BPN 1683: The Finnish Prime Minister is wrong

Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb accused Apple's late founder Steve Jobs of crushing his Nordic country's job market by selling innovations that caught Finland's companies off guard. "We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry," Stubb told Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri.

However, the Finnish Prime Minister is crying over spilled milk. There was nothing wrong with the innovations of the Finnish and in particular Nokia. The company had the brick, the Communicator phone and mobile internet since 1997. And in 2000 Nokia had a prototype of a tablet in its US laboratory (Which company did not have a prototype? HP was working on its PC/hybrid turnstile screen).

Problem with the Nordic countries and particularly Finland was that despite the famous glass and clothes design, the IT companies did not have the design ability, which Apple celebrated as part of its company policy. Nokia was technically well advanced with its Communicator and shelved in 2000 the beta-development of the tablet for another five years due to the economic downturn.

My observation

In 1999 I was in Finland at the first Scholars’ Network Conference in Tampere, hosted by the Hypermedialaboratory of Tampere University in Tampere, the home of my friends Jarmo, Cai and Sohvi. As I had been studying the second wave of electronic books with Rocket Books, I presented an overview to the audience of the history and the near future.

I divided the history in two waves. Sony hijacked the term Electronic Book in 1990 and introduced a adapted discman plus a minidisk. The first device weighted 450 grams, had a black and white screen, but it rendered text, drawings and photographs as well as music. E-Books were produced for it and in fact the American novel Sliver was first published on e-Book and later in print. The device was introduced in The Netherlands in 1993 and a consortium of publishers and producers bundled reference works like a dictionary and hotel guide. The e-book adventure of Sony did not catch on. In my opinion for the singular function of reading books (no games, no diary), only the electronic cover was too expensive.

The second wave came in 1997 when internet was there as a distribution mechanism for e-books to be downloaded on a small tablet. Again, it was experienced as an exciting proposition for distributing and storing a number of book. But in my opinion it failed again by the louzy design, black/white screen and the single functionality. So in 1999 I projected that smart phones and smart tablets would meet e-book functionality. There were not too many smart phones around at that time, while tablets were just around the corner.

Invitation by Nokia

After the presentation a manager of the Nokia Venture Company came up to me and invited me to Helsinki to speak to the people of Nokia Research and Business Development. They wanted to discover the world of e-books, the production and the copyright issues.

By April 2000 we had set a date and I travelled to Helsinki. I was told that I was going to be picked up by cab and that I would travel with a Nokia researcher in the States. So at 8.30h we were ready and waiting for the cab. In the meantime we had gotten into a discussion on e-book, smartphones and tablets. So in the cab he opened his attaché case and took a demonstration tablet out. It was clear to me that this tablet was for games and e-books. Later on it appeared that the tablet should not have been shown to me. But I had had a peep into the future of Nokia; little did I know that the tablet would be on the market some 4 or 5 years later.

It was not innovation, but design

 

Looking at the statement of the Finnish Prime Minister, I conclude that Nokia missed the design ability of Apple and not the innovation capability. If Nokia had been able to apply more design to the Communicator, they would have been a competitor or Apple. Nokia launched some designs of future Communicators, but did not carry out further laboratory work. And Nokia stopped developing the tablet due to the economic downturn. These days we know that during low economic tides innovative development should not get shelved, but should get priority in laboratories.  

I also conclude that the Nordic countries did not take the threat of e-book serious enough and thought that dead trees would be the basic material for newspapers, magazines and books for centuries to come. At a meeting in Stockholm in 2000 on e-books, many directors of the pulp industry were present. My advice to them was to invest in e-readers and e-books like their American colleague pulp company Mead Corp had done in the seventies with Mead Data Central, the originator of the Lexis-Nexis online information service, now a Reed-Elsevier company. The Nordic directors did not. So, the North American companies like Amazon and Kobe are now dominating the e-reader and e-book market.

Despite the misinterpretation of corporate history, the Finnish Prime Minister is looking at the bright side of the Nordic development. The Nordic pulp industry is now at least investing in bio-technology, bringing in its pulp knowledge. And the Finnish IT industry is putting money on the game industry with companies as Rovio with Angry Birds and many app developers.

Update BPN 1649: e-books in the Netherlands

Update article Google starts e-book sales in the Netherlands (5)

14 August 2013

Presently more than 75 per cent of the Dutch e-books are DRM-free. This comes down to 8400 titles. Now the publishers still get another chance to move from DRM to DRM-free before September 1, 2013.

Most publishers will have DRM-free titles, but in the distribution things might be different. Bol.com and bruna.nl deliver e-books DRM-free, but with a digital watermark against piracy. E-books, distributed by Apple’s iBookstore and Kobo, still carry DRM. Also Google, since last month a new player on the Dutch e-book market, adds DRM to the e-books sold.

web roi

BPN 1419 Eat your heart out, Roger Fidler

The presentation of the Apple iPAD is a milestone for the newspaper publishers, regardless of the actual gadget. For it is years ago – to be exact from 1991 – that the newspaper company Knight Ridder sponsored a new media lab to develop the newspaper of the future. Head of the New Media Lab was Roger Fidler.

One of the outcomes of the lab activities was the Electronic Tablet. The Electronic Tablet never came further than a not working prototype (see illustration) and a very realistic promotion movie. The lab was suspended in 1995 and Roger Fidler started a tour around the world and also landed in Amsterdam, where he showed the promotion movie (still not available on YouTube; I have a digital copy which I transferred from the video tape). If you replace the Electronic Tablet in the movie with the iPAD, you see that Roger Fiddler was on the right track, but that the necessary technology was not available yet. So eat your heart out, Roger.

Digital newspapers developers should really look at the movie. It tells what the iPAD can do for an electronic newspaper. It goes further than the static digital paper e-reader copy, which basically present the newspaper in pdf. E-readers have become the representative of the static black and white books and newspapers by the introduction of the iPAD. Now the dynamic digital newspaper can be shown with the newspaper as is, but also with a movie behind the photograph. Welcome to the new gadget which gives colour to the world and opens up a completely new avenue for publishers: the mobile entertainment centre. It will carry information in multimedia and link in friends of the social network.

But having looked at the strategic implications of the iPAD, the gadget warrants a closer look. For what has Apple iPAD to offer? First impression is a larger screen than that of the iPhone and for the rest much of the same. And some gurus already question the quality and use of the movies, the typing on the iPAD. Reading a book will be tiresome on the LCD-screen. So do we have to be happy with the iPAD? I think that we should as it is a break-through of a mobile entertainment centre, which is going to be of strategic value for newspaper and magazine publishers.

BTW Have a look at the funny take-off on the iPAD.

I finally found the video of Knight Ridder with Roger Fidler.


Blog Posting Number: 1419

Tags: newspaper

BPN 1416 Colour screen and video on ereader

It is coming, the colour screen and video on an ereader. So far ereader have black/white screens and are slow in internet representation. The Eindhoven based company Liquavista, a Philips Research spin-off, is now showing a colour screen and video at CES in Las Vegas thanks to the technology of electrowetting.

Electrowetting looks like the e-Ink technology. They both work without backlightning and have low energy consumption. E-Ink technology is fully implemented now for ereaders in the meantime. Electrowetting will change the reader from reading to entertaining and yield a complete new range of interactive colour devices for consumers. Now ereaders based on the principle of e-Ink technology are used as text iPods in black and white and audio iPods. Devices based on electrowetting will become content devices, offering ebooks and epapers in colour, audio, but also high-fidelity video as well as internet. The greatest advantage will be the low energy consumption.

Electrowetting is now shown as a laboratory development, which will be in operation by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. The production is rather simple as 90 percent of the existing LCD production equipment and processes are being used.

Plastic Logic Unveils QUE E-book Reader. At CES the digital paper manufacturer Plastic Logic on Thursday introduced its QUE e-book reader device, which features a 10.7-inch touch-screen display, is about one-third of an inch thick, and will sell for $649 (4GB + Wi-Fi) and $799 (8GB + Wi-Fi + AT&T 3G). Pre-orders for the device are now available from the QUE Store and will ship in mid-April. Later this year, the QUE will also go on sale at Barnes & Noble stores nationwide, and from the bookseller's website.

Samsung Ebook Readers with Stylus Pen. On Thursday at CES Samsung debuted its first two e-book reader devices, the $399 E6, which features a six-inch screen, and the $699 E10, which sports a ten-inch screen. Both devices feature non-back-lit displays, which come with a built-in electromagnetic resonance stylus pen that can be used to write annotations or create to-do lists directly on the device's screen. The devices, set to ship in early 2010, will also feature Wi-Fi capability and Bluetooth, which allows sharing of certain content with other devices.

Plastic Logic and Samsung are creating a new top of the range. Kindle DX and iRex Digital Reader 1000 series were already leading the pack, but they will now get company of Plastic Logic and Samsung. They will be sitting together uneasily as the prices are same range and a choice of preference will made on facilities and services such as news online and telephone services.

While this ‘traditional’ fight will go on in the market place for the year to come, Electrowetting will get introduced by the beginning of next year with colourful devices and have competition awaiting from Apple, from new LCD manufacturers like Pixel Qi and to a less extent from HP, Asus and others. And these new players will not just be in the market for flogging books and newspapers. They will do text, audio and video on the content container. And a complete new game with ebooks, epapers, emagazines, music and video will start.

Blog Posting Number: 1416

Tags: ebook, ereader

BPN 1415 Content, community and commerce

It is CES-time. The Consumer Electronics Show has opened in Las Vegas. So it is time for the announcements. Google tried to steal the thunder with its smart phone from Apple, which is rumoured to announce the iSlate, a multimedia tablet, functioning as movie screen, iPOD and as ereader. And the ereaders will be obvious in the stream of press releases.

Amazon came with a press release for the international market. It introduced a new version of its larger-screen Kindle e-book reader, the Kindle DX with Global Wireless, which features wireless Internet connectivity in 100 countries. The company has said that the 9.7-inch display on the Kindle DX, first released last May, is more suited to reading newspapers, magazines and textbooks. The move will also make AT&T the company's global partner for 3G Kindle connectivity, replacing previous partner Sprint in the US. The $489 global Kindle DX is available for pre-order today, and will begin shipping on January 19, 2010. As said before I wonder whether the Kindle DX and the Kindle 6 inches are going to sell in Europe at all, given the Mobipocket format and the unknown AT&T network.

Also Microsoft had a product announcement. It finally showed its tablet. Not the rumoured Courier with two pages to be closed like a book, but the HP tablet, a derivative of the HP tablet PC, with a colour screen of 11 inch, but with touch screen technology. And more tablets of this type are to follow, coming from Asus and Archos. A real disappointment. Nothing special, nothing new. But this was not the only disappointment in the product announcement. Microsoft would associate its tablet with the Amazon.com online shop. A cheap choice as the Blio platform had been expected to be the online shop. All together is the Microsoft announcement already the most disappointing product announcement. The tablet was termed to be a Slate PC by Steve Ballmer. It exactly indicates that he does not understand the world of content and text iPODs.

Surprising was the press release of DMC Worldwide. The company announced a new platform dealing with content, community and commerce: The COPIA platform is a hybrid solution for consumers of all ages to experience a completely new way to discover, enjoy, share and purchase books, newspapers, magazines and a wide variety of digital content. At the same time, it integrates a software application engine for OEM brands looking to deliver content across their digital devices including e-readers, notebooks, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. The press release also includes an announcement about its own series of six ereaders: Ocean and Tidal. Every eReader powered by Copia comes standard with 2GB internal storage enough space for about 1500 eBooks. The top of the line Copia Ocean eReader features a 9-inch ePaper capacitive touchscreen, 768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 4-directional tilt-sensor, 3G connectivity (optional), WiFi (802.11b/g), Linux 2.6.21, 2GB internal memory, stereo speaker and 3.5mm stereo jack. The series of ereaders looks like a collection of OEM ereaders already on the market. Copia will be on trial from this month onwards and start selling by April, 2010. At first glance the DMC company seems to combine content, community and commerce for the first time. The question will be whether content is the same community commodity as music.

Blog Posting Number: 1415

Tags: content, community, commerce, ereader, netbook

BPN 1396 E-readers in the pipeline

In the past weeks e-readers have been at the center of attention. Amazon.com has gone international with the sales of its e-reader, at last. And Barnes & Noble has introduced its e-reader with two screens. But now announcements are coming from different nooks (!): tire manufacturer Bridgestone, hardware/software manufacturer Creative Labs and consumer electronics manufacturer LG. In the meantime, Apple is still quiet about its iBook or iTablet.

Yesterday at the first Grand Prix Formula 1 race in Abu Dabhi the name of Bridgestone as tire preferred manufacturer was all over the dazzling race circuit. But Bridgestone will stop with Formula 1 as it is changing its business direction. Part of this change was announced as Bridgestone is working on an e-reader with colour screen. The e-reader will have a 13,1 inch touch screen with 4096 colours grades and have a refreshing time of 0,8 seconds (as opposed to 15 seconds with E-Ink screens). Not only the screen, but also the substrate will be made of flexible material. There is no date of issue nor a set price or the names of any e-reader developers.

Also hopping on the bandwagon of e-readers is Creative Labs, the hardware/software manufacturer for music and graphics The company has shown a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled. It will run videos, pictures, text, and services in one device. Creative is talking to 10 international and local publishers to provide content for the MediaBook, with fiction, newspaper, magazines, education materials, and textbooks. No word on pricing and availability.

Another development has been shown by consumer electronics manufacturer LG. They have provided the e-reader with solar cells. Take your e-reader in the sun for four or five hours and you extend the battery life with one day. Again no word on pricing and availability.

And so far no word about the iBook or iTablet of Apple. It is said that Apple has an e-reader in the pipeline, but the crucial element of the e-reader is the colour screen. Given the announcement of Bridgestone the colour screen should not be too far off nor the iBook or the iTablet.

But with the appearance of colour screens and high refreshment rates, it also means that the function of the e-reader will be widened. A colour coffee table book can be published for the e-reader. But with the fast refreshing rate also colour video clips can be shown. And will a book than still be a book or a newspaper a newspaper.? Or will we just have an all in one tablet for games, movies, books and newspaper?

Blog Posting Number: 1396

Tags: e-books, e-readers

BPN 1167 iPhone and iPod as e-readers

Several times writing about e-Books, I have posed the question why Apple would not get into the fray. With so many iPods around and more recently the iPhones, the Apple products have a perfect point of departure of becoming text iPods. Well it is happening now. Fictionwise and e-Reader.com, both e-Book web shops, have announced the availability of its free eReader application for eBooks on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The users of these Apple devices get immediately access to almost 50.000 eBooks, including bestsellers of Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, Ann Rice, James Patterson, and Harlequin Romance.




The eReader application is immediately downloadable on the Apple iPhone 3G. The older iPhomes and the iPod Toch need to upgrade to the 2.0 operating system through iTunes 7.7. The eReader application is available as a free download. The Apple devices have three advantages as e-reader. Uploading of e-Books can be done wirelessly. They have large screens compared to most PDAs besides the screens are sharp and clear. And last, but not least they have 6 to 8 solid hours of battery life.

The eReader application is not just limited to the Apple devices. Multiformat versions are also available for more than 300 different handheld devices, ranging from special e-Reader devices to mobile phones and PDAs. The eReader program can read encrypted or unencrypted eBooks from Fictionwise and e-Reader.com.

The eReader is a first version for the Apple devices. It means that it will not be possible to transfer eReader content downloaded from other websites onto eReader for iPhone and iPod touch. Version 1.1 will have the ability to browse other sites and directly download from them, as well as ways of moving eReader format eBooks from your personal computer to the iPhone and iPod touch. This includes both encrypted and unencrypted eReader files. Version 1.1 will contain features like reverse video, the ability to lock the page orientation, the option to tap rather than swipe to turn pages, options to sort your on-device Bookshelf by author or title or most recently purchased, the ability to browse the web right from the application and download eReader PDB files from any website, and several other improvements.

Looking at the attempts of these web site e-book shops, it is very laudable what they are doing for the distribtion of e-books. But promotion by Apple would help the promotion of e-book. Of course integrating the e-reader software and offering access to the iTunes e-Bookshop would defeat the Kindle in one strike.

Blog Posting Number: 1167

Tags: e-book, e-reader

BPN 1126 Will the Apple magic work in Europe with iPhone 3G?

On July 11, 2008 the Apple magic will have to work in Europe. On that date Apple introduces the iPhone 3G in Europe. AS sales strategy it has selected two European telecom operators, T-Telecom and Orange, to take care of the introduction. Question is: will the iPhone 3G become a runaway success. Can this version of iPhone seduce the European user? Where can they get them? Is the price okay? Or will the sales people of T-Mobile and Orange have to go to the beach to push their phoneware/wear?

Apple has divided Europe into two parts: the T-Mobile sphere and the Orange sphere. T-Mobile start distributing the iPhone in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands on July 11th and later on this year in Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Orange will launch the iPhone on July 11 Austria, Portugal and Switzerland, in France on July 17 and in the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Luxembourg, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Orange's African markets later this year.

The geographical division in Europe is interesting. Mid-Europe and the Mediterranean are have been covered, but it looks like the UK and Ireland will have a separate deal as well as the Scandinavian countries. Although it looks like there is sales exclusivity for the telecom operators in large countries, for countries like Austria, Poland and Slovakia both operators can sport the iPhone. In The Netherlands T-Mobile will sell the iPhone, while incumbent telco KPN also wanted to sell the iPhone, despite the dislike of its boss, Ad Scheepbouwer.

The iPhone has been readied for the European mobile market, which differs drastically from the US market. Orange will use its network which is a combination of widespread EDGE, Wi-Fi, 3G and HSDPA networks. iPhone 3G combines all the revolutionary features of iPhone with 3G networking that is twice as fast* as the first generation iPhone, built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs the hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK.

As a price 199 US dollar has been set. In present European currency this roughly would mean 120,00 euro. Question is of course, what kind of exchange rate the companies will choose. In some countries also the subsidising principle, driving down the costs of the device might work. The price, being so cheap, might work.

The roll-out will start from July 11 onwards. In Europe this will mean holiday season with Dutch and Germans are going to Spain, the Mediterranean coast of France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Greece in great numbers. Was this day picked purposely, so that the warehouses would not be empty in a day or two?

Will people buy it in Europe. The sale of the first version of the iPhone was not exactly a bomb, to put it mildly. So why should the Europeans fall for it now? Of course the iPhone 3G has been adapted to the European networks. The price has gone down dramatically. But will Apple be able to remove the impression that the first generation was not really super. The telecom operators T-Mobile and Orange will know soon after the roll-out. In the sale is not impressive after a few days, the telecom operators should keep an army of students, clad in telephone wear, at hand to scour and canvas the beaches.

Will I buy it? Not for the time being. I recently bought an HTC. Am I happy with it. No, but I am sick and tired of discovering all the procedures and the ways you have to work around features. Of course Apple will tell me that it has an intuitive interface. For the time being I am not ready for another device, regardless whether I can watch TV on it, listen to radio and music and read newspapers, magazines and movels. By the end of July I will phone up my friends on my HTC and do a survey on whether they have bought an iPhone or are going to buy one.

Update 20080614T-Mobile in The Netherlands expects many iPhone buyers. It says that 40.000 people requested the newsletter about iPhone in one week. The iPhone 3G will not deliver a percentage of the data traffic to Apple but a fixed fee.

Blog Posting Number: 1126

Tags: mobile telephony

Warner Bros. takes Blu-ray stand

The entertainment company Warner Bros. has decided to publish movies exclusively in the Blu-ray DVD format from June 1, 2008 onwards. This is a heavy blow for the Toshiba and Microsoft, who support the HD-DVD format.


Many signs point to the end play of this company power game between industrial camps. It is clear that consumers are not being impressed by technology specs, but want one format and a reasonably priced DVD player. It is the old video recorder lesson, when JVC won from Sony’s Betamax and Philips’ V2000 (they also happen to be technically superior to the JVC recorder).

In the development of the first DVD format a dichotomy was also showing between the CD inventors Sony/Philips and Toshiba. But pressured by IBM and some armwresling by Jan Timmer the companies produced one standard format. And again Toshiba split off when the high definition DVD had to be standardised. The main difference between the two formats is in the storage capability; the Blue-ray format can comprise 25GB on a single layer and HD-DVD can contain 15GB. Of course both camps hold several patents, which they like to use in their players.

Why does it look like an end-play? With Warner Bros. taking sides with Blu-ray all kind of rumours spring up and certainly during the Consumer Electronics Show, which is being held. Toshiba was supposed to hold a press conference at CES, but cancelled, feeding speculations. So, rumour has it that Apple will implement a Blu-ray DVD player in its new computer model. And to top it all even the movie company Paramount is said to return to the Blu-ray DVD club with Philips and Sony.

However the consumer is putting on pressure too. The consumer is not going to buy two high definition DVD recorders, except for the buffs. But presently the economic crisis is not contributing either to the sale of high definition DVD recorders. First the mortgage and then the luxury. With this tight budget – if one still has some room in the budget – people do not want to be confronted with a choice out of two and a lock-in by technology. Consumers look at the camp with the most movies and the most solid commitment; last April Toshiba sold its movie and DVD division. And movie companies look at the market place and ask themselves where they can sell most.

Also regional differences play a role in the DVD format battle. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are in direct battle on the US market and HD-DVD has an edge on Blu-Ray. The companies always introduce their devices at a later point in time in Asia and Europe. In Europe Blu-ray is ahead due to its implementation in Play Station 3; Microsoft delivers to the Xbox an optional HD-DVD player.

So the end-play has started. When will it be over? I guess that HD-DVD will be over and buried by the summer, certainly if more movie companies join Blu-ray and Microsoft starts implementing Blu-ray in its new edition of Xbox.

Blog Posting Number: 973

Tags: DVD format, HD-DVD, Blu-ray

My museum of content related artefacts (22)

1980: Apple II

In 1980 I got acquainted with Apple. In the company we had CP/M machine like the Superbrain (see photograph from the VNU Koerier). But as we were a new media lab, we tried everything; also Apple. To me the Apple was the same as the CP/M machines, but in 1980 the Apple was fascinating to me in as far as it made music. Apple as well as CP/M computers were ready for programming in Basic, text processing in Wordstar and calculating with Visicalc.

But at Christmas 1980, I took the Apple machine home and discovered the music on it. At that time to me a computer was no more than an automated typewriter and an enlarged calculator. The Apple II had a computer version of Switch-on Bach (listen to a fragment of the analogue version), a bestseller of the MOOG synthesizer music. I had bought the vinyl version in 1968 and still have it. It still makes Christmas 1980 stand out.

The Apple IIe in my collection is not the first Apple I worked with. From an acquaintance I got an Apple IIe, a machine produced from 1983 onwards. The keyboard was fixed to the machine. On top of it there is a separate dual floppy disk drive. The monitor is still in one of my moving boxes.

Come to think of it, the first confrontation with an Apple did not convert me to the Apple section. Despite the fact that I was impressed by the interface, I never bought an Apple for the company. When I worked for the newspaper company Wegener for one year in 1995, I was issued a portable Apple as the company was into graphics. I enjoyed the use of it, but once the year was over I did not feel unhappy going back to my Windows PC.

Yet I have always been impressed by the inventiveness of the company. Besides the many computers as Apple II, Lisa and Apple Book, it created the personal digital assistant Newton with handwriting recognition software; the iPOD; iTunes, the iPhone. Apple brought and still brings sound and vision to computing.

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Blog Posting Number: 831

Tag: digital heritage

My museum of content related artefacts (15)

1987: External CD-ROM player

The external CD-ROM player on the photograph was my first private CD-ROM player, a Sanyo PD1, Portable CD-ROM drive (serial number 13711231). At that time I was working for a software company, which had electronic publishing as a mission. Publishing CD-ROMs was part of the mission. But preaching is not enough to convince potential clients. So a PC plus a CD-ROM player was needed and those PCs were not in abundance on the market. There was no consumer market yet as CD-ROM was still a carrier of text rather than multimedia. If you needed a CD-ROM player in the early years you needed external top loaders, which were not exactly portable. So the next generation external CD-ROM players had portables, which could be linked to the PC with a 16 pins cable and software. By 1988 the first built-in CD-Rom players came on the market, produced by unknown companies. The company I was working for bought a BEST machine, which looked like a sewing machine with a blue screen. It worked well and it was transportable (something like 8 kilo in weight); but for demonstration purposes it was sufficient.

But the hardware was not the only worry from the start of CD-ROM. There was a problem with the software. From the beginning of CD-ROM in 1985 there was a problem with the software format. Every brand had its own format, which presented a problem to publishers. They would have to format their products according to brands. This would present an extra cost factor. As the problem was soon recognised by the industry, action was initiated. Computer companies (Apple), publishers (Elsevier Science with Philip Lord), software companies (Microsoft) and electronics manufacturers (Philips) started to talk to each other and decided to establish an industry standard to overcome this standard. And soon there was the High Sierra standard, named after the conference hotel High Sierra at Lake Tahu (USA). This industry standard became an official standard, ISO 9660. This standard gave an impulse to the CD-ROM text publishing industry.

In the first five years of CD-ROM the market was a professional information market and the products were mainly text oriented products such a reference works and databases. With the advent of internet between 1991 and 1993, the debate came to the point that publishers were asking themselves whether the future would be off-line with CD-ROM or online. A publisher like Elsevier SCience had invested heavily in CD-ROMs as the products were close to the books they used to publish.

It was only by 1989 that the consumer market was addressed, partly with text products and multimedia products. Problem was the lack of an industry standard of multimedia. By 1991 the MPC standard came about and the CD-ROM market bursted open. PCs were sold with built-in CD-ROM players and a bundle of CD-ROMs. Philips, still a computer manufacturer at that time, was ahead of the trend and started in 1989 the Headstart PC series with built-in CD-ROM player and a bundle/bookshelf of CD-ROMs. In Europe the bundle of CD-ROMs, under the name CompLex, was produced by AND in Rotterdam; one of these CD-ROMs contained a European road database.

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Blog Posting Number: 826

Tags: digital heritage

My museum with content related artefacts (6)

1996: PDAs

I started to experiment with PDAs in 1996. My first one was a Sharp ZR-5800. Later on I bought an HP 320LX. I was rather late in the game. In fact in 1981 I saw a prototype of a handheld computer; the label Personal Digital Assistant did not exist at that time. But I saw a first prototype at the annual conference of International Electronic Publishing Research Centre (IEPRC), which was held on the grounds of the Paper Research Institute in Leatherhead, UK.


Present as a delegate was also Dr David Potter, who was typing on a small machine, which consisted of three parts: a small screen, a keyboard and a battery part. It looked a little bit like a later copy of the Psion series on the photograph. David Potter was one of the smart guys of the UK together with Clive Sinclair, who later on produced the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers. David had established a software house in 1980, which developed games to make money in order to invest in PDA-like machines. The article in the UK Wikipedia on Psion also explains the company name as "Potter Scientific Instruments Or Nothing", a reference to its founder David Potter, CBE.

Later on I met in the Netherlands an entrepreneur who was thinking along the lines of PDAs. But he was too far ahead of the masses. The company was named ENPROS. It wanted to manufacture small machines, which worked with flash memory. The brochure gave a clear idea of the what the machine was intended for (see illustration)

The term Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) did not exist until January 7, 1992 and was coined by the then Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the speech where he coined the name he referred to the Apple Newton. Apple developed and marketed this line of PDAs from 1993 to 1998. Suddenly the handhelds of Psion and Palm had a label. And the Newton, an allusion to Isaac Newton's apple, had something more than the others. For its message pad it featured handwriting recognition software. This handwriting recognition software was in its early stages and did not function too well. In fact there have complete take-offs on television like in the series of the Simpsons, ridiculing the handwritten results.

By 1996 I thought that PDAs would be as normal as address and appointment books in the future and that people could also load a book into the memory and read it when they were riding the train or flying. And indeed Peanut Press provided e-Books for the Palm handhelds. But none of the other computer companies stimulated publishers to go into e-Books for their PDAs. I think that it has been a missed chance.

Do I use a PDA at present? No. I will be going for the Nokia Communicator as it will hold my address and calendar books; but I will not load books onto it. I will keep my iLiad for that purpose.

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Blog Posting Number: 818

Tags: digital heritage, PDA

Going back in time

Holiday in the Netherlands has started for some time now. But last night it was officially kicked off. It was Friday 13th of July and it will be 11 months on before another Friday will be on Friday. Reason enough for Arko van Brakel of the Nieuwe helden (New Heroes) to throw a party, complete with music. For the party he invited people he had worked with in the past, which makes up a nice group of internet experts.

Arko (see photograph) and I got to talk about I told him about my Bahrain trip and he was very interested, more than a casual listener. It turned out that Arko had been to Bahrain in 1995 to talk about internet. He would be completely surprised to find out that internet is now part of life, also in Bahrain. He should see all the government systems such as the electronic visa application and the hospital information system. But he has never been back in Bahrain since.

I had also taken my text iPOD iLiad along and showed it to him and other people. They were very impressed with the immaculate and beautiful screen. They toyed around with it and leaved through some books on the iLiad.

So the holiday can start. I will not be on holiday now. So I will continue this blog. Tomorrow I start with a mini-series on content artefacts from my museum. I will go back in time starting with the iLiad and going back to 1977, stopping to commemorate DVD, CD-ROM and CD-I, but also the three waves of electronic books, my first portable PC, the videotext executive terminal, but also the first PC software. I will end the series with the Apple IIe. Main focus will be on the content side and my personal recollections. So go with us back in time.

Blog Posting Number: 812

Tags: history

Mobile entertainment (2)

Last Monday I visited the symposium on mobile entertainment: now and in the future, organized by students of INHolland College in Haarlem. The audience mainly consisted of students and instructors as well as a few outsiders, a scriptwriter, a blogger of Mobile Dutchcowboys and me.

The program had been built up in two tracks of presentations which were held once. So choices had to be made and by definition four presentations had to be missed. After the introduction, the first selection moment presented itself: a presentation on the network of KPN or a presentation of Microsoft the Netherlands. Both are public companies quoted at the stock exchange, so no real novelties will be told and presuming that the network presentation was going to be rather technical I went to the Microsoft presentation. Perhaps the guy was going to give a reaction on the iPhone.

The presentation was nicely built up with market research data, basically indicating that consumers are going to spend more money on data service and certainly on mobile gaming; $ 722 million in 2006 and $ 1.3 billion in 2010. Mobile will become more interesting for mobile services as everyone is used to a mobile and with the data speed becoming faster and more comparable to the fixed line speeds, mobile data services will become more prominent. But the acceptance will follow the model of business first and then consumers.

For Microsoft this means that it will have to address mobile data services. It means that Microsoft is confronted with multiple form factors of stand alone machines, networked PCs and PDAs. And even in mobile Microsoft has to address mobile multiple form factors with Windows. There are now some 140 devices around, which are moving from a media centric orientation (mediabox for TV) to a voice centric orientation and on to a data centric orientation; let alone the notebooks and tablets. Mobile telephones are moving from talking machines to data machines, from devices with small screens to larger screen.

Microsoft has now a range of mobile software with Windows Mobile, Windows CE (e.g. to be used for the infotainment system in Fiat cars), and Windows embedded. It is clear that Microsoft wants to couple smart mobiles to the net and have the users go through an experience. An example was shown in the presentation. A Silverlight plug-in for the webbrowser combined with Deepfish for the building up the page on a mobile was shown in the example of the major baseball league, including video and audio (see photograph).

In the Q&A session the inevitable question about the Jezus machine of Apple, the iPhone, popped up. Was Microsoft going to follow also that road. The Microsoft presenter offered compliments to Apple, but supposed that Microsoft would not follow the example. In his opinion Microsoft was a platform development company and not a service oriented company. I guess I do not agree with that. It is just that Microsoft is always late and imitates. Microsoft was late in internet browsers; Microsoft was late mobile software; the X-box came after PSP and the Zune followed the iPOD. So one day Microsoft will have a device comparable to the iPhone (famous last words!). I guess that it will be nicknamed the Gates machine.

Blog Posting Number: 803

Tags: mobile entertainment