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The Resurrection
of Indie Radio
by Charles C. Mann
Wired, March 2005
FM never sounded so freaking good. How the coming digital boom - and Big Radio's bottom line - is driving the new golden age of multichannel, microniche broadcasting.
High-Tech Tension Over Illegal Uses
by Jonathan Krim,
Washington Post, February 22, 2005
In 2002, a young software programmer in Seattle named Bram Cohen solved a vexing
Internet problem: how to get large computer files such as home movies or audio
recordings of music concerts to travel rapidly across cyberspace.
Among the benefits of the invention, called BitTorrent, was that millions of
users could quickly see lengthy amateur videos documenting the devastation of
the December tsunami in the Indian Ocean, helping to spur an outpouring of
charitable aid.
But BitTorrent also is wildly popular because the technology makes it easier to
freely trade Hollywood movies and television shows, putting it in the cross
hairs of the entertainment industry.
Increasingly, that same tension surrounds a dazzling new generation of high-tech
products and services that help people copy, customize and increase the
portability of digital works, sparking a sharp legal debate: How should courts
view technologies that have beneficial uses but also are heavily used for
illegal acts?
Broadcast Flag Oral Arguments
Luminous Void, February 22, 2005
Today I went to see the oral arguments at the D.C. Circuit Court in American Library Association v. FCC. This case has been described as “just as important as Grokster” to the future of technology and information. Several groups are trying to stop the FCC broadcast flag rules.
Just as the cable TV companies have been offering Internet service for several years and are now offering voice services, what we used to call telephones, so the telephone companies are starting to offer TV services.
Interactive TV
Poised for a Rollout
by Bruce Meyerson
iWon News, February 13, 2005
Just as the tech bubble's promise of "IP" telephone service over an Internet
connection is only now becoming a widespread reality, IPTV finally appears to be
on the verge of cracking the U.S. mainstream.
Not the cable TV establishment - which questions the technology and the demand
for so much interactivity - but rather three Bell telephone companies are taking
IPTV off the drawing board in the United States, much as telecom players in Asia
and Europe have led the way abroad.
The extent of the Bells' plans vary considerably, but perhaps a dozen markets
will see some form of IPTV starting later this year, and millions of homes may
have the option by the end of 2006.
Math Is Done: Napster To Go Doesn't Add Up
by Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post, February 13, 2005
Whether you like Napster To Go, the online store's new music subscription
service, depends on whether you think of it as all-you-can-eat or
all-you-can-pay.
Both descriptions are accurate. For $15 a month, Napster To Go offers unlimited
song downloads -- in a copy-restricted format that can be played only on Windows
XP computers and some digital music players -- but these songs expire if you
don't keep paying that fee each month.
The next article has good recent stats for your PEST analysis and market research.
10 Million iPods, Previewing the CD's End
by Sean Daly
Washington Post, February 13, 2005
"The new format is no format," predicted
[George] Petersen, a 24-year
industry veteran who also owns a record label, a recording studio and a
music-publishing company. "What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you
could create whatever you need. If you want to make an MP3, you make an MP3. If
you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that."
"We're moving beyond the media stage to the delivery stage," agreed Mitch
Gallagher, 41-year-old editor of EQ, a San Mateo, Calif.-based magazine for
music producers. At some point, he said, "you won't have something to hold in
your hand" until you transfer a data file to a blank disc or tape.
"We can make our own plastic," Petersen said. "I've been thinking this is what
should happen for years, but it's actually the way we're going anyway."
Oakland aims to
be a hotspot for wireless Internet: Plan spreads free or low-cost access
over the entire county
by Kathleen Gray
Detroit Free Press, February 11, 2005
Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson had his head in a high-tech cloud Thursday when he spelled out a vision of an Oakland County with wireless Internet access for free or little cost from border to border.
Hands off our Wi-Fi network!
by Dianah Neff
CNet News.com, February 10, 2005
Why are Wireless
Philadelphia and other city wireless programs such a big threat? More
precisely, why do the big boys keep trying to kill our Wi-Fi networks? ...
The truth, of course, is that the incumbent local exchange carriers want
unregulated monopolies over all telecommunications.
Napster To Go campaign will challenge Apple iTunes' lead
New Media Age
Forbes, February 10, 2005
"We're confident it will be the model
the entire industry backs," said Gorog. "It's exactly what consumers want to do.
Napster To Go is very similar to the P2P experience."
He believes the best way to market the new service is
to emphasise its advantages over iTunes. He's particularly keen to highlight
iTunes' iPod-only compatibility. "We're going to be communicating to people that
it's stupid to buy an iPod."
Court:
Hollywood gets P2P giant's server logs
by John Borland
CNET News.com, February 10, 2005
A Dallas federal court has ordered file-swapping site
LokiTorrent.com to shut down and provide Hollywood lawyers with access to its
full server logs, including data that could expose hundreds of thousands of
people to copyright lawsuits.
The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it had won a quick
court victory against LokiTorrent, and was launching a new round of actions
against other online piracy hubs. The data provided by the onetime file-swapping
hub would provide "a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in
illegal activities," the trade group said.
School RFID
Plan Gets an F
by Kim Zetter
Wired, February 10, 2005
Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small
California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently
launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with
radio frequency, or RFID, chips. ...
The system consists of a photo ID card affixed to a lanyard and worn around the
neck. Embedded in the card is an RFID chip that contains a 15-digit number
assigned to each student. As students pass beneath a doorway scanner on their
way into a classroom, the scanner records the number and sends it to a server in
the school's administrative office. The server translates the digits into names
and sends an attendance list to the teacher's PDA, identifying all of the
students who walked through the door. The teacher then visually verifies that
the names on the PDA list match the students in the classroom.
The school as factory where human widgets get stress-tested to see if they're strong enough to withstand the rigors of the corporate world.
'Podcasting' lets masses do radio shows
by Matthew Fordahl
Associated Press (in USA Today), February 7, 2005
After getting a taste of the radio business in college,
software designer Craig Patchett never lost his interest in broadcasting. But
without a job in radio, it seemed likely to remain one of those unfulfilled
passions — until something called "podcasting" came along.
Now, Patchett's creating shows and sending them out to the masses every day —
not over the airwaves to radios but over the Internet, from his personal
computer in Carlsbad, Calif.
His listeners download his shows to their iPods and other digital music players.
Patchett, 43, is among a growing number of people getting into podcasting, which
is quickly becoming another of the Internet's equalizing technologies.
Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have
done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly
nothing, it's enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.
...
It was in a Sept. 15 online post that Dannie Gregoire of Louisville, coined "podcast."
When entered into a Google search, the word now returns 1.6 million results.
Curry says his own podcast now has 50,000 listeners, and Gregoire has created a
portal that organizes podcasts by content. A number of Web sites do the same,
including Curry's ipodder.org and Patchett's
godcast.org.
But is there money to be made? Maybe, podcasters say. ...
Podcasting isn't likely to threaten traditional broadcasting any time soon, as
the number of digital music players is only in the tens of millions, compared
with hundreds of millions of radios. But as the player market grows — and more
devices such as cell phones become capable of playing audio files — it could
pull away advertising dollars, especially those that target younger generations.
Public radio is showing the most interest, both in distributing traditional
programs as podcasts and looking for new voices.
"It's easier for us to jump into this because our profit model is still very
similar to the profit model of podcasting, which is put something out there and
then figure out how to ask money for it," said Brendan Greeley, site editor of
the Public Radio Exchange, a distributor of programming.
Some podcasters still see podcasting as just a fun hobby.
Mark VandeWettering, a Pixar Animation Studios technical director, podcasts
Brainwagon from his El Sobrante, Calif.,
home on a range of subjects, including fatherhood, baseball and telescope
building.
"It would be great if I made a fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could
possibly happen," he said.
Can you help Mark?
8 U.S.
technology firms endorse health data plan
by Steve Lohr
The New York Times, January 27, 2005
Eight of the largest American technology companies,
including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, have agreed to embrace open nonproprietary
technology standards as the software building blocks for a national health
information network.
The Bush administration has said that creating such a network should be a
national priority over the next several years.
The goal is to improve care and reduce costs by abandoning paper and moving to a
digital system for handling patient records, clinical research, claims and
payments. Such a network, analysts say, should save both lives and money.
Wireless
Companies Eye Next Next-Generation Technology
AP, January 4, 2005
About 26 wireless carriers, including Cingular, Vodafone, China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo, are working together to develop an advanced mobile phone standard called W-CDMA that will enable users to transmit and receive high-resolution video instantaneously.
A
Hotspot For Your Car
Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2005 (sub req'd)
A closely held Northern Virginia company has developed a satellite antenna that turns a moving vehicle into a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot.
Sirius To Launch Video Service Next Year
Reuters, January 5, 2005
Sirius Satellite Radio says it's planning to launch a video service during the second half of 2006. Subscribers will pay a monthly fee, just as Sirius' radio customers do now, and the company says it will devote two to three channels to children's programming.
Corel
acquires Jasc to draw home office crowd
by Neil Sutton
ITBusiness.ca, October 14, 2004
"Corel's definitely back on track," he said. "Graphics has
been a very strong area for Corel for a very long time. There was a CorelDraw
long before Corel acquired WordPerfect."
By adding more consumer products to its graphics line, Corel may be able to
capitalize on the boom in home digital photography, said Wilcox. According to
Jupiter, 52 per cent of U.S. households own a digital camera.
"How do you help consumers discover the capabilities? Well, by providing robust
but approachable products. With Jasc, (Corel has) not only photo editing but
photo management," he said.
The Jasc acquisition is "a really good confirmation" that Corel is ready to
focus on its strengths again.
Music
Industry Spurned by Court
by Michael Grebb
Wired News, October 12, 2004
The Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand a lower court decision holding that
the recording industry can't force internet service providers to turn over
the names of users trading music files online, effectively stopping one of
the legal tactics of the music business as it tries to stamp out piracy.
The case pitted the Recording Industry Association of America against
Verizon Internet Services, which earlier had challenged a 2002 copyright
subpoena stemming from a provision in the controversial Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998.
Law
Sends Sharers to Slammer
by Katie Dean
Wired News, September 28, 2004
A new anti-piracy bill in California gives law enforcement another tool to
crack down on copyright infringement, but critics say it will only divert
resources away from fighting more important crimes.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill last week requiring
file swappers to provide a legitimate e-mail address when they share music
or movies online, or be charged with a misdemeanor. The law goes into
effect in January. ...
Any Californian who shares files with more than 10 people must add their
e-mail address to the file. Those who break this law could be fined up to
$2,500, spend a year in jail or both. Minors who break the law would pay
$250 for their first and second offenses.
Stevenson said that the MPAA plans to use this legislation as a model for
other states.
Critics said the law is a tricky way for copyright owners to get at file
swappers. People are not targeted for copyright violations, rather, they
are nabbed for not adding their e-mail to a shared file.
"No one believes that it's a crime to leave your e-mail address off of a
file you're sharing," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. "It's a means to an end to get around the limits of
federal copyright law and give state prosecutors leverage to bust people.
Now they are going to be arresting people for forgetting to list their
e-mail address."
File
Traders Could Do Hard Time
by Reuters
Wired News, September 28, 2004
Users of internet peer-to-peer networks, already dodging lawsuits from the
recording industry, could face up to three years in prison under a bill
passed Tuesday by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The House voted to enlist the government to a greater degree in the
entertainment industry's fight against those who trade copies of its
products over the internet. ....
The Motion Picture Association of America applauded the bill's passage,
while consumer groups, conservative groups and libraries said it would
radically broaden copyright law and drag the government into a battle that
should be handled by the entertainment industry.
MP3
Creator Warns on Format Wars
by Reuters
Wired News, September 29, 2004
Rival technologies that baffle consumers will run more companies out of business in the nascent music download market than will head-to-head competition, one of the lead creators of MP3 playback technology warned Wednesday.
Since the record industry seems to think they're selling a physical product, might as well be completely reductionist about it.
Burn your own Green Day compilations.
Apple vs
Apple: 'mind boggling' pay-out imminent - report
by Tony Smith
The Register, September 14, 2004
Apple Corp. and Apple Comp. - aka the Beatles and the maker of the Mac -
are reported to be on the verge of ending their legal dispute over the
latter's right to operate in the music market. ...
"People are expecting this to be the biggest settlement anywhere in legal
history, outside of a class action suit," said one lawyer. "The numbers
could be mind boggling."
To date, Apple Corp. has sued Apple Comp. twice, each time successfully.
In the early 1980s, the two were at legal loggerheads over the use of the
word 'Apple'. Comp. settled with Corp. and agreed to pay a large sum of
money and never to enter the music market. The Beatles' label sued again
in the late 1980s, claiming Apple Comp.'s QuickTime multimedia software
violated the earlier agreement. Once again, Comp. coughed up a tidy sum -
$26.5m - and agreed it wouldn't enter the music business.
Now, with Apple's iTunes Music Store successfully launched, Apple Corp.
has yet again alleged the iPod maker has violated their no-music
agreement. Apple Comp. maintains that iTunes lies beyond the scope of the
restrictions previously agreed upon. ...
In addition to a monster pay-out, speculation about the Apple-Apple
settlement centres on Paul McCartney taking a seat on Apple Comp.'s board
or the Corp. taking a wodge of Comp. shares.
Sony Shifts Strategy to Support MP3 Files
by the Associated Press
WashingtonPost.com., September 23, 2004
In a major strategic reversal, Sony Corp. said Wednesday it plans to add
support for MP3 music files to some of its portable music players.
The shift to support the widely used MP3 music format would end Sony's
long-standing insistence on its proprietary format, called Atrac. It also
better positions the electronics giant against rivals such as Apple
Computer Inc., whose portable players support both MP3s and other file
formats.
Though some of its CD Walkmans could play MP3s, Sony had fallen behind in
recent years as it stuck to its proprietary format in its newer class of
audio players, forcing users to first go through an extra step to convert
their digital song files - often already in the MP3 format - to the Atrac
format.
Can IM morph into 'instant music'?
by Jim Hu
CNET News.com, September 22, 2004
As Internet giants step into the crowded online music arena, some are
banking on a new weapon to help attack market leader Apple Computer:
instant messaging.
Yahoo last week acquired digital music service Musicmatch for $160 million
in cash in a move that adds a multimedia player, a digital music store and
a subscription service to the company's arsenal. Despite the acquisition,
Yahoo is on track to launch its own music service, music industry sources
said, and eventually combine it with Musicmatch. ...
The addition of digital music features illustrates IM's transformation
over the years from a simple text-based chatting tool to a control panel
for multimedia applications.
AOL, MSN and Yahoo have added dozens of bells and whistles into their
technologies to broaden IM's appeal. Current versions of Yahoo Messenger,
MSN Messenger and AIM let people play games, share photos, listen to Net
radio stations, communicate through Webcams, and send text messages to
cell phones.
Infinity Records St. Augustine, part of Infinity Music Corp.
Infinity Music Corp. is a St. Augustine, Fla.-based company which was formed through a series of mergers between companies in different areas of entertainment, including record labels, a recording studio, concert management and a broadcast production company. Its subsidiaries are Retrophonics West Recording Studio; Media Works Communications, a broadcast services company; Infinity Records Nashville; Infinity Records St. Augustine; Lou-Do Music, a concert production and artist management company; and Jeshaiah Records, a Christian music label. Some of the key components of Infinity have been in operation since 1977. Infinity Music Corp. trades publicly under the symbol IFMU.PK.
McCain seeks funds to speed digital-TV shift
by Reuters
CNET News, September 20, 2004
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain is pushing for up to
$1 billion in aid to ensure that consumers are not left in the dark when
television stations broadcast only new, crisp digital signals, according
to draft legislation obtained Sunday.
McCain's measure would require broadcasters to air only digital television
signals by 2009 and help consumers who rely on traditional television sets
buy devices that would convert digital back into a format that they could
watch.
"Consumers who rely on over-the-air television, particularly those of
limited economic means, should be assisted," according to the draft
obtained by Reuters.
The government is eager to get its hands on the airwaves that broadcasters
use now because they will likely auction it for commercial wireless
services, which could rake in billions of dollars, according to some
estimates. Under the measure, the $1 billion would come from the auction
proceeds.
Forecast:
Song Costs May Fall Like Rain
by Steven Levy
Newsweek, September 27, 2004
Memo to music labels: lowering prices will get you more sales
As residents of the Gulf Coast were reminded last week, there's no turning
away nature. You can't pass a law that snuffs a hurricane at the border.
You can't sue it. You've got to understand it, and make the right plans to
deal with it. Technology generates its own form of nature, a set of
conditions that enforce an artificial, yet equally unstoppable, reality.
With the Internet, fast computers, cheap storage and high bandwidth, it's
now just a fact that digital files—be they documents, images or Hoobastank
tunes—can be sped through the ether with ease, a phenomenon no easier to
halt than a storm surge.
Sasser creator hired by security firm
The Age, Australia, September 20, 2004
A German teenager accused of creating the Sasser worm that infected
millions of computers around the world is being taught to become a
security software programmer, the company that hired him said on Friday.
Eighteen-year-old Sven Jaschan has been taken on by the Securepoint
computer firm based in Lueneburg, northern Germany and is being trained to
make firewalls, which stop suspect files from entering computer systems.
Firefox drawing fans away from Microsoft IE
by Robert Lemos
CNET News.com, September 15, 2004
Open-source browsers Mozilla
and Firefox have won over a significant number of defectors from
Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the past nine months, Web site metrics
suggest.
The gains for Firefox, which was released in a version 1.0 preview on
Tuesday, and for Mozilla are most noticeable at Web sites popular by
geek-chic early adopters.
Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors with the Firefox and Mozilla
browsers jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, up
from 8 percent in January.
Also from the same article but on a related subject:
Martin Taylor, the general manager of Microsoft's platform strategy, who is in charge of Microsoft's response to Linux and open-source software.
1,000,000 Downloads. 10 Days.
We're igniting the web. Join us!
Welcome to Spread Firefox. You are our marketing department, a diverse
community of people tired of swatting popups, chasing spyware, combatting
identity theft and installing security updates you could set your watch
to. You have a vision of the 21st century web and are ready to push it to
the world, wresting control from a monopoly that has let it stagnate.
Here's an idea: InterSMS. ... You run a band's web site. Fans see your banner ad on your site or someone else's site. They click on it. A piece of code goes to their mobile phones in the form of a SMS message. Later when they are in the music store, they can pull up the SMS message. The cashiers can scan it as they do bar codes and give the fans a special discount.
IBM
Gives Speech Recognition Code To Open Source Groups
New York Times, September 13, 2004
In a shrewd move intended to
outmaneuver rivals, IBM is contributing some of its proprietary
speech-recognition software to two open source groups. One application
that handles basic words for dates, time and locations will go to the
Apache Software Foundation, and another that targets speech-editing will
be donated to the Eclipse Foundation. "We're trying to spur the industry
around open standards to get more and more speech application
development," says IBM senior VP Steven Mills. "Our code contribution is
about getting that ecosystem going."
The move reflects IBM's strategy to broaden its software business
opportunities by giving away various pieces of code to open source
software developers. IBM has been an avid support of open-source projects
like the Apache Web server and the Linux operating system and last month
it contributed Cloudscape, a database written in Java, to the Apache
Foundation. "This whole speech world is going in the same direction as the
rest of the information technology industry, and that would drastically
reduce the cost of building speech applications," says one market research
analyst.
World Association of Newspapers' Future of the Newspaper
By 2006, U.S. Teens Can Buy and Sell Russia
PRNewswire, July 22. 2004
By 2006, 12- to 19-year-olds in the United States are projected to have a buying power that will top the $182 billion gross domestic product of Russia. The U.S. Teens Market, a new report from Packaged Facts available at MarketResearch.com, estimates that the buying power of teens will reach $190 billion, increasing a staggering 27.7% between 2001 and 2006 due to higher earnings from jobs held by teens, as well as a jump in family expenditures on teens.
Digital paper makes device debut
BBC News, March 26, 2004
Sony, Philips and digital paper pioneer E-Ink have announced
an electronic book reader that is due to go on sale in Japan in late April
for $375 (£204).
Called Librié, the device will be the size of a paperback book and can hold
500 texts in its onboard memory.
The device will also have a PC connection built in to allow owners to
download fresh reading material such as newspapers and comics. ...
The Librié has been under development since 2001 and brings together
technology from four companies.
E-Ink and partner Toppan make the basic electronic paper
technology, Philips is supplying the electronics to drive the display
and Sony has handled the design of the outer case.
Could the DearReader.com idea work with music?
Congress
Moves to Criminalize P2P
by Xeni Jardin
Wired News, March 26, 2004
Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on
multiple fronts.
A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary
committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue
criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof.
The bill, obtained Thursday by Wired News, also would seek penalties of
fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. ...
The bills come at a time when the music and movie industries are exerting
enormous pressure on all branches of government at the federal and state
levels to crack down on P2P content piracy. The industries also are pushing
to portray P2P networks as dens of terrorists, child pornographers and
criminals -- a strategy that would make it more palatable for politicians to
pass laws against products that are very popular with their constituents.
In defending the Pirate Act, Hatch said the operators of P2P networks are
running a conspiracy in which they lure children and young people with free
music, movies and pornography. With these "human shields," the P2P companies
are trying to ransom the entertainment industries into accepting their
networks as a distribution channel and source of revenue.
"Unfortunately, piracy and pornography could then become the cornerstones of
a 'business model,'" Hatch said in a statement. ...
anyone who distributes content that hasn't been released in wide
distribution (for example, pre-release copies of an upcoming movie) also
would face the penalties. Even a single file, determined by a judge to be
worth more than $10,000, would land the file sharer in prison.
Duke To Provide Freshmen With iPods
by The Associated Press
Information Week, July 21, 2004
The school is experimenting
to see if the portable music player can become a learning tool as well.
...
Schauman isn't worried that students will start listening to music in
class.
"If you're in a class so boring you need to do that, then I encourage you
to do so," Schauman said. "Or if your need to learn is so low, you
shouldn't be here in the first place."
Big Music's Worst Move Yet
by Alex Salkever
Business Week, January 27, 2004
The RIAA's newest legal assault on file swappers is pushing
them to encrypted networks, where the damage could become catastrophic. ...
One has to admit: The RIAA sure is tenacious in pursuing its strategy. What it
doesn't seem to realize, though, is that it has already lost the war. The
recording industry's hardball tactics have fueled a technological shift that'll
make it nearly impossible to pursue file swappers in the future.
How so? The culture of fear and loathing that the RIAA has created is starting
to put encryption on the must-have list of every Joe and Jane Internet user. The
results will be wide-ranging and will pose a threat to the movie industry, the
software industry, and just about any other industry involved with the creation
and sale of intellectual property.
The Eagle Is
Grounded
by Thomas Goetz
Wired, February 2004
While America works to protect intellectual property,
everyone else is innovating.
The US is in danger of repeating the mistake, this time with intellectual
property. In the face of new technologies and competition, the US is toughening
patent and copyright protections. It's leaning on other countries -- and its own
citizens -- to play by ever tighter rules. But if it's not careful, the US will
drive its intellectual property offshore into a shadow world that, like
shipping, is replete with piracy and rogue states.
Requiem for the Record Store
Downloaders and Discounters Are Driving Out Music Retailers
by David Segal
Washington Post, February 7, 2004
There's something
close to panic in the retail trenches of the music business. The record store is
in serious trouble. Sales have been hammered by Internet piracy as well as
competition from big-box retailers, such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart, which are two
of the nation's leading music vendors. Online CD stores, such as Amazon.com, are
gaining momentum, too -- 3 percent of the market in the most recent survey by
the Recording Industry Association of America, up from zero eight years ago.
Now a new threat looms. ... A recent study by Forrester Research, which examines
technology trends, predicts that in five years fully one-third of all music will
be delivered through modems, and the CD itself will be passe, if not obsolete,
in the years after. This isn't necessarily bad news for the record labels, but
it could be lethal for brick-and-mortar stores.
"I tell retailers they need to get out of the plastic business," said Josh Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, titled "From Discs to
Downloads." "Two-thirds of the people who currently download say that when it
comes to music, it isn't important to them to hold a physical object. They're
done with the CD. They just care about the songs."
For $5.95 a month, AnonX provides protection by setting up a virtual private network between the user's computer and the company's servers. The AnonX computers act as proxies, so that the actual users' identities are masked. AnonX has promised not to divulge the e-mail addresses of subscribers and says he doesn't think he can be forced to do so because AnonX's official owner lives in Vanuatu, the Pacific island nation that also hosts Kazaa's parent company, Sharman Networks. AnonX's servers are located overseas as well.
F.C.C. Begins
Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet (free reg. req.)
by Stephen Labaton
NY Times, February 13, 2004
Homes could start being connected to the Internet through
electrical outlets, and consumers and business may find it easier to make
cheaper telephone calls online under new rules that the Federal Communications
Commission began preparing on Thursday.
Taken together, the new rules could profoundly affect the architecture of the
Internet and the services it provides. They also have enormous implications for
consumers, the telephone and energy industries, and equipment manufacturers.
Michael K. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, and his two Republican colleagues on the
five-member commission said the twin moves, and a separate 4-to-1 vote Thursday
to allow a small company providing computer-to-computer phone connections to
operate under different rules from ordinary phone companies, would ultimately
transform the telecommunications industry and the Internet.
"This is a reflection of the commission's commitment to bring tomorrow's
technology to consumers today," Mr. Powell said. He added that the rules
governing the new phone services sought to make them as widely available as
e-mail, and possibly much less expensive than traditional phones, given their
lower regulatory costs.
At the same time, once the rules allowing delivery of the Internet through power
lines are completed, companies could provide consumers with the ability to plug
their modems directly into wall sockets just as they do with a toaster, desk
lamp or refrigerator.
Under the new rules, expected to be completed in coming months, electric
utilities could offer an alternative to the cable and phone companies and
provide an enormous possible benefit to rural communities which are served by
the power grid but not by broadband providers. A number of utility companies
have been running trials offering high-speed Internet service through their
transmission lines.
While the technology has been developed, it is not clear if such a service would
be profitable or able to compete in markets dominated by cable and telephone
companies. But F.C.C. officials noted that the vast majority of the nation's
households did not yet have high-speed Internet service, leaving the market wide
open to rivals.
In the phone proceedings on Thursday, a majority of the commissioners suggested
that new Internet phone services should have significantly fewer regulatory
burdens than traditional telephone carriers.
The commissioners also voted 4 to 1 to approve the application of a small
Internet company, Pulver.com, ruling that its
service of providing computer-to-computer phone service, called Free World
Dialup, should not make it subject to the same regulations and access charges as
the phone carriers.
Industry experts say that neither the phone service nor the broadband delivery
systems offered by electric utilities would make sizable inroads for at least
the next two years. But in moving forward with the new regulations, they said
the F.C.C. was reducing regulatory uncertainty and encouraging major companies
and investors to put lots of money into the new technologies to enable them to
move to market more quickly.
Note the clause that I boldfaced above. It has two parts: whether or not the regulations would be clear and what they would encourage. What they encouraged here, they could have discouraged. The point is that they have the power to do so.
Some ideas for making money with music:
Listen
to the Technology
by Arnold Kling
Tech Central Station, April 18, 2002
Let's pretend, though, that the CD didn't exist. How would
music makers try to deliver their music today?
I believe there would be two modes of distribution.
Do you think the movie industry is ready for this?
Catch a
Flick on Flexible E-Paper
Reuters, September 24, 2003
Even before the electronic ink has dried on the e-page, a
new generation of electronic paper may soon be able to bring a moving image to a
foldable screen near you, according to scientists in the Netherlands.
Hot on the heels of the invention of a wafer-thin foldable screen that can
display static type and may one day replace newspapers as it can be overwritten
each day, scientists at Philips Research in Eindhoven have found a way to
display high-definition moving pictures as well.
Using a process called electrowetting, the scientists claim to be able to
manipulate colored oils in the pixels on the page with such speed and accuracy
as to be able to generate clear and accurate video displays.
"The reflectivity and contrast of our system approach those of paper,"
they wrote in the
science journal Nature. "In addition, we demonstrate a color concept which
is intrinsically four times brighter than reflective liquid-crystal displays and
twice as bright as other emerging technologies."
Not only does e-paper work on very low voltages, but its light weight and great
flexibility give it a multitude of potential applications from computer screens
to wearable cinematic suits.
With an e-paper screen sewn into a jacket, wearers could read e-mail or even
watch the news on their sleeves while hot-footing it from one meeting to
another.
TV: The
Fast-Forward, On-Demand, Network-Smashing Future of Television
What happens when digital video recorders give viewers control of the TV
schedule, the content, and the ads? The whole world is watching.
Disney
on-demand digital video service launches in three cities
Assoc Press, September 29, 2003
The Walt Disney Co. began making available on Monday a new
service that transmits movies over the airwaves to customers' homes and which
the media giant hopes will catch on as a better alternative to going to the
video store or ordering movies through cable.
MovieBeam sends whole movies in digital form over the same broadcast spectrum
already used by television stations. The movies are then stored in the hard
drive of a set-top box and can be viewed at any time, unlike movies ordered on
cable television, which run at preset times.
The set-top units come with around 100 movies already stored and available for
viewing. Ten new releases a week are transmitted to the unit, edging out 10 of
the older titles, and so on. Users pay a $6.99 monthly rental fee for the
set-top unit and between $3.99 and $2.49 for each movie they watch, depending on
whether it's a new release.
How long do you think it will take some 15-year-old genius who can't get a date next Saturday to hack into this box?
The guy in this next story was 22, but that's close enough to 15.
SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 Technology Receives Certification
press release, August 8, 2003
Internationally-recognized Organization Validates MediaMax
CD3 Copy Management and Enhancement Technology for Playability, Stability, and
Protection Robustness
"an incredible level of security"
Student skirts CD's piracy guard
by Elise Ackerman
Mercury News, October 8, 2003
A Princeton University student has found he can defeat a
highly touted computer program to prevent music piracy with the stroke of a
single key: ``Shift.''
In a paper posted on his Web site Monday, graduate student John Halderman, 22,
said he got around restrictions built into the CD ``Comin' From Where I'm
From,'' by Anthony Hamilton, a soulful R&B artist. The CD, released by BMG's Arista Records last month, was heavily promoted as the first to use
copy-management technology. Software included on the CD limited consumers to
burning only three regular copies or to sending promotional copies that timed
out after 10 days.
But Halderman managed to stop the software from installing itself on his PC.
``In practice, many users who try to copy the disc will succeed without even
noticing that it's protected, and all others can bypass the protections with as
little as a single key stroke,'' he wrote.
Princeton Student Sued Over Paper on CD Copying
by Ben Berkowitz
Wired, October 9, 2003
Three days after a Princeton graduate student posted a paper
on his Web site detailing how to defeat the copy-protection software on a new
music CD by pressing a single computer key, the maker of the software said on
Thursday it would sue him.
In a statement, SunnComm Technologies Inc. said it would sue Alex Halderman over
the paper, which said SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 software could be blocked by
holding down the "Shift" key on a computer keyboard as a CD using the software
was inserted into a disc drive.
"SunnComm believes that by making erroneous assumptions in putting together his
critical review of the MediaMax CD-3 technology, Halderman came to false
conclusions concerning the robustness and efficacy of SunnComm's MediaMax
technology," it said.
SunnComm, which trades on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, said it has lost
more than $10 million of its market value since Halderman published his report.
The software was used on a CD, Anthony Hamilton's "Comin' From Where I'm From,"
released last month. Halderman, who has done research in the past on other CD
protection technologies, said the software could also be disabled by stopping a
driver the software loads on the computer when the CD is played.
SunnComm alleged Halderman violated criminal provisions of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act in disclosing the existence of those driver files.
Halderman -- who received an undergraduate degree from Princeton earlier this
year and is now pursuing a doctorate in computer science with an emphasis on
computer security -- said he had not yet heard directly from SunnComm in regards
to litigation but was unconcerned.
"I'm still not very worried about litigation under the DMCA, I don't think
there's any case," he told Reuters. "I don't think telling people to press the
'Shift' key is a violation of the DMCA."
This next article is about a Congressional hearing last fall. I couldn't figure out what to excerpt because every paragraph has something interesting and relevant.
RIAA:
P-to-P vendors must filter content
by Grant Gross
IDG News Service, October 1, 2003
Senators question RIAA's tactics of suing hundreds of P-to-P users.
New Outlet for
High-Speed Access
by Joanna Glasner
Wired News, February 18, 2004
In a broadband world dominated by cable and DSL, the vision
recently put forth by top U.S. telecom regulator Michael Powell of a high-speed
Internet connection in every electrical outlet may seem a bit far-fetched.
After all, broadband over power line, or BPL, services are currently available
in only about a dozen communities nationwide, and even then only on a trial
basis. The first commercial service -- to be deployed in Manassas, Virginia --
isn't expected to launch until summer. And so far, power companies have been
reluctant to spend the vast sums required to retrofit aging networks for data.
...
The power grid is too big to be ignored as a data channel. "We're piggybacking
on the world's largest infrastructure. It's that simple," said Philip Hunt, CEO
of Amperion. ...
Power companies are notoriously conservative about investing in new
technologies, Schaar said, and have thus far been reluctant to spend heavily on BPL initiatives. ...
"We're able to basically give an IP address to every outlet," Wheadon said. "So
hypothetically, the water heater would have an IP address and would be cycled
off and on."
New Flurry of
RIAA Lawsuits
by Katie Dean
Wired News, February 17, 2004
The music industry sued another 531 people on Tuesday in
several courts across the United States for sharing copyrighted music on the
Internet illegally, the Recording Industry Association of America said.
Like the 532 people it sued last month, the RIAA identified its targets by the
"John Doe" process, where the identities of these alleged file swappers are
unknown. The defendants are listed by their Internet Protocol address. Those
identified had shared an average of 800 copyright files, the RIAA said.
RIAA sued
under gang laws
by John Borland
CNET News.com, February 18, 2004
It's probably not the first time that record company
executives have been likened to Al Capone, but this time a judge might have to
agree or disagree.
A New Jersey woman, one of the hundreds of people accused of copyright
infringement by the Recording Industry Association of America, has countersued
the big record labels, charging them with extortion and violations of the
federal antiracketeering act.
Through her attorneys, Michele Scimeca contends that by suing file-swappers for
copyright infringement, and then offering to settle instead of pursuing a case
where liability could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the RIAA
is violating the same laws that are more typically applied to gangsters and
organized crime.
"This scare tactic has caused a vast amount of settlements from individuals who
feared fighting such a large institution and feel victim to these actions and
felt forced to provide funds to settle these actions instead of fighting," Scimeca's attorney, Bart Lombardo, wrote in documents filed with a New Jersey
federal court. "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to
extortion."
Scimeca is one of a growing number of people fighting the record industry's
copyright infringement campaign against file-swappers, although few have used
such creative legal strategies. ...
Even RIAA critics look at Scimeca's racketeering-based countersuit as a long
shot. But it's worth trying, they say.
"It is the first I've heard of anyone attempting that," said EFF legal director
Cindy Cohn. "I guess that is a silver lining of the fact that the RIAA is suing
so many people, that there are a lot of lawyers trying to figure out ways to
protect folks."
Wi-Fi changes virtually everything
by Michelle Kessler
USA Today, February 18, 2004
Wi-Fi is catching on fast — and changing the way people use the Internet. Fans say it leads them to do more things online: They pay bills from the living room, search recipes from the kitchen and check e-mail on the go. Tech analysts say that's just the beginning of what Wi-Fi can do. In the future, it will connect all kinds of devices — lamps, stereos, computers — and, for the first time, truly integrate the Internet into daily life.
Navigating Digital Home Networks
by Michel Marriott
NY Times, February 19, 2004 - dougatriccist
While the broad vision of a digital lifestyle is clear, the
details of living it are still a bit blurry.
In the not-so-distant future, computers are not only supposed to churn bits and
bytes for utility, productivity and fun. They are also to form the center of a
digital home network, smartly knitting together television sets, video game
consoles, home theater systems, portable music players, cameras and camcorders,
telephones and almost anything else that can bear a microchip and liquid crystal
display screen.
Wittgenstein's Vienna
by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin
They quote a German visitor to Austria a hundred and fifty years ago who described
Johann Strauss's waltzes as "an escape into the demonic".
African and hot-blooded, crazy with life... restless, unbeautiful, passionate... Strauss exorcises the wicked devils from our bodies and he does it with waltzes, which are the modern exorcism... capturing our senses in a sweet trance. Typically African is the way he conducts his dances; his own limbs no longer belong to him when the thunderstorm of the waltz is let loose; his fiddle-bow dances with his arms... the tempo animates his feet; the melody waves champagne-glasses in his face and the devil is abroad... A dangerous power has been given into the hands of this dark man; he may regard it as his good fortune that to music one may think all kinds of thoughts, that no censorship can have anything to do with waltzes, that music stimulates our emotions directly, and not through the channel of thought... Bacchantically the couples waltz... lust let loose. No God inhibits them.
He sounds as outraged as those who were shocked SHOCKED by Janet at the Super Bowl. If such scandal happened now, the FCC would be holding hearings!
SWIPE addresses the gathering of data from driver's
licenses, a form of data-collection that businesses are starting to practice in
the United States. Bars and convenience stores were the first to utilize license
scanners in the name of age and ID verification. These businesses, however,
admit they reap huge benefits from this practice beyond catching underage
drinkers and smokers and fake IDs. With one swipe—that often occurs without
notification or consent by the cardholder—a business acquires data that can be
used to build a valuable consumer database free of charge. Post 9/11, other
businesses, like hospitals and airports, are installing driver's license readers
in the name of security. And still other businesses are joining the rush to scan
realizing the information contained on driver's licenses is a potential gold
mine.
SWIPE brings attention to this practice and enables people to see exactly what
is stored on their mysterious strip.
The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed
by Clay Shirky
shirky.com, December 17, 2003
In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share
music files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them to create
encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. As a
result, all their communications in these spaces, even messages with no more
commercial content than "BRITN3Y SUX!!!1!" are hidden from prying eyes. This is
not because such messages are sensitive, but rather because once a user starts
encrypting messages and files, it's often easier to encrypt everything than to
pick and choose. Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because
users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals.
The obvious parallel here is with Prohibition.
FDA backs RFID tags to track prescription drugs
Accenture will serve as the RFID program manager for major industry players
by Bob Brewin
Computerworld, February 19, 2004
The Food and Drug Administration views radio frequency
identification technology as the best way to track, control and identify
prescription drugs and anticipates the widespread use of RFID tags to identify
prescription drugs in the supply chain within three years.
Prescription drug manufacturers, in general, back the plan, with key
manufacturers, distributors and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores
settling on Accenture Ltd. to serve as their RFID program manager.
The FDA, in a
report
released yesterday on combating counterfeit drugs, called RFID tags the most
likely technology to bring about "mass serialization" of prescription drugs. The
FDA defined mass serialization as "assigning a unique number (the electronic
product code or EPC) to each pallet, case and package of drugs and then using
that number to record information about all transactions involving the product."
Hollywood Wins
DVD-Copying Case
by Katie Dean
Wired News, February 20, 2004
A federal judge ruled on Friday that 321 Studios, a software
developer, must stop selling its DVD copying program, delivering a huge win for
the entertainment industry.
Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District Federal Court for California sided
with the Motion Picture Association of America, which claimed that
321 Studios' DVD-X Copy and DVD Copy
Plus software violate copyright law. The company, based in St. Charles,
Missouri, must stop "manufacturing, distributing or otherwise trafficking in any
type of DVD circumvention software" in seven days. ...
321's software bypasses CSS -- the encrypted locks on his client's copyright
movies. That is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. ... Under
the controversial law, any mechanism that breaks a digital lock that protects
copyright content is illegal. The judge agreed.
EarthLink Invests in Powerline Broadband
by Jim Wagner
Internet News, February 20, 2004
Earthlink, one of the largest broadband Internet service
providers in the U.S., is investing $500,000 in a broadband Internet technology
only recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), it was
announced Friday.
Officials at Ambient Corp., a Newton,
Mass., communications company specializing in broadband over power line (BPL)
broadband Internet, announced the ownership investment in its company, as well
as the addition of Earthlink to its advisory board, the first ISP to join their
ranks.
The announcement is another victory for Ambient, which provides Internet
connectivity over a medium that's faced a lot of criticism the past year over
interference concerns. BPL uses radio frequency (define) power to deliver
digital information over a utility line, using repeaters at power boxes to
strengthen the signal from the carrier to the home.
Because of the ubiquitous nature of power lines, the FCC has warmly embraced the
technology as an alternative to existing broadband Internet technologies, and
bridging the digital divide throughout the country, mainly in rural locations.
Digital subscriber line (define) is limited to areas surrounding telephone
companies; cable isn't carried outside urban areas (for the most part), and
satellite Internet connectivity is bogged down with lag issues.
Digital
Music:
"Fear-to-Peer" Tactics Pave Way for Download Revenue
by Ross Rubin
eMarketer Spotlight Report, January 2004
Online retailers will have the most success in selling
digital music as a break-even product or loss leader. The mass appeal and low
price of music make it an excellent impulse purchase, but few digital music
stores today integrate sales of digital music with CDs or related products.
Retailers will need to capture profit elsewhere, given that thin margins on
digital music make it untenable. Mass market retailers such as Best Buy already
use CDs as a loss leader; online retailers such as Amazon.com, which will launch
digital music alongside CD sales and its CDNow discount buyers' club, will reap
the highest overall value from selling digital music.
Radio Takes
Music From the Street
by Leander Kahney
Wired News, February 23, 2004
Program directors would like you to believe that commercial
radio gives the listener a pretty good idea of a city's urban soundscape. But
two radio shows -- one in the United States, the other in London -- are
exploring the idea that the urban soundtrack is best heard through the
headphones of residents' personal stereos.
On National Public Radio, reporter Gideon D'Arcangelo produces an occasional
radio column for The Next Big Thing
show called "Walkman Busting."
In it, D'Arcangelo approaches people in public spaces who are listening to
personal stereos. With their permission, he plugs in his minidisc recorder to
record whatever music they are listening to, as well as their conversation about
it. ...
In London, Michael Weinkove and Saul Albert roam the streets looking for people
wearing headphones. Like D'Arcangelo, they conduct a short interview while
recording the interviewee's music. Their show,
Traffic Island Disks, is produced
for a London art radio station, Resonance104.4fm. ...
"People are listening to hip-hop, U.K. garage, Turkish hip-hop, Sukus (upbeat
and energetic music from Africa)," said Albert. "One Ukrainian woman on Shoreditch High Street was listening to shamanic chanting with a Euro pop
backing track."
"If you listen to what people are listening to, it's not what you hear on the
radio," said Weinkove. In fact, the pair are intrigued by the idea of getting
music from the street onto the radio, rather than music from the radio getting
onto the street.
In Japan, a Wireless Vision of Future for U.S.
by Anthony Faiola
Washington Post, February 19, 2004
Mobile Internet Is Mainstream as Cell Phones Take Place of Computers ...
"The cell phone is way past being just a phone in Japan," said Wai, 32, a
systems engineer who wakes up with his phone alarm at 6:30 a.m. and then uses
the phone almost every waking hour to send and receive dozens of e-mails, link
remotely to his home-office PC, download music and read newspapers, even novels,
during his daily commutes. "For us," he said, "the cell phone is now a way of
life." ...
Technologies considered experimental or novel in the United States have already
gone mainstream here, giving rise to an unparalleled cell phone culture. Today,
Japan offers a fascinating glimpse into a possible future for Americans: life in
a wireless world through the cell phone.
About 70 million Japanese -- 55 percent of the population -- have signed up for
Internet access from their cellular phones, a threefold increase from 2000. Cell
phones, or keitai in Japanese, are closing in on computers as the device
of choice for surfing the Internet. While the Japanese are using their cell
phones in the same way many Americans use their laptop computers or personal
digital assistants, they also are pulling out their phones to watch TV, navigate
labyrinthine city streets with built-in GPS systems, download music, take and
transmit home movies, scan bar-coded information, get e-coupons for discounts on
food and entertainment, pay bills, play Final Fantasy, even program karaoke
machines.
While at least some of these uses are expected to become commonplace in the
United States, Japan's penchant for the cutting edge, the cute and the compact
has given rise to a particular, occasionally peculiar, keitai culture.
Casting
Milestones: The Internet Is Now More Wired Than Cable
by Joe Mandese and Ross Fadner
Media Daily News, February 24, 2004
According to soon-to-be-released estimates compiled by the
stats-keepers at Web researcher eMarketer, the Internet has surpassed the U.S.
household penetration level of cable TV. ...
eMarketer now estimates U.S. household Internet penetration is about 67.9
percent. That compares with a 65.8 percent U.S. household penetration level for
cable. ...
More significantly, Ramsey noted that while cable TV penetration has essentially
been flat at about 66 percent of U.S. households, online penetration continues
to expand. ...
That should be a "wake-up" call to the ad community, said Greg Stuart, president
of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is looking at ways of promoting the
milestone to the ad industry.
Not everyone agrees with the statistical symbolism, of course.
The Internet has already surpassed some major national media in terms of Ira
Sussman, senior vice president-research, Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.
"I'm just wondering why it's relevant to anyone? If you're talking about cable
networks, you have to talk about cable-plus [satellite/alternative delivery
systems]. That's what online is competing with and that's what national
advertisers are buying when they buy cable networks," pointed out Ira Sussman,
senior vice president-research at the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. ...
Sussman also noted that cable ironically is pushing Internet distribution via
the deployment of broadband cable modem lines, a development that some believe
may lead to the fusion of television and online applications via broadband video
development. ...
But the IAB's Stuart claimed even those statistics may be misleading, because
the quality of time spent with each medium is different. ...
"I think we need to be really careful about time spent on television. There's
research that shows as much as 50% of TV viewers aren't even paying attention to
the advertising. So it's not real time spent. Whereas Internet time spent is
real time spent. It's the difference between a lean-back medium like cable and a
lean-forward medium like the Internet," he said.
check out the graph
Size Matters
by Spencer Reiss
Wired, February 2004
Nanotech? Check. Molecular medicine? Got it. GE's Jeff
Immelt is building the future, one billion-dollar business at a time.
"You can't base long-term investment decisions on government policy - it's too
capricious. ....
"The real way for the government to affect my long-term decisions is to help
develop big, transformational technologies with broad applicability and multiple
layers of risk."
Kill a brand, keep a customer (not available online)
by Nirmalya Kumar
Harvard Business Review, Dec 2003
Most brands don't make a profit.
Diageo, the world's largest spirits
company, sold 35 brands of liquor in roughly 170 countries in 1999. Only 8 of
those --Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Baileys, J & B, Captain Morgan, José Cuervo and Tanqueray -- provided the company with more than 50% of its sales and
70% of its profit.
Nestle promoted more than 8,000 brands in 190
countries back in 1996. Most of the profits came from 200 brands or 2.5%.
Procter & Gamble had more than 250
brands sold in 160 countries. The company's 10 biggest brands accounted for 50%
of sales, over 50% of profit, and 66% of sales growth between '92 -'02.
Unilever had 1,600 brands sold to
150 countries in 1999. More than 90% of its profits came from a mere 400 brands.
WNY firms struggle to attract venture capital
Tracey Drury
Business First, February 23, 2004
According to Growthink Research's Northeast Venture Capital
Report, the region as a whole attracted $505 million in investment dollars
during third quarter 2003. More than 55 percent of the total went to 20
companies in the New York City metro area, with the remainder of the state
receiving $26.8 million. Cymfony, a Williamsville technology company with
headquarters near Boston, was the only Western New York firm listed in the
report, receiving $6.4 million.
Investments "stable" in region
Investments in the region have remained relatively stable in recent years,
according to the recently released 2003 Money Tree Survey by
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture
Capital Association. Seven companies in Western New York's 716 area code
received $50.82 million in VC investment during 2003, up slightly from the $43.4
million invested in nine companies in 2002.
Nationally, investments totaled $18.2 billion in 2,715 companies, a decline of
15 percent from the previous year. Life sciences, including biotechnology and
medical devices together, attracted $4.89 billion or 27 percent of all venture
capital - the highest proportion directed to life sciences in the last 12 years.
Jeanne Metzger, vice president for public affairs, said the majority of
investments continue to take place in high tech hotbeds like Northern
California's Silicon Valley and the New England-Boston area, followed by places
like the New York City metro area, Austin, and Research Triangle Park.
Dell CEO eyes music, movies content deals
by Caroline Humer
Reuters, September 24, 2003
Dell Inc. Chief Executive Michael Dell said on Wednesday
that it has been talking to media companies in order to make it easier to listen
to music and watch video on their PCs.
"We've been participating a lot in working groups to get agreements with the
content owners and the artists. We're going to do some things with music and I
think there's opportunity in movies," Dell said at the
Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT on
Wednesday.
Canada
Blame Canada
by Jay Currie
Tech Central Station, August 18, 2003
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada.
Europe
U.S. Is Only the Tip of Pirated Music Iceberg
by Mark Landler
NY Times, September 25, 2003
Hang around any schoolyard in Germany or college campus in Indonesia and it becomes clear that the recording industry's problems with the illegal online distribution of music in the United States pale beside the rampant piracy that goes on overseas.
Piracy on wireless Internet raises legal challenges
by Steve Makris
CanWest News Service, February 25, 2004
As the recording
industry pursues illegal music traders, how does it prove who was actually doing
the stealing?
Think twice the next time you access the Internet at home on your wireless
laptop.
Your next-door neighbour, even passersby outside your home, could be tagging
along for the ride and leave no trace of their online adventures, such as
sharing music files, something the Canadian Recording Industry Association is
intent on prosecuting.
CRIA's attempt last week to get names and addresses of suspected heavy music
traders from the country's top Internet-service providers underscores the
difficulty of telling the good guys from the bad guys over the Internet.
Routers that cost less than $100 not only let many computers share one Internet
connection, they create a firewall to protect the identity of every connected
computer. That makes it difficult to track down who exactly is copying music
illegally.
Rip-off 101: How
The Current Practices Of The Textbook Industry Drive Up The Cost Of College
Textbooks
State PIRGs' Higher Education Project
January 29, 2004
> Textbooks are expensive and getting even more expensive
> Textbook publishers add bells and whistles that drive up the price of
textbooks; most faculty do not use these materials
> Textbook publishers put new editions on the market frequently, often with
very few content changes, making the less expensive, used textbooks obsolete
and unavailable
> Faculty and students support alternatives that lower students’ costs,
maintain quality
> Online textbooks hold promise for dramatically lowering the cost of
textbooks
Kiss your taxless Net goodbye
by Allen Wastler
CNN, February 27, 2004
An effort by states to collect sales
taxes on cyber purchases is likely to unleash a tax onslaught.
Don't snicker at the effort by 19 states this year to collect Internet sales
tax. You'll be sorry.
Sure, from an enforcement perspective, adding a line on tax forms and asking you
to pay up is laughable.
Content Creation
Online
Pew Internet Project, February 29, 2004
44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world.
Hitachi sees consumer devices pushing storage market
by Martyn Williams
IDG News Service, February 27, 2004
Company announces 300GB
hard drive ...
The average user will have two or three hard-disk drives around them in their
office in five years from now but as many as 15 or 20 in devices surrounding
them at home.
"You will have notebook computers for all members of your family interconnected
wirelessly in your home. You'll have a home server to store your video,
high-definition TV recording, music, pictures and data. You will have your
set-top box recorders and DVD recorders to record the television signals in each
of your television sets. You'll have your PDAs, digital cameras, digital video
cameras with hard-disk drives. You'll have your car out in the garage with a
hard-disk drive for control of the car electronics and perhaps even the vision
of each cellphone that you own will have a hard-disk drive included." ...
"Two years ago you would not have thought of a hard-disk drive in an MP3 music
player," he said. "Apple, at the end of last year, reported 730,000 units of
hard-disk drive sales for the iPod music player."
The Reinvention of
Neil Young, Part 6
by Ted Greenwald
Wired, March 2004
The folk-country-grunge dinosaur is reborn
(again) as an Internet-friendly, biodiesel-driven, multimedia machine.
Neil Young flips genres so often that his record company once sued him for
failing to release "Neil Young music." He experimented with orchestral
accompaniment in the '60s and techno in the '80s. But the folk-country-grunge
rocker's latest project makes those early forays look like adolescent angst. The
58-year-old has transformed the songs on his latest album, Greendale, into an
opera that plays in every medium but PowerPoint (so far): There's a CD and bonus
DVD; a live concert tour, which boasts three stages filled with 30 lip-synching
actors; a Web site that streams every song on the album; and finally, a movie
opening in Los Angeles February 27. Taken together, they tell the Faulkneresque
tale of a fictional rural California family, the Greens, who get caught up in a
media frenzy. Given Young's penchant for simple statements, Greendale's scope
may seem like overkill. But that might be just what it takes for an aging rocker
to survive in the MP3 era.
WIRED: You're a music legend. Why be a director and an Internet entrepreneur,
too?
YOUNG: I don't have mainstream radio to count on anymore - they won't play my
stuff. The Internet is the new radio. To tell the stories I want to tell, I have
to use everything that's available and use it all at once. ...
When I play a new song in concert, it's immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard
it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me.
But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.
How do you mean?
During the acoustic tour in Europe, when I performed the show that's on the
bonus DVD, I was aware that everything I said would be recorded, transcribed,
and circulated. So every night I dumped in different information about different
parts of Greendale. If you say something in one town, and the next night you add
a little more, the Internet brings together these separate occasions. It makes
you look at things as not being separate.
Don't you want to control the use of your material?
I can't control what people do. I don't want to. If they want to sell my music
to someone else or send it to their friends, they can just as easily tape it off
the radio as the Net.
Indies Stay in
Tune With Sharing
by Katie Dean
Wired News, March 3, 2004
Citizens of Austin, Texas, have
free wireless Internet access in nearly 30 restaurants and coffee shops around
the city. Thanks to the South by Southwest music festival, patrons also enjoy
the added benefit of free music.
The city's well-known independent music festival, also known as SXSW, is
providing this year's library of music for free through an iTunes shared music
playlist. The music library will be available during the festival, and possibly
after the festival ends. Music fans can access the collection at free wireless
hotspots around the city, whether lunching at Guero's Taco Bar or sipping coffee
at the Triumph Café.
More than 1,200 acts will play at this year's festival, which runs from March 17
to 21. About 600 musicians provided a free MP3 of their work to run on the South
by Southwest website. The festival then took the extra step of making the whole
catalog available through a shared playlist over a Wi-Fi network.
"If someone launches iTunes, these 600 songs will pop up in their iTunes," said
Scott Wilcox, chief technical adviser for SXSW.
To EDUCATE, ADVISE, ENABLE and ASSIST operators of public spaces in providing free wireless hotspots to ALL residents of Austin and surrounding areas.
Intel To
Launch Wi-Fi Computer-TV
by James Maguire
Wireless NewsFactor, March 3, 2004
The EPC is "the
convergence of the consumer-electronics arena and the computing arena," says
Intel spokesperson Howard High, "and the two industries trying to work out how
to dance together."
Intel has plans for a product that futurists have long predicted: the
combination personal computer-television.
Called the "Entertainment PC" (EPC), the device will connect with the TV and be
controlled by a remote. It will surf the Web using a Wi-Fi connection and cruise
TV channels, recording movies and shows onto its hard drive and downloading
programs and music not broadcast on TV. ...
Intel plans to make the EPC available in the second half of this year, with
no-frills units retailing for under US$1,000. ...
At its core, the EPC will contain a pair of Intel desktop PC chips with
wireless-networking capability. Incorporated in these Wi-Fi chips will be router
technology that enables the unit to connect to the Internet without a separate
hardware router. ...
The EPC will stream video and audio to other playback devices throughout the
home, including wireless handhelds. The chips will provide surround-sound audio,
a multichannel audio technology.
Rockin' Music Business Books (Amazon list)
Phone
Services Bring New Hope to Music Industry
Trends in Japan, March 3, 2004
In a quickly emerging trend in mobile phones, users can now be notified of incoming calls with songs performed by the musicians themselves. Called Chaku-uta - ring songs, if you will - the service is anticipated to create a new market for the music industry, where domestic shipments of CDs and other music content dropped in 2003 by 10% over the year before and the public is tuning in to radio less and less.
Novels
Delivered To Your Phone
Trends in Japan, March 10, 2004
E-mail Opens New Possibilities for Old Medium
Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail
with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan. This technology
has now led to the emergence of a new and unexpected phenomenon: people
reading entire novels on their mobile phones. The growing population of
readers consists mainly of young people in their late teens and early
twenties, the first generation to have grown up with e-mail.
Money brings Skype closer
to mainstream
by Ben Charny
CNET News.com, March 15, 2004
Skype, a free Net-phoning service, announced on Monday a $19
million investment that sources said will "go a long way" toward letting Skype's
users connect to the traditional phone network.
For now, the company's customers are limited to calling only other computers and
laptops that are linked to the Net and can run the Skype software. Home or
office phones use the traditional phone network and are thus off limits.
Skype, a start-up founded by the creators of the Kazaa file-swapping software,
needs cash to buy hundreds of thousands of minutes a month from major telephone
carriers and make those minutes available to its own customers--one of several
premium services Skype says it wants to create and launch. But for now, the
company's main product--its peer-to-peer software--is free, and sales of its
headsets don't generate enough money to fund a jump onto the traditional phone
network.
P2P in the
Legal Crosshairs
by Xeni Jardin
Wired News, March 15, 2004
Is California's attorney general preparing a legislative
assault on peer-to-peer file sharing?
A draft letter purportedly circulated by Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys
general characterizes P2P software as a "dangerous product" and describes the
failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those dangers as a deceptive
trade practice. ...
"P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to
disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies,
software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly becoming a
means to disseminate computer worms and viruses. Nevertheless, your company
still does little to warn consumers about the legal and personal risks they face
when they use your software to "share" copyrighted music, movies and computer
software. A failure to prominently and adequately warn consumers, particularly
when you advertise and sell paid versions of your software, could constitute, at
the very least, a deceptive trade practice. ...
"In the future, we will not hesitate to take whatever actions we deem necessary
to ensure that you fulfill your duties as a responsible corporate citizen."
The Tipping Point
by Dana Blankenhorn
A-Clue.com, March 1, 2004
I'm in the market for a new computer. For career reasons, it
needs to be a Windows machine. I've found a nice little "white box" PC for
$484 .
Of course it will need an operating system. Since I need Windows, that means
$146.75 for Windows XP Pro. Office Depot sells Office 2003 for about
$400 .
See the tipping point? The hardware costs $484, the absolute minimum Microsoft
software needed for it to run costs $546.75. ...
Put simply we need a new business model. The answer may come from what many ISPs
have just begun doing. ...
The World of Always-On, in other words, needs new business models that aren't
based on the old PC model, and the tipping point for seeking-out those models
has been reached, as the cost of software has risen over the cost of hardware.
There are ways this can work. There are ways out of the box. First one to find
them wins the future.
Starbucks,
HP music cafe percolating
by Richard Shim
CNET News.com, March 12, 2004
Coffee company Starbucks and computer maker Hewlett-Packard
are working together on a new music-centric coffee store as they look for ways
to grow.
Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz and HP CEO Carly Fiorina plan to be in Santa
Monica, Calif., to launch the companies' first such shop, according to an HP
advisory. More of these stores, each called Hear Music Coffeehouse, are expected
to open later this year, according to the Starbucks Web site.
A
Piano Duet For One
CANARIE press release, February 26, 2004
(Canada’s advanced Internet organization)
Piano to piano instruction over high speed networks benefits
young students
A new technological innovation is changing the way music is taught in Canada.
MusicPath - a unique software development produced by a special partnership of
education, industry and government - allows one pianist to simultaneously play
two pianos located distances apart.
RFID:
More Fun Than You Might Think
by Chris Partridge
NewsFactor Network, March 15, 2004
Philips is serious about RFID for consumers. It has set up
partnerships with Visa, which would handle the payments bit, and Universal,
which wants to sell DVDs and the like. It is even negotiating with a major
mobile-phone company (not Philips, which is a minor mobile-phone company) to
start getting RFID readers into the hands of the public. ...
They aim to do this by putting an RFID reader in every mobile phone, so that
users could look at the contents of a tag simply by holding their phone up
against it.
Once the code is extracted, the phone would look it up on the Web and display
the information it had retrieved on the screen.
Hand-held video
The bright, clear color screen measures 3.5 inches (Lyra) or 3.8 inches diagonally (the Archos). A permanent rechargeable battery plays video for a little over three hours; the Archos provides 10 hours of music playback by shutting off its screen (a feature RCA plans to add to the Lyra in a software update later this month). Inside, a 20-gigabyte hard drive holds about 20 movies, 5,000 songs, or 200,000 photos. (The Archos is available in 40- and 80-gigabyte models for those who feel constrained by that repressive 200,000-picture limit.)
Where are the applications?
We need real always-on, wireless home network entertainment applications. We need applications that run on top of a modular, scalable robust home network and provide entertainment and information, greater control over our stuff, greater control over our lives. Applications that pay for themselves in improved, more interesting lives.
"We'd Like to
Thank Our PC"
Wired, March 2004
Being an indie rocker today means more than pressing your own 7-inch. Boston-based Freezepop not only recorded a demo but also animated a digital video, designed logo gear, and booked an international solo tour. For their effort, the computer-pop artists got the kind of exposure that usually requires a cigar-chomping manager and a record label's budget
BBC launches online clips archive
Thousands of clips from BBC radio and TV factual programmes
will be free to download from the internet this autumn, the BBC has announced.
The clips, of up to three minutes, will include natural history footage and be
available on the BBC website.
The service is the first stage of the Creative Archive initiative announced by
former director general Greg Dyke. ...
Ashley Highfield, head of BBC new media and technology, announced the launch on
Wednesday, saying: "This is the BBC taking an innovation risk, but a risk that
will add to the creative capital of the UK as a whole.
"It's all part of the BBC providing public access to its sound, television and
film archives in a way that appeals to the new generation of media consumers."
The public will be able to download clips for non-commercial use, keep them
forever, and manipulate and add to them.
They will be able to pass clips on to one another and, in future, post
user-generated material back on to the BBC's website.
Mforma has built relationships with top-tier publishers,
content partners, and application developers in order to create an expansive and
compelling suite of wireless applications for the mobile subscriber. Mforma's
Mserver platform enables its developer community to create killer content and
applications on a common development platform, delivering services across all
types of wireless devices through a consistent and intuitive interface.
The Mforma Developer Network's tools and services offer the developer and
publisher community a fast deployment channel to monetize their applications
with the world's leading network operators. Today, many world-class developers
are creating applications on Mforma's Software Development Kit, available free
of charge through the Developer Program.
Happy hacking!
by Mike Langberg
Mercury News, February 06, 2004
Most of us look at a toaster and see a kitchen appliance for crisping bread.
Scott Fullam looks at a toaster and sees an engineering challenge,
compelling him to open it up and make it do something the manufacturer never
intended.
The result: a toaster that burns the words ``hot'' or ``cool'' on the side
of a bread slice.
Fullam, a 37-year-old computer consultant in Menlo Park, is at the forefront
of a new trend called ``hardware hacking.'' Or maybe it's an old trend --
teenagers in the 1950s who turned ordinary cars into hot rods by modifying
the engines and bodies were driven by the same desire to take everyday
objects in new directions.
Hacking got something of a bad name in recent years, becoming linked in the
public eye to criminal invasions of computer networks. But true hackers,
unlike the few misfits who stray over the legal limits, are motivated only
by curiosity. ...
A few of the projects are practical; most are whimsical and none is
justified by the outcome alone -- the journey is the reward.
``The hope is to inspire people, through role models, to pick up a
screwdriver and a soldering iron and to start hacking,'' writes Andrew Huang
in the introduction to his ``Hacking the Xbox.'' ``Instilling this sort of
exploratory spirit in the younger generations will be important in the long
run for preserving the pool of talented engineers that drove the technology
revolution.''
Instructions for hacking your toaster and coffeemaker:
Hardware
Hacking Projects for Geeks
By Scott Fullam
January 2004
Record Stores: We're Fine, Thanks
by Katie Dean
Wired News, March 20, 2004
Some independent music stores are thriving despite the competition from
illegal downloads on the Internet.
The stores are finding that file sharing can help create a buzz online that
can lead to more sales, according to a panel of independent music store
owners who spoke at the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival here
Friday.
Take Hoodlums Music, located on the Arizona State University campus, which
opened during the heyday of Napster. One might think Net-savvy students
would ignore the shop in favor of free downloads.
"It's a myth," said Steve Wiley, co-owner of the store. "We see them wanting
to buy music. ...
To be sure, independent music retailers can do well in major music markets
like Austin, Seattle and Denver, but small towns are a different story.
Communities that are just large enough to support one big box store may be
left with mainstream music choices from Wal-Mart.
Don VanCleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, said
high-school students in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, complain to him
about not being able to buy what they want locally.
Instead, they go online to download it.
"It's the end of the record store in those markets," said Carl Singmaster,
owner of Manifest Disc & Tapes of South Carolina.
South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival
Coalition of Independent Music Stores
The Catalog is a list, index, directory of music labels which offer you free downloads from their pages. There is no strict name for such labels. Some people call their netlabel also mp3 label (mp3label), online label (onlinelabel), web label (weblabel), internet label or even netaudio label... But all of them have the same idea in common: to spread good music via the world wide web for free. So check them out and find some fine netaudio-music and write the artists a nice email ;)
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