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MP3 Players, Online Music Stores Expected To Be A Strong Holiday Combo
TechWeb News , 10-Dec-2003
Shipments of MP3 players are expected to nearly double this year, and continue growing by almost 50 percent a year for the next three years, a market research firm said Tuesday.
The number of units shipped by manufacturers in the U.S. is expected to be more than 3.5 million this year and exceed 26 million by 2006, market research firm Jupiter Research said. In three years, enough people are expected to have the digital music players to start driving online music sales.
In addition, Forrester found in a consumer survey that nearly 60 percent of people shopping for music players will look online for the holidays to take advantage of the Internet's convenience and the ability to mail gifts directly.
"They're not quite this season's DVD player, but portable music players, combined with online music stores and services, will be a strong holiday shopping combination," Jupiter analyst David Card said in a statement.
To lure shoppers, Internet retailers need to promote convenient shipping, competitive pricing and how customers can beat the holiday crowds by buying online. The survey found that these shoppers were less concerned about credit card security than average, but more worried about late arrivals and returns.
This year will likely see a half dozen new stores and services join existing players like America Online, MusicMatch, Napster, RealNetworks and Apple Computer's iTunes Store, which together with the Applie iPod player has energized the music industry.
Computer makers Dell and Gateway have already launched hard-drive-based players, joining previous entries from Philips and Toshiba, as well as from specialists like Creative Labs and Archos. Sony is expected to announce its plans for the space shortly, but Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Amazon.com will miss this season, Forrester said.
List of EVD makers
by: domuna (40/M/London) 12/18/03 08:32 am
Msg: 56948 of 56983
We have SVA.
We have shinco
http://hk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/031208/82/vuwf.html
We have Skyworth.
We have BBK.
We have Malata
any others?
Report: Intel, NTT DoCoMo team up on phone chips
Companies form alliance to jointly develop next-generation chips for cellular telephones
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service November 17, 2003
TOKYO -- Intel Corp., the world's biggest chip maker, and NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cellular carrier, have formed an alliance to jointly develop next-generation chips for cellular telephones, according to a report in the Saturday morning edition of Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun.
The business daily, which did not identify its source for the story, said the joint work by the two companies will be in seven areas, including NTT DoCoMo's WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), or so-called third-generation (3G), telephones and future fourth-generation (4G) handsets.
Part of the work will include the development of a chip for use in NTT DoCoMo's 3G handsets that can simultaneously handle multiple tasks, such as audio and video communications and image processing, said the report. The companies plan to begin using the chip in two to three years, the newspaper said.
Intel's research and development unit is working with NTT DoCoMo on cellular telephone technology, said William Giles, a company spokesman. He could not immediately provide details of the work under way. NTT DoCoMo could not be reached for comment.
Intel is one of several companies that have been trying to move into the telecommunications space over the last few years as cellular telephone handsets become more complicated and processors are called upon to perform more complex tasks. Other companies entering the market include Texas Instruments Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., NEC Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. and Hitachi Ltd.
YEAR IN REVIEW
Industry by industry, executives give their outlook for 2004
By The Associated Press, 12/18/2003
EDITOR'S NOTE: For an industry-by-industry look at the year ahead, beat reporters for The Associated Press asked a prominent executive in each sector to provide their view of important trends for 2004.
......
AIRLINES: Gerard Arpey, CEO of AMR Corp.
After more than two years in crisis, the nation's major airlines will start to see the benefits of cost-cutting and restructuring, Arpey believes. The economic upswing will boost travel demand, if only slightly.
"We're excited about the prospect of growing again and competing again," he says.
AMR owns American Airlines which, like many of its competitors, plans to add capacity for the first time in several years in 2004, and hire back a small percentage of the tens of thousands of employees it has laid off since late 2001. Analysts expect the nation's six largest carriers to increase capacity by as much as 4 percent -- a significant chunk of that coming from flying more frequently, not from adding more planes.
Whether or not the industry returns to profitability in 2004 will depend, Arpey says, on the economy, the price of jet fuel and business travel demand. Either way, hub-and-spoke carriers such as American and Delta are now in a much better position to compete with profitable low-cost carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest, whose discount fares and efficient operations have reset industry standards.
Carriers are experimenting with everything from new inflight entertainment systems to better quality food -- only some of which is free, as the industry attempts to distinguish between what fliers want and what they value.
"All the arrows are pointed generally in the right direction," Arpey said. "But clearly, we have a long way to go."
--AP Business Writer Brad Foss
Wal-Mart Tests New Online Music Service
By CHUCK BARTELS, Associated Press Writer
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Thursday began a test of its new 88-cent-per-song online music service, a price that undercuts the 99-cent standard of its competition.
The site was up and running Thursday morning, signaling that the world's largest retailer is moving to capture more of the music market.
Wal-Mart executives are fond of saying 20 percent of their customers don't have checking accounts. But in Thursday's announcement, Walmart.com senior category manager Kevin Swint said 64 percent of Wal-Mart customers are online.
"We see digital music downloads as a natural extension of the music selection offered in Wal-Mart stores," Swint said.
The company plans to see what customers like and don't like about the service in the months ahead and formally launch the service in 2004.
The site has "hundreds of thousands" of songs, available in WMA format. The songs can be transferred to compatible portable devices, burned to a CD or played on Windows-compatible PCs, the company said.
"The test phase for this new service is important to gauge customer feedback, so that we can deliver a quality music downloads service that customers will want to use time and time again," Swint said.
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes offers songs for 99 cents apiece. Roxio Inc. and Napster (news - web sites) are players in the sector, and Microsoft Corp. is to crowd the field next year when it introduces its own song-downloading service.
Wal-Mart said it developed its online service with Anderson Merchandisers and the songs will be provided by Liquid Digital Media, previously known as Liquid Audio, which was acquired by Anderson Merchandisers in January.
Thursday morning, the Walmart.com music site featured the club mix of OutKast's "Hey Ya!" as its top download. Its No. 9 entry was "First Cut is the Deepest" by Sheryl Crow (news).
In 1996, Wal-Mart refused to stock a CD by Crow that contained lyrics criticizing Wal-Mart for selling guns. Her greatest hits CD is featured on the site with a greatest hits CD by country performer Alan Jackson (news) under the heading "All the Best." The Crow CD doesn't feature the offending song, "Love is a Good Thing."
Video compression's quantum leap
By Didier LeGall, LSI Logic -- 12/11/2003
EDN
As video goes digital, content producers, distributors, and users are all demanding ever-higher quality and ever-larger display screens--in other words, more megapixels per second. Consider a typical TV-broadcast video stream characterized by 24-bit color and 720×480-pixel resolution refreshing at 30 frames/sec. Uncompressed, it would require a bandwidth of greater than 248 Mbps. High-definition TV requires five times the bandwidth of standard-definition TV. Because the carrying capacity of most communication channels cannot keep up with pixel demand, video compression has been the only option, particularly in the high-definition era.
For more than a decade, standards from the ISO MPEG (International Standards Organization Moving Picture Experts Group) and the ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union Telecommunications Committee) have successfully addressed the demand for high compression ratios.
MPEG-2 has been the most successful to date, achieving mass-market acceptance in applications such as DVD players, cable- and satellite-digital TV, and set-top boxes. However, operators are continuously reducing the operating point, affecting image quality, and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of compression artifacts, such as blocking, ringing, and drifting. More recently, MPEG and ITU have developed MPEG-4 (Advanced Simple Profile) and H.263, respectively, but in the face of new market demands, they are ready for a successor.
HDTV (high-definition TV) and video over IP (Internet Protocol) using an ADSL (asymmetrical-digital-subscriber-line) connection represent a set of bandwidth-hungry terrestrial-broadcast and wired applications. In the broadcast world, the cost of satellite transmission is increasing. It is becoming increasingly evident that two-times-better compression than MPEG-2 is the most cost-effective way to provide a sufficient number of local channels and to transmit HDTV. The same arguments are true for cable and even more imperative in Internet-content distribution.
By all accounts, the HD-DVD will take over where DVD leaves off and start a multibillion-dollar market for players as long as video-compression technology keeps pace with bandwidth demands. Meanwhile, IEEE 802.11e WLAN (wireless-LAN) "hot spots" and in-home wireless networks, in which multiple users share bandwidth, present an even more daunting engineering challenge. Engineers will meet that challenge when they adopt an ITU-T- and ISO MPEG-approved standard. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) will deliver a twofold improvement in compression ratio and improved quality. As such, it represents the most significant improvement in coding efficiency and quality since MPEG-2/H.262 (Reference 1).
Compression basics
Compression essentially identifies and eliminates redundancies in a signal and provides instructions for reconstituting the bit stream into a picture when the bits are uncompressed. The basic types of redundancy are spatial, temporal, psycho-visual, and statistical. "Spatial redundancy" refers to the correlation between neighboring pixels in, for example, a flat background. "Temporal redundancy" refers to the correlation of a pixel's position between video frames. Typically, the background of a scene remains static in the absence of camera movement, so that you need not code and decode those pixels for every frame. Psycho-visual redundancy takes advantage of the varying sensitivities of the human visual system. The human eye is much more discriminating regarding changes in luminance than chrominance, for example, so a system with this feature can discard some color-depth information, and viewers do not recognize the difference. Statistical redundancy uses a more compact representation for elements that frequently recur in a video, thus reducing the overall size of the compressed signal.
Removing temporal redundancies is responsible for a significant percentage of all the video compression that you can achieve. Although H.264 makes advances in removing temporal redundancies, it is also better across the board, thanks to the adoption of innovative techniques.
Into the future with H.264
Video-compression schemes today follow a common set of interactive operations. First, they segment the video frame into blocks of pixels. Also, the schemes estimate frame-to-frame motion of each block to identify temporal or spatial redundancy, within the frame. In another operation, an algorithmic DCT (discrete cosine transform) decorrelates the motion-compensated data to produce an expression with the lowest number of coefficients, reducing spatial redundancy. The video-compression scheme then quantizes the DCT coefficients based on a psycho-visual redundancy model. Entropy coding then removes statistical redundancy, reducing the average number of bits necessary to represent the compressed video. Coding, or rate, control--also known as mode decision--comes into play to select the most efficient mode of operation. Figure 1 provides an overview of coding.
Motion estimation
Estimating the movement of blocks of pixels from frame to frame and coding the displacement vector--not the details of the blocks themselves--reduce or eliminate temporal redundancy. To start, the compression scheme divides the video frame into blocks. Whereas MPEG-2 uses only 16×16-pixel motion-compensated blocks, or macroblocks, H.264 provides the option of motion compensating 16×16-, 16×8-, 8×16-, 8×8-, 8×4-, 4×8-, or 4×4-pixel blocks within each macroblock. The scheme accomplishes motion estimation by searching for a good match for a block from the current frame in a previously coded frame. The resulting coded picture is a P-frame.
The estimate may also involve combining pixels resulting from the search of two frames. In this case, the coded picture, or B-frame. (In MPEG-2, these two frames must be one temporally previous frame and one temporally future frame, whereas H.264 generalizes B-frames, thus removing this restriction.) Searching is an important aspect of the process because it must try to ascertain the best match for where the block has moved from one frame to the next.
To substantially improve the process, you can use subpixel motion estimation, which defines fractional pixels. Unlike MPEG-2, which offers half-pixel accuracy, H.264 uses quarter-pixel accuracy for both the horizontal and the vertical components of the motion vectors.
H.264 uses P- and B-frames to detect and code periodic motion. Although B-macroblocks often give better performance than P-macroblocks, using them in a traditional manner delays decoding. This delay occurs because H.264 must decode the future P-frames before temporally decoding preceding B-frames. By using multiple frames, H.264 delivers superior performance for translational motion and occlusions.
For blocks that are poorly represented in previously decoded frames, due to such actions as camera panning or moving objects uncovering previously unseen background, motion compensation yields little significant compression benefit. In these instances, H.264 capitalizes on intraframe estimation to eliminate spatial redundancies. By also removing spatial redundancy in the pixel domain instead of exclusively in the frequency domain, as its predecessors do, H.264 achieves significantly better compression that is comparable to that of the JPEG-2000 still-image compression standard.
Intraframe estimation operates at the pixel-block level and attempts to predict the current block by extrapolating the neighboring pixels from adjacent blocks in a defined set of directions. The method then codes the difference between the predicted block and the actual block. Intraframe estimation is particularly useful in coding flat backgrounds (Figure 2).
Domain transformation
Perhaps the best known aspect of previous MPEG and H.26x standards is the use of DCTs to transform the video information that results from motion and intraframe estimation into the frequency domain in preparation for quantization. The widely used 8×8 DCT assumes a numerically accurate implementation, akin to floating point. This implementation leads to problems when you use mismatched inverse-DCT implementations in the encoder and the decoder. This mismatch causes "drifting," which results in visible degradations particularly apparent at low bit rates in streaming applications.
In a significant innovation, H.264 uses a DCT-like 4×4 integer transform to translate the motion-compensated data into the frequency domain. A key advantage of switching to the new algorithm is that the smaller block reduces blocking and ringing artifacts. In addition, integer coefficients eliminate the rounding errors inherent with floating-point coefficients. Rounding errors can cause drifting artifacts in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP.
Quantization
Psycho-visual redundancy comes about because of the human eye's acute sensitivity to slow and linear changes (constant low-frequency information) and its relative insensitivity to high-frequency information, such as busy textures. The human eye has a lower sensitivity to spatial resolution in the chrominance signal; in consumer-video applications, therefore, the system commonly subsamples chrominance signal by a factor of two, both horizontally and vertically. The output of the transform step completely represents information for all frequency levels, providing another opportunity for compression.
The quantization process eliminates high-frequency information by mapping, or quantizing, each DCT coefficient to a discrete set of levels. In H.264, the 4×4 transform expands to an 8×8 transform for chroma-predicted blocks and to a 16×16 transform for some luma-predicted blocks by applying second-level 2×2 and 4×4 integer transforms, respectively, to the lowest frequency information to which the human eye is most sensitive. You use the smaller transforms for the quantization of chroma samples because the chroma samples are already decimated at a 2-to-1 ratio. The larger transform for the luma samples reduces fidelity, but the human eye cannot discern the result. Quantization is also useful in controlling the bit rate by selectively eliminating visual information.
Entropy coding
The entropy-coding stage maps symbols representing motion vectors, quantized coefficients, and macroblock headers into actual bits (Figure 3). In compression standards, all entropy coding shares a common goal: to reduce the average number of bits necessary to represent the compressed video. Previous standards accomplished this task by using VLC (variable-length-code) tables. The goal of VLC tables is to ensure that you use shorter code words for more frequently occurring symbols, such as small coefficient values. But you can also use arithmetic coding instead of VLC tables, and H.264 introduced this concept for the first time for video compression, even though it was an option in the JPEG standard for still images.
In either scheme, before entropy coding can begin, the system serializes the quantized DCT coefficients into a 1-D array by scanning them in zigzag order. The resulting serialization places the dc coefficient first, and the ac coefficients follow in low- to high-frequency order. Because higher frequency coefficients tend to be zero (the result of the quantization process), the system uses run-length encoding to group adjacent zeros, which results in more efficient entropy coding.
In MPEG-2, serialization depends on whether the coefficients originate from a motion-estimated or an intraframe-estimated macroblock. In H.264, serialization depends only on whether the coefficients originate from samples coded from the same video field (a field macroblock) or from a frame containing both the top and bottom video fields (a frame macroblock).
H.264 introduced CABAC (context-adaptive binary-arithmetic coding), which is more efficient than VLC for symbol probabilities greater than 50% because it allows you to represent a symbol with less than one bit. CABAC manages this task by adapting to the changing probability distribution of symbols and by exploiting correlations between symbols. Table 1 illustrates the differences between VLC and CABAC. H.264 also supports CAVLC (context-adaptive variable-length coding), which is superior to VLC without the full cost of CABAC.
Deblocking loop filter
Introducing more options and modes into the encoding algorithm also introduces more opportunities for discontinuities. Artifacts occur, for example, when you code adjacent macroblocks using different modes. The encoder may make independent decisions to compress macroblocks using the motion-estimation (interframe) mode, the spatial (intraframe) mode, or skip mode (skipping the macroblocks altogether). As a result, the pixels adjacent to two blocks compressed in different modes can have different values, even though they should be similar. Artifacts can also occur around block boundaries by the transformation/quantization process and motion-vector differences between blocks.
To eliminate these artifacts, H.264 defines a deblocking filter that operates on both 16×16-macroblocks and 4×4-block boundaries. In the case of the macroblocks, the filter eliminates artifacts resulting from motion or intraframe estimation or different quantizer scales. In the case of the smaller blocks, the filter removes artifacts that transformation/quantization and motion-vector differences between adjacent blocks cause. Generally, the loop filter modifies the two pixels on either side of the boundary using a content-adaptive, nonlinear filter. (Both the decoder and the decoding loop that replicates within each encoder use the deblocking filter--hence, the term "loop filter.") The result is not only improved visual quality, but also, because motion compensation uses deblocked decoded frames, improved coding efficiency.
Modest complexity increase
As mentioned, H.264 achieves compression ratios that are two to three times better than those of its immediate predecessors. You must balance these gains, however, against the increase in the complexity of the algorithm as well as its implementation in silicon. The result is a manageable increase when you compare it to MPEG-2; so the trade-offs have been positive for the industry. Nevertheless, implementation is far from trivial and demands a thorough understanding of the standard and the silicon-design and -fabrication process. Striking examples are the new options available for compression coding, which requires a way to fit together macroblocks that you have compressed using different modes. Implementing this feature and other H.264 features in silicon requires years of experience to achieve the most cost-effective silicon approach.
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Author Information
Didier LeGall is vice president of engineering and business development for LSI Logic's Broadband Entertainment Division. He is in charge of the engineering and business-development activities for digital-video products, including DVD, video peripheral, PVR/DVR, and video production and broadcasting. He has been involved with ISO's MPEG-standardization effort since its inception and served as chairman of the MPEG-Video group until 1995. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California--Los Angeles.
Chinese electronics makers plan to start marketing EVD players as early as Christmas
Shanghai. (Interfax-China) - China's electronics makers will begin marketing their EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc) players as early as Christmas, Interfax learned after interviewing several companies. Manufactures, however, are worried about how the market will respond to the first Chinese developed digital laser video system.
Shanghai-based SVA Group said it would start selling EVD players ahead of Christmas, while Jiangsu Shinco Electronics Group said it would begin sales in January of 2004, ahead of China's Spring Festival holiday (Chinese New Years). Both companies produce DVD players that are popular among Chinese consumers. Meanwhile, however, Xiamen Xiaxin Electronics said it would wait and see how the market responds to EVD technology before beginning sales of its own EVD players. All three of these companies are among a group of 15 leading Chinese industry players that co-funded the EVD standards developer Beijing E-world Technology.
Additionally, Hao Jie, president of Beijing E-world, disclosed to Interfax in an interview that Shinco has already ordered 5 mln EVD movie disks to be bundled with the sales of their EVD players. Shinco officials, however, declined to comment on the issue.
Hao, furthermore, estimated that sales of EVD players would to hit 1 mln sets for the full year of 2004, and that sales would increase to 12 mln sets by 2006.
Worries, however, continue to linger over the prospects of EVD players on the Chinese market. These worries exist partly because of the higher prices EVD players will demand, as compared to DVD players. EVD players are likely to be priced between RMB 1,000 (USD 120.8) and RMB 2,000 (USD 241.6), as compared to the RMB 500 (USD 60.4) to RMB 1,000 (120.8) price range most DVD players fall into.
Moreover, although EVD is reportedly capable of delivering video that is five times clearer than DVD technology, this difference in quality is only perceivable when an EVD player is connect to a high definition television (HDTV). China's current HDTV market has been limited by higher prices, but has shows recent signs of growth. Nevertheless, manufacturers fear that China's small HDTV market will also limit the popularity of EVD players and that the new technology will get the cold shoulder from price sensitive Chinese consumer.
Despite these worries, some electronics producers are still pinning big hopes to the EVD market, largely because EVD players enjoy higher profit margins than DVD players, SVA spokesman Tao Jun explained to Interfax.
"The cut-throat competition on the DVD market leaves almost no margin for domestic producers," Tao noted.
08.12.2003 China's electronics manufacturing sees positive outlook towards 2005 and beyond
Representatives from foreign electronics manufacturers expressed that the outlook for China's electronics manufacturing industry is very positive for the next few years, and that China is also increasing its input in product R&D for the Asia Pacific region.
George Yang and Yang Fuyan, both senior executives with Siemens Dematic told Interfax that in China most local (electronics) firms are currently moving from low-end towards middle and high-end manufacturing. Siemens Dematic already provides around 3,000 SMT (Surface Mount Technology) machines to Chinese firms such as Haier, Konka, TCL, Bird, ZTE, Huawei, Eastcom and DBTel, as well as foreign firms such as Siemens Mobile, Motorola and Nokia. Between 2-4 SMT machines would be needed for the average mobile phone production line. According to Yang Fuyan machines come as a "manufacturing solution package," which cost in the region of USD 500,000, depending on client requirements. Siemens' SMT sales account for about 50% of the China market according to Yang, of which 95% are imported from overseas. Yang also identified a strong trend towards the increasing requirement in China for R&D investment to localize products to meet requirements for China and Asian markets.
The firm's competitors are foreign vendors such as Philips, Fuji and Panasonic. Yang revealed that firms such as Huawei and Datang are already preparing 3G handset manufacturing lines, using Siemens' SMT technologies. Yang predicted that the future trend is for smaller and smaller components, with increasing accuracy needed in the manufacturing process. With the challenge to manufacturers to produce products for technologies such as 3G and camera phones Yang said "the market is pushing us and we're leading the market We're creating smaller and smaller components."
Gu Ying Hao and Kelvin K.W Poon, both senior executives with Omron also expressed positive growth plans for China, in an interview with Interfax. Omron plans a USD 830 mln investment by 2005. Poon said that "China is really catching up," when comparing the country's electronics manufacturing capabilities to countries such as Japan. Poon predicts the trend for the next 3-5 years will also include the transfer to China of high-tech R&D, with the country possibly accounting for almost half of the world's capability before the end of the decade.
Omron is the leader in sensing technologies used by electronics manufacturers in China, and with the increasing sophistication of products being built in the country Poon sees growth for his firm being high, predicting a tripling of business volume by 2005. His firm deals with manufacturers who build PCs, laptops and other high tech goods - building brands such as Compaq, IBM, Dell, Foxcom, BenQ and Acer, among others.
Poon sees several factors for his very positive outlook on China -the WTO accession, tax benefits, low labor costs, an increasingly better infrastructure, low cost of local materials, and the growth of the market for high-tech goods within the country, as well as exports.
Poon sees the north of China, with its strength in car manufacturing, as being a hotbed of clients for the firm's electronic sensors used in automobile electronics, the south of China with its focus on labor intensive consumer product manufacturing similarly provides many clients, with East China having more of a R&D and high-tech focus. Poon said the firm has looked to the west of China to work on products for the fixed-line telecom industry at a later date.
Besides 3G Poon also sees environmentally friendly high-tech products a being a future trend.
American Tec, which is 15% owned by the Singapore government is a service equipment provider and distributor for OEM in China, representing a wide range of products including SMT makers and VI technologies.
According to Jimson Lee, the firm's general manager, local partners are crucial for foreign firms operating in the electronics business in China. He is talking to 2-3 SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) in Nanjing and Shanghai with a view to forming a joint venture, which he described as being in the 'multimillion dollar" range.
But setting up JVs in China with SOEs is not an easy process Lee told Interfax: "SOEs have learnt a lot of lessons, with difficulties such as debt, bankruptcies and uncertainties, it makes them conservative. As an outsider…we have to understand their concerns. We need to be very patient. But if they do not learn there is no way they can compete with the outside world," he said. Currently his firm's largest China facility is in the Suzhou Singapore high-tech park.
Lee hopes that this kind of cooperation between local firms and foreign firms will secure both strong local sales and exports of high tech goods. "We don't want to kill the bird and take all the eggs," Lee said. Currently 50% of his firm's revenue is from China.
The company representatives were present in Shanghai for a warm-up event for the NEPCON Shanghai 2004/ EMT China, to be held in the city in April 2004. Reed Exhibitions East China said the show is expected to draw a record 650 top manufacturing companies. Josephine Lee, general manager for Reed Exhibitions East China also told Interfax that her firm is very positive on the outlook for the electronics industry in China, and is also looking for investment opportunities in the region. Reed is looking to acquire a local firm she said.
According to a study by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), quoted by the show organizers, 16% of all electronics manufacturing takes place in developing nations, with China already accounting for half of that. By the end of 2005, China will be manufacturing an additional USD 46 bln worth of electronics gear, an increase of 135% over present production values, bringing in contracts at an estimated USD 80 bln.
Philips Will Launch Open Digital Media System Soon
Tue Dec 16, 2003
By Lucas van Grinsven, European Technology Correspondent
EINDHOVEN (Reuters) - Philips Electronics (PHG.AS)(NYSE:PHG - news) said on Tuesday it was six months away from launching a system against illegal copying that will allow consumers to play digital video and music on any digital media player.
Philips hopes the so-called digital rights management (DRM) system being developed by Intertrust, which it jointly owns with Japan's Sony Corp (news - web sites). (6758.T), will replace a confusing array of proprietary systems.
Digital music stores which have opened on the Internet this year use different DRM methods to protect songs against unlimited copying. But consumers can then only play the music on computers, CD and MP3 players which support the same DRM system.
"Consumers want an open system, and the electronics industry wants it too," Ruud Peters, chief executive of Philips's intellectual property and standards unit, told Reuters.
U.S. software maker Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), for instance, has opened music stores on the Internet that sell music encoded in such a way that they can only be played back with a Windows Media Player.
This player can be installed on any personal computer, and Microsoft has already struck deals with consumer electronics makers to build it into hundreds of devices.
"The electronics industry recognizes that Microsoft is a formidable player, but consumer electronics makers do not want to become dependent on Microsoft. They need an interoperable and independent system," Peters said in an interview.
"DRM is an accelerator which will boost digital sales of media, because it will convince media companies their content is protected. It should not be a competitive weapon," he added.
"We hope to have an interoperable system between now and six months," Peters said. When launched, the new DRM system will be endorsed by a large number of electronics companies and media companies such as film distributors and music publishers, he said.
"When we launch we want to give guarantees that it will be sufficiently supported," Peters.
Philips is Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics and the world's No. 3, while Sony is the biggest. Intertrust is the biggest holder of DRM patents, and all digital music players need Intertrust's technology to develop their own DRM system.
Philips and Sony bought Intertrust early this year to make sure key DRM patents would be available to everyone in the electronics industry, and also because they saw that DRM technology would become a crucial part of digital media. They have said they would make them available on reasonable terms.
HONG KONG: Impatient government acts on digital TV plan
The Hong Kong government will go ahead with its long-delayed digital terrestrial television plan despite not knowing which standard the mainland will adopt
South China Morning Post
Saturday, December 6, 2003
By Hui Yuk-Min
The Hong Kong government will go ahead with its long-delayed digital terrestrial television plan despite not knowing which standard the mainland will adopt.
"We've been waiting for three years for China to finalise its decision on which digital TV standard to adopt," Commerce, Industry and Technology Bureau (Communications and Technology) permanent secretary Francis Ho said yesterday.
"It had come to a point to decide whether we should keep waiting indefinitely or should we move."
The government will start rolling out its digital terrestrial television service in 2006, and will free up four single-frequency network multiplexes to lure four new players to apply for the licences.
It is hoping to complete the migration to digital television by 2008.
Digital television is a progression from the traditional analogue transmission signal and takes up less frequency spectrum while offering higher picture quality. It also allows innovative add-on services such as internet access, a paging service and other telecommunication services.
Each frequency can be used to transmit four standard definition television channels with picture quality similar to a digital versatile disc (DVD) or one high definition television (HDTV) channel, a much higher resolution display quality.
Mr Ho said China was developing its own digital television standard and was targeting 2005 for its introduction. Therefore, Hong Kong's plan to migrate to digital television in 2006 would still match the mainland if it did not face further delays.
However, Hong Kong's two terrestrial television broadcasters - Television Broadcasts and Asia Television - reiterated it was crucial to wait for China's decision before Hong Kong went ahead with its plan.
Although countries such as Britain and Sweden launched digital television services in the late 1990s, they had only recorded single digit penetration rates because of the high cost of an HDTV set.
An HDTV can easily cost up to US$4,000, compared with less than $200 for most conventional sets.
The proposal allows all licensees to apply for digital terrestrial television licences. Previously, it was restricted to domestic television licensees. This means broadcasters such as existing pay-television licence holders and non-domestic television licensees such as Star TV and Phoenix TV can apply.
The proposal has allocated one multiple frequency network for TVB and ATV to share. They will also be allowed to apply for additional licences if they want to provide add-on services.
However, analysts and industry experts did not expect the availability of four frequencies to draw much interest. "I'll be surprised if there is a lot of interest. I think it will be niche operators [which will be interested in bidding for the licences]," CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets analyst Danie Schutte said.
Date Posted: 12/6/2003
CES: More than Consumer Electronics
Techies of every ilk will head to Vegas in January
LAS VEGAS
When the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show opens Jan. 8-11, virtual tents will expand over 23 specialized pavilions-ranging from HDTV and home networks to mobile telematics and storage technologies. Video and home theater systems-once among the centerpieces of CES-are now merely high-visibility elements in a digital bazaar that is expected to attract at least 115,000 people, about the same-sized crowd as in 2003, according to the CEA.
The product range, in turn, lures hordes of attendees from beyond CES's original cadre of electronics manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers. Cable TV executives show up-this year in packlike troops organized by CableLabs and CTAM-on the prowl for deals, including ones relating to the plug-and-play agreement that the FCC recently blessed. The cable moguls will also be fleshing out plans for their industry's move into the retail market, as underscored by recent broadband collaborative deals with Office Depot, Best Buy and Staples.
Satellite TV, with its HDTV jump on cable, is also high on CES's agenda. The show will feature a face-off among the three DBS chiefs: Eddy Hartenstein of DirecTV, Charlie Ergen of EchoStar and Charles Dolan of the newly launched VOOM.
Digital video recorders and similar media center devices will be on display from dozens of manufacturers, extending far beyond TiVo, ReplayTV and earliest pioneers. Several vendors are expected to unveil micro-drives built into TVs, paving the way for integrated TV/DVR sets.
GOO GOO G'JOOB
Meanwhile, one of the largest CE makers acknowledged the looming demise of the videocassette recorder business, pointing out that his company would only show two standalone VCRs at CES, but will have seven DVD models, plus a variety of combination DVD+DVR, TV+DVD and combo DVD/VCR/TV devices.
CES has revived its videogame presence, thanks to the direction in which Sony PlayStation and Microsoft XBox are taking that sector. The growth of laptops and PDAs on college campuses is attracting academic purchasing officers to look in on the education/productivity tools on display.
Hollywood has been showing up in greater numbers at CES in recent years, especially studio technology executives who are trying to foresee the ways in which their output will be viewed on big and small screens and via an expanding array of storage and transmission devices. Predictably, Texas Instruments and its DLP technology, plus Kodak's expanding Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) products-now named "Nu-Vue"-will be on display, in larger and brighter configurations.
And reflecting the legislative/regulatory implications of the CE industry-on everything from trade policy to Internet telephony-CES typically attracts more than a hundred federal, state and local public officials. It's hard to gauge how the FCC's recent travel cutback may affect the Washington contingent at this year's event.
On the global scene, the top government technology officials from France, Germany and South Korea will be touring the CES floor.
The 100-plus conference sessions, on topics ranging from copyright policy to digital TV installation procedures, account for some of the throngs at the Las Vegas tradeshow.
Also pulling crowds who want to do face-time with digital notables are the daily keynote sessions, featuring top executives from an array of allied industries, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates; Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel; Carly Fiorina, chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard; Gary Forsee, chairman and CEO of Sprint; Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon amd Fumio Ohtsubo, president, Panasonic AVC Networks, and senior managing director, Matsushita.
GIZMOS OF TOMORROW
CES throngs come to see and play with gizmos, not just to hear visionary pep talks about the industries on display. While the 1.1 million square feet of trade floor exhibits would seemingly fulfill most of these hands-on desires, the best viewing will inevitably be in the hotel suites and private exhibit rooms around town. During the past few years, specialty chip-makers such as TransMeta, Cirrus Logic and dozens of other microprocessor companies have showcased their components to manufacturers seeking to put advanced features into their future devices. Getting invited into the suites, or more importantly into the backrooms where the "best stuff" is revealed, is the hottest ticket in Vegas.
With a month to go before CES, handicappers are cautious about equipment debuts. Leading contenders include voice-recognition and voice-activation, designed for phone and remote control products, according to industry sources.
On the business front, China will be one of the most-discussed topics, both as an emerging consumer of CE devices and as a competitive supplier. One insider noted the "palpable panic" among Japanese and Korean mainstays, fraught with fear about what's coming next in HDTV or other products from China, a country that has already produced the $29 DVD player, thus altering the economics of the global hardware bazaar.
Closer to home, there's considerable anticipation about what the Media Lab from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will display. MIT's much-lauded Media Lab has signed up for its first-ever booth at CES, and lots of visitors are wondering what the visionaries will show off.
China muddles the picture for high-def format
EVD raises concerns; DVD Forum votes for Toshiba
By Paul Sweeting
November 24, 2003
c 2003, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
A government-backed consortium of DVD manufacturers in China has thrown a major and unpredictable wrinkle into worldwide efforts to develop a unified high-definition DVD system.
The nine-member consortium, which includes some of the world's largest producers of DVD players, unveiled a new disc format, called Enhanced Video Disc, based on technology developed in China that is different from either of the two major HD-DVD efforts under way in Japan, Europe and the U.S.
As the world's largest maker of DVD players and with a domestic market of 1.3 billion people, China now stands as a major obstacle to Japanese or U.S. hopes for a single, worldwide HD-DVD standard.
The announcement last week in Beijing comes at a critical time for the Japanese and U.S. efforts. Last week, the steering committee of the DVD Forum, the worldwide standards body for DVD, voted narrowly to adopt technical specifications for an HD standard developed by Toshiba Electronics and NEC Corp.
The Forum has been split between rival HD camps with Toshiba Corp./NEC on one side and the Blu-ray Disc camp, led by Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial and Philips Electronics, on the other.
Earlier this year, Toshiba failed to get the nine votes needed on the 17-member steering committee to carry its proposal.
For last week's vote, the committee's rules were changed so that abstentions were not counted, allowing the Toshiba/NEC proposal to pass with an 8-6 majority of votes cast and three abstentions.
Although the Toshiba/NEC system is now the quasi-official HD-DVD format, the Blu-ray Disc Group continues to develop its format outside the auspices of the DVD Forum. Blu-ray Disc recorders have already reached the market in limited numbers in Japan.
Unlike the blue-laser-based Blu-ray and Toshiba/NEC systems, EVD is based on the current red-laser technology.
EVD uses a new, high-level compression system called VP6, developed by New York-based On2 Technologies, to squeeze 120 minutes of HD movie footage onto a single disc.
Another American company, Milpitas, Calif.-based LSI Logic, is providing the encoder/decoder chips used in the EVD format.
Last week's announcement caught many involved in the DVD Forum and Blu-ray Disc Group off guard. Although China had been known to be developing a new DVD format since 1999, when its leading manufacturers and the government collaborated to form the Beijing E-World Technologies consortium, few were expecting anything so soon.
Chinese manufacturers account for more than half of all DVD players made in the world, including most of those sold under Japanese brand names. China has also become one of the largest markets for DVD players.
The Chinese have long chafed at paying the steep patent fees and royalties associated with the current generation of DVD technology, and the new format is seen as a way to break the hold of the primarily Japanese companies who control those patents.
The Chinese move leaves the U.S. studios in an uncertain position.
China has become a sinkhole of DVD piracy, largely scuttling studio hopes of developing the vast Chinese mainland as a legitimate market. A homegrown format with explicit government backing could provide a stepping stone toward addressing the piracy problem, especially if EVD includes some measure of copy protection, as the announcement suggested it would.
On the other hand, studios have grown increasingly alarmed about the split between the two blue-laser camps and the prospect of multiple HD formats.
Last month, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment joined Warner Home Video and Buena Vista Home Entertainment as a member of the DVD Forum in a bid to exert more Hollywood influence over the development of an HD standard.
Warner is the lone studio to sit on the Forum's steering committee, but studio sources say Fox is considering an application to join.
Of particular concern to the studios is the relatively little information they've been provided about copy-protection schemes by either the Blu-ray or Toshiba camps.
"It hasn't been as high a priority as we think it should be," said one studio executive involved in the discussions.
Even without major studio product, the vast Asian market for Chinese and Asian-language films gives E-World a solid base on which to build the EVD format.
The Chinese are also not closing off the possibility that they will seek to export the format to other territories, putting further pressure on Blu-ray and Toshiba/NEC.
On2 Technologies CEO Douglas McIntyre said that E-World had put great emphasis on export markets in negotiating the rights to On2's codecs.
"There are many long and involved clauses in the contract covering their right to export the technology beyond China," McIntyre said. "For the Chinese, it has become a question of, why just be the manufacturer for some other guy? Why not just be the guy?"
Hot Topic: What Will Be the Big IFE Issues In 2004?
Before industry pundits pose this question in December, we thought we would beat a few to the punch. Prior to reading further here is a disclaimer: We do not have any inside information or a crystal ball - your "big questions" will probably be different from ours, but we thought our readership might want to start thinking about what next year might bring. So, here goes!
When will someone "Show Us the Money" on the proliferation of in-flight connectivity business models? There we said it! Sunk costs, satellite lease costs, hardware costs all continue to make us uncomfortable about your in-flight surfing future. No question VPN is a requirement for business - who can do it? Is there an alternative to email on over water flights? Ever heard of ASI?
What the heck is going on with wireless in-flight connectivity? Yes we know that PDA's are being looked at by the RTCA and yes, we know the FAA is taking a wait and see posture (we hear they didn't even attend the latest Hamburg TC meeting). Supposedly the B7E7 is cooking up some wireless IFE but that is a rumor and 2008 is a long time to wait. In the US and elsewhere "hot spots" are popping up faster than Starbucks outlets but when do you think we will we see onboard installs fleetwide?
What's the future of in-flight TV? The popular service offering on JetBlue seems to captivate all who use it but how can airline ownership proliferate the product when competitors ask for it? Logically, a sale to an IFE company would seem to be a smart solution but there is no talk on the street about that? With all the promised ground-based bandwidth on the horizon, will there be another supplier in the near term? Over water, Connexion by Boeing has sold this feature to Singapore Airlines but is there hope for new sat-based TV entrants with the high cost of building new "birds"?
As we predicted, the single-aisle market has ballooned. For example, Aloha Airlines is flying B737-700s from Hawaii to the mainland - and we want IFE so we don't have to look out the window. But what are the fallout implications to the IFE vendors? We do know that all IFE suppliers are downsizing their gear, ostensibly for the bizjet market but they are also looking at regionals and, by coincidence, these products may be the "right stuff" for the implementation on single aisle twins….not to mention the retrofit of that same market.
Where is in-seat power going? A few pundits told us battery technology will develop real competition in the decision to power-up or not. Insiders also have said that "DC is dead, AC is the answer" but many will disagree with that position (You know who you are). Will the proliferation of portable VOD players demand more seat juice?
When will that aircraft network fall under the "open system architecture" heading? Admittedly, LINUX is fast becoming the popular solution but software folks tell us that the vendors write the applications and may, for a price, provide licenses to 3rd party vendors. This is probably another quest for ARINC 628?
Lastly, there is a small trend (Alaska Airlines with the rented DigEplayer) that points to the acceptance of pay-for-play IFE. If this is the beginning of IFE-based (or at least cost reduction) revenue streams, it will be interesting to see if airlines who adopt this strategy (at least initially), stick to it when the competition gives it away.
Spare a microdrive, Toshiba?
By Michael Kanellos
CNET News.com
December 10, 2003, 2:31 PM PT
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At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, Toshiba will unveil a hard drive that measures less than an inch across, as the mini-mass-storage market marches on.
The drive, about the same size as a quarter, will go inside MP3 players, set-top boxes and other consumer-electronic goods, according to sources close to the company. The capacity of the new drive is not yet known, but Hitachi and others currently sell 1-inch diameter hard drives (also known as microdrives) that can hold 1GB to 4GB of data.
Increasing densities, shrinking sizes and declining prices have allowed the hard drive to become firmly ensconced in consumer-electronics products. TiVo and other personal video recorders rely on hard drives to store date. A number of music players, most notably Apple Computer's iPod, have taken advantage of smaller drives. In the future, small drives will likely be incorporated into cameras and TVs, some analysts have said.
Toshiba was the first major manufacturer to come out with a 1.8-inch drive, which can now hold up to 40GB of data. Apple, in fact, uses Toshiba drives in the iPod and enjoyed almost a complete monopoly on the supply of these drives for about a year, according to sources in the drive industry.
Competition in that market, however, has been heating up. Hitachi came out with its first 1.8-inch drive in November, and Dell adopted it in its Digital Jukebox.
Similarly, Hitachi, which acquired its micro drive technology from IBM in 2002, dominated the market for 1-inch drives until this year.
In the summer, however, Cornice, a start-up in Colorado, came out with a 1.5GB microdrive that cost less than Hitachi's small drive. Samsung has put Cornice's drive into a music player that takes up less space than those from Dell or Apple and a digital video camera that's slightly larger than a computer mouse.
Cornice will also announce new drives at the conference, which takes place in Las Vegas between Jan. 7 and 11.
Fiorina: Upbeat economy puts H-P on track for 20% growth
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
Despite tepid tech spending, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) expects profit to grow 20% next year because of a resurgent economy and consumer demand for PCs and printers.
H-P Chief Executive Carly Fiorina on Tuesday told financial analysts that H-P should meet Wall Street earnings estimates of $1.43 a share on revenue of $77.6 billion in 2004. "Clearly we believe the economy is improving," she said.
H-P's projected profit growth would double that of Microsoft (9%) and IBM (8%) but trail Dell (26%) for the same period, says Wall Street estimates tracked by market researcher Thomson First Call.
The growth prediction, on the heels of strong quarterly results last month, is the latest encouraging news from H-P since it acquired Compaq in tech's biggest deal last year. H-P so far has largely cut costs to boost profit.
The bullish forecast comes amid concern about H-P's inconsistent performance in recent quarters and that it is caught in a competitive vice between Dell's inexpensive PCs and IBM's high-end services.
"I know it's popular these days to describe H-P as stuck between IBM and Dell," Fiorina said. "But unfortunately the facts don't support the thesis."
During a wide-ranging presentation, H-P also discussed:
•Reorganization. To boost sales among large customers, H-P will revamp its sales force to sell computers and services under one organization -- a tactic IBM has successfully used for years.
"The intention is to combine two low-profit segments and have them drive each other's sales," says analyst Peter Kastner of Aberdeen Group. The change, expected next year, could also clarify for customers who they deal with at H-P.
•Acquisitions. H-P has targeted several small software companies to acquire next year for about $100 million. However, Fiorina said, H-P has no intention of buying a big services or consulting company, which has been rumored.
•Tech spending. Fiorina expects corporate budgets to grow in the low-single digits in 2004 after several flat years. But she doesn't expect much in year-end purchases by companies as they try to use up budgets. "I think most (chief information officers) and CEOs want to exit the year not spending what they don't need to spend."
Her projection that tech spending won't pick up until next year may have offset, to investors, H-P's bullish projections. H-P shares fell 2% Tuesday to $21.96; other major tech stocks also fell.
H-P also played up the fact that it recently landed service contracts worth more than $1 billion from entities including the U.S. Postal Service and Novell.
Why DoCoMo endorsement of Linux is a big deal
Monday December 08, 2003 - [ 12:00 PM GMT ]
Topics: Devices , Mobile Computing
By: Chris Preimesberger
At first glance, the news item earlier this week didn't look that significant: NTT DoCoMo, the huge Japanese telecom, announced it will urge its handset suppliers to build Linux-based phones. So? Lots of companies urge other companies to do things every day. Big deal.
That's exactly what it is. A big deal. We're about to watch the famous trickle-down theory start to work wonders for Linux mobile development.
Let me tell you a story. There are clear parallels here.
Thursday morning I attended a briefing at IBM's Partnership Solutions Center in San Mateo, Calif. I listened as a start-up called Evant, Inc. gave an update: A scant one year ago, it was
a 12-person operation in a little office in San Francisco. Managers had a good software product (a browser-based retail merchandise reporting application), some faithful investors, and lots of hope. But they were about to run out of money, and things looked grim indeed. They needed just one big retail client to put them over the top, and they had a big fish on the hook in Staples, Inc. But they couldn't land it by themselves, because they were not an established entity. Evant was on track to become yet another high-tech VC casualty.
However, Evant found the right ally at exactly the right time in IBM. They had their software tested and certified on the IBM stack, and key decision-makers at Big Blue took note. IBM wanted to land Staples, too (an $11 billion, multinational corporation), so partners they became. They signed the deal. Twelve months later, the software works, and everybody is happy.
Largely because of one key partnership with the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, Evant has leveraged that first account and added 50 other clients, such as McKesson, Napa Auto Parts, United Stationers, and Camping World. It also had added 148 more employees. With vision, a quality product, and political tenacity, Evant is now well on its way to becoming a leader in its very niched field.
Linux is no startup, but its mobile version certainly is. Since IBM, Oracle, Sun, and others mainstreamed Linux for server-side and desktop applications in the last three years, the system has rocketed to prominence and will only keep growing.
Now it's Linux Jr.'s turn to rock and rule.
NTT DoCoMo is more than an 800-pound gorilla; it is every bit as powerful in the Far East as IBM is everywhere. DoCoMo wants Linux as a cost-saving measure for its 2004 line-up, and what DoCoMo wants, DoCoMo gets. Linux will help its handset suppliers -- Panasonic, Toshiba, Fujitsu, NEC -- seriously drive down the price of some of the phones they manufacture. Once those big guys start building Linux phones, the rush will be on.
The world's leading handset maker, Finland's Nokia, started the mobile Linux ball rolling last January when it released the first mobile Linux SDK. In February, Motorola followed suit by announcing plans to eventually run Linux on most of its phones, then introduced its first Linux phone, the A760, in August.
IDC Research estimates that Linux -- whose mobile market share is virtually zero at the moment -- may own as much as 4.2 per cent of the market for high-powered smart phones in only two years. That share could reach 10 percent by 2007.
IT companies, including NTT DoCoMo and others in the Far East, are dominoes. If they're all standing up together and doing business side-by-side, they're all in close proximity. When one makes a move, others are sure to follow. It just takes that first big one to take the jump.
And DoCoMo is the first big one. The dominoes will be falling soon. Investors, take note.
Is bulked-up HP ready for battle?
By Ina Fried
CNET News.com
December 8, 2003, 11:31 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5116531.html
Although Hewlett-Packard is finally getting settled into married life, some analysts say the company still needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.
While the company has managed to shave considerable costs and return all its businesses to profitability following the Compaq Computer merger, analysts say it is still unclear whether the combined entity is much better positioned to compete against IBM or Dell.
"Our primary concern is our sense that HP is back where it was prior to its acquisition of Compaq: a great printer franchise with a suboptimal long-term outlook for the computer business," Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff said in a research note last week. "Essentially, we're looking for something that can convince us that HP can show consistent growth--but we have concerns."
News.context
What's new:
The hard work of absorbing Compaq seemingly behind it, HP plots a course of future growth.
Bottom line:
While HP's printing business remains strong, some analysts wonder how the company's other units will fare. To date, they say, HP has been more follower than leader in its computing businesses, and the same may prove true of its forays into consumer electronics.
For more info:
Track the players
HP executives will try to address these issues Tuesday in a meeting with financial analysts in New York. The company is likely to trot out the heads of each of its business units to talk about gains in PCs, services deals and high-end computer gear, such as servers and storage.
While concerns linger, analysts expect the company itself to be quite upbeat, since it's coming off a quarter in which all five of its business units posted profits. While CEO Carly Fiorina was reserved in July when HP missed expectations, she said confidently in November that the company had hit its stride, with the company posting sales considerably ahead of expectations.
In addition, there seems to be a sense that much of the hard work of bringing together HP and Compaq, which merged in 2002, has been done.
"The big blowups that people anticipated happening from the merger haven't happened," said Shannon Cross, a financial analyst for Cross Research.
HP will be looking to prove to the financial community that it has emerged from the merger a stronger company and that it is capable of growing its business as technology spending improves.
"We've done the heavy lifting," said HP spokesman Brian Humphries. "We've integrated the two companies. We've put a deliberate portfolio (of products) together. Wall Street is now looking to understand if we can continue the momentum of the fourth quarter."
Bumps in the road
But not everyone is convinced that the company's fortunes have significantly improved. Outside of its printing business, HP tends to be more follower than leader, Neff said.
"It entered the workstation market because Sun was in workstations," he said. "It entered the PC business because IBM was in PCs. It started to go direct because it wanted to be like Dell. It bought Compaq because it wanted to be like IBM."
Neff said HP's recent hints that it plans to enter into consumer electronics areas, such as the digital music player market, again shows the company following rivals such as Dell, Gateway and Apple. "However, when companies want to be like other companies, they often underperform, since the other companies typically determine the rules of the game," Neff said.
For her part, Cross said HP has not clearly shown how its disparate business units have really begun to work together. "I'm still not really sure how their divisions are truly working together and how much they have that's integrated at this point in time."
Another topic likely to come up at the event is a recent management exodus, with executives leaving to take other jobs, to retire, or in the case of former Compaq CFO Jeff Clarke, for less-than-clear reasons.
Beyond the personnel issues, analysts raise other issues about the company's execution, including a desire to better understand why last quarter's better-than-expected sales did not give more of a boost to the bottom line.
In his note last week, Neff also questioned the impact Dell could have on long-term profit margins in the printer market. He also pointed out the challenges of making significant profits from the PC business.
HP has already committed to more sustained profitability from its computing units. Chief Financial Officer Bob Wayman said last month that the company's plans call for both the PC unit and high-end computer business to be profitable each quarter in the current fiscal year. He also said he was comfortable with analysts' outlook for 2004, which pegged company earnings at around $1.42 per share.
Cautious optimism
Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich noted that HP sees its PC business as strategic and a potential source of profits, but he said he doesn't expect significant profits until next year at the earliest. Milunovich said he came away from a recent meeting with company management slightly more optimistic than he had been about the company's prospects.
The company may have an easier time of winning consumer business by tying its products together than it will have standing out in the enterprise market, Milunovich said. There, he said, HP faces the challenge of trying to position itself as more of an innovator than Dell but lower cost than IBM.
"IBM and Dell have staked out the extremes," Milunovich said. "The fact that HP's differentiation depends as much on comparing to IBM and Dell as to an absolute proposition is telling."
That said, Milunovich noted that a company doesn't have to be No. 1 to make money. "If you can't be Hertz, be Avis," he wrote. "There's money to be made in being a solid No. 2."
On the printing side of the business, HP continues to generate strong sales and profit growth. The company is expected to outline its strategy to maintain double digit increases in revenue by expanding into new areas, such as high-speed copiers.
Pressures on the profitable ink and toner business remain, but analysts say the company is not seeing any large-scale erosion. Cross noted that the amount of retail shelf space being given to remanufactured ink vendors has been growing at several retailers, with mall shops also opening to sell refilled cartridges.
"There is a huge amount of money to be made doing this," Cross said.
At the same time, Milunovich said that the percentage of cartridges that are being refilled has remained roughly steady for the past 18 months. He cites statistics from Lyra Research that shows remanufactured toner cartridges make up about a quarter of toner revenue, while refilled inkjet cartridges account for about 17 percent of ink sales. "The printer supplies business appears safe from disruption for now," he said.
Chinese Newspaper 'Cankao Xiaoxi' Article Reports on On2 Relationship With Beijing E-world In November 11 Edition
November 17, 2003: 8:25 a.m. EST
NEW YORK and BEIJING (PRNewswire) - NEW YORK and BEIJING, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- On2 Technologies, Inc. today announced that the "Cankao Xiaoxi," published by China's official news organization, has published an article describing the cooperation between On2 and Beijing E-world in its November 11, 2003 edition. The article, entitled "New Road To 'Made in China,'" ran in advance of On2's previously announced meetings in China this week.
The article, published only in Chinese, made several points about the relationship between the two companies, which was officially established by contract last June. These included:
-- A U.S. listed company, On2 Technologies is a world leader in the
research and development of video compression. Beijing E-world has
extensive cooperation with On2 in the technology area.
-- The cooperation between On2 Technologies and E-world is a win/win
situation because through the partnership On2 acquires special
marketing rights to the large Chinese market. As for E-world, it has
obtained the right to use one of the world's most advanced codec
technologies.
-- On2 and E-world have already discussed further plans for after the
launching of the EVD standard. These include developing several new
products, first targeting the Chinese domestic market and then the
international markets.
Commenting on the article, On2 Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Douglas A. McIntyre said: "It is really gratifying to arrive in China and be greeted by a press account of our relationship that affirms the bonds between our two companies."
About On2 Technologies, The Duck Corporation
On2 Technologies is a leading technology firm at the forefront of video compression. The Company revolutionized video encoding with the creation of its advanced full-motion, full-screen, video compression and streaming technology (TrueMotion(R) VP4/VP5/VP6). On2 licenses its high quality video codecs for use in set-top boxes, consumer electronics devices and wireless applications. In addition, On2 offers a suite of products and services, including high-level video encoding, customized technical support, and consulting/integration services. Located in New York City, the Company has an office in Clifton Park, NY, and operations in Cambridge, UK. On2 may be reached at 21 Corporate Drive, Suite 103, Clifton Park, NY 12065 or info@on2.com or sales@on2.com.
On2 Technologies, Inc.
Will the new EVD format from China take advantage of VP6?
Posted by Dan Bell on 14 November 2003 - 17:43 - Source: on2.com
I received an email this morning from a visitor that read the article we posted recently about EVD technology in China. The reader wondered if the Chinese would be utilising the VP6 compression format, good question! So I did some digging around the Internet.
The EVD format is a possible High Definition replacement or a next generation of DVD player. What makes it interesting is it skirts the royalty issue of the DVD format. Couple that with Chinas' manufacturing position and you already have a serious contender to the existing hardware manufacturing pool. But now the plot thickens, as it appears the new players will be capable of using the cheaper VP6 compression technology as well. In fact, one could surmise they are being optimised for it.
An article last June at CBS market watch stated that shortly after announcing VP6, a very large deal was penned with Beijing E-World Technology Co., a consortium of several of China's largest consumer electronic makers. The first agreement calls for On2's latest video compression technologies, called VP5 and VP6, to be used in E-World's Enhanced Versatile Disk, which is essentially the next-generation DVD player currently being developed. The agreement also provides for VP5 and VP6 to be used as the video compression technology in a high definition TV standard being developed for China as a standard by E-World and others. "This is a huge deal," said Doug McIntyre, On2's president and chief executive officer, who noted that the deal had taken 15 months to complete. "By a wide margin, it's the biggest deal in the company's history," he added. Mr. McIntyre, and other members of management, are supposed to travel to Beijing to attend the official launch on Nov. 18 of China's new digital standard.
VP6 is the leading codec available for PC and set-top box applications, offering up to 40% better quality and 50% better playback performance than our revolutionary VP5 codec.
VP6 is the best video codec on the market today. It offers better image quality and faster decoding performance than Windows Media 9, Real 9, H.264, and QuickTime MPEG-4.
In our internal testing, VP6 beat H.264, Windows Media 9 and Real Networks 9 in PSNR comparisons using the standard set of MPEG-2 test clips. The codec looks better than Windows Media 9, shows far fewer motion artifacts than Windows Media 9, and maintains more texture and detail than Real 9 or H.264.
I downloaded the Truecast player and did side by side comparisons with VP6 and Windows Media 9 which is obviously a very capable compression technology. Frankly, to my untrained eye, VP6 did look better. Nonetheless, it makes no difference as the quality is good enough, the point to be taken here is cost and competition. VP6 is promising to be cheaper than MPEG and Windows Media compression technologies. It looks as if the EVD is going to be a serious contender in the marketplace and shows some long term strategy and planning have gone into this product.
Thanks for the great question!
On2 not the only company involved in standards' fights goin on.. Interesting read.....
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031208/dam008a_1.html
>"TI is a member of the MBOA, and is committed to enabling UWB technology. Moving forward, TI's royalty-free offering will enable consumer electronic and PC manufacturers to quickly deliver a variety of high performance, interoperable wireless applications, such as streaming video from set top boxes to HDTVs"<.
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Texas Instruments Accelerates Wireless PAN Industry with Royalty-Free Licenses For IEEE 802.15.3a Ultra Wideband (UWB) Technology
Monday December 8, 9:27 am ET
480 Mbps Solutions Enable High-Performance Applications for Consumer Electronics and PCs
DALLAS, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- In an effort to ensure rapid adoption of the emerging high-speed Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology in wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications, Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN - News; TI) today announced its plans to offer royalty-free licenses under TI essential patents directed toward the IEEE 802.15.3a standard, pending ratification of the MultiBand OFDM Alliance's (MBOA) proposal as the new IEEE 802.15.3a standard for high speed WPANs. (See www.ti.com/uwb .)
TI is a member of the MBOA, and is committed to enabling UWB technology. Moving forward, TI's royalty-free offering will enable consumer electronic and PC manufacturers to quickly deliver a variety of high performance, interoperable wireless applications, such as streaming video from set top boxes to HDTVs.
UWB is a wireless technology for transmitting digital data at very high rates over large bandwidths, all while using very low power. UWB is ideally suited for wireless communications, particularly short-range and high-speed data transmissions for personal area network applications.
"TI hopes to promote rapid industry adoption by offering royalty-free WPAN technology to the IEEE 802.15.3a standardization effort, since our technology will be crucial in enabling high-performance WPAN applications," said Yoram Solomon, general manager of TI's consumer networking business unit. "This offering is an effort to remove potential barriers to commercial adoption of this technology. Ensuring interoperability and having multiple silicon sources will help assure market growth of UWB technology."
TI's technology is designed to comply with all existing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements. End users are expected to benefit from the deployment of high-rate TI-based UWB products as soon as early 2005.
Proposal Offers Rapid Path Toward Improved Performance and Functionality
TI's OFDM-based proposal emerged as the principal UWB technology candidate from the March 2003 IEEE 802.15.3a Task Group meeting due to its ability to efficiently capture nearly 100 percent of the multi-path energy, which results in having the best range, its ability to provide a robust link in the presence of multi-path and interference, its relaxed RF and analog requirements, and its ability to coexist with current and future wireless services. These are all key requirements for many consumer electronic applications. The TI proposal has become the basis for a merged proposal sponsored by a new group, the MultiBand OFDM Alliance, with membership of approximately 34 companies.
Essential TI patents directly associated with the MBOA proposal to the IEEE 802.15.3a Task Group will be licensed royalty-free on a worldwide basis. Technology licensing is extremely important to the UWB industry as it seeks to establish a clean and rapid path towards greater performance and functionality. Adoption of the MBOA proposal will help the industry quickly roll out new UWB-enabled products.
"We're pleased to provide UWB component and system developers full access to standards-based, cost-effective solutions for higher performance," said Solomon. "Licensing our UWB patents free of royalties is an important part of our strategy to provide a continuum of high-performance wireless connectivity. Confirmation of this licensing offer will be contained in a written statement to the IEEE."
Texas Instruments - Making Wireless
TI is the leading manufacturer of wireless semiconductors, delivering the heart of today's wireless technology and building solutions for tomorrow. TI provides a breadth of silicon and software and 15 years of wireless systems expertise that spans handsets and base stations for all communications standards, wireless LAN, Bluetooth and Ultra Wideband. From custom to turn- key solutions, including complete chipsets and reference designs, OMAP(TM) application processors, core digital signal processor and analog technologies built on advanced semiconductor processes, TI is making wireless personal, intelligent and seamless.
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Deploying Video Over DSL As a Universal Service
July 1, 2003
America's Network
By Malcolm Loro and Mike Drew of Catena Networks
Within today's evolving telecommunications landscape, the delivery of advanced video services over DSL has emerged as a significant opportunity area for many service providers. The widespread reach of copper loop infrastructures and the long-standing relationships with POTS customers offer fertile ground for deploying video as a bundled offering with voice and broadband data services. However, the successful deployment of video-over-DSL requires a well-planned approach that is both economically viable and addresses the full scope of the market opportunity.
Video-over-DSL offers an excellent way for carriers to reverse revenue erosion and to compete effectively against cable providers. Not only can video provide significant new incremental revenue for carriers; the bundling of voice, data and video can be a powerful factor in reducing subscriber churn. Subscribers can get a complete spectrum of advanced services from a single source. In some areas ― such as rural environments, where cable has not yet been deployed ― video-over-DSL even provides an opportunity for telco carriers to leapfrog potential cable competitors and build a significant barrier to entry.
Having learned from the difficulties with first-generation DSL deployment, which treated broadband as an overlay to the voice network and resulted in disjointed pockets of service availability, the industry needs to view video-over-DSL as a universally deployable service from the outset. This doesn't necessarily imply the immediate, wholesale conversion of existing networks. However, carriers must make careful, up-front architectural decisions, so that they can smoothly roll out video services and avoid technology roadblocks along the way.
Key considerations for the success of video-over-DSL deployments include:
Seamless architecture for deployment in both Central Offices and Remote Terminals
Standards-based delivery of existing and emerging video services (broadcast services, video-on-demand, interactive video, etc.)
Technological and economic scalability to allow for smooth expansion, universal availability and manageable operating costs
Creating a seamless architecture is critical because it lays the foundation for both universal service delivery and economic scalability. While many Central Offices (COs) now house DSL equipment, deploying such equipment at remote terminal (RT) sites has been more challenging because of operational and physical-space issues. Further, carriers continue to rely on Digital Loop Carriers (DLCs), originally designed for narrowband services, to reach subscribers served from RTs. It has been prohibitively expensive for carriers to deliver broadband services from RTs, because they must absorb the capital costs of collocating remote DSL equipment and/or the operational costs of sending technicians to install DSL linecards in Next Generation DLCs (NGDLCs). This overlay approach simply cannot provide the flexibility or sustainable economics needed for delivering consumer-oriented video services. Using a new Broadband Loop Carrier (BLC) architecture, which combines POTS and DSL on every line, service providers are now deploying networks that treat voice and broadband as universally available services. This lays the foundation for delivering video-over-DSL services quickly and cost-effectively. Because BLCs provide POTS and DSL on every line, carriers can software-provision services to any subscriber - remotely, without manual intervention.
As carriers move toward including video as an integrated service offering, advanced capabilities within the access network equipment will play a critical role. For example, carriers using BLCs that have integrated IGMP and multicasting capabilities will have much more flexibility in delivering video services over their network infrastructures. By driving multicasting functionality as close to end users as possible, service providers can minimize the need for high bandwidth consumption on their video transport networks. Carriers also can use distributed multicasting intelligence, rather than dedicated servers, to eliminate potential bottlenecks and single points of failure within the video delivery infrastructure.
By moving video service provisioning and multicasting to BLCs near the subscribers, carriers have more flexibility to use a variety of standards-based technologies in the transport network. Remote BLCs can interface with a wide range of transport technologies including, ATM, IP, Gigabit Ethernet, Packet over SONET (PoS), and DWDM. Therefore, carriers can seamlessly deliver video-over-DSL services at the edge of their existing networks, without having to make forklift technology changes to the core.
Besides simplifying technology choices, the ability to deploy integrated voice, data and video services over BLCs also enables carriers to leverage the standards-based, multi-vendor marketplace. Instead of being locked into a broadband video delivery architecture that dictates equipment choices at various points throughout the network, the BLC-based approach is independent of both transport and CPE choices (set top boxes, etc.). This open-standards approach is equally applicable to broadcast environments, where a common video stream is served to many subscribers via multicasting, and to video-on-demand environments, where the video content is delivered point-to-point from the video headend server.
Carriers also must determine what "flavor" of DSL is needed for effective delivery of video services. Some industry experts contend that VDSL will be necessary to provide the bandwidth for supporting different, simultaneous channels on a large number of televisions within each home. However, the reach of VDSL is so small that it typically doesn't fit well within most existing telco networks. Carriers must undertake expensive redesign efforts, which prevents them from cost-effectively deploying video to the majority of their current subscribers. In reality, the "sweet spot" for serving most residential customers is the need to support two simultaneous TV users. ADSL can adequately address this requirement, while still supporting concurrent Internet usage. Choosing a BLC with support for optional parameters in the ADSL standard that enable downstream data rates of more than 10 Mbps provides even more headroom on the ADSL link. Carriers also can consider the emerging ADSL2+ standard, which will boost ADSL carrying capacities even further. At the same time, advances in digital video encoding technologies are opening the potential for more channels to be carried over any given bandwidth level.
The bottom line is that by deploying highly integrated POTS+DSL architectures and standards-based BLCs, carriers can immediately generate new revenue from video services ― without sacrificing current POTS densities or compromising on rate/reach performance. At the same time, they can create highly scalable, broadband video delivery networks, while avoiding major forklift upgrades and excessive, ongoing operational costs. In addition, the scalability of BLC architectures will enable carriers to offer new, on-demand and interactive services using their existing network infrastructures.
Tiny Hard Drives Offer Big Storage
Toshiba and others ready high-capacity, sub-1-inch drives.
Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Monday, December 08, 2003
The growing demand for low-cost, high-capacity, and compact storage for mobile devices is pushing development of small form-factor hard drives and the first of a new generation of sub-1-inch drives should hit the market in 2004.
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One of the first companies to show a sub-1-inch hard drive is expected to be Japan's Toshiba. The company plans to show a sample drive product at the CES show that takes place in Las Vegas in January 2004, it said Monday.
Toshiba wouldn't provide any further details about the drive although industry sources say that Toshiba and several other companies, including Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries, are working on development of drives with 0.8-inch or 0.7-inch diameter platters. That's smaller than the CompactFlash form-factor Microdrive produced by Hitachi, which is based on a 1-inch platter, and less than half the size of the 1.8-inch drive used in Apple Computer's IPod portable music player.
Making Predictions
"Disk drives are going into more and more applications," said Thomas M. Coughlin, president of storage market analysis company Coughlin Associates, during a storage industry conference in Tokyo in November. "Companies are looking at 1.8-inch, 1-inch, and possibly 0.8-inch or 0.7-inch drives."
His predictions for the hard drive market have 1.8-inch and smaller drive shipments reaching 3.3 million drives this year and climbing to 23.7 million drives in 2008 or, as a percentage of the overall disk drive market, from 1.4 percent this year to 5.3 percent in 2008.
The drives are expected to appear in products which require high-capacity data storage in a small form factor such as MP3 players, handheld digital video players, and other portable consumer electronics and even some cellular telephones.
Such is the demand already that Toshiba recently announced it is doubling production of its PC Card-size 1.8-inch hard drive to 600,000 units per month by March 2004. The drives can be found in Apple's IPod, Toshiba's own Gigabeat digital music player, and some ultra-portable notebook PCs and are available in capacities from 5GB to 40GB.
First Choice
Flash memory storage is the medium of choice for many portable consumer electronics products at present, although small form-factor hard drives offer advantages in several areas over solid-state memory.
One of its prime advantages is high storage capacity at a low cost. Prices for a 1GB Microdrive begin at around $159 and the cheapest 1GB CompactFlash memory card costs $205, according to PC World's Product Finder service. The price gap widens as capacity increases with a 4GB Microdrive costing $500, or less than half that of a CompactFlash memory card of the same capacity.
At present the market for 1.8-inch and smaller class hard drives is dominated by two Japanese companies--Toshiba in the 1.8-inch space and Hitachi in the 1-inch space--but competitors are beginning to grab for a piece of the action.
Several companies are expected to launch 1.8-inch drives during 2004 and Hitachi already has two competitors in the 1-inch market space. They are Colorado-based Cornice, which brands its 1.5GB drive the "Storage Element" and is already shipping the drive to customers including iRiver and Digitalway for use in MP3 players, and GS Magicstor, a start-up disk maker based in China's western province of Guizhou.
"Hitachi has been until recently the only player in the market and we expect them to continue to be the technology leader," said Thomas Su, chief technical officer of GS Magicstor, at the same Tokyo conference. "Cornice has enjoyed some early success with a proprietary interface. But we expect many players will come into the market sooner or later. It's a matter of time."
Cost Concerns
However, while the hard drives are cheaper than flash memory the price tag for a 4GB drive still puts it out of the reach of most consumers.
"With only three companies it's hard to get economies of scale," said Su. "Consumer electronics products are very cost sensitive."
Still, the entry of Cornice and GS Magicstor has already resulted in lower prices for users. GS Magicstor's CompactFlash form factor 2.2GB drive costs $199, which is only $40 more than the cheapest 1GB Microdrive, and Cornice's non-removable drive is cheap enough that Digitalway's 1.5GB HS-100 USB drive costs $150.
Toshiba wouldn't disclose pricing details or a shipping schedule for its sub 1-inch drive due to be shown at CES.
Pirated Movies Flourish Despite Security Measures
The more studios try to stifle bootlegging, the more technology works to undermine them.
By Lorenza Muñoz and Jon Healey
Times Staff Writers
December 4, 2003
Hollywood's all-out war against movie piracy is turning into a big-budget bomb, with illegal copies of virtually every new release -- and even some films that have yet to debut in theaters -- turning up on the Internet.
Sophisticated computer users currently can download pirated versions of titles ranging from "Bad Santa" to "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." While some of the versions are crude copies made by camcorders aimed at theater screens, a surprising number are nearly pristine transfers.
The abundance of bootlegs arrives just as the movie studios have launched their most aggressive campaign yet to protect their business from the rampant downloading that has plagued the record industry. As part of this antipiracy initiative, the studios have done everything from banning the distribution of free DVDs to awards voters to stationing security guards equipped with night-vision goggles inside Hollywood premieres to spot camcorder users.
The steps may have made some thievery more difficult, but overall, piracy appears to be up from previous years, when an avalanche of year-end awards DVDs and videos, or "screeners" as they are called, flooded the entertainment and media communities. In fact, the new security measures seem only to have emboldened some pirates.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America says that last year it found at least 163,000 Web sites offering pirated movies. The number is likely to go up to 200,000 sites by the end of the year, said Tom Temple, the association's director of worldwide Internet enforcement.
A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These "ripping crews" -- which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films -- compete with each other to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected to the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.
Pirates usually copy a movie first by sneaking a digital camcorder into a movie theater, sometimes the very auditorium in which antipiracy public service announcements have just played before the feature attraction. These copies yield something less than DVD-quality results. After this version appears online, crews will continue to compete to deliver a true DVD-quality version before it is officially released to video stores.
Piracy-monitoring firms say the advancing technology of digital camcorders is yielding dramatic improvements in the earliest versions of pirated movies. Although these efforts vary, the best ones come close to the picture and sound quality of DVDs.
Mark Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a Los Gatos firm that helps studios combat online piracy, said, "We have seen some copies of 'Finding Nemo' that look like they were DVDs, yet after forensics we determined they were camcorders." Said another antipiracy expert who asked not to be identified: "The quality of non-DVD screeners has increased so much in the past year, the DVD screener ban is too little, too late."
The crews store films on powerful computers connected to the Internet but not accessible to the public. But their movies quickly trickle down to places open to the Internet savvy, such as Internet chat rooms and news groups. They take pains to hide their identities and locations, and so far have remained outside the reach of federal enforcers and studio lawyers. The Justice Department has struck only a glancing blow against this type of piracy, prosecuting members of several so-called "warez" groups, loose confederations of online partners who concentrate on copying computer software and games.
Nevertheless, government agencies are paying attention. The FBI began investigating the unauthorized release to the New York Post of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" two weeks ago; by the time that probe began, federal authorities already had launched a broader investigation into the unauthorized copying of numerous other first-run films, according to sources.
Adding to the magnitude of the problem is the fact that some of these bootleg copies are pirated from inside the entertainment industry itself.
Piracy from such an array of sources means that there now are more Internet movie offerings than at the world's largest megaplex. Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is available in two versions, an American/European edition (with portions in black and white) and one in Japanese (all in color). Other titles available include "The Rundown," "Timeline," "21 Grams," "The Missing," "The Cat in the Hat," "Thirteen" and "Pieces of April."
The box-office hit "Elf" was available four days before its Nov. 7 release in theaters, taken from a digital camcorder recording made in a theater, with the sound most likely recorded from a cinema seat audio jack used by hearing-impaired moviegoers. Films not yet in theaters, including "Girl With a Pearl Earring" and "Monsieur Ibrahim," were taken from DVD screeners sent out in advance of the films' release.
As part of the campaign against movie piracy, the MPAA on Sept. 30 banned the seven major studios and their specialty film divisions from sending out free movies to anyone but the 5,800 Academy Awards voters. Oscar voters, furthermore, can only receive specially marked videocassettes and not DVDs, which provide better masters for bootlegs. The move infuriated the makers of lower-budget movies and less conventional fare, who feared the true motive for the ban was to bring Oscar attention back to big studio releases.
Movies from independent companies that are not part of the MPAA are turning up in a number of Internet sites. DVD copies of all of the movies being pushed for awards consideration by Lions Gate Films, for example, are available illegally online. Lions Gate began sending out screeners to an array of awards voters two weeks ago. The studio declined comment Wednesday.
The motion picture association's Temple said the main point of the ban was to delay the arrival of high-quality copies of movies online as long as possible. It's too early to tell the impact of the new rules, he said, because the studios have just started sending out screeners. But a few copies of DVD and VHS screeners have started to pop up online; for example, a VHS copy of United Artists' "Pieces of April" hit the Net on Thanksgiving.
The piracy expert who asked not to be named said the MPAA's action "has of course caused a shortage of real, true DVD screeners of movies" online. "But it doesn't matter because there are copies out there that are good enough…. Some of them even exceed the quality of VHS screeners."
Several other experts agreed that the new rules have had absolutely no effect on the availability of movies online.
"There's no difference," said Kevin Moylan, senior vice president of the antipiracy firm Vidius Inc. of Beverly Hills. "The thing to remember is that all it takes is one copy. So even an authorized screener, one of them is going to perpetrate a leak."
The MPAA ban is now at the center of a lawsuit in New York, where on Wednesday a federal judge heard a full day of testimony on a challenge by a group of independent filmmakers to the screener edict. MPAA President Jack Valenti testified that the prohibitions were necessary to combat the illegal copying and sale of videotapes and DVDs.
But two independent film producers who are among the plaintiffs in the case testified that the distribution of screeners is essential to their strategy of marketing independent films based on good reviews, word of mouth, mentions on critics' Top 10 lists and, eventually, awards nominations.
"The hardest thing with my movies is getting people to see them…. [It's] not that people would want to steal them," said producer Ted Hope, who has prize aspirations for two films this year, "American Splendor" and "21 Grams."
He and fellow indie producer Jeff Levy-Hinte, who has similar hopes for his film "Thirteen," told the judge that the major studios would have a big advantage if lower-budget films like theirs cannot send thousands of copies to opinion-makers and voters who may never see the works in theaters.
The organization's vice president supervising its anti- piracy efforts, former FBI agent Kenneth Jacobson, later told the judge that the film studios were trying to avoid what happened in the music industry, in which illegal Internet downloading is widely seen as cutting sharply into sales.
Authorities around the world already have seized "35 million [illegally copied movies] so far this year," Jacobson testified, adding that film piracy has become so rampant in countries such as China, Russia and Pakistan that the legal markets there have all but evaporated.
Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, who has used promotion campaigns to gain multiple Oscars for films such as "Shakespeare in Love," submitted a declaration stating that "a successful awards season can make the difference between a movie grossing $5 million at the box office and a movie grossing $20 million."
U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey said he will rule Friday whether to grant a temporary restraining order barring the MPAA from carrying out the ban.
The MPAA and California law enforcement officials plan to announce today how they will enforce a new state law barring the illegal recording of motion pictures in movie theaters. Similar federal legislation has been proposed.
November 22, 2003
The Best New Technologies of 2003
A number of broadly applicable technologies with the potential to change the home and workplace have been selected by Business 2.0 as the best new technologies of the year. Canon, Cornice, Hitachi, and Rio are marketing or developing micro hard drives that can store more data in smaller packages, which promises to dramatically boost the data storage capacity of personal digital assistants, cell phones, and camcorders, as well as increase computing's mobility. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), which have started to show up in automotive systems and consumer electronics, are being driven by cheap, simple fabrication methods; the technology has the potential to penetrate the medical industry as drug delivery systems and the telecommunications sector as tools to lower the cost and complexity of fiber-optic networks. Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) now competes with traditional circuit-switched calls in terms of voice quality, due to breakthrough data compression and prioritization software that reduces lags and voice distortion. In addition to costing far less than circuit-switched calls, VOIP boasts an easier switchover process. The 64-bit computing age has been ushered in with the introduction of new chips such as Apple's G5 and AMD's Athlon 64, which are capable of processing up to 16 billion GB of data at a time; this means that companies with large databases will be able to significantly reduce their IT costs, while researchers and visual-effects experts will benefit from 64-bit computing's expanded memory. Business 2.0 also lists a set of promising technologies that could make their market debut next year, including LED light bulbs, ultrawideband, magnetoresistive random access memory, bioinformatics, gecko tape, organic light-emitting diodes, effective antispam software, WiMax wireless broadband, micro fuel cells, and radio frequency identification tags.
Startup Cornice readies 1-inch hard drive
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
May 27, 2003 (10:39 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030523S0046
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A startup is close to announcing a 1-inch hard-disk drive that could offer 50 percent greater capacity than IBM Corp.'s Microdrive at less than half the cost.
Cornice Inc. (Longmont, Colo.) said its 1.5-Gbyte internal drive, aimed at the next generation of digital portable consumer gadgets, could sell for as little as $70. The drive is already generating some buzz for a ground-up redesign of the hard disk that focuses on low power consumption as well as cost.
But analysts noted that other 1-inch drive startups have not been able to overcome financial and technical difficulties and that a broad market for the drives has failed to emerge.
With just four chips--three of them from Texas Instruments Inc.--and a handful of discretes, the Cornice drive is said to use fewer components than the current, 1-Gbyte IBM Microdrive. Cornice is said to have a road map that gets the drive down to three and then two chips.
The drive does not use a conventional interface but instead links directly to a host processor and is designed as an embedded drive. It was reportedly used in several prototype products shown at CES in January, including the Digital Gadget, a multifunction camera developed by Samsung Electronics.
The new drive comes as other startups with 1-inch drives struggle to survive.
Marqlin Corp. (San Jose) is trying to find a new set of financial backers after having lost its initial investors. The company has given up hopes of launching its initial product, a 2.5-Gbyte drive using the CompactFlash interface, and is now designing a second-generation product as its market entry. "We ran into some funding problems. This is one of the tightest funding environments I have seen," said Gilbert Springer, chief executive of Marqlin.
Another 1-inch drive startup, GS Microdrive Inc. (Guizhou, China), has launched the 2.4-Gbyte MagicStor 1-inch drive in a CompactFlash II format. However, the drive has had poor feedback from reviewers, who said it draws too much current and can be unreliable at times. "The 1-inch drive market thus far has totaled "a few hundred thousand drives, not the millions that were promised," said veteran drive analyst Jim Porter of Disk/Trend (Mountain View, Calif.). The industry is awaiting the arrival of "shirt-pocket computers with voice recognition--the grandsons of the Palm"--as the app that could see the drives take off, he said.
Most IBM Microdrives have wound up in professional-grade digital cameras that sell for more than $2,000, Porter said. The company plans to follow up its 1-Gbyte model, which sells for slightly more than $200, with a 4-Gbyte model later this year, Porter added.
"I don't think these systems will find a huge business in the next year or two," he said.
Cornice Storage Technology Recognized with Awards
Cornice, Inc., an innovator in compact, high-capacity storage, recently has been named as the winner of the Boulder County Business Report's fourth annual IQ (Innovative Quotient) Awards in the Computer Products and Services category from 80 nominations. The Company also has been named to the 2003 AlwaysOn List of Top 100 Private Companies from a pool of more than 700 companies.
Cornice was selected for both awards because of its innovation in the creation and design of the Storage Element (SE), a 1.5GB one-inch storage device. The SE provides a high-capacity, low-cost, compact and durable storage choice for consumer electronics devices such as MP3 players, USB storage, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and imaging products.
Founded by veterans of the PC-oriented storage industry, Cornice has developed a revolutionary storage device designed specifically for consumer electronics products. When integrated into a new generation of versatile mobile devices, the SE brings new levels of affordability and content capacity to consumer electronics products. Name brand companies with plans to launch future products featuring the Cornice SE include Digitalway, iRiver, Rio (formally SONICblue), Samsung and Thomson. SAE, Texas Instruments, SigmaTel and PortalPlayer have partnered with Cornice to support product development.
Founders Curt Bruner (CTO and EVP) and Kevin Magenis (President and CEO) formed Cornice in August of 2000. Both men had previously worked together in the technology industry. "As a company and as engineers, we are proud to be recognized with these innovation awards," said Bruner. "They are another endorsement of the world class team of engineers and innovative thinkers we've assembled."
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Here are my favorite Q&A's... I am getting all teary-eyed and nostalgic:
Q: When will the Eclipse by Fujitsu Ten product go on sale?
A: The timing of retail availability will be announced by Eclipse by Fujitsu Ten.
Comment: Interchange Fujitsu Ten with Hytek, Hango, Intel, any OEM EDIG was/is dealing with. All EDIG stockholders know what the "OEM's time table controls the announcement" means.....
Q: What is happening with bundling?
A: We are negotiating with PC manufacturers and other hardware providers
Comment: This one is a sweatin' to the oldies.... We must have heard/seen this "negotiating with bundlers'" realistically 10x by now....
A:Digitalway is marketing their version of our Odyssey 1000 worldwide to OEMs and plans to sell it under their MPIO brand name in Asia.
Comment: Notice the word "Marketing". That is definitely not "Selling". EDIG O1000 is on the market, why is Digitalway only "Marketing" this??? Do you remember Hango marketing the MP2000 meant on the Phantom launch.
Q: Please discuss our PORTALPLAYER relationship.
A: PORTALPLAYER is bringing to us qualified customers who are interested in having products developed utilizing the PORTALPLAYER chipset and e.Digital’s proprietary and patented technologies.
How many times have we seen EDIG saying one of their relationship is yielding referrals??? What did these relationships result in?
A: ...we expect revenues to significantly increase in the following quarter.
Comment: They used "significant" when describing Dataplay's revenues to them... This word is really the kiss of death w/ EDIG.
These FAQ's are the continuing EDIG "wool-over-the-eyes"...
CORNICE CONFIDENTIAL Confidential Page 1 5/27/2003 NEWS RELEASE Media & Analyst Contact: Phil Gomes G2B Group (510) 601-6288 pmg@g2bgroup.com Corporate Contact: Melissa Kutrubes Cornice, Inc. (303) 651-7291 ext. 103 Melissa.Kutrubes@corniceco.com Cornice Secures $22M Financing From Top Tier VCs Cornice Set to Introduce New Storage Technology in Q2 2003 LONGMONT, Colo., May 28, 2003 Cornice Inc., an innovator in compact, high-capacity storage, today announced that the Company closed $22 million in venture capital funding in August 2002. The Company received its first venture investment from CIBC Capital Partners, Nokia Venture Partners and VantagePoint Venture Partners. Early investors in Cornice include the company’s founders, management team, and Texas Instruments. Cornice was formed in August 2000 by Curt Bruner, CTO, and Kevin Magenis, president & CEO; both veterans of the PC-oriented storage industry. Cornice was established to provide a new class of portable storage solutions for consumer electronics and pocket-able entertainment and computing devices. The Company has also developed a successful manufacturing model with SAE, a subsidiary of TDK. “We are excited by the endorsement Cornice has been given with the active involvement and strong backing of such top-level venture investment firms,” said Kevin Magenis, Cornice president & CEO. “This investment coupled with our engineering expertise, and the team’s product vision, provide us with the confidence that Cornice will be successful in addressing the needs of the high-volume, cost-competitive markets that it has chosen to support.”
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Cornice Secures $22 Million Page 2 of 2 Top Technology Venture Finance Firms Voice Support for Cornice CIBC Capital Partners “CIBC Capital Partners invests in well-managed companies that demonstrate strong engineering, successful business acumen and significant market-altering potential," said Norm Kumar, Executive Director, CIBC Capital Partners. “Cornice amply exhibits all three of these key qualities and we look forward to working with the company more closely as it opens new markets and changes existing ones.” Nokia Venture Partners “We believe that the Cornice technology has the potential to provide a breakthrough in the capabilities of applications for handheld devices,” said Peter Buhl, Partner, Nokia Venture Partners. “We anticipate that the new, unique, storage model they have developed as the technology, will make a truly multi-functional lower price point portable a reality for tomorrow’s consumers.” VantagePoint Venture Partners "We believe that Cornice's seasoned management team and their strong storage industry track record offer an incredibly compelling formula for success," said Melissa Crane, Partner, VantagePoint Venture Partners. "By addressing the demanding storage requirements for mobile devices from a consumer's point of view, Cornice has a tremendous opportunity to leverage the increasing appetite for portable storage in products ranging from specialty electronics items to very-high-volume consumer products.” About the Investors CIBC Capital Partners CIBC Capital Partners is a leading North American merchant bank and part of CIBC World Markets, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s investment bank. CIBC Capital Partners is invested in over 240 companies and in approximately 150 private equity funds around the world, with total commitments in excess of $5.5 billion. CIBC Capital Partners' merchant banking activities include private equity investments in venture capital, leveraged buyouts, and other special situations.
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Cornice Secures $22 Million Page 3 of 3 Nokia Venture Partners Nokia Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. Backed by a number of value add limited partners, the fund leads investments in early stage mobile technology companies around the world. Launched in 1998, Nokia Venture Partners has a strong track record of leveraging its combined resources, experience and contacts to help build successful mobile businesses. The firm also has offices in Washington DC, London, Helsinki, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo. For more information, visit http://www.nokiaventurepartners.com. VantagePoint Venture Partners VantagePoint Venture Partners is one of the nation's largest venture capital firms, with $2.5 billion in committed capital in four funds. The Firm is an active multi-stage investor, providing funding and resources for all stages of a company's lifecycle from seed round through late stage and privately negotiated investments in public companies. VantagePoint is based on a full-service Partner-Team approach that provides entrepreneurs with a blend of technology, venture capital, operations, marketing, and corporate-finance expertise. As hands-on investors, the Firm is focused on technology investing in communications, semiconductor, software, and related growth industries. About Cornice Privately held, Cornice maintains headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. Visit Cornice at http://www.corniceco.com/. Investor Contact Information For CIBC: For Nokia Venture Partners: Stephen Forbes Gina Bauman (416) 956-6021 (650) 462 7255 stephen.forbes@cibc.ca press@nokiaventurepartners.com For VantagePoint Venture Partners: Christine Hinton (650) 624-1595 chinton@vpvp.com # # #
conice-dataplay
Start-up brings hard drive to the masses
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-1012235.html
Story last modified June 3, 2003, 4:00 AM PDT
Cornice wants to take the hard drive out of PCs and put it into your camera.
The Longmont, Colo.-based start-up has developed a 1.5GB, 1-inch diameter hard drive for consumer-electronics devices that the company says will be cheaper, smaller and hold more data than some other mini-hard drives or flash-memory cards.
And, while competitors are sure to challenge the company, electronics manufacturers appear to be responding favorably at a time when drives are increasingly becoming important and more prevalent in the consumer-electronics world.
Samsung will release a digital video camera containing the company's drive in the United States in August. The camera, which was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show but not described in technological detail, will cost less than $600 and is "about the size of a pack of cigarettes," Cornice CEO Kevin Magenis said.
Twelve companies so far have plans to release products with the drive. RCA/Thomson, Rio and five other manufacturers will come out with MP3 players with the Cornice Storage Element (SE), and a major U.S. retailer will feature a Cornice-based player from Korea. The first products will hit shelves this quarter, according to Cornice.
"I think it could have a big impact," said Cindy Wolf, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR. "From an audio perspective, it could kind of help spur the market. (Consumer-electronics makers) will be offering a hard-drive player at a lower price than an iPod."
Invite Michael Kanellos into your in-box
Senior department editor Michael Kanellos scrutinizes the hardware industry in a weekly column that ranges from chips to servers and other critical business systems. Enterprise Hardware every Wednesday.
The Cornice drive is essentially a minimalist hard drive that has been shorn of any materials not needed for portable electronics. The drive, for instance, doesn't have its own internal, dedicated pool of memory; instead, it uses the memory shared by the rest of the device to cache data. The SE doesn't have rails, so it can't be removed from the host device; by contrast, the drive is planted on the motherboard, and transfers of files are accomplished through USB (universal serial bus) ports.
"Mechanically, it has about one-third of the parts of a Hitachi Microdrive," which is also a one-inch drive, Magenis said. The drive contains only three screws, compared with 12 in similar mini-drives, he said.
A reduction in components cuts costs. The 1.5-inch GB drive, which has been in volume manufacturing since mid-April, sells for $65 in quantities of 10,000. The company is aiming for $50, Magenis said. By contrast, existing standard 1-inch Microdrives from IBM sell for $219 at retail or more, while 1GB flash cards go for around $200.
The price versus density argument results in an interesting niche, said Susan Kevorkian, a consumer-electronics analyst at IDC. Currently, Flash-based memory players containing 256MB of flash sell for $175 to $200, she said. The Cornice-based devices will sell for less than $200 but come with 1.5GB of storage.
At 1.5GB, the Cornice-based devices will hold far less than other hard drive-based music players such as Apple Computer's 20GB iPod. However, they will cost less and be smaller. RCA's planned MP3 player using the micro-drive is about the size of a sports watch. The iPod and other hard drive-based players, which come with 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch drives, are much larger.
Smaller devices are more popular. In 2003, 1.8 million hard-drive music players will get shipped, compared with 1.9 million flash players and 10.6 million MP3/CD players, according to IDC.
"To date, there has been a real difference in form factor between flash-based players and hard-drive players," Kevorkian said. "Even the iPod is bulkier than the flash players."
Energy savings
Density also will increase, Magenis said. Along with stripping out parts, the company has worked on engineering issues such as keeping energy consumption down. The RCA device will be able to run 12 hours on a single battery charge because the drive's motor shuts down between tasks, Magenis said. Shock-absorbing materials in the drive case will allow devices to sustain the shock from a 1-meter drop, he added.
Although a start-up, Cornice has been able to establish at least some credibility early on with large manufacturers--in part because of its pedigree, said In-Stat/MDR's Wolf. Engineers and executives from Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum and other hard-drive makers largely staff the company. Magenis, for instance, was a vice president of engineering at Maxtor. Cornice's chief technology officer, Curt Bruner, served as chief electronics architect at Quantum.
Some of Cornice's employees came from Dataplay, a once-promising mini-disc start-up.
Established manufacturers also are helping the company. Texas Instruments manufactures silicon for the SE, while the platters are made by Hoya, which manufacturers the small, thin disks for a number of companies. The drives are assembled in a factory owned by SAE, a subsidiary of Japan's TDK.
"Fundamentally, SAE is carrying our working capital," Magenis said. Venture investors include Nokia, CIBC World Markets and Texas Instruments.
Competitors are pursuing the market as well. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which took over IBM's hard-drive division, is coming out with a line of 1.8-inch drives this year. Currently, only Toshiba markets 1.8-inch drives, and one of the few products that contain the drive is the iPod. The paucity of finished products containing these sort of drives will change soon, said Bill Healy, general manager of the mobile business unit at Hitachi.
Hitachi will come out with a 4GB Microdrive before the end of the year. Flash-memory cards, which now hold 1GB of data, meanwhile, will continue to boost density.
Magenis, though, claims it will be tough to beat Cornice on price. The industry is moving away from flash and toward hard drives for storage, and coming up with a minimalist hard drive takes time.
"It took us almost three years to do this," he said. "Anyone else is literally looking at at least two years."
Texas Instruments and Cornice, Inc. Enable Higher Storage Capacities and Lower Costs for Portable Consumer Electronics.
PR Newswire, June 2, 2003
HOUSTON -- HOUSTON, June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- By leveraging its expertise in storage solutions and portable consumer electronics, Texas Instruments (TI), today announced that it is working with Cornice, Inc. on their 1.5GB Storage Element (SE). The SE, a 1-inch, high-capacity, embedded storage device, is designed to bring low cost storage solutions to portable consumer electronics devices such as MP3 players, PDAs, digital video recorders and players, and handheld gaming devices. (See www.ti.com/innovativestorage ).
The Cornice SE is designed to revolutionize the capabilities and functionality of consumer devices by providing gigabytes of extremely affordable storage when compared to today's flash memory solutions. A flash card that offers comparable capacity typically costs between $400 and $500 retail in addition to the cost of the portable device. The price of the SE enables Cornice customers to deliver their products to consumers at well under the retail cost of a similar flash-based device.
TI expertise enables innovative storage solution for portable applications
"TI brings systems expertise on multiple levels to our Storage Element. Our objective was to design a highly reliable, low cost, small form factor storage device and by leveraging their hard disk drive (HDD) and consumer electronics systems expertise, we were able to deliver a unique and innovative storage architecture," said Kevin Magenis, Cornice founder, president and CEO. He went onto say, "By working very closely with an industry leader such as TI, Cornice was able to achieve the cost, quality, and competitiveness that we needed to take advantage of the growing market for compact, high-capacity storage technologies."
TI's chipset solution consists of a custom TMS320C2000(TM) platform DSP controller, SR1740 pre-amp, and SH2100 servo controller. The DSP controller performs real time signal processing for, among other things, read/write positioning, error correction and control (ECC) and buffer management in addition to providing the interface to the Storage Element. This industry unique solution incorporates the DSP on the host, not the storage device, allowing for a higher level of future integration.
The SR1740 preamp was designed with the specific needs of the 1 inch form factor market in mind, resulting in a pseudo-differential, low power, low cost preamp that is now offered as part of TI's standard catalog of preamp products. Similarly, the SH2100 servo controller was specifically designed for low voltage and small form-factor applications. Containing the digital interface logic and other utility functions required in this drive, the SH2100 is a highly integrated solution that complements the rest of the chip set and turns it into a complete solution.
Innovative approach to classic HDD electronics
"Larger, desktop PC hard drives often utilize an electronics architecture that integrates around the read channel integrated circuit (IC)," said Kenneth Nesteroff, storage DSP manager, TI. "However, when Cornice targeted the portable consumer electronics market for their 1 inch SE, they seized a prime opportunity to differentiate their electronics architecture to better meet the requirements unique to these non-PC applications. The result is a repartition of classic HDD electronics that enables a cost-effective and technologically advanced chipset solution."
TI's programmable DSP and analog solutions for portable audio, imaging, and video encoding and decoding, provide support for the Cornice Storage Element in addition to other industry standard storage solutions. "Continuing its commitment to the multimedia jukebox market, TI is addressing the primary concerns of its customers -- form factor and cost," said Chris Schairbaum, business manager of portable audio and infotainment at TI. "We feel Cornice's new Storage Element will help boost growth in the portable multimedia player market and we look forward to working with Cornice and seeing it implemented in our customers' latest products."
The Cornice Storage Element is already shipping in volume quantities and will be available in portable consumer products including Rio(R) Nitrus Urban and Eigen Executive portable digital audio players, iRiver's iGP-100 digital audio player and Digitalway's HS100 portable USB storage unit and HD200 portable music juke box beginning in early June through August.
Cornice Inc.
Cornice Inc. is an innovator in small, compact, low-cost, high-capacity storage that enables a new generation of pocket-able consumer electronic devices for the world's leading brand-name manufacturers. The Cornice Storage Element (SE) is durable, integrated, personal storage that brings new levels of affordability and content capacity to these devices.
Early investors in Cornice include the company's founders and management team and Texas Instruments. In August 2002, the Company received its first round of venture financing, from CIBC Capital Partners, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Nokia Venture Partners. Privately held, Cornice maintains headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. Visit Cornice at http://www.corniceco.com/
Texas Instruments Incorporated
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.ti.com/ .
Texas Instruments and Cornice, Inc. Enable Higher Storage Capacities and Lower Costs for Portable Consumer Electronics.
PR Newswire, June 2, 2003
HOUSTON -- HOUSTON, June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- By leveraging its expertise in storage solutions and portable consumer electronics, Texas Instruments (TI), today announced that it is working with Cornice, Inc. on their 1.5GB Storage Element (SE). The SE, a 1-inch, high-capacity, embedded storage device, is designed to bring low cost storage solutions to portable consumer electronics devices such as MP3 players, PDAs, digital video recorders and players, and handheld gaming devices. (See www.ti.com/innovativestorage ).
The Cornice SE is designed to revolutionize the capabilities and functionality of consumer devices by providing gigabytes of extremely affordable storage when compared to today's flash memory solutions. A flash card that offers comparable capacity typically costs between $400 and $500 retail in addition to the cost of the portable device. The price of the SE enables Cornice customers to deliver their products to consumers at well under the retail cost of a similar flash-based device.
TI expertise enables innovative storage solution for portable applications
"TI brings systems expertise on multiple levels to our Storage Element. Our objective was to design a highly reliable, low cost, small form factor storage device and by leveraging their hard disk drive (HDD) and consumer electronics systems expertise, we were able to deliver a unique and innovative storage architecture," said Kevin Magenis, Cornice founder, president and CEO. He went onto say, "By working very closely with an industry leader such as TI, Cornice was able to achieve the cost, quality, and competitiveness that we needed to take advantage of the growing market for compact, high-capacity storage technologies."
TI's chipset solution consists of a custom TMS320C2000(TM) platform DSP controller, SR1740 pre-amp, and SH2100 servo controller. The DSP controller performs real time signal processing for, among other things, read/write positioning, error correction and control (ECC) and buffer management in addition to providing the interface to the Storage Element. This industry unique solution incorporates the DSP on the host, not the storage device, allowing for a higher level of future integration.
The SR1740 preamp was designed with the specific needs of the 1 inch form factor market in mind, resulting in a pseudo-differential, low power, low cost preamp that is now offered as part of TI's standard catalog of preamp products. Similarly, the SH2100 servo controller was specifically designed for low voltage and small form-factor applications. Containing the digital interface logic and other utility functions required in this drive, the SH2100 is a highly integrated solution that complements the rest of the chip set and turns it into a complete solution.
Innovative approach to classic HDD electronics
"Larger, desktop PC hard drives often utilize an electronics architecture that integrates around the read channel integrated circuit (IC)," said Kenneth Nesteroff, storage DSP manager, TI. "However, when Cornice targeted the portable consumer electronics market for their 1 inch SE, they seized a prime opportunity to differentiate their electronics architecture to better meet the requirements unique to these non-PC applications. The result is a repartition of classic HDD electronics that enables a cost-effective and technologically advanced chipset solution."
TI's programmable DSP and analog solutions for portable audio, imaging, and video encoding and decoding, provide support for the Cornice Storage Element in addition to other industry standard storage solutions. "Continuing its commitment to the multimedia jukebox market, TI is addressing the primary concerns of its customers -- form factor and cost," said Chris Schairbaum, business manager of portable audio and infotainment at TI. "We feel Cornice's new Storage Element will help boost growth in the portable multimedia player market and we look forward to working with Cornice and seeing it implemented in our customers' latest products."
The Cornice Storage Element is already shipping in volume quantities and will be available in portable consumer products including Rio(R) Nitrus Urban and Eigen Executive portable digital audio players, iRiver's iGP-100 digital audio player and Digitalway's HS100 portable USB storage unit and HD200 portable music juke box beginning in early June through August.
Cornice Inc.
Cornice Inc. is an innovator in small, compact, low-cost, high-capacity storage that enables a new generation of pocket-able consumer electronic devices for the world's leading brand-name manufacturers. The Cornice Storage Element (SE) is durable, integrated, personal storage that brings new levels of affordability and content capacity to these devices.
Early investors in Cornice include the company's founders and management team and Texas Instruments. In August 2002, the Company received its first round of venture financing, from CIBC Capital Partners, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Nokia Venture Partners. Privately held, Cornice maintains headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. Visit Cornice at http://www.corniceco.com/
Texas Instruments Incorporated
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls, and Educational & Productivity Solutions. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.ti.com/ .
Subject: From the SHAREHOLDER MEETING. .
From EDIGOKIE
PostID 297462 On Thursday, December 04, 2003 (EST) at 9:15:58 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not much to add from being at the MEETING in person except the pleasure of MEETING d.inkie, tattuva, and others. I will decide whether seeing sunpoop was a pleasure or not after our golf game tomorrow. Don't know about the future of the golf tourney since the guy from out of town is the only one who could get a tee time. Back to the MEETING:
I assume everyone caught the veiled message about the ''Gateway'' to increased revenues. Got to actually see, touch, feel and hold a Gateway player. Funny how e.Digital had a Gateway player on display at a shm - maybe we are actually in the Gateway player (do ya think). Digiplayer is everything we have heard. It is top drawer quality and the picture and sound make me want one. The Disney headsets are not as ugly as emit thought and the young engineer who told us about them was obviously excited about all the products on display.
We should all be proud of Robert. Frank tried everyway he could to pin RP down, but RP deftly defended his position with RP speak that would be the admiration of the world's greatest negotiators. No new news but I continue to view my investment with ever increasing optimism.
Convergence is the future for e.Digital and that is going to take some additional time. My personal view is that the IFE and player sales are good for keeping us up and running until the real future arrives and e.Digital ties it all together. As you heard from the question and answer session - we have the products we need. The development work is done and it is time to focus on marketing the converged solution. Works for me. I am sure more specifics will come to me after I sleep on it and get a relaxing round of golf under my belt. We may see more dilution, as RP clearly stated, but the end result will more than make up for the immediate pain. Hang in there all - start making plans to attend the MEETING next year.
Kirk
Back from the SHM
From joetraader
PostID 297490 On Friday, December 05, 2003 (EST) at 12:39:00 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Got more info talking after the meeting to FF etc...
Asked about several things....some listed below
Q:How come no one has taken credit for the dell player?
FF: don't know...but heard the unit is experiencing high return
rate 30% +
Q:How does the small amount of new financing 1.2M solve any
concerns of new large OEM's?
FF: It's not so much the 1.2M but the company's ability to raise it
quickly. ( If they can raise 1.2M...can probably raise more if necessary)
Q:Does our technology place us way in front of any competiton,
or are there other competitors on on tail??
FF: We are way in front
Q:Is the current Eclipse unit in production beyond the scope of
technology of anything else in the marketplace, and is it apparent
thar F10/Eclipse has both the desire and where with all to make
a major industry marketing push with the product?
FF: Yes & YES!!
It's gonna take a little time, but these guys ( edigital team ) seemed
pretty darn excited about the near and not so distant future.
ps. the new products are extremely well produced, Gateway player
has a substantial feel yet very stylish...cooler than ipod
dig e player was as clean as any high end consumer electronics
I've seen.
e.Digital Releases SUMMARY of Annual Shareholders Meeting
Replay of the Webcast Available at e.Digital.com
(San Diego, CA - December 5, 2003) - e.Digital Corporation (OTC:
EDIG) held its Annual General Meeting of Shareholders yesterday
at its corporate offices in San Diego, California. This alert
summarizes the company's presentation to shareholders.
The Company's formal business consisted of two proposals:
Proposal #1 to re-elect Alex Diaz, Alfred H. Falk, Robert
Putnam, Allen Cocumelli and Victor Ramsauer to the Board of
Directors; and Proposal #2 to ratify the appointment of Singer,
Lewak, Greenbaum & Goldstein LLP as independent auditors of the
Company for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2004; both proposals
were approved by the shareholders.
Fred Falk, e.Digital's president and chief executive officer,
highlighted the Company's core values and innovations which
form the foundation for e.Digital's technologies and approach to
customers. Falk emphasized that the ability to innovate and
integrate new and emerging technologies into the Company's
platforms are the framework for the Company's current and future
achievement.
MicroOS™
A brief description of e.Digital's MicroOS patented technology
was included in the presentation. Of note were the technology's
ability to incorporate voice recording, AM and FM reception,
audio/video storage and playback, and wireless utilities. As
the foundation for e.Digital's major platforms, MicroOS also
manages the volume and equalizer functions, the LCD drivers and
interfaces, a wide variety of audio and video codecs, digital
rights management schemes as well as today's most popular media
storage formats. The compact size and the dynamic capability of
MicroOS is e.Digital's key asset in servicing the needs of OEM
clients faster and better than competitors.
The presentation included information on the Company's revenue
sources and its method for selecting new projects. According to
Falk, each new business proposition must have "home run"
potential, opportunities for next generation products creating
multiple revenue streams to be considered by the Company.
On-going revenue streams and diversification were noted as key
components in the Company's endeavor to ensure continued revenue
growth.
Falk noted that the Company is expanding opportunities with
existing customers and developing projects with new clients as
well. Each of these growth segments relate strongly to the
Company's stated policy for new business.
"We are confident that the quality of our technology and designs
position e.Digital at the forefront in fulfilling the future
needs of today's clients," commented Falk.
Falk stated that MicroOS is the foundation upon which the
Company has developed its leading platforms and is the key to
emerging business opportunities for e.Digital. With the bulk of
the technology development complete, each new product will have
reduced development costs and increased revenue potential.
MP3-Based Wireless Headset Platform
Falk highlighted many of the Company's recent projects including
the wireless communications project for Softeq and
Hewlett-Packard. The Ears to the World wireless MP3-based
headset was delivered this summer for use within The Magic
Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney's Animal Kingdom.
The headsets utilize e.Digital's patented MicroOS as well as its
hardware and firmware.
"We expect additional orders to be placed to accommodate a
greater number of guests and language selections within the
Florida parks and for use at other Disney properties around the
world," said Falk.
Additional information regarding other uses for the translation
headsets coupled with the wireless system was provided.
Scenarios ranging from use at museums and national parks to
worldwide tourism were highlighted. Each scenario related the
value of the system, providing location-based information
pertaining to specific areas of interest. It was also noted
that location based wireless technology has vast potential for
generating advertising revenue.
In-Car Infotainment Platform
The current embodiment of the Eclipse by Fujitsu Ten In-Car
Infotainment device, which Falk announced is now in production,
includes multi-codec support, integration into the car's head
unit, huge capacity, real-time MP3 encoding, 5 minute FM write
back and a high-speed connection to the PC. Falk addressed the
In-Car Infotainment platform and its potential enhancements for
future generations. Ultimately, the device is intended to
service multiple In-Car Infotainment needs ranging from wireless
communications to music, video and games and could include
virtually any other digital audio/video need desired by car
manufacturers and after-market OEMs, all in a single system.
e.Digital is targeting automobile manufacturers for the adoption
and integration of its In-Car Infotainment platform in its
current configuration. The Company is also working to penetrate
after-market audio manufacturers. According to Falk, "By
working with these outlets early on in the integration of our
In-Car Infotainment system, we are well positioned to proffer
2nd, 3rd and 4th generations of our products."
Falk also cited the Company's commitment to wireless
technology. In addition for plans to integrate 802.11
technologies into future devices, the Company's engineers
closely monitor developments with other emerging wireless
technologies including ultra-wide band.
Odyssey 1000 Personal Digital Audio Platform
Immediately following Falk's update on the In-Car Infotainment
product, he addressed the Odyssey 1000 Portable Digital Audio
Platform. The Odyssey 1000 has served as a model to OEM partners
demonstrating the full range of features that can be integrated
using MicroOS. The stylish casing, unique scroll wheel,
intuitive user interface are characteristic of the Odyssey 1000
and are easily recognizable in the first OEM branded, 1.8"
version of the platform announced last month.
"With the introduction of the 1.8" version of the Odyssey
platform for an OEM client with the branding power to move
volume and further opportunities in this area, we have decided
to discontinue retail sales of the e.Digital branded Odyssey
1000 as well as all other e.Digital branded devices," remarked
Falk. "We will continue to support sales of the player through
December 4, 2003 and honor all outstanding warranties. The
mission of the e.Digital branded Odyssey 1000 to serve as a
model for the strength and flexibility of our MicroOS core has
been realized through this latest release of the OEM branded
1.8" version. We are working with and continue to seek new OEM
customers for this platform, providing comprehensive, customized
digital music solutions to brands not yet in the market or
brands looking to enhance their existing products."
Personal Video Platform
The final product platform Falk discussed was e.Digital's
Personal Video Platform. He stated e.Digital's first commercial
release of a video-on-demand, personal video platform has
enjoyed tremendous initial success through APS's digEplayer
branding and distribution to Alaska Airlines. The first units
shipped this fall and were in the hands of select Alaska
Airlines passengers in October. The units are loaded with
content from partners such as 20th Century Fox and DMX. The
large screen delivers better than DVD quality video - a key
barrier of entry to others evaluating opportunities in the
market.
APS continues to aggressively market the digEplayer and is in
active negotiations with many of the world's leading and
emerging airlines and other companies within the travel
industry.
While e.Digital anticipates the commercial success of the
digEplayer, the Company remains active in its pursuit of other
OEMs seeking personal video platforms for their own branding
purposes. There are many opportunities for new and next
generation applications of this device as well as highly
lucrative revenue opportunities.
Included in future OEM opportunities are adaptations of
e.Digital's Personal Video Platform to service field repair
technicians, professional services (doctors, dentists, hospitals
and emergency personnel) and many other niche markets.
Falk also discussed a potential direct to consumer application
for the device. The model for this market could include
digitized content from multiple distributors, such as 20th
Century Fox and Paramount, that could be accessed by consumers
through kiosks at locations such as Hollywood Video,
Blockbuster, Wal-Mart or others.
"According to Video Business Magazine," commented Falk,
"Consumers spent $10.2 billion to rent and buy videos during the
first half of this year, a 16% gain compared to the first half
of 2002. Of that $10.2 billion, over $7 billion was spent on
the purchase or rental of DVDs indicating the readiness of
consumers to adopt advanced digital technologies over the VHS
format.
"e.Digital is well positioned to provide a wide range of digital
video solutions for OEM partners," added Falk. "Because the
foundation work is complete, the costs of development will
continue to shrink."
SUMMARY
Falk summarized "Because of the flexibility of MicroOS and the
insatiable consumer demand for portable devices, e.Digital is
well positioned to expand relationships with existing OEMs and
to enter into partnerships with new OEMs to create devices to
address multiple needs and to service the audio/video demands
for the home, the car, the office, commercial transportation -
virtually every aspect of the portable digital entertainment and
infotainment domain.
"The Company is presently in advanced negotiations with two
major OEMs on separate projects of enormous potential, each of
which seek to combine two or more of e.Digital's existing
platforms to advance the convergence of these devices. These
pending opportunities necessitated the Company securing
additional funding to strengthen its financial position."
Falk continued "While all of e.Digital's platforms and
derivative products have ‘home run' potential, each product
will require different time frames to evaluate their expected
success, some results will be evident within weeks, others may
take longer.
"e.Digital has enhanced MicroOS from a digital voice technology
into a multi-faceted digital audio, video and wireless tool
capable of servicing many needs, in many industries for many
customers.
Falk concluded by quoting former president Ronald Reagan;
‘"There are no such things as limits to growth because there are
no limits on the capacity for intelligence and imagination.' and
I would like to postulate that there are also no limits on
technology."
A replay of the meeting is available through website at
www.edigital.com for the next 30 days.
###
About e.Digital Corporation e.Digital Corporation specializes
in technology innovation and applications integration through
engineering partnerships with leading original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs) designing, licensing, branding, and
manufacturing digital audio, video and wireless products and
technology platforms. The Company also sells its Odyssey 1000™
digital jukebox through selected e-tail and retail outlets.
Applications for e.Digital's technology include delivery and
management of open and secure digital media with a focus on
music, voice, wireless and video players/recorders, automotive
infotainment and telematics systems, portable digital music
players and voice recorders; desktop, laptop, and handheld
computers; PC peripherals; cellular phone peripherals; e-books;
video games; digital cameras; and digital video recorders.
Engineering services range from the licensing of e.Digital's
patented MicroOS™ file management system to custom software and
hardware development, industrial design, and manufacturing
services. For more information about e.digital and its products,
please visit the company website at www.edigital.com.
Safe Harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation
Reform of 1995: All statements made in this document, other than
statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements are based on the then-current
expectations, beliefs, assumptions, estimates and forecasts
about the businesses of the Company and the industries and
markets in which the company operates. Those statements are not
guarantees of future performance and involve risks,
uncertainties and assumptions that will be difficult to predict.
Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially
from what is expressed or implied by those forward-looking
statements. More information about potential factors that could
affect the Company can be found in its most recent Form 10-K,
Form 10-Q and other reports and statements filed by e.Digital
with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). e.Digital
disclaims any intent or obligation to update those
forward-looking statements, except as otherwise specifically
stated by it.
CONTACT:
e.Digital Corporation: Robert Putnam, (858) 679-1504,
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sunpoop --SH Mtg summaries
PostID 297503 On Friday, December 05, 2003 (EST) at 2:55:05 AM
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A few of us arrived early. Early enough to have a coffee clatch in the parking lot....Ediglong, jdtiii (the nit picker) Edigokie (whom I will trounch at golf tommorrow) myself and two or three more who I apologize for not naming since my notes are in the car and I am not going downstairs to get them....Hitachi was there.... Anyway we did our normal Edig speculation on what would transpire at the meeting with jdtiii being honestly negative and not too enthused. We all went inside and saw that the meeting was not very well attended. In fact a room 1/4 that size would have been sufficient. Maybe 1/3 of the amount of attendees from last year...
I was in error when I previously posted EDig would NOT be at the CES ''ala'' RP. Of course ''RP Speak'' was a little foggy on that subject...EDig will have no booth but will have a display, about the size of the prior booths at the CES in the middle of TI's booth, manned by EDig people. TI wanted and invited EDig to be there to showcase the products that are being produced with TI technology. To me that is a heckova a deal. More exposure that EDig ever got from its own booth with TI pushing and I do mean pushing EDig and its technology.(and its free) In fact RP, after the formal meeting, emphasized that TI has sent EDig many customers and is still doing so. TI gets inquirees about certain technology and replies to those queries ''we don't do that but the company you wish to talk to is EDigital'' Call them.......I was't going to the CES this year but I am now and will meet with D'inki (Ediglong) to do our normal harrasment of all and with the express purpose of checking out the HP booth.....
I hit RP about HP and he flat refused to answer one way or the other about EDig's involvement. I did throw some other questions to try to get around ''RP Speak'' and while this is just pure conjecture on my part, ''everthing fits''.
RP did emphasize and re-emphasize that companies the magniture of HP or Gateway will NOT acknowledge anywhere on the product anyone else but themselves. The IPOD being a great example. I did not know it until today but the IPOD has a great percentage of the unit made by other companies, WHO WILL NEVER BE ACKNOWLEDGED. (in fact FF did say that EDig tried to get its name somewhere on the Gateway player but Gateway flat refused and (verbatum) ''you want our business you do it our way''.
Again talking privately with FF, I tried ''smoozing'' a bit but could get nothing factual about the 2 OEM's that he stated ''will be bigger than anything we have ever been involved with'' and that ''we are in advanced negotiations with as we speak'' I guess I lost my touch at ''smoozing'' but I did get something very significant from him, at least to me, in that I said ''in the past we have heard about this OEM and that OEM etc...with no business ever quite coming about.'' In his candid opinion did he feel this was more of the same? A definite NO to my question, I then asked him if he knew or felt the signing on the dotted line to do business with these OEM's was, (1) so-so (we are just talking or in the beginning stage of talks to see if we can do business), or (2) serious but not near an accord, or (3) ''very close'' and most likely will happen. His answer was a very positive #3. In fact he said it was in the hands of the lawers right now and he acted a little frustrated when he said that. ''You know those guys, every letter, word and paragraph has to be examined, written and re-written. Sent back and forth...etc...'' I got the impression what he was talking about was fairly close to being ''a done deal''
I was wrong in my thoughts about the need for the latest financing. It wasn't to ''pay the bills, keep the doors open or the lights on'' It wasn't to defray operating costs and it wasn't for what I thought it was for, ''to front manufacturing costs to get products to market.'' EDig has far bigger irons in the fire than we know of. Both FF and Rp stated the major reason for the financing was to have enough on the books to satisfy potential, (perhaps 1 ??) customers that the company (verbatum) ''will be around a while.''
There was no definitive news on the 3rd quarter earnings until F10 is shipped and that will happen this month. However perhaps the entire order (4,000 units) will be not be finished shipping until the 1st. couple of weeks in Jan 04. Disappointing, so I don't think this will be a ''wizz bang'' quarter.
However, FF STRESSED, that ALL, ALL, the business they are involved in now are ''LONG TERM'' relationships, meaning the products will have demand and strong sales throughout the entire year, not just at holiday times. FF says if it doesn't meet that criteria they will not do it.
I am getting pooped, its late, I have much more to say, will try to gather thoughts and do more tomorrow. Just to finish it up however, our nit picking, doubtling thomas, jdtii was swayed over to the positive side after spending at least a half an hour with RP and asking him everything in the book he could think of... As we walked out of the metting, (we were the last two beside EDig personell in there) he indicated that he was much happier and very much convinced he had a winner..
My personal opinion was one of great optimism. Of course you all know I have never been negative about EDig but just couldn't quite put my finger on what manner of success, and when, EDig would have. While FF and RP gave the usual platitudes during the formal part of the meeting afterwards they both spoke more candidly and with much enthusiasm. The meeting was not full of ''maybes'' or ''we have contacted this or that OEM and we could possibly do business with them''. It was of a quiet confidence, expressed strongly, as if they knew what they couldn't tell us was in fact ''signed, sealed and just about delivered''
This was 180 degrees off of last years meeting and while FF was not forthcoming factually you could see in his demeanor that he ''proud as punch'' in what he had to say to us.
Frank
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The following is a summary of the EDIG annual Shareholder's meeting from December 4, 2003.
I have tried to capture as much of this, verbatim, as the poor quality of the webcast would allow.
EDIG Annual SHM Summary
December 4, 2003
Introduction - Robert Putnam
Welcome to the meeting (blah blah blah).
The meeting is divided into 2 parts -
Part One - corporate governance matters
Part Two - company presentation
QA to follow company presentation.
Part One
Alot of voting, motions and elections.
Part Two
Fred Falk
Thanks for joining us this afternoon for our annual shareholders meeting - held for the first time in our corporate offices - not as beautiful as the Performing Arts Center, but a lot cheaper (saved close to 5000 dollars by being at corp. offices).
This year has been about cutting costs, working towards profitability, and doing what we do best - developing technology.
Introduction of key members of EDIG team -
BOD - Alex Diaz, Alan Cocumelli, Victor Ramsauer, Rene Warden (CAO, Corp. Sec), Corporate Council
Senior VP - Atul Anundpura
VP of Biz Dev - Steve Ferguson
Marketing Communications Mgr. - JoAnn Platt
Chief Engineer and Engineering team
This past year has been very exciting - new products have been introduced. Advancements have been made. Many people have been following the progress, and are eager to learn more.
"I am certain that by the end of this presentation you will be as excited about the future of e.digital as I am."
Core values and innovations lay the foundation for our technology and approach to customers. Our ability to adapt innovations to new and emerging platforms is the framework for future achievements. Partners, customers and licensees are the Gateway to continued success. EDIG's core values ensure a consistent approach to how we handle customers, clients, employees, shareholders, partners and projects. Proprietary technology, quality, consumer satisfaction and considerations made for legitimate content are what sets EDIG apart from other technology integrators. Through innovation, EDIG's engineering team has achieved superior digital audio and video quality in a variety of portable devices. The quality of our designs, core technology, and overall deliverables make us a desirable partner for OEMs looking for fast, integrated solutions for their branded digital entertainment devices.
Consumer satisfaction is another of e.digital's strengths which enhances our position with our OEM partners.
MicroOS allows us to offer OEMs a broad range of features and functionality across multiple audio and video platforms, all designed with an intuitive user interface. e.digital's manufacturing partners represent the best in their field for audio, video, industrial and mechanical design and manufacturing.
Our own technical and customer support teams provide services directly to our customers and are a value-added option for our OEM partners.
Legitimate content is the driving force behind the demand for digital audio and video platforms. Forrester Research reported this quarter that all the major digital music services already have several hundreds of thousands of tracks from all of the major labels and many independents. Newsweek reported that on-line music will total 3.3 billion dollars in five years.
With the proliferation of legitimate content, consumers now require quality devices on which to play and store their songs, movies, games and other entertainment files and applications. This September, In-Stat/MDR reported that consumer electronics with integrated hard-drives will represent 7% of the total hard drive market this year- which is nearly double that of 2002. This market is forecasted to have a 56.7 compound annual growth rate over the 2002 - 2007 period. EDIG is part of this plan.
The technology that serves as the foundation of our platform is our proprietary MicroOS. MOS began as a voice recorder technology, but because of its inherent flexibility, we have developed it to support AM/FM reception audio and video storage and playback, and wireless utilities. MOS is compact and dynamic, responding to a variety of user interfaces. MOS manages the volume and equilizer functions, the LCD drivers and interfaces, ----- a wide variety of audio and video files, interacts with a variety of DRM schemes, and supports today's most popular media storage formats, including hard-disk drives, CD-ROMs, compact and embedded-flash, and many more.
Because MOS services so many options in such a compact package, we are able to integrate many functions within a single device, using less power, space and operating capacity. EDIG has enhanced and perfected MOS over the past several years, and as a result, we are able to complete projects faster and better than our competitors.
EDIG focuses on pursuing business that provides the company with multiple revenue opportunities. Everyone of our projects is structured to generate multiple revenue sources. By generating ongoing revenue streams, we are endeavoring to ensure that EDIG's financial success is diversified. As part of our evaluation of these projects, a primary criteria for each opportunity is that they represent home-run potential, as well as possibilities for future product generation incorporating additional functionality.
Our OEM customers come to us because we have demonstrated our ability to be on the cutting edge of technology. They rely upon EDIG to further their leadership positions with their markets.
EDIG is expanding opportunities with existing customers and developed projects with new clients. Each new customer represents technology platform opportunities for follow-on orders, maintenance fees, refurbishment, and most importantly, future projects.
We are confident that the quality of our technology and designs and our ability to service our customers' needs faster and better than our competitors positions EDIG at the forefront to fulfill the future needs of today's clients. Our success relies not only upon our technology, but also upon our ability to enhance existing relationships, and to forge new relationships with leading OEMs and manufacturing partners. It is through demonstrated design and product quality and deliverables, that we are able to augment existing alliances and attract new ones.
MicroOS is the foundation upon which we have developed our leading platforms, and the key to emerging opportunities for e.digital. All the products that you see here today have had at least one commercial release, with the exception of the first product to be derived from our in-car infotainment platform.
I am delighted to announce today that the Eclipse by Fujitsu-Ten product is now in full production.
The development of MicroOS and its applications for digital audio and video is largely complete. With the lion's share of the work behind us, each new project requires fewer development hours thereby reducing our cost and increasing the revenue potential of each project.
I would like to provide a brief update on the product that we delivered this summer to Softeq and HP. As many of you know, the end-customer for this product is Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Florida. "Ears to the World", a wireless, MP3-based headset, serves as a personal translation device for park guests within the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney MGM-Studios and Disney's Animal Kingdom. The translator utilizes our patented MOS as well as our hardware and firmware. We expect additional orders to be placed in order to accommodate a greater number of guests and language selections within the Florida parks and for use at other Disney properties around the world. The platform developed for ETTW can easily be adapted for other uses and markets. While Disney ------ the five languages, there are no limitations to the number of ----------- and dialects the device can support. Imagine going to the Louvre in Paris and receiving information on history about each piece of artwork and its artist; or visiting a national park or historic site and gleaning insights about each landmark and its relevance to history. This platform also has the ability to span(?) well beyond the ----- paths of national monuments and exhibits.
Perhaps you fancy a trip to Hong Kong - these headsets, coupled with the wireless system, would allow tourists from any nation to navigate their way from their hotel to Po Lin Monastery or the Cantonese Opera House without having to stop and fumble for directions. And of course, location-based wireless technologies also have the tremendous potential for generating advertising revenues.
The past several years have seen the proliferation of new in-car technologies introduced one component at a time. Integrated and after-market GPS systems are available at a fraction of the price of just 3 years ago. Many of us have fumbled with task of linking our MP3 players to our in-dash car stereos, mostly with disappointing results. XM-Satellite is going head-to-head with Sirius radio; portable DVD players resell for less than $400(?) dollars at the local Target store. And don't forget - along with those DVD screens in the back, little Tommy will want to access his favorite video game which may or may not be little Sally's game of choice. Some car lines even provide a live camera on the back fender to assist in the nasty task of parallel parking that monstrous SUV in a compact-sized space.
And there you have it - there's the future of in-car infotainment ----- (something combination?) of all these applications into a single system.
Presently we are in full production of the E-by-Fuji-10 product that you have heard about for the last several months. Today the product offers multi-codec support, integration into the cars head(?) units, huge capacity, real-time MP3 encoding, five-minute (?) FM write back, and a high-speed connection to the PC.
But what is even more exciting is the potential for this platform. Because of the MOS foundation and the strength of wireless technology, this platform has the ability to service all of the in-car infotainment functions I just described within a single system, providing the future of driving convenience.
While the near future may offer a comprehensive MOS-powered infotainment driving experience, today we are targeting automobile manufacturers ---- to give options and integrations of our platform in its current embodiment. We are also working to penetrate the after-market audio manufacturers. By working with these outlets early on, with the integration of our in-car infotainment system, we are well-positioned to proffer(?) second, third, and fourth generations of our product.
Each of our platforms has a direct application for wireless technology. The next generation of infotainment device is expected to enable the system in your car to communicate with your desk-top PC, and transfer content wirelessly. Future generations of the product could benefit by receiving automotive manufacturer diagnostic information. In other words, Toyota could communicate directly with your car to determine the time for a regularly-scheduled service, or your appointment software could upload directions for your early morning meeting while you were asleep. The possibilities are literally endless.
802.11 wireless technology has a wide range of applications and possibilities. In addition to integrated 802.11 technology, and for our plan for future devices, EDIG engineers closely monitored the development of other new wireless technologies, including ultra-wide band.
The Odyssey 1000 digital audio player was our first product to launch this year. The initial 2.5 inch version featured a broad range of functionality that set itself apart from competitors. More importantly, the O1K has served as a model for our OEM partners, demonstrating the full range of features that can be integrated using MOS. The stylish taste, scroll wheel, intuitive user interface that are characteristic of the O1K are easily recognizable in the first OEM branded 1.8 inch version of our platform, that was announced last month.
With the introduction of the 1.8 inch version of the Odyssey platform for an OEM client with the branding power (brand new?) to move volume and further opportunities in this area, we have decided to discontinue retail sales of the EDIG-branded O1K as well as all other EDIG-branded devices. We will continue to support sales of the players through today, and to honor all outstanding warranties.
The mission of the EDIG-branded O1K to serve as a model for the strength and flexibility of our MOS core has been realized through this latest release of the OEM-branded 1.8 inch version. We are working with, and continue to seek new OEM customers for this platform to provide a comprehensive, customized, digital music solution to brands not yet in the market, or brands looking to enhance their existing products.
EDIG's first commercial release of a video on-demand personal video platform has enjoyed tremendous initial success through APS' Digeplayer branding and distribution through Alaska Airlines. The first units shipped this fall, and were in the hands of select Alaska Airlines passengers in October. The units are loaded with content from partners such as 20th Century Fox and ???? The large screen delivers better-than-DVD quality video, a key barrier to entry of others (?) evaluating opportunities in the market. APS continues to aggressively market the Digeplayer and is in the active negotiations with many of the world's leading and emerging airlines and other companies within the travel industry.
While EDIG is certainly very proud of the expected commercial success of the Digeplayer, we remain active in our pursuit of other OEMs looking for personal video platforms for their own branded purposes. As you will see in the slides(?), there are many opportunities for new and next-generation applications of this device as well as a highly lucrative revenue opportunity.
APS' Digeplayer is just one illustration of the flexibility of this platform. Opportunities for B2B sales include airlines, car rental agencies, cruise lines, franchise sports teams, and field repair technicians. Imagine the Maytag repairman coming to your hometo fix your 'frig, and all the schematics of every single model ever made are on his personal video device.
The Motion Picture Association of America recently imposed, and then modified a ban on "screeners" (?) - DVD's of a film, provided to the Academy for viewing. The concern has been over the security of the DVD screeners, and the electronic distribution of copyrighted content. Providing each voting Academy member with and EDIG personal video device with the capacity to store and play each motion picture, documentary and short film would ensure the mobility required by the voters, as well as the security sought by the MPAA.
EDIG's personal video platform also has applications within the professional services field, offering doctors, dentists, hospitals and emergency personnel access to critical information - all in a device weighing less than 2 pounds.
Many of you have expressed interest in learning about direct to consumer applications for EDIG's personal video platform. I'd like to outline for you a very promising model for this market. Imagine premium content providers such as 20th Century Fox or Paramount could prepare their content for digital distribution to movie outlet locations such as Hollywood Video, Blockbuster, Walmart and others. These movie outlets could supply kiosks fitted with connections for the devices allowing consumers to download any content, any time they want, and never experience the disappointment of out-of-stock (?) again.
According to Video Business Magazine - consumers spent 10.2 billion dollars to rent and buy videos during the first half of this year - a 16%(?) gain compared to the first half of 2002. Of that 10 billion dollars, 7 billion was spent on the rental of DVDs, indicating the readinessof consumers to adopt advaned digital technologies over the VHS format.
EDIG is well positioned to provide a wide range of digital video solutions for OEM partners, and because the foundation work has been completed, the cost of development will continue to shrink. Because of the flexibility of MOS, and the insatiable consumer demand for portable devices, EDIG is well positioned to expand relationships with existing OEMs and to enter into partnerships with new OEMs to create devices to address multiple needs, to create devices to service the audio and video demand for the home, the car, the office, commercial transportation, virtually every aspect of portable entertainment and infotainment domains.
EDIG is presently in advanced negotiations with 2 major OEMs on separate projects of enormous potential each of which seeks to combine two or more of our existing platforms to advance the convergence of these devices.
These opportunities require EDIG to secure additional funding to strengthen our financial position.
All of our platforms and projects have Home-Run potential. Because these products require different timeframes to evaluate their success, some results will be evident within weeks, while others, because of their niche markets, may take longer.
EDIG has enhanced MOS from the digital voice technology into a multi-faceted digital audio, video and wireless tool capable of servicing many needs in many industries, for many customers.
Former President Ronald Reagan said, "there are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the capacity for intelligence and imagination."
I would like to postulate that there are no limits on technology.
Thank you so much for your time.
Fred Falk.
End of Part Two.
CORNICEco.com/customers/images/pic_digitalway_sm.jpg> CORNICEco.com/images-logos/logo_digitalway.gif>
Digitalway
Digitalway's new USB storage product, MPIO HS100, will be using with the company's 1.5GB fixed storage element, enabling it to store large data or multimedia files within a competitive price.
Digitalway's MPIO HS100
USB Storage Unit
The MPIO HS100 storage device, which measures 43.6(W) x 84.5(H) x 14.8(D) mm, will available in retail stores in early summer. The MPIO HS100, combined with the CORNICE SE, enables consumers to carry a small and portable device in hand that is able to store up to 1,000 floppy disks worth of information.
The MPIO HS100 is compatible with Windows 98, SE, ME, 2000 and XP and with Mac OS version 8.6 and later. Users can now easily carry data whereever they go and plug the storage device into any computer, or a variety of other USB-compliant devices, allowing ample bandwidth for multimedia and storage applications. The MPIO HS100 transfers data through its 2.0 USB port, which gives users the convenience of high-capacity, high-speed portable storage at a price point less than half of other USB storage manufactures' products that use conventional storage technology such as Flash memory or miniaturized hard disk drives.
The device comes with an installation CD, a USB extension cable, a carrying case, a necklace strap, user guide and a warranty card.
The CORNICE SE helped Digitalway develop and deliver the MPIO HS100 by supplying an ideal balance of compact size, durability, high storage capacity, and low cost. The storage capacity and the overall cost point that CORNICE SE delivers outclasses many of the conventional portable storage solutions available in today's highly competitive consumer electronics market. The CORNICE SE was critical in terms of enabling Digitalway to deliver a portable USB storage device at a consumer-friendly cost.
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CORNICE ... Another mystery ...
kinda ... just click on the following URL ...
http://www.corniceco.com/index.html
... and look to see what appears under CUSTOMERS + PARTNERS ... look for a BIG NAME CE company whose name starts with an "S" ... keep hitting "Refresh" until its name appears, then click on the name, and see where it takes you ...
I have no idea what it means, if anything, but it may just provide a fun little diversion [something different] while we, and Cassandra, await the announcement of HP`s OEM
if you click on Samsung it takes you to the Digitalway HS100 project writeup. Samsung doesn't seem to be listed as a partner or customer anywhere else on the site. However, this widget from Samsung does use the CORNICE drive...
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New Digitalway HD200 portable music juke box !!!
Texas Instruments and CORNICE Enable Higher Storage Capacities and Lower Costs for Portable Consumer Electronics
Monday June 2, 12:00 pm ET
HOUSTON, June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- By leveraging its expertise in storage solutions and portable consumer electronics, Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN - News; TI), today announced that it is working with CORNICE, Inc. on their 1.5GB Storage Element (SE). The SE, a 1-inch, high-capacity, embedded storage device, is designed to bring low cost storage solutions to portable consumer electronics devices such as MP3 players, PDAs, digital video recorders and players, and handheld gaming devices. (See
The CORNICE SE is designed to revolutionize the capabilities and functionality of consumer devices by providing gigabytes of extremely affordable storage when compared to today's flash memory solutions. A flash card that offers comparable capacity typically costs between $400 and $500 retail in addition to the cost of the portable device. The price of the SE enables CORNICE customers to deliver their products to consumers at well under the retail cost of a similar flash-based device.
TI expertise enables innovative storage solution for portable applications
'TI brings systems expertise on multiple levels to our Storage Element. Our objective was to design a highly reliable, low cost, small form factor storage device and by leveraging their hard disk drive (HDD) and consumer electronics systems expertise, we were able to deliver a unique and innovative storage architecture,' said Kevin Magenis, CORNICE founder, president and CEO. He went onto say, 'By working very closely with an industry leader such as TI, CORNICE was able to achieve the cost, quality, and competitiveness that we needed to take advantage of the growing market for compact, high-capacity storage technologies.'
TI's chipset solution consists of a custom TMS320C2000(TM) platform DSP controller, SR1740 pre-amp, and SH2100 servo controller. The DSP controller performs real time signal processing for, among other things, read/write positioning, error correction and control (ECC) and buffer management in addition to providing the interface to the Storage Element. This industry unique solution incorporates the DSP on the host, not the storage device, allowing for a higher level of future integration.
The SR1740 preamp was designed with the specific needs of the 1 inch form factor market in mind, resulting in a pseudo-differential, low power, low cost preamp that is now offered as part of TI's standard catalog of preamp products. Similarly, the SH2100 servo controller was specifically designed for low voltage and small form-factor applications. Containing the digital interface logic and other utility functions required in this drive, the SH2100 is a highly integrated solution that complements the rest of the chip set and turns it into a complete solution.
Innovative approach to classic HDD electronics
'Larger, desktop PC hard drives often utilize an electronics architecture that integrates around the read channel integrated circuit (IC),' said Kenneth Nesteroff, storage DSP manager, TI. 'However, when CORNICE targeted the portable consumer electronics market for their 1 inch SE, they seized a prime opportunity to differentiate their electronics architecture to better meet the requirements unique to these non-PC applications. The result is a repartition of classic HDD electronics that enables a cost-effective and technologically advanced chipset solution.'
TI's programmable DSP and analog solutions for portable audio, imaging, and video encoding and decoding, provide support for the CORNICE Storage Element in addition to other industry standard storage solutions. 'Continuing its commitment to the multimedia jukebox market, TI is addressing the primary concerns of its customers -- form factor and cost,' said Chris Schairbaum, business manager of portable audio and infotainment at TI. 'We feel CORNICE's new Storage Element will help boost growth in the portable multimedia player market and we look forward to working with CORNICE and seeing it implemented in our customers' latest products.'
The CORNICE Storage Element is already shipping in volume quantities and will be available in portable consumer products including Rio® Nitrus Urban and Eigen Executive portable digital audio players, iRiver's iGP-100 digital audio player and Digitalway's HS100 portable USB storage unit and HD200 portable music juke box beginning in early June through August.
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Digitalway is making the IFE device and the larger 01000. What makes you think they are entitled to make the smaller model? Perhaps, just perhaps, the end user (whatever brand it turns out to be) uses this other Asian OEM to manufacture their devices. Were we supposed to say "sorry, but you go with our manufacturer or nothing"... didn't think so!
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The march of the mini music drives
Last modified: October 22, 2003, 2:43 PM PDT
By Ed Frauenheim
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://www.agoracom.com/nonmemforum/msgreview.asp?id=288189&refid=0&orig=288189
Look out iPod.
Apple Computer's popular portable music player should start to see increasing competition, as more manufacturers adopt mini hard drives for music players.
Later this month, Dell is expected to include a 1.8-inch hard drive in its Dell Digital Jukebox portable MP3 player. That would essentially match the size of an iPod's hard drive. Meanwhile, Samsung and others are promoting players with a still-smaller drive from start-up company CORNICE.
The push toward miniaturization is possible, because more companies are getting into the small-drive business. Toshiba was the first major manufacturer of these drives, and Apple was able to obtain the bulk of the drives Toshiba produced.
Disk drive maker Hitachi Global Storage Technologies recently entered the fray. Hitachi has shipped 1.8-inch drives for an MP3 player made by Rio, and its 1-inch Microdrive is an option in MP3 devices other companies offer. A Hitachi spokesman said the company plans to announce next Tuesday that a music player made by a ''household name'' is using Hitachi drives with a 1.8-inch diameter. The spokesman declined to specify the customer.
CORNICE also hopes its drives will rock the music-player market. CORNICE has launched a 1-inch drive, which is being used in MP3 players from Rio and RCA. The drive is also part of a Samsung product that acts as a digital camcorder, digital still camera and MP3 player. The Samsung gadget is expected to be released next year.
A 1.8-inch hard drive has a 40GB capacity, which can translate into more than 650 hours of music. CORNICE's 1-inch drive holds 1.5GB of data, about 26 hours of music, according to the company. A portable music player that uses flash memory rather than a hard drive can be more compact but will hold less data.
''In a number of months, we're going to be announcing more MP3 customers,'' CORNICE spokesman Phil Gomes said. Gomes declined to specify how many of its drives have shipped so far, but he said CORNICE's main manufacturing partner is very busy churning out the drives. ''The factories are running full-out right now in Asia,'' Gomes said. ''Demand has been very high.''
Consumer electronics giant Sony said it is looking at the possibility of hard drive-based music players but that it has no plans to come out with one for the foreseeable future. Instead, the Japanese giant will concentrate for now on portable music devices that depend on minidiscs, flash memory or CDs, a Sony representative said.
Interest in hard drives for portable music players comes amid growing demand for disk drives in relatively new consumer applications such as personal video recorders. A burgeoning consumer electronics market for hard drives is one reason the hard-drive industry is enjoying a sunny outlook.
Research firm IDC expects the number of hard drives shipped in portable MP3 players to hit 1.8 million this year, up from 900,000 last year. In 2004, it expects the number to climb to 2.4 million.
IDC analyst Dave Reinsel said Toshiba, Hitachi and CORNICE could find the personal music player arena more crowded still. ''I certainly could imagine a Seagate'' introducing a drive for the market, Reinsel said.
Although the music player market for hard drives is growing rapidly, it is a small fraction of the overall hard drive industry. IDC expects a total of more than 250 million hard drives to be shipped this year.
Rob Enderle, principal analyst with research firm the Enderle Group, said the CORNICE product combines a relatively low cost with low power usage and robustness--meaning that the drive can survive a fair amount of physical abuse.
On the other hand, CORNICE is competing with established manufacturers that offer products with more capacity. In addition, Hitachi is planning to release an upgraded 1-inch drive soon. That drive is now being tested by MP3 makers and holds 4GB, or 75 hours, of high-quality digital music, according to Hitachi. Hitachi has been selling a 1-inch drive with 1GB.
Dell and other manufacturers will also have to contend with the intangibles of the consumer electronics market. Style and design are big in that market. Apple has historically shown that it has a knack for design, something for which Dell is not known. Apple has also persuaded companies to build add-on devices, such as microphones, for the iPod.
Hard drives are one method of providing storage in portable music players. Flash memory, which involves holding data on silicon chips, is another. But flash memory is more expensive than hard drives on a per-megabyte basis, Enderle said. Although flash memory costs are declining, Enderle doesn't expect the price per megabyte to reach that of hard drives ''for another three to five years--if then.''
DVD And EVD - Real Competition?
November 28, 2003
In a move to shake off its dependence on foreign technology, China has begun to release its alternative to the DVD (digital versatile disc) standard--EVD (enhanced versatile disc).
A consortium of businessmen and academics is behind the launch, operating through a front company called Beijing E-world Technology, and promise that the new format will offer five times the image quality of DVD movies and a higher data-storage capacity. The first EVD players are to be marketed next month, with several manufacturers eager to make the switch because of the high amount of royalty fees for using DVD technology - they pay US$9 in royalties for each player exported to nine foreign electronic giants who own DVD technologies.
Already, however, doubts are emerging both from within and outside the industry as to whether EVD will be viable and globally accepted. Although the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) intends to establish a task force to examine whether EVD should be adopted as the new national industry standard, analysts are far from confident that the rest of the world will fully adopt the format--even if China were to adopt it.
Price is certainly one barrier standing in the way of EVD--an EVD player will cost as much as 2,000 yuan (US$240) compared with an average of only 1,000 yuan (US$120) for a DVD player. More of an issue will be the reaction of the international markets, which have already embraced DVD as the standard--there is great debate as to whether influential players such as the Hollywood studios will release their films on EVD. Additionally, EVD, with its higher data-capacity and improved image quality, will be reliant to a great extent on the success of HDTV in China, as it will be HDTV that is best able to make full use of EVD's advantages. Currently, the reach of HDTV in China is small.
ChinaTechnews.com
More over DVD, here comes 'superior'
( 2003-11-27 13:37) (China Daily HK Edition)
China, the world's largest maker of DVD (digital versatile disc) players, has launched a new format to shake off its dependence on foreign technologies but insiders question whether the so-called enhanced versatile disc (EVD) would be viable and globally accepted.
Beijing E-world Technology, the front company of a consortium of businessmen and academics, released the new format, which will be playable only on EVD players and promises five times the image quality of DVD movies and a higher data-storage capacity.
The first EVD players will be marketed next month.
A spokesman for SVA Electronics, one of China's biggest makers of DVD players, said its first EVD machines would reach shops nationwide early next month. Another eight big makers of DVD players have signed up to make EVD players.
The reason behind their switch to EVD technology is the high amount of royalty fees for using DVD technology - they pay US$9 in royalties for each player exported to nine foreign electronic giants who own DVD technologies.
China produced over 30 million DVD players last year, accounting for up to 70 per cent of the world market.
The government contributed 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million), or one-quarter of R&D costs, in 1999 after the royalty claims by foreign companies.
"It's not a question of whether we walk the EVD path. It's a question of how fast or slow we go," said Hao Jie, president of E-world Technology, which designed the new standard.
The company has registered seven EVD patents and applied for 40 more.
Up to 1.8 million EVD players would be manufactured next year; and production would be boosted to 3 million in 2005 and 9 million in 2006.
The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) will set up a task force this month to study whether to adopt EVD as the new national industry standard, a ministry spokesman said.
But analysts doubt that EVDs would be widely adopted in the rest of the world even if China were to adopt it.
An EVD player costs up to 2,000 yuan (US$240) compared with an average of 1,000 yuan (US$120) for a DVD player.
More uncertain is the international market, which has moved toward DVD as the standard.
A pivotal factor would be whether Hollywood studios, which drive the world video software business, will release their films on EVD.
The SVA spokesman said negotiations on the release of some 100 films on the first EVD discs are going very well between the MII and several large Hollywood film distributors.
"The first film on EVD will be available in Chinese shops by the end of the year," he said.
Also, the popularity of EVD - which is designed for more superior image quality than DVD for high-definition TV - would be linked to the reach of HDTV, which is rather small now. China plans to introduce HDTV in phases, ending analogue transmissions in 2015.
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DVD format war on the horizon
Reuters
December 1, 2003, 9:48 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5112286.html
Toshiba and NEC have won a round in the fight for standardizing the format for DVDs as their technology has been embraced by an industry forum, but the real battle is won by convincing consumers and Hollywood.
Japan's Toshiba and NEC received the support from the DVD Forum in October, but it was only over the weekend that the news spread into the public domain.
Last year, the two companies pitched their version of a blue-laser DVD player against that of a consortium of the world's biggest electronics makers, including Japan's Sony and Matsushita and Dutch firm Philips.
Sony and Philips are also members of the DVD Forum.
Blue-laser DVD players will replace the current generation of red-laser DVD players in a few years time. A blue-laser disc can store around five times more information than red-laser discs -- which is up to three hours of high-definition video.
The electronics industry expects that over the next few years high-definition TV will at last reach a critical mass, which in its turn will push the need for higher quality DVDs.
The DVD Forum, an industry association of some 220 electronics and media companies, said it will endorse only one technology. By backing the so-called HD DVD standard from Toshiba and NEC, a new format war is looming.
The electronics industry has plenty of experience with format wars. In fact, the last format war, over recordable DVD discs, is still being fought out in the market.
The DVD Forum did not approve the so-called DVD+RW recordable technology developed by Sony and Philips--yet, this technology has a significant chunk of the market. Its inventors even claim that it is the dominant standard.
The importance of royalties
Financial analysts said the DVD Forum's choice does not mean Sony and its consortium partners will miss out on the next stream of technology licensing income, which is what the struggle is really all about.
Licensing fees have become a substantial income source for the notoriously low-margin electronics industry. Philips, for instance, has an official target to double its two to 2.5 percent profit margins with royalty income--it has a strong patent pool as it has helped invent the CD and the DVD.
Low-cost Chinese electronics makers have often complained about the high DVD royalty payments, which can run to $10 per machine. China has therefore invented yet another DVD technology, EVD, which might become a local Chinese standard. For a standard to be successful, the support of Japanese giants Sony and Matshushita, which operates the Panasonic and JVC brands, is crucial, said investment bank J.P. Morgan in a research note. Only with their support will there be sufficient products in the shops.
These companies can still push their own so-called Blu-Ray technology--both blue-laser formats will play old DVDs.
There is, however, one major difference with the current recordable disc format war, as the first blue laser products are aimed at DVD players and pre-recorded discs, not recorders. The electronics makers need the full support of the movie industry to supply films on pre-recorded DVD discs.
The DVD Forum appears to have the ear of the media industry, and industry analysts have said it is unlikely Hollywood will back two different blue-laser formats.