BPN 1659: WSA Grand Jury 2013 in Tallinn, Estonia (8)

Just imagine: one startup to almost 1000 Estonians. That is the remarkable statistic about the wave of startup activity in Estonia in the 10^th anniversary year of Skype. Their company names cover the full alphabet from A-Z. All these companies are located at the TechnoPol IT park in Tallinn. The Technopol IT park is a cooperation of the Estonian business community, the government and the university. The park is almost symbolically situated next to the international airport. The startups can and do fly out at short notice.

The success of the intensive business started in 2000 when the Estonian government began working on an e-government. But it the e-gov innovation did not take place in just a void. Estonia had already a fine IT infrastructure. The e-Cabinet was eventually shaped by four independent IT companies. But also businesswise IT was doing well. In fact Estonia became the cradle of Skype. When this company was sold to eBay in 2005 for 1.9 billion euro, part of the money was ploughed back in the country, creating a wave of startups. Skype, in the meantime part of Microsoft, has still a substantial subsidiary of 400 people in Estonia (see photograph).
 

Healthcare is an area of attention. The care sector has formed the eHealth Foundation, which develops health care solutions for in the hospital with tablets, but also mobile solutions, while on-the- go, for example in an ambulance.

The range of applications and systems is very wide. The firm Defendec has set apart the company IoT (Internet of Things), which creates machine-to-machine solutions, solving smart streetlight plans.  

One of the winners of the World Summit Award 2013 is GoSwift. This is an application for truckers who want to cross the border from Estonia to Russia. This used to be a problem with long waiting times, lots of waste and garbage as well as selling tickets to the highest bidder. By setting up a queu management system waiting times have been cut down, waste and garbage reduced and corruption cut out.

BPN 1209 When will Blu-ray be over

It is interesting to hear how the consumer electronics manufacturers are looking for the next golden egg in the compact disc technology. At the consumer electronics fair IFA in Berlin the manufacturers are sending out messages. Sony and Philips tell the consumer that Blu-ray will be a mass product in two years time, while Panasonic says that DVD will be terminated soon. And the loser of the race for the successor to DVD, Toshiba, is still selling a High Definition booster to the DVD. In short, the DVD generation is nearing the end of its commercial DVD lifecycle.

It is almost 15 years ago that Philips boss Jaap Timmer, supported by IBM, banged the heads of the rivals and told them to set a common standard. Toshiba gave in and the DVD could get a fast start. After 10 years there was a new round for specifications of the next generation of DVDs, which was going to include more volume, but especially High Definition. This time Toshiba, NEC, Matsusishu and Microsoft did not give in and started to develop their own next generation DVD format. But they had to give up as sales were not impressive and the movie world held back. In the end Sony won the race with Blu-ray.

So now Philips has become a Blu-ray missionary, as many of its patents have been brought into the technical specification and says that Blue-ray will be a mass product within two years. It gambles that the film fans will start playing their DVD collection on the Blu-ray player and eventually will buy the Blu-ray version of the movie. After that wave the masses will follow. Sony on the other hand serves already the market of game consoles with Blu-ray and of course will also sell Blu-ray players to the movie loving audience. In fact Sony will have the Blu-ray version of the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.

Will the Blu-ray really be a mass product in two years? The introduction of CD-ROM from the lab to the commercial market took three years and it was a success almost five years later. The introduction of the DVD from the lab to the commercial market took also three years and it was a success almost four years later. The Blu-Ray came on the market in 2005 and did not make much impact so far. Now after three years it looks like it will pick up. The movie industry does not have to make a choice any longer and neither has the consumer. So the consumer gets more volume, a better picture and an online link BD Live.

But the customer follows the industry. Presently there are roughly 200 movies on Blu-ray. This will not be enough to convince people to buy a Blu-ray player. A portfolio of at least 750 movies is needed to get the traffic in the consumer electronics shops going. Whether that portfolio will be reached in two years time is debateable.

There are two factors influencing the acceptance of Blu-ray: the portfolio and the introduction of disruptive technology. Big movie firms release between the 450 and 600 new movies every year. So in numbers the portfolio can be put together; however not every movie will automatically be released on Blu-ray. My guess is that by 2012 the Blu-ray will sell as DVD is selling presently. And in the background of course lure the disruptive technology of broadband. How fast will Hollywood release movies in HD quality over broadband? I do not think that Blu-ray will be the last offline movie medium to be replaced by online. But once the speeds are up, the online distribution of movies might become more interesting. I guess that the games world is already predicting that trend.

Blog Posting Number: 1209

Tags: DVD, Blu-ray, broadband

BPN 1013 HD-DVD: It’s over

Toshiba stops promoting the HD-DVD format. From today on the company will decrease the distribution of the HD-DVD players and recorders, and by the end of March it will stop the entire distribution. Toshiba terminates the product line of players and recorders, as film studios and retail chains no longer supported the DVD format.

This is a real blow for Toshiba. The Japanese company had built up a slew of movie companies, hardware and software manufacturers as well as retail chains for the distribution of the HD-DVD players, recorders and titles. And now the game is over for Toshiba and its following, which includes Microsoft as the most prominent partner. Toshiba and the companies which followed will have to write off a lot of money on the research, production and stock. (Save a recorder/player and several titles for the Museum of the Future, for digital heritage's sake, please).

This decision proves that the market will not take two different formats for its edutainment products, certainly not when exclusive deals are being made. This was already clear from the history of the first DVD series, when Toshiba also tried to set up its own format, but bowed for the pressure of IBM, being helped by Philips.

Does this mean that Philips and Sony have won? This depends on the horizon of duration of this format. One lesson has been learned. Despite the fact that movie titles are a driving force of the DVD and HD-DVD format, the format of the second generation of DVDs has been dictated by the game world. Sony built in the Blu-ray in the PlayStation. Microsoft offered HD-DVD optionally for XBox users; HD-DVD would have had a better chance if they had been built in.

So now the victory march for Philips and Sony can begin. Their stock prices will rise a little bit, I guess. Just for some days and no longer than that. For DVD is no longer a real money maker for Philips or Sony. The recorders of Philips and Sony are still pricy, the players will drop and be given away, when you buy a few movie titles. But it is not the manufacturing which makes money for Philips and Sony in the field of DVD and Blu-ray, but it is the stream of license money on the patents. With the sale of every non-Philips and non Sony hardware as well as the discs, the cash till will rattle; be it for a few euro cents, yet we are talking about millions of pieces of hardware and discs.

The victory might also be short-lived as glass fibre becomes more common. By offering glass fibre connections, the need for DVD and its second generation will decrease, as the speed of downloading will increase dramatically. In fact it will be just as a milestone as the change from dial-up to ADSL was., but then exponentially. The whole optical disc movement which started in 1984 is temporary as optical discs contain only frozen online.

The DVD format war is over after two years. Let it be a lesson for the future.

Blog Posting Number: 10012

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

BPN 1008 The flood of press releases on mobile stops today

Today the boys and girls of the mobile industry pack up and will leave Barcelona. They have a lot to think of. They got quite some messages for the next year to think about. I am not in the mobile business nor am I in Barcelona. I am just a mobile user with an interest in the development of mobile content. So I have been reading the stream of press releases. Most of them could be relegated to the dustbin immediately and were not even worth reading. And as I wrote before about the Readius, the mobile with flexible digital paper, of course the old tricks were played to lure the press; but the press can have a better memory these days due to search engines. (I recently spoke to someone who had seen and felt the Readius and was shocked to find out that you have to open the mobile when called. There is no interface and/or screen on the outside of the mobile to accept the call. This mobile will not win a usability award, was his final judgement).

The flood of press releases shows that the mobile industry will have to deal with saturation. This year there will be more mobiles in China than in the USA. Of course there are still markets which still have to pick up mobile telecom, but they are not the most interesting markets. And the profit margins on devices are under pressure; Nokia has to move its production from Germany to Romania.

After saturation, consolidation sets in. No longer the various models of mobile telephone (or handy as the Germans call the device) are important but the software will influence the acquisition. And the software is based on the operating system. Presently there are some 50 operating systems and new ones still pop up like Google's Android. But the most important ones for now dominate the market: Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, Opera. And the manufacturers are no longer strict in using operating systems. Even Symbian shareholder Sony-Ericsson has now used Microsoft Mobile in one of its new models. And they are desperately looking for infrastructure like search engines. Of course Microsoft hoped to catch two flies in one go with Yahoo. Once the search engine would be part of the conglomerate, it could also function as mobile search engine.

But the main manufacturers and operators are still dancing around the issue of content. The latest item in content is of course television. This will bring in the ship with gold; so they think. I am not a believer of that. Mobile television will fit in the snack culture: short, funny movies. I do not believe that you will watch television series. In my view this will be something for the Ultra Mobile PCs, which will flood the market by mid 2008.

But also in other content areas, manufactures are looking again. Nokia started to distribute content of games, music, navigation information and other information through its Ovi service. Local operators will be glad to pick up the connect minutes, but will not get any extra’s out of it. The operators have also looked for the content revenue extension. But the time of the walled garden services is over. Besides people pick what they want to have and not what the operators think that they should have.

One of the reasons mobile content has not been a success is the tariff of connect time. Just downloading a1Mb from the mobile net cost a fortune. Of course T-Telecom has brought down the price, but if you have to pay yourself, you will not connect to YouTube for the daily selection. And money is not the only handicap, but also the operating systems. The scaling/reformatting of internet screens does not really work, even not on smart phone screens.

There is an old wisdom in the PC world that you have to sell a PC for free and ask money for software. IBM forgot to do this, when it launched the PC in 1981 and Microsoft came in. In 2004 IBM had to sell its PC business to Lenovo. Nokia is trying to hold the fortress by launching the Ovi service. But will this service mature in time to deliver profits, when the profits on device manufacturing will start to tumble and local operators are back to their old game of ticks and bundles.

Blog Posting Number 1008

Tags: mobile, walled garden, smart phone, digital paper

BPN 999 Google still rules the search market, but for how long?

The company Indenty has published a Dutch language report of 52 pages on search engine marketing under the title Google still determines, but for how long... The authors, Michel Bieze and Peter Schinkel, looked at the competition between search engines, the development in searching, search engine marketing campaigns and the search engine marketing bureaus.


In summary the following conclusions are produced:
- Competitors will be able to damage the imago of Google, now that Google has left the ‘do not evil’ principle behind and has replaced this with commercial monopoly. In the market opportunities are created for an Open Source Search engine, when this initiative is supported by the Open Source Community.
- Mobile internet will be mainly used for local search questions and the fulfilment of an immediate information need.
- Due to the Google algorithm updates, the link structure itself will be less influential. More stress will be on the relevance of web pages in the link structure and the uniqueness of the content in the web page.
- Social bookmarking and personalised search will be the trends for the next five years.
- SEA campaigns need well converting landing pages, the use of images and user interaction.
- For SEO campaigns the relevance of the web pages in link structures and the uniqueness of content will be more important. The top 500 advertisers will choose for a holistic approach with optimised web sites.
- For the search engine marketing bureaus client loyalty will be a challenge due to the rising level of knowledge among advertisers.

The report comes at an interesting time. The proposed merger of Microsoft and Yahoo will become a challenge to Google; of course the question still is whether Yahoo wants to merge with Microsoft (a pioneer of internet with the slowest internet software provider).

The report sees opportunities for an Open Source Search Engine. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has started such an initiative under the name of Wiki Search. But the first trial was not impressive. Besides the search engine follows the same search principles as Google.

The report has a holy belief in Google’s algorithm, which is based on simplified Boolean operators and masses of results. I do not notice any research in other algorithms, which will deliver more precise results and less duplications. I take it also that internet users are becoming more and more versatile with searching and will be able to use the AND, OR and NOT as long as Boolean operators are in use.

Blog Posting Number: 999

search engine, search engine marketing
Tags: search engine, search engine marketingIdentity, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

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

Wikia not moving Fast

There is some movement in the field of search engines. Jimmy Wales has launched the first prototype of Wiki Search, while Bill Gates is attempting to leave Microsoft with the legacy of a decent search engine by bidding for the Norwegian search engine Fast Search & Transfer.

Wikia or Wiki Search is part of a commercial project, contrary to Wikipedia, and is now in its alpha version and it will take another two years to mature. Wikia is open source and will have to develop with the input of users. Presently mainly English language websites are indexed; the alpha version has some 50 to 100 million web pages of the 18 billion indexed pages by Google or the unofficial estimate of 30 billion pages. Search results will come with mini articles with a small explanation or photograph. Users can write mini articles regarding the subject like in the Wikipedia. User can also rank articles thus providing better results. The site starts out for searches, but in the future images should be searchable as well as news. To protect Wikia from spamming the same methods are being used as with Wikipedia.

I have had a look at the search system and can imagine that it will take at least another two years. Of course with help of the open source community and open content community it should be possible to reach a competitive stage with Google earlier. But this help might be sparse as Wikia is a commercial operation.

The results of the search were very disappointing. I did 3 searches. One calibration was searching for my name, one search action for the blog and one search on cross-media. The search for my name Jak Boumans delivered 11 results, of which 6 were displayed and the series of 7 to 11 was not accessible. The first 6 results were not impressive: 3 results were duplications, 2 were not really important references and one result was okay. For the first 6 results the search engine had picked up references fitting the multiple word criterion; what I did not get to see is whether the other results dealt with Jak and Boumans separately. Searching for this blog’s name, I had 2 hits, both referring to secondary sources and not to the blog itself. Last but not least I searched for cross-media. I did this in order to see how it would handle cross-media, with or without a hyphen and perhaps even a word morph like x-media, with or without a hyphen. The list of its results was overwhelming 1490 hits, again only 10 hits were displayed; there was a reference for the hits from 11 to 20, but again this did not work. Of course, asking for such a fashionable media term is like asking for the word God in the Bible or Allah in the Koran. Clear is that the search engine looked for cross-media and cross media, but not for crossmedia and the search engine did not sidestep to the term xmedia.

On the search engine front there was some encouraging news: Microsoft had made a bid for 837 million euro (1152 million dollar) for Fast Search & Transfer. I have written about this search engine before. I consider it as one of the best one in Europe and a better search engine than Google. So far it has been oriented to the business market. It has dived into the mobile search market and in the advertising sector. When Microsoft has bought this company by the second quarter (it is a friendly acquisition), it most likely will start out to exploit it in the business sector as Fast Search is active there already. I would not be surprised, when Microsoft would start to build up a competitor of Google in the background.

Blog Posting Number: 972

Tags: search engine

A Happy and Open 2008

Two Dutch parliamentary commissions have approved an action plan to set a soft deadline for the application of open standards and open source software in government environments. Mr Heemskerk, vice-secretary at the department of Economic Affairs and a former software application entrepreneur, has set a hard deadline for January 1, 2009. The action plan should lead to more competition and lower costs for the government.

The action plan, entitled The Netherlands open in connection, is ambitious in its objectives and its time window. The plan has three objectives: increasing interoperability, decreasing dependency on software suppliers and promotion of a level playing field in the software market. All objectives can be reached by defined open standards. The proposal distinguishes between open standards improving the interoperability and the use of open source.

If there is equality between open source software and software of a closed system, the open source should be preferred. When government bodies want to use a closed application rather than a open source application or open standards, they will have to explain the reason why and offer a time scheme, telling when the open standard will be applied; the so called comply or explain/commit principle.

The action plan contains rigid deadlines. Government bodies are obliged to apply the comply-or-explain/commit principle, while other (semi-) state bodies and institutes have December 2008 as a deadline. From January 2009 implementation strategies have to be formulated for tendering, buying and using open source software by all government ministerial departments. One year later these strategies should also be applied for semi-government bodies such as education, health and social care institutes.

The Dutch citizen should notice the first results by January 2009, when the Open Document Format (ODF)or the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications should be in use for text files, spreadsheets, graphs and presentation by all ministerial departments.

In the meantime the vice secretary of the Economic Affairs department has asked the Dutch monopoly watchdog to perform a market analysis. The government estimates that it would save no less than 5,6 million euro (8,8 million US dollars).

It is not surprising that the reactions to the action plan were a mixed bag. Microsoft’s CEO in The Netherlands thinks that the Dutch government will burn its fingers, if the action plan will be executed without change. “In fact, innovation will be curbed”, he said (Hear Microsoft!). So far Microsoft’s Open Office XML standard failed to achieve certification by ISO. The Dutch association of ICT entrepreneurs ICT~Office reacted ambiguously, as could be expected. It profiles itself as an association for open and closed software developers, while it has only a few open source software developers among its 450 members. ICT~Office stresses that the focus of tenders should be on facts and not on emotions. The OpenDoc Society is happy with the action plan as far as the support of open standards.

So I wish you a happy and open 2008. One of my first actions will be to order an ASUS EEE with Linux OpenOffice software.

Blog Posting Number: 965

Tags: open standard, open source software

DVD Forum anniversary party rudely disturbed

This month the DVD Forum celebrates its 10th anniversary. And the members of this international organization that defines formats for DVD products and technologies, took care of the fire crackers: Paramount will exclusively use the HD-DVD format for releasing its movies for one year.

The Forum is a collaboration between the consumer electronics, IT and entertainment industries and was founded in August 1997. It assumed and extended the work of the DVD Consortium, the ten-company organization that initially developed the DVD format. When it started its work in developing the DVD format and promoting its widespread dissemination, the DVD Forum counted 86 members. Today, it has about 220 member companies, drawn from all over the world.

The launch of DVD was one of the most successful consumer product launches in history. An immediate hit with consumers around the world, DVD brought new and exciting capabilities to home entertainment, computing and gaming, and created an immense global market: 2006 demand for DVD players and recorders stood at over 110 million units, and reached about 290 million units for DVD drives. In the same year, 1.7 billion DVD movie discs were shipped in the North America, while shipments of recordable discs climbed to 5.1 billion discs globally.

In an anniversary message, it reads: This extraordinary success rests on the concerted efforts and long-term support of the DVD Forum. The Forum assured the versatility and wide-ranging applicability of DVD by defining key specifications that met diverse needs, including those for DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-Audio, DVD-RW, and DVD-Video Recording(5). The Forum continues to define the future for DVD, and is now promoting development of HD DVD, the next generation DVD format -- based on blue laser -- and working on the development of an integrated networking environment -- extending DVD formats to adapt to the expanding online world.

But the anniversary party has been rudely disturbed by the fire crackers of Paramount movie studios and its subsidiary Dreamworks. Paramount has chosen to release movies in the HD-DVD format only for one year. The company hopes to force a format dominance on the market. Paramount follows the lead of Universal Pictures which had exclusively chosen for HD-DVD as its only release format. According to The Wall Street Journal, Paramount will get money and promotion assistance for one year in lieu for the format exclusivity. (from what company will it get money? Microsoft?).

This fight has always been immanent since the two DVD format parties of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray could not agree. They nicely went ahead, but both knew that the fight was going to be on the commercial battlefield: the consumer will decide. Dreamworks indicated that it chose for the HD-DVD format not for the financial support the studios get for it, but because the HD-DVD player costs less than 300 dollar. The cheapest Blu-Ray player costs 449 dollars.

Is that argument valid? I do not think so. Mr Katzenberg of Dreamworks should know his classics and remember that the video tape fight in 1980 was won by the company which had the most content, regardless the genre. Can Universal and Paramount offer the consumer so much content in only HD-DVD format, that Blu-Ray will wither? Forget it. For the DVD is not only a movie format, but also a game format. Sony uses Blu-Ray for its Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox plays HD-DVD.

The battle field is larger than the movie industry and Universal Pictures and Paramount will not o dictate the format. The HD-DVD camp with Masushita, Microsoft, Universal and Paramount will battle the Blu-Ray camp of Philips/Sony, Walt Disney and News Corp. Which company will have the largest offer of entertainment products; that is the question.

Paramount will review its stance after a year. By then the company will find itself in isolation and will have lost a lot of money by not selling its movies to the Blu-Ray community or it will have gained a dominance in the movie world, but not in the gaming world, which has other buying rules. In both cases the consumer will loose.

Blog Posting Number: 846

Tags: DVD format

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 of content realted artefacts (8)

1995: Seiko SMS watch

In 1995 I bought a Seiko MessageWatch. It was one with a digital display, indicating the time, while the display also rendered messages such as telephone numbers to call, but also short messages. It was a nice piece of technology. And the technology enabled communication and content; but the services were lousy, at least in the Netherlands. They eventually folded when mobile phones with SMS became popular.

The MessageWatch was a nice combination of a time piece and a chip containing a tunable receiver chip, a DSP chip to extract the information. It used an FM subcarrier to receive its information. The FM subcarrier is an auxiliary channel used for items like Musak music, data and communications and foreign-language audio channels. Seiko negotiated per country access to the FM subcarrier and organised its service. So when I arrived in New York in 1998 the temperature in the city was displayed on my watch.

In the Netherlands someone wearing the MessageWatch could receive message from people, who used the phone in order to get into contact with them or who wanted to mail short standard messages like SMS messages now, but shorter. So the office regularly sent a message, requesting to call someone who had phoned the office. And then I jumped out of the train or bus, went to a public phone booth and called the person in question. There was a problem as far as coverage; you were never sure that the message arrived.

But on the technology also a publishing service was organised. In the Netherlands the service was called Minimail. The service broadcasted very short headlines. And the shorter the headlines, the more incomprehensible the message became. You can not do much with a headline like: Dangerous explosion without the mention of a location. But the service was cheap and in most cases you could make out what was going on. On January 1, 2002 the Dutch Minimail service, which took care of transmitting the messages and services to the smart watches, ended its services after six years of service.

As mobile phones were not as common as they are now, the Seiko MessageWatch was a nice intermediary device with content, a headline news service. The watch was only a receiving device. It was not the communication device in the series Star Trek, in which Captain Kirk requests transportation from Montgomery Scott with the famous sentence: Beam me up, Scotty.

The message watch remained a mythical piece. In January 2003 Microsoft announced details of a comparable service to transmit information over FM radio to watches equipped with its Smart Personal Objects Technology. SPOT watch buyers would be able to select from a menu micro messages such as news, stock quotes, weather, traffic, and restaurant guides. By the end of the year the launch was postponed. The main differences between the MessageWatch and SPOT watches were the network connection and advances in low-power radio receivers that make for more powerful receivers and longer battery life. By January 2004 the smart watches based on Microsoft’s SPOT Technology came onto the market, amongst others produced by Swatch, but the watch did not make any impression. In fact it never crossed the ocean to Europe. Time had passed for this push technology.

But as the world turns, a new watch has been manufactured, to which you can speak and receive messages, the M500 Mobile Fone Watch. You can use it to phone; it is a tri-band GSM with GPRS. It has a touch screen display, multimedia player (MP3/AAC/MP4), Bluetooth and USB on board. It looks great, but battery life is not long; only 80 hours in standby mode. But despite the communication facilities, it looks that it will be only a luxury gadget competing with a mobile.

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Blog Posting Number: 820

Tags: digital heritage

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

Microsoft under x-fire

Microsoft finally bowed last Saturday, admitting last Saturday that something could be wrong with the CD-player of the Xbox-360. In the Netherlands after more than 1000 complaints, the television consumer program Kassa (Cash!) took Microsoft on to test and demonstrated that Xbox-360 discs could be damaged.

It had been singing around already for sometime in the gamers’ quarters. But the rumour was every time stemmed by Microsoft by repeating the message to put the Xbox-360 on a stable surface. But after a thorough test shown on TV (see the Dutch language broadcast), it was clear that Microsoft could not maintain that it was only a matter of putting the Xbox-360 in a stable position. During the program the CD player was blamed for the scratches as the lens lacks padding.

The conclusion of the consumer broadcast was difficult to swallow for Microsoft. Having blamed the users themselves for incorrect usage in a broadcast of February 24th, Microsoft now declared that scratches can surface on the discs due to regular usage. Microsoft did not want to react to the findings of the broadcast in particular as it was not part of the test. The company said to have no indication that the problem is a large scale one. People with the problem should contact the company. The player will be inspected and if needed repaired. The company will also inform the users how they can get replacements for the discs.

Looking at Microsoft handling this problem, one can only conclude that Microsoft is in a big fight with Nintendo and does not want to admit that there is a structural problem. Besides they have not taken the people that complained seriously. What should they have done?

Admitting that there was a problem could have been done when the first complaints were heard. At that time they could have seriously supported the complainants by repair and replacement. Microsoft did not do so. Depending on the number of complaints worldwide they could have started a call back of the Xbox-360, just like car companies do, when a serious safety problem occurs.

One can ask of course whether scratches on a disc are a serious safety problem. Of course they are, for gamers can no longer play their favourite game, when scratches appear on their disc. The gamers will get annoyed and will no longer be happy. And then they became a danger in the social traffic.

It still beats me that a company like Microsoft just plays down a consumer problem like this and does not pamper their gamers. They are the audience for the next generation Xbox. Once they get disappointed and switch to Nintendo, Microsoft looses a potential buyer for future game consoles.

Microsoft avoided having to undergo an x-fire during the broadcast. They did not appear, stood back and issues a written statement. This is not exactly the way of handling involved gamers, IMHO.

Blog Posting Number: 726

Tags: games