its way into many CE areas," he said, adding that there are many products that contain internal memory and can accept removable cards.
The vendors scoffed at the possibility of flash memory cards losing out to other forms of high-capacity removable media like the upcoming 500MB DataPlay disks or IBM's MicroDrive, which has found its way into several products.
"I think DataPlay works as a good tool for mass distribution of content (like music) but not as an initial storage device. Flash just works better, faster and more stable. DataPlay and optical media work best as backups," said Peterson.
Olympus' John Knaur, senior product manager for digital products, added, "There is a thing as too much memory for a digital camera. If you have an optical disk that can store 500 pictures, how are you going to remember what was what when the file names are simply numbers? It's too much to organize."[Unless you have a really good operating system to manage all that memory that has a small footprint and low power requirements.]
Full Audio Alters Launch Plans (includes portables!)
Staff
TWICE
7/23/2001
CHICAGO— Startup Full Audio will concentrate on launching its subscription music-download service and put a hold on plans to offer related hardware, which would have wirelessly connected a PC to a home stereo system via 900MHz to stream content from the PC's hard drive.
That customized service (see TWICE, Jan. 22, page 32) works like this: Users pay a subscription price to download and store Windows Media Audio songs, which is protected by Microsoft's digital rights management (DRM) technology, onto their hard drives. The PC will play back the downloaded music as long as the subscription is in effect. The intent is to guarantee sound quality by letting users play back music from their hard drives rather than from a Web site.
The music can also be transferred to any portable music device incorporating Microsoft's DRM.
The company has secured publishing rights to the entire catalog of EMI and BMG music, but before it can upload the songs to subscribers, it must also obtain master recording licenses from the two companies. FullAudio said it has already obtained a master recording license for all tracks to which EMI has digital distribution rights. Currently, that includes about 30,000-40,000 tracks, a spokeswoman said.
Samsung posts surprise net, non-chip units help
BY KIM MIYOUNG
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's Samsung Electronics posted a better-than-expected second quarter net profit of 880 billion won ($675.8 million) after telecom revenues helped offset the impact of diving chip prices.
Its second quarter net was down 29 percent from 1.24 trillion won in the first quarter, but beat market expectations of 600 billion won to 800 billion won.
``Increased earnings from telecommunications compensated for a sharp decline in chip sales and such a trend may help it later this year,'' said Jon Chong-hwa, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney.
Samsung had a 400-billion-won jump in telecom sales, including wireless handsets, which helped cushion it against an 800-billion-won tumble in semiconductor revenue.
Telecom sales exceeded chip and digital product revenues though the three were similar and were trailed by home appliance sales which accounted for 11 percent of Samsung's total.
The world's largest computer memory chipmaker was expected to earn a net 3.8 trillion won this year, a Multex Global Estimates forecast by 23 analysts showed.
Diving chip prices and demand were blamed for a 63 percent plunge in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to 600 billion won, down from 1.61 trillion won EBIT a quarter earlier.
Samsung said profits at affiliates including Samsung Card and Samsung SDI (06400.KS) contributed 250 billion to 300 billion won.
Samsung holds more than 50 percent of the unlisted credit card unit and over 20 percent in the world's top television and computer display maker.
CHIPS COULD HURT SECOND HALF
Still, Samsung made money on chips in the second quarter, something its major competitors are failing to do in the sector's worst-ever downturn.
But analysts cautioned Samsung may also be hit hard later this year if chip prices did not rebound.
``Due to a sustained slowdown in the PC market, DRAM supply and demand imbalance may continue until the fourth quarter,'' Samsung chip marketing manager Kim Il-ung told reporters. ``The second-half prospect for the memory chip sector is not clear.''
Samsung reaped 260 billion won in EBIT from its chip unit, or 43 percent of its total EBIT.
Domestic rival Hynix Semiconductor posted operating losses, or negative EBIT, of 168 billion won from chip sales or 63 percent of its negative EBIT of 266 billion won.
U.S. chip giant Micron Technology, the world's second largest memory chipmaker, last month posted a $313-million loss for the quarter to May 31.
Despite a fall in chip prices, Samsung said it was standing firm on not cutting production, a step Hynix took this week by closing its U.S. plant for six months.
``But if every other chipmaker agreed on an output cut, there is no need for us not to consider the measure,'' Samsung vice president of investor relations Chu Woo-sik said in a conference call.
Samsung decided to reduce capital expenditure to 5.1 trillion from 6.1 trillion won.
The one-trillion-won cut would be made to planned investment in its semiconductor business, which accounts for 86 percent of its total capex plan.
Hynix cut its 2001 capex plans on Thursday to 600-800 billion won from one trillion won.
Samsung Electronics shares closed down 1,000 won at 176,000, compared with a 1.47 percent slide in the benchmark index. Hynix ended at a fresh lifetime low of 1,400, down 7.6 percent.
Samsung said on Friday it had drawn up plans to repurchase up to 500 billion won of its own shares by year's end to help boost share prices, but the exact amount and timing would depend on its cash flow and other business conditions.
Samsung is up 11 percent in the year to date, while Hynix has shed 65 percent.
(US$1 - 1,302.0 won)
cksla, how long before the software to clean up the audio on ripped music files is published LOL?
Hmmm..VADA. I wonder if we might be involved here...
On the downside, it is Hy-Tek.
Mark (words only): VADA
Current Status: Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney.
Date of Status: 2001-03-25
Filing Date: 2001-03-19
Registration Date: (DATE NOT AVAILABLE)
Law Office Assigned: TMO Law Office 110
CURRENT APPLICANT(S)/OWNER(S)
1. Hy-Tek Mfg. Co. Inc.
GOODS AND/OR SERVICES
device for storage and playback of video and audio data
PROSECUTION HISTORY
(NOT AVAILABLE)
CONTACT INFORMATION
Address:
HY-TEK MFG. CO. INC.
1998 BUCKTAIL LN
SUGAR GROVE IL 60554-9609
US
Case highlights law's threat to fair-use rights
BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News
The music industry is no longer threatening computer science professor Ed Felten with civil
lawsuits for his research into one of the industry's digital copy-protection schemes. He doesn't
have the same assurance, however, that the United States government won't launch a criminal
prosecution if he proceeds.
That uncertainty grew more pronounced this week when the FBI arrested a visiting Russian
computer scientist Monday in Las Vegas, charging him with violating the 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act by distributing software that cracked a system for encrypting electronic books. It
was one of the first criminal prosecutions under a bad law that was designed to protect copyright
owners from unauthorized copying but is having all kinds of other negative effects.
Before I explain why Felten feels more jeopardy than ever as a result of his efforts to publish
scholarly research, you need to understand some background as well as what happened to the
Russian programmer.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a gift to the well-financed entertainment and
software industries, trashed the public interest. It gave copyright owners the right to assert absolute
control over copyrighted material, effectively allowing them to prevent the public from asserting a
variety of traditional user's rights, including the ``fair use'' of making personal copies.
In this week's case, Adobe Systems sicced the cops on the Russian programmer, Dmitry
Sklyarov, who'd written and was selling software that broke Adobe's encryption method for the
Acrobat software it uses for what it calls eBooks. Sklyarov, in Las Vegas at a security conference,
was arrested after giving a talk on -- you guessed it -- security measures in electronic books.
The DMCA makes it a crime to ``manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise
traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof'' that ``is primarily
designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological
measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion
thereof.''
Hollywood, the music industry and software companies have used this breathtakingly broad
measure to file a variety of civil lawsuits. The recording companies' threats against Felten and his
colleagues were part of a campaign to keep software that breaks encryption, no matter how feeble
the encryption method is in the first place, out of circulation. It's as if we outlawed cars on the
principle that they could be used to help crooks escape from bank robberies.
Please understand what's at stake here -- some fundamental and traditional rights.
Software that breaks encryption schemes is not, by itself, a certain sign that its purpose is to help
people make illegal copies. We have the right to make personal copies of copyrighted works.
That's fair use, and fair use is enshrined in our law.
Sklyarov's company, ElcomSoft (www.elcomsoft.com), says its software has entirely
legitimate uses. People who have purchased eBook files can convert the files to a format that can
be read on types of computers not currently supported by Adobe's eBook Reader software, for
example. The company, on its Web site, also offers scathing criticism of Adobe's encryption
methods, saying they are inherently weak.
For its part, Adobe seems to see only the piracy potential in such code-breaking software. In the
process, Adobe is asserting the right to prevent people from making fair-use rights with electronic
books they buy. Hollywood and the record industry insist on the same restrictive control over
digital versions of the works they own.
OK, back to Felten, who teaches at Princeton University. He ran afoul of the DMCA earlier this
year. He and other researchers had taken up the music industry's challenge to break a digital
watermarking scheme that was under consideration for CDs and other digitally recorded music.
They easily defeated the watermarking system, and prepared to describe their results at an academic
conference. But the music industry -- specifically, a consortium that has come up with the
watermarking idea in the first place -- and a software company that had worked on the system
threatened the researchers, citing the DMCA, leading them to withdraw their paper.
Felten and his colleagues then filed suit, asking a federal judge in New Jersey to specifically allow
them to publish -- to allow them their First Amendment rights -- and declare the DMCA
unconstitutional. The industry and software company, no doubt realizing their blunder, have sent
letters to the judge, promising they won't sue even if the paper is published.
But the U.S. Justice Department, also a defendant in the Felten suit, hasn't responded. And after
Tuesday's arrest, it's no wonder that Felten -- and programmers and researchers everywhere --
should be feeling considerably more nervous. A federal prosecutor in San Jose told me Tuesday
that the law under which was Sklyarov charged wouldn't apply in Felten's case, but why should
he take the risk?
So, under the DMCA, it's a crime to spread the word about technology that maintains your fair-use
rights. One of these days, it may be a crime to talk about anything that displeases the control freaks
who run the entertainment and software industries.
Speech Technology Magazine
The Voice of Speech Technology.
JULY / AUGUST 2001
Cover Story:
Peak Performance Award Winners Announced
By Gary Moyers
Interest and excitement in speech technology is growing. Speech is making its presence known on the Internet, in the automobile, over carrier networks and in mobile devices. Users are talking to mobile devices, computers, phones and automobiles at an ever-growing rate. Companies have discovered that speech satisfies customers, cuts operating costs and increases profit margins. Speech as an input modality is not just a topic for conversation anymore - speech is an actual deployment consideration for more and more companies.
The Kelsey Group projects that worldwide spending and revenues from the Speech Web and speech applications will reach $41 billion by 2005, and is predicting voice announcements from all major U.S. wireless carriers and escalating European activity, starting in the late second quarter and early third quarter of this year. VoiceXML appears to be here to stay, with more and more new deployments using the standard to voice-enable the Internet.
As a result of the tremendous growth and interest in the speech industry, Speech Technology Magazine instituted its first Peak Performance Awards to recognize the outstanding performers and innovators in 12 speech technology categories.
Competition was spirited, with almost 100 companies nominated for the awards. Each company nominated for an award is considered a Peak Performer in speech technology. Award winners will be recognized at a special presentation ceremony at SpeechTEK 2001, in New York at the Hilton New York and Towers on Oct. 24-26. The staff at Speech Technology Magazine would like to thank each company and person who participated.
One company in each category was chosen to receive an Editors' Choice Award or Readers' Choice Award. The Editors' Choice Awards were chosen by a panel of the Speech Technology Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board members, columnists, contributing writers and industry experts. The Readers' Choice Awards were chosen by online voting at Speech Technology Magazine's Web site.
Editors' Choice Awards
Call Center and Telephony:
SpeechWorks International. - SpeechWorks International (NASDAQ: SPWX) provides over-the-telephone speech recognition technology and solutions. The company provides solutions to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and leverage web investments by allowing people to direct their calls, obtain information and complete transactions by speaking naturally over the phone. SpeechWorks International, Inc. offers four complete speech recognition solutions for over-the-telephone applications: SpeechWorks 6, SpeechSite, Speechify and ETI-Eloquence.
Embedded Application:
Sensory Inc. - Sensory, Inc., is a provider of embedded speech recognition and speech synthesis technology. Privately-owned Sensory ships products in personal electronics, smart toys, wireless and automotive applications, and offers IC and small-footprint software as well as animated speech technologies. Sensory's products provide discrete word speaker-independent and dependent recognition. In addition, a wide variety of technologies can be added to make products talk and hear.
Microphone and Headset:
Andrea Electronics Inc. - Andrea Electronics (AMEX: AND) is a developer of hardware and software microphone technologies which optimize the performance of speech-enabled applications for telematics systems and auto PCs, Internet telephony, voice-enabled web browsing, desktop dictation, audio/videoconferencing, Internet appliances and other voice user interfaces. The company also offers a line of Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and Noise Canceling (NC) PC headsets for voice applications in which a headset is desired, such as with wearable PCs and in call center environments.
Mobile Speech:
VerbalTek Inc. - VerbalTek is privately-owned and develops technologies for speech recognition on mobile platforms such as PDAs and wireless phones. The mission of the company is to research, develop and refine the most advanced technologies for natural speech interaction with mobile devices, where the difficulty of keypad text input makes speech recognition an ideal solution to improve usability and customer acceptance.
Speech-to-text (large vocabulary):
IBM Voice Systems. - IBM (NYSE: IBM) provides data access through voice integrated solutions. Its ViaVoice dictation software and Websphere natural language translation products head its speech-to-text product line. Features such as seamless Direct Dictation, Command and Control, Navigation Macro Creator, ViaVoice Marks, Analyze Voice and an Advanced Acoustic Model are designed to make users more productive using voice instead of typing.
Speech-to-text (small vocabulary):
VerbalTek Inc. - VerbalTek is privately-owned and develops technologies for speech recognition on mobile platforms such as PDAs and wireless phones. The mission of the company is to research, develop and refine the most advanced technologies for natural speech interaction with mobile devices, where the difficulty of keypad text input makes speech recognition an ideal solution to improve usability and customer acceptance. Its VerbalCommand products are available in both speaker-independent and speaker-dependent versions.
Text-to-speech (large vocabulary):
Lucent Speech Technologies. - Lucent Speech Solutions (NYSE: LU) delivers speech recognition and text-to-speech technology along with speech server products. Its TTS software development kit (SDK), Articulator, maintains all of the advantages of Lucent's existing TTS R3.1 in terms of intelligibility and scalability. This stand-alone product enables third party application developers, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and service providers to provide speech-enabled services to their customers.
Text-to-speech (small vocabulary):
Sensory Inc. - Sensory, Inc., is a provider of embedded speech recognition and speech synthesis technology. Privately owned Sensory ships products in personal electronics, smart toys, wireless and automotive applications, and offers IC and small footprint software as well as animated speech technologies. Sensory's products' Speech and sound effects are synthesized by the on-chip microcontroller from data stored in ROM. The technology is capable of replicating distinct voices without degradation of quality.
Voice Portal:
HeyAnita. - HeyAnita is a privately held company focused on voice access, navigation and management of Internet data and information. Through HeyAnita's software platform, companies and end users globally can now access Internet data by simply using a telephone and their voice. HeyAnita offers its platform and applications through a variety of business programs including an application service provider model (which includes software and hosting), application licenses (for those who wish to host themselves) and OEM opportunities (for integration into hardware and software platforms).
Innovative Solution:
ShopTalk for Jiffy Lube. - Privately owned ShopTalk Networks specializes in enterprise speech software and applications. Its deployment for Jiffy Lube International was one of the first retail applications written in VoiceXML, integrating speech-recognition technology from Nuance Communications Inc. and VoiceXML from Tellme Networks Inc. to let customers talk directly to a voice server. Once customers sign up, the software calls them three months after each oil change. They can tell the server to forward the message to an e-mail address or connect them to the nearest Jiffy Lube for an appointment.
Best Speech Deployment:
AOL by Phone by SpeechWorks International. - America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL), servicing over 25 million subscribers, chose SpeechWorks International to speech-enable its AOL by Phone voice portal service, and by January 2001 the service had signed up over 300,000 users and had handled over one million calls. SpeechWorks supplied speech recognition software as well as Speechify, its TTS engine. AOL members who sign up for the service are able to dial a toll free number and access news, weather, sports and stock quotes by voice commands, as well as check e-mail, shop online and other personalized functions.
Speaker Verification:
Keyware. - Keyware (NASDAQ Europe: KEYW) is a pioneer in the field of biometrics. Co-headquartered in Belgium and Woburn, Mass., Keyware is a provider of intelligent biometrics and centralized authentication solutions for real-world business applications. The company licenses its Layered Biometric Verification software and delivers systems integration and development services to government and large enterprise users. Keyware also licenses its technology to original equipment manufacturers, systems integrators and application service providers in the network and Internet data security, physical access, telephony and smart-card markets.
Readers' choice Awards
Call Center and Telephony:
Nuance Communications. - Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a provider of Voice Web software - speech recognition, voice authentication, voice browsing and TTS products - that makes the information and services of enterprises, telecommunications networks and the Internet accessible from any phone. Nuance delivers solutions to customers worldwide in industries such as banking, brokerage, telecommunications, travel, transportation, entertainment and retail. Nuance offers a complete line of speech recognition and voice authentication.
Embedded Application:
IBM Voice Systems. - IBM's voice technology portfolio includes Internet, call center, messaging, mobile devices, desktop, embedded and machine translation products. IBM is demonstrating a wide range of embedded solutions created with its Embedded ViaVoice toolkit. IBM is also showing an automotive solution (www-4.ibm.com/software/ speech/enterprise/ms_automotive.html) with hands and eyes-free control for driver safety. The solution not only lets a driver control features, but informs the driver and a remote service center when the car has problems. Monitoring is through sensors embedded in the car's engine and other systems.
Microphone and Headset:
Sony Electronics Inc. - Sony Electronics (NYSE: SNE) is a manufacturer and supplier of analog dictation products as well as digital voice recorders. The company's digital voice recorders range from simple memory devices to units that can interface with PCs and recognition programs. Sony produces a wide range of microphones and headsets.
Mobile Speech:
General Magic Inc. - General Magic (NASDAQ: GMGC) provides software and supporting voice dialog design and hosting services that let companies provide anytime, anywhere access to information and services over the telephone. General Magic's VoiceXML-based solutions let businesses integrate voice access into enterprise applications using a broad selection of speech recognition technologies and telephony interfaces. These solutions help businesses improve customer relations, deliver value-added service and provide unlimited access to content.
Speech-to-text (large vocabulary):
IBM Voice Systems. - The IBM ViaVoice family of products is available in several editions to provide specific speech solutions and features designed to fit the needs of individual users.
Speech-to-text (small vocabulary):
Lucent Speech Technologies - Lucent Speech Solutions delivers speech recognition and TTS technology along with speech server products. It recently released the Lucent Articulator TTS program. Lucent's TTS software development kit (SDK) delivers an intelligible and cost-effective synthesized voice providing our customers with the technology and resources to build telephony and PC applications.
Text-to-speech (large vocabulary):
Fonix Corp. - Fonix (OTC BB: FONX) is a provider of natural user interface technology and voice solutions for wireless devices, Internet and telephony systems, and vehicle telematics. Fonix Unlimited Vocabulary TTS provides an infinite vocabulary of understandable speech output. This system uses speech clusters and the software means for concatenating them in desired words and phrases. The software allows for modifications to pitch, emphasis and pauses that provide correct meaning and context to spoken words and phrases.
Text-to-speech (small vocabulary):
Fonix Corp. - Fonix Customized Vocabulary TTS uses a specific vocabulary of predefined words generated from cluster palettes. Fonix's TTS engine is used in a variety of applications, including the OnStar deployment by General Motors.
Voice Portal:
Tellme Networks Inc. - Privately owned Tellme is an Internet-powered telecommunications company. The Tellme voice application network is used by businesses to build and outsource voice applications that answer their phones, reducing telecom costs and improving customer interaction. The Tellme Network is also used by subscribers to connect with businesses, people and information they need through a toll-free number.
Innovative Solution:
Fonix Corp. - One of its most widely deployed solutions is the TimeTalk application, enabling PCs, mobile devices and other machines to speak the time to users.
Best Speech Deployment:
OnStar - (Dialogic, Nuance, General Magic and Fonix). OnStar, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), is a provider of in-vehicle safety, security and information services using the global positioning system satellite network and wireless technology. The OnStar Virtual Advisor, developed and hosted by General Magic, was built on the magicTalk voice platform, by integrating Dialogic's telephony products, Nuance's speech recognition, Fonix, TTS and other content sources.
Speaker Verification:
Nuance. - Nuance Verifier 2.0 uses voiceprints to deliver secure telephone access and personalization without the use of passwords and PINs. Consumers can conduct financial transactions, place orders and more using only the telephone and voice.
And the Nominees Were:
Companies who were nominated online for the Peak Performance Awards included: Abasoft, Acoustic Magic, Advanced Recognition Technologies, Aeritas, AirTrac, Andrea Electronics, Audiopoint, BBN Technologies, BeVocal, BuyTel, Brooktrout, Clarity, Comfort Telecommunications, Conita, Conversay, Data-Tel Info Systems, Datria, Dialogic, Don Johnston Inc., Emkay Innovative, En-Vision America, Famous 3D, Fonix, Force Computers, General Magic, GIMS Interactive, GN Netcom, Gold Systems, HeyAnita, IBM Voice Systems, iConverse, Indicast, inzigo, iSilk, iVoice, JustTalk, Keyware, Lanier, Lernout & Hauspie, LIPSinc, Locus Dialogue, Lucent Speech Solutions, Mindmaker, Motorola, NetByTel, NSC, Nortel Networks, Nuance Communications, Ottawa Telephony Group, Panasonic, Persay, Philips Speech Solutions, Phone-Or, Phonetic Systems, PipeBeach AB, Plantronics, PriceInteractive, Pracom Limited, RightVoice, Sensory, ShopTalk, Sony Electronics, Sound Advantage, SpeakEZ, Speech Machines, SpeechWorks International, SQZ, SRS Labs, SyberSay, Talking Drum, Telex, Tellme Networks, TellSoft, Verascape, VerbalTek, ViA, ViaVis Mobile Solutions, Vocalis, VoiceGenie, VoiceSurf, Wavemakers, Winbond, Wind River Systems and Wizzard.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review of Peak Performance Award Rules
Nomination Process
Companies were nominated in the following categories:
Call Centers and Telephony;
Embedded Application,
Microphones and Headsets;
Mobile Speech Products;
Speech-To-Text (large vocabulary);
Speech-To-Text (small vocabulary);
Speaker Verification;
Text-To-Speech (large vocabulary);
Text-To-Speech (small vocabulary);
Voice Portal Application,
Best Speech Deployment since 1/01/00
Most Innovative Speech Solution since 1/01/00.
Nomination forms were located on the Speech Technology Magazine Web site beginning Jan. 1, 2001, through Feb. 15, 2001.
The nomination form consisted of certain required fields and other optional information. Failure to complete the required forms negated the nomination. Nominators were provided with a text box to explain their nomination in 30 words or less, and forms were provided for each of the 12 categories. All nominated companies were listed in the final election process.
Voting Process
During the period between March 1 and May 1, visitors voted online in each of the 12 categories. Each nominated company was profiled with short descriptions in their respective categories.
Who was eligible to vote? Anyone who visited the Speech Technology Magazine Web site. However, readers could vote only once per category, and could not vote for their own employer or company. We requested contact information in order to perform spot checks on the voting.
The exception to the just-mentioned rule was the "Best Speech Deployment" category. In the Best Speech Deployment category, enterprises submitted nominations for speech companies, and Speech Technology Magazine verified each submission. Each speech company was limited to three nominations, and the company decided which three to post for final voting if they were nominated more than three times.
Decisions and Awards
The voting was conducted between March 1, and May 1, 2001.
The Readers' Choice Award reflects the results of the online voting.
The Editors' Choice Award, which may or may not have been the same winner as the Readers' Choice Award, was chosen by a panel that includes the editor, editorial advisory board, magazine columnists and contributing writers from the past year. Panel members could not vote for their own company in the Editors' Choice selection process.
OT: Vocollect Unveils Talkman T2 --the Next-Generation Voice-Directed, Wearable Computer
--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Vocollect, a world leader in providing voice powered solutions for business, today announced the release of Talkman(R) T2, its latest voice-enabled wearable computer for warehouse and industrial applications.
Re-engineered with more advanced features, the Talkman T2 terminal utilizes advanced speech recognition and speech synthesis technology, providing users with real-time communication with their logistics, manufacturing or business systems.
You can reach the story directly by going to http://www.newstream.com/cgi-bin/display_story.cgi?3509.
This multimedia news story is for free and unrestricted use on your news information site (and for print or broadcast too). Visit http://www.newstream.com to download video, audio, text, graphics and photos.
If you have any questions about the story, or about Newstream.com, please write to us at info@newstream.com.
--30--sg/sa*
CONTACT: Newstream.com, New York
Les Blatt, 888/560-5578
info@newstream.com
Ethanol fuel cells take aim at portables' power
By Charles J. Murray
EE Times
(07/13/01, 5:22 p.m. EST)
PARK RIDGE, Ill. — Fuel cells inched closer to the consumer electronics market this week as a portable fuel cell developer unveiled a technology that it claims could vastly improve the performance of handheld cell phones and notebook computers.
The technology, which drew mixed reactions from industry experts and competitors, reportedly could provide a shot in the arm for the ailing cell phone market by boosting the average "talking time" from about three hours to about 20 hours.
Medis Technologies Ltd. (New York), which introduced the new technology at this week's Fuel Cell 2001 Asian Conference in Tokyo, also said that its product could boost a notebook computer's time between recharges to approximately 12 to 15 hours.
"This could take wireless to the next step," said Bill Hyler, an analyst for CIBC World Markets (New York). "They look like they have the best technology in the portable fuel cell space right now."
Medis executives said that in addition to longer charge times, its new technology will also recharge in seconds and will cost less to use than conventional batteries. The company announced that it will make its fuel cells available to OEMs by the beginning of 2003 and expects them to replace cell phone and laptop batteries by 2004 to 2005.
"Ultimately, every cell phone and every laptop will use fuel cells," said Robert K. Lifton, chairman and chief executive officer of Medis. "It's obvious: No one will be able to compete in that market unless they have a fuel cell."
Lifton said the higher power and longer operating times of fuel cells will be necessary if mobile phone manufacturers expect to deliver new features, such as Internet capabilities and movies, to their products. Such features, he said, will draw more power but will be necessary if manufacturers expect consumers to buy new models.
"This is a product on which hundreds of billions of dollars, and perhaps even trillions of dollars, are dependent," Lifton said.
Industry experts were intrigued by the new technology, but questioned whether it would be cost-competitive. "They have a huge advantage in being able to charge up in a matter of seconds," said Donald Sadoway, a professor of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a nationally recognized battery expert. "They also have the ability to run for much longer periods of time than a conventional battery. But these are remarkable performance figures and I'm intrigued by their ability to manufacture these devices at low cost. I find that puzzling."
While experts acknowledged the technology's potential, most were cautious about seeing it as a successor to conventional battery schemes. "There's enough work being done that we know portable fuel cells will arrive and will find a niche in the marketplace," said Barry Huret, president of Huret Associates Inc. (Yardley, Pa.), a battery consultant. "But how big a niche, no one knows."
Simple, low-cost
Medis executives, however, said that the technology is deceptively simple and can be manufactured for low cost, making it a legitimate candidate for widespread use.
Unlike traditional fuel cell designs, which typically use hydrogen, Medis' new system employs direct conversion of ethanol to create electrical current. In that sense, it also departs from other techniques that use methanol as a fuel that is later converted to hydrogen before the reaction.
Medis said a proprietary additive provides the key to the fuel cell reaction. This so-called "X-additive," an electrolyte, is contained in a thumbnail-sized cartridge that also includes water and ethanol. The cartridge fits in the fuel cell, which is about the size of a cell phone battery.
Medis said the "X-additive" allows engineers to scrap proton exchange membranes, typically used in large hydrogen-based fuel cells. Proton exchange membranes, or PEMs, are considered too bulky and costly for the smallest fuel cell applications, and they can be damaged by high concentrations of methanol or ethanol. "Our people recognized that you can't make a small fuel cell with a PEM," Lifton said. "So they invented the proprietary liquid electrolyte."
The electrolyte enables ethanol or methanol to be converted directly to electricity, eliminating the need for hydrogen and PEMs. That allows higher concentrations of methanol or ethanol, up to 30 percent. The technique is so effective that company engineers were said to have effectively run the fuel cell on vodka.
Medis executives said the new technology offers energy densities "an order of magnitude higher" than anything available on the fuel cell market right now. The company said it has demonstrated energy densities of 150 W-hr/kg and expects that figure to climb to 450 W-hr/kg by the end of next year. In contrast, the lithium-ion batteries being used in today's cell phones have a theoretical energy density of 150 W-hr/kg, they said.
The announcement surprised some experts, many of whom expected direct ethanol conversion technology to be limited to smaller electronic devices, such as PDAs and cell phones, but not anything as large as a laptop computer.
Scaling up?
"Usually, you take a power performance hit when you use alcohols and methanols, but you gain the ability to package it in a tight space," said Bob Hockaday, chief fuel cell scientist for Manhattan Scientifics Inc. (Los Alamos, N.M.), a Medis competitor. "But if they can efficiently do this for smaller devices, then there's no reason they can't take it up to laptops and even larger systems, such as automobiles and power plants."
Medis is not expected to be alone in its effort to develop direct-conversion liquid fuel cells. Similar efforts are being undertaken by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Motorola Inc. and Manhattan Scientifics. Los Alamos and Motorola recently co-announced development of fuel-cell-on-a-chip technology, which they expect to see in devices like PDAs, cameras and electronic games.
But Medis is thought to be the first to propose OEM products and pricing. The company said it plans to manufacture its fuel cells for about $9 each and sell them to OEMs for about $15. The thumbnail-sized replacement cartridges, which could be popped into the fuel cell in seconds, would sell for about a dollar apiece.
The company's first ethanol-based product, scheduled for release late next year or in early 2003, will be a fuel-cell-based charger, which can be kept in a briefcase to recharge a conventional battery-based cellular phone. The system, which will offer 20 hours of recharge time before it needs cartridge replacement, is seen as a first step in bringing fuel cells to consumer products. Medis said the charger will eliminate the need for cell phone users to recharge by plugging their phone into a wall socket. Medis is working on the product with Sagem SA (Paris).
Medis is also working with General Dynamics Corp. on military applications for its ethanol-based fuel cell and said it has talked with cell phone makers as well. Ethanol is said to be an ideal fuel for mobile military communications systems because it is far less volatile than hydrogen. The Federal Aviation Administration also allows ethanol on commercial airplanes but forbids methanol.
Industry experts expressed skepticism, however, especially with regard to manufacturing costs and safety issues. Ethanol is flammable, they said, and could pose problems for cell phones left in hot locales. They suggested that years of additional testing would be required before such technologies could reach the market.
Oracle, Ford partner for "talking" car service
Thu Jul 12 20:50:00 EDT 2001
By Siobhan Kennedy
NEW YORK, July 12 (Reuters) - If you thought Kitt, the
talking car in the famous 1980's TV show Knight Rider, was a
marvel of science fiction, think again.
Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL), the world's No. 2 software company,
on Thursday signed a partnership with Wingcast, a joint venture
between automaker Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) and wireless software
developer Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM), to help bring talking cars to
the masses.
In the hit TV series Knight Rider, David Hasselhoff plays
the crimefighter, Michael Knight, whose partner, Kitt, is a
futuristic talking car that constantly updates Knight with
information about the quickest route to their destination or
the whereabouts of criminals.
Now Oracle, Ford and Qualcomm plan to mimic that technology
in modern cars using telematics.
Telematics is the fusion of computers and wireless
communications technology inside cars to enable, for example,
motor vehicles to "speak" instructions to drivers about such
things as traffic conditions and weather conditions.
"The cars will not only be giving you advice as to the
right freeway to go on but they'll tell you which freeway has
the most traffic on it," Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman and
Chief Executive said on a conference call on Thursday.
Ellison said cars using the service would be equipped with
global satellite positioning technology, which beams the
location and speed of the car to a central computer at
Wingcast's headquarters.
The computer then uses that information to send back
relevant data to the driver's whereabouts. Using speech
recognition technology -- which Wingcast said it is developing
in conjunction with an as yet unnamed partner -- that data is
then "spoken" back to the driver minutes later.
In addition to traffic information, the service also
enables drivers to connect wirelessly to the Internet and check
their corporate e-mail and have the messages read back to them
in the car.
"A salesperson will not only be able to pick up their mail
... while watching the road with their hands on the wheel, but
they will also be able to receive new leads ... and directly
link up with a perspective customer," Ellison said.
The idea is to enable all of Oracle's software so that they
can be delivered wirelessly to automobiles via Wingcast's
service, Ellison said.
TELEMATICS SET TO BOOM
Industry research firm International Data Corp. has
estimated that the telematics market will grow to $42 billion
by 2010 from $1 billion in 1998. For that reason, automakers
around the globe are racing to develop such futuristic
services.
San Diego-based Wingcast was founded in October 2000.
Although Ford and Qualcomm have a majority holding in the
venture, Harel Kodesh, chief executive of Wingcast, said car
maker Nissan Motor Co Ltd. (TOKYO:7201) has agreed to include
Wingcast's telematics technology in its vehicles next year.
Wingcast said it will also sign deals with
telecommunications service providers, although Kodesh said it
was too early to name partners.
Kodesh added that the deal with Oracle was not exclusive
and that Wingcast would offer connections to corporate data,
like e-mail, stored in other software firms' applications, as
well as information on the Internet.
Having originally said the service would be available later
this year, Wingcast in May delayed the launch of its in-vehicle
communications service until mid-2002.
The delay sets Wingcast further behind rival General Motors
Corp. (NYSE:GM) OnStar telecommunications service, which since its
launch in 1996 has grown to over 1 million subscribers. OnStar
is available on 32 GM vehicles, or about half of its fleet.
Copyright 2001, Reuters News Service
Elibron Adds Downloadable Music To Its Collection of Electronic Books
BOSTON, July 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Adamant Media, already partnered with two of the world's largest libraries to bring its customers over
30,000 electronic books, now officially announces the addition of secured downloadable music to its website, Elibron, at www.elibron.com.
Elibron has teamed-up with Liquid Audio, Inc. (Nasdaq: LQID - news) to provide customers with a large selection of CD- quality digital
downloads. Users can sample more than 150,000 tracks and download thousands of promotional songs offered by a wide variety of artists
and record labels.
Elibron contains the biggest online retail collection of eBooks, which includes volumes of classical works and rare editions from its partner
libraries and many contemporary titles from major U.S. publishers. Over 100 titles are being added to this collection each day.
``We have reached an important milestone toward realizing our company's vision of making all artistic creations available in all types of
media that can be accessed by everyone,'' said Andrei Volgin, chief executive of Adamant Media. ``With thousands of important literary
and artistic works already available in multiple formats at Elibron, this addition of downloadable music powers us ahead in reducing the
cost of distributing music, books, and artwork to the global community.''
``By collaborating with Adamant Media, the leading provider of electronic books, we can bring secure digital music to the Elibron website
and reach an even wider audience of Internet users,'' said Gerry Kearby, CEO and co-founder of Liquid Audio, Inc.
About Adamant Media:
Adamant Media works to develop Elibron -- a leading source of secured electronic books and downloadable music. Elibron also offers
classical music scores that can be downloaded and printed, many renowned paintings available as eCards and greeting cards,
illustrations from old and rare books, unique historic photographs, and a large collection of notable quotations. Based in Boston,
Massachusetts, Adamant Media created Elibron to establish a rich and flexible online platform that preserves copyright compliance.
Elibron uses digital technologies to enhance traditional ways of promoting and selling books, music and artwork.
Adamant Media and Elibron are trademarks of Adamant Media Corporation.
SOURCE: Adamant Media
Old? Audiovox MP3J MP4000 340MB (microdrive)
Full Review
All User Opinions
Specifications
Manufacturer Profile
Check Latest Prices
More Audiovox MP3 Players
Submit Your Opinion
CNET's Music Center
CNET Review
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 best
The good: 340MB Microdrive; includes all the in-car accessories.
The bad: Very short battery life; small LED screen.
The bottom line: This specialized portable MP3 player is designed to work best in your car.
By Ken Feinstein
(7/11/01)
The Audiovox MP3J MP4000 strikes an interesting balance between a portable MP3 player and a dedicated player for the
car. Its roomy 340MB hard drive offers enough storage for long road trips, and Audiovox includes all of the necessary
accessories for hooking the player into your car's cassette deck. However, the MP4000's large size and short battery life
limit its usefulness as a standalone MP3 player.
Full review
Specifications
Brand:
Audiovox
Model:
MP3J MP4000 340MB
Built In Memory:
340MB
Memory Slots:
Flash
Connectors:
USB
Power Source:
DC Adapter
Headphones:
Earphone
Get more details from Audiovox
What to Look for in MP3 Players:
1. Memory
More memory means more music; it's as simple as that.
2. Transfer Rate
In this day and age, speed is important. Keep an eye out for players with a high transfer rate per second, and avoid
players that use the serial port for transfers.
3. Sound
Look for a signal-to-noise ratio above 85 dB and for equalization options that let you tweak bass and treble to your
liking.
4. Software
Encoding MP3s and transferring them to your player is a simple task, and the software you use to do so should be
simple too. You don't need a lot of bells and whistles in your way.
5. Design
Pick a player with a sturdy belt clip so you'll be able to take your player with you easily. After all, these are very portable
devices, and it should be a cinch to just clip it on and go.
Thanks bosox. Nice post.eom
OT STMicro reports Q2 loss, warns on Q3
Laura Rohde, IDG News Service\London Bureau
July 12, 2001, 06:09
Europe's biggest semiconductor maker
STMicroelectronics NV (ST) blamed order
cancellations for disappointing second-quarter
revenue, down to $1.59 billion compared to
$1.88 billion a year ago, and warned that
lower earnings would continue into the third
quarter.
That figure is in line with the lowered revenue
expectations of between $1.55 billion and
$1.6 billion for the quarter ending June 30
that ST announced last month, but well down
on the $1.65 billion to $1.8 billion range that
the company had previously anticipated.
The order cancellations mainly affected ST's
telecommunication and computer peripheral
businesses. The company said it will take a
charge for excess inventory of $70.7 million
in the second quarter as a result.
The market still has further to fall, but will
begin to recover at the end of this year, the
company said in a statement. The industry
will bottom out in the third quarter of 2001, it
said, and revenue will decline by between 10
percent to 15 percent from the previous year, but the company expects to see signs of a recovery in the fourth
quarter, according to the statement.
During the quarter, Europe accounted for 35.9 percent of ST's revenue, Asia/Pacific for 33.4 percent, North
America for 18.3 percent and Japan 7 percent, ST said.
Revenues declined fastest in North America, where they dropped 35.3 percent compared to the same quarter
last year, while the market in Japan grew 3.2 percent, the company said.
ST has instituted a hiring freeze and said that since the beginning of the year, employee headcount has been
reduced by about 1,500 people due to attrition.
In May, ST announced plans to close its wafer fabrication plant in Ottawa and transfer most of the employees
there to other facilities. The Ottawa plant was formerly the in-house silicon semiconductor production operation
for Nortel Networks Corp. ST also said at the time that it would limit its capital investments to $1.5 billion this
fiscal year, down from a planned $1.9 billion.
ST supplies chips to large players in various parts of the technology industry worldwide with customers including
Nokia Corp, LG Electronics Inc., and Hewlett-Packard Co.
STMicroelectronics, in St. Genis-Pouilly, France, can be reached at http://www.st.com/.
Busybump find: Panasonic buying Preview Sys. DRM...
By: BusyBump $$$$
Reply To: None Wednesday, 11 Jul 2001 at 5:09 PM EDT
Post # of 722736
Matsushita set to buy digital music business
By Gwendolyn Mariano CNET News.com
Anti-piracy technology company Preview Systems is selling its electronic music distribution business to Matsushita Electric for $1
million in cash.
Preview Systems said Tuesday that under the deal, Matsushita Electric--a producer of
electronic products sold under brand names such as Panasonic and National--will have
nonexclusive rights to the source code for all components of Preview's ZipLock System,
which provides digital rights management for digital music and video.
A Matsushita representative confirmed the deal but declined to comment.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Preview Systems said it will transfer to Matsushita its active
customer contracts, which include Arcstar, a service provider operated by NTT
Communications, and LabelGate, a service provider operated by Sony.
The announcement is part of Preview Systems' latest efforts to wind down its operations. In May, the company closed shop,
selling its software security technology to Aladdin Knowledge Systems.
Preview Systems, which once contributed to laying the groundwork for the delivery of secure digital goods, has faced heated
competition in the digital rights management arena with rivals such as InterTrust Technologies and Microsoft--which are currently
in a legal dispute over patents.
"We believe that the value of our technology may be better (used) when combined with that of another company," Vincent
Pluvinage, chief executive of Preview Systems, said in a statement. "This agreement with Matsushita validates our technology,
ensures that our music customers will continue to receive a high level of ongoing support, and delivers additional value to our
stockholders."
Eric Scheirer, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that the deal represents Preview's final scramble to sell its remaining assets.
"Preview is going out of business, and it's a fire sale more or less to get rid of their assets at whatever price they can on behalf of
their stockholders," he said.
Matsushita Electric is part of a group known as the 4C Entity, which is making efforts to lock down content.
The group, which is also made up of Intel, IBM and Toshiba, created a technology, dubbed Content Protection for Recordable
Media (CPRM), that would add a piracy-blocking mechanism directly into data storage drives. The technology would stop
protected content from being transferred to a drive with CPRM built in.
"I don't think there's anything particular or magical about Matsushita except that they're a company that is interested in technology
just as many others" are, Scheirer said. "I wouldn't be any more surprised if it had been a Microsoft or an IBM or a Texas
Instruments or any kind of hardware or software company that was the buyer."
Hmmmm! Intel, IBM, and Toshiba....where have I heard those 3 mentioned before??
Just reminding those who need reminding that we are in great company! Have a good day everyone...well, almost everyone!
(Voluntary Disclosure: Position- Long; ST Rating- Strong Buy; LT Rating- Strong Buy)
The New Napster The Record Industry Has Met its Match
Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, July 10, 2001
If the recording industry thought Napster was a headache,
it's going to get a genuine migraine from the latest version
of Gnucleus, a free Windows-based open source software
program released last month for the Gnutella file-sharing
network.
The recently improved Gnucleus software is one of
several clients such as LimeWire and BearShare that run
on the Internet's self-organizing Gnutella network. The
software programs combine the shared contents of
constantly shifting clusters of about 10,000 or so linked
personal computers into searchable interactive archives.
Like the now-defunct Napster, the Gnutella clients make
sharing songs over the Internet simple and easy. But
some of them are owned by private companies, which
could conceivably be shut down should the courts
eventually conclude they are facilitating illegal file
sharing.
But not Gnucleus. It can't be put out of business by the
record industry or the government, because it's not a
business, it's just a piece of free software.
The programmer behind Gnucleus has no commercial
aspirations. Instead, he says that all he has done is create
a new tool for sharing files, one that works without its
author exerting any control over it and without him having
any knowledge about which files are being shared.
Ironically, the recording industry's own lawyers have
done the most to help push users toward the legally
invulnerable Gnutella network, for which the snazzy new
Gnucleus software was written.
Last year, the Gnutella file-sharing network was a distant
threat and a poor substitute for Napster, mostly because it
didn't have enough users, which in turn made it hard to
find many popular songs. But shutting Napster down was
like squeezing on one end of a digital sausage. The
recording industry simply (and entirely predictably)
pushed users toward Gnutella.
Even an entry-level programmer could have told the
record execs that file-sharing through a centralized
Napster-like service would have been far easier to control
than will ever be the case with Gnutella.
As of today, there are already hundreds of thousands of
music files available for free on the burgeoning Gnutella
network along with all sorts of other media files, including
full-length episodes of TV shows such as Seinfeld and
The Simpsons, and even one 15-part file purporting to be
the latest Star Wars movie.
In recent weeks, in fact, former Napster users have been
downloading Gnutella clients so fast that some of their
file-distribution sites have been brought to a crawl.
But there's one critical difference between Napster and
the Gnutella network, over which the new open source
Gnucleus software operates.
Gnutella's decentralized network architecture makes it
impossible for the government to shut the service down
without changing the basic way the Internet operates or
violating long-established constitutional protections
against illegal searches and seizures.
Because it can't be shut down, the new Gnucleus
software promises to finally force a day of reckoning for
the music industry.
The question now is whether artists will continue to allow
people to distribute their material over the Internet without
any opportunity for payment or whether they will at long
last rise up and demand that their record companies start
making those songs available online legally and at
reasonable prices.
In the meantime, file sharing is out of the bottle and won't
be stuffed back in.
The fact that Gnucleus is open source and Windows
based means it runs on most computers and will be
available permanently, says John Marshall, the
18-year-old New Hampshire high school student who led
a team of about a half-dozen other contributors who
created the program.
"I got tired of what was happening to other file-sharing
services," he says. "I wanted to create something that
couldn't be shut down or taken away."
Marshall learned computer programming out of a book
purchased just two years ago. Soft-spoken and modest,
he has resisted making Gnucleus available on the most
popular software-download sites, preferring to wait until
he has time to make additional improvements.
Nonetheless, he's already fended off several offers from
firms wanting to buy the software for use as an advertising
platform, similar to the competing closed-source
BearShare Gnutella client, whose advertising practices
some users find annoying.
"I'm not going to sell out," Marshall says flatly. "That's why
it's open source. There's no way anyone can own it."
Despite his obvious talent for programming, Marshall
plans to study manufacturing engineering at a New
England college in the fall.
"I don't have any interest in doing computer science," he
says. "I've worked for enough computer companies
already to know that's not what I want to do."
Marshall's Gnucleus software comes with a few
complications. One of the program's main deficits, at least
for now, is an almost complete lack of documentation -- in
particular, any form of user manual. Marshall says most
new Gnucleus users are having pretty good luck just
downloading the program and figuring it out for
themselves.
That's easier than it sounds, because the Gnucleus
software is remarkably intuitive, particularly for those
familiar with the way Napster worked.
When the software is installed and activated, a
"connection" screen searches out other online members
of the Gnutella network and notes how many files are
available for sharing. All users have the option of sharing
or not sharing files. Some Gnutella network-software
clients also give users the option of locking out the
approximately 10 to 20 percent of users, on average, who
don't share anything.
Once a search command is initiated, the software quickly
queries all the linked computers and returns a list of those
that have a copy of the requested file or files. If directed to
do so, the software then cycles through the list and
downloads all requested files, moving from computer to
computer as necessary until each task is complete.
The software works in the background, giving users the
freedom to ignore it. Downloads can sometimes be pretty
slow, so many users leave the software up and running
24/7. The program automatically restricts access to just
those files each user wants to share.
Marshall says he hopes future versions of the software
will support simultaneous downloads of different parts of
the same file from different computers. That's important, in
part, because Gnutella clients are usually being scanned
constantly for files of interest to other users, which creates
a steady stream of bandwidth-hogging data in both
directions.
Most Gnutella clients also let users bring up a screen that
displays a list in real time of what other users, who are not
identified, are looking for.
While it may be possible to shut down the for-profit
companies that provide some of the competing Gnutella
clients, there's no clear and easy way to get rid of the
Gnutella network itself. The list of files available for
sharing is stored and constantly refreshed by each
individual computer, not on a centralized server operated
by any one company.
Closing down the Gnutella network would require
breaking down the door of every person on the network
and confiscating their computers. And even that wouldn't
do the trick, because membership in the Gnutella network
changes every second as computer users around the
globe log in and out. The record industry would need the
equivalent of a worldwide strike force.
"You just can't shut down the whole network," says
Marshall. "If you disconnect some computers, the others
will just reconnect to each other. The network re-forms
itself. It won't fall easily."
The Gnutella network pits two well-established legal
rights against each other: the right to protect copyrighted
materials and the right of citizens to be secure in their
homes from the threat of unreasonable searches and
seizures. It will be interesting to see how the courts
resolve that conflict.
The clearly established precedent, however, is that a
merchant (read: record company) has no right to
indiscriminately search homes or personal mail (read:
computers and email) for stolen property just because
they think someone might have burglarized their store.
It's possible, of course, that the courts may eventually rule
that commercial rights trump civil rights. But if that
happens, the country we now know will have ceased to
exist.
There is still time, however, even at this late date for the
recording industry to at least partially get its digital act
together. Public file-sharing services all have one
common weakness: authenticating files. Files are not
always what they appear to be. Users can go to the
trouble of downloading a long music file, for example only
to discover it was not correctly labeled (or, in some cases,
was maliciously mislabeled).
I'm sure many Internet users would welcome the chance
to pay reasonable prices for the music they enjoy,
particularly if they are assured of getting the files they
want. It's not hard to imagine, for example, a more
enlightened record company eventually making music
files available on the Gnutella network along with
certificates of authenticity and a little removable electronic
header that invites fans to pay 25 cents or so for each
song.
Some freeloaders will never pay a dime. But the world
has more honest people than thieves. Lots of music fans
would gladly pay up but still can't. Unfortunately, there is
little chance that will happen until top record-company
executives realize that technology has already turned the
Internet into a global jukebox.
It's a jukebox with considerable untapped potential. Many
music lovers would no doubt love more direct contact with
their favorite talents, including the opportunity to directly
purchase concert tickets in advance or get information
about other songs and related products, all of which could
put additional money into the hands of artists.
It's hard to believe that years after the phenomenally
popular online-music revolution began, no one is making
any money off music downloads yet.
Except, of course, all those lawyers.
So now we know why they're walking it down.oems
Yahoo Chief Prepares to Run the Gantlet
By Ronna Abramson
Jul 10 2001 05:00 AM PDT
Terry Semel will hold his first earnings call Wednesday, and
analysts will be very interested in hearing his plans for the
troubled portal.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel will face a tough
audience when he makes his earnings
premiere before investors Wednesday, two
and half months after taking the helm of
the troubled Internet portal. Rather than
watching the numbers, however, investors
will focus on Semel's plans for Yahoo, which
to date remain the subject of conjecture.
In his first earnings call as Yahoo's chief,
Semel is expected to announce after
market close Wednesday that the
Sunnyvale, Calif., company has met
significantly reduced second-quarter
estimates. In April, Yahoo lowered
second-quarter revenue forecasts to
between $165 million and $185 million —
compared with $270 million in the second
quarter 2000 — and breakeven pro forma
earnings — compared with earnings per
share of 12 cents in the second quarter
2000. The bar has been lowered so far on
expectations that some analysts say
exceeding estimates would be unlikely to
create much fanfare.
Given Semel's background as former
co-chief of Warner Bros., some analysts anticipate Semel's vision
calls for Yahoo expanding more into the entertainment arena. Scott
Kessler, an Internet analyst at Standard & Poor's, suggests music is
likely to be the entry point, given Yahoo's recent $12 million
purchase of Launch Media and plans to create a subscription music
service called Pressplay, spearheaded by Sony and Universal Music.
"I think he's probably going to give a little bit more detail [about]
the recent acquisition they made and Pressplay and what those
two together are going to mean for the company and how the
company is going to make money," said Kessler, who has a "hold"
rating on Yahoo.
Wall Street has been waiting for Yahoo to develop subscription
services such as Pressplay as an alternative to plummeting ad
revenues. Yahoo's advertising revenues, which accounted for 90
percent of total revenues last year, have fallen as dot-coms have
tanked and the weak economy has caused ad budgets to shrink.
For the full year, Yahoo projects revenues will total $700 million to
$775 million, down roughly one third from $1.1 billion in 2000.
But Jeff Fieler, mobile and consumer Internet analyst at Bear
Stearns, says he's not figuring music revenues into his estimates,
even though he's expecting Semel to give a more specific launch
date than the previously announced end-of-summer target. That's
because Yahoo has yet to announce a deal with the other three
major record labels, which are launching their own service at the
end of the summer called MusicNet. "You can tell me it's going to
come out next week or it's been delayed six months," Fieler said. "I
don't think any online music subscription will take off unless it gets
all five labels."
Similarly, analysts are holding out little hope that Yahoo will disclose
numbers on non-advertising revenue. Kavir Dhar, VP at Jefferies &
Co., expects Yahoo will at least detail how many consumers have
signed up for its auction and real-time stock services, both of which
charge fees. But he acknowledges the company is likely to remain
quiet about how much revenues are being generated by the
services, because it's probably less than 10 percent of total
revenues — a common threshold for publicly traded companies to
divulge such data.
If there's one alternative revenue source that should experience
growth, it's Yahoo's corporate portal business, says Dhar, who has
a "hold" rating on the company's stock. Last quarter, Yahoo
reported 22 companies had signed on to the service and said more
are in the pipeline. "If they're offering a real value-added service
which can save a company money, then in this time of IT curtailment
of spending that might actually be a good thing," he says. "It might
be an opportunity."
Fieler of Bear Stearns takes a different view, saying he would be
"extremely surprised" if Yahoo reported strong growth in the
corporate portal business. "As strong as the product is, there are a
lot of other strong products enterprises aren't spending money on,"
he says. Like advertising, IT spending is sensitive to the economy,
he notes. "Most businesses are," he added. "There's not a lot you
can do on that."
Advertising, meanwhile, may be stabilizing, albeit at far lower levels
than in the past, analysts say. Dhar expects Internet advertising to
emerge from its slump around the first quarter 2002. "I think pretty
much this whole year is a transition year."
OT:Motorola moves out of managed network business
By Total Telecom staff
06 July 2001
Motorola is selling its Multiservice Networks Division to Platinum Equity for an
undisclosed amount in order to focus on its core business activities.
The division, which employs 600 people, provides network design, implementation,
integration and network management. It is being sold to Platinum Equity, a Los
Angeles-based financial/strategic buyer that will announce its strategy for the
division once the deal has been closed, which is expected by the end of the year. It
will, however, keep MND's headquarters in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
Platinum Equity said it operates according to a "managed entrepreneurship"
approach, whereby management teams operate the business independently.
"The MND managed network solutions are a strong addition to our portfolio," said
Tom T. Gores, Platinum Equity president and chief executive. "We will aggressively
pursue growth through the Network Operations Center."
Gores continued, "We are continuing to build our presence in the network space
and see the employees and customers of MND as important components in our
continuing drive to create new value."
E.Digital's letter of confidence has an air of uncertainty
July 4, 2001
Losses are mounting at e.Digital, the maker of portable products that link personal computers and the Internet.
In fact, last year's losses were about double revenues, but the company -- known in the past for big claims that didn't bear fruit -- professes optimism.
The chief executive's letter to shareholders exudes confidence.
But the 10-KSB report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission late last week, admits that there is "substantial uncertainty about future operating results."
According to that 10-KSB, revenues increased 270 percent last year to $1.83 million. But the company lost $3.65 million, or 7 cents a share, compared with a loss of $2.61 million, or 5 cents a share, the previous year.
"Notwithstanding delays, progress has been made with our (original equipment manufacturers) and manufacturing partners on our hard disk drive-based jukebox designs and other product platforms," Alfred H. Falk, president and chief executive, said in the letter to shareholders.
"Service offerings are expanding significantly," enthused Falk, who also talked of valuable strategic partnerships and noted that the personnel count was up 30 percent.
"We appreciate your desire for more news and details on our products, projects, agreements and relationships," Falk said. "We also share your frustration that expected announcements have been delayed."
The 10-KSB reported that the company has established relationships with such companies as Lucent, Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Sony and Toshiba.
The document also revealed big increases in administrative and research and development costs.
But, confessed the 10-KSB, "There is no guarantee that we can or will report operating profits in the future." That is particularly true since one customer -- Lanier Healthcare -- accounted for 90 percent of revenues in each of the last two years.
The company has a fat accumulated deficit of $52 million. There are 130 million shares outstanding.
There is a reason that the letter from the president and the filing with the SEC have such different tones, explains vice president Robert Putnam.
Falk's letter describes "things that are on the verge of happening," he said, while "all financial filings have to be grounded in what you have done, and have all the disclaimers."
Trouble is, this company's shareholders have been told they were on the cusp of great success for many years. Maybe it's finally true. Maybe not.
The stock of e.Digital soared from 5.8 cents in early 1999 to almost $16 early last year. In 1999, it was the hottest local stock, even surpassing Qualcomm, as e.Digital zoomed 4,447 percent. Qualcomm could only muster a 2,619.4 percent gain.
A large group of e.Digital investors, including insiders, filed to sell 13 million shares in mid-1999 as the stock hit $2.26. Putnam says he doesn't know if the shares were actually sold.
But the stock closed yesterday at $1.43, down 3 cents.
Don Bauder's e-mail address is don.bauder@uniontrib.com. His phone number is (619) 293-1523.
Samsung Diversifying Line Of Internet Audio Portables
By Joseph Palenchar
TWICE
7/9/01
RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.— Samsung will diversify its portfolio of Yepp Internet audio portables in the summer and fall with its first MP3-CD portable, its first pendant-style flash-memory portable, and its first firmware-upgradable flash-memory portable, which will also be among the company's first multicodec models.
A pair of lightweight 1.13-ounce models, and a second-generation shelf system with dockable flash-memory portable are also on the way, said product manager Rich Martens.
The MP3-CD player, due in July at $129 MAP, plays 5-inch MP3-encoded CD-R/RW discs and features 45-second CD memory buffer and 100-second MP3 memory buffer.
Samsung's first firmware-upgradable portable, the YP-700S, is due in November at a tentative $229 retail with 128MB embedded memory. Only Rio and Intel currently offer 128MB portables, Martens said. As one of the company's first two multicodec models, the 700S will play MP3, WMA, and AAC files and support WMA's DRM technology. The unit can be upgraded to support additional codecs and DRMs. The device also features voice recorder, FM tuner and Smart Media slot for memory expansion.
MP3-CD players and 128MB flash-memory portables, like hard-drive portables, Martens said, are turning out to be hot categories because of the amount of music they can store in comparison to most flash-memory portables.
The pendant player, the $169-MAP YP-30S, plays MP3 files, features embedded 64MB non-expandable memory, and voice recorder. It ships in September.
The two 1.13-ounce models are the 32MB YP-20T and 64MB YP-20s. Both feature MP3 playback, nonexpandable embedded memory, and equalizer at retails of $99 and $149.
The shelf system with dockable flash-memory portable is the $399-MAP Combi Yepp, due in August. The microsystem rips music from its vertical-load CD player and encodes the songs in the WMA and MP3 formats. The music can be transferred to the included dockable flash-memory portable, which features 32MB embedded memory, Smart Media slot, and WMA and MP3 playback.
Samsung's first such shelf system, the Wingo, supports only MP3.
Liquid Audio Announces Resignation of CTO
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Liquid Audio, Inc. (Nasdaq: LQID - news), a leading provider of software, infrastructure and services for secure Internet media delivery, today announced the resignation of Philip Wiser as senior vice president, chief technology officer, and director.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19990915/LQIDLOGO )
``As we built a global music distribution network, Phil organized and staffed a world class development organization. Under his leadership, Liquid Audio has amassed an incredibly valuable intellectual property portfolio, built the first online music distribution system, and deployed the most widely used music distribution network,'' said Gerry Kearby, president and chief executive officer of Liquid Audio, Inc. ``Phil's dedication and vision have been an integral part of this management team for the last six years. We wish him the very best in the next phase of his career.''
Wiser is leaving Liquid Audio to spend additional time with his family and investigate new opportunities. Leon Rishniw, vice president of Engineering and Matt Smith, vice president of Product Marketing at Liquid Audio, Inc. will assume Wiser's responsibilities.
Liquid Audio, Inc. is a leading provider of software, infrastructure and services for the secure digital delivery of media over the Internet. The Liquid Audio solution gives content owners, Web sites and companies the ability to publish, syndicate and securely sell digital media online with copy protection and copyright management. Using the Liquid(TM) Player software, available for free download at www.liquidaudio.com, consumers can preview and purchase downloadable music from hundreds of affiliate Web sites in the Liquid Music Network(SM). Traded on Nasdaq under the symbol LQID, Liquid Audio is located in Redwood City, Calif.
NOTE: Liquid, Liquid Audio, Inc., Liquid Audio, the Liquid Audio logo, Liquifier and Liquid Music are trademarks of Liquid Audio, Inc.
SOURCE: Liquid Audio, Inc.
LAPD Pilots Infokall's Handheld Application for Law
Enforcement
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 2, 2001--
eLEDR (e-handheld Law Enforcement Data Recorder) enables officers to collect information at the scene
without paperwork.
Infokall, a global provider of eBusiness and Wireless solutions, Monday announced a pilot project with the
Los Angeles Police Department to support Field Data Capture.
Infokall's application eLEDR enables LAPD officers to capture information on every stop they make, all on a
handheld device.
"Infokall is enabling LAPD to move forward with our key initiatives. We have been impressed with the
eLEDR solution and services provided by Infokall during the pilot program," said Chief Information Officer
Roger Ham, of the LAPD Information and Communication Services Bureau.
During the pilot, LAPD officers can record information such as reason for stop, whether a search or seizure
took place, action taken, and more. To automate and speed up the data capture process, eLEDR allows bar
code scanning of VIN (Vehicle Identification Numbers) numbers and reads magnetic strips from drivers'
licenses.
"We are pleased to be working with LAPD. Infokall continues to help companies and government
organizations leverage their existing processes and systems, while enabling information through wireless
technology," said Vishnu Choudary, CEO of Infokall.
About Infokall
Infokall is a global provider of eBusiness and Wireless Integration solutions, which enable companies and
government organizations to achieve maximum benefit from their existing IT infrastructure. By collecting,
combining, and delivering mission-critical information across the wired and wireless world, Infokall's
customers have access to relevant data to make informed decisions anytime, anywhere. With headquarters in
Newport Beach, Infokall has offices in India, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. For more information, visit
www.infokall.com or call 949/955-3535.
--30--KT/np* FR/np
CONTACT: Infokall, Newport Beach
Steve Hamman, 949/655-3063
steve.hamman@infokall.com
OT more from the darkside..High-Tech Security on Tampa Streets
Updated: Sun, Jul 01 5:22 PM EDT
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Tampa is using high-tech security cameras to scan the city's streets for people wanted for crimes, a law
enforcement tactic that some liken to Big Brother.
A computer software program linked to 36 cameras began scanning crowds Friday in Tampa's nightlife district, Ybor City, matching
results against a database of mug shots of people with outstanding arrest warrants.
European cities and U.S government offices, casinos and banks are already using the so-called face-printing system, but Tampa is the
first American city to install a permanent system along public streets, The Tampa Tribune reported Sunday.
A similar system was used at Super Bowl XXXV, which was held in Tampa last January.
"Tampa is really leading the pack here," said Frances Zelazny, a spokeswoman for Visionics Corp., which produces the "FaceIt"
software.
The software has raised concerns over privacy, ethics and government intrusion.
"This is Big Brother actually implemented," said Jack Walters of the Tampa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I think
this just opens the door to it being everywhere."
But Tampa Detective Bill Todd says FaceIt is no different than having a police officer standing on a street holding a mug shot.
At the Super Bowl, a Visionics competitor, Graphco Technologies, wired cameras around Raymond James Stadium and in Ybor City.
The computer spotted 19 people at the crowded stadium with outstanding warrants, all for minor offenses. But no arrests were made.
"During the Super Bowl, we got overwhelmed," Todd said. "That's the other thing: When you get a match, how quickly can you get to
these people?"
Business owners have mixed emotions about the new technology.
"I don't know if I like it," said Vicki Doble, who owns The Brew Pub. "It may be a bit too much."
Don Barco, owner of King Corona Cigars Bar & Cafe, approves of the cameras but says they may not be as effective as the city hopes.
"Sometimes these high-tech toys, they tend to give a little too much credence to what they do," he said.