Monday, September 27, 2004
Posted by Roberto
6:38 AM
0 comments
ALL FROM ONE SUPPLIER:
YOUR BROADBAND MEDIACOM PROVIDER
Triple Play = Entertainment + Broadband Internet + Telephony
For digital service providers like telcos and cable providers, the "triple play" represents the ultimate way to increase profits and customer loyalty at the same time.
TV over phone lines (TV-over-ADSL), also known as TV over Internet protocol (IPTV), is already taking root in Europe, with offerings from France Telecom, Italy's FastWeb, Britain's HomeChoice (Video Networks) and others.
HomeChoice service, which today is priced at £35 per month and up, features 35 traditional, linear broadcast television channels, 23 digital radio channels, broadband Internet access, headend-driven PVR and a number of unique "hybrid" broadcast/VOD channels.
Examples of current HomeChoice ITV services:
V:MX
A collection of over 2,800 music videos, which are organized into 9 genre-based channels, and which viewers can search by genre, artist or track title. It allows viewers to pause, rewind and fast-forward, to skip videos they don't want to watch, and to compile personal favorites lists for later viewing (the top-30 videos that are most popular with HomeChoice subscribers are compiled each week into a channel, called "V:MX Chart"). You can sit back and watch like a regular channel, but if there's a music video on it that you don't like, you can just hit the Skip button, and it will go to the next video automatically. If the next video is one you happen to like, you can hit the Yellow button, and it puts that video in your favorites list. After you've built up your favorites list, you can go straight to it and play it all day long, if you like.
Scamp
An interactive "hybrid" service which is targeted at pre-schoolars. When kids decide, for example, that they don't want to watch the Teletubbies, they can skip that and go to the next program, or, if they like it, they can put it in their favorites list. Another thing they can do is press a Find button that brings up a video wall with all the characters on the channel: Barney, Scooby Doo or whatever. They just navigate to the character they like, press the OK button, and the service plays just cartoons with that character.
BBC News Interactive
HomeChoice ITV service that provides viewers with a menu from which they can select and view segments from the BBC's News 24 channel. It's all on-demand and always allows you to start from the beginning. Unlike the multi-screen news services on Sky, which require you to tap into a looped broadcast stream, and which make you wait until the stream starts over if you want to see the beginning of a segment.
Replay
A headend-driven PVR service, that provides viewers with on-demand access via the EPG to popular shows that have been broadcast over the past 7 days on BBC One, BBC Two or Channel 4.
Today, Cable & Satellite operators are still offering superior quality video streams to their customers, but in the near future this competitive advantage will dissipate and Telcos will offer equal quality streams to their ADSL customers.
Broadband Penetration along Market Maturity Stages
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Posted by Roberto
10:35 PM
0 comments
PREDATORY ROBOTICS
To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.
The robot's energy source is the sugar in the polysaccharide called chitin that makes up a fly's exoskeleton. Ecobot II traveled for five days on just eight fat flies at a top speed of 10 centimetres per hour.
NewScientist.com Article
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Posted by Roberto
1:22 AM
0 comments
MOBILE INFOTAINMENT
According to wireless consulting and research firm Alexander Resources, the mobile "infotainment" market will be a $7.2 billion industry by 2008.
Japan and South Korea already have mobile TV service.
In the USA Sprint offers some limited content through its MobiTV service, including the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, some sports stations, and a variety of news services. The service offers 15-frame-per-second streaming video on a Samsung phone.
Nokia, Motorola, NEC, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson are collaborating on the mobile-broadcast specifications as members of the Open Mobile Alliance.
In the meantime, there is a company named OnAir Entertainment that delivers live television to Wi-Fi-enabled lap-tops and PDAs in public hot spots. Goldman Sachs estimates there are currently 100M Wi-Fi users worldwide. In-Stat/MDR estimates 95% of laptops sold in 2005 will have built-in Wi-Fi capability.
Broadcasting to mobile phones
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Posted by Roberto
1:26 PM
0 comments
AUTONOMOUS AGENTS CAN LEARN
AND ACT INDEPENDENT OF HUMAN CONTROL
What makes agent software different is that the designs also incorporate disciplines such as game theory. Agent designers tend to draw from a variety of areas, such as economics and psychology, in an effort to create programs capable of handling complex interactions. Programmers are adept at building systems that respond to a certain set of "if-then" circumstances. But agents are model-based, designed to achieve the goals and intentions of the designers, not merely to respond to a given event. That means they can react to unimagined events.
At NASA, software agents are performing work previously handled by ground controllers.
IBM is building agent technology to support its autonomic computing systems, which have the intelligence to reconfigure themselves in response to changing conditions.
Agents may change the nature of distributed computing environments. Instead of centralized control systems, agents could independently operate parts of a network but also have the ability to take over other functions if problems arise.
Computerworld: Agents of Change
aamas: Autonomos Agents and Multi Agent Systems
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