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By: WhatDoesItSay
24 Mar 2003, 01:51 PM EST Msg. 1117372 of 1117376
More problems for the iPod...
iPod problems send PC users in search of Zen solution
By Charles Wright
March 25 2003
theage.comau
When things first started going wrong with our friend Tim's iPod, he took it back to the dealer. It's a Windows version, which uses MusicMatch Jukebox Plus rather than the Mac's beautifully integrated iMusic software. Windows, it turned out, was part of the problem.
The dealer would have liked to help our friend, he explained, 'but we don't have anyone here who knows anything about Windows'.
Tim went to Apple tech support. They told him roughly the same thing.
As you might imagine, this was a discouraging response for someone who'd just spent $590 (a student discount on the reduced $650 sale price) on the 5GB iPod, and another $140 on a FireWire card for his laptop.
The problems had begun almost immediately. When he plugged the iPod into the FireWire card, Jukebox Plus started getting haughty. Sometimes it recognised the iPod was there, sometimes it didn't. When it did, it would agree to download about 3 per cent of the music, then suddenly freeze.
Our friend isn't easily discouraged. He mucked around and finally persuaded the iPod to download one track, selected randomly from the albums being transferred. He spent an hour one night going through that process and ended up with about 100 songs on the iPod.
His hopes were rudely dashed, however, when he discovered that many of the tracks skipped. That's when he went to the dealer, and Apple, and discovered that Apple apparently had no means to support a product it was selling.
So he brought the iPod to us. As the song goes, that's what friends are for.
When we examined his expensive new toy, it looked like it had no tracks on it. It refused to sync with any of our computers. It seemed that the internal database had become confused, perhaps because the batteries had gone flat while syncing. In any case, the iPod was essentially useless.
We used the update tool that ships with the iPod to reset the factory defaults. That made things worse. Now we'd lost the iPod menu. All we could see was a folder. We had to run the update program several times, and then reformat the hard disk.
We transferred a good deal of Tim's music, most of it without skips. Unfortunately, it wasn't the end of Tim's problems. Within days, he was having the same problems.
We think we've tracked down the likely cause - almost certainly the combination of Tim's laptop and either his FireWire card or cable.
We're about to make another attempt to resolve the issues, using the tips we discovered at www.ephpod.com/troubleshoot.html.
EphPod is an interesting product. It speeds up PC-iPod transfers, and interfaces with Outlook contacts and WinAmp playlists. It requires a copy of MacOpener, which allows Windows to read Mac files.
Another useful resource in our hunt for a solution is the information at garote.bdmonkeys.net/ipod-experience/
As that site points out, it appears that the FireWire port built into Creative Labs' Audigy soundcards works very well with the iPod. Although that's not going to work with a laptop, it may be that Tim needs to use his desktop for his iPod syncing.
The irony is that Creative Labs' Zen MP3 player is a strong competitor to the iPod on the PC. We reviewed it a few months ago and, although we were tempted by it, we ran into a few irritations. A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the new 20GB version. Initially Creative decided against including a USB 2 interface with this unit, but they've changed their mind. That means you can have high-speed transfers without buying a FireWire card - provided your motherboard or an external card supports USB 2.
The iPod has fewer buttons than the Zen - this makes accessing some functions take that little bit longer. Also we found we could do more with the Zen without looking than we could on the iPod.
When we last looked at it, we found ourselves accidentally pressing the Zen's controls, because of the layout of the buttons. The 20GB model comes with a pouch/belt clip that solves all those problems. Simply being able to grip the pouch and not the Zen puts those buttons out of reach.
The Zen has a separate power input, while the iPod uses the FireWire connection. If you are syncing your iPod with a notebook, you have to make sure it's fully charged because it will not run off the notebook's power supply.
The Zen also has a great feature called EAX. In addition to some great reverb and echo effects, it allows you to control the speed of your music. You can slow it down to 50 per cent or speed it up to 150 per cent.
When it comes to software, both leave something to be desired.
Even with all its bugs worked out - and we're sure they can be - the iPod is much better with a Mac than a PC. And because Apple and its dealers don't seem to be enough aware of the problems to warn customers of possible difficulties with hardware, let alone point them to reliable FireWire solutions, we can't recommend the iPod for Windows users, although the Mac version, particularly with its links to iCal and iSync, remains peerless as an MP3 player. If you have a PC, the new 20GB Creative Zen with USB 2 is our choice.
sassy - if EDIG could drum up demand
at will, why havn't they done it
whenever they please - why ever let
the PPS drop at all. Of course this
is one of your many pre-fabs.
(WinDVD) to target the OEM market
Divx Networks is pushing their codec to the general consumer market, in order to make it an accepted standard. Divx alredy is a very popular video compression format, but hasn't received much recognition from the major players of the PC-industry.
InterVideo and DivXNetworks Expand Comprehensive Licensing Agreement to Target Global PC OEM Market
Partnership Will Enable Large OEMs to Bundle InterVideo Software Tools Powered by DivX Technology
FREMONT, Calif.--March 19, 2003--DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary patent-pending DivX® video compression technology, and InterVideo, a leading provider of DVD software, today announced an expansion of their existing licensing agreement to distribute DivX-powered InterVideo software products directly to hardware OEMs, including manufacturers of PCs, video cards, camcorders, disk drives and consumer electronics products.
Last year, InterVideo licensed the leading DivX video technology for use in its award-winning suite of retail video software products, including WinDVD, WinDVR, and WinProducer. The new agreement will enable major OEMs to bundle DivX-enabled InterVideo software directly with their hardware products. DivX video compression technology is a hugely popular video encoder / decoder that offers DVD-quality video at sizes 7-10 times smaller than MPEG-2 and ranks among the world's most popular video technologies, with over 75 million downloads and an average of over 2 million downloads per month.
InterVideo software is bundled by eight of the top ten PC makers in the world and over 150 other companies including Acer, Dell, Intel, Gateway, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC, Toshiba and others. DivXNetworks and InterVideo will work together to market DivX-licensed software products to InterVideo's influential OEM customer base.
the accusation is not childish - that is your interpretation.
You are a self appointed critic of MP3 players and believe
others should follow your lead.
Do you go view a movie becuase a critic tells you should
see it?
Do you not go see a movie if a critic tells you wouldn't
enjoy the movie?
I'm not saying don't voice your opinion - but - you
keep repeating and repeating and ...
it's obvious you have a mission to discredit
E.digital - I don't have any thing to let
go - you're posts are meaningless to me.
just a shame you are given the opportunity
to beat up on whom ever you please.
we'll see how the "emergency" webcast goes
monday.
"emergency" ???
you know what you're lying about mr. "i'm innocent"
I wouldn't want to know what that moron
looks like.
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can't wait to hear your reviews on the new players.
(and pullleeeeese don't take me seriously)
"It seems that the majority of posts on this board are now off-topic or generic posts about the music industry, other digital music players, telematics, generic IFE or other off topic hopeful dot-connecting information. "
EDIG happens to be in the industries you described therefore
it is my opinion that whether these news items refer to EDIG
directly or indirectly should not determine it they are on
topic or off topic.
I have not heard you comment about how the increasing blabber on another board relates to E.Digital - where personal attacks
are becoming the normal topic.
No, you're well aware of what I was saying.
You believe it's not the best but you're
saying it's the best therefore you are
the one that is decieving the buyer.
You keep justifying your FOC belief system.
so what you're saying is it ok
for you to deceive the buyer.
and now I should believe everything
you say - what a dork.
austonia do you happen to know what Ipod return
policy is. TIA
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an expert would be professional therefore
being objective in his or her analysis and
professionally avoid slanting what they
present to please themselves.
in other words you should clean up your act.
jtdiii, and what is your selection? LOL
CeBIT offerings emphasize ease of use, better design
http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/2003/03/14/cebit.html
By David McHugh, Associated Press, 03/14/03
HANOVER, Germany -- The combined printer-scanner-copier makes no great technological leap, but it's sleek and small enough to cut the clutter and wires in your computer nook.
The Hewlett-Packard PSC1210 thus fits right in at this year's CeBIT technology fair, where the latest products reflect a more sober, post-boom tech world -- not necessarily cutting-edge, but better designed and, in theory anyway, less of a challenge.
With a footprint just a little longer than a sheet of letter paper, the $186 HP all-in-one device is the smallest of its kind in the world, the company claims.
The buzzword this year is "ease of use" saving people time, hassle and money, said Bernard Meric, HP senior vice president.
With consumer and business spending sluggish and the threat of war casting a pall, this year's CeBIT saw the number of exhibitors drop by about 20 percent to around 6,500, and there were noticeably fewer new devices on show.
Much of the buzz was about wireless local area networks -- just as it was in 2002. Much of the new hardware to accompany the trend may show up next year, analysts say, though Intel did unveil its wireless-ready Centrino chip assembly for portable computers.
Things like cell phones with a built-in digital camera, and laptops with detachable keyboards were new and cool last year; this year they're everywhere and companies have made them less confusing.
Sony Ericsson last year touted its P800 camera-equipped cell phone. This year, it's the T610, which simplifies the taking and sending of pictures down to five button pushes. "It's fine to offer imaging and gaming capability, but you have to make it easy to use," said company spokeswoman Kerry Matheson.
Likewise at Nokia, the world's largest phone seller. Its 3300 model, available in the second quarter in Europe for about $320 depending the country, includes an MP3 player and an FM radio.
It's the successor to the previous 5510 music phone that was larger and had a typewriter-format QWERTY keyboard for people who send a lot of SMS text messaging. Consumers balked. "We learned that people didn't want to make a size compromise," said spokesman Damian Stathonikos.
So the phone shrank, and got a game machine-like oblong shape -- though it can still be held up to the ear for phone conversations without looking odd.
Sony's new equipment such as its Z1 Vaio notebook emphasizes design over specification, encased in a very light, gracefully curved magnesium-aluminum case that the company -- which frankly admits it's responding to the success of Apple's metallic notebook design -- says resists scratches.
Another old-is-new design is Parrot's DriveBlue $187 handsfree cell phone adapter for autos. It uses voice recognition software and the Bluetooth wireless standard -- about 7 percent of the phones in Europe but only a few in the United States have Bluetooth-capable phones, said Paris-based Parrot's president Henri Seydoux.
Complicated installation was a deterrent to earlier devices, so with this one the only setup is sticking it in the cigarette lighter, and briefly training it to the sound of the user's voice. Hit the call button and say the person's name, and the device dials it.
There was also the usual rash of eye-catching gimmicks, including the $187 transparent, lighted computer housing by German company Pearl, which caters to a fad among European gamers who like to show off their computers' innards.
Siemens and the Dutch company Alva BV offered usability of a more serious sort -- what they say is the first cell phone for the blind. It uses a strip of moving dots that form Braille letters so people can read the phone display with their fingers.
The device, the size of a small book, combines technology already used by the blind for note-taking with a tri-band cell phone, a PDA function and SMS messaging capability.
The companies hope to sell 4,000 over the next five years; it lists for $4,350, though many purchasers will have some sort of public subsidy available to defray the cost.
Palm OS 5 Powers Up Cell Phones
Arik Hesseldahl, 03.14.03, 10:00 AM ET
Ten O'Clock Tech
http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/2003/03/14/cx_ah_0314tentech.html
NEW YORK - If this week was all about mobile computing, the coming week will be all about mobile phone handsets.
Next week the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association kicks off its big trade show in New Orleans. It's at this show that manufacturers of mobile handsets start showing off their new phone models that will carry them through the rest of the year.
Samsung's SGH-i500 PDA phone features Palm OS 5.
As it happens, the CTIA trade show is taking place within a few days of the CeBit trade show in Germany, which started March 12, where many phones also tend to be unveiled for the first time. One that caught our eye came from South Korea's Samsung.
The SGH-i500 is the first mobile phone-PDA combination that runs on Palm OS 5. This is the newest version of the Palm operating system, which has so far debuted in handhelds from Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ), and is coming in a handheld from Garmin (nasdaq: GRMN - news - people ). It is produced by Palm subsidiary Palmsource.
The phone has a clamshell design, which for Samsung is a departure from its previous candy bar-shaped Palm phones. It runs on global system for mobile communications/ general packet radio services networks (or GSM/GPRS networks) like those operated by Cingular Wireless, Deutsche Telekom's (nyse: DK - news - people ) T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless (nyse: AWE - news - people ). It's a tri-band phone, so it should work in the U.S., Europe and much of Asia.
It can handle features like multimedia messaging and WAP Web browsing, and it has a 330,000 pixel digital camera. Inside is an Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) Xscale chip running at 300 megahertz.
Another new feature is the new Graffiti 2 pen-input system, which replaces the original Graffiti system that was unique to the first Palm handhelds. The original Graffiti system fell victim to a legal fight between Palm and Xerox (nyse: XRX - news - people ). Xerox has argued that Graffiti too closely resembled a Xerox-made system called Unistroke. Graffiti 2 is based on software called Jot from a software firm called CIC, of Redwood Shores, Calif.
Samsung hasn't yet said much about price of its unit, but it should appear in the third quarter of this year. The company has aggressive plans for mobile phone sales for the rest of the year. San-Jin Park, head of Samsung's mobile phone division, told an audience of reporters in Hannover, Germany, that the company plans to sell 52.5 million handsets this year. That would solidify its place as the number three maker of handsets behind Finland's Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) and Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) in the U.S.
It might just make that goal. Samsung's unit sales grew by 50% while the rest of the industry's players saw their sales pick up by smaller margins.
SanDisk Introduces 1GB SD and Mini SD Format
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=5118
Posted By: Ryan on Friday, March 14, 2003 9:52:28 AM
SanDisk has announced that 512MB and 1 GB SD cards will be available this year at a press conference at CeBit. SanDisk has also debuted 2 and 4 Gigabyte CompactFlash cards and a new MiniSD format. MiniSD was recently adopted by the SD card association as an ultra-small form factor SD card.
The 512MB and 1GB SanDisk SD cards use one gigabit NAND flash memory chips, based on patented multi-level cell (MLC) technology pioneered by SanDisk. MLC allows two bits of data to be stored in one memory cell, doubling memory capacity.
SanDisk is currently shipping 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256MB SD cards. The 512MB and 1GB SanDisk SD cards have suggested retail prices of $169.99 and $329.99 respectively. The 512MB SD card is expected to be available in the second quarter while the 1GB SD card is expected to be available in the third quarter.
2 and 4 GB CompactFlash
For HandEra and other CF device users, SanDisk has also announced 2 & 4 Gigabyte CompactFlash Cards. The cards work with any device with a CF Type 1 slot. The 4GB CompactFlash card has a suggested retail price of $999.99 and is expected to start shipping this summer. The 2GB CF card has a suggested retail price of $499.99 and is also expected to start shipping this summer.
MiniSD Format
In addition, SanDisk has introduced the SanDisk miniSD card, a new thumbnail-sized flash memory card that is designed to meet the needs of the mobile phone market for greater storage capacity in the smallest possible physical form factor. The miniSD card was recently adopted by the SD Association as an ultra-small form factor extension to the SD card standard. While initially targeted for mobile phone devices, the format may eventually make it's way into handhelds.
The miniSD card offers significant savings in card area and volume, two critical design parameters for the new generation of increasingly miniaturized mobile phones. Compared to standard SD cards, the miniSD card saves more than 40% of the printed circuit board area and more than 60% of the volume required to support the card in a portable device. SanDisk will offer a wide range of memory capacities in the new format, with 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 megabytes (MB) expected to ship in March 2003.
A key benefit of the miniSD card is that it is both electrically and software compatible with the existing SD standard. It uses the same SD interface, including security features for content protection (CPRM -- Content Protection Rights Management) as the standard SD card. To allow interoperability with standard SD devices, SanDisk will also offer an adapter that converts the miniSD card into the SD card form factor. The adapter allows the miniSD card to fit into existing SD card slots, and thereby provide compatibility with the rapidly growing number of SD compatible devices in the market.
The miniSD card is 21.5 millimeters (mm) long, 20 mm wide and 1.4 mm thick, and occupies a footprint of 430 square mm and volume of 602 cubic mm. The new format was developed by the three original developers of the SD card, Toshiba, Matsushita and SanDisk, and recently adopted by the SD Association, an organization consisting of more than 500 member companies.
In order to reach the broadest set of devices for the miniSD, the SanDisk-branded miniSD cards will be packaged with a full-sized SD adapter. Suggested retail pricing for the miniSD plus SD adapter will be US $29 for the 32MB card, which is approximately the same price of an SD card of the same capacity. Prices on higher capacities have not been set.
yeah, I noticed somethings missing.
Analysis: Germany's copyright levy
By Sam Vaknin
UPI Senior Business Correspondent
From the Business & Economics Desk
Published 3/12/2003 12:30 PM
View printer-friendly version
SKOPJE, Macedonia, March 12 (UPI) -- Based on the recommendation of its patent office and following fierce lobbying by VG Wort, an association of German composers, authors and publishers, Germany is poised to enforce a 3-year-old law and impose a copyright levy of $13 plus 16 percent in value added tax per new computer sold in the country.
The money will be used to reimburse copyright holders -- artists, performers, recording companies, publishers and movie studios -- for unauthorized copying thought to weigh adversely on sales.
This is the non-binding outcome of a one-year mediation effort by the patent office between VG Wort, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany's largest computer manufacturer and other makers.
VG Wort initially sought a levy of $33 per unit sold. But Fujitsu and the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, known as Bitkom -- including Microsoft, IBM, Alcatel, Nokia, Siemens and 1,300 other member firms -- intend to challenge even the more modest fee in court.
They claim that it will add close to $80 million to the cost of purchasing computers without conferring real benefits on the levy's intended beneficiaries. They made similar assertions in a letter they recently dispatched to the European Commission.
The problems of peer-to-peer file sharing, file swapping, the cracking and hacking of software, music and, lately, even e-books, are serious. Bundesverband Phono, Germany's recording industry trade association, reported that music sales plunged for the fifth consecutive year -- this time, more than 11 percent.
According to figures offered by the admittedly biased group, 55 percent of the 486 million blank CDs sold in Germany last year -- about 267 million -- were used for illicit purposes. For every "legal" music CD sold, there are 1.7 "illegal" ones.
Efforts by the industries affected are under way to extend the levy to computer peripherals and, where not yet implemented, photocopying machines. Similar charges are applied already by many European countries to other types of equipment: tape recorders, photocopiers, video-cassettes and scanners, for instance.
Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs, are -- or have been -- taxed in more than 40 countries, including Canada and the United States.
Nor is Germany alone in this attempt to ameliorate the pernicious effects of piracy by taxing the hardware used to effect it.
The European Union's Directive on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society, passed in 2001, is strenuous, though not prescriptive. It demands that member states ensure "fair compensation" to copyright holders for copies made by means of digital equipment -- but fails to specify or proscribe how. It has been incorporated into local law only by Greece and Denmark hitherto.
In Austria, Literar-Mechana, the copyright fees collection agency, negotiated with hardware manufacturers and importers the introduction of a levy on personal computers and printers. The Swiss are pushing through an amendment to the copyright law to collect a levy on PCs sold within their territory. The Belgian, Finnish, Spanish and French authorities are still debating the issue. So are Luxembourg and Norway.
According to Wired, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry trade group, has proposed "new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and MP3 players."
Precedent is hardly encouraging.
The aforementioned Canadian collective has yet to distribute to its members even one tax dollar of the tens of millions it inexplicably hoards. In Greece, a 2 percent levy on all manner of computer equipment provoked a hail of legal challenges, still to be sorted out in the courts. The amounts collected hardly cover the government's legal expenses hitherto.
The United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark are against the levy, claiming, correctly, that hardware is used for purposes other than pilfering intellectual property digitally. The Italians, Portuguese and Dutch haven't even considered the option.
Hardware manufacturers are livid. In a buyers' market, their razor-thin profit margins on the commoditized goods they are peddling are bound to be erased by a copyright levy.
The European Information and Communications Trade Association implausibly threatens to pass on such extra costs to consumers and recommends to stick to technological means of prevention, collectively known as digital rights management systems, or to novel CD copy protection measures.
Moreover, the fuzzy nature of the surcharge leaves a lot to be desired. Peter Suber, a prominent advocate of free online scholarship, analyzed the various post-levy scenarios in his FOS blog: "What I can't tell is whether the copyright levy on hardware will come with universal permission to copy. If so, that's a big gain for a small cost ... If the levy does not imply permission to copy, then which copying does it cover?
"If it covers copying without prior permission, then users will simply stop asking for permission, and convert all copying to pre-paid copying. If it covers copying without pre-payment, then that begs the question: what does the levy pre-pay? (It's not clear) how the plan would continue to distinguish authorized from unauthorized copying."
Yet, at this stage, it is difficult to see how to avoid the kind of rough justice meted out by Germany. Even the most advanced digital rights management systems lack a reliable model of remunerating copyright holders. Hence the conspicuous absence of DRM in the EU's Copyright Directive.
Suber raises some practical concerns, though he broadly supports a copyright levy on hardware: "To make the system fair, we would need reasonably accurate measurements of the amount of copying. Otherwise we wouldn't know whether to bump up the price of a computer $35 or $350 or whether to give Elsevier 1 percent or 10 percent.
"Download counters wouldn't catch the peer-to-peer traffic. So would you put up with packet sniffers or other eavesdropping technologies to take random samples of the copy traffic, as long as your identity was not recorded?"
Even what constitutes copyrighted work is not entirely clear. The European Court of Justice heard arguments last week in a case pitting two American companies, IMS Health and NDCHealth, against each other. IMS Health vends aggregated German data pertaining to the sales of pharmaceuticals.
NDCHealth tried to emulate an organizational element of the IMS Health database. The court is faced with seemingly intractable questions: Can IMS Health be compelled to license its database to a potential competitor? Is the structure of the database -- the way Germany is divided to 1,860 reporting zones -- protected in any way?
In essence, copyright is a temporary monopoly on creative work granted to the authors, publishers and distributors of such products. It is intended to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to continue to create. Yet, the disintermediation brought on by digital technologies threatens to link author and public directly, cutting out traditional content brokers such as record companies or publishers.
This is the crux of the battle royal. Middlemen are attempting -- in vain -- to sustain their dying and increasingly parasitic industries and refusing to adapt and re-invent themselves. Everyone else watches in amazement and dismay the consequences of this grand folly: innovation is thwarted, consumers penalized, access to works of art, literature and research constrained.
-0-
Send your comments to: svaknin@upi.com
Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International
Apple's Chance To Get Online Music Right
By Alex Salkever
March 12, 2003
A Mac-centric online-music venture would fill a hole in Apple's digital-hub strategy by giving Mac users a legal means to enjoy downloaded digital music.
It's an incredible technological irony: Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod is the best-selling and most acclaimed digital music player on the market -- but iPod owners can't legally use big-label music sites to download tunes. That because the recording industry has basically shunned Jobs & Co., resulting in the ridiculous situation where the big labels' commercial download sites aren't compatible with the No. 1 MP3 player.
That may be about to change. If the rumors floating around the techsphere last week are to be believed, Apple users will soon have a bona fide legitimate online music service of their own, on par with PressPlay, MusicNet, Listen.com, and other PC-only sites that offer vast catalogs of legal tunes.
Naturally, Apple wouldn't comment for this story on the rumors allegedly leaked by loose-lipped record execs. Those accounts, which appeared everywhere from music and tech trade magazines to wire services and the big local dailies, claimed that Steve Jobs had talked the beleaguered music business into backing an Apple service. It would provide at least comparable terms to the PC-based sites, many of them owned directly by the labels themselves and operated by subsidiaries. That means Apple users could listen to libraries of music for a monthly fee in the $10 range. Or they could pay a buck or so to download a tune and burn it to a CD.
A Mac-centric online-music venture would fill a hole in Apple's digital-hub strategy by giving Mac users a legal means to enjoy downloaded digital music. This compares to the distinctly illicit pleasures of KaZaA and other pirate file-swapping systems -- until now, the only choice for Apple owners. In addition, a handful of cheap programs have allowed iPod users to override the paper-thin copyright-protection mechanisms on the portable music players that are supposed to prevent the devices from downloading songs on multiple computers.
Apple didn't help its relations with the recording industry much with its earlier digital-lifestyle marketing mantra: "Rip. Mix. Burn." The three-word slogan became a thorn in the side of the big labels, with its semi-veiled reference to ripping off copyrighted materials. Perhaps Jobs is trying to make nice with the music folks and do right by his customers at the same time.
Whatever the case, I was stoked to hear about this prospect. It gave me the chance to fantasize about what the perfect Apple music service would provide. Sure, one-click downloads and total portability are a must. Ditto for no copyright protection on downloaded songs. Also, it should have no limits to the number and type of songs a user can burn onto a CD -- among the major-label sites, only Listen.com's Rhapsody service has this necessary provision in place.
Sensible System
Apple shouldn't stop there, though. It has a long history of innovation, and I think it can turn the music business upside down with some moves that don't cost a lot of money but really shake up the model of selling music over the Net.
For starters, I would set up a demand-based pricing system. Listen.com now offers unfettered access to its tracks, but each burnable download costs 99 cents, and the service has been very slow to catch on. I think Apple should set up a system that makes more economic sense to customers.
To date, the music industry has failed to capitalize on enormous pent-up desire for back-catalog songs. At the same time, it has missed out on ridiculously strong demand for songs high up on the charts. By keeping prices constrained within tight boundaries, the industry doesn't collect a penny from the millions of people who might balk at paying a buck for an old Miles Davis recording but would take the plunge for, say, 45 cents.
A Win-Win-Win
Likewise, Listen.com's set fee prevents the service from making more money from tracks people might be willing to pay a little extra to download. Think of the millions of fans who might pay $2 to get the new Eminem track a week early.
Apple should break this mold by pushing for floating pricing that actually establishes variable market prices based on how many people are downloading a song. It would be good for Apple by improving its service's bottom line. It would be good for the back-catalog artists who rarely get downloaded at 99 cents a track but might well generate some income at lower prices. And it would be good for Eminem and the record companies by capitalizing on the biggest acts.
As a second step, I would establish a new way for audiences to relate to artists through their wallets. I'd call this program "The 20% Club." Basically, artists who received fair deals from their labels would gain membership to the club. By fair, I mean the artist receives 20% of all revenues derived from sales of music after the label has recovered its recording and promotional costs. All members of the club would get a big logo button, or something like that, on the Apple site.
Outsize Fruit
This is, of course, a bit of a pipe dream. Labels have been notorious over the years for obfuscating their books to hide royalties due to artists. But I'm personally far more inclined to buy music when I know the artist is getting a reasonable cut. And I've heard from several friends who say they would be much happier buying music if they felt the artists weren't getting short-changed. This initiative on Apple's part would help assuage our fears as well as help to create much-needed reform in the music industry's treatment of artists.
These are two modest suggestions. But I think they would bear outsize fruit. Putting variable pricing in place would free vast amounts of money that the recording industry can't touch right now. Putting a seal-of-approval on artists and record labels acting in good faith will help clean up a business that suffers acutely from its bad image.
Still, Apple will need to do a lot more than this to win with selling tunes online legitimately. To date, the top three label-approved online music services combined haven't cracked 500,000 subscribers. That compares to the 200 million downloads so far of KaZaA's peer-to-peer software.
Overturning those failures requires more than just slapping an Apple logo on a site and saying it's great. This music service really needs to be different. An Apple-branded site that's basically no different from Listen.com, PressPlay, and MusicNet would just indicate that Jobs & Co. has fallen into the same traps that snare the old-line music giants.
© 2002 Business Week Online, The McGraw-Hill Cos i/a/w ScreamingMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2002 NewsFactor Network. All rights reserved.
The Problem with Convergence
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Quick quiz: Name a successful electronic or digital convergence device other than the clock-radio.
Did you say MP3-camera or video-telephone? Did wristwatch-PDA come to mind? No fair counting Dick Tracy's Wrist Communicator.
How about Internet refrigerator? Camcorder-browser-voice recorder? Phone-browser-camera?
Yesterday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, representatives from Sony and Microsoft were pressed to describe their visions of convergence in the home.
Convergence has been a popular word in recent years, applied to everything from giant company mergers to the mingling and melding of consumer products. There seems to be an irresistible human urge to converge things despite ample evidence that most successful products should simply be left alone. How else to explain the "spork" or AOL Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE's publisher)?
Adam Horowitz of Business 2.0 magazine moderated a panel called "Convergence Devices of the Future." He invited Eric Gould Bear of Microsoft's Windows Hardware Innovation Group and Mark Hanson of Sony's VAIO PC division to discuss the question: "What appliance wins out as the centerpiece of the living room of tomorrow: the television, the computer, or the gaming station?"
It was a tricky question, and the panelists artfully dodged it. (I was on the panel to represent the consumer's interests.)
Sony's official answer would have to be "all of the above." Consider: The Japanese electronics giant recently launched (in Japan) a TV-based hardware platform called Cocoon, which is sort of like a Web-enabled TiVo hard disk recorder on steroids; it's easy to see Cocoon evolving to grab entertainment and information not just from the Internet and from video broadcast sources, but also from Sony's vast libraries of movies and music, and from the hard disks of VAIO PCs around the house.
Sony also sees its VAIO computers as more than just computing devices. Sony was first to add a TiVo-like hard disk video recorder feature called GigaPocket to its desktop PCs, and it claims to have been first to include a IEEE 1394 port for attaching digital video cameras. Video, audio, and info all converge in the PC.
But guess what? Despite those cool technologies, more than half of Sony Corporation's profits last year came from the PlayStation video game machine. Sony has put tens of millions of them into play, and the next logical step is to add Internet access and local storage, transforming the PS2 into the home's portal for games, music, and other forms of entertainment.
If you skip the living room part of the question, Sony is also trying to figure out how to crack the convergence conundrum through its Sony-Ericsson joint partnership, creating mobile handsets that combine voice and data communications with video, music, and games.
Microsoft is no less ambitious. The software colossus sees the PC as the brains of the converged household, acting as traffic manager and control hub for all sorts of digital media that are shuttled, either wirelessly or over wires, to various other devices in the home. Televisions, other PCs, Smart Displays, tablet PCs, automobile dashboards, handheld computers, surround-sound systems, digital picture frames - the company has lots of very smart people, including Mr. Bear, working to define the standards for the converged future.
But Microsoft is also spending billions of dollars to develop and promote its Xbox, a game console that, not coincidentally, connects to the Internet and turns the TV set into more than just a video monitor. It's not a new idea for Microsoft, which has bankrolled and mothballed projects including WebTV and UltimateTV. Microsoft may not make television sets, but it brings convergence to other people's TVs.
With its PocketPC Edition handhelds, Microsoft has converged wireless data, communications, games, video, music, digital photos - well, you get the picture.
What becomes obvious is that we're not really talking about convergence into one universal device, but rather an evolving array of digital devices that overlap in function and - in theory, at least - communicate with one another.
Mr. Hanson gives this example: He takes his camcorder into the backyard to take video of his children at play. When he walks back into the house, he wants the camcorder to automatically communicate with other devices in the home. The TV might offer to display the video. The computer might offer to store the video, or to e-mail it to grandma. The game console might offer to incorporate images of the kids into a game. He wants to download music from Sony's online music service and transfer it to the music player in his car. He wants to order a Sony movie through his VAIO and have it streamed to the Sony Wega TV in the bedroom.
This isn't convergence; it's divergence.
And here's what's wrong with the picture:
It's far too complicated for a consumer audience, unless the consumers have a technical degree from the University of Pluto. Most Americans still connect to the Internet over dial-up modems. The VCR clock is still blinking 12:00. When consumers go to the electronics store to buy home networking gear, more often than not they return it because it's just too hard to figure out. That's not an exaggeration: The return rate for home networking products is well over 50 percent, according to retailers.
And that's just for connecting computers, not to mention a United Nations of devices that use different communications protocols, different operating systems, and different media formats.
Sony and Microsoft don't even know how to explain to Ma and Pa and the kids why they should want their PC to communicate with the TV. Stop someone on the street and ask, "Are you frustrated because you want to stream video from your PC to the video monitor in your bedroom?" Chances are you'll get slapped.
Electronics stores aren't going to help. Camcorders, aisle 1. PCs, aisle 6. Televisions, aisle 13. Computers, aisle 25. With the possible exception of the dedicated retail stores operated by Apple and Gateway, there's no easy way for people to see how all these "convergence" devices are supposed to work together.
Apple has done a masterful job of showing consumers how easy it is to get connected to the Internet, rip and burn music to CDs, edit home movies onto DVDs, synchronize calendars and contacts between a computer and a portable device, set up wireless networks at home, and so on. Nobody does it better than Apple.
And yet, Apple still struggles to get even 5% of the market.
I'm glad Microsoft, Sony, IBM, and other companies are planning for the coming era when all devices are smart and all of them communicate with one another. But for now, it all seems like a solution in search of a demand. Here's an idea: Start by making the devices in my home less confounding, and then we can talk about convergence.
CeBit shifts from an IT show to an integration exhibit
By Christoph Hammerschmidt
EE Times
March 12, 2003 (12:55 p.m. EST)
Latest Headlines
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HANNOVER, Germany — When CeBit opens its gates today (March 12), organizers won't be reporting record attendance as they have in the past. Economic doldrums have hit the world's biggest IT exhibit hard. Perhaps because of the ongoing downturn, hardware and software manufacturers, developers, dealers and service providers are pinning their hopes on an economic upswing — and soon.
The number of exhibitors has dropped for the second year in a row. Only 6,526 exhibitors will show up here this year, 738 less than 2002. According to industry insiders, however, the show remains the most important platform for exchanging ideas and products. With nearly 3.9 million square feet of exhibit area divided into 27 exhibit buildings and with about 600,000 visitors expected, the event is gigantic and serves as an economic barometer.
"CeBit is unique in setting the pace for the information and telecommunications (ITC) industry in terms of innovation and investment,” said Bernhard Rohleder, president of the ITC industry association Bitkom.
The range of exhibits, traditionally oriented more towards the IT needs of corporate customers, is increasingly expanding in the direction of multimedia and consumer electronics. Key themes are mobility and mobile communication in the broadest sense, the convergence of IT and electronics as well as network security.
Focus on trend-setting
Topics considered especially trendy by the organizers are showcased in “Exchange Booths." Choices for that distinction this year were wireless Personal Area Networks (PANs) based on technologies such as Bluetooth, 802.11, GSM, the infrared standard IrDA and 3G mobile communications. The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) also set up its Wi-Fi pavilion by the Wireless PAN/LAN booth.
Another Exchange Booth is devoted to open source. The product categories range from embedded systems through handheld solutions and office applications to open source for standard platforms. One point that emerges here is that the triumphal march of Linux continues. With the exception of PDAs, Linux is now available for practically all computer platforms, even on the Sparc platform.
An original theme for CeBit is computing. Interest this year is concentrated on anything mobile. Thus Intel will be introducing its new Centrino platform today. Intel is seeking to build the foundation for a new generation of energy-saving, low-power mobile computers.
A trend towards server consolidation has been evident over the last few years for larger machines. This has influenced the design of computing center machines: blade servers and devices for installation on racks are being more widely used. For example, Fujitsu Siemens' "Flexframe" server is based on blade technology that makes it possible to concentrate up to 300 servers within one case.
Voice and data convergence is the dominant theme in network technology at CeBit, but there will be little here in the way of innovation. "The topic of VoIP is not in the foreground this time around," said Carsten Queisser, marketing manager for Cisco Germany. "The market is moving along. We're very happy about the development of VoIP," said Queisser.
In the mobile communication market, UMTS networks are expected to open up before the end of the year. Terminal equipment should therefore be on the way. Among others, Nokia is showing its Model 6650, Sony Ericsson is introducing the Z1010 and Motorola has two UMTS cell phones, the A820 and the A835. The common denominator for all these devices is outfitting them with a camera and relatively high-resolution color display. Data transmission is reaching 384 KBit/s.
While UMTS has yet to be tested in day-to-day use, wireless LANs (WLANs) are hot, and not just in offices. They are springing up in hotels, train stations and airports. CeBit itself is a good example: All buildings are equipped with access points based on the 802.11b standard, and, for a fee, attendees can plug in to the service.
Consumer electronics emerges
Intelligence is increasingly being built into consumer electronics devices in the form of processors, memory and software. Cell phones with built-in cameras or MP3-capable PDAs illustrate just how fuzzy the boundaries are between entertainment electronics, messaging technology and IT.
A Korean exhibitor, Imri, for example, is showing a "Smart PDA phone" called Lenio that combines the functions of a Windows PDA with a CDMA portable telephone. It is also equipped with a camera. It can also be used as a voice recorder. The device communicates not only via digital cellular network, but also with Bluetooth, infrared and serial connections. Computing power is provided by an Intel XScale processor running at 400 MHz.
Christoph Hammerschmidt is editor-in-chief of EETimes.de.
my bad bad
You forgot to include your previous post on that list.
Press Release Source: SRS Labs, Inc.
SRS WOW(TM) Technology Adds Audio Punch to New Portable Digital Audio Player From e.Digital
Tuesday March 4, 7:31 am ET
WOW Technology Rapidly Becoming Audio Standard for Digital Entertainment Products
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030304/latu038_1.html
SANTA ANA, Calif., March 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SRS Labs, Inc. (Nasdaq: SRSL - News), a leading provider of innovative audio, voice and ASIC technology solutions, today announced that its patented WOW audio technology has been selected by e.Digital Corporation (OTC: EDIG - News) to deliver the ultimate audio experience for its premier digital audio player, the Odyssey(TM) 1000. WOW creates a natural and expansive audio experience with rich bass enhancement through Odyssey's included collapsible stereo headphones or when connected to the external speakers of a home stereo or multimedia PC system. The Odyssey 1000 is available exclusively through e.Digital at www.edigital-store.com/odyssey1000.html for $349.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to InStat/MDR, worldwide portable digital music player unit shipments (including solid state and revolving media products) will grow from about 7.2 million in 2002 to almost 30 million in 2006. Based on e.Digital's MicroOS(TM) technology, the Odyssey 1000 plays both MP3 and Windows Media(TM) audio files and features an FM tuner and a digital voice recorder with built- in microphone.
Steve Ferguson, e.Digital's vice president of sales and marketing, said, "When designing our premier large-capacity player, the Odyssey 1000, we chose to incorporate SRS WOW audio technology because it delivers the most powerful audio experience possible in a portable entertainment product. Our customers demand the best and we are pleased to offer them the best design, the best features, and the best audio technology."
"e.Digital's new Odyssey 1000 is an example of the growing importance of delivering a high quality audio experience in portable entertainment products," said Ted Franceschi, executive vice president, marketing and sales for SRS Labs. "WOW is the ideal audio solution for this rapidly growing product segment and we are pleased to work with an innovative company such as e.Digital to deliver the ultimate in digital audio entertainment."
SRS WOW is an award-winning, patented, playback enhancement technology that improves audio dynamics and bass performance of any mono or stereo audio. It provides a stunning improvement when used with smaller speakers or headphones that are not capable of achieving a high fidelity experience, especially when the audio has been digitally compressed into formats such as MP3 and WMA. WOW is a compelling audio solution for manufacturers of mobile or portable devices, in addition to products in which speakers are located close together, such as televisions. Hardware and software products that feature WOW include mobile phones from Sharp, Microsoft's Windows® Media Player series software products, car CD receivers from Kenwood, as well as televisions from Sony and Sharp. To date, over 300 million hardware or software products have been shipped or downloaded that include the powerful WOW audio feature.
About e.Digital
e.Digital Corporation designs, licenses, brands, manufactures, and sells digital audio products and technologies. The company's trademarked digital audio players include the MXP® 100, Treo(TM) portable digital jukebox line, and Odyssey(TM) line of flash- and hard disk drive- based players. e.Digital launched WeDigMusic.com to complement its digital audio players by providing consumers with a one-stop-shop for streaming and downloading music from thousands of artists on the Web. For more information on the company, please visit www.edig.com . To shop in the e.Digital online store, please visit www.edigital-store.com .
About SRS Labs Inc.
Over the past decade, SRS Labs has become a recognized leader in the advancement of audio and voice technology. The company works with the world's top manufacturers to provide a richer entertainment experience through patented sound techniques. SRS technologies can be heard through products ranging from televisions, DVD players, and cell phones to car audio systems and computers. Through its SRSWOWcast subsidiary, the company offers hardware and software tools to professionals and consumers for the production of content featuring SRS technologies. SRS Labs' wholly owned subsidiary, ValenceTech, is located in Hong Kong and provides custom ASICs and standard ICs to top manufacturers worldwide. Based in Santa Ana, Calif., the company also has licensing representation in Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, and Korea. For more information about SRS Labs, Inc. or SRS technologies, please visit www.srslabs.com . The information on the above-referenced websites is not incorporated by reference into this press release.
For further information, please contact: Investors, Tami Yanito of SRS Labs, Inc., +1-949-442-1070, ext. 3093, tami@srslabs.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: SRS Labs, Inc.
Windows Media 9 Enables "Second Session" Creation
By Staff
Mar 10, 2003, 16:38 PST
http://www.uemedia.com/CPC/article_5814.shtml
Redmond, WA -- Microsoft recently announced the availability of its Windows Media Data Session Toolkit, a content protection/copy management component of Windows Media 9 Series designed to enable entertainment media companies to securely create and deliver content for computers via a "second session" on various recorded media formats.
CDs and DVDs created using Windows Media Data Session Toolkit include a protected second session, which includes a version of the audio encoded using Windows Media Audio that can be played back when loaded or downloaded onto a PC. The second session includes packaged Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) content, which allows content owners such as music labels and movie studios to set up specific business rules around usage to protect their intellectual property.
For example, content owners could set up rules to allow a consumer unlimited playback of content from a CD or DVD on their PC and give them the ability to transfer content to a portable device. Entire second session digital offerings also could be made available for direct downloading via the Web.
In addition, content providers can offer content or capabilities that are only available in second sessions. The second session could include artist interviews, bonus tracks, liner notes or enhanced playback capabilities such as support for 5.1-channel surround sound through a PC running the Windows XP operating system.
French replicator MPO has adopted the Windows Media Data Session Toolkit technology and is marketing the capability to its international customer base of record labels, which includes EMI Virgin, Warner, Universal and independent label Naive.
The new technology has also received endorsement from Universal Music Group and EMI Recorded Music.
Some of the first commercial album releases using an early version of the Windows Media Data Session Toolkit include the U.S. version of Sinead O'Connor's Sean-Nos Nua on Vanguard Records, Len Doolin's Once in a Lifetime on Sunbird Records and a forthcoming DVD-ROM from the U.S. band Fischerspooner on Capitol Records.
The Windows Media platform includes Windows Media Player; Windows Media Services, a streaming server for distributing content; Windows Media Encoder for content creation; Windows Media Audio and Video; Windows Media DRM for protecting content; and the Windows Media Software Development Kit for software developers.
( BW)(MA-COPYRIGHT-CLEARANCE) Euromoney Implements Digital Rights Management Solution from Copyright Clearance Center
BW5453 MAR 11,2003 6:51 PACIFIC 09:51 EASTERN
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/cb_headline.cgi?&story_file=bw.031103/230705453&director...
Business Editors
DANVERS, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 11, 2003--
Customers Can Easily Secure Rights to Reproduce Content from 'Euromoney,' 'Institutional Investor,' and Many Other Popular Euromoney Titles
Copyright Clearance Center, the world's largest licensing agent of text reproduction rights, today announced that London-based Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC has implemented Rightslink(TM), a digital rights management (DRM) solution, on Euromoney's flagship Web sites euromoney.com and institutionalinvestor.com. Copyright Clearance Center's licensing solution currently enables 24x7 permissions to use copyrighted materials from Institutional Investor, Euromoney and other widely read Euromoney titles, and will provide permissions for content from all Euromoney titles in the future.
Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC is one of a growing number of financial information services organizations using Rightslink to derive additional value from digital assets, while easing copyright compliance for customers. Others include Dow Jones and Company, MSNBC.com, and Thomson Media, publisher of American Banker.
Paul Hunt, business manager for Euromoney, is deeply impressed with Rightslink's design. "Copyright Clearance Center is very experienced in rights management and its reach extends to business users worldwide, offering us a low-risk solution," he said. "When we selected Rightslink, we knew that it would meet our needs. It is helping us harness the value of our content in the digital marketplace and test pricing models for this uncharted terrain."
"Digital, point-of-content licensing continues to gain momentum across the financial publishing sector," said Bob Weiner, Copyright Clearance Center's vice president of licensing and rightsholder relations. "With the growing amount of online content that Euromoney provides, it faces the challenges of ensuring copyright compliance and generating measurable value from its assets. By implementing Rightslink, Euromoney simplifies the permissions/payment process, and is able to generate new revenues from the evolving digital marketplace."
Copyright Clearance Center's Rightslink is a complete DRM solution that extends the value of content for rightsholders by creating revenue opportunities, increasing customer satisfaction and improving operational efficiencies. The service facilitates web-based content reuse in print or electronic publications, automates ordering of hard-copy reprints, and provides valuable insight into customer behavior to support intelligent marketing decisions.
About Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Copyright Clearance Center is the world's largest licensing agent for text reproduction rights and provider of licensing services for reproducing copyrighted materials in print and electronic formats. It currently manages rights relating to over 1.75 million works and represents more than 9,600 publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors and other creators, either directly or through their representatives. Licensed customers in the U.S. number over 10,000 corporations and subsidiaries (including most of the Fortune 100), as well as thousands of government agencies, law firms, document suppliers, libraries, academic institutions, copy shops and bookstores. Copyright Clearance Center can be found at copyright.com.
About Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC
Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC is quoted on the London Stock Exchange and publishes around 100 business-to-business titles including Petroleum Economist, Euromoney and Institutional Investor. In addition, the company runs conference and training events, database, electronic and other print publishing businesses in a variety of markets internationally. Further information is available at euromoneyplc.com.
--30--MB/bo*
CONTACT: Copyright Clearance Center
Christine Corcoran, 978/646-2631
ccorcoran@copyright.com
or
Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC
Paul Hunt, +44 207 779 8116
phunt@euromoneyplc.com
KEYWORD: MASSACHUSETTS
INDUSTRY KEYWORD: BANKING PUBLISHING
SOURCE: Copyright Clearance Center
Industry still grappling with copy protection tech
15:30 Tuesday 11th March 2003
John Borland, CNET News.com
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2131748,00.html
Demand for chips destined for multimedia devices may mean that companies move digital rights technology onto software, so that they can be more flexible
Plans to hard-wire copy protection into popular digital music and video devices are being shelved as the consumer-electronics industry grapples interminably with antipiracy policies, standards and consumer rights.
Until recently, many makers of chips for consumer-electronics devices had hoped to build anticopying technology into the chips themselves, a process known as "hard coding". That technique speeds up a device, saves on battery power, and makes the antipiracy technology harder to break through. Prominent security researchers say that hardware-based rights management technologies are more secure than alternatives that rely primarily on software.
Chipmakers have not completely abandoned efforts to create such copy protection features. But developers now say that they're ready to move ahead with what some call a second best alternative in order to feed surging demand for chips bound for new multimedia devices such as MP3 players, mobile phones and PDAs. This so-called soft coding -- putting antipiracy rules into software that is more accessible to users -- is slower and less secure, but lets companies adapt to rapid changes in the market more easily, developers say.
"In the past we've invested in hardware security that has not borne fruit," said Michael Maia, vice president of marketing for Portal Player, a company that makes multimedia chips focused on portable devices. "But there's a big risk there, because the market changes so much. Until it stabilises enough, we will be soft-coding."
The impasse over copy protection has stretched on for years, feeding distrust between the entertainment industry and consumer-electronics makers swept up in the digital technology revolution. Delays in hammering out antipiracy features for MP3 players and other devices have led to at least one proposal for legislation that would mandate the creation of a government-backed copy protection standard -- a plan that was greeted with a standing ovation in Hollywood and catcalls in Silicon Valley.
That doesn't mean chipmakers oppose hard-wired copy controls. Indeed, the trend toward software-based protection is at odds with the longer-term direction of companies such as Intel and Microsoft, and their so-called trusted computing initiatives. Under both companies' plans, a hardware-based authentication system would let computers guard against hackers' intrusions and viruses, as well as potentially block use of pirated software, songs or movies.
Hard coding has proven extraordinarily elusive, however, making software-based copy controls the best alternative for bringing passable, but not perfect, antipiracy features to the coming generation of digital devices.
"For the average user, soft coding is sufficient. For the hacker, soft coding leads to a wide-open hole," said Maia. "But that's the reality right now, because the business is in flux."
Not perfect
Average music listeners surely will have little idea how deeply antipiracy technology might permeate the products they buy. But small differences in built-in rights-management technology can translate into big headaches for consumers, and ultimately have substantial influence over the success or failure of consumer products and digital music business models.
A few examples of that influence have already been seen today. Most MP3 players do not have any antipiracy, or digital rights management (DRM), technology built in. That has led the legal online music services to bar most transfers of songs to portable devices, creating a Byzantine list of what can and can't be done with music downloaded through services like MusicNet and PressPlay.
On the flip side, Sony has been one of the few companies to release portable music players with digital rights management technology built in, but some consumers have criticised its products as a result.
Chipmakers have watched the battles between record companies, consumer groups, file-swappers and legislators for the past year with some impatience. One constant has been Microsoft's rapid growth into the leading rights-protection company, while other once-prominent rivals such as Intertrust and Reciprocal have faltered.
Content companies have pushed manufacturers to support rights-management technology for years. Early cross-industry collaborations such as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) failed, however. Individual device manufacturers and chipmakers have more pragmatically been signing licences to use varying digital rights management technologies over time, although few piracy-fighting devices have seen their way to shelves in the United States.
"The hardware companies get stuck in the middle," said Mike McGuire, an analyst with GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm. "This issue is going to be part of an ongoing set of negotiations between content and device manufacturers."
Despite a move away from building the rights-management tools deeply into chips, chipmakers' strategies remain widely varied. Given the long lead time in designing and building chips -- often 18 months or more -- this is one sign that DRM support is likely to be scattered and haphazard for some time to come.
Giant Texas Instruments has long eschewed hard-coding DRM technology into its chips, for example, despite the potential speed and memory gains.
"Our philosophy has always been that DRM should be software," said Randy Cole, chief technologist for Texas Instruments' Internet audio business. "The advantage to that is that it's changeable in the field."
What that means is that if a consumer is able to break through the antipiracy technology on a device such as an MP3 player, it can be restored automatically the next time the device is connected to the Net, Cole said.
Other functions that support antipiracy technology are increasingly being added more deeply into multimedia chips, however. Maia's company, which has focused on creating chips for mobile devices such as mobile phones, is working on features that can speed up decryption of protected files such as songs that are transmitted over cell phone networks. That falls short of the benefits of putting the full rights-management system on the chip itself, however.
GartnerG2's McGuire said he expects the hardware manufacturers and chipmakers to stay out of the fray as much as possible until there is more clarity in the market and in the public policy arena. Given the different needs of different kinds of devices, the market may always be fractured, he noted.
"You're going to see some more false starts, but I think the notion here is that there is going to be ongoing experimentation," McGuire said. "Practically, we do not believe there's going to be a single magic bullet."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wrapped up in Crypto Bottles
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/14337/1.html
Stefan Krempl 09.03.2003
A talk with cyber-rights pioneer John Perry Barlow about Digital Restrictions Management and the future of human knowledge
John Perry Barlow or JPB for short is maybe best known for three things: he was the song writer for the Grateful Dead and is still supporting music bands. He wrote the Cyberspace Independence Declaration seven years ago during a visit to the World Economic Forum. And he tried to define a brand new way of thinking about copyright in an well-received article that was published in Wired magazine. Recently, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to Berlin to fight the German version of the Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DMCA) together with the civil rights organization privatkopie.net. Stefan Krempl sat down with him to look forward and back in the history of Cyberspace and copyright.
There are new laws for copyright in the digital age drafted here in Europe everywhere at the moment. What do you think is at stake? Why is this an important issue people should care about?
John Perry Barlow: There are three things at stake. The first is, extending a monopoly to a few large organizations about what people can or cannot know and express. This is really about the control of information and it has the potential to become over time a kind of private totalitarianism. That is not an exaggeration since it has already happened in the United States. The reason that the U.S. is behaving in the completely irrational and dangerous way that it is, is because we have erected private totalitarianism and are suffering a reality distortion field that is as dangerous as the one erupted in Germany in the 1930s. But not being driven by the government, but being driven by the media. Being driven by ourselves. I fear erecting a system which highly advantages a very few corporate channels for human intellectual exchange.
What are the other points?
John Perry Barlow: Secondly, I fear that Digital Rights Management today is Political Rights Management tomorrow. That embedding these kinds of technological controls into the very architecture of computing has the capacity to become a form of political control in the not so distant future. Because you're putting at a very basic level surveillance capacity, control over what information may or may not travel, and a whole range of things in the architecture that can be very easily used to suppress dissent. Third, I am very afraid, that by wrapping a large amount of human knowledge up into bottles that can no longer be opened except at a price, much of it will be wrapped up in crypto bottles that in a very fairly short time cannot be opened even at a price. A huge amount of human creativity will simply be lost for future generations.
So you're mainly worried that the content industries in cooperation with the help of hardware and software makers and their DRM techniques are taking over control of the data universe?
John Perry Barlow: It's not the data universe only, it's human conversation. They want to turn it into a one-way flow that they have entirely monetized. I look at the collective human mind as a kind of ecosystem. They want to clear cut it. They want to go into the rainforest of human thought and mow the thing down.
Many people are worried about the efforts of the computer industry to establish a new computing model based on TCPA and Microsoft's Palladium.
John Perry Barlow: They should be.
What's your take on this issue?
John Perry Barlow: I think it's very dangerous. This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is the first form of Political Rights Management. And there won't be anything we can do about it. After these organizations have come up with a new business model, Palladium will still be there. And the chip and the computer architecture will have been changed so that it will be very easy to track what everybody is doing and saying online. Germany has some memory of what it's like to live in a society where everybody is visible in that way. And I suppose that we don't want to go there again.
Could you express a bit more widely your thoughts about copy protection and informational sustainability? I mean, today we still have a lot of books, and they can be read for centuries. What about the digital world?
John Perry Barlow: This is one of my greatest concerns. I am really afraid that a lot of material that is already in the Public Domain is going to be re-encapsulated and taken out of the Public Domain. I'm also very afraid that they are going to refuse to digitize -- or are only digitizing in this highly controlled way -- much of what has taken place over the last 150 years. And that, as a consequence, this will die embedded in their corpses and be lost to future generations. I'm disappointed with the human species that we are less concerned about that than we are about strengthening a monopoly for a very few large organizations. We're given this choice. Why are we choosing to help them instead of our descendants?
The "culture of the free" has to end, it was a "mistake by birth" of the Internet, Thomas Holtrop, the CEO of T-Online, proclaimed a while ago. If you could talk to him right now, what would you say?
John Perry Barlow: I would say that the culture of the free started the first time when somebody said something and it was heard by another human being. It wasn't started by the Internet. People have been sharing information that they found relevant without cost for their entire history. Do you think that there were royalties collected on the early cave paintings? Do you think that Bach wrote everything he wrote because he was looking to get his copyright royalties? The culture of the free has been around for a while. And people nevertheless managed to be enormously creative and managed to get paid for, by a wide variety of means.
You helped to found the EFF about 13 years ago due to "concerns over the combination of governmental zeal and cluelessness", you once said. How far did you come in educating the politicians?
John Perry Barlow: Unfortunately they are half-clued now in a dangerous way. Now they recognize that something is going on and they are responding to it in a way that is as bad and as harmful as it could be -- in terms of what I would consider to be the optimum future of Cyberspace.
Could you give an example?
John Perry Barlow: What I want to see is a world where anybody can know anything what they are curious about. I want to see a world where any kid in Africa can find out all that human beings know about any subject no matter how obscure. And that's not an unrealizable dream. But if we continue in this way, it will never be realized. And that's because the large media corporations, the content industry, have succeeded in buying our policy makers and taking over the control mechanisms. If you got to WIPO in Geneva, you will not find anybody who has not worked for a large content organization. They are just not there. They own that. If you go to Brussels, it's just the same. And they have succeeded in getting the public to think that there is no difference between sharing knowledge and shop-lifting.
You're maybe most famous in the "old" Internet community for writing the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. "You titans made of flesh", in that time you wrote, "back off". How do you feel about the piece today?
John Perry Barlow: (laughing) I wish they would have taken my advice. I mean, looking back it seems impossibly quiet. It seems like an incredibly 90s thing to have done. I don't regret it, however, because I think that over the course of time it will be demonstrated to have been correct that the industrial period is simply not equipped to understand the information age. That the traditional nation state does not nearly have the same kind of sovereignty over the virtual domain.
The declaration still stands the test of time?
John Perry Barlow: Now one thing that I have regretted at that time and should have revised was that I didn't make it more clear that I understood that there was a profound connection between the physical and the virtual worlds. The virtual world bares the same relationship to the physical world that the mind bares to the body. Which is to say an intimate connection. But even though they are closely connected, the body and the mind are two very different things. And so are the politics of the virtual world, the global mental space, and the politics of the physical world. And so are the economics and so are the philosophical underpinnings. And those differences need to be recognized. What's been happening is that those differences are not being recognized and that the physical world is trying to impose all of its economics and political philosophy on the virtual world in a way that I think will be in the way of the long term reliability of the human race.
How is the copyright situation in the US in the moment? Do you consider it worse for the average user than in Europe?
John Perry Barlow: It's much worse because we already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that you plan imposing on yourself. We already have obscenely long extensions of copyright, which have been recently upheld by the Supreme Court in a way that I think is clearly unconstitutional. And even they had some questions about it. They ruled very narrowly. They ruled that Congress had the right to do what it had done even while expressing concerns that what it had done was wrong. And it's even getting worse. Hollywood wants to rule the world, make no mistake. And I think that there are more uplifting things for the world to be ruled by than Hollywood.
The EFF has warned often about the "chilling effect" the DMCA might have in terms of fair use and free speech. Do you still consider this piece of legislation a threat?
John Perry Barlow: The real threat has still to be seen. We're gonna really see it when all CDs are copy-protected, when all music and all literature has Digital Rights Management embedded, when all software does. And that will be very shortly. At that point it will be too late for us to do anything about it and furthermore we won't be able to have a public discourse on this subject because the channel will no longer be open for that to take place. That's already the case. You can see how difficult it is to get a story about copyright on television, despite the fact that it is extremely important and critical. But the channels just don't want to carry anything about it.
You've coined a totally different notion of copyright in your Wired article about the "Economy of Ideas". Could you please shortly sum up your main points?
John Perry Barlow: I said back in 1993 that it was going to be very difficult -- given the natural human desire to share information and human creativity -- to control that desire in an environment in that everything humans do can be easily reproduced at zero cost. And that we had to come up with a different way of monetizing human creativity than to deal with it as though it was no different from physical goods. Because the physical goods in which it was previously embedded would go away. And that what previously would have been a noun would become a verb. But we didn't know about the economy of verbs and we would have had to learn. Instead, what we've been doing is trying to turn many things that are not verbs into nouns and imposing a large number of very severe constraints on the people in order to preserve the business models of a few large organizations. And that's what the European Copyright Directive is about. It's about consolidating and strengthening media companies that are actually of dubious long term benefit to humanity.
Now, a decade onward, could you run a "reality check" on your thesis?
John Perry Barlow: I think it stands up quite well. Well, one thing where it does not stand up that well is that I don't think that I proposed the right kinds of approaches to solving the problem. I stated that there was a problem and I didn't talk much about solving it. Actually, one of the solutions I proposed is what I think extremely dangerous, which is the use of cryptography to bottle information. Which is much all this is about, giving a legal protection for that method. And I don't think anymore that this is a particularly good method. At this stage I have other suggestions how to monetize human creativity. I'm not too hard on myself on not having them because even today I feel like what needs to happen is for us to have an open field of experimentation what the appropriate business models are. When Gutenberg created the massively reproducible book there was no model for the economic return on that product. And actually it was another 250 years before they came up with copyright. And they somehow managed to have books in the meantime. I would have been a lot happier if we would have stuck to that waiting period instead of going right through the door as we've gone.
Giving away content might work in the realm of music. But would it also apply to other content and copyright areas?
John Perry Barlow: Well that was misunderstood. I mean, what I think the reality is that making freely available virtual copies increases the sale of physical copies in many cases. And it certainly did for the Grateful Dead. Despite the fact that our fans had access to better recordings that we made commercially available, they went out and bought our commercial copies. Not right away, but over the course of time just about all of our records went black. And I think that the fact that much literature is available online is in some way responsible for the fact that somehow book sales are higher than ever. Furthermore I think that even tough I would concede that some people are not buying CDs that the might have bought otherwise economic I would also insist that there are many people -- myself among them -- who have bought CDs because of downloading that the never would have bought. Otherwise you would see a much greater fall-off in the record industry.
Why?
John Perry Barlow: There are probably five or six million people trading files at any given moment with Morpheus or Kazaa. And the fact is that the record industry is only off ten percent. In the United States everything is off at least ten percent. We are in a recession. In fact, the record industry is not in anyway dying. It has just to become much more realistic after a long period in which it has seen obscene profits. Because when they first produced the CD they had huge gross margins. The cost of a CD was based on the cost of making a CD, and that cost plummeted immediately. And the cost of selling one and the cost of buying one staid the same. Huge amounts of many was pored into the record companies. They got ridiculously fat and heavy, and now they are having to pay the piper. And they claim it's not their own mismanagement and greed but that they are being attacked by pirates. In fact they had been the most unconsciousness pirate at all.
Would this model also work in other content areas?
John Perry Barlow: Yes, there the demonstration is even much more clear. You can get a DVD of any first-run movie now before it is released. But the actual attendance in theatres has never been higher. DVD sales and video cassette sales are on a all-time high. So if downloading is injurious to these industries, why are we not seeing the results? What they would tell you is, that we haven't seen them yet, but that we will. Well, I'm a big fan of solving problems that we have, not problems that we think we might have.
Do you have a long-time strategy to protect the knowledge commons?
John Perry Barlow: I don't think it's a matter of protecting them. It's a matter of distributing them properly. The whole notion of protection is based on the assumption that there is a hard-coupled relationship between scarcity and value. Which there is in physical goods, but not in virtual services, where there seems to be a relationship between familiarity and value. There are a variety of ways to monetize it. But one way that I think may work in the short run is for us to create a pool of money at the ISP level from a percentage of what people are charged for their online accounts and make those funds available on a statistical basis to the creators themselves as you do with entities like ASCAP. And unlike these licensing and collection entities, you have the potential to come up with a very clear understanding what material is actually passing online. You don't have to know who it's coming from or where it's going. But easy enough to know what it is quite accurately and then dividing up the proceeds from that general pool to the people who are responsible for the material that is passing through the ISPs on a most regular basis. That's my current idea for solving this problem. But his presupposes something that I am not very comfortable with which is compulsory licensing such as you've got it in broadcast now.
What role could Open Source play in this context?
John Perry Barlow: I think this movement will ultimately prevail. My big concern is what damage gets done before that happens. What architectural changes will be made in the substrate of computing, what intellectual output will be lost forever, and what freedoms will be endangered. But ultimately, it's hard to come up with a better model than open source where everybody can be involved improving everything. I don't care how smart you are, how rich you are as a company. You don't necessarily have the world's greatest programmers working for you. And even if you did, if you think about human knowledge and how it grows: it grows in an open system. It doesn't grow in a closed system. Science is about an open self-feeding process, it's about expanding the consensus and reality-checking at the broadest possible level. The same thing applies to any form of human creativity.
You've been doing a lot of research about Internet censorship too. Here in Germany, or better say: Nord-Rhine Westphalia, a government official has forced access providers to "block" access to two controversial US-sites with Neonazi content, which is, of course, illegal in Germany.
John Perry Barlow: Where does that stop?
Many people are worried that this is just a beginning. Do you see web blocks as a workable solution for the problem?
John Perry Barlow: I don't think that the answer to hate speech is trying to shut your ears to it. The answer is love speech. And as terrible and stupid I find Nazi propaganda, I still remember that Hitler was in jail when he wrote "Mein Kampf". So it would seem apparent to me that oppressing that kind of expression actually strengthens it and gives it a kind of credibility that it would not otherwise have. The answer to it is to let it disprove itself which it does quite easily when given the opportunity to flop out. But also I would say that a community has the right to define what is a permissible topic to discuss. I just think that a community by necessity is a smaller entity than the entire nation state. And the right to express inherently includes the right not to listen. But it doesn't necessarily include the right to make everybody else not listen.
In ten years, what will the Internet look like? Will there still be a culture of sharing information or will it be totally walled down?
John Perry Barlow: I would be very disappointed of my species if it is all walled down. But I'm afraid that what we're gonna see is two separate entities. One of which will look like interactive television and will have all of the commercially made available material that has been produced. And the other which will be an open-source Freenet and will have little access to the previous works of humanity. This is already more or less the case. If you go to Google and search on a topic what you get is what has been written but not published in a material form.
A German translation of this talk was published in c't 5/2003.
Intervideo Introduces Divx/AC3 Compatible Windvr 3
By Vipul Shah
DT: 12/03/2003
vipul@gate2info.net
Today at CeBIT 2003, Hanover Germany, Intervideo, Inc. announced release of WinDVR 3, the newest version of its digital video recorder for computers. WinDVR 3 lets users record TV shows directly to CD or DVD that can be watched later on a PC or a consumer DVD player. In fact, users don’t even have to be there to record, WinDVR 3 will even wake your computer up when it is time to record a show and then shut down all by itself when it’s done.
Divx encoding feature was missing link in DVR market and it was not addressed by any major player, With WinDVR 3 Intervideo will be able to get into this segment. Divx is very popular video codec used for high quality video files for transporting on CD or via net. Quality of video can be very close to DVD. Control over file size is possible without sacrificing quality in Divx.
Apart from Divx, WinDVR 3 also adds DV device support for camcorders and Multi-monitor and TV output options.
Is the Tech Industry Ready to Rebound?
One exec says yes, and knows exactly when the recovery will begin.
Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
HANOVER, GERMANY -- National Semiconductor Chief Executive Officer Brian Halla refined his forecast Tuesday for the beginning of economic recovery in the technology industry.
Halla said at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas last November that the recovery would begin on June 21, 2003, basing his prediction on a mathematical model developed by a colleague of his.
That model has been tweaked, he said Tuesday.
"The equation gave a date of June 21. We have refined the equation now. It's going to be at 2:15 p.m.," he said, adding "Pacific Time" in response to a question from the audience here on the last day of the ICT World Forum. The conference precedes the CeBIT trade show.
Getting Serious
While Halla made clear that the forecast had begun as a joke, he seemed serious about what will drive the recovery when it comes: digital video and audio.
"Computers are no longer processing ones and zeros, they are processing sight and sound," he said. "The growth will be driven by sight and sound."
Imaging technology such as that developed by Foveon of Santa Clara, California, could drive the market for IT, he said. National Semiconductor has licensed Foveon's X3 image sensor technology, which increases the density of pixels in an image captor by layering sensors for red, green, and blue light one on top of the other, rather than placing them side by side.
In addition to allowing the creation of new converged devices with low-cost integrated cameras, such image captors could also drive the market for faster, more powerful microprocessors in PCs, he said. A compressed image file from one of these captors contains so much information that in a demonstration it took a Pentium 4 processor 12 seconds to decompress it, he said.
Past the PC
But the semiconductor industry can look further afield for the roots of its recovery. While the chip industry still sells 30 percent of its output to mobile phone manufacturers, the balance of what's left has tipped: before the latest economic crash, the PC industry consumed 40 percent of the world's semiconductors, and other applications the remaining 30 percent. Now they've switched, with PCs taking only 30 percent.
So it could be the automobile industry, or medical applications, that kick off the recovery this summer, Halla said.
He cited examples of remote sensing systems in these two markets that could stimulate demand for IT products.
One, a proximity detection and remote sensing system proposed by automotive parts manufacturer Robert Bosch GmbH for inclusion in future BMW cars, combines imaging, ultrasonic, and radar technologies to provide information about obstacles around and ahead of moving vehicles.
Medical Applications
The other is a remote sensing system for conducting minimally-invasive endoscopy, colonoscopy, and proctoscopy examinations. The capsule, containing a tiny camera, light source, and radio transmitter, is designed to be swallowed by the patient. It then transmits pictures to a receiver on their belt, which stores them on its hard disk, he said.
Current versions of the device only run for eight hours, the time to examine the interior of the patient's stomach, but future versions will go further.
"The next version goes 24 hours, from launchpad to splashdown, and costs $450. Why $450? Because that's the alternative costs," Halla said. "And anybody who has had the alternative knows why the pill gets my vote," he said.
Halla predicted that, in the future, we could be swallowing as many as half a dozen of these disposable devices a year to detect different medical anomalies, which would provide a welcome revenue boost for someone in the industry.
Nokia announces new products, services
11 March 2003 -- PMN -- Nokia has announced several new products and services at the CeBit event in Hannover, including two new mobile handsets. Jorma Ollila, the company's Chairman and CEO, also used the opening of the world's largest IT trade show to deliver an upbeat message on the future of the mobile industry.
Nokia had earlier released a mid-quarter financial update confirming that it would meet previous guidance, albeit at the lower end of its existing forecasts.
The handset releases included a new camera phone - the 6220 - which is aimed at business users and features a colour screen and tri-band EDGE compatibility. Nokia also showed the 3300, intended for the consumer market, which occupies a form factor similar to a handheld gaming console and includes MP3/AAC/FM music capabilities. The 3300 has a colour screen and can record FM radio directly into AAC format.
In a separate announcement, Nokia said that KPN is to start making i-Mode content available on the Nokia 3650. The move will come as a blow to Japanese manufacturers which had been hoping to improve their market share in Europe on the back of i-Mode service deployments. It comes as part of DoCoMo's drive to widen the appeal of the service by extending camera phone and Java capabilities to the European market. Samsung also said yesterday it was working with DoCoMo on GPRS handsets.
"Mobile phones are not purchased just for their voice functionality any more. Messaging, business applications, entertainment and other value-added features, infused with a strong brand experience, are the most compelling attractions. Standardised open technologies create an essential platform for the industry and for Nokia to fully leverage the market potential of mobility," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia Mobile Phones. "This is concretely illustrated for example in KPN's decision to make i-Mode content available on open standards starting with the Nokia 3650 imaging phone."
Nokia is showing several new accessories at CeBit, including a digital pen which records notes and drawings and transmits them via Bluetooth to a compatible handset. The notes can then be sent as multimedia messages. It also announced an enhanced lens for the Nokia 3650, enabling close-up shots.
In a new departure, Nokia said that it would start offering a mobile business service to enterprise customers. Nokia One service is a multi-access service for accessing e-mails, contacts, appointments and company directories using a mobile phone, web browser or fixed voice line. It will operate as a hosted service, with Nokia undertaking integration with existing corporate systems and providing local access numbers.
The company's US operations also issued a statement today saying that Nokia expected to produce its 25 millionth CDMA handset later this month and reiterating its objective of pursuing market share in the expanding CDMA market. Nokia plans to start testing handsets with next generation CDMA2000 1xEV-DV chipsets in H2 2003.
Germany's chancellor opens CeBit
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has officially opened the world's largest computer fair, CeBit, in Hanover. More than 6500 computer representatives from 69 countries are displaying their new computer and telecommunications products. Some 600,000 visitors are expected to attend the fair. In his speech opening the event, Schroeder warned of the economic consequences of war with Iraq. The current tension surrounding the Iraqi crisis has already had a negative effect on the world's economic climate.
so don't think. that shouldn't be hard for you to do.
March 10, 2003
Microsoft Ships Office 2003 Beta 2
By Peter Galli
Microsoft Corp. on Monday formally announced the release of the second beta for its Office 2003 family of products, which is known by the code name Office 11 and is the upgrade to Office XP.
That beta comes only days before Sun Microsystems Inc. releases the first beta of StarOffice 6.1 and follows last week's release of Corel Corp.'s first beta of WordPerfect Office 11, which is expected to be available in North America late next month.
Microsoft on Monday said it will be distributing the second beta to some 500,000 customers and partners globally to begin testing. The company has also provided a Web site where interested parties can find more detail about Office 2003 and the other system components.
This beta contains, for the first time, new CRM (customer relationship management)-type features designed to attract more small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), as well as other features to sway enterprises to upgrade. It includes a new feature called Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, as well as the first incarnations of DRM (digital rights management) in the suite.
Microsoft Office 2003: Beta Shows Promise of this Major Overhaul (PC Magazine)
Office Beta Eyes SMB
Sources familiar with the product said Business Contact Manager, previously code-named Iris and aimed at the SMB market, will let users track clients, create accounts, generate product lists, and track sales and account leads.
"[It's] a nice CRM-type solution for small business that plugs into the Outlook framework," Joe Eschbach, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, told eWEEK recently. "It's a sales-process contact manager solution. It will function as a desktop application and not need other Microsoft server products to work."
On the enterprise front, Office 2003 Beta 2 will give testers their first view of the DRM technology in the product. "The information rights management solution is one of the most compelling solutions in Office 2003 for enterprises," Eschbach said, adding that this solution will run only in conjunction with the upcoming Windows Server 2003.
However, Beta 2 code will include a trial solution that can be run without Windows Server 2003. Testers can try the feature using Microsoft Passport for validation and authentication. "But longer term, it's for enterprises who want it to work inside their intranet and do authentication on a central server," he said.
The second beta also includes the Office 2003 suite, comprising Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access and two new applications—OneNote and InfoPath—as well as FrontPage, Publisher, Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2.0.
The final versions of the product are expected this summer, according to Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., company previously said the product would be released by the end of June. Pricing and details on which products will be included in which SKU and which will have to be bought as separate add-ons were not disclosed.
The release of the second beta provides an infrastructure and platform that enables Microsoft business partners to build the next generation of information worker solutions that incorporate collaboration and portal capabilities and improved desktop tools, Eschbach said.
Microsoft, in line with its goal of ensuring that its products maximize the use of other company products, pointed out that its upcoming Windows Server 2003 product will play a complementary role with the Office family of products, as will Windows SharePoint Services, which is the engine for creating Web sites that enable information sharing and document collaboration. This infrastructure will be delivered in Windows Server 2003.
Latest Microsoft News:
• Exclusive: A Chat with Bill Gates
• Microsoft Ships Office 2003 Beta 2
• Microsoft Holds the Line on Server Prices
• With BuildIt, .Net-Based Apps Will Come
• Microsoft Debuts Collaboration Server
• more
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