Month: February 2004

Nokia Boss Admits N-Gage Below Expectations

Jorma Ollila Nokia chairman and chief executive, admitted to the Financial Times yesterday that the N-Gage, their gaming platform, has not been the success they had hoped for, in his words “The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal.”

The original aim was to sell 9 million units within its first two years, but many feel that the €300 (£200, US$380) is too expensive when compared with other gaming-only platforms such as the Nintendo GameBoy. It has also been criticised for its lack of game support and difficulty in operating it, in particular requiring the removal of the battery to change the game. The cracking of their game copy protection method last year has also not helped them with game publishers.

Ollila said he plans to wait until November 2005 to decide if it has been a success or failure.

Optical Fiber Communiation Conference & Exposition

OFC combines a high-powered, commerce-driven exposition with leading-edge, peer reviewed educational programming. This unique combination makes the conference among the field’s most important events. Attend and take advantage of all OFC has to offer.Professionals from all disciplines within optical communications come to OFC to: see/evaluate new products and developments, attend educational sessions, keep up to date on industry trends and issues, and network with colleagues. The value OFC delivers consistently exceeds the industry’s expectations—and 2004 will be no exception. The conference lasts only a few days, but participants use the information and contacts they gather throughout the years. Los Angeles Covention Center http://www.ofcconference.org/

Telewest Float Surf & Sniff Smell Generator

It being Friday and we thought we would bring you a light-hearted piece.

UK cable company, Telewest, has suggested that they may release a computer add-on that generates aromas that can be controlled software. Sound like an urban myth/joke, but it is not without precedent. The first time a computer-controlled device was suggest was in 1999 by a start-up called DigiScent. Prior to that it was on the grander scale of whole cinemas, when in the last 50’s two similar ideas, AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision, were introduced to US cinemagoers.

AromaRama used the theatres ventilation system to get their scents out and Smell-O-Vision far more expensive approach was to place units under each cinema seat.

DigiScent was a serious, scientific approach to the subject that was started by two Stanford graduates that had made some serious fortunes from software for genetic databases.

One of the founders, Joel Lloyd Bellenson looked into previous scientific research around the subject to discover how humans perceived smells. His explanation was detailed in an article by Wired at the time.

“The explanation for this proved relatively simple. When odour molecules drift into the nose, each of them binds with a particular protein on the surface of a neuron. There are about 1,000 odour-matching proteins, each with a slightly different configuration, scattered across a human’s 10 million odour-detecting neurons. (By comparison, a mouse has about 1 million neurons of this type, while a pig boasts 100 million.) When the shape of an odour molecule matches the shape of a protein, the molecules lock together, triggering the neuron, which sends a signal that the brain recognizes as a smell. DNA is relevant because its instructions – its genes – tell the body how to build the proteins that receive odour molecules and activate the neurons. ”

Calling on his previous software experience, Bellenson wrote software to simulate the binding of odour molecules with proteins. By using this he felt he could generate billions of odours simply by selecting different proportions of 100-200 “scent primaries.”

DigiScent’s business was to licence its software to the creators of  other media, to synchronise aromas with them. Web pages would be able to trigger them, as would TV shows, video games and films. The scent generators would be plugged into the serial port and sit on the desk – Reekers, instead of speakers.

Like many ideas around 1999, sadly DigiScent is not around anymore. One possible reason for that could have been is the name they chose for their product – iSmell.

Telewest say they have tested the idea in their labs, calling email using the device ‘ScentMail’, or on a wider scale, ‘Aromanet’. They plan to bring out a domed device that plugs in to the serial port of a computer or set top box, that takes dispoable cartidges to generate the aromas. They say the intial range of smells will be around 60 by mixing the palette of 20 oringial aromas.

Appearing to be designed to get them a few column inches for their broadband service, it is not clear how serious Telewest are about it. When discussing the cost of the dome they are less than exact, ‘Hardware for a surf & sniff set up might cost around £250 for the basic equipment’. We are sure Telewest is not trying to create news during the time their managing director, Charles Burdick, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities.”

Telewest corny press release

Wired 1999 article on DigiScent

Europe’s first mega-pixel camera phone launched by Vodafone

Vodafone has beaten the rest of the market to be the first to bring a mega-pixel camera to Europe. In a further development of their relationship with Sharp, it will be Sharp GX30.

Not content with being just a mega-pixel camera, this quad-band (GSM) phone of many features incorporates an MP3 player, offers Bluetooth support, has a removable SD memory cards and provides video message functionality. The screen on the handset has been significantly uprated to be capable of displaying 262,144 colours, four times its previous model, the GX20. It will be available in retail stores from March 2004.

Breaking the mega-pixel barrier is significant. At this resolution the photographs start to become useful beyond simply sending them other phones. The quality is sufficient to print them out and services such as Pixology (We QuickLinked earlier), are planning to take advantage of the always increasing resolutions.

The other direct benefit for Vodafone in higher resolution cameras’ becoming the norm is in increasing their call income – the higher the resolution, the more data there is to transmit, the higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Raising ARPU is the mantra for mobile operators.

Vodafone’s global presence means it has tremendous clout and purchasing power enabling it to secure exclusive deals with phone manufacturers. It is known in the industry that Vodafone is keen to develop its own, branded phones in an attempt to break the power of Nokia on the phone market. They want to move their users from identifying with the make of handset, “I’ve got a Nokia” to “I’ve got a Vodafone”. Extending the relationship with Sharp is a further step towards that.

Vodafone

Sharp phones

ATI Announce HTDV PVR Card

ATI Technologies have announced they will be releasing a card capable of receiving and storing US-standard HDTV. Called the HDTV Wonder, the add-on card will receive standard NTSC cable as well as free-to-air HDTV broadcasts enabling content to be saved to the computers hard drive. Full PVR functionality will available, as will the ability to burn recordings direct to DVD.

They plan bundle it with a selection of their All-in-Wonder graphics cards and make it available as a standalone product when they release it in the spring. The price hasn’t been disclosed.

No word has been received from them as to whether the card will comply with the FCC Broadcast flag requirements.

Hy-Tek are getting to free publicity, by announcing their will be releasing two wide-screen all-in-one multimedia computers, Tekpanel 300HD and the Tekpanel 370HD which will incorporate the card.

ATI

Hy-Tek

Akimbo Launch PVR-over-IP Box

Akimbo Systems launched their television-via-Internet service yesterday at Demo2004. They are claiming the service will start with over 10,000 hours of video content, organised in to 50 categories, will be pulled from a variety of sources. The number of hours available will grow to 20,000.

The $199 player, which is expected to be in US retail stores in late 2004, receives content via a broadband connection and can hold 200 hours of video, in Microsoft’s WM9 DRM-controlled format on it’s 80Gb drive. Subscription to the service is $9.99 per month.

This product is the first of released example of the long spoken about idea of distributing content by passing previously used broadcast structures. Akimbo claim a number of factors have now come together to enable the services to become realistic; the cost of transporting a gigabyte of video over the Internet has dropped to around $1 from $20 a few years ago; video compression has improved to the point that DVD-quality video can fit into a 1.5 megabit per second stream; broadband has grown to an audience of 50m people.

Given it is initially a dedicated box, that we assume will be closed to customer enhancements, it will live or die by the content they can secure for the service. We suspect the service may well morph in to a content channel when more PC’s are connected to the TV in the lounge.

Akimbo are canvassing for new content from video rights owners and are giving the option for subscription, rental, purchase, or advertising supported model. Their big pitch is niche content direct to the consumer and they will handle transactions, delivering the due fees to the rights holders.

We feel the other vital component for them to get right is the navigation of the content, enabling consumers to actually find the programmes that they want to watch.

Akimbo

Phone-on-a-chip Coming Soon

Bill Krenik, who heads up research and development in Texas Instruments (TI) wireless terminals business unit has been revealing the companies intention to create an integrated chip that will hold all of the functionality of a current smartphone, on a single chip. TI plan to have it available by the end of 2004.

TI, the world’s largest maker of cell phone chips say the integrated chip would reduction power consumption by a half and free up large amounts of the valuable system board real estate for additional chips providing features Wi-Fi high-speed wireless networking and satellite location tracking to be added to phones.

TI is not alone in thinking along these lines. Samsung were speaking about this very idea last week. They prefer the term System-in-Package chip and plan to show it at the coming GSM World Congress Conference in Cannes. Their chip will include a 203MHz ARM-based processor with 256MB of NAND flash memory, 256MB of SDRAM and support for USB.

Legal Music Downloads Reach New Highs

There were more than 150,000 legal music downloads in the UK in January 2004, putting downloading in second place behind buying singles for the first time. Although there were still about 341,500 singles sold in in that month, these figures show that legal music downloads are increasing in popularity all the time.

We feel that if there were more options for people to easily download music, then the CD single would die even quicker – it will be interesting to see what happens when iTunes eventually opens up shop in the UK later this year.

Of course, now that record labels are producing “copy protected” CDs with deliberate errors that do not play in many CD players (owners of car CD players be especially wary), and are difficult to rip, this may have the effect of driving more users to download sites.

MyCokeMusic has been an enormous success prompting many more people to download music, the January 19th launch was followed by 50,000 downloads in one week – we’ll be watching to see what the figures will be for February.

The Official Chart Company is now compiling figures on music downloads, and intends to issue a download chart in the future. Hopefully when this appears users will be able to buy music directly from the chart listing itself and will increase sales even further.

The Offical Chart Company

The Register on this week’s launch of “copy crippled” CDs

Vodafone launches 3G in Europe

Vodafone have announced today that it will be starting its 3G service in Europe. Interestingly their first offering will be a data only service using the catchyly named Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data card, rather than a voice service. Slotting one of these into a laptop will provide data speed up to 384kbps.

It is clear that Vodafone is not just throwing money at bring their 3G service to the public – they are taking a cautious, measured approach to it. The service is launching in seven European countries over the next four weeks; UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The coverage will not be comprehensive to start, but will focus initially on major cities and grow through transport routes, then expand over the next few years. When the 3G service becomes too weak, the card will automatically fall back to GPRS without interrupting service.

We feel there may be a number of reasons that Vodafone have launched their initial offering as a data service and not voice as was expected. In short, predictability – of income, subscribers and usage. The data service, aimed at businesses, will more than likely bring in more income than the voice service, for the use of the same infrastructure. It is unlikely that there will be thousands of individuals clamouring to get on to it and signing corporate accounts will give them a far better ability to plan for expansion and usage patterns. In addition, may be something as simple as they do not feel the handsets that are currently available would appeal to their clients.

Vodafone

Comcast Make Surprise Bid For Disney

In a move that surprised a lot of people, Comcast has put in a hostile bid for the entire Walt Disney Corporation, appealing to shareholders suffering from “Eisner fatigue”.

Things have been troubled at Disney for a while – Roy Disney recently resigned after describing the company as “soulless” (copy of the resignation letter here.), they have not had a decent traditional animation hit in years, and the parks were suffering even before 9/11. In all, Disney has a net debt of some US$11bn.

Comcast on the other hand, have been doing quite well for themselves. They have more than 21 million subscribers, out of the 40 million homes they pass, and their operating cash flow was over US$2bn in 2003. Amongst the other assets they own they have ten local TV stations, the ABC Television Network and 72 radio stations. Acquiring Disney will give them vast, high-quality content production facilities – giving them control over the whole commission/produce/broadcast chain. We think they will ditch the theme parks fairly quickly as they seem less relevant to Comcast’s plans.

The US$66bn bid (let us just write that out in longhand for you: US$66,000,000,000.00) is ambitious, and there will be obvious comparisons with the ill-fated AOL/Time Warner merger, but if the deal goes ahead it will be interesting to see what kind of company it will create.

Steve Burke, President of Comcast Cable says in their press release: “I know Disney’s businesses very well, and I am confident that when we put those great brands and programming assets together with our distribution, there will be significant opportunities to produce compelling returns for shareholders.”

Rupert Murdoch has already said that the deal would make the company a competitor to NewsCorp., but who else might step forward with a bid?

Comcast estimate that the market capitalisation of the combined company would be around US$122bn, with revenues of US$45bn, and an EBITDA of US$10bn. Accountants are said to be stockpiling hoards of zeros in case there is a worldwide shortage after the deal.

Comcast’s statements

The FT’s comments