Teases the NYT: “Imagine a magic box that gives you an extra half-hour of free time every day. Imagine that it could also shift any TV show so that it comes on just as you sit down to watch. Imagine a gizmo so amazing that everyone who bought it turned into an evangelical fanatic, extolling its virtues to anyone within earshot.”
The answer: a Digital Video Recorder.
Intel said it has developed underlying technology for a new class of pocket-size gadgets that will store as many as 70 hours of video programming on a hard disk.
The gadgets, which Intel is calling portable videoplayers, are the latest in a growing category of devices that use storage capabilities normally found in computers to store digital entertainment.
To load up the player with video, users will need to connect the devices to a computer or a digital video recorder such as TiVo, a popular device for storing television programming onto a hard disk in the home, made by TiVo Inc., Alviso, Calif. Intel said it will take about three minutes to download roughly four hours of video, assuming a fast network connection and a new image-compression plan Intel is pushing. The devices, which also will store digital pictures and audio, will sport small color screens and enough battery life to play four hours of video.
Adds News.com: ” Intel won’t manufacture the device, but the design is meant for a player to be the size of a paperback book that downloads content from a PC via a USB 2.0 port or through wireless 802.11b networking technology. The device would include an Intel XScale processor, hard drive and liquid crystal display. The devices are expected to be available from manufacturers next year for about $400.”
Playstation 3 is likely to be 1000x more powerful than PS2. Writes Red Herring:
The soul of Sony’s new machine is a cell-computing chip. These chips enable a distributed style of computing (known as cell computing) that performs computing tasks in much the same way a cell phone network routes calls from base station to base station. Due for release in 2005, the PlayStation 3 will thus be able to use its broadband Internet connection to reach across the Internet and draw additional computing power from idle processors. And if still more horsepower is needed, the PlayStation 3 can use a home network to enlist support from other available machines to tackle big computing jobs. Pieces of a computing task–for example, creating realistic 3D graphics that simulate entire worlds–will be distributed among available processors to harness their combined power.
Buoyed by so much processing power, consumers will be able to interact with these worlds without worrying about hackers, viruses, or lost connections. Instead of using a mouse or game controller, players might wave their hands in front of a Web cam, showing what they want to do through gestures. They might play games without ever putting a disc into the console machine, downloading games from the Internet instead. They could tap into vast networks of movies and music, or they could record shows on the PlayStation 3 hard drive, which, by 2005, might hold 12,800 hours of music or 2,000 hours of video. And, starting with buying games from Sony, consumers will also be able to use the PlayStation 3 to engage in all sorts of e-commerce, through either a Sony ISP or a potential ally like AOL Time Warner.
Sony’s plan to build a box that could be the nexus of home entertainment was revealed in a speech by Shinichi Okamoto, senior vice president of research and development at Sony’s game division, at the Game Developers Conference in March. Mr. Okamoto said that Sony’s next box will make good on the unfulfilled promise of the PlayStation 2–that the PlayStation 3 will be a broadband-enabled computing machine. As such, it will compete not only with game consoles from Nintendo and Microsoft, but also with PCs from the likes of Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard, and with TV set-top boxes from Motorola and Philips.
The next few years will see a lot of action on the home front. That is now the Next Frontier.
Hward Rhiengold is a person who can spot revolutions before they happen, says the New York Times. Author of the “Virtual Community” book in 1993, his next book is on “Smart Mobs” and will be released later in the year. Writes NYT:
[Smart Mobs] has been coined by the author Howard Rheingold to describe groups of people equipped with high-tech communications devices that allow them to act in concert whether they know each other or not.
This phenomenon is showing up among teens in tech meccas like Tokyo, where wireless text messages have caught on in a big way. American hip-hop fans, using two-way pagers, spontaneously appear for parties. And in Finland, members of a local cooperative mix the virtual and the physical by communicating via pagers and cellphones to meet at their club.
It’s not all fun and games. Smart mobs in Manila contributed to the overthrow of President Joseph Estrada in 2001 by organizing demonstrations via forwarded cellphone text messages. Protesters at the World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle in 1999 were able to check into a sprawling electronic network to see which way the tear gas was blowing. Or they could use the network to determine their preferred level of involvement: nonviolent demonstrations, civil disobedience or mass arrests.
Mr. Rheingold argues that the convergence of wireless communications technologies and widely distributed networks allow swarming on a scale that has never existed before. He envisions shifts along the lines of those that began to occur when people first settled into villages and formed nation-states. “We are on the verge of a major series of social changes that are closely tied into emerging technologies,” he said.
This blossoming of smart mobs will probably happen despite the interests of business, Mr. Rheingold said, not because of any plan. He points to other technologies, like Napster, that have emerged into broad acceptance to the horror of larger business interests, and said that smart mobs could be setting the stage for the next big fight of the new economy over control of personal information and of the technologies that connect people.
Writes Lee Gomes in the WSJ in “An Ode to Computer Disk Drives”:
Today, IBM makes a gigabyte drive the size of your thumb, and an entry-level Dell PC comes with a 20-gigabyte drive. Seagate says that over the next dozen or so years, it expects to increase drive capacities a thousandfold. That sounds preposterous, until you realize that’s exactly what the industry has done in the past 12 or so years.
In three or four years, a few hundred dollars will buy a terabyte-size drive, or 1,000 gigabytes. Who needs that much storage? You do! Imagine one of those laptop DVD players, the sort first-class passengers get on airplanes, but all-digital, and holding 1,000 movies.
The one thing that computing is not is computerized. IBM is starting to think about goal-oriented computing, where you tell the computers what you want to do and let them work out the details. Strategy and implementation are literally merged: Come up with the strategy, and the implementation is automated.
IBM is breaking down strategy and implementation into smaller pieces, letting each component know the goals, monitor its own performance, and do some problem solving. At IBM, this merger of strategy and implementation became known as “SMASH”: simple, many, self-healing. The most effective computers would be made of many small, interchangeable components with the ability to monitor their own performance and solve problems as they arise rather than wait for instructions from the central processor: headquarters. Biology was IBM’s inspiration. A hangnail doesn’t prevent you from typing; the flu doesn’t prevent you from walking. Similarly, a small software or hardware problem shouldn’t bring computing to a halt.
This is part of IBM’s autonomic computing initiative.
WSJ writes about Case Western Reserve University:
In all, 16,000 computers, including student-owned machines in every dorm room, will be linked over the coming year to a fiber-optic network that delivers data at up to one gigabit per second. That is about a thousand times faster than the typical home broadband connection — so fast that the research university’s computer experts still don’t know exactly what they will do with so much capacity.
And that’s the point of this $27 million investment: Case will look to develop applications that benefit from a supercharged Internet.
With the new system, “you can actually do full-screen, full-motion high-definition video with high-definition sound,” said the school’s technology chief, Lev Gonick. “That’s pretty amazing when you think about research science.”
Medical students will be able to watch surgery in real time from a remote location yet experience it as if they were in the room. A musician could even study with a teacher in, say, New York via an Internet audiovisual conference — provided the teacher had an equally fast connection.
Smart Cards, which have been an “emerging technology” for quite a long time. I too had looked at smart cards in 1999 and had thought then that they could be a useful payment alternative in India where the credit/debit card penetration is still quite low. But somehow, smart cards have not taken off though many banks are making attempts. I have a feeling that smart cards have been like ISDN in the telecom area – “I Still Don’t Know” what to do with them!
Writes WSJ on a new approach being taken in the US:
Having seen the near-complete failure of large-scale smart-card applications, a handful of companies now are thinking small. They’re seeding rock concerts, movies and playgrounds with smart cards, hoping to spur young consumers to adopt the technology.
“The young-adult marketplace is the ideal place to start with new technology, especially if it’s low cost,” says David Morrison, president of Twentysomething, a Radnor, Pa., marketing-research firm that focuses on young people. “The companies can start recovering some capital investments and get a better feeling about the applications.”
The theory goes that once American kids have adopted the technology, their parents will become more familiar with it, and eventually more comfortable in using it. “Not only are you conditioning the youth market, but through demonstration and explanation, the larger market as well,” Mr. Morrison says.
One of the chief lessons learned in the 1998 [New York Upper West Side] experiment was that the cards need to offer more than just a cash substitute. The project’s credit-card sponsors said in the future they would like to put more functions on the cards — for example, allowing you to use the cards as subway passes or phone cards in addition to making simple purchases — and would introduce wider loyalty programs that offer perks to users.
As the article says later, “Smart cards have long been popular in Europe and Asia. In Hong Kong, the Octopus card started as a simple subway-fare card, but is now accepted by businesses ranging from fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. to local movie theaters, and even street parking meters. The cards also are increasingly used for security purposes at schools and residential complexes.”
I still feel Smart Cards have got good potential – what’s needed is a consortium of a few companies to aggregate together apps (so I can use the same smart card in multiple places).
It Slices! It Dices! Nanotube Struts Its Stuff, writes the NYTimes:
It is stronger than steel and far sharper than a pin. It shoots electrons and draws away heat. It can become the thinnest of wires and, potentially, electronic devices almost as minuscule as molecules.
In the last decade, the cylindrical molecule of carbon known as a nanotube has become a do-all wonder substance, touted for future use in everything from X-ray machines to paint. Nanotubes are already sprinkled in more than half of lithium ion batteries: their ability to carry electricity hastens recharging, and they act like tiny springs to hold apart the sheets of graphite in the battery, extending its lifetime.
Kevin Werbach’s article in The Feature describes how “communications is going to be free”, as it gets integrated on the same chips as computing by companies like Intel. Think of every chip with a built-in radio. Writes Werbach:
Integrating radios into chips is more than just an engineering accomplishment. It has profound consequences for the devices and services that make use of those chips. The most obvious advantage is price. When the addition of wireless communications to a device adds negligible cost to the device, there’s no reason not to do so.
Another advantage of building RF capabilities into CPUs is that wireless devices will have newfound smarts, because they will be able to take advantage of the computational power of the microprocessor. They will be able to sense and adapt to whatever wireless networks are within range.
The communications industry is also being transformed, just like the PC industry was verticalised more than a decade ago. Werbach:
The hardware elements of communications have already started to go horizontal. Handset vendors are outsourcing production to the same contract manufacturers that are prominent in the PC industry. Switching equipment increasingly uses general-purpose semiconductors. Once connectivity can be integrated into devices at marginal cost, though, the possibility of an entirely different communications industry arises.
Imagine that every laptop, every PDA, every home media server is also an agile communications device, able to connect to any available network. In such a world, paying a carrier for access to a single network, with a limited choice of services and hardware, will seem archaic. There will still be services businesses linking together these devices and, more important, the user data that flows across them. But they won’t look much like the integrated communications carriers of today.
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