Cross platform – Page 7 – Digital-Lifestyles

iTunes on Linux with Crossover Office

Codeweavers have released version 3.1 of their CrossOver Office application – and this new version features support of Apple’s iTunes jukebox.

Codeweavers CEO Jeremy White said in a statement: “iTunes has been our number-one most requested application. We remain confident that by the end of 2005, the majority of Windows applications will be supported by CrossOver Office. Until then, we’re pleased to be bringing the appeal of iTunes to Linux users through the development of Version 3.1.” Indeed, Codeweavers intend to have 95% of Windows applications running by the end of next year.

CrossOver Office relies on Wine to make Windows programs work under Linux. Wine is an open source re-implementation of the Windows API, and does not use Microsoft code. It’s not an emulator either – think of it as a wrapper that allows Windows programs to run under Linux.

Unlike RealNetworks’ Harmony product, released last week, CrossOver office makes no changes to iPod and does not reverse-engineer any code. Apple has yet to make a comment, but it is unlikely that they will be as vehemently opposed to CrossOver Office as they were to Harmony.

Codeweavers

Wine Is Not an Emulator

Ken Rutkowski – the IBC Digital Lifestyles Interviews

The second in a series of eight articles with some of the people involved with the Digital Lifestyles conference day at IBC2004.

We interviewed Ken Rutkowski, the force behind Ken Radio, on the media platforms available to today’s consumers, and what’s exciting him.

Fraser Lovatt: It is possible that some of the visitors to Digital Lifestyles might not know about Ken Radio. Do you want to tell me a bit about yourself and what you are up to at the moment?
Ken Rutkowski: Well, Ken Radio is the largest piece of listened to content on the web with over 186,000 listeners every single day. What we do is we look at technology on a global level. Where most shows on TV or on Radio are generally very localised, we try to do away the whole US-centric concept and say “Hey, technology is global” and see how it impacts people. So we are trying to really see what is happening – like we say: other sites might break the news – we’re here to fix it.

By really bringing together a team of global observers that can dissect what is happening and then interpret it properly. So we are probably the only place where people can go to really find out what is going on at a global level. We are pretty proud of that.

What are you up to at the moment? What is your current project?
My broadcast business is radically different to what my personal business is. My personal business is a company called RefreshIQ.com What we do is we help technology companies have better interface with media companies. So we basically bring technology to Hollywood and Hollywood to technology. We allow companies like Microsoft to have better relationships with the Studios. We help companies like Nokia have better relationship with media companies.

Microsoft have recently set up their own internal group for this, haven’t?
Absolutely and that’s kind of a contradiction. Think about this – I don’t know – when you go to war you generally have to be on the ground where war is waged. For example World War II was waged in Europe initially – you went to Europe to fight the war. Well the war right now is in Hollywood and when you set up a shop in Redmond you are mixing with words.

The contradiction is they are playing war but they are not playing in the right place. We are here to help them actually understand the strategy and place their troops in the right place.

Recent social and technological developments are creating the concept of a digital lifestyle and we’ve seen an explosion in the number of media platforms that are out in the wild. How many media platforms do you think that people have space for in their lives? The reason I ask this question is because I was looking in my bag earlier on and I had more media platforms in that bag than my entire household had up until about 1995.
Let’s be realistic – what is the dream? The dream is to have one. That’s really the goal.

You know, I picked a brand new Nokia 7610, I think, and I’m finally seeing a convergence happening. Where I have my standard phone, it holds 18,000 of my contacts, shows me video, it’s a 1 mega pixel camera, it will have software to allow me to play MP3s – and now with some of the technology coming up, like Nokia’s visual radio, it can allow me to actually get some data from radio that’s fine.

Obviously it is not a high-quality camera, it is not a high-end MP3 player, it is a good phone and it’s got some decent video – and it’s moving in the right direction.

One device is sufficient and if the phone can be it – and I think it is going to move in that direction dominate that market.

I would like to see one device. Now you are asking the question – how many devices can people tolerate? Well I think that toleration is something that is based upon the actual time parameter. What do I mean by that? We uses to tolerate in XT or AT computer which weighed about 65 pounds with a monochrome screen that would go out every once in a while that had a fan that sounded like an aircraft carrier and it processed real slow. We tolerated it because that was accepted during that time.

Now we have flat screen monitors, we have three gigahertz processors. Right now people can’t accept having a wallet, a phone and a third device – being an MP3 player or a digital camera. The minute we start going over four, to a PDA or going to a GPS, I think we have gone too far.

We use the tolerance limit anything over – you are overboard. Now again let’s talk about that Utopian world that I want to be living in and have one – and I’m happy.

We have seen that today’s platforms mean that there is some exciting content appearing. For example the quiz came called “Come and Have a Go”. It’s live broadcast and it uses the Java mobile phone application tool for the people at home so they can get involved. What other content are you excited about?
Well I think the location based technology stuff that we see proliferating right now throughout Japan is so damned exciting, you know we are able to locate my children and we see this even coming in the States and I know the UK has is too.

Using RFIDS? WiFi child tracking at Lego Billund?
No – let’s take it in another direction. What I find is heinous is that with cheating spouses, their husbands or wives can go out and buy a cheap phone and they put it in their spouses car. They put it in the car and turn it on and they are able to track to see where their spouse is. You know it is getting to a point where it is so inexpensive to do forms of surveillance.

Swatch, the watch making company has a watch that uses location-based GPS, so the parents can easily identify where their children are on a computer screen. You know technology is coming up right now where there is location based technology for cattle. In Montana they are using this – even in Mongolia they are using it for horses right now, where they can track where horses are. That’s cool stuff. It is so inexpensive.

We have RFIDS – sure the technology has been around for 20 years – giant retailers are starting to see how these ideas make sense. We are not going to have to go around and take everything out of our carts have it scanned, put it into a bag and walk out – we can just drag the cart out and be told exactly what we owe and we are done.

That is cool. Now a Java application at a phone – that is mundane.

But we have a Java application which ties together a broadcast programme and provides a new type of content.
Let’s take it this way. My TV is my TV.

My television might have more additions to it being for interactivity – polling, voting, e-commerce and all that – that’s my TV – don’t give me television on my phone. My radio is my radio. Now if I want to use my phone as a radio – I can tolerate that because it is a device that I need to have portable with me because I am conditioned to have a portable with me. If I can get information like Nokia’s Visual Radio is doing, that’s cool, because I’m conditioned to take radio on the go. I’m not conditioned to take television on the go. I don’t want people to be watching TV on the go. We have a society that is suffering from the inability to collaborate right now. Add another one?

What about creating types of content that could never exist before?
I had the opportunity to see this really cool web cam technology that allows me to use my GPS – GSM phone and my camera on my phone to be a live streaming web cam. I could call my son and I could say “Look what daddy’s looking at right now? I’m looking at the Statue of Liberty”. He is able to go to a web page and see what his Dad is looking at right now. That’s cool.

Also, I think Microsoft’s Media Centre really is going to be exciting. It finally takes your pictures, your CDs, your DVDs, your music, your television and aggregates it into one platform and you finally get to use the TV as a true collaborative tool.

What is exciting is taking existing models like television. I hate to use these 1990 terms but time shifting is becoming to reality. The word “TiVo” is becoming part of the English language – you don’t tape TV shows any more you “TiVo”.

It is coming out to where even in Movies “I TiVo’d that”. We have seen it in Sex in the City. There was whole episode around her TiVo was better than her boyfriend because it was consistent and reliable. It is so amazing to start seeing this technology become part of our lives. We are becoming dependent upon it.

For example – I’m in Washington DC, I live in Los Angeles, and I am able to go to my own special web page to make sure I have taped my favourite shows because when I get back to Los Angeles I get excited to watch my shows on my time without commercials. That is so damned exciting. I get home – technology has transformed my life.

So we have TV – we have location based technology devices that are coming out. I actually think where portable media players are going is really hot.

We can take all of our media with us in any environment – I am sitting in a hotel room right now and I am able to link to my server at home which is actually quite easy. I call it KIDMA. If it’s kidma, meaning my kids or my grandmother can do it, that right there just passed the test. These new devices are kidma – they are easy and simple – so I could sit down and listen to all my music sitting in Los Angeles right now right here in Washington DC. I don’t feel like I am away from home now.

The last thing which I get really excited about is the unified messaging technology that is coming out. Are you familiar with this?

Email, SMS etc together in one place?
Let’s take it a little further than that. I now can have the universal phone number – one phone number – and I can travel throughout the world and I can always be reached by that phone number in multiple ways.

There was a company about ten years ago called Wildfire, and there are better ones that allow me to have my own number and it follows me. So right now if somebody calls my number and I’m in Sydney, Australia it will find me and ring me on whatever mobile device I’m on or hotel phone in Sydney. If I’m not there, I am sleeping or I’m taking a shower when someone leaves that voicemail it will be emailed to me.

Unified messaging is so hot and we are starting to see some of the voice over IP companies bring services out.

So tell a little bit about your IBC session that’s coming up.
We’re going to really explore the idea of the platforms that are going to enable these devices.

This is important because anyone can paint a great picture – but tell me about the paint, the canvas and even the talent to make the picture. We are going to show how everything is put together so the technology on the consumer end will work. Interactive television is extremely dynamic and powerful, it is worth billions of dollars in the ad market. An interesting report came out recently from Jupiter Media Metric showing that the stereo-typical 18 – 34 male who everyone thought was playing video games would rather watch Survivor or rather watch television than play video games.

This is exciting – this is what the networks have been saying is true – well the numbers came out yesterday proving it. So that means television has the opportunity not just to become compelling but even generate more revenue. We are going to talk about how television, mobile devices and whatever the next generation media platform is, portable music player, or how they are going to empower the consumer to spend more money and be utilised even more.

How are established content businesses going to make money out of all these platforms then? Where is the business model? We have got lots of media companies out there like the BBC with huge media libraries and lots of resources to be able to create compelling media, but it can be argued that but there is no proven way to get the cash out of the consumer at the other end.
Well I would disagree with that – let’s look at a couple of ways.

One, we know that companies like Apple’s iTunes, Rhapsody or Harmony by real networks – even Microsoft MSN music – they’re generating money. iTunes is reporting some really decent sales not just on the music side that works.
Now let’s take music to the next level and look at fan based sites. Sites that you subscribe to you’re like David Bowie you now are part of David Bowie’s community which will include music, video, emails, chat – people will pay money for that.

Those advanced services that we were talking about earlier like location based technology and phones that might cost two or three dollars a month extra. People are not just willing, they are paying it. We don’t want to use Japan as a good example because their culture is radically different than in the West, but they prove that advanced technology services are worth paying for.

The next is the simple idea of advanced tools for television. Premium channels like HBO and Showtime. HBO has more Emmys than any one single Network right now. We are seeing people paying for premium content on television, which means that the trickle down concept always applies. If they pay for it on television once true broadband – we are not talking about a megabit, we are talking about 5/10 megabits – people will pay for premium content because it will feel like it’s television, coming through a TV.

So when you say it’s not there, it is there, it is in unique situations, but it is going to build and I see the money opportunities.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting times – and I didn’t even say that through the dot com times – one of the most exciting times to be part of this brand new industry.

What about the little media start-ups who are going to be faster moving, more technologically savvy – how are they going to capitalise on convergence?
Think about this idea – News Corporation’s Lucy Hood, who is running it on the technology side, creating content in one minute. Mini series for mobile phones – you are creating content with a cast, with screen writers to create one minute episodics on the phone. They’re going in a direction saying “Let’s look at the money and seize this opportunity”.

Again, you know my position regarding taking television to a phone, I don’t think it is going to work but we are seeing News Corp trying it out, we are seeing companies playing an HD. HD is going to be explosive.

HD is a brand new environment for consumers once HD televisions drops down in price, which they will soon.

So these studios can use tools like Final Cut Pro, even some of the cheap Avid systems to produce HD at a fraction of the cost of two years ago. That’s compelling.

What do you think of iTunes/Motorola deal?
They’re making a slimmed down version of its iTunes jukebox software that cell phone makers like Motorola will install in its wireless devices, to be rolled out in 2005.

That is the right direction. You know, again, back to your second question – how many devices will people be able to tolerate – if you could make my phone do everything – including being a functional music player, because I am conditioned to take music on the go, cool. It sounds like a good start. It’s a good catalyst. I don’t think it is going to be the win-all but it is the tweak to allow it to happen.

We have got content running on different hardware and software platforms and quite often consumers can’t move content from one platform to another because of incompatible DRM systems. How long do you think that is going to last?
Well you know the irony is most consumers don’t know about the limitations of that content.

They are going to find out pretty soon.
They are absolutely going to find out and once they find out they are going to start questioning the ideas – a 99 cent track that I could only have at 128k, only on four different devices, and not at the same time but individually? They are going to say “Well, wait a second a CD is a better value. I got the content at 320k, I can rip it and I can move it to any device”.

I have a feeling the labels will start questioning the value or the cost for certain DRM content. For example, if you want a 328k piece of content with unlimited DRM it is going to cost you three bucks, or maybe making it 99 cents with DRM. The labels have talked about this. I think the labels are going to have to change once the consumers are more educated.

I relish that day because what is going on is horrible, especially when you know the true value of that piece of media that you downloaded. It is extremely limited in its mobility because of its DRM. It pisses me off.

Ken Radio

Ken is chairing ‘Understanding the Range of Platforms – A Multitude of Destinations’ session between 14:00 and 15:30 at the IBC conference on Sunday, 12th September in Amsterdam. Register for IBC here

The IBC Digital Lifestyles Interviews – Simon Perry – Part I

This is the first in a series of eight articles with some of the people involved with the Digital Lifestyles conference day at IBC2004.

We interviewed Simon Perry, the executive producer of the Digital Lifestyles theme day, in a two-part feature that covers on the makeup of the day and question him convergence and other aspects of the media. He publishes Digital Lifestyles magazine.

Fraser Lovatt: Tell me about the four discussion sessions at IBC this year. What are they about and who’s speaking at them?

Simon Perry: When the Digital Lifestyles day was introduced at IBC last year, my aim was to set the scene – to signal the change in the content industry. This year builds on that, by highlighting four specific areas that merit closer attention by the creative, business and technology people.

The day will inform the delegates on the new types of content possible, how to get paid for it, where you can deliver it and the business models around it.

The first session is titled ‘New platforms, new content’.

It is set in the context that, with new content delivery methods comes new forms of content. It’s chaired by Ashley Highfield, director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, and will create a discussion between some of the most experienced and forward-thinking Games, Film and TV people. In each of their fields they are bringing together different strands of content, creating something that couldn’t have existed previously, such as content that migrates between platforms, creating united content.

The second session is about getting paid for content. Up to now, the industry has been focused on protecting the content that they have, which is understandable and technology companies have been more than happy to assist them.

I feel this is a distraction. The really key part is how the consuming public are going to pay for content that they think is worth paying for, whether they receive it to their mobile phone, their TV, via broadband to their PC’s or through an adaptor on to their TV. The methods of payment are as diverse as the delivery methods.

The panel brings together the knowledge and experience of people who are successfully receiving payments from the public for text and video content; others offering payment systems that take small amounts, less that a pound/dollar, online and others that use mobile phones to make payments.

Tim Jones, the CEO of Simpay will be on the panel. Simpay was brought to life by the four major mobile phone networks in the UK. The first stage of their service offers the phone-carrying public to pay for phone delivered content – catching up with the currently favoured premium-rate SMS charging. The next stage is – and this is where it becomes a more interesting example – allowing you pay for any types of content, as well as physical goods from shops, using your phone. It is something that has been theorised for a long time and Simpay appear to be pulling it together now. Tim’s background is particularly interesting. He co-invented Mondex, which as we all know, was the first form of public e-cash in the UK.

The third session is chaired by Ken Rutkowski of Ken Radio, and is about informing the content creators about the increasing range of platforms that are available to them for distributing their content. Within the industry there are different stages of knowledge, expectation and experience of what digital lifestyles will mean to the creators of the content, as well as the public. In this third session they will explore what roles different media play on different platforms and the effect it is going to have on the type of content people produce. Ken’s enthusiasm will lift the best out of the panellist.

The forth session is future business models chaired by media journalist, Kate Bulkley. It will explore the models that will run aside 30-second spot ads; mobile delivery; gaining benefit from efficient delivery to different platforms; generating new revenue from TV. There’s a lot of innovation in this area.

What does convergence mean to you? What’s your internal definition of it?

It’s an interesting word. It’s been around for a long time – and increasingly, over the last six/nine months it has become to mean anything that any marketeer wants it to mean. The original definition saw all devices being morphed in to one device. It’s clear that there won’t be convergence to that extent. It’s becoming less defined. The more it enters everyones vocabulary, the wider the definition becomes. Perversely it’s definition is diverging.

The convergence that Digital Lifestyles magazine focuses on, is how the influx of technology into the creation, transfer and reception of media content is changing the industry. Where media and technology touch, is what’s of interest to us, and the impact it will have.

There is an argument that media has always been a technological activity. From first workings and marking things on cave walls to the development of perspective, to the first film studios to television. It has always been technology-led.

That is probably true. Well it’s not probably true – it is true. The definition of what is technology is a sliding window, isn’t it? Pens, paper and the printing press were all once thought of as advanced technology, and then they slowly shifted to become the norm. I would argue that the window moves more quickly these days.

But media always seems to be at the forefront of technology – many technological breakthroughs are media related and have been throughout the history of mankind.

Technology has certainly had an influence – I don’t know whether media has always been pushing technology, or whether it has always been using the latest technology. It certainly has previously utilised it, and the people who have utilised the technology are the ones that have had the upper hand. Look back to Murdoch in the use of technology in the production of newspapers, originally pioneered by the Eddie Shah with Today.

I think people get business advantage by using technology and media. I don’t think necessarily the mainstream media are quick in adopting technologies and making the most of them, and that’s frustrating. However, this gives a space for the people who are outside the mainstream media, micro-production companies if you will, to use the technologies to create and deliver their content to an audience on an economic basis.

Do you think the public thave an active participation in convergence? Do they see the convergence as something they are getting involved in or do they see it as something that has happened around them? Five years ago they were going out and buying DVD players and now they are buying PVRs – Do you think they are seeing it as progress or just something new to buy?

Let’s use digital music, because that’s quite a good example. One of the articles on Digital Lifestyles today covered the Virgin Music Player, a little thing you just hang on your waist. People will obviously notice that they don’t have to carry around a bulky CD player or a mini disc player or a cassette player, but as to whether they realise that the changes are wider reaching than that – I doubt it. It will feel like another small step.

These days people are now conscious of change. They have come to expect things to change. They are becoming numbed to the “Oh my god” reaction, when they come into contact with a new use of technology.

The people in the industry see it as significant, because they see the long-term impact.

One of the ironies I perceive with convergence is that the media itself, those pieces of entertainment like music, film and to some extent e-books, are becoming fragmented through platform and DRM issues. Do you think that we will be happy buying three versions of the same thing in the near future because the DRM or file formats are incompatible, or do you think that this will be resolved gracefully?

Incompatibility is a fear of mine and yes, in the short term, it is likely. It’ll happen because of the number of incompatible content protection systems that are around. I think the industry, whether it be the providers of content protection or the media companies, which are using the content protection systems that don’t allow interchange between devices are going to do themselves a disservice and, if it continues, will frankly end up irritating the customer.

I have asked the question to quite a number of people in the media business and technology business – I have never really had a good answer from them either. How do you sell the public something that’s less good, through it’s restrictions, than the thing that is being replaced? Something that ends up flexible, even though the form it is held in allows greater flexibility? So, short term I think it probably will be a problem. I hope that it won’t be a problem beyond the short term.

It can be argued that a lot of the fragmentation that we are seeing in media in file formats and devices is down to proprietary systems that are involved in the creation of media, and in its protection and distribution so we have DRM, we have CDs which can’t be played on PCs. These are all proprietary. Do you think there is a place for open standards in a convergent media culture?

I think the reason this hasn’t happened so far is that the prize is so enormous. The prize for being the provider of content protection is to be one of the largest businesses in the world. Much commercial material will only reside in the rights holders-approved DRM formats; ones that they feel protect their interest. That’s not to say that there won’t be a huge market for other content in another format, and that could be an open format.

Do you think that one company will be allowed to hold the keys for content protection?

Who is going to stop them? Are you talking about Government restrictions?

Some view it as a monopoly.

Certainly from the discussions I have had with content creators of the large studios, there is an unease with a number of companies holding all of the keys. There have been many suggestions as to the way that could be got around. One I found interesting was Fraunhoffer’s Light Weight DRM (LWDRM), but it still relies on a central repository that decides whether you are entitled to this music or that you have paid to have access to it.

The Fraunhoffer response to that question is to say, well we place that with a third party – so you split up the business of running the content protection system away from the business of holding the keys to the access to that content. Their suggestion was that it be done by institutions like the German post office. Different nations have got different relationships with their governments. So that’s something that might work in a country such as Germany, but not others.

There are two arguments – on the open source side there are many people, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for example, who argue that there should be no content protection and people will pay for their content, relying on the good nature of man.

Rightly or wrongly, that is not how the mainstream media industry sees it. But if you look at companies like Warp Records, they sell their music in MP3 format. They have taken a more open file format, which can be exchanged quickly between different formats and difference devices. The consumer in me sees this as completely reasonable. I buy something and then I am able to put it on whichever device I want.

I did some research for the European Commission on a unified media platform called N2MC and it became clear from speaking to a wide range of people, along the whole creation-to-distribution change, that the idea of an open source content protection system didn’t currently work for them.

Because it could be easily reversed engineered?

It was seen as a weakness in the chain. One part of a content protection system must remain proprietary.

This interview is continued and concluded here.

Simon is chairing ‘The missing piece – Getting paid for content’ session between 11:30 and 13:00 at the IBC conference on Sunday, 12th September in Amsterdam. Register for IBC here

Microsoft’s Media/Entertainment & Technology Convergence Group

No-one could have predicted that Microsoft would evolve from selling DOS to being a company whose technologies shape many of the industries around us. Microsoft’s media products such as its Windows Media 9 platform are used throughout the media and entertainment industries from authoring, distribution and viewing. As the company’s relationship with the media and entertainment industries has grown very complex indeed, Microsoft have created a group to manage and develop these alliances: the Media/Entertainment & Technology Convergence Group.

The group aims to drive the company’s strategies for the digital convergence of home entertainment technologies, personal computing and media with a focus on market development, policy and standards.

The former chairman of the Universal Television & Networks Group, Blair Westlake, will join Microsoft and be the group’s new vice president.

“The creation of the Media/Entertainment & Technology Convergence Group and Blair Westlake’s appointment underscore Microsoft’s strong commitment to delivering cutting-edge products for the digital networked home and continuing to build mutually productive and profitable relationships with the media and entertainment industries,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

Microsoft on the new group

Exclusive: Mobile Gaming Goes 3D

Mobile gaming, that is playing games on your mobile phone, is growing rapidly. Advances in phones, displays and networks mean that the handset in your jacket pocket is a considerably more powerful games console than that NES you sat in front of just a few years ago playing Mario Kart. In fact, phones have grown in sophistication so quickly that it’s quite shocking to think that just five years ago our most immersive mobile gaming experience was a quick bout of Snake.

The success of mobile gaming can attributed to Java – Sun’s environment means that games can be written in Java and will run on any phone that has a J2ME (Java 2, Micro Edition) virtual machine embedded in its operating system.

Additionally, Gamers are now used to seeing graphics made out of millions of polygons on their GameCubes and PlayStation 2s and expect the same thing from their mobile gaming. Memory and processor advances now mean that games developers can now meet this demand, and so the JSR184 standard (now known as M3G) came into being, to provide a platform for developers to produce immersive 3D games.

As phones incorporate more memory, faster processors, dedicated graphics chips, stereo sound and 3D graphics, it means that games too require more resources to produce. As the games get more complex they require a multi-disciplined approach, with artists, coders, level designers and musicians all contributing to the final product.

This rapid increase in sophistication means that it’s now impossible to produce a decent game for modern phones without a suite of development tools, and as 3D graphics creep out onto our phones, tools are appearing that deal specifically with the unique problems of throwing around shaded, textured polygons on tiny screens with limited resources.

A new breed of tools, specifically designed to enable developers to squeeze the best performance out of M3G is appearing, and you’ll be playing games created with these tools on your phone in the very near future.

I had a chat with Stephan Groud from Superscape – one of the companies behind the M3G standard – and product manager for the first 3D toolkit for mobile phones, Swerve. We talked about the benefits of 3D and what’s up next for mobile phone gaming.

Tell me a little how Superscape got into 3D on phones, and how Swerve came into being.

Superscape is 3D company – we’ve done 3D for 18 years now. We’ve always worked in the 3D field, either around 3D games or tools. In short, the company has always been focussed on 3D for low processing power or low bandwidth.

We looked at the mobile market and decided that we had the expertise to take our experience and provide 3D for constrained devices and constrained networks, which is exactly what the mobile market is about.

We set out to develop this technology, Swerve, which is basically suited for 3D on mobile devices. To make it a success, we went to companies like ARM and Vodaphone – and came to the conclusion that unless there was a standard to do 3D on mobile phones, then it wouldn’t be a viable proposition.

We then went to Nokia and Sun and helped set up the JSR 184 standard, which basically states how you do 3D, in Java, on a mobile phone. The exact remit of the standard was to deliver 3D experiences on mobile platforms, over the air. The standard had to be generic enough to do not only games, but menus, user interfaces and potentially location-based services. It also needed to be a standard that could output content small enough to downloaded over the air.

The standard was ratified in November 2003, and since Swerve had been in the making for about three years, it was the first commercial implementation of that standard, both in terms of engine and tools.

What exactly is the Swerve platform?

The Swerve solution is an engine, compliant with JSR 184, that sits on your phone, within the Java architecture. We worked with companies such as Siemens and Motorola to embed our technology in handsets to make them JSR 184 compliant, or M3G compliant which is the new name for the standard. A M3G phone can run any JSR184 piece of content.

On top of releasing the engine on the day the standard was ratified, we announced the second generation of our tools, SwerveStudio. This allows you to export 3D scenes from 3dsMax – we took the most popular 3D package and built in every function that would be required to author or develop content for the M3G platform, without having to recreate everything from scratch. If you know 3dsMax and you have an understanding of the M3G API, you can use SwerveStudio because it’s basically the same thing, but with tools for optimising the scene for mobile phones, to preview the scene as it would look on a handset, to script behaviours, and to export the scene as a M3G file.

If you have SwerveStudio and you have 3dsMax you have an environment that allows you to create a good chunk of what a game is. The rest is done by a coder through a regular Java IDE [integrated development environment].

By integrating your toolkit in 3dsMax and using the Java VM on phones, that gives you a huge installed base of artists and coders that can use Swerve straight away – and a huge installed base of consumers that can run the content.

We’re working with mobile phone manufacturers to get the M3G API embedded onto handsets shipped from this summer onwards.

We’re not the only people to come up with a product based on the M3G standard, and there are other people announcing phones and tools based upon it, so that’s basically growing the market for games that are based on our tools.

What are the main titles coming out that use Swerve?

We realised quickly that it was all well and good to have a tool set, but the manufacturers and operators want games. What we’ve done over the past six to eight months is to create a catalogue of games – and most of those games are based on famous intellectual properties from Sony, Disney and 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Activision. We either developed those games in house or worked with external developers. The games are Independence Day, based on the 20th Cenutry Fox movie; Van Helsing, Universal’s blockbuster this summer; SWAT from Sony Pictures; and Evel Knievel – we have the rights for mobile platforms to develop games based on his brand; we’re working with Disney on TRON2.0, which will be focussed on Light Cycles, so we’re not cramming too much into a game that has to be downloaded over the air.

Big brands, big studios, big companies are all working with us because they’ve had a look at our technology and said “Hey, this is the best way to take our brand into the mobile space.”

M3G as a technology gives a truer representation of your brand. If you look at other technologies, even 2D, it’s sometimes difficult to recognise the brand you’re using.

We’re working with the guys behind the brands and studios to improve our tools, improve the engine and tackling IP holders, game developers, network operators, handset manufacturers and technology guys to make sure the whole system works together.

When will the first Swerve-developed titles be available for download?

That’ll be with the release of the first M3G handsets, in Q3 2004.

What do you think of handsets like the N-Gage QD that use dedicated games on memory cards, and attempt to be more of a games console rather than a phone? Do you think they’re a kind of stopgap, or that this will be a common way for distributing titles?

There are two ways to do mobile 3D games. One way is the N-Gage route, which is basically native games, megabytes of data, you buy a cartridge in a shop and you plug it into your handset. That’s something that has been proven in the past with the GameBoy and GameBoy Advance, there’s clearly a market for it. Whether there is room for a mobile phone player to create a market for it is another question.

The other way is what M3G is exactly about: It’s not native, it’s Java with none of the benefits of native because the engine is partly Java, partly native to keep performance up. It’s sub-250 kilobyte games, to be downloadable over the air, and you don’t have to go into a shop and buy it. You can be on a train or a taxi, you didn’t know you wanted to play a game, but you’ve got fifteen minutes in front of you and no newspaper at hand. You can download a game on impulse.

These are two very different propositions. If you’re talking about platforms like the N-Gage right now, the volumes are fairly limited, because of the price point, because of the market it targets, as opposed to Java handsets – there are going to be millions of those over the coming years. Java handsets are a cheaper proposition and are more accessible. A handset can have the M3G API embedded in it and still look like a professional handset.

We’ve chosen the M3G way because we believe that mobile handsets are inherently connected devices and, in the same way that add-on camera accessories for handsets never took off, potentially the same thing could happen to platforms like the N-Gage. If you have to think about what you’re going to be doing with the phone over the day, you lose the immediate satisfaction of downloading a game on impulse and being able to play it.

What N-Gage has done though, is to put mobile gaming on the map for a lot of people. Nokia is a big company and the fact that they’ve pushed this platform so much and invested so much money in it has raised a few heads around the industry and also around the console industry.

Our proposition is downloadable content and we’re sticking to that right now, because our technology can do it.

What’s next for Swerve?

We’ll be looking at how well customers react to 3D on mobile phones, and looking at the uplift that 3D on phones causes, in the same way that 3D on consoles caused such a big market.

We’ll also be growing the catalogue of games that we have in house, or that we develop with partners. We have about 25 right now – we’re going to need a lot more than that when there are several different handsets in the market.

Also, Swerve as a 3D technology can also run in BREW and native environments, as well as J2ME. Swerve BREW applications can be run on BREW handsets such as the recently announced Kyocera Koi, thanks to a downloadable BREW extension provided by Superscape to BREW network operators. Swerve Native applications can run on the same engine as Swerve J2ME applications as it is a dual language 3D engine. This makes the business case for embedding the engine on an upcoming handset even more attractive, especially as Swerve is a generic 3D engine.

The next challenge will be hardware graphics acceleration, and the M3G standard was built with hardware acceleration in mind. The hardware acceleration does the grunt work in terms of rendering polygons, shading and anti-aliasing and M3G gives the developers a nice API to work with to develop games quickly.

M3G is a high level API, with a scene tree with nodes for each object in the scene – what that means for an animator or a programmer that you move a car or an actor rather than move every single polygon that makes up the car. It’s object based.

M3G has a long life in front of itself, even when hardware acceleration comes along because it gives an entry point for developers and designers that is very easy to use without losing the benefits of hardware acceleration.

What do you think are the most important types of game for mobile phones? Will the connectivity change the types of games people play?

We’re developing a variety of games, single player games. Given the interface on mobile phones, we have racing games, first person shooters, sports games. These are quite well-suited because most handsets today have some form of joystick so it’s quite easy to navigate a car around.

In terms of multiplayer, you have to be concious that networks have latency and so turn-based games are the ideal target for the moment. Golf is a great example of a game that is quite interactive and visual, benefits from being in 3D and at the same time is simple to implement in multiplayer because you can actually play in turns.

I suppose bandwidth is less of an issue with golf because you’re only transmitting a vector?

The interesting thing with golf in 3D is that if you both have the same game and you’re playing with each other you don’t have to send that much data across the network because you’re not replicating that much data: the power of the shot, the swing. The game engine can understand this and replay it like a movie on your opponent’s handset.

There are a lot of tricks with 3D implementations of games, like being able to download new levels, new guns that we’re looking at also.

Do you think there is much of a market for selling add-ons to games like levels, skins and equipment?

If you look at ringtones and wallpapers, well who would have thought that people would be willing to pay millions of dollars to just have a different ringing sound on their phone?

We hope there is a market for game add-ons, and it depends on the way that a campaign is organised. In Formula One, for example a developer could release a game on the first day of the season, with the first track — and subsequently produce new tracks for every race available for download.

This makes a lot of sense because they can charge a little for each new track, but in terms of network usage it’s nothing. The data they need to send to recreate a new 3D track if the game is well built is minimal. The less data they send over the network, the better it is for them economically. The value for the user is extreme, because they have a new track and they can actually play the race that’s being run that weekend.

It’s a whole industry in the making!

3D brings a lot more. If you need to send a 2D track, then you’re in for a big download. You’re looking at sprites as opposed to rearranging pieces of track. You can have green trees in England and yellow trees in Spain, but in 3D it’s the same tree, it’s already on the phone – you’re just saying “this.tree = yellow”, rather than downloading an image of a new tree.

We’re learning every day – it’s exciting times. When you think about convergence, this really gives some meaning to the word: you have people from the PC world, such as developers, hardware and 3D guys, mobile phone operators, cinema studios – everybody is coming together.

It does seem that you need many different skills to produce a game these days – you need proper artists, programmers, musicians, you need to get the intellectual property from somewhere…

It’s not easy, but the results are quite impressive!

The JSR 184 Standard

Swerve

Superscape

Ofcom’s Media Literacy Strategy

Centring around the principles of research, partnering and labelling, Ofcom have published a report outlining a strategy for media literacy in the UK.

Ofcom recognise that the public are now faced with a huge choice of media, and that familiarity and media awareness are essential to managing this choice, protecting children and understanding the world around us. The regulator wishes to promote media literacy as “A media literate person will have the potential to be an efficient worker, an informed consumer and an active citizen. People who are not able to use effectively the new communications technologies will not be able to take full advantage of the benefits they bring and may become marginalised in society.”

Ofcom’s strategy is based around three main work strands:

“Research. Key to the success of our early work and in defining future priorities is to develop an evidence-base of research. This will help us to identify the issues, to direct our work and inform progress towards achieving our goals.

Connecting, partnering & signposting. We aim to add value to existing media literacy activity, to stimulate new work and to promote and direct people to advice and guidance concerning new communications technologies.

Labelling. Viewers and listeners need to have clear, accurate and timely information about the nature of content so that they can make informed choices. Our prime concern is to ensure consistency in the presentation of information related to possible harm and offence, in particular to help protect young and vulnerable people from inappropriate material. This advice can be effectively delivered using a content labelling framework. Ofcom will work with industry players to explore the possibility of creating a common content labelling (information) scheme for electronic audiovisual material.”

Of primary interest to many, the call for a universal e-content label covering TV, internet, mobile products and games presents a considerable challenge to industry. Ofcom isn’t even sure it can be done – and of course the regulator has no remit when it comes to internet content.

Ofcom’s strategy and priorities for the promotion of media literacy

Bringing the School into the Home via Broadband

As Britain moves closer to complete broadband coverage, communities around the country are beginning to explore the potential that interactive services offer and are partnering with technology companies and content providers to create some innovative services.

We decided to look at one of the best examples of community broadband TV: Kingston Communication’s collaboration with an East Yorkshire school which has led to an exciting project to engage pupils in interactive learning, both at home and in the classroom.

The Kingswood High School’s Broadband TV (KBTV) Project was conceived in 2001 under the UK Government’s Information Society Programme and Hull’s own Digital Learning Plan. Kingswood was chosen to collaborate with the BBC in its Headstart project.

The BBC provided the school with access to its film and video archive – and from this, using standard desktop tools like Premiere, pupils and teachers were able to create interactive content that formed the basis of many exciting and informative lessons.

Kingswood High went on to develop the idea into community broadband TV – with the aim of providing a range of interactive services via set top boxes (STBs). The school secured enough funding for the project to provide a one-year trial of STBs for all the families in the local community with a suitable phone line.

We spoke to Andrew Fawcett, Head of Products and Services at Kingston Communications about the stealthy growth of broadband television: “IPTV has come of age, and it’s come of age in a non-linear fashion. We’re on both sides of the equation, because part of our business is being a broadband ISP, and that’s been experiencing exponential growth, delivering one megabit of broadband to a consumer PC. Since 1998, we’ve been delivering five megabits into the back of people’s television sets with a service that people don’t know is broadband.”

We asked him for some background to the Kingswood project: “Everybody who goes to Kingswood School, all the kids basically as part of their school work, use the KIT service – it’s given to them free of charge. They’re creating their own content at school level.”

“The service covers 200 homes at the moment, but we have a proposal to roll it out to 2000.”

Staff at the school are finding that this new way of learning reaches and appeals to children who would not normally enjoy or benefit from traditional classroom teaching methods.

The interactive service provides immersive learning tools at school and at home. Andrew added, “They (the pupils) get the Kingswood Channel, a school’s TV channel with three elements to it. One is that we deliver curricular materials – there’s a permanently available set of resources for all subjects that’s very video rich.”

“The second part is taking stock materials and turning them into their own programmes.” Each (school) year has its own area on the service, though areas are accessible to everyone.”

As an example of this, Andrew showed us a documentary on arson that had been created at the school. The film had been constructed from content that was put together by the school’s pupils and teachers.

Part of the experience of learning about arson includes the kids going out with cameras and interviewing people. The idea of making children media literate is very powerful. I’ve seen kids who would be a nightmare in class, but this stops being class work, and becomes making a film – and more importantly it becomes a film that’s going to be on live telly when they get home. You can suddenly engage kids at a level that’s incredible. Very significantly, the school comes into the home.”

The film included an interview with victims of arson, and an arsonist – and was put together with standard desktop tools like Adobe Premier.

Interactive television like this also provides educators with valuable information on the effectiveness of services and lessons. “Year Ten”, he told us, “will be asked to go home and watch this as homework. We track usage for a select number of pupils who have chosen to opt in to the research elements in the programme. We’re looking at Educational Family Footprints. One of the key determinants of the success or failure in education is parental support. We’ve taken families with different educational footprints – from homes where education is core to the family life, to others where education is less important.”

The third aspect of the service provides pupils with a virtual PC they can access using their television set at home. The system runs a virtual PC using Citrix MetaFrame – all the processing is done at the server end of the network, which only sends screen updates to the set-top box. The box essentially becomes a “dumb terminal”. Pupils can access and save work stored on the school’s network, and use Star Office providing them with applications for word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations.”

A virtual PC service like this has many advantages, as the customers don’t have to maintain a PC at home and so security against spyware, hacking and viruses is taken care of by a qualified IT department at the school. It also ensures that pupils all have access to the same computing platform.

Andrew is justifiably proud of this aspect of the service, “Of all these things we’ve done with KIT, this brings everything together. It brings the localness and on-demand aspects of the service together, and it emphasises the difference of broadband TV – you could never provide an application like this with satellite TV. It’s wholly back-channel dependent.”
Kevin Beaton, Head Teacher at the school explains why they wanted to get so involved in a service like this: “The rationale for the whole project is that the school becomes the local hub that is able to provide the surrounding community with access to digital services. Initially the focus will be on education, so that we can prove to everyone involved that the principle of on-demand access to information and interactive educational content really is viable.”

Vein continued, “The school is currently developing material to be used on KBTV, and we’ve identified a number of logical and consistent uses for the system. Lessons in several departments are already being developed using our very latest interactive ‘White Boards’. This in turn means that teaching methods and the style of learning are changing, and more and more lessons will begin to make use of film and video as a stimulus to greater creativity. Some of the items will only be produced for homework purposes; hence students would be expected to watch educational material on film, and then complete set work on the film at home. Other material will be work from lessons at school, which can be completed at home, or perhaps reviewed at a later stage as part of a planned revision programme.

“Yet other material will be demonstration work from subjects like Design Technology, where soldering small intricate parts can be clearly be shown to pupils in close-up mode. In the field of Art it would be possible to view many different examples of paintings and sculptures, with the key points that ensured the success of the work clearly demonstrated.

“Another interesting aspect of the KBTV on-demand channel is that parents would have independent access to vital school information concerning their children. This would include attendance records, term dates, coursework deadlines, examination entries, parents’ evenings, exhibitions and school music and drama productions. In addition, direct contact could be made with school staff via e-mail, with the possibility of video conferencing for those parents or guardians who were unable to physically visit the school for whatever reason.”

And what about the future for services like Kingswood? Andrew Fawcett told us what was up next: “There was a very small budget for this – by squeezing things, as we tend to do, we managed to deliver it to 200 homes, to get a reasonable feel for the potential. This stage of the trial finishes in June – our intention is to look for additional sources of funding.”

Kingswood High and Kingston Communications are compiling information on the before and after effects of the KBTV initiative – hopefully benefits of this sort of programme will inspire more partnership and research in the educational possibilities of our broadband future.

Kingswood High School

Kingston Communications

BBCi Humber

Windows Media 9 Now On Linux

Turbolinux have become the first major distributor to provide a Linux-based OS with Windows Media and DVD playback built in.

Version 10F of their distribution comes with both CyberLink’s PowerDVD for Linux and Xine. Xine is the most popular Linux video playback engine and this distro comes with licensed Windows Media 9 codecs.

PowerDVD supports CSS (the Content Scramble System), allowing Linux users to watch DVDs legally, they’re no longer bypassing a copy protection algorithm to decode content off disks.

As Linux distributions go, Turbolinux 10F is not cheap – it’ll set you back US$149 (€125), but then it does contain proprietary commercial software and codecs. However, Windows XP Home, which has the same functionality (with free WM9 codecs) is only US$30 (€25) more expensive than Turbolinux.

Although getting WM9 into a Linux distribution is a step forward, it’s not really all that surprising: Microsoft’s new expanded licensing programme means that the company is very willing to get their media technology onto as many platforms by “allowing the components to be deployed on all platforms—even non-Windows desktops” (from the WM licensing page).

Turbolinux’s announcement

Microsoft’s Windows Media Pricing and Licensing

RealNetworks Talking to PC Manufacturers

RealNetworks are in talks with PC manufacturers regarding shipping their player software with new PCs. Since the EU ruling on Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, it looks like other software houses finally have a chance of getting their own players shipped with PCs – as was the EU Commissions intention.

“In a few very preliminary talks with computer makers we’ve discussed options, Europe is the first jurisdiction to rule on this,” said RealNetworks’ chief executive Rob Glaser. He believes that PC manufacturers are about to embark on a new course. Glaser is very proud of the capabilities of the latest Real Player, version 10, as it will play a wide variety of files and incorporates sophisticated DRM via RealNetworks Helix technology. RealPlayer 10 is capable, the company claim, of playing any file format on any device. It certainly is the only player at the moment that can play all major formats.

Additionally, RealNetworks are getting more heavily involved in mobile phone-based media, where there is much less standards fragmentation than with PCs. “The bulk of our business is still in the PC segment, but we’re focusing on both. We hope to see significant mobile growth”, Glaser added.

RealNetworks

Microsoft and Sun Kiss and Make Up

It came as a surprise to many, but Sun and Microsoft agreed to a settlement to their long-running anti-trust dispute on Friday. The dispute was centred around Microsoft’s treatment of Sun’s Java programming language.

Microsoft has never liked Java, seeing it as a direct competitor with many of its own technologies such as ActiveX and C#. Microsoft support for Java was always patchy – MS’s own Java virtual machine was not strictly standard, and Java implementation and integration in Internet Explorer was troublesome. For a while Microsoft tried to divide the Java community with its own, not strictly compatible J++ language, but is now promoting C# as a substitute for Sun’s write-once-run-anywhere platform. Whilst C# is syntactically similar to Java, and has a remarkably similar API, it does not have many of the benefits of the Java platform, nor is it so widely supported.

However, it was J++ that angered Sun Microsystems – further inflamed when Microsoft declared that they would stop supporting Java, forcing users to download a VM if they wanted to run Java applets. It was this dispute that kicked off the EU’s case against Microsoft – and led to rulings relating to including better Java support in Windows and the uncoupling of Windows Media Player.

“Our companies will continue to compete hard, but this agreement creates a new basis for cooperation that will benefit the customers of both companies,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft in a statement, “This agreement recognizes that cutting edge R&D and intellectual property protection are the foundation for the growth and success of our industry. This is a positive step forward for both Sun and Microsoft, but the real winners are the customers and developers who rely on our products and innovations.”

Microsoft will pay Sun US$700 million (€578 million) to resolve the Java dispute, and a further US$900 million (€743 million) for patent issues. Both companies have agreed to pay each other royalties for the technologies that they license from one another, with Microsoft paying US$350 million (€289 million) up front.

Sun on the agreement