Category: Networking

.mobile domain on the way?

There has not been a new Top Level Domains (TLD) since .name came out a couple of years ago. Even that ended up as a bit of a damp squib. But now a collection of nine corporations, have applied to ICANN (Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers) to form a new domain. Their proposal, .mobile is to be used for mobile applications/devices and will be filed by 15 March 2004.

Nokia is leading some pretty heavyweight companies from the worlds of computing, software, tech manufacturers, mobile phone makers and cellular service providers. The list; Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Vodafone, 3, GSM Association, HP, Orange, Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd. and Sun Microsystems is not only from a diverse range of areas, but are feature companies that normally do not really like each other, like, Nokia, Microsoft and Sun.

If the current application is successful, the current estimate is to have the first names available during the second half of 2005. An independent, separate organisation would run the registry.

This is not the first time Nokia has tried to get some new TLD’s introduced, back in October 2000 they requested, the following form ICANN:-

.mas
.max
.mid
.mis
.mobile
.mobi
.now
.own

At the time they came out with a press release, which sadly they have removed from their site, but thanks to archive.org (nee Way Back Machine), we can find the original release. (Interesting to see their projections for mobile handset, overtaking computers for IP access by 2003). The 2000 applications, clearly was not a success.

UMTS forum has been a big supporter for a Mobile TLD, or M-TLD, as they prefer to call it, and two years ago (March, 2002) they published the findings of ‘Benefits and Drawbacks of Introducing a Dedicated Top Level Domain Within the UMTS Environment’ prepared by Theron business consulting. The Executive Summary –  is available to the public, the detail (TOC) is not without registration. The estimated cost of applying for and running the was estimated at less than 3m Euro.

The purpose of the .mobile domain, beyond opening up the domain market to another potential name grab, is not immediately clear. So after reading between various lines and carrying out further research we’ve concluded the following.

It appears that the idea is to limit the people who can get a .mobile name, and by doing this, they hope to ensure that, at the very least, the content is formatted for mobile devices and the service has a level of QoS (Quality of Service). If this will turn out to be a mobile walled garden, a mini-internet, only for mobile devices is not clear. Will .mobile domain only be available for use BY mobile devices, or are people to put their mobile-friendly content on .mobile domains?

Some quotes by the founding partner companies appear to support the walled garden theory.

“We expect that by leveraging the technologies of the Internet, appropriately scaled for mobile scenarios, this initiative will provide the ease of use and efficiency that will significantly fuel mobile Internet usage.”
Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of the MSN Communications Platform at Microsoft

“Creating a unique, standard platform for a mobile Internet environment is a natural next step to enabling new and compelling services for businesses and consumers,”
Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives and business development, HP

Forcing publishers to create a whole separate sites to operate under a .mobile domain appears a very expensive route. We would imagine that it would be a much better to define a standard that can be used with any currently existing domain. ie just serve it from the same domain as before but define Digital-Lifestyles.info/mobile or mobile.Digital-Lifestyles.info as the convention.

If the mobile phone owners would get a choice between .mobile-internet or Internet is also not clear.

One things that the mobile industry understand is if each handsets has its own domain name, there are significant issues in maintaining DNS records and monitoring their connection to the Internet – as the phone connect and disconnect so regularly. This lead us to think that they are talking about maintaining a separate DNS system for mobile devices. If they do end up running a separate DNS, Nokia (or their JV company/partners) would become the gatekeeper to and from the mobile world – a very powerful position.

More details of this are bound to popup over the next few weeks, if anything relevant turns up, we will let you know.

The mobile Top Level Domain initiative

Nokia October 2000 application to ICANN

Theon business consulting

Ofcom Chair: UK with True Broadband by 2010

Fifty days in to Ofcom’s existence, its Chair David Currie delivered a speech to the Communications Management Association conference. He recapped on what Ofcom had been doing, then outlined where he felt it was going, focusing mainly on broadband.

We feel the most exciting part of the speech was, in his words, True Broadband.

Anyone with a real understanding of why broadband is such a vital part of the future will be hugely encouraged by his words. In summary, what is currently being sold as broadband to the UK consumer and many other around the world, a 512k connection, is not broadband. It is the equivalent of a 1200/75-baud modem.

We heartily agree with Currie view that ‘DSL at 512k is a convenience product’. He argues that it is not practical or possible for the UK to lurch from a 512k connection to something much faster – the current copper-wire based system we have simply would not support it.

Instead a target of 10Mbps should be set for 2010 and that it should be provided competitively. We read this as; the long lasting monopoly that BT has, and does enjoy will be removed. His comparison with the multi-supplier mobile market bears this out. In our view BT consistently hoodwinked Oftel. At first glance it looks like they will not have the same joy with Ofcom.

This was further underlined by his praise of the Parliamentary Trade and Industry Select Committee point that

‘[we must] make certain that the regulatory framework ensures that commercial decisions by private companies are aligned with the wider economic and social needs of the country.’

He and his colleagues clearly recognise and understand what is required for a proper broadband service. With connections being symmetric rather than the slow transmit, asymmetric we have now, he identified the need for the network to enable distributed system, not just central services delivering to the ends of the network. We also find it encouraging that he reiterated the pursuit of wireless connections.

Currie states his aim is ‘Liquid bandwidth; all you can eat; always on. No contention.’

Very encouraging.

Full text
David Currie, Ofcom chairman, Communications Management Association Annual Conference, 16 February 2004

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

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

TiVo Consumes StrangeBerry

TiVo has announced that it has acquired a company called StrangeBerry. The stock-for-stock deal actually took place on 12 January but the details have only just emerged due to a recent SEC-filing by TiVo. No real details have been released by TiVo as to why they have bought it, but in the filing TiVo describe it as

a small Palo Alto based technology company specializing in using home network and broadband technologies to create new entertainment experiences on television

Very little is known about StrangeBerry and the products they have been working on since its inception in April 2002. What is know is there are only a handful (five) of signed deals with companies like Coke & Fox to place promotional videos on TiVo’s and given TiVo has over one million paid up users, handling this would require a highly scalable solution. StrangeBerry could bring these skills.

Time will tell – but it sounds interesting.

TiVO SEC filing

TiVo announcment about StrangeBerry

Sony Announce Location Free TV

Among the many announcements at CES was an interesting portable 12″ LCD TV screen from Sony, that can be carried around a house and have various content delivered to it from its base station, enabling the showing of video from many different sources, as well as playing music, viewing photos and browsing the Internet. Sony calls it LocationFree™.

It is based on a similar device released just in Japan called AirTact and a few TVs. Kunitake Ando, president and group COO at Sony Corp has realised the potential to freeing the screen. At Sony “Dream World” held in Paris, Sept. 2003 was quoted that transforming traditional TVs to “location-free” TV or displays could take the 125 million TV sets sold worldwide and “easily increased to four or five times that number.”

The basestation can have many different sources plugged in to it, including; video, be that TV ariel/cable, DVD, VCR, DV video camera; audio sources; other media files stored on computers via Ethernet. There is a wide selection for possible connections to the network, wirelessly (802.11a, 802.11b (WiFi), or 802.11g) or an Ethernet cable. The content is delivered to the remote, battery-powered 12.1″ LCD touch screen, which can also run from a main source. There are also plans for a pocket sized 5.8″ version. The viewer is free to move around the house while continuing to access the different media sources, selecting them by touching the screen. As yet, Sony has not discussed battery life.

For the first time Sony have brought technology from their high-end TV sets to the LCD display including 3D Y/C separation circuitry for clear, vivid picture and colour blur reduction; angled line correction circuitry for smoothing out jagged lines; motion adaptive I/P conversion circuitry for improving fast moving action scenes; and digital audio amplifier circuitry for crisp sound and minimized distortion.

It looks like Sony have carried out considerable research to find what function user may want. The five pounds screen itself has a lot of connectors includes an Ethernet port, a USB port, Memory Stick media slot, headphone jack, keyboard port and an AV input for connecting to a camcorder. Useful features include viewers being able to “freeze” and save a TV scene by using the “capture” button on the remote screen – saving a mad scrabble for pen and paper where information appears on the TV.  Prints of the images or homepage data, e-mail attachments and digital photos can also be made to USB printers connected to the base-station.

While using the screen to browse the Internet, the viewer will be able to watch their choice of TV/video source displayed in a Picture in Picture (PiP) window, but given the screen is 800×600, we imaging this might not be used much beyond demos to friends.

Sony has omitted to give any precise dates for the shipping of Location Free, preferring to say it would be “Later in the year”.

Sony say one of the benefits of the screen being an IP device is that access your media does not need to be restricted just to your own home network. By taking the screen with you on your travels, you can access the self same content through any IP connection, which are increasingly found around the world in offices and hotel rooms. One example cited gives an interesting twist to the product – a person on the road, unable to attend their child’s birthday, has an opportunity to tune in, watching the live video being shot on a camcorder plugged in to the basestation at home. We believe application such as this, which can be used to bring together families distributed over great distances, will be a major driver in purchasing products.

We are excited about this step of remote access to your home media, firewall configuration allowing of course. It could be an interesting early step into a future where your home media server becomes the focal point of your media ownership, with your various remote IP devices having access, via your home server.

At this point it is worth highlighting that hard facts about which protocols are used to transfer content back and forth between base-station and screen. It would be a great shame if the protocols were proprietary. We think there is real potential in this device, and by using open standards; there could be a real potential for a product like this to become a standard for interfacing analog media to an IP device. There is a real need for a device like it and it appears that Mr Ando at Sony Corp is trying to fill it.

TiVo Claim Patent Infringment by EchoStar

PVR pioneer, TiVo, has filed a patent infringement suit against US satellite TV provider, EchoStar. They are claiming that EchoStar are using technology that violates their patent, “multimedia time warping system”, that enables viewers to “store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program” that they filed for in 1998 and were granted in 2001.

The headline is clear, TiVo start to see the PVR world become accepted by the general public and want to start gaining income from their patents – they have 40 awarded and a further 100 applications pending. It is also in TiVo business plan to increase their income from patents and reduce their reliance on selling boxes.

We wonder if there is another, less immediately obvious, intention. One of TiVo’s largest customers is US satellite TV provider DirecTV, who were recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch and amongst the many companies that Mr Murdoch has as interest in is NDS. NDS market a PVT, the XTV PVR, which could be a major threat to TiVo and their continuing relationship as a supplier to DirecTV – unless DirecTV know legal action would following the changing of suppliers.

EchoStar PVR

NDS XTV PVR

BT Extends Radio Broadband Trial

Following satellite coverage, but this has not been taken up due to its very high costs.

Their new approach is to provide high-speed connections to a central point, then distribute to households that have uninterrupted, line-of-site to the antenna (picture right) mounted on top of the subscribers rooftop. Labelled as P2MP (Point to MultiPoint), it provides a two-way connection that will, in their words, supply connections of a similar speed to 512k ADSL.

For the trial, they are working with Israel-based company, Alvarion, using their BreezeAccess product that operates in the 5.8GHz Band C radio spectrum.

Other similar services have been available around the UK for some time. Firstnet (who were bought by Pipex in August this year) have been running a similar service in densely populated areas around cities including Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham, Reading and Coventry for locations up to 10km away from any of its base. They are offering two-way 512Kbps, 1Mbps or even 5Mbps services.

Porthleven trial site

BreezeAccess from Alvarion

Firstnet

HomePlug IC Now Under $10

Intellon Corp. have announced their third generation of chip for use in powerline-enabled devices. Priced at under $10, the lowest current unit price cost, it enable builders of devices to embed Ethernet connectivity using nothing more that the powercord of the device plugged into the wall socket, creating a network around the building.

The HomePlug Alliance is a US-based organisation that promotes the use of power circuits to carry Ethernet signals and their HomePlug 1.0 standard can now carry up to 14Mbps of data theoretically.

The single chip, INT5200, includes a fair bit of functionality; a HomePlug 1.0 physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC), three host interfaces including MII, Ethernet 10/100BT MAC, and USB1.1 device, and a complete analogue front-end (AFE) with receive and transmit amplifiers, all in CMOS technology. Backward compatibility has been maintained by using the same pin out as previous versions.

While transferring data using the power cord of devices seems like a panacea, some parties have voiced concerns that such devices cause interference with radio signals, both within and outside the households using them.

Intellon

The HomePlug Alliance

Over 1m Bluetooth Units Shipping a Week

Six years after its launch, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that they are now shipping over one million Bluetooth devices a week. They hold this up as proof that Bluetooth has now moved out of hype and into reality.

It is generally thought that laws being enacted around the World, that forbid car drivers to hold their mobile phone while driving, are providing a significant contributions to the increased in these figures, and that this will only continue.

One concern in the Bluetooth circles are the number of non-ratified devices that are being brought in to the market, with TDK estimating that as many as half of products sold in shops are made by companies that are not member of the Bluetooth SIG. The industries big worry is that these devices will not function correctly and Bluetooth generally starts to get a bad name.

Bluetooth SIG