... While the average TV set lasts about 11 years, families typically buy a new set every three or four years, industry officials say. Over all, Americans are expected to buy 30 million televisions this year, at a rough average of $400 each.
"Let's face it, the big-screen TV is the fireplace, the hearth of family in our society," said Andrew Shulklapper, senior buyer for televisions at Circuit City, one of the biggest electronics retailers.
For all of the technical mumbo jumbo, the two most important changes in the television market are quite simple. In image quality, big-screen televisions (those with screens larger than 36 inches, measured diagonally) are no longer markedly inferior to smaller ones. Perhaps more important, a big-screen television no longer has to be a behemoth in the corner.
That change in overall size extends far beyond the expensive flat-panel sets, which are mere inches thick and use either a liquid-crystal display (L.C.D.) or plasma technology. While an analog rear-projection set with a 50-inch screen might weigh more than 200 pounds and be almost three feet deep, digital projection sets might pack the same screen size into a unit weighing less than 80 pounds and measuring barely 18 inches deep. Moreover, the digital projection set will probably cost thousands of dollars less than a flat-panel display.
Many electronics experts agree that the thinning of the television has wrought a striking change in the way families shop for TV's. Suddenly, they say, women who might have objected to their husband's or boyfriend's big-screen fantasies are softening their objections.
"Now, the consumer purchase process has evolved simply from a male-centric decision process to one that is being driven equally if not more by the female, given that you can now integrate the TV into the room as art, rather than the big black box," said Tim E. Baxter, senior vice president for marketing at Sony Electronics' consumer division. "Now I am giving back an entire corner of the room that was dedicated to the TV."
Independent:
The heads of McDonald's, Cadbury Schweppes and Pepsi said yesterday that their products were not to blame for Britain's obesity epidemic.
The chief executives of the three companies claimed that heavy marketing of junk food, "super size" portions and offers of promotional toys had little effect on what most people ate.
Andrew Cosslett, the managing director of Cadbury Schweppes, said: "There is no correlation between confectionery consumption and obesity. All the evidence suggests that people eat our products extremely sensibly.
"The problem is that people are buying things that they think are low-fat, products that are masquerading as healthy with misleading labels." Mr Cosslett claimed that products such as low-fat yoghurts were more to blame for the rising rate of obesity than sweets. "There is nothing dangerous about a Curly Wurly," he said.
He and the heads of Britain's other leading food companies were giving evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee investigation into obesity.
The committee is considering whether to recommend a ban on television advertising of high-fat and sugary foods during children's viewing times, and the introduction of cigarette-style health warnings on junk food. One in five people in Britain is classed as overweight or obese and rates have tripled among children.
Campaigners say the aggressive marketing of sweets, crisps and soft drinks, using sporting heroes such as Gary Lineker for Walkers crisps and cartoon characters for McDonald's Happy Meals, encourages people to eat poor diets. Increased portion sizes, such as "go large" burger meals and extra large chocolate bars, have also been blamed.
AllAfrica.com:
Some 24 million Africans are currently known to have tested positive to the deadly HIV virus which is responsible for the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
Chairman, University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan and Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Professor Oladipupo Olu Akinkugbe, revealed this yesterday at a commemorative lecture to mark the 10th anniversary of the transition of eminent expert in development Economics, late Professor Ojetunji Aboyade.
Akinkugbe told the distinguished gathering of scholars, experts and businessmen at the Development Policy Centre (DPC),Ibadan ,Oyo State founded by the late economist that the African HIV infection data is the highest of all the continents.
According to Akinkugbe, who delivered the anniversary lecture titled "Undeserved Yet Undeserved," pointed out that the figure is quite alarming when viewed against the fact that the global HIV infection figure to date stands at 35 million people.
SeattleTimes:
The telecommunications industry, eager to find a route around a 100-year-old regulatory regime, has turned to a new path: the Internet.
In the month since a federal court in Minnesota ruled calls delivered over the Internet are not subject to state regulation, Qwest Communications International, Verizon Communications and SBC Communications have announced intentions to beef up their ability to deliver phone calls over their data networks.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) traditionally has had a hands-off policy when it comes to regulating the Internet. But it will hold its first hearing tomorrow in an effort to decide whether it needs to step into an issue that has the potential to transform the industry.
In Washington state, regulators next year are expected to rule for the first time whether the technology falls under their authority. A federal judge found that the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission was better-suited to make such a decision.
The stakes in the debate are huge. Federal and state governments could lose billions of dollars in revenue from regulatory fees if calls moved onto the Internet no longer are subject to the charges. And if the FCC chooses not to regulate Internet calls, it could raise questions about the future of the Universal Service Fund, a $6 billion federal program funded by telephone fees that subsidizes phone service in rural areas and Internet service for schools.
...Local and long-distance companies are migrating quickly to the new technology to avoid the cost of maintaining separate voice and data networks. Nortel Networks, the Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, estimates local telephone companies could cut costs of running a network by 30 percent by shifting to an Internet-based network. "The market is absolutely moving in the direction of the convergence of these networks," Nortel executive Martha Bejar said.
Long-distance companies also hope to reap huge savings by using the Internet to bypass local telephone networks. Long-distance companies pay local companies $25 billion a year in "access charges." The fees cover the cost of connecting long-distance customers to the local network. The long-distance companies say they should not have to pay access charges for Internet calls.
FCC Chairman Michael Powell had been reluctant to jump into the debate. As recently as October, he said the agency would launch a notice of inquiry, an agency proceeding designed to invite public comment on an issue without reaching a decision. But Powell this month suggested in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that the agency could issue a final rule within 12 months.
TelegraphIndia:
In a desperate appeal to China’s fashionable youth, the Chinese Communist Party has approved the repackaging of Mao Zedong as a rap artist.
Mao’s favourite exhortation — the Two Musts — is to be set to music and released alongside pop versions of all the Great Helmsman’s old slogans, such as The East is Red and Serve the People.
The rap album to honour the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth next month follows another record, A Red Sun, released to mark his centenary.
The Beijing Times said yesterday: “Ten years ago, the album A Red Sun brought a crimson tide of songs rushing through our music industry. This year, the China Record Company has finished the production of the powerfully red Mao Tse-Tung and Us.”
The Two Musts were: “To preserve modesty and prudence and to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle”.
They formed a key part of Mao’s professed, though unpractised, passion for peasant life.
As Mao’s anniversary on December 26, 1893 approaches, the party is keen to use the opportunity to revive interest in his ideology, increasingly .
SFGate:
Cable television giant Comcast is jumping into the Internet music market with a deal to promote RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody music subscription service with TV commercials and free songs.
The two-month marketing deal between Rhapsody music service of San Francisco and Comcast, which has 21.4 million cable TV subscribers and 4.86 million high-speed Internet service customers, will be announced today.
The joint promotion marks the latest in a series of high-profile marketing campaigns to catapult into the spotlight licensed music services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Roxio Inc.'s Napster 2.0.
"This kind of attention is all good,'' said analyst Mike McGuire, research director at Gartner G2. "The idea they are now going to have TV advertising to promote this is enormous, not just for Rhapsody. Raising the general public awareness that there is a new form of accruing music legally is very valuable.''
Those services have the backing of the slump-ridden recording industry, which has been slapping customers with copyright infringement suits for using free but unlicensed online song-swapping programs like Kazaa.
... Ms. Lauzen's latest study, which analyzed the 2002-3 prime-time season, found that women made up 22 percent of all creators, executive producers, producers, directors, writers, editors and directors of photography, a percentage that has remained virtually unchanged for the last four seasons.Meanwhile, on screen, male characters outnumbered females by almost 2 to 1 (62 percent males, 38 percent females). The women were also younger than the men: 70 percent of all characters in their 40's and 80 percent of those in their 50's were men. Among major characters, only men held political office or were military or religious leaders. A total of 93 percent of business owners were men.
But the presence of at least one powerful woman behind the screen translates into more women on-screen and more powerful women on-screen, Ms. Lauzen found. For example, women accounted for 36 percent of all characters in programs without female creators, compared with 44 percent of all characters in those with at least one female creator.
"I don't think there's some grand conspiracy out there," Ms. Lauzen said. "I think it's a subconscious thing going on. People hire people they feel comfortable with. But you can't possibly understand TV unless you look behind the screen to who is putting the words in the characters' mouths." Ms. Lauzen is just one of a growing number of feminist and communications theorists who have been studying the portrayal of women on television.
An ambitious new study of the top 15 Nielsen-rated network sitcoms from 1950 to 1999 by a group of Ohio University researchers, for example, is trying to document more precisely the ways TV warps reality and ducks nuance.
NYNewsDay:
After years of false promises and halting starts, HDTV -- the ultimate in TV picture sharpness -- finally appears to be ready for prime time. A combination of lower prices and more HD programming, bolstered by the trend toward spending more on in-home comforts, has helped accelerate the flow to high-definition television.
More than 2.4 million HDTV sets were sold in the United States in the 12 months ended in September, according to the NPD Group, a research firm based in Port Washington. That's a 50 percent jump from a year earlier and triple the number sold two years ago.
"This is going to happen much, much faster than anyone thought even six months ago," Bryan Burns, vice president of strategic business planning at ESPN, which has launched an HD channel, said at a recent SportsBusiness Journal media and technology conference in Manhattan.
Industry analysts, executives and retailers say there are a number of reasons HDTV is gaining traction and that this holiday shopping season should provide a key test.
The lowest price tags have dropped to $599 for a 26-inch set, down from $1,000 a year ago, although prices for a 63-inch flat-panel set can reach as high as $20,000. High-definition programming, while still too scarce for HDTV junkies, has become available enough to justify the purchase for more consumers. Cable TV companies are offering 60 million homes set-top boxes that transmit HD signals, often for no extra fee to digital customers or $5 to $10 extra per month, while satellite TV providers offer HD packages for about $10 extra per month. And sleek flat-panel sets that adorn walls have captivated shoppers, even if their prices are still out of reach for many. "It's the near equivalent of moving from black-and-white to color," Charles Dolan, chairman of Cablevision Systems Corp., the biggest cable operator in the New York metro area, said of the growing popularity of high-definition television.
Dolan has tried to catch the trend by launching a nationwide satellite TV service called Voom that will feature 39 HD channels, compared with five to 10 channels at competing satellite and cable companies. "High definition will quickly become the standard," he said at the satellite TV industry's SkyForum conference.
Twenty-one of those channels -- including one with art gallery tours, two with sports and 13 featuring movies -- are being created for Voom by the Rainbow Media division of Bethpage-based Cablevision. Dolan, who recently put a 61-inch HDTV set in his Oyster Bay home, says the key to sparking more interest in HDTV is providing a lot more programming.
Skeptics, however, still abound. They say that beyond the most rabid of HDTV fans, who are endlessly enthralled by the clarity of fish swimming, dust settling and tennis balls flying, the market may be limited. And even the zealots may be frustrated by the shortage of programming that takes full advantage of high definition.
"I don't think the high-definition transition is like black-and-white to color," Ken Aagard, senior vice president for operations at CBS Sports, said at the SportsBusiness Journal conference. "I think high definition is just going to be another niche."
MRONS:
Scarborough Research and Nielsen Media Research in the US have recently formed a partnership to offer the NSI Profiler—a new qualitative television rating which combines Nielsen Station Index (NSI) ratings with Scarborough’s qualitative consumer indices.
This combination of Scarborough’s premier qualitative information with the NSI rating – the currency for television audience measurement – enables users to take lifestyle, shopping preference, and other consumer behaviours into account when determining the propensity of a viewer to tune into certain television programs. The NSI Profiler is available through Scarborough’s PRIME NExT data analysis software to all clients who subscribe to both Scarborough Research and Nielsen’s local ratings service.
‘In a world where media choices are seemingly limitless, an in-depth understanding of the local television viewer is vital for competing in today’s economy,’ said Bob Cohen, president, Scarborough Research. ‘The creation of this qualitative rating will add a new dimension to the buying and selling process and ultimately improve our client’s return on their investment. As a response to marketplace demands, we are pleased to bring this new measure to our users.
Independent:
Police forces are to introduce a revolutionary method of taking fingerprints, which makes it virtually impossible for offenders to erase incriminating evidence.
This wipe-proof fingerprinting technique gives a much clearer image of the whorls and ridges of the finger than the fluorescent powder currently used by detectives. Scientists at the University of Sunderland have developed this new tool for detectives, which is based on a special dust made up of millions of minuscule specks called nanoparticles.
Only one billionth of a metre in length, each nanoparticle has a sticky surface which enables it to attach itself tightly to the oily residue left by a fingertip. They are also impregnated with a special dye to help scene-of-the-crime officers to identify prints left by criminals.
Nanoparticle technology has already been used by "nuisance control" officers to prevent vandals defacing buildings with graffiti. Forces, including Avon and Somerset and West Midlands police, are already planning to carry out trials of this advance in forensic science within the next 12 months. There has also been interest from the US where police in Texas and Florida are hoping nanoparticle technology will increase their clear-up rate for all types of crime.
Professor Fred Rowell, from the University of Sunderland's school of health, natural and social sciences, said that one of the advantages of nanoparticle-fingerprinting is that results can be obtained more quickly than from DNA screening.
"Using nanoparticles should get better definition of fingerprints. It should improve the detection rate in the long-term," said Professor Rowell. "It makes identification easier, and provides better sensitivity. Even with a fraction of a print, police are able to make an identification."
TheGuardian:
The United States is embarking on a multimillion-dollar expansion of its nuclear arsenal, prompting fears it may lead the world into a new arms race.
The Bush administration is pushing ahead with the development of a new generation of weapons, dubbed 'mini-nukes', that use nuclear warheads to penetrate underground bunkers.
Last week, it gave a quiet yet final go-ahead to a controversial research project into the bunker-buster. The move effectively ends a 10-year ban on research into 'low-yield' nuclear weapons. Critics fear it may lead other countries to push ahead with developing such weapons. It also comes at a highly sensitive time diplomatically, with the US lobbying countries such as Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear plans.
'The United States is spurring a new global arms race with our own development of a new generation of nuclear weapons,' said Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who led an unsuccessful bid in Congress to have the programme scrapped.
The new warheads are designed to use shockwaves to destroy deep bunkers even if the bomb does not reach them. Experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has shown army planners that bunkers are being built deeper and more securely. 'We have to be able to match our capability to our potential targets,' one White House official said.
But critics say the weapons won't work and doubt claims that the radiation will remain underground.
The US Army plans to convert two existing nuclear bombs - the B61 and B83. The B61 can be dropped by B-52 bombers or F-16 jets. The larger B83 has explosive yields of one to two megatons. Research will focus on hardening the bomb casings so they can penetrate layers of steel, rock and concrete.
Anti-nuclear campaigners say the B83's large size makes its classification as a 'mini-nuke' debatable. 'The powers that be describe them as low-yield weapons. But that is far from the case,' said Jay Coghlan, director of Nukewatch.
TimesHerald:
Though the 358th reservists are eligible for a 15-day rest and recreation break, they are required to spend at least a full year in Iraq. At least one 358th officer, who asked not to be identified, said a long deployment wasn't what she and others had anticipated.
"We didn't sign up for two weeks off and the rest of the year deployed," the officer said. "We have jobs that we need to get back to."
In the past, Army reservist typically spent about one weekend a month training locally in a chosen occupational specialty. Weekend duty included classroom and physical fitness training, and during the summer there was a two-week training requirement.
Since the Iraq war, all that is changing. In 2004, U.S. National Guard and military reserve units will take on more of the combat burden in Iraq, according to Associated Press, replacing some army troops with a smaller, lighter and more mobile force equipped with fewer tanks and more armored Humvees and other light infantry vehicles.
The Department of Defense's transformation initiative envisions lighter, nimbler forces with service branches working jointly on missions. In the future, troops should be able to mobilize quicker and arrive at their overseas deployments in a matter of days.
Currently, there are 130,000 troops serving in Iraq - about 20 are reserve forces. Next year's troop rotation is scheduled to take place between January and April.
By April, nearly 40 percent of the 105,000 troops in the fresh force will be National Guard and reservists. Also, the U.S. Marines plan to use about 6,000 of their citizen-soldiers in the switch-out.
U.S. forces in Iraq are already traveling lighter these days, trading firepower for mobility, many armored divisions having traded many of their Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles for Humvees.
A contingent of 5,000 soldiers in a combat team called the Stryker Brigade, from Fort Lewis, Wash., has been training in Kuwait since October in preparation for duty in Iraq. The unit's Stryker vehicle, which is half the weight of a tank, will debut sometime in 2004.
Obesity is the fastest-growing major health problem in the United States. In 2000, 31 percent of American adults were obese, up from 23 percent in 1990 and 13 percent in 1960, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.And those, like Mr. Rosenthal, who are classified as "morbidly obese" tripled in number in just a decade, to 2.2 percent of the population in 2000.
The perils of morbid obesity are not limited to life-threatening ailments like Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure; merely getting the health care other people take for granted is beyond their reach.
Severely overweight people cannot fit into standard wheelchairs, waiting-room armchairs, blood pressure cuffs, hospital beds and gowns, or M.R.I. and CAT scan machines.
X-rays often cannot penetrate far enough into their bodies to produce useful images, and wall-mounted toilets snap off under their weight.
About:
...Along with the TV application, there is the Gemstar Guide+ TV listing software that is integral to the EASYLOOK functions. This application downloads TV listings based on your television service and location to provide up to a week's worth of programming schedules. While using this application, it is also possible to watch the TV tuner in the upper left corner. This application is ad supported with two ads displayed on the left side of the programming window.
One of the outstanding features of the All-In-Wonder software bundle is the video recording capability. Video can be captured and stored to the hard drive for later viewing or through time shifted display similar to a personal video recorder. Programs can be scheduled for recording through the TV listings or by browsing the listings with the remote control via EASYLOOK. The programming can be stored in the ATI VCR format that provides high quality with low file sizes or the more standard MPEG standards. The MPEG standard is the choice to use if you would like to record the programs onto CD or DVD.
One of the major additions to the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is the inclusion of an FM tuner. A simple FM antenna is necessary in order to use the tuner. Once installed, simply load up the FM player tool to start listening to the radio. Of course, finding stations will be a bit more of a challenge than the TV tuner. First it does not have an autoscan feature like the TV player. This means you must manually tune them in.
...Similar to the TV recording functions, the FM tuner also has an on-demand feature for scheduled recording or time delayed playback. Recordings are restricted to the MP3 format with a fixed 224 Kbps constant bit rate. This isn't much of a problem since the MP3 format is very portable, but the bit rate is much higher than is required for FM radio quality sound.
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Note: There is no charge for the directory service and prices for the cards that pop into an AGP slot on a PC range from $100 - $400. This is another strong indication that PVRs and PARs (personal audio recorders) will probably be standard features in future PCs and LCD TVs. - N. Wada
SBC Internet Services is promoting an online video-on-demand service from Movielink, in the hope of luring new customers to its broadband access with film rentals.The high-speed Internet access provider, a unit of SBC Communications, has teamed with Movielink to create a co-branded Web site of video downloads for subscribers to SBC Yahoo DSL, the companies said Monday. New members will receive $10 in movie rentals from the service, which is powered by Movielink. The online video company, a joint venture of five major Hollywood film studios, lets people rent, download and watch movies on a PC for roughly $4 a title.
The partnership is a trial, and terms were not disclosed.
"By working with Movielink, SBC Yahoo DSL members receive a more robust choice in true broadband content," Tyler Wallis, executive director of SBC Consumer Marketing, said in a statement.
For Movielink, the deal promises greater exposure among its target market: broadband subscribers. The company has long faced difficulties in winning moviegoers over to rent films online. But as increasing numbers of people sign up for high-speed Net service, it has more opportunities to sell its movie downloads, which are less likely to result in a shaky picture on a PC, or on a TV set fed by a PC, if a broadband connection is used.
TheAge:
Australia's health ministers have rejected widening calls for a ban on television food advertising aimed at children, saying there is no evidence that promoting fatty, sugary foods to children makes them overweight.
The Australian Medical Association yesterday joined most other big doctors' groups in calling for a ban.
Participants at yesterday's health ministers conference in Sydney agreed obesity was a big cause of preventable health problems and poor eating habits were creating a huge health and financial burden. However, the push from doctors to ban the television advertising of inappropriate food was not discussed.
The AMA's decision to call for a ban comes after the release this week of a report, Children's Health or Corporate Wealth, compiled by the Coalition on Food Advertising to Children, which found the vast majority of commercials were for foods high in fat, sugar or salt, and of low nutritional value, and cited studies showing these influenced children's diets.
Michael Rice, the children's health spokesman for the AMA, said: "Health ministers must today put children's health ahead of the wealth of big business by banning the TV advertising of unsuitable and unhealthy food to kids.
"Studies have shown that advertising unsuitable foods during peak children's television viewing times leads to an increase in the consumption of these foods."
Boyd explained Friendster this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how.Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.
ABC:
MARK COLVIN: The stranglehold that Qantas enjoys on the so called 'Kangaroo route' between Australia and London faces a new challenge tonight, after Sir Richard Branson's international airline, Virgin Atlantic, won approval to fly into Sydney.
An agreement between aviation authorities in Britain and Hong Kong allows Virgin Atlantic to begin flights from Hong Kong to Sydney. The airline already offers a number of services between Hong Kong and London. The deal saw Qantas' share price fall by as much as four per cent as investors faced the prospect of greater competition on the Kangaroo route.
Michael Rowland reports.
MICHAEL ROWLAND: Sir Richard Branson has been talking about flying Virgin Atlantic jets into Australia for so long, that a lot of aviation analysts were starting to think it may never happen. So the deal reached overnight between Hong Kong and Britain took more than a few by surprise.
One of those reading the news release twice was Peter Harbison, the Managing Director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.
PETER HARBISON: First reflex is somewhat surprised. I didn't think that this would go through at this stage.
MICHAEL ROWLAND: The deal went through only after the British government allowed Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific airline to fly from London to New York.
Mr Harbison says Virgin Atlantic will undoubtedly benefit from the agreement, most particularly on that first hop of the kangaroo route, between Sydney and Hong Kong.
PETER HARBISON: In terms of direct impact, the greatest effect will be on the Hong Kong-Sydney route which is currently basically the preserve of Qantas and Cathay Pacific.
Adding Virgin Atlantic onto that route is going to create some additional capacity of course, which will dilute the power of the existing carriers and also create a bit of high level competition at the premium end of the market.
SMH:
A hacker famed for defeating Hollywood in a cyber-piracy trial has rejected allegations he has illegally unlocked a code that enables unauthorised copying of music files from the internet.
Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old Norwegian computer programmer who was cleared of piracy charges in January, has developed a source code for copying music and posted it on the internet less than a week before he is due to appear in an Oslo appeals court.
Johansen's code allows users of Apple Computer Inc's new iTunes online music store to break digital rights management (DRM) technology that prevents people copying files downloaded from the service.
On an internet site named "So Sue Me", Johansen said critics had "failed to understand that by buying into DRM they have given the seller complete control over the product after it's been sold", calling them "clueless about copyright law".
The new program circumvents iTunes' anti-copying program, MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, by legally opening and playing a protected music file in QuickTime, but then, essentially, draining the unprotected music data into a new and parallel file.
There are other programs that can circumvent copy protection schemes by capturing analog audio, though that typically causes a loss in quality. The program on Johansen's site appears to capture unprotected digital data, which could be used to make perfect copies of an unlocked tune.
BBC:
The PlayStation 2 console is being launched in China next month, despite concerns about widespread piracy.
Sony chairman Hiroshi Shoda said the company had to face the reality that piracy could not be totally eliminated.
More than 60 million PlayStation 2's have been sold worldwide, generating almost two-thirds of the company's operating profits
... In the past, the major console manufacturers have steered clear of China because of the risk of product piracy.
In September, Nintendo became the first one to brave the Chinese market, announcing plans to sell a version of its GameCube console.
Now Sony has followed suit, aiming to capitalise on an untapped market for video games.
Nintendo has a special GameCube version for China
"We have to realise the reality, that piracy cannot be controlled 100%, not only in China but also in other parts of the world," said Sony China Chairman Hiroshi Shoda.
"We have to be courageous, to face the reality."
As more consumers begin surfing the Web and sending e-mail messages on cell phone and hand-held devices, along comes a new worry: worms and viruses that spread via Internet-enabled handsets.The problem is still small, with only a few cases reported globally. But as operating systems in cell phones become standardized, hackers will probably begin focusing on vulnerabilities in those systems as they have with personal computers.
And as cell phones and personal digital assistants connect to the Internet at ever faster speeds, more users will be able to download files with attachments - some of which may be infected.
Asia, where high-speed networks and text messaging on mobile phones are common, is the most vulnerable to these threats. As carriers in Europe and North America adopt similar technology, they will confront the same kinds of hazards.
Telecommunications companies currently spend as much as $8 billion a year fixing handsets with programming errors, faulty mechanics and other problems. Now some are scrambling to prevent virus attacks that could cost carriers millions of dollars more in repairs and lost business.
If I were an entertainment industry executive, I'd worry less about college students sharing files on the Internet and more about what's happening in China.The Chinese government just announced a government-funded project to develop an alternative to the DVD. Called "EVD" (for "enhanced versatile disc"), the new format is reported to be technically superior to DVD, especially for recording and showing high definition television programs (HDTV).
Normally, I don't get too worked up over a new recording or storage format, especially when it's competing with an already entrenched standard such as DVD or CD. But every other time I've reported on a new standard, it was being pushed by a company or, at most, a consortium of companies. It's extremely difficult for a few companies -- even when it includes the likes of Sony or IBM -- to overturn an entrenched standard, but we're not talking about companies here.
We're talking a country that's home to 1.3 billion people. In 2002, according to the CIA Word Fact Book, China had a purchasing power of $5.7 trillion dollars. OK, the U.S. has one-fourth as many people and twice as much purchasing power, but China is still an emerging economic powerhouse that is getting stronger and richer all the time.
The sites are offering deal-hungry consumers a way to quickly compare merchandise and prices from thousands of Web retailers.It didn't take long for Paul Rattay to grasp the power of shopping comparison sites on the Internet. He figures he saved at least $150 on a Sony digital camera by turning to DealTime.com to hunt for the best prices with a few quick clicks of his computer mouse.
"I could have just gone to Amazon, but I figured I could get a better deal by shopping around a bit," said Rattay, a 34-year-old software engineer who ended up buying the camera from an online merchant so obscure he can't remember the name. "You have so much information at your disposal on these sites that I plan to use them as a reference for price points, if nothing else."
For deal-hungry holiday shoppers such as Rattay, the Internet is offering more help than ever, as online search engines morph into price-sorting machines that can compare products from thousands of merchants in seconds.
The shopping services have been around for awhile, but they have become increasingly useful in recent months. Most of the top sites have expanded the number of merchants that they track and introduced new features designed to make it easier for consumers to quickly call up an array of product research.
Product comparison sites have become such a major draw that they attracted 33 million unique visitors in October, according to ComScore Networks, a research firm. Total traffic to the sites rose 9% from the same time last year, making them one of the Web's fastest-growing categories.The free shopping assistance is available through search services offered by California companies Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc., as well as specialty online commerce sites such as NexTag Inc., BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com, MySimon, and New York-based DealTime — now known as Shopping.com Inc. Shopping.com did best among the specialty sites in October, with nearly 15.5 million unique visitors. Like some of its rivals, Shopping.com is making a major holiday push — it recently launched its first TV ad campaign in a few major markets.
Most of the sites scour inventories of major retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp., as well as quirky upstarts such as Petshed.com and Givinggallery.com. With the comparison sites monitoring so much merchandise, their services are gaining wider appeal after years of catering to gadget-loving geeks rummaging for bargains.
The fastest-growing areas on Yahoo's shopping channel, for instance, include home decor and clothing, said Rob Solomon, who oversees the product comparison service for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet giant.
Culver City-based PriceGrabber is so confident it can offer something for everyone that it is selling gift cards that can be used toward purchases from any of the 3,000 merchants tracked by its site.
It's all part of "an unmistakable shift in the way consumers open their wallets online," said Chuck Davis, chief executive of Los Angeles-based BizRate.
A year ago, BizRate's site monitored 5 million products carried by 3,300 stores. It now spans more than 25 million products from 39,000 merchants, which generally pay sites such as BizRate for referrals.
The sites typically include side-by-side comparisons of similar products made by different manufacturers, as well as prices offered by different merchants and reviews written by consumers.
The services can sift through a multitude of merchandise or focus on products that fit the shopper's preferences and price range. Most sites include tools that factor shipping costs into the final price and identify whether a product is in stock.
Although the sites profit from the referral fees they collect from listed merchants — a factor that sometimes sways their search results — the site operators insist their top priority is satisfying shoppers so retailers stay happy too.
"Merchants are really hungry for the customers that we send them because these are people who are usually really ready to shop," said Purnendu Ojha, chief executive of San Mateo-based NexTag.
Part of the reason for these sites' expanded popularity is the sheer growth of Internet commerce. Through mid-October, consumers spent nearly $37 billion at online retailers this year, excluding travel sites, according to ComScore. That was an 18% increase from the same period last year.
But even when they aren't planning to buy online, consumers increasingly are turning to product comparison sites to research prices and features before hitting the mall, said Dan Hess, a ComScore Networks analyst.
Despite his positive experience finding a camera, Rattay sees limits to the usefulness of product comparison sites. "I don't think I would use them to buy bedsheets," he said.
LA Times Registration Required
...But the buzz at her Midwestern agency - and in the fashion buyers' offices of New York and the garment factories of Hong Kong - is that the current specifications for every size, from 1X to women's 8 to men's medium, may soon be sent out for alterations.
In September, the last of 10,800 volunteers stepped into a booth at a shopping mall, stripped nearly naked and submitted to a 10-second body scan under white light. In exchange for $20 in cash, a $25 gift certificate or, in some cases, no giveaway item, the volunteers contributed to a database that could give manufacturers vital marketing information while helping shoppers find clothes that fit, either in stores or online.
...
Mr. Lovejoy would not disclose preliminary results, but he did drop one bombshell: of 4,000 women included in the survey, less than 10 percent met the definition of misses size 8 established by ASTM International, formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials, which develops standards through industry consensus for products, systems and services. Yet the fit of today's clothing is often still based on the notion that size 8 is closest to the midpoint of the size range of American women. Some companies, sensing that the standards are obsolete, have already moved the base line up to size 10. The sizing survey aims to substitute data for hunches.
HoustonBusiness Journal:
A century after oil gushed out of the ground in Texas at Spindletop, a Houston company is planning to build a pipeline to bring oil to Texas from Canada.
Enbridge Energy Partners LLP last month announced plans to develop a new 630-mile, $600 million crude oil pipeline from Superior, Wis., south to Wood River in southern Illinois, where it will connect with an existing Enbridge pipeline that runs north from Cushing, Okla.
Enbridge plans to reverse the flow of the old pipeline, which has traditionally carried oil north from the oilfields of Oklahoma and Texas to Illinois. By 2005, that pipeline is expected to begin bringing 200,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil a day south to the major oil pipeline hub at Cushing.
And the ultimate target of Enbridge's strategy is to bring Canadian oil all the way down to the Gulf Coast.
It's a sign of the steep decline in U.S. land-based oil reserves and production.
It's also related to the political upheaval in Venezuela, which was a major exporter of oil to the U.S. -- particularly the refineries along the Gulf Coast -- until a national strike against the government earlier this year decimated that country's oil production and exports.
"There is huge heavy oil refining capacity on the Gulf Coast, and that's why Enbridge wants to build these pipelines -- to tap the huge oilsands reserves in Canada and bring it to the enormous markets for heavy oil on the Gulf Coast," says an industry consultant in Houston whose firm has been involved in advising Enbridge and some of its refinery customers.
WashingtonTimes:
Greece will provide an unprecedented 50,000 police and soldiers for next summer's Olympic Games in Athens, a newspaper reported Monday.
The country will deploy 10,000 soldiers in support of the 40,000 police, including a battalion trained in dealing with nuclear, chemical and biological attacks.
Greek Defense Minister Yannos Papantoniou told London's Financial Times: "We want to be able to prepare our forces for any eventuality."
The security budget for the games has reached an unprecedented $650 million and the Athens government is committed to spending up to $1 billion on games security in 2004.
GameGirlAdvance
"Where the Girls Are" article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday suggests that the game industry is waking up to the commercial possibilities of paying attention to the growing female market.
Some numbers provided by the Entertainment Software Association in the article are interesting:
26% of electronic game-players are women over 18.
21% are boys 6-17,
12% are girls 6-17,
38% are men over 18.
The article also notes that "For the holidays this year, Codemasters says it will run its most aggressive U.S. ad campaign ever, placing print ads in magazines including CosmoGirl, YM, Teen People and Working Mother. The multimillion-dollar campaign also features TV spots set to start airing next month on the WB network, during "7th Heaven," "Smallville" and other shows popular with young women and girls."
Note: Before you jump to any conclusions about ESA's numbers, check out the comments on GGA related to this posting. - N. Wada
See also GameGirlAdvance:
The U.S. videogame industry today is larger than Hollywood's domestic box-office receipts and is closing in on music sales. Doesn't a sector that size deserve sophisticated mainstream critique, even academic study?
... Some of the academics complain that the videogame industry lacks the sort of critical media eye that has accompanied the development of cinema, and has acted as cheerleader for more creative and important -- if less financially lucrative -- films.
Without such legitimate critique, they argue, the industry will take few chances on things besides violent fare, sports games and half-hearted ripoffs of Hollywood. If the games industry is ever going to get beyond its current fascination with heavy ammunition, high-speed chases and pixelized hot-tub vixens, their argument goes, the public has to hear from reviewers who can call the game makers to task or applaud loftier offerings -- and do it for a new, bigger audience.
Instead, videogame reviews are stuck in the Pac-Man era. Matteo Bittanti, a researcher in Italy, says games are still judged on graphics, sound, longevity and playability. That would be like film critics writing only about a movie's audio track and special effects.
The magazines out now are primarily "magalogs, official catalogs, unofficial promos and buyer's guides masquerading as serious information," Mr. Bittanti says.
The academics want a videogame version of Cahiers du Cinema, the French film review founded in 1951 that assisted the birth of the French New Wave movement and championed the likes of Hitchcock and Truffaut.
... Better videogame criticism is a good idea. But for it to matter, games will have to expand their cultural and social impact to match their economic weight. Game publishers should work harder to attract more gamers outside of their traditional demographic market. They can also offer some more sophisticated fare, games worth writing about.
HeraldNet
If a parent wanted their children to develop attitudes like Gary Ridgway, the confessed killer of at least 48 women, these games might provide a good training ground.
... First, people were thoroughly chilled by confessed serial killer Ridgway's admissions and descriptions a week ago.
Even the sanitized details within the King County prosecutor's summary are so bad that the cover page warns that the report "... contains graphic and disturbing descriptions," which may not be suitable for every reader.
... Second, these games are not movies. Nor are they spectator games. Rather, they are simulations.
...The youngsters who hold the joysticks and sit at the keyboards hold the guns and axes. Young players practice cutting heads off. They rehearse shooting police officers and urinating on them.
... Third, the Mothers Against Violence group sent underage youngsters into familiar stores, and 15 out of 17 of the stores sold adult games to children under 12.
... One danger for children lies in any tendency of parents to think "not my child."
Before drawing that conclusion they should consider four facts.
Video games are expected to reach $20 billion in sales this year. That is a sizable piece of the growing economy everybody is hoping for, and it works directly against what most parents want for their children.
Every year, enough video games are sold to put two of them in every American household.
More than nine of every 10 American children play video games.
Research shows that playing violent video games increases children's violent thoughts and aggressive behaviors.
BBC
Condoms have made a rare appearance on Chinese state television as part of an official campaign to highlight the dangers of Aids.
The 30-second film, broadcast across China, showed a young couple, with a voiceover explaining the importance of safe sex.
It was prepared for World Aids Day on 1 December, according to state media.
China faces a growing Aids problem, but has been cautious about officially promoting contraception.
...The disease is estimated to have increased by 30% a year in China since 1998, with more than 800,000 infected with HIV.
The United Nations warns China's Aids cases could rise to 20 million by 2010.
MediaWeek:
Speaking at the Measuring Media in the Future conference organised by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising on Tuesday, Professor John Naughton said: "The ball game is over.
"We're moving from an economic system dominated by push media and moving to a completely different world which is a pull world - where consumers are empowered by digital technology and only get what they want."
Naughton was referring to the growing popularity of Personal Video.
Recorders, and predictions that in the next few years an increasing amount of media - including TV programmes - will be accessed and watched via the internet.
"This is a pull world, and if we want to thrive in it then we have to find a way of recognising that fundamental shift," he said.
Forbes:
Hewlett-Packard plans to offer its own brand of large flat-screen TVs from spring, the latest sign that major technology companies seek growth in a home entertainment market traditionally dominated by consumer-electronics companies, the Wall Street Journal said in its online edition.
The computer and printer-maker plans to offer both a liquid crystal TV and a larger screen that uses plasma technology, according to people familiar with the matter.
The devices will have tuners to receive broadcast signals, but "I wouldn't call it television," said Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president leading HP (nyse: HPQ - news - people )'s consumer advance. Rather, HP says the offerings will complement its other products for creating and managing "digital content," such as photos, music and video.
At the heart of HP's living-room strategy is the company's "Media Center PC," a sleek silver and black device that looks more like a stereo component than a personal computer, said the Journal. It has ports to plug in cable television, a VCR and audio devices.
It incorporates a TiVo-like digital video recorder and DVD player, as well as a dock for a digital camera. HP's Joshi said he realized the company's opportunity in TV display while visiting a Circuit City (nyse: CC - news - people ) store where HP had hooked up a media center PC to a large-screen plasma TV. Joshi heard a customer say, "Oh my God. I didn't realize you could do that."
Forbes
... Newly issued ratings data showing that men aged 18 to 34 are watching less TV, amid sagging viewership overall, will put the onus on broadcasters to invest in riskier programming and fight harder for advertising, media experts said Tuesday.
Media buyers said some networks have already been offering "make-goods" -- free commercial time to advertisers who were promised bigger audiences -- which could total up to $300 million to $500 million this year.
"The loss is especially troubling to the networks because advertisers pay premiums to reach (young men)," said Jack Myers, editor of a media industry newsletter.
"The networks, just to stay even, will need to get higher prices next year. There's already a backlash against prices advertisers were paying this year, so it's going to be a very difficult negotiating period," he said.
... For their part, the networks downplayed the significance of the reported decline in male viewers aged 18 to 34.
CBS ratings chief David Poltrack said the Nielsen "white paper" confirmed that about half the drop-off fell within the range of normal year-to-year fluctuations.
"It doesn't look like any real change in lifestyle by young males or any real significant defection from the ranks of television viewers," Poltrack told Reuters
Poltrack said one explanation could be that young men, including those who live with their parents, watch more TV outside the home and beyond Nielsen's reach.
The head of ratings and research of NBC, Alan Wurtzel, agreed that the notion of the vanishing young male has turned out to be a myth.
"Nielsen has basically agreed that about half of this decline is not real.... It's a measurement issue," he said. "I just don't want anybody to feel that television has become irrelevant to a group of people when it just isn't true."
...Jon Swallen, director of media knowledge for Interpublic Group's Universal McCann agency, said the networks were caught in a bind between needing larger audiences while being averse to groundbreaking shows that cost more to develop.
"If programming becomes increasingly similar and undifferentiated ... the natural result for viewers is confusion, apathy and forsaking the television for something else," he said.
MSNBC
... Cable, after all, is where the juice is these days. Cable is where you’ll find risk-takers and programming with creative passion and vision. As for the broadcast networks, well they obviously continue to be mired in a play-it-safe rut.
With big money and ratings at stake and numerous fickle advertisers to appease, broadcasters tend to operate in a climate of fear. Consequently, so much network fare is the bland residue of conservatism and compromise. There is little incentive to be unique and daring.
In contrast, cable often leads the way in providing bold, edgy shows that defy the formulas. By now, everyone is familiar with HBO and its string of high-quality hits, including “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Wire.” Those shows blow away almost anything the networks can offer.
But other cable outlets are making headway as well. Little FX has two of the most compelling and daring dramas on the air in “The Shield” and “Nip/Tuck.” Comedy Central, which continues to push the envelope with “South Park,” also offers “The Daily Show,” the mock newscast that gleefully wallows in political satire — a form of humor the networks have all but abandoned.
And when it comes to innovative, buzz-generating shows, cable continues to make a splash in prime time. Last year MTV struck paydirt with “The Osbournes.” This year, Bravo grabbed gobs of attention with the hilarious “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
The trend is just as pervasive, if not more so, in made-for-television movies and miniseries, a genre that cable has dominated in recent years. While the networks generally stick to superficial explorations of current events (i.e. NBC’s disappointing “Saving Jessica Lynch”) and fluffy show-biz biopics, cable, led by HBO, churns out award-winning films that outclass even some of the better theatrical offerings.
BBC:
United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he has seen evidence that two Arabic TV networks have been co-operating with insurgents in Iraq.
He said both al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera had been in "close proximity" to attacks against coalition forces, sometimes even before they occurred.
Mr Rumsfeld added that he could not make a final judgement on the issue.
On Monday the US-backed Iraqi authorities banned al-Arabiya - a Dubai-based channel - from Iraq.
The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) accused the station of inciting murder "through the voice of Saddam Hussein".
On 16 November the channel broadcast a recorded message said to be from the former Iraqi leader calling for new "resistance".
UPI:
Open societies are emerging in the Islamic world. This is mainly due to cable television, the Internet, and mass education, according to Dartmouth College anthropologist Dale F. Eickelman, who has observed new ways of thinking as a result of these developments.
Eickelman studied the impact of new media as part of a major research project on Islam and democracy conducted by Boston University's Institute on Religion and World Affairs, or IRWA, and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. This UPI series is largely based on the IRWA undertaking.
What Eickelman witnessed in Morocco applies to most of the Middle East: "State television and radio have lost the battle for eyes and ears except for the countryside, where there is no alternative. Most of the sets are tuned to al-Jazeera Satellite Television or one of the newer Arab satellite channels."
From Casablanca in Morocco clear through Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Qatar's al-Jezeera, which has been patterned after CNN, dominates the new public sphere. "For many viewers, its Arabic news broadcasts have become the standard against which other broadcasters are judged," Eickelman writes.
In most Arab countries, reliable surveys of viewing habits are lacking, he allows. But there is one place from which dependable figures have been culled -- Gaza and the West Bank. Its inhabitants have rated al-Jazeera TV as the most reliable source of information (33.7 percent), Eickelman reports. Other satellite channels follow with 26 percent, well ahead of the television stations operated by the Palestinian authority and Israel.
Altogether, Eickelman observed that the new media have had "profound consequences for the political and religious imagination. First, they create and sustain a new public." Combined with modern mass education, they "offer wider, competing repertoires of intellectual techniques and authorities and the erosion of exclusivities that previously defined communities of discourse, extending them also to women and minorities."
Furthermore, "viewers can now watch religious and political authorities and commentators explain their views and answer questions more as equals than as distant orators who cannot directly be challenged," Eickelman writes. "Moreover, it is not just religious specialists who debate religion but other educated persons and public figures.
StraitsTimes:
A new chapter in the history of journalism unfolds today as The Times, arguably Britain's most venerable daily newspaper, appears in both its traditional large-paper format and a smaller, so-called tabloid version.
The change is of major importance in that it might well be symptomatic of a profound shift in British reading habits and social divisions.
It might also indicate a trend which could spread throughout the English-speaking world.
... Full-format newspapers, the so-called broadsheets, have been perceived as quality publications for the more educated and affluent while tabloids are for the masses - and newspaper editors know their audiences well.
So a war could erupt in some corner of Europe and The Sun tabloid might ignore it completely, devoting its front page instead to a story about a film star's divorce.
A mere glance at the newspaper being read was often all that was needed in order to evaluate an individual.
If it was The Sun, the reader was probably a single, male manual labourer. If it was The Guardian, the reader was probably a Labour Party voter of higher education and usually a civil servant.
The Daily Telegraph was for Conservative voters, The Financial Times reserved for people in the banking and insurance sectors, and The Times the newspaper of record in which members of the ruling class read about one another and announced their births, marriages and deaths.
...Everything changed, however, when The Independent, the smallest of the quality dailies, launched a tabloid version recently.
To the amazement of media experts, its circulation jumped by more than 7 per cent last month, a huge amount in a crowded and generally declining newspaper marketplace. The temptation for The Times to follow suit became inevitable.
But the fundamental question to which nobody seems to have an answer is why, after centuries, does the basic distinction between the tabloid and the broadsheet appear to be crumbling so rapidly?
The explanation may lie partly in a changing Britain, and it may be partly related to more global shifts in readership habits.
...Newspapers no longer provide the most immediate news source and cannot compete with the electronic media in speed of delivery.
People read newspapers either in order to obtain wider background commentaries on stories which they already know, or as pure entertainment.
The result is that education levels, social origins or income are no longer the determinants in newspaper consumption.
Indeed, the entire make-up of the readership of the press is being reshuffled.
Furthermore, the availability of many press articles on the Internet has further affected the question of a newspaper's format.
Net immigration to the United States rose dramatically by 1.4 million in each of the past two years, about half a million of whom were listed as illegal aliens, a report said yesterday.The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said if the numbers remain unchanged, this decade will mark the most massive wave of immigration in American history, with 45 million immigrants -- about 14 percent of the country's total projected population -- forecast to be residing in the United States by 2010.
The extensive FAIR report also said the figures show that immigration totals are unrelated to the labor needs and economic conditions in this country. Despite a weak U.S. economy and rising unemployment in the United States since 2000, the report said, immigration significantly has outpaced record levels seen in the 1990s and has shown no sign of abating.
A tropical fish that fluoresces bright red is set to become the first genetically modified pet to go on sale in the US. Alan Blake and colleagues at Yorktown Technologies LP say the GloFish will be available from January 2004.The little zebra fish were originally developed by researchers in Singapore to signal the presence of water pollutants by changing colour. "These fish were bred to help fight environmental pollution," Blake told Reuters. "They were bred to fluoresce in the presence of toxins."
Blake and the scientists who developed the GM fish, which especially glows under ultraviolet light, say they pose no threat to the environment as they cannot survive in non-tropical waters. However, the news of the GM aquarium pet has sparked concern among conservationists.
They are often debated, but low-carbohydrate diets are more popular than ever. Still, many dieters get bored eating the same type of food every day. In the past, eating out left even fewer options, but restaurants are joining in on the low-carb craze.More restaurants are fattening their wallets on the low-carb/high protein menus.
Woody Sniffen is a big fan of the Atkins diet and eating out.
"It's convenient and quick," he said. "I've lost like 15 pounds in the past month, month and a half!"
However, even strict carb counters get bored with their choices at restaurants. Eating on the run leaves even fewer options. Sure, you can order a hamburger or chicken sandwich, but you have to take off the bread. More restaurants now cater to low-carb diners. Michael Dean's Wood Over and Bar in Raleigh serves a low-carb lunch menu. Even fast food restaurants like KFC boast carb counts.
"...Nielsen Media Research released a report late Monday strongly defending itself against complaints by the networks that its research is faulty.Through mid-November, Nielsen has said that prime-time TV viewing by men aged 18 to 34 is down nearly 8 percent this fall compared to autumn 2002.
That statistic has baffled and infuriated the major broadcast networks, particularly since the young male audience is elusive and advertisers pay a premium to reach it.
Nielsen said that it has checked its numbers, and checked again, and believes them to be accurate. Young men are turning on TV in the same numbers as past years, but are staying for a much shorter time, Nielsen said.
Among men aged 18 to 24, use of DVDs, VCRs and video games has increased by 9 percent this year, Nielsen said.
The viewership decline is part of a long-term trend for the networks, and may be accentuated this year because there were slight increases the past few years, Nielsen said.
The company believes that its sample of "Nielsen families" is better than in past years and is even representative of young men who have moved back home with their parents. Networks grumble that these young men are less reliable than heads of household in reporting to Nielsen what they watch.
Nielsen dismissed a theory by NBC's chief researcher that an increased number of Hispanic viewers who have proved unreliable in reporting their TV usage is a big part of the decline.
Nielsen said young male viewership has decreased, on average, by 4 1/2 minutes a night; Hispanic changes accounted for five seconds of this decline.
"...Specifically, the Department of Defense authorization bill that President Bush is scheduled to sign Monday eases the military's responsibility under two important environmental laws.The bill allows the Navy to redefine "harassment" under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, making it easier to use low- frequency sonar suspected of harming whales and dolphins. The Pentagon's $401 billion authorization bill for the 2004 fiscal year also exempts military bases from stringent habitat-protection requirements under the federal Endangered Species Act.
In addition, the Pentagon, as it has in the past, is seeking exemptions to the Clean Air Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (which governs hazardous waste), and the Superfund Act responsible for cleaning up toxic-waste sites around the country. Last year, an exemption to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was granted the military as well.
The scope of the issue is enormous. The Defense Department oversees some 25 million acres of military bases and other training facilities. The military's pollution problems - including corroding bombs and rockets, and old chemical munitions now outlawed - date back over a century.
Over the years, military facilities have come to include 131 hazardous-waste sites on the federal Superfund priority list. They are also home to more than 300 threatened or endangered species. Ironically, the pressures of nearby urban development (especially in places like southern California) have turned military ranges into prime habitat.
"...But the recent bombs bear traces of known Al Qaeda tradecraft. There is a pattern emerging, say some experts, that indicates the terror group is determined to wage a sort of world war."This feels like a strategic shift to me, or a phase shift," says Jerrold Post, a former CIA official who heads the political psychology program at George Washington University.
If Al Qaeda is behind Thursday's attacks - as well as last week's twin bombings of Istanbul synagogues and the explosions that devastated a residential compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earlier this month - it would mark an unprecedented surge in activity for the Islamist terrorists.
Many more people were killed on September 11, 2001, and in Al Qaeda attacks in Bali, but the ability to carry out the recent series of obviously related attacks is itself impressive, say analysts.
That's one reason to lend credence to Al Qaeda claims of culpability. The showiness of the attacks, so close together, is one of their trademarks.
"Many terrorist groups wish they could do this but if you look at the historical record, relatively few have the capabilities - intelligence, reconnaissance, dedication, the loyalty of their cadres," says Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at the RAND Corp.
"...From Turkey to Iraq and beyond, there are signs that Al Qaeda has become extremely proficient at getting its message out - through television, newspapers, and the Internet, officials say.Websites continue to crop up more quickly than the CIA can shut them down. The sites are used as vehicles for recruitment - often showing videos of what Al Qaeda members say depict US abuse of Muslims in Iraq, among other places, at the behest of Israel.
On websites this past weekend, for example, two different militant groups claimed responsibility for the attacks in Turkey and warned of other attacks in the works against the US and its allies. Moreover, an Arab language newspaper based in London published a statement purported to be from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigrades, affiliated with Al Qaeda. The group claimed responsibility for the attacks in Turkey and went on to threaten the US and its allies.
Indeed, what bin Laden is doing quite well in the Muslim world, officials and experts say, is constantly casting the US as exploiting and repressing Muslims.
Take the situation in Iraq. "Look at it from bin Laden's point of view," says Robert Baer, a former CIA undercover operative who spent many years in the region. Bin Laden's assumption was that the US used Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to invade Iraq. Now that none have been found, he is exploiting that and the fact that US officials now say Hussein was evil and he had to be removed. "They're using that argument to say the US wants to occupy the Middle East on behalf of Israel."
"... For Al Qaeda, we can understand why Turkey makes sense. It is the only well-functioning country in the Muslim world, and the Islamists who lead the government are trying to take Turkey into the European Union," says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul Bilgi University. "The extremists want to make sure that this experiment doesn't succeed."After the weekend synagogue bombings, authorities tightened security at Jewish establishments and for other religious minority groups such as Greek and Armenian Christians.
But Thursday's bombings fired what some feared is a first shot at political and economic targets, causing panic and a skid in the Istanbul stock market.
In response, Turkish officials can be expected to launch a crackdown on fringe groups with connections to extreme Islamic groups that may have been overlooked in the past. Virtually all acts of terrorism Turkey has experienced over the past few decades has linked to Kurdish separatist groups - not Muslim fundamentalists.
Georgia Tech researchers have developed a machine that can instantly sniff out cocaine and other illegal drugs without the hassle of feeding, training and interpreting a police dog."This works the same way as the dogs," said Bill Hunt, the electrical engineering professor heading the project. "They're picking up on the vapors coming off the cocaine."
From a few feet away, the device can "smell" microscopic amounts of a particular substance - as little as one-trillionth of a gram. So far it's only programmed to detect cocaine. But Hunt says it could be developed to sniff out other drugs, anthrax, bombs, chemical agents and even cancerous cells.
Inspired by stirrings among corporate users for desktop Linux and with Microsoft’s forthcoming Longhorn operating system not expected on desktops until 2005, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell are augmenting their corporate Linux desktop wares. Novell and Red Hat also are assembling Linux desktops.IBM’s Global Services unit, for instance, intends to put in place next year a broad-based technical support program for Linux on corporate desktops.
What figures to add even more momentum is that HP and Dell are expected to announce technical support programs early next year, according to an industry executive familiar with both companies’ plans, who requested anonymity.
“You are going to see similar announcements from HP and Dell around the [late January] LinuxWorld timeframe. If IBM is going to stand behind Linux on the desktop, that is something those two will have to do as well,” the source said.
Sun, too, has been pushing desktop Linux and its StarOffice suite.
“Customers now have a few strong reasons to consider alternatives to Windows desktops,” said Hal Stern, CTO of Sun Services.
First, the cost of Microsoft software and licensing terms are considerably higher than that for Linux, Stern said. Second, desktop and user provisioning with Linux has improved. And third, a proliferation of stateless clients, such as Sun Ray systems, offers users non-Windows choices for desktops.
... The October 2002 survey of nearly 1,700 Americans focused on personal technologies, revealing that a greater proportion of enthusiastic tech users would find it more difficult to do without their computer, cell phone, and Internet than their television and landline telephone.Along with these key findings, Pew's research revealed Americans' growing dependency on new media, technology, and information sources, while categorizing enthusiasts as the "tech elite." This group has three distinct subsets, which comprise 31 percent of the population and are the most voracious consumers of information goods and services. They are:
The "Young Tech Elites" have an average age of 22, and account for 20 percent of the highest adopters. "Older Wired Baby Boomers" have an average age of 52, and they also represent 20 percent. Representing the largest segment are "Wired GenXers" at 60 percent, with an average age of 36.
Generational differences are exhibited, and John B. Horrigan, principal author of the report and senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, notes that each group are "likely to take their preferences into the future with them, continuing to value their technololgies."
"We can reasonably infer that in 30 years, the young tech elites will be the wired older baby boomers," Horrigan commented. "They will try new technologies and fold them into their daily rhythms."
The survey offered revealing insight about new media adoption rates. For example, DVD player penetration in American households grew from 16 percent in 2000 to nearly half of all homes in 2002, while significantly fewer households used pagers in 2002 than they did two years prior. Additionally, both Internet penetration and cell phone penetration rates jumped the same 38 percentage points between 1996 and 2002.
US President George W. Bush signed a 401-billion-dollar defense authorization bill Monday for the 2004 fiscal year at the Pentagon, pledging to do whatever is necessary to keep the United States strong and safe."America's military is standing between our country and grave danger," Bush said at the signing ceremony.
The authorization, an increase of 8 billion dollars over the 2003 fiscal year, provides a 4.15-percent average pay raise for military personnel and 9.1 billion dollars for the development of missile defense.
... The authorization bill also granted Defense Secretary Donald H.Rumsfeld much of the control he sought over the Pentagon's civilian work force. It would give supervisors greater flexibility to hire, fire and transfer civilian workers.
Rumsfeld has sought to set up a separate personnel system for the Pentagon's civilian work force in a bid to free more troops for combat position. Democrats complained the bill stripped civilian workers of many basic rights.
... One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market. "One of the things that limits or slows the growth of imports is the cost of establishing connections and networks," says Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist. "Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So--wham!--you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing."Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He's president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers--half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins's customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.
"People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains," says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."
...Bain & Co., the global management consulting firm, is in the midst of a project that asks, How does a company have a healthy relationship with Wal-Mart? How do you avoid being sucked into the vortex? How do you maintain some standing, some leverage of your own?
This July, in a mating that had the relieved air of lovers who had too long resisted embracing, Levi Strauss rolled blue jeans into every Wal-Mart in the United States. Bain's first insights are obvious, if not easy. "Year after year," Carey, a partner at Bain & Co., says, "for any product that is the same as what you sold them last year, Wal-Mart will say, 'Here's the price you gave me last year. Here's what I can get a competitor's product for. Here's what I can get a private-label version for. I want to see a better value that I can bring to my shopper this year. Or else I'm going to use that shelf space differently.' "
Carey has a friend in the umbrella business who learned that. One year, because of costs, he went to Wal-Mart and asked for a 5% price increase. "Wal-Mart said, 'We were expecting a 5% decrease. We're off by 10%. Go back and sharpen your pencil.' " The umbrella man scrimped and came back with a 2% increase. "They said, 'We'll go with a Chinese manufacturer'--and he was out entirely."
The Wal-Mart squeeze means vendors have to be as relentless and as microscopic as Wal-Mart is at managing their own costs. They need, in fact, to turn themselves into shadow versions of Wal-Mart itself. "Wal-Mart won't necessarily say you have to reconfigure your distribution system," says Carey. "But companies recognize they are not going to maintain margins with growth in their Wal-Mart business without doing it."
The way to avoid being trapped in a spiral of growing business and shrinking profits, says Carey, is to innovate. "You need to bring Wal-Mart new products--products consumers need. Because with those, Wal-Mart doesn't have benchmarks to drive you down in price. They don't have historical data, you don't have competitors, they haven't bid the products out to private-label makers. That's how you can have higher prices and higher margins."
... For two technologically eventful decades, the Betamax case—formally, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios—has defined the tense frontier that divides the rights of entertainment companies from those of technology providers. The conflict arises from a fundamental tension. Copyright laws grant creators a monopoly over the right to reproduce and distribute their works during the term of a copyright. Technology providers make devices that enable consumers to reproduce and distribute copyrighted works—photocopying machines, VCRs, TiVo, "ripping" software, CD burners, and high-bandwidth cable and DSL lines, to name just a few. Does that mean those technology providers are facilitating copyright infringement by their customers? Must technology providers be perpetually seeking permission from entertainment companies every time they want to develop a new invention capable of reproducing a copyrighted work?Since 1984, the answer in the U.S. has been a resounding no. In the Betamax case the court decided that Sony, by marketing VCRs, could not be held liable for facilitating copyright infringement, even though it knew that some consumers would use its VCRs illegally. The VCR's "primary" uses, Justice John Paul Stevens noted, were noninfringing. But his ruling then went a step further. He suggested that any technology provider should be protected as long as the device it marketed was "capable of substantial noninfringing uses"—even if the device was not currently being used that way. The idea was that courts should not stifle potentially beneficial technologies in their infancy, before their usefulness might be fully understood.
In the intervening 19 years digital technologies have supplanted analog, and technology providers have devised ever faster and cheaper ways for their customers to copy and distribute content. As a result, the perils those technologies pose to copyright holders have increased. At the time of the Betamax ruling the studios had not yet been able to show any actual revenue loss attributable to VCRs, even though VCRs had already been in circulation for almost a decade. In contrast, since 1999, when a 19-year-old college kid launched the first music file-sharing service, Napster, unit sales of recorded music have dropped 26% and record industry revenues have fallen 14%—a $2 billion decline. It was a measure of the industry's desperation that last month the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 file-sharing music fans, knowing full well that it was asking for a public-relations shellacking.
Microsoft is bound to play a growing role in enterprise telephony systems over the next few years, helping them to evolve beyond the simple features such as speed dial, conference call and voice mail most companies know today. What's less clear is what that role will be.The Redmond, Washington, software giant is likely to muscle in on the territory of traditional vendors of PBXes (private branch exchanges) and even threaten the desktop handset, through PC-based "soft phones," according to some industry analysts. However, Microsoft and some major vendors in that market say they don't see themselves on a collision course. Microsoft may increasingly provide the platform software for telephony, but more specialized vendors will write the applications on top, they said.
It may be a tempting target: Counting both the servers and clients in this category -- IP (Internet Protocol) PBXes and handsets or soft phones -- IP-based telephony products worldwide should bring in US$6 billion per year by 2008, according to IDC analyst Tom Valovic, who earlier this year wrote a report on Microsoft's possible future in this market. Between 10 percent and 30 percent of that spending will go toward applications, IDC estimates.
Cisco Systems Inc.'s acquisition of Latitude Communications Inc., announced last week, may be a step up the software stack toward what has been Microsoft's territory in the data world, some analysts said. Latitude makes audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and Web-based collaboration tools.
A Microsoft move deeper into telephony and communications software could place complex decisions in the laps of IT executives who are used to dealing with one vendor for telephony systems and others for data applications, Valovic said. Microsoft could be part of a coming shakeout.
"Life will probably be initially more complicated but eventually more simple," he said. "There's going to be a transition of vendors. We don't know which vendors are going to be the winners and who will be the losers."
At the same time, telecommunications departments and IT groups will need to work out where the new telephony infrastructure should go, said analyst Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group. The same functions may be available on traditional computing platforms and on network platforms such as routers, he said. A company shouldn't do it two different ways.
PBS flagship station WGBH-TV in Boston unveiled a digital asset management center earlier this month that is designed to serve as a test lab for the television industry.The multimillion-dollar facility is also critical to the future of WGBH because it will allow the station to "morph into a digital library" and share resources across its many different businesses, said David Liroff, VP and chief technology officer at WGBH. "We think this is essential to the future of public broadcasting," he said.
The new center will change the way WGBH uses and reuses content for its various businesses, including the Web, home videos, DVDs, education outreach and books, as well as TV. WGBH and lead technology partner Sun Microsystems also intend to allow other broadcasters and content companies to kick the tires at the so-called "iforce center" and take the technology for a test drive before buying.
Digital asset management is an area of increasing importance as media companies grapple with how to repurpose and share content efficiently. The goal behind digital asset management is to make content easier to search, retrieve and share.
WGBH's need for the system became apparent in the days following Sept. 11, when "Frontline" produced several documentaries.
The staff needed to assemble footage from archives and previous documentaries about al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, a process in which "Frontline" staff requested 1,500 items from the archives over two months, requiring more than 625 hours of research to retrieve the material. Much of that process relied on the memories of producers who had been with the show more than 20 years and were able to act as detectives to locate the footage.
TVWeek:
ABC, the network that pioneered the use of demographic ratings and transformed the way television is bought and sold, appears to be at it again. But instead of age-/sex-based demographics, the network is planning to leverage a new form of television ratings based on consumer attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors.
The network initially will begin using the new data to fine-tune the way it schedules shows and develops programming for its viewers. But over time it is expected to develop advertising sales strategies and maybe even advertising packages based on the so-called "behavior graphic" ratings.
"We're going to be using it for a number of areas, but one of the things we'll be looking at first is how the attitudes and lifestyles of our current audience segments impact viewing, as well as where we want to go in the future," explained Rachel Mueller-Lust, VP of sales research at ABC.
The new research, which Simmons Market Research Bureau developed in cooperation with Nielsen Media Research, creates a direct link between the TV viewing data provided by Nielsen's respondents and a wide range of consumer behavior data generated by Simmons' National Consumer Study, an exhaustive twice-yearly study that surveys more than 37,000 people about nearly 8,000 consumer brands.
It also asks people to provide information about other so-called psychographic data, including attitudes and lifestyles that might be relevant to marketers. By combining those two sets of data into a linked database called BehaviorGraphics, marketers, agencies and the media can now look at the behavioral characteristics of specific TV shows or channels.
In other words, instead of simply describing the TV audience by the limited age, sex, income or geographic composition of a show, the BehaviorGraphics data can determine the audience skew of a show based on 21 lifestyle segments, ranging from "Must-Buy Shoppers" to "Gadget Gurus."
..."On the sales side, we can use this data to find new sales stories," she noted. "We can use it where we are looking at more advertiser brand-level information and how to target the specific type of consumers they are looking to reach. It gives us an additional ability to talk about heavy users of ABC programming."#
TVWeek:
Time Warner Cable plans to launch on Wednesday, Nov. 26 its first retail high-definition marketing effort, a massive promotion that will reach across 1,300 retailers nationwide.
The promotion is designed to drive interest in HDTV, expected to be a huge hit this holiday season. As part of the promotion, HDTV set maker Pioneer will offer customers $500 cash back on a Pioneer HDTV set and Time Warner will pony up six free months of digital cable service, which includes HD content from Discovery, iN Demand, Fox Sports Net, HBO, Showtime and the broadcast networks.
NYT:
To consumers who took nutritionists' advice seriously and began eating more fruits and vegetables, word that fresh green onions could carry the hepatitis virus came as a shock.
Yet the recent outbreaks of hepatitis A linked to contaminated scallions imported from Mexico, which have killed three people and sickened hundreds, are only the latest examples in a sharp rise of food-borne illness from fruits and vegetables. In 2000, the last year for which information is complete, there were almost as many reported cases of food poisoning from produce as there were from beef, poultry, fish and eggs combined, according to an advocacy group's compilation of government data.
"It's a huge problem and not one easy to solve," said Dr. Glen Morris, chairman of the department of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a former Agriculture Department official. "Produce is emerging as an important cause of food-borne illness in this country."
Scientists and some government officials say illnesses have risen sharply because people are eating more fresh produce and want it year-round, leading to an increase in imports from countries with less stringent sanitary standards.
...... When the F.D.A. tested 1,003 samples of fresh produce imported from 21 countries in 1999 and 2000, 4.4 percent were found to have harmful bacteria. Of 959 domestic samples, 1.3 percent tested positive. Dr. Bob Brackett, director of food safety and security for the agency, said the results were statistically insignificant because of the study design. But some scientists disagree. "While the study design may not have been optimal," Dr. Morris said, "the differences are striking given the relatively large overall sample size."
... But cloning is back. And this time, the F.D.A. and consumer groups are involved, asking, Is it safe to eat a clone? Can you safely drink a clone's milk? If you breed a clone, can you eat its offspring?Some consumer groups are wary and some industry groups said they wanted to be sure consumers would accept milk or meat from clones or clone offspring. Public interest groups are weighing in and the F.D.A. will hold a public meeting to air the issue. It expects to decide by next spring whether to regulate food from animal clones.
What changed?
Cloning methods, for one. The clones in 1988 were made from embryos — scientists would breed a prize cow or bull, freeze some of the embryos and let a few go to term. Then they would examine the calves to see if the animals were what they wanted. If so, they would go back to the frozen embryos and clone them, making multiple copies that were clones of the embryo clones, and letting them go to term.
Today, scientists start with adult animals, making clones from adult cells. Like the embryo clones, the clones made from adult cells start out as embryos and are gestated in surrogate mothers. Cloning of adults is less likely to succeed than cloning of embryos, but the methodology is much the same.
Dr. Westhusin says that, as far as food safety is concerned, the question of whether the clone comes from an adult or an embryo "is not a significant issue."
The real change is in the public's perceptions, said Gregory Jaffe, who directs the biotechnology project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group in Washington that describes itself as a nutrition advocacy organization.
"The interest plays off of two things," Mr. Jaffe said. "One is the concern over cloning humans and the other is the attention being given to genetically engineered foods and increased concern about the nature of the food supply. Animal cloning gets thrown in, whether it's the same or not."
NYT:
The Michigan Democratic Party's plan to allow Internet voting in its presidential caucus won approval on Saturday from national Democrats.
Opponents said online balloting was not secure and discriminated against poor and minority voters, who are less likely to own computers.
The Michigan party will allow those participating in the Feb. 7 caucus to have the option of voting over the Internet, by mail or in person. Democrats in Arizona used the Internet in the presidential primary in 2000. Voter turnout was more than double the previous record and about 40 percent of the 86,000 ballots were cast online.
Twenty Michigan voters objected to the state party's plan, saying it would disadvantage poor and minority voters and be subject to fraud.
"The costs and risks of transacting ballots on the Internet really outweigh the benefits," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, which made the case against the plan to the Democratic National Committee.
The committee rejected the argument on a 23-to-2 vote.
Internet voting could benefit former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, who has built significant support among Web users. A poll taken in Michigan last month shows Dr. Dean with a slight lead among likely caucusgoers, but his support jumps significantly among those who plan to vote by Internet.
...In the first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites -- almost triple what they spent in all of 2001. Online dating is the most lucrative form of legal paid online content. According to comScore Networks, which monitors consumer behavior on the Internet, 40 million Americans visited at least one online dating site in August -- 27 percent of all Internet users for that month. The sites they visited range from behemoths like Yahoo! Personals and Match.com, which boasts 12 million users worldwide, to smaller niche sites catering to ethnic and religious groups and to devotees of such things as pets, horoscopes and fitness. In between are midsize companies like Spring Street Networks, which pools the personals ads for some 200 publications nationwide, including Salon.com, the Onion and Boston Magazine, and sites like Emode and eHarmony, which specialize in personality tests and algorithms for matching people. A recent entrant, Friendster, conceived of as a site for dating and meeting new people through mutual friends, has become a raging fad among the younger set and now claims more than three million members.The societal reasons for this fury of activity are so profound that it's almost surprising that online dating didn't take off sooner: Americans are marrying later and so are less likely to meet their spouses in high school or college. They spend much of their lives at work, but the rise in sexual harassment suits has made workplace relationships tricky at best. Among a more secular and mobile population, social institutions like churches and clubs have faded in importance. That often leaves little more than the ''bar scene'' as a source of potential mates. (Many single people I spoke to saw this as their only option, aside from online dating.)
Improved technology -- namely, the proliferation of broadband and the abrupt ubiquity of digital cameras -- partly explains online dating's surge in popularity. More critical still is the fact that the first generation of kids to come of age on the Internet are now young adults, still mostly single, and for them, using the Web to find what they need is as natural as using a lung to suck in air. They get jobs and apartments and plane tickets online -- why not dates?
NYT:
... Information technology industries have "led the initial overseas exodus," according to a study by Forrester Research, published in November 2002. In a survey of 400 hiring managers in May, the Information Technology Association found that 12 percent of the information technology companies in the survey had moved jobs offshore, compared with 6 percent of the nontechnology companies.
"I feel to some extent the train has already left, and I'm not sure how it can be reversed," Mr. Marx said. "The layoff has had a profound effect on me. It's difficult walking away from something you've been doing for 27 years. There used to be two pages of tech jobs in the classified section. Now there's maybe one column."
Many American technology workers whose jobs have not been moved offshore say that they are being offered lower salaries than in the past. "It's a total deflation period" for information technology workers, said John C. McCarthy, a Forrester Research group director who led the firm's offshoring study. Many technology workers "can expect to make at least 20 percent less than they did during the boom," he said.
Many experts are stressing that technology workers must upgrade their skills and are advising them to shift their sights to sectors that are still hiring.
Wireless technology, broadband and security technology are all growing fields, according to John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement consulting firm. Mr. Challenger also recommends that tech workers consider looking into government and military technology, health care and pharmaceuticals.
"When the dot-com bubble burst it was the end of skyrocketing I.T. salaries," Mr. Challenger said. "It's important for I.T. workers to make sure their skills are not outdated."
The proponents of offshoring see it as an effective solution to rapidly rising costs. An August report by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group that is part of McKinsey & Company, called offshoring a win-win situation for the global economy and asserted that it allowed American companies to not only reduce their costs but also reap larger profits by investing in new businesses at home.
That study said that an Indian software developer could make as little as $6 an hour, compared with $60 an hour for an American.
NYT:
...A recent report by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, shows that the average monthly rate for what the industry calls expanded basic cable service is $36.47. That is up 40 percent since 1997, when the monthly average was $26.06. And it contrasts sharply with the rise of 12 percent in the Consumer Price Index for the same period.
Yet the comparison is not quite as stark, considering that the average expanded basis cable tier - a menu of nonpremium services, typically including CNN, ESPN and MTV - is 63 channels, compared with 48 in 1997. That may partly explain why there has been relatively little consumer outcry over the steady increase in cable rates since the industry was deregulated seven years ago. And the expansion of satellite television has provided an alternative, particularly in rural markets, for customers seeking specialized programming like sports.
Consumer groups argue that the public has simply given up protesting the increase in cable rates because no one in Republican-controlled Washington these days seems interested in doing anything about it - a theory supported by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who tried to preserve cable regulation in 1996 and has long been seen as a consumer advocate in communications matters. Even if someone is unhappy about cable rates, Mr. Markey said in a telephone interview, "They can't go to the House, they can't go to the Senate and they can't go to the president, because nobody cares.''
The GAO report, commissioned by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, stopped short of saying anything should be done about price increases or whether they were justified. But it did recommend that the Federal Communications Commission continue to monitor the state of competition in the pay-TV business. Cable industry executives insist that consumers are not complaining about their monthly bills because they are getting so much value for their cable dollar. And cable executives argue that much of the money from the higher rates has been reinvested in network technology. A report by the National Cable Television Association says that the industry has made $75 billion in capital expenditures since 1996 to upgrade systems and to add digital video, fast Internet access and telephone calling capabilities. Today, of the nation's 70 million cable subscribers, about 21 million take digital video and 15 million use high-speed Internet access.
NYT:
E-COMMERCE is starting to find a place in some of the world's emerging economies. Governments and businesses in a growing number of developing nations have begun building the infrastructure needed for online commerce, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or Unctad.
"Governments are more and more aware that this can be a tremendous boon to their economy," said Angel Gonzalez-Sanz, an Unctad economist who spoke by phone from Geneva. "They're starting to recognize that policy choices matter; the attitude of the government, the business community. When you tackle issues like infrastructure and lack of awareness, results come."
Mr. Gonzalez-Sanz said that Thailand, for example, is starting to see results from a government strategy that began in 1996 and was updated in 2002. Under that plan, the nation has moved aggressively to improve computer and Internet literacy by, among many other things, selling $250 personal computers and $500 notebook computers to its citizens and wiring thousands of schools for the Internet in the last two years.
The government has also set up two national Internet switching points and created a plan to offer Internet services throughout the country.
The early results for online commerce are modest but promising. From 2000 to 2001, the latest period for which data is available, the share of Thailand's Web sites selling goods or services online doubled, to 12 percent. The proportion of Thailand's Internet users who live outside Bangkok, the capital, has steadily improved, reaching 50 percent last year.
NYT:
... Revenue of Mickey-related products sold by Disney's consumer products division, for example, has shrunk to less than 40 percent of the division's $2.3 billion annual total, down from 50 percent during the peak in 1997, according to Disney executives. Winnie the Pooh merchandise is now outselling Mickey items.
Even the company's own research suggests that the 75-year-old mouse is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans of all ages to relate to - particularly children, whose entertainment world is filled with online computer games and other distractions.
"Mickey hasn't really changed, and I guess the question is, have the times passed him by?" said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Company who covers Disney. "I think they've had chances to upgrade the character, but they haven't done a lot with it."
...Mickey is competing against streetwise and sophisticated animated newcomers like Viacom's SpongeBob SquarePants. So Disney is literally taking Mickey to the streets, painting black and white murals of him on the sides of buildings around Los Angeles.
Disney is also planning new feature films, including next year's "Three Musketeers," the first full-length film starring Mickey Mouse and his friends, and for 2005 the first computer-animated Mickey movie, "Twice Upon a Christmas." The movies will not be released in theaters, instead going straight to home video, under the theory that it can be difficult to muster cinema-size crowds for animated characters older than many of today's children's grandparents.
CSMonitor:
... Video games are proving to be a good partner for a struggling industry eager to find new ways to appeal to young people who would rather pirate music off the Internet than pay for it.
Million-selling games are boosting sales, launching musical careers, and persuading skittish record executives that not all technology is bad for business.
"It's fishing where the fish are," says Dave Kusek, associate vice president at Berklee College of Music in Boston. "The best way to reach [the youth market] today is through video games and the Internet."
Now that video games are mainstream, they've gained the heft to reach coveted markets - often edging out radio as a marketing tool. A survey by New York marketing firm ElectricArtists earlier this year found that among its sample of video game consumers ages 13 to 32, 40 percent had bought a CD after hearing it in a video game.
Electronic Arts, a Redwood City, Calif.-based video-game company, is a pioneer in making deals that blend new music and video games. Where once it had to go looking for music, now labels are making house calls.
Its bestselling football game, "Madden," for example, has become the "American Bandstand" of the video-game world. For the 2004 version, released in August, the company was offered more than 2,000 songs for the 23 slots available on the game.
The interest is understandable. Factoring in things like the millions of copies sold and the number of hours people will play it, "a song in Madden hypothetically will get over 500 million spins, which is close to, if not beats, the No. 1 record in America when it comes to the number of impressions," explains Steve Schnur, worldwide executive of Music for Electronic Arts.
Music has been part of video games for years, becoming more common in the mid-1990s, when CD-based game consoles came on the scene. Companies often have created their own music in-house, or licensed songs from back catalogs. But in the past two or three years the use of popular music - particularly current songs - has taken off.
Makers of video games also are going beyond just licensing music as background for their sports and adventure games. This week, Square Enix launched a radio station on America Online featuring only the music from its series of "Final Fantasy" games. Other innovations include music video games like "FreQuency" and "Amplitude," which allow people to remix their favorite songs, and games like "Def Jam Vendetta," which not only has rappers Method Man, Redman, and DMX on the soundtrack, but features them as characters in the wrestling game.
... Electronic Arts is now in a position to broker deals that allow it to debut songs from popular artists like blink-182 before they even get sent to radio stations - with radio stations having no choice but to play the songs off the video games when the requests roll in.
"We've only begun to see the impact," says Schnur. "In the next five to 10 years, not only are video games ... going to become the next generation of MTV, but I think the PS3 [PlayStation3] and the X-box 2, are going to be the next generation of Wal-Mart. I think that's where you're going to actually purchase music, bring it into your game."
Rutland Herald:
Only two decades ago, it was a small electronics workshop in a warehouse. Now, it’s an industry powerhouse poised to displace Sony Corp. as the world’s No. 1 television maker.
The growth of TCL is a homegrown success story of modern China, where manufacturers are elbowing leading Japanese electronics giants aside.
Just as Sony and Panasonic once edged out top American brands, Chinese brand names like TCL, Haier, Konka and Midea are positioning themselves for a broader push into world markets. While they still sound unfamiliar to Western consumers, they’ve already gained a foothold in Asia.
Now, they’re positioning themselves for a broader push into world markets. On Tuesday, TCL International Holdings Inc. and Thomson SA, the French company that owns the American television brand RCA, announced a joint venture to produce 18 million TV sets and up to 4 million DVD players a year. Annual revenues are forecast to exceed $3.49 billion.
Thomson now sells 7 million RCA televisions a year worldwide, including some under the GE brand in the United States. TCL, China’s second-biggest maker of TVs and cellular phones, exports about a third of the 10 million sets it makes each year. TCL was founded in 1980 in Huizhou, an electronics export base in southern China’s Guangdong province. At the time, U.S. giants like RCA were beginning to shift their manufacturing to the cheap-labor operations of Mexico.
But China’s economics soon lured manufacturers there. According to official Chinese estimates, the average manufacturing wage is 61 cents an hour, compared with about $2.50 in Mexico and $16 in the United States.
“Consumer electronics left the United States long ago, and now production is being consolidated in China,” said Andy Rothman, China strategist for CLSA Emerging Markets. “There clearly is a shift to China as a major manufacturing platform for world consumption.” The Chinese government is encouraging Chinese companies to expand overseas, partly to counter rising trade friction.
SeattleTimes:
A new study from InfoTrends Research Group projects that worldwide unit sales of consumer digital cameras will reach nearly 53 million in 2004. Furthermore, digital camera sales are expected to experience a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 15% over the next four years, reaching 82 million units in 2008. In 2004, worldwide unit sales of consumer digital cameras are expected to surpass unit sales of worldwide film cameras.
“Digital cameras are becoming an essential communications device for consumers,” says Michelle Slaughter, Director of Digital Photography Trends at InfoTrends Research Group. “Consumers are becoming accustomed to the immediacy of digital photography and are integrating digital photos into their daily communications with friends and family and for work. As a result, digital cameras have a higher intrinsic value to consumers than film cameras. This, in turn, paves the way for digital camera sales to exceed film camera sales, while maintaining a higher average selling price.”
The three leading regions for digital camera penetration are North America, Japan, and Europe. The Asia Pacific region, China, and the Rest of the World combined currently account for 10% of worldwide digital camera unit sales. By 2008, however, these regions are expected to account for 27% of the worldwide digital camera market in terms of unit sales. The growing middle class in developing countries, including China, will initiate the transition from film to digital in these countries during the forecast period between 2003 and 2008.
The digital camera market remains very competitive. The top five worldwide market leaders in 2003 are expected to be Canon, Sony, Olympus, Fuji, and Kodak. The combined worldwide unit market share of these companies is currently almost 75%. These companies are expected to remain in the top five through 2004, although their individual positions may change.
... The TV animation division is enjoying a much higher profile these days thanks to these animated hits on the Disney Channel. No longer relying solely on the film studio to generate new characters that can feed Disney's much-needed merchandise sales, Disney increasingly is turning to its TV animation unit to launch original
... More than 30 Disney TV animation series air seven days a week on the Disney Channel, Toon Disney and ABC in more than 80 countries.
To ramp up production and allow TV animators to work more closely with the cable programmers airing their shows, Disney integrated the TV animation unit into the company's ABC Cable Networks Group in January. Previously, the operation had come under the umbrella of the film studio.
The group was formed in 1984 as the primary source of animation for afternoon syndication and Saturday morning television on ABC. But the growth of Disney's stable of cable channels, especially the Disney Channel, has created much more demand for original animated TV series, executives said.
The elevation of the TV animation unit, which employs about 300, is a key plank in Disney's strategy to take on Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon and Time Warner Inc.'s Cartoon Network, as kids' programming increasingly shifts from network TV to cable TV.
TV animation has become an important contributor to the success of the Disney Channel, which has grown in the last 15 years, to more than 83 million households from 14 million.
...The elevation of the TV animation unit, which employs about 300, is a key plank in Disney's strategy to take on Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon and Time Warner Inc.'s Cartoon Network, as kids' programming increasingly shifts from network TV to cable TV.
TV animation has become an important contributor to the success of the Disney Channel, which has grown in the last 15 years, to more than 83 million households from 14 million.
In stark contrast to its struggling ABC Family cable channel, which Disney bought nearly two years ago and is trying to retool, the Disney Channel has been a growth engine for the Burbank, Calif.-based company.
In the last two years, the cable channel has vaulted from third place to No. 1 in ratings among 9- to 14-year-olds because of the success of original live action movies and original series such as "Lizzie McGuire" and "Even Stevens."
But the channel also has made inroads among younger viewers who typically have been the domain of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
Year-to-date, Disney Channel ranked No. 2 in ratings, closely behind Nickelodeon, among kids 6 to 11, a 53 percent jump in ratings over last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.
SeattleTimes:
Shrubs are appearing where before there were none; gray whales are venturing farther north; clams and their predators, diving sea ducks, are less plentiful. The ice is melting.
These disparate phenomena are signs of a radical change in the Arctic ecosystem. Moreover, changes in the Arctic mean changes everywhere else. That consensus is part of a broad discussion among 400 Arctic scientists meeting in Seattle this week as part of a new multimillion-dollar effort to study the far-reaching changes occurring in the far north.
The Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH), sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of Washington, has brought together climatologists, biologists, oceanographers and social anthropologists to examine how warmer temperatures are altering life on the tundra and how the changes may affect the rest of the Earth.
Their findings, presented at a symposium yesterday, continued to add to a growing, and somewhat ominous scientific consensus.
The Arctic, which has seen temperatures increase 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, is on track to become as warm as it has been in 130,000 years, according to Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona paleoclimatologist, who studies the history of climate change.
...Implicit in a radical climate change, Overpeck asserted, is a mass species extinction.
There have been five known mass species extinctions — meaning more than 50 percent of the Earth's species were wiped out — and four were related to climate change, Overpeck said.
SFGate Via NYT:
... All this interest revolves around a fantasy game that allows online players to trade "securities" whose prices forecast the first four weeks of box office revenue for new and yet-to-be-released films. Late last week, traders could "buy" stock in "The Cat in the Hat" (released on Friday) at $130 a share, meaning that the market expected four-week box office receipts of $130 million. Or they could buy "Spider-Man 2," due for release in May, at $235 a share, or even "Spider-Man 3," which has not yet been made and won't be released for years, at $87.
The exchange's appeal lies in the premise that the collective wisdom of large numbers of traders can most efficiently determine the value of properties that would otherwise be hard to assess.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange, known as HSX, was started in 1996 by Max Keiser, who had been a stockbroker, and Michael Burns, a former investment banker who is now vice chairman of Lions Gate Entertainment, which produces and distributes films and television shows. In 2001, they sold HSX to Cantor Index Holdings, a London unit of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm. After buying the game, Cantor introduced film futures for its investment clients in Britain, using real money in this case. With the Hollywood Exchange as a guide, Cantor puts a price on a certain film, and the customers can bet on whether that will ultimately be too high or too low.
The game has inspired a similar approach in the music business. Fuse, a cable network owned by Cablevision Systems that mostly shows music videos, licensed the HSX software last year and set up its own Web site, where 70,000 players now trade "stocks" of artists and videos. In January, the network introduced a nightly television show, the Interactive Music Exchange, which often invites bands to appear based on their soaring values on the exchange. The show has attracted advertisers like Sony and Coca-Cola.
The success of the music show is inspiring Cantor to consider other possibilities for the game. Developing a television show based on the movie exchange "is definitely a consideration," said Alex Costakis, managing director of HSX. An online exchange based on video game sales is also a possibility, a Cantor executive said.
Cantor has started offering research generated from the game on a test basis to Hollywood studios, which have long sought better box-office forecasting tools. Most research firms determine consumer attitudes through interviews, surveys and focus groups, but HSX, by analyzing trading, can get a day-by-day picture of shifts in sentiment.
... Anita Elberse, an assistant professor who teaches marketing at Harvard Business School, said the last HSX trading price of a film before it opens is a more accurate indicator of how a movie will do than any other single measure
-- which is not to say that it is precise. She estimated that the closing prices ended up being within a range of 16 percent above or below the actual receipts.
Elberse and her research colleagues at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and at UC Berkeley are studying whether the sort of technical analysis usually applied to equities -- examining patterns in trading volume, for example -- can give clues to the future value of HSX stocks.
...Elberse said she also believed that HSX's rich trading database could be mined to improve forecasts -- by following expert traders, for example. "I would assume you could bring down the median error to less than 10 percent by just focusing on the people that are always right," she said.
TVWeek:
Nielsen Media Research this week will deliver to its clients a white paper whose bottom line is expected to be that there is no need to correct anything in Nielsen's methodology.
It's a message guaranteed to anger the TV rating agency's clients, who have long been frustrated that Nielsen is their only source of such data. They have been particularly troubled this season by steep declines in young male viewership.
Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus said the white paper will include recaps of three months of data produced by Nielsen for itself and at the special request of clients, as well as analysis that supports Nielsen's contention that the disappearing act pulled by 18 to 34 male viewers during the past three months is correcting itself and is not a reflection of a flaw in Nielsen's National People Meter sample.
... The season-to-date decline in 18 to 34 men's prime-time TV usage was at 8 percent last week. "If you trend the data, it is right on trend for the past 10 years," Mr. Loftus said.
That brought a quick reaction from some TV executives who have been troubled by the numbers, which ultimately translate into revenue from advertising based on the size of the audience.
"I can't believe they're actually saying that," said one network executive.
"Their own numbers suggest it is not correcting itself," said another.
Indeed, Nielsen is certain to find such intuitive assertions hotly debated by network research executives, who say none of the data given to them by Nielsen is consistent with such an optimistic view.
The debate over the missing young men came to a boil last week after an NBC analysis pointed to young Hispanic men who are new to the National People Meter sample as a possible explanation for skewed results."I am not suggesting that what we found is the answer," said Alan Wurtzel, NBC's president for research and media development, who has been among the more vocal questioners of Nielsen's methodology.
Then CBS suggested that Nielsen had laid the foundation for the steep defections by letting a disproportionate number of historically "problematic" survey participants-young men living in a household not headed by themselves-into the 5,100-home National People Meter sample this year as it attempted to meet client requests for a survey that better reflects the country's demographic makeup.
David Poltrack, executive VP for research for CBS and UPN, asked Nielsen to compare the behavior of the men 18 to 34 who were in the national sample last year and are still in it this year. That analysis showed that in 40 percent to 50 percent of the unified sample, young men are actually watching more television and that declines in viewership are "concentrated in a relatively small percent of the overall sample."
"Of all the men 18 to 34 in the sample, 20 percent are accounting for 70 percent of the decline," Mr. Poltrack said. "Now, we look at that 20 percent and the first thing we notice about them is that the young men in that 20 percent are significantly more likely to live in homes headed by someone else, as opposed to young men living in their own homes.
"Throughout the history of the Nielsen system and of measuring audiences, this has always been the most problematic group, because these young men living at home with their parents, with other relatives, or whatever, tend to be involuntary participants in the survey. Someone else agreed to do the survey and they were dragged into it reluctantly," Mr. Poltrack said. "As a result, they've been, as a group, the least diligent in their button pushing. They've caused the most problem for Nielsen over the course of this People Meter measurement era.
...Mr. Fisher is pessimistic about the solidity of meter-produced data to accurately reflect viewing in younger demographic groups. "To me the people meter has always been a time bomb waiting to explode for younger demographics," he said. "I consider it inevitable that younger demographics will be increasingly resistant to constantly pushing buttons to prove what they are viewing, just as they would be unwilling to make their beds or call their parents every half-hour or otherwise adhere to rigid requirements."
Canoe.ca:
... For years Canadians have been watching more and more pay TV and specialty stations, and in 2002 it occupied 25% of their viewing time compared to 16% in 1998, the agency reported yesterday.
"In contrast, the time spent watching Canadian conventional television stations has continued to decrease -- from 56 percent to 51 percent -- during the same period," said the report.
...The average Canadian spent nearly 22 hours a week in front of the tube in 2002, mostly watching comedies and dramas, which combined accounted for 38.5% of total viewing, followed by news and public affairs at 25.2%.
Men aged 18 to 24 on average spent the least amount of time parked in front of the television at 12.6 hours a week, while women over 60 are the biggest couch potatoes, spending on average nearly 36 hours per week watching TV.
PCMagazine:
We're told that blogs will evolve into a unique source of information and are sure to become the future of journalism. Well, hardly. Two things are happening to prevent such a future: The first is wholesale abandonment of blog sites, and the second is the casual co-opting of the blog universe by Big Media.
Let's start with abandoned blogs. In a white paper released by Perseus Development Corp., the company reveals details of the blogging phenomenon that indicate its foothold in popular culture may already be slipping (www.perseus.com/blogsurvey). According to the survey of bloggers, over half of them are not updating any more. And more than 25 percent of all new blogs are what the researchers call "one-day wonders." Meanwhile, the abandonment rate appears to be eating into well-established blogs: Over 132,000 blogs are abandoned after a year of constant updating.
Perseus thinks it had a statistical handle on over 4 million blogs, in a universe of perhaps 5 million. Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.
The most obvious reason for abandonment is simple boredom. Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs. Some people must feel the futility.
NYT:
The recipe for a computer chip of the future may read something like this: Take some wires. Add DNA. Stir.
In an advance that might provide a practical method for making molecular-size circuits, the smallest possible, scientists in Israel used strands of DNA, the computer code of life, to create tiny transistors that can literally build themselves.
"What we've done is to bring biology to self-assemble an electronic device in a test tube," said Dr. Erez Braun, a professor of physics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and a senior author of a paper describing the research today in the journal Science.
Scientists have in the last few years accomplished feats of the incredibly small, constructing devices not much larger than individual molecules, but they also realize that their current painstaking techniques are too slow and inefficient.
"In order to construct a circuit," Dr. Braun said, "you need to invent ways to tell molecules where to go and how to connect to each other."
To that end, many scientists have turned to the biologically inspired notion of self-assembly, using molecules like DNA and proteins that can automatically link together in the correct configuration.
"It's all of the dynamics on that scale rather than just making small stuff," Dr. Horst Stormer, a professor of physics at Columbia, said.
CSMonitor.com:
Growing numbers of rural poor are migrating to cities around the developing world, giving aid experts a new cause for anxiety - beyond just the deplorable conditions of the burgeoning slums.
The concern goes like this: living in such close quarters with the urban rich exacerbates the disparities between the "haves" and the "have-nots," fueling a global explosion in crime, street violence, and extremism. The urbanization of poverty, say development experts, could become as much a world-security issue as the hunt for Osama bin Laden or weapons of mass destruction.
"Relative deprivation has always been a flash point," says William Masters, interim executive director at Colombia University's Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development in New York. "Globalization has opened up comparisons and created expectations that make the gaps in world living standards increasingly unacceptable."
To try to close these gaps, a handful of projects around the world, including an ambitious one here in Egypt's capital, are bringing hope to some of the most squalid places on earth.
CSMonitor.com:
In the global fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS, there are few happy stories to tell.
Thailand may be one. Its nationwide prevention campaign, launched in the early 1990s, has dramatically cut the spread of the disease. As a result, the number of people testing positive for HIV, the virus linked to AIDS, fell last year to 23,676, down 83 percent from a peak in 1991 of 142,819 according to the Thai government.
Thailand's success in averting an epidemic on the scale of the most afflicted African nations has won international praise - particularly its promotion of 100 percent condom use in its sex industry, and the involvement of Buddhist monks.
Keen to share its experience, Thailand is emerging as a learning center for developing countries in Asia, where AIDS is spreading rapidly. At Thailand's Chiang Mai University, training courses for AIDS prevention have attracted healthcare workers from around the region, including most recently from Afghanistan, East Timor, and Sri Lanka.
"We need condom promotion at a district level. Now we have zero percent condom use in our country," says Shiafiqullah Shahim, a member of Afghanistan's Ministry of Health. "We also have large numbers of drug users sharing needles."
Experts say countries at risk of an AIDS epidemic can adopt Thailand's lessons of early intervention and pragmatic policies for illicit activities. In Afghanistan's case, which has only recorded 15 cases of HIV this year, this would involve targeting intravenous drug users and refugees, and screening unsafe blood supplies.
What may prove harder to transplant is Thailand's other strength in battling AIDS: grass-roots community activism.
CSMonitor.com:
Two bombs ruptured busy districts of Turkey's biggest city Thursday, killing at least 26 people - including Britain's most senior official here - and wounding about 450. The nearly simultaneous attacks targeted symbols of the United Kingdom, the country that President Bush only a day earlier called America's best friend in the war on terror.
... "For Al Qaeda, we can understand why Turkey makes sense. It is the only well-functioning country in the Muslim world, and the Islamists who lead the government are trying to take Turkey into the European Union," says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul Bilgi University. "The extremists want to make sure that this experiment doesn't succeed."
After the weekend synagogue bombings, authorities tightened security at Jewish establishments and for other religious minority groups such as Greek and Armenian Christians.
But Thursday's bombings fired what some feared is a first shot at political and economic targets, causing panic and a skid in the Istanbul stock market.
CSMonitor.com:
...In an initiative that would render bootlegging unnecessary, the country's largest concert promoter is set to make CD recordings of shows available to concertgoers within minutes of the last note. The project, dubbed "Instant Live," could encourage bands to tour more often because of the lucrative revenue possibilities.
But it is audiences who may register the most applause. Since a CD of a show is more likely to last longer than a T-shirt with a three-rinse life span, the initiative could create an appetite for live albums not seen since the era of "Frampton Comes Alive" and Cheap Trick's "Live at Budokan."
"It is almost an impulse buy," says Don Jorder, chair of the Music Business and Management Department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "You walk home with a memento of the concert. You had a great feeling coming out of it and, for $20, you can put it on again anytime you want."
Clear Channel, the media corporation behind Instant Live, has spent months testing its product in small clubs around Boston. This summer, it took its banks of CD burners to a few shows by The Allman Brothers Band. Now, in its largest experiment yet, an Instant Live crew is touring with moe., a five-piece jam band whose onstage improvisations can make a three-chorus song last as long as an episode of "The Simpsons." That makes each show unique, an ideal selling point for Instant Live.
At Boston's 2,800 seat Orpheum Theater, fliers advertising the initiative briefly distract the eye from faux-marble columns and a series of spray-painted candelabra that would make a "Trading Spaces" decorator blanch. It's not long before a large huddle forms near a table where tokens for the live CDs can be purchased in advance. Fifteen minutes before the show, the cash drawer is at least $4,300 heavier. But the revenue stream doesn't end here.
DetroitNews.com:
...Pace Micro Technology unveiled at cable's annual convention here what it calls the "world's first" inexpensive digital-to-analog signal converter.
These devices, about the size of two cigarette packs, could enable cable systems to transmit lots of high-definition TV (HDTV), video phone connections, video on demand and far faster high-speed Internet connections.
...Operators envision buying millions of these converters — or similar ones planned by Motorola and others — and putting them on virtually every TV owned by their nearly 72 million customers. Then operators can stop transmitting analog signals and go all-digital.
That's a big deal. Analog TV channels consume about 65% of the bandwidth on most modern systems — and operators can squeeze as many as eight digital channels into the bandwidth that each analog channel now fills
...An HDTV channel takes two to three channels of analog capacity," says Kagan World Media chief content officer Larry Gerbrandt. "So it's a better use of bandwidth."
Some also see using the capacity for services satellite and phone companies can't easily match.
"What may drive us to use a device like that is the ability to mix voice with video and data — like with games, where you could talk" to opponents, says Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.
The Pace adapter is attractive, executives say, because it's small and inexpensive. The model on display this week would sell for about $70 and would feed signals to both a TV and a VCR.
DetroitNews.com:
The Federal Communications Commission will reject a request by television broadcasters such as ABC to force cable companies including Comcast Corp. to show digital versions of network programs, five FCC lawyers familiar with the matter said.
Broadcasters want shows such as "Monday Night Football" to be carried on cable both in the current format and in digital form to reach viewers who have new, high-definition televisions. The broadcast networks are trying to maintain audience and revenue against gains by cable and satellite television, which earn money from both advertising and programming fees.
"Broadcasters now run the risk of losing more customers to cable and satellite, which are almost all fully digital," said Rudy Baca, a Precursor analyst based in Washington. "The networks had hoped to delay the expense of upgrading their networks and digitizing their programming while holding their core audience."
The commission vote in Washington may take place as early as Dec. 17, FCC Chairman Michael Powell said last week. All five commissioners, including Powell, have decided individually to deny the broadcasters' request, said the FCC lawyers, who asked not to be named.
Cable companies have resisted the change because it would force them to duplicate their current network programming, potentially squeezing out other channels that could increase revenue.
The FCC decision means broadcasters won't be guaranteed that cable will carry digital programs during viewers' conversion to high-definition TV -- an issue known as "dual must-carry." Broadcasters will have to decide whether to transmit shows under either the current format or digital, but not both.
GovExec.com:
New personnel rules about to be developed and implemented at the Pentagon will give managers the flexibility to reorganize their offices and will help reduce the stress on uniformed and civilian forces, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday.
During a town hall-style meeting with civilian and military personnel, Rumsfeld lauded new personnel legislation approved by Congress earlier this month. The legislation gives Rumsfeld the authority to throw out the General Schedule classification system and replace it with a new pay-for-performance system.
The legislation allows Defense managers to hire highly skilled workers more quickly, promote top employees, and fire poor ones. Defense officials will also be able to rewrite the rules governing collective bargaining with labor unions and establish a new internal appeals system for employees to protest disciplinary decisions. More than 700,000 employees will be affected by the changes once they become law.
...According to Rumsfeld, as many as 300,000 jobs currently performed by uniformed military personnel could be performed by civilians or contractors. New personnel rules will allow managers to reorganize their offices as needed.
Forbes.com:
U.S. advertising agencies have asked antitrust authorities to investigate the business practices of dominant TV ratings provider Nielsen Media Research, a spokesman for the agencies said Friday.
The American Association of Advertising Agencies formally requested that the Federal Trade Commission look into new fees imposed earlier this year by Nielsen to see whether they constitute an abuse of the company's dominant position in the TV ratings business.
Variety:
The broadcast networks aren't the only ones complaining bitterly about Nielsen Media Research these days. In an unprecedented move, Madison Avenue has asked federal regulators to examine whether the ratings company engages in monopolistic practices....
MediaPost:
Following weeks of finger pointing over a sudden decline in ratings among young adult men, the major broadcast networks are faced with an equally troubling, but somewhat less debatable decline in ratings among young adult women. Buyers suggested the latest development further reinforces the notion that the shifts taking place in TV viewing patterns are part of a fundamental change in the nature of media consumption driven by a generational shift and are not merely the result of lackluster programming or scheduling patterns.
"It's a different culture," suggests Shari Anne Brill, vice president and director of programming at Carat USA. Brill first identified the troubling pattern over the past several weeks and began raising questions about the drop in young adult women ratings on the major broadcast networks while network and Nielsen executives were jousting over the cause of a corresponding drop in young adult men.
Now Steve Sternberg, senior vice president and director of audience analysis at powerful media buying agency Magna Global USA has weighed in with an in depth analysis of the first weeks of the new broadcast season. The report finds that the women 18-24 demographic has declined by 2.9 rating primetime points among the broadcast networks. Overall TV usage levels, while not falling as precipitously, nonetheless dropped 1.4 points from the first eight weeks of the 2002-03 season.
WebUser:
O2 has launched a new service that lets you download and store the latest chart hits to a digital music player via your mobile phone.
Songs from any of the current music charts can be downloaded to the new O2 Digital Music Player (O2 DMP), developed by Siemens, at £1.50 a track.
Connect the O2 DMP to your mobile handset via infrared (or using a short cable), and select a track, searching by genre, artist, track or chart. You have the option of hearing a 30-second preview clip or purchasing the entire track.
The preview clip is free and takes around 20 seconds to begin streaming. The entire track takes an average of 3.5 minutes to download, although O2 claims you can start listening within 30 seconds.
...The O2 DMP is available at www.02.co.uk, with a promotional price of £99.99 until 31 December 2003. Music tracks average £1.50 each, with pre-releases and a back catalogue of nearly 100,000 tunes available.
Interfax:
Huaxia Film Distribution Company, a film distributor in China, has filed a lawsuit against chinadotcom, a major Internet portal in China, accusing the website of providing unauthorized downloads of "Terminator 3." Huaxia is suing for RMB 286,720 (USD 34,636) in compensation.
"We have collected a great deal of evidence and the court has already decided to hear our case. The hearing will be conducted at an appropriate time," a Huaxia official surnamed Dong told Interfax in an interview. "We haves not authorized any Internet companies to offer download services. Any online download of the film in China is a copyright infringement and affects our sales."
Huaxia is the exclusive distributor of "Terminator 3" in China. Although the film has generated approximately RMB 30 mln (USD 3.62 mln) in revenues, this figure is somewhat lower than what the company had expected for the Chinese market.
High-stakes poker, once relegated to smoky rooms and Las Vegas casinos, is on a hot streak: Spectator-friendly television coverage of poker tournaments, surging interest among amateurs and the emergence of a game called No Limit Texas Hold `Em _ which can bust a player on the first hand _ have helped its popularity.With the resurgence and air time come notoriety for the best-known pros, many of whom are converging this weekend on the Sands Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.
The casino is hosting "The Showdown at the Sands," a three-day Hold `Em tournament in which the winner walks off with $1 million.
About 120 people _ some amateurs playing their way in, others high-rollers paying $10,000 just for a seat at the Starlight Ballroom's green felt tables _ will compete for the seven-figure prize, under the watchful lenses of Fox Sports Net, which is televising the event for national broadcast on Thanksgiving Day.
"There's always been a lot of interest in the game, but watching it was like watching paint dry," said Duke.
That has changed thanks to The Travel Channel, ESPN and Bravo networks, all of which have gambled on poker as a television event, using innovations to make it more viewer-friendly.
Among them: Tape-delayed coverage and the use of "hold card cams" _ cameras that focus in on each player's hand _ that let viewers at home know who's holding what, without the players knowing one another's hands.
Instead of guessing which players hold which cards, the device opens a window into the strategy and bluffsmanship of steely eye professionals and rank amateurs.
Gazette:
Spike TV - ''the first network for men'' - will hold its inaugural Video Game Awards show in Las Vegas next month, with actor-comedian David Spade as host.
The show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena will premiere on Spike TV on Dec. 4 at 9 p.m.
''The VGAs celebrate those games that have blistered our fingers poised on the joystick and kept us up all night,'' Albie Hecht, president of Spike TV, said in a statement Monday.
''We're throwing out all the boring and stagnant elements of traditional awards shows and focusing on what matters - the characters, game play, animation, music and performances that have made an impact on the video game community throughout the past year.''
Salon:
In just a few years, new cars in China, a developing nation that is not renowned for being a paragon of environmental virtue, will be required to be more fuel efficient than automobiles in the United States.
According to a story published in the New York Times on Tuesday, China plans to regulate fuel-economy standards for the first time, and the rules that it's imposing will be "significantly more stringent" than American standards. By 2005, says the report, new cars, vans and sports utility vehicles in China will be required to get about two miles better gas mileage than in the U.S., and five miles more a gallon by 2008.
The news came just as the U.S. House of Representatives sent the country's most sweeping energy bill since 1992 to the Senate, a bill which environmental groups blasted as a huge giveaway to the oil, coal and nuclear industries, doing little to curb pollution or improve greenhouse gas emissions.
Daily Star
Worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide, considered a culprit in global warming, are expected to increase by 3.5 billion tonnes, or 50 percent, annually by the year 2020, an executive for ExxonMobil Corp said on Wednesday.
At the same time, global demand for energy will rise by 40 percent as the world population increases and economies grow, said Randy Broiles, global planning manager for Exxon's oil and gas production unit.
"Between now and 2020 we estimate increases of some 3.5 billion tonnes per year of additional carbon emissions, so it's definitely increasing," Broiles said at an energy conference sponsored by accounting and consulting firm Deloitte.
He said about 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, go into the earth's atmosphere each year from power plants, cars and other sources.
Experts say the United States, which has the world's largest economy and 4 percent of its population, is responsible for about 25 percent of so-called "greenhouse" gases now produced, but Broiles said most future growth in output will come from developing countries.
CRN:
The movement of IT services jobs overseas will not lead to less work in the U.S., but will require workers to learn new skills in order to remain employed, a study released Thursday showed.
A survey of leading vendors worldwide showed that as much as 23 percent of IT services is likely to be performed by workers outside the U.S. in 2007, compared with 5 percent this year, market researcher International Data Corp. said.
The dramatic increase, however, does not mean fewer IT jobs in the U.S., but rather a shift in the kinds of jobs that will be available, IDC said. The number of jobs are expected to increase as demand for IT hardware, software and services grow.
IT spending in the U.S. is expected to increase 1.5 percent this year over last year to $372 billion, according to IDC. Over the next five years, spending is expected to increase at a modest compound annual growth rate of 4.9 percent, reaching $467 billion by 2007.
"The absolute number (of jobs) will show small growth, but underlying that is a pretty dramatic realignment," IDC analyst Ned May said. "To the individual worker, it means take control of your own development, and map it so that you're headed to the jobs that are going to remain onshore."
In addition, IT services vendors need to take responsibility for the impact on workers as jobs head outside the U.S., by training employees for positions remaining in the country.
"(IT services vendors) are going to need to put an effort toward retraining as part of their operations," May said. "Everything is so bottom-line focused today, that it's a tough message for them to hear. But morale is critical in a services company. If layoffs occur as jobs are added offshore, then it's going to create some problems."
For the most part, IT jobs performed by workers new to the profession are the ones heading overseas. Call centers providing customers with tech support and custom-application development are examples.
UPI:
Syphilis rates rose dramatically for the second straight year in the United States, particularly among gay and bisexual men, a finding that has health officials worried about an increase in HIV/AIDS cases in the coming years.
Overall, the U.S. syphilis rate rose by 9 percent between 2001 and 2002, the second consecutive increase from an all-time low in 2000, according to figures released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The bulk of the increase occurred among men, rising by about 27 percent overall, including a staggering increase of more than 85 percent among white men and a nearly 36 percent increase among Latino men. Information on sexual orientation is often not collected by health departments but the CDC estimates 40 percent of the increase was in gay and bisexual men.
The total number of syphilis cases increased from 6,100 to more than 6,800, but CDC officials think this probably is only the tip of the iceberg because many cases go undiagnosed.
"The overall number is probably significantly higher," Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDCs division of sexually transmitted diseases, said during a teleconference about the new figures, which appear in the Nov. 21 issue of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The rise in syphilis infections indicates a growing number of gay and bisexual men are having unprotected sex, which worries health officials because the men could be spreading other diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
The problem is not just limited to the United States. "Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and several countries in western Europe have also reported increases of syphilis and other diseases among gay and bisexual men and in many of these there are high levels of HIV co-infection," said Dr. Ronald O. Valdiserri, deputy director of CDC's HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis prevention center.
PCWorld:
America Online and Macromedia are working together to integrate instant messaging with Web and wireless applications. They plan to offer a Software Development Kit early in 2004 that will let developers work features of AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ into a software environment called Macromedia Central. The two companies announced their partnership this week at the Macromedia Developers Conference.
Macromedia Central, announced earlier this year, is based on Macromedia Flash. It can deliver Web or network content to PCs or wireless devices without requiring an open browser window. Central applications can be automatically updated with new information such as current weather, news, or movie listings. The Software Development Kit is a step toward integrating messaging and presence with Macromedia applications, says Kevin Lynch, Macromedia's chief software architect.
SixApart:
Weblog software leader Six Apart and NIFTY, one of Japan's leading ISP, have announced a licensing agreement to provide Six Apart's popular TypePad(TM) weblogging service to over five million NIFTY subscribers in Japan. The ISP licensing agreement, Six Apart's first, signals the beginning of the company's global rollout of its highly-acclaimed weblogging tools.
Starting December 2, 2003, NIFTY will offer "Cocolog," a service powered by Six Apart's TypePad software and customized for NIFTY and Japanese customers. The service will be offered to NIFTY's paying subscribers without additional charge and allow them to easily set up and maintain fully-featured private or public weblogs.
The companies said the agreement is the first in a number of partnerships the firms are discussing together to offer additional services to Japanese users. Terms of the agreement, which include localization, customization and per user licensing fees, were not disclosed.
Weblogs, commonly referred to as "blogs" for short, are one of the fastest growing phenomena on the web, with millions of webloggers all over the world participating in the medium by publishing their thoughts on any topic in this simple, richly linked format. Six Apart, founded by the husband and wife team of Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott, has been a technological innovator in the weblog space since its launch of Movable Type in October 2001. The company's second and highly-acclaimed product, TypePad, offers a hosted service with powerful yet intuitive tools for creating accessible, media-rich weblogs and photo albums.
"People want to share their experiences, opinions and photos with their families and friends, no matter where they live," said Mena Trott, Six Apart's chief executive officer. "NIFTY has already given Japanese users a way to tap into the Internet to communicate, and we're pleased to help them expand their users' horizons through weblogging. We look forward to continuing to partner with NIFTY on a number of new
Wired:
The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to outlaw deceptive spam and to set up a "do not spam" registry for those who do not want to receive unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Internet spammers who flood e-mail inboxes with pornography and get-rich-quick schemes could face jail time and million-dollar fines under the bill, which passed by a vote of 97 to 0.
BBC:
Scandal-tarred Putnam Investments saw its assets under management fall by $7 billion last week, bringing the total lost by the Boston fund powerhouse in the past two weeks to $21 billion.
The size of the drop, which was primarily due to a flight of investors from Putnam's mutual funds and separately managed accounts, surprised industry observers yesterday - even though the pace of outflows slowed down.
The figure doesn't include about $1.2 billion that the nation's largest public pension fund, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, voted to pull yesterday.
With $256 billion of assets under management, Putnam remains one of the biggest fund firms in the country. But its assets shrunk by about 8 percent in the past two weeks, according to Putnam parent Marsh & McLennan Cos.
``That kind of loss is unprecedented,'' said Louis Harvey, president of the Dalbar Inc. research firm in Boston.
Putnam has seen an exodus of investors since Secretary of State William Galvin and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against the firm on Oct. 28, claiming the firm failed to stop improper fund trades.
BBC:
The Motion Picture Association Of America chief said issues of secure delivery were almost resolved.
Valenti said films should go straight from big screen to internet well before rental release on DVD and video.
However, the film business had no plans to follow the music industry in suing pirates, Valenti added.
"As long as stealing movies and music is high-reward and no risk, people are going to do it," he said.
According to Valenti, film industry insiders are currently working with a number of companies, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to develop a secure system for delivering films to the internet.
"I really do believe that maybe by this time next year we'll be able to have the beginnings of some really sturdy, protective clothing to put about these movies," Valenti said.
Online movie piracy, while still a relatively small part of overall film piracy, is beginning to grow as internet connections become faster.
Many of this year's blockbusters, including The Matrix Reloaded and Hulk, were available before they were released in cinemas.
Studios have been experimenting with putting their films online legitimately.
One service, Movielink, allows users to download films for a fee - although most films are not made available until a few months after they have been in cinemas, and currently the service is only available in the US.
News.com.au:
THE alleged contamination of feed for 70,000 Middle East-bound sheep was economic terrorism, a federal government backbencher said today.
David Hawker, whose electorate of Wannon takes in the port of Portland where the sheep are being held, said Australia's export industries were being threatened by the action.
Animal Liberation claims to have used pig meal to contaminate food and water supplies for the sheep.
Contamination would mean the sheep would not be fit for human consumption and were likely to be destroyed because of disease fears.
USAToday:
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, government officials have secured cities, airports, harbors, government buildings and tourist sites, but food experts say more attention should be focused on the country's food supply.
"We have become a nation concerned about receiving anthrax in our mailboxes," said Dr. Tom McGinn of North Carolina Department of Agriculture. "Imagine what it would be like to be a nation concerned about opening our refrigerators and anthrax being in our refrigerators as well."
A terrorist could easily use a handkerchief to spread a disease, such as foot and mouth disease, which affected 2,000 farms in Britain in 2001.
"If you exposed livestock before they were being shipped back to the farm from a state fair, you would have dispersed the disease across the state, frankly, in a saddeningly efficient way," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.
Those and other nightmare scenarios show why government officials should pay more attention to the vulnerabilities of America's agriculture system, officials said. And using bioterrorism to attack the nation's food supply could be very attractive to terrorists, said Senate Government Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Such an attack would have a devastating effect on the American economy, with food production accounting for about 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product and generating cash receipts in excess of $991 billion in 2001, said Peter Chalk, a Rand Corp. analyst.
Jane's.com:
Amid mounting concerns that some areas of scientific research might be exploited by terrorists planning biological attacks, the British government is likely to consider moves to regulate certain types of research, particularly in the field of immunology. JID asked a top UK biowarfare specialist to assess the latest developments and the potential risks.
The current debate has been fuelled by the publication earlier this month of the eighth report by the UK parliament's select committee on science and technology. In particular, the committee focused on the important issue of the security of scientific research and made proposals that would see tighter control of the vetting of scientists and restricting access to certain kinds of research data.
One major concern expressed in the report conclusions is that some UK universities have been slow to participate in the existing voluntary vetting scheme that is designed to prevent potential terrorists - and scientists from 'rogue states' - from gaining access to technological know-how that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons. The report warns: "It is important that the UK does not become a scientific training ground for terrorists."
To what extent is this warning justified? In the recent past there have certainly been some instances in which foreign scientists trained in the UK have been accused of using the skills learned in UK university labs to develop banned weapons in their home countries. Examples include the Iraqi microbiologist Dr Rihab Taha (nicknamed 'Dr Germ'), who studied at the University of East Anglia, and General Amer Saadi, another Iraqi who took a post-graduate course in chemistry at Oxford University (see JID 22 November 2002).
TripleCrownSurfing:
Eleven year-old Carissa Moore (Kahala, Hawaii) battled victory at sea conditions and a stellar lineup to win her way into the quarter finals of the $30,000 Roxy Pro at Haleiwa today - the opening event of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. After fighting her way through an onslaught of 4-6 foot waves at the start of the heat, Moore set straight to work against current world No.4 Heather Clark (South Africa), former world No.2 Serena Brooke (Australia) and Dara Penfold (Australia) to eventually turn the tables and win the heat. Moore entered the event at the seeded second round with a wildcard berth.
"It was a little bit scary, but I've surfed here at Haleiwa in competitions before and I've been out here practicing for this."
Conditions were particularly difficult for Moore, with blustery side-shore winds making hard work of it for the young surfer who weighed half as much as any of her rivals. Still, she flitted across the waves like a feather as she notched up a total of six rides in the 20 minute heat. Her best two scores gave a total of 8.27 (5.10 and 3.17) points and saw her eliminate Brooke and Penfold. After losing today, Brooke is now borderline for requalifying for next year's elite World Championship Tour (WCT).
"It was a little bit scary," said Moore, "but I've surfed here at Haleiwa in competitions before and I've been out here practicing for this. I was definitely excited to be out there. My goal for this event was just to do my best for me. I'm pretty surprised."
GameGirlAdvance:
It’s been big in Asia and especially Korea for years now. Professional gaming. Getting paid for being good at videogames; it may just be the dream of many a gamer. However, in America, tournaments have almost never been much larger than city-wide, and never consolidated on an international basis. They payouts have mostly been small pots made by the players themselves. And now, an upstart company, Major League Gaming, is trying to change that.
Major League Gaming has so far played their cards right. They’ve scored a spot on ESPN 2’s show Cold Pizza. They’ve spent plenty of capital to get their project off the ground, and their forums show them to be pretty well known amongst the competitive crew.
However, now, the weekend of October 24th-25th, Major League Gaming has its first real test. According to the co-founders of MLG, they’ve put a large amount of money into the event, and the success of the upcoming tournaments really decides whether or not the business becomes either the NFL of gaming sports or the XFL.
The first tournament, in Halo, Soul Calibur II, Madden 2004, and Gran Turismo 3, takes place at GameTime Nation in New York City, New York, a small console-based gaming café.
GameGirlAdvance:
The U.S. videogame industry today is larger than Hollywood's domestic box-office receipts and is closing in on music sales. Doesn't a sector that size deserve sophisticated mainstream critique, even academic study?
That's what industry boosters are saying. A call for a "third way" of game criticism, beyond jargon-filled reviews and advertorials, is being heard from a growing cadre of academics around the world who themselves have begun serious research on videogames. In a sign of their increasing numbers and organization, more than 400 of them are expected Tuesday in Utrecht, Netherlands, under the auspices of the newly formed Digital Games Research Association, based in Tampere, Finland.
Some of the academics complain that the videogame industry lacks the sort of critical media eye that has accompanied the development of cinema, and has acted as cheerleader for more creative and important -- if less financially lucrative -- films.
Without such legitimate critique, they argue, the industry will take few chances on things besides violent fare, sports games and half-hearted ripoffs of Hollywood. If the games industry is ever going to get beyond its current fascination with heavy ammunition, high-speed chases and pixelized hot-tub vixens, their argument goes, the public has to hear from reviewers who can call the game makers to task or applaud loftier offerings -- and do it for a new, bigger audience.
Instead, videogame reviews are stuck in the Pac-Man era. Matteo Bittanti, a researcher in Italy, says games are still judged on graphics, sound, longevity and playability. That would be like film critics writing only about a movie's audio track and special effects.
The magazines out now are primarily "magalogs, official catalogs, unofficial promos and buyer's guides masquerading as serious information," Mr. Bittanti says.
DigitalSpy:
Recent releases such as The Matrix Revolutions are already available on the black market, whereas some films like Tomb Raider 2 were available in pirated form before their cinema release in the UK.
The boom in film piracy has accompanied the growth of the DVD platform as a whole; recent statistics show that a quarter of all UK households now own a DVD player; piracy cost the film industry an estimated £400 million last year.
A spokesman for the council explained that illegal copies are often packaged well but are barely watchable. "[They] are usually sold by fly-by-night dealers at
MotleyFool.com:
Fool.com interview of Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix
Hastings: OK. Most threatening is piracy, second most threatening is Blockbuster, third is Wal-Mart, and fourth is video on demand.
TMF: And why is video on demand such a small threat, in your opinion?
Hastings: Well, because it is much more an opportunity for us. We named the company Netflix and not "DVD By Mail" for a reason, which is we plan to lead the downloading market and over time we will offer both DVDs by mail and downloading. The consumer will be able to choose. Some will prefer downloading to the TV and to the computer; some will prefer getting a DVD by mail because it is portable. They can play it in the car, on the airplane, etc. So we intend to lead both of those sectors. So that is why I look at VOD as more opportunity than threat.
TMF: You listed piracy -- services maybe like Kazaa and others where people can come in and download sometimes-rough versions but a full-length movie -- as No. 1 on that list. I am not sure whether you would consider that a very serious threat or not, but certainly Napster and Napster-like services have hurt the music industry.
Hastings: I think it is a very serious threat, again, over the next five years, not necessarily next year. But over time, if the culture takes hold that no one pays for movies and everyone just steals them, then that is going to hurt the entire industry. There will be less movies made. It will be dramatic. So it is very much in the entire industry's and in the retailer's interest to avoid that. Netflix is one of the services that is a piracy-inhibitor basically because it is such a good value. If for $20 you can rent unlimited movies, your incentive to do piracy is a lot less.
TMF: OK. Are there any specific steps that you expect to be taking as the CEO of Netflix to combat piracy head-on?
Hastings: No. I think the real focus for us is to provide a great legal alternative that is cost effective, has incredible selection, and in that way lessen the incentive for piracy.
TMF: Reed, given your success, is it possible that studios will begin wanting a bigger share of retail profits?
Hastings: Studios always want a bigger share, whether we are successful or not -- they want a bigger share of the movie theater's profits, they want a bigger share of Wal-Mart's profits. That is a healthy and creative tension. They recognize that new channels often bring in new customers. What we have seen over 25 years is growth in the movie market from about $6 billion 25 years ago when it was the movie theater only to nearly $30 billion last year when there is rental, sell through, pay-per-view, all of the different channels and that they really tend to reinforce and grow each other. So the studios have been very supportive of us. Not because they love us particularly, but because they are always supportive of new channels because that creates more revenue for them.
TMF: There has been serious innovation in the provision of entertainment services in America over the last 10 years. How do you think the movie-viewing and movie-making experiences are being changed by all these new services?
Hastings: Movie-making hasn't changed that much. Obviously there is digital cinematography, and that helps to a certain degree. But the film expense is small compared to the actors and the setup of the sets and all of the promotion aspects. On the consumption side, the big change has been home video. Home video is now 59% of the studio's revenue and 41% is everything else combined: the movie theater, pay-per-view, TV, etc. Home video has gone from nothing 20 years ago to essentially 60% of studio revenues. That is a phenomenal engine. DVDs... only about 50% of households have it today. So, we are looking at another doubling as DVD grows, and I think you will see that DVD just becomes a monster success over the next five years.
StarTribune.com:
For the first time since the Vietnam War, the streets of what was once Saigon were alive Wednesday with U.S. sailors on a port call.
The crew of the USS Vandegrift, many of them sons and daughters of Vietnam veterans, arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on a visit aimed at boosting relations between the former foes.
Miami.com:
... Stir, a 30-minute magazine-style show, is scheduled for broadcast nationally by the International Channel early next year.
Shot in a bright, zippy style, the aim is to provide entertaining, Asian-American spins on topics like sports, the gender
divide and the meaning of cool.
For the show's co-producers - the International Channel and KTSF, a San Francisco-area station that devotes most of its
programming to Asian-language shows - it marks the first foray into original, English-language programming targeted at 18
to 25-year-old Asian-Americans.
And "Stir" is just one example of how broadcasters are trying to entice young, second- and third-generation audiences.
Spanish-language network Telemundo recently added closed-caption English subtitles to two of its popular soap operas.
Telemundo cable network Mun2 features music videos, game shows, extreme sports and other programs in Spanglish, a
blend of Spanish and English - and in English alone. And Si TV, an English-language network for young Hispanic and
multicultural audiences, plans to start up early next year.
Together, the efforts represent a rush by broadcasters and advertisers to appeal to rapidly growing groups of minority youth.
For example, there are about 12.5 million Asians in the United States, and more than a third are under 25, according to
census data.
... Sherman said Asian-language programming will always be the station's main focus. But "Stir" is "part of our effort to stay ahead of the demographic tidal wave," he said. "The one piece of the puzzle we always felt we were missing was the English-language show."
Noting NBC's acquisition of Telemundo in 2001, Sherman said it's all part of the same trend, "ethnic media becoming kind of mainstream in the U.S. just because of the demographic changes."
CBC:
A new study reports that many watch R-rated movies and play video games filled with violence, theft and prostitution.
The kids told the people doing the study that 75 per cent of them watch TV every day.
The study, conducted by ERIN Research for the Canadian Teachers' Federation, surveyed 756 students in Grades 3 to 10. The survey was intended to provide a snapshot of how students use media.
Findings:
The youngest kids are the most likely to be playing video and computer games. Nearly 60 per cent of boys in Grades 3 to 6 play almost every day. In Grade 10, more than 30 per cent play daily.
- 20 per cent of students say they watch movies every day. Another 42 per cent watch movies a few times a week.
- 48 per cent of children have their own television set.
- 26 per cent have their own computer and internet connection.
Kids say there should be more restrictions on mature subject games and programs. As kids get older, they are more likely to watch TV news, and less likely to be frightened by what they see on the news.
The study also found that kids watch unsuitable and R-rated programs at a young age. By the time they reach Grade 6, half of them say they've watched what they know are inappropriate movies on video.
About half say their parents don't limit how much TV they watch. By Grade 7, 75 per cent of children say they have R-rated movies at home and 25 per cent have personally rented R-rated movies.
One of the most popular video games, particularly for English-speaking boys, was Grand Theft Auto, which the study describes as "an ultra-violent action game aimed at mature audiences, which involves murder, bludgeoning and prostitution."
Independent.co.uk:
Coca-Cola is to stop aiming its TV commercials at children. The world's biggest soft drinks company said yesterday that it had abandoned so-called pester power advertising that tries to make children bully their parents into purchasing decisions.
The decision was made after growing criticism of food and drinks companies for encouraging children to consume sweet and fatty products, a trend blamed for an alarming rise in childhood obesity.
Martin Norris, communications director of Coca-Cola UK, said: "In the case of children under 12 the responsibility for consumption should be left in the hands of parents and guardians." He said the company had stopped advertising its fizzy drinks to children, and was extending the policy to all its brands, which include Coke, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Oasis and Roo Juice, a fruity mixture aimed at under-fives. Under the ruling, these drinks will not be advertised during children's programmes.
StraitsTimes:
A NEW college will be set up in Singapore early next year to equip sales executives with the skills to be in tune in the ever-changing pay and cable TV industry.
It is being established by the Cable & Broadcasting Association of Asia (Casbaa), which represents 125 Asian broadcasters and channels.
... Changes in the industry mean old sales practices do not work as well these days, Mr Twiston-Davis said.
For instance, rather than a single channel or broadcaster beaming programmes to a single country, one channel could be broadcasting to 14 countries in the region simultaneously, he said.
'We need to raise the bar of knowledge. A good salesman will be able to figure out what it takes to sell such a channel regionally, rather than be too focused on a single country.'
Technology will also force change. Advances such as digital TV will make it possible to deliver a different advertisement to different countries, or deliver additional programming that will appeal to the culture of that country.
DigiTimes:
After stumbling for many years, the digital television (DTV) market is finally on the path to rapid growth, according to iSuppli/Stanford Resources.
Growth in DTV shipments is being driven by new mandates and deadlines from governments across the globe to convert all analog transmission to digital. In the US, all TV stations must transmit digitally by 2007, while worldwide deadlines for digital transmission range from 2007 to 2010.
DTV has passed through some rough patches on its way to becoming a viable and growing consumer electronics product. It has suffered from slow sales in recent years because neither of the major parties involved – the set makers and the broadcasters – were willing to shoulder the risk of taking the first steps to promote DTV broadcast and reception.
Now, with the government mandates and rulings in place, the broadcasters and TV makers are working quickly to meet the deadlines.
Worldwide DTV shipments will grow at a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 89% over the next four years, rising from 3.6 million units in 2003 to 45 million in 2007. Revenue from DTV shipments will reach US$38.7 billion in 2007, rising at a CAGR of 51% from US$7.5 billion in 2003.
The major advantages of DTV are excellent picture quality and more efficient use of transmission bandwidth than conventional analog TV, freeing broadcast spectrum for other purposes.
Beyond government intervention, market growth will be driven by the desire of many of the companies involved in the DTV value chain to capitalize on the wave of digitization that is sweeping the consumer-electronics marketplace. This will spur several developments that will promote DTV growth, including:
* Digital transmission by numerous stations
* Wide availability of content
* Availability of television sets that support digital reception along with high-quality pictures
Rear-Projection TVs (RPTVs) will account for 64% of the DTV market in 2003. However, the RPTV’s share of the market will decline to just 11% in 2007, as other technologies gain prominence.
LCD TVs will account for only 3% of shipments in 2003 but will see tremendous growth during the coming years. By 2007, LCD TVs will claim the largest portion of the DTV market, with a 41% share of unit sales.
DigiTimes:
Booming demand for flat-panel TVs will cause LCD panel prices to rise in November and December and may perpetuate the present undersupply situation in the market into 2004, iSuppli/Stanford Resources predicts.
Demand for large-sized LCD TVs is increasing at a rapid rate, with panel sales expected to rise by 184% in 2003. Hoping to cash in the LCD TV craze, panel makers are boosting production of 30/32-inch panels. However, those production increases are coming at the expense of smaller-sized panels, leading to a general shortfall of LCDs not only for TVs, but for notebook computers and desktop PC monitors.
“The supply situation is extremely tight right now,” said Sweta Dash, director, LCD & projection research for iSuppli/Stanford Resources, Santa Clara, Calif.
“A lot of new manufacturers are entering the LCD TV market right now, including PC makers, and they are ordering huge numbers of panels from LCD suppliers. This is making the present shortfall even worse.”
Large-sized LCD panel average selling prices (ASPs) rose 2-3% in October and will rise another 2% in November. The figure presents iSuppli/Stanford Resources’s latest forecast of pricing trends for large-sized LCD panels.
LCD makers that operate fifth-generation (5G) fabs are able to produce three 30/32-inch LCD panels on a single motherglass, Dash noted. In contrast, they are able to produce 15 to 16 15-inch panels or 12 17-inch panels on the same motherglass. With the move to larger panels, there is less available capacity to manufacture the smaller sizes.
CBS News:
Though Bill Gates didn't invent TV, he is trying to reinvent it. Microsoft has recently released the second iteration of the Media Center Edition of Windows XP that transforms PCs into, among other things, TVs. And, thanks to Gates' technology, it won't even take 60 minutes to watch your show. Media Center PCs are also personal video recorders (PRV), which means you'll be able to zip through the commercials and watch a one-hour show in about 48 minutes, assuming your TV set doesn't crash in the middle of the program.
For years, Microsoft, Intel and other PC industry companies have talked about moving PCs from the den to the living room. For most consumers, the pitch has fallen on deaf ears. People don't want ugly beige boxes in their living rooms. What's more, people want consumer electronics that are reliable and easy to use. When was the last time you had to load anti-virus software on your TV? Has your CD player ever been attacked by a hacker?
Still, the industry continues to push forward. Specially equipped PCs running the new version of Microsoft's Media Center Edition can not only be used to watch and record TV, they can play DVD movies, audio CDs and FM radio, as well as let you view your photographs and home movies and listen to MP3 music files. Depending on the configuration you can also use them to edit home movies and burn DVDs.
Unlike Tivo, which costs $12.95 a month, there are no usage charges associated with using the machine's PVR function. The program guide that you use to select TV shows to watch or record is downloaded from the Internet for free.
Honolulu Advertiser:
The North Shore's longstanding lock on the title of world's supreme surf spot is being challenged, most recently on Page 418 of "The Encyclopedia of Surfing," a 744-page, authoritative volume released last month:
"Dungeons in South Africa, along with Maverick's and Todos Santos on the North American West Coast, have broken up the North Shore's big-wave monopoly, while Indonesia with its perfect waves has to a large degree replaced the North Shore as the ultimate surf destination."
... "It's totally true," said Randy Rarick, executive producer of the prestigious Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, which will start today at Hale'iwa Ali'i Beach, conditions permitting. "Maverick's blew away the notion that Hawai'i was the only location with the big waves. In Indonesia, during its prime surfing season from May through October, the surfing conditions are more ideal, more consistent, they have fewer storms and they don't get the chop and the wind.
... Manuel Menendez, executive director of the Honolulu Office of Economic Development, was more blunt.
"The surfing industry has been stolen from Hawai'i by California, by places like Huntington Beach, and by places like Australia," he said. "We lost it because we have never placed surfing as a priority industry. We used to have an envious position, but there are a lot of competitive places now that attract surfing visitors from all over the world."
The first attack on the North Shore's reputation as the No. 1 surf destination can be traced to Bruce Brown's 1964 classic "Endless Summer." Although still expressing reverence for North Shore spots, the film showed there were other places around the world to catch waves.
TVPredictions:
Visible World, a technology and media service company that has developed an effective solution for getting consumers to watch TV ads, today announced that it has received $8 million in second round venture capital financing led by RVC L.P., the former venture capital arm of Reuters. Participants in this financing also include first round investors Grey Ventures, WPP Group, Leucadia, Edgewater, as well as new investors Comcast Interactive Capital and SoundView Ventures.
Visible World's second round investors decided to participate in the funding because they strongly believe the company has developed a service that the marketplace is in desperate need of - i.e. a way to help advertisers keep viewers from skipping commercials. Called IntelliSpot®, the system allows advertisers to finely customize TV commercials so they are more relevant to multiple segments of viewers, as opposed to one mass audience.
...Developed by Visible World and SeaChange, IntelliSpot lets advertisers create and deliver more meaningful ads for specific markets, zip codes, buying groups, times of day, and in the future, households. Through the IntelliSpot toolkit, commercials are easily broken down into all their individual media elements -- i.e. video, audio, text, and graphics -- and then assembled into a variety of unique ads, based on the advertiser's requirements, at or near the point of delivery. The result is dozens, hundreds or even thousands of commercials.
TelevisionWeek:
... When seen on film, Diaz's skin imperfections are not noticeable, thanks to Hollywood's talented makeup artists. However, with HDTV, the picture is so precise that the acne damage cannot be hidden. In a high-def broadcast of Charlie's Angels on HBO, Diaz looks like a different person. She's still very pretty. But to be very frank, I doubt that she would make People's most beautiful list.
I am writing this not to discount the considerable charms of Cameron Diaz. But the story illustrates the impact that HDTV is having on the Hollywood glamour machine. As stars run for cover-literally-the industry is searching for new makeup techniques that will combat the evils of digital television. With high-def now in fewer than 6 million homes, the problem is under control. But if new solutions aren't found-and millions more get HDTV, as expected-the technology could change our perception of who's beautiful and who's not.
People sometimes say that an actor looks better-or worse-on TV than in person. Well, there's a reason for that. Heavy makeup-combined with the imprecise picture of an analog TV channel-can make an average-looking person look attractive.
However, HDTV's ultra-realistic picture is the great equalizer. Someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones, who has naturally beautiful skin and hair, looks even better on HDTV while Diaz suffers in comparison. Younger actors look more vibrant while older actors, such as Becker's Ted Danson, look their age or worse. Sorry, Ted.
In the early days of HDTV, makeup artists piled on the goo, thinking it would cover everything from wrinkles to blemishes. But heavy makeup is noticeable on HDTV, which can detract from a show's realism.
RedlandsDaily:
More than 300 members of Teamsters Local 399 and members of other labor unions held a boisterous rally Friday morning to protest against California losing film and television production jobs to Canada and other countries and called upon Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger for his help.
The rally was decidedly anti-Canadian with speakers assailing the U.S. neighbor to the north for luring a flood of productions out of Los Angeles and other parts of the state with its lower production costs.
Alarcon expressed his feelings bluntly: ``This is b---s---! The audacity of these people to come into our town to try and steal our jobs and our business. Just as we are fighting this so-called war in Iraq, we need to fight a war against those people who are stealing jobs away from California.''
A study by Encino-based Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research stated that since Canada began offering tax subsidies five years ago to film production companies for major films, the U.S. economy has lost about $4 billion in economic benefits, equal to about 25,000 jobs per year.
Many of those very workers who have suffered from the situation were among those in the crowd Friday holding signs which read: ``Canada: We need to feed our families too! Don't steal our jobs.''
``When we started 11-12 years ago, they were shooting everywhere in this town, like 15 movies a day,'' he said. ``We used to make a couple of phone calls and we'd get right on a movie. The movie industry has been completely stolen away.''
ChinaView:
China's record space launches from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15 indicate the nation's improved capability in technological development and manufacturing in the space field and space project management, a senior space expert said Monday.
Zhang Qingwei, general manager of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., the manufacturer of the country's Long March carrier rockets and spacecraft, said his corporation had successfully launched the Shenzhou-5 manned spacecraft and four satellites in the period.
Zhang said the launches represented a record high in a month both in the number of launches and the rate of successful launches.
China's first manned spacecraft was rocketed into space on Oct.15 and returned to the Earth safely the next day.
TVWeek:
Cable operators aren't convinced that interactive TV has got the goods, even though competing satellite service DirecTV will aggressively launch ITV in the not-too-distant future.
That's the finding of a Yankee Group study released last week outlining expectations for News Corp.'s interactive strategy once DirecTV officially joins its fold later this year or early next year.
ITV has stalled over the past year, but DirecTV's line of attack could reinvigorate the industry. Cable operators are taking a measured approach because the waters surrounding consumer demand and willingness to pay for ITV are murky. In addition, video-on-demand is proving successful for cable.
"They are not convinced that ITV will make a huge difference in the market," said Yankee Group analyst Adi Kishore, adding that multiple system operators will wait until 2005 at least to aggressively deploy ITV. Satellite providers have deployed ITV to 12 million homes, but cable counts only 2 million ITV homes, with only Cablevision, Insight and Charter widely pursuing the market, he said.
DirecTV's introduction of three enhanced TV applications in September for the football season set the stage for what many expect will be a hard-hitting approach to rolling out ITV. Despite the expected ITV assault, Mr. Kishore said, most cable operators will wait and see how the applications play out in the marketplace. Besides, cable operators are still squarely focusing their interactive energy on VOD and now DVRs.
In a September Federal Communications Commission filing, DirecTV discussed plans to introduce a new set-top box user interface next year, roll out new middleware to enable more ITV services, including interactive news, sports, weather, traffic and games in 2004, and deploy at least 1 million integrated DVRs each year starting in 2005.
"DirecTV is not waiting for anybody," Mr. Kishore said. He also expects that the satellite company will quickly launch "personalized video," which means alternating camera angles to show different views during a sporting event. Based on Yankee Group consumer surveys, multiple camera angles is one of the top two most attractive interactive applications, along with additional programming information, he said.
OpenTV said Thursday morning that one of its interactive television services would be dropped from DirecTV next month. DirecTV's decision to drop OpenTV's Wink service -- a move that will affect 10.4 million of the satellite operator's set-top boxes -- cuts off business that amounted to 2% of OpenTV's revenue over the past nine months. It eliminates one of the three major carriers of Wink in the U.S.Finally, the move spotlights shifting relationships and complicated loyalties in the interactive TV market, which has for years held out the promise of revolutionary changes in TV viewing habits and industry economics, but so far has failed to deliver.
... Wink, which enables viewers to react to specially programmed TV shows and commercials through activities such as participating in polls or requesting more information about an advertised product, remains available on EchoStar Communications' Dish Network satellite service, and through cable operator Charter Communications.
The government Tuesday approved an anti-piracy mechanism that will make it harder for computer users to illegally distribute digital TV programs on the Internet. The goal is to speed the transition to higher quality digital broadcasts and ensure such programming remains free.Some people already share TV shows and movies online, though the practice is limited by the speed of Internet connections -- it can take many hours to transfer high-quality copies.
But as Internet connections get faster and broadcasters switch to much clearer digital television, the movie and television industries fear consumers will put high-quality copies of shows and films on the Web that others can download for free. This would reduce the broadcasters' ability to sell the shows for syndication or overseas.
The music industry saw CD sales fall as free music sharing proliferated on the Internet. It has started to sue listeners who illegally distribute songs online.
... In its order, the FCC told makers of digital television receivers that by July 1, 2005, their models must recognize the flag, an electronic signal that broadcasters can embed in their programs.
... FCC officials said the flag would not prevent consumers from using existing or new DVD or VCR machines to make copies of TV programs. But the signal is designed to make it more difficult for consumers to then transfer those copies to the Internet and make them available to potentially millions of others free of charge.
This is not your grandma's PC," said Louis J. Burns, the executive in charge of Intel's desktop computer division.The arrival of the more flexible personal computers, Silicon Valley executives argue, is aimed at permitting the industry to make big inroads into the consumer market as digital television replaces conventional analog TV, a move that is expected to lead Americans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years on things like new big-screen displays and home-theater-in-a-box sets."It will define a whole new category," said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, a maker of PC video cards also based here. "In five years it will absolutely reshape the consumer electronics industry."
In a 21st-century twist on Roosevelt-era public works projects, Salt Lake City and 17 other Utah cities are planning to build the largest ultrahigh-speed digital network in the country.Construction on the project is scheduled to start next spring - if the cities can raise the money to pull it off. The network would be capable of delivering data over the Internet to homes and businesses at speeds 100 times faster than current commercial residential offerings. It would also offer digital television and telephone services through the Internet.
... Fact is, we've been getting a lot of attention and new searches, and the blogosphere seems to be growing at a pretty steep rate as well. This double whammy has caused our current infrastructure to buckle, and has caused some service outages.I'm sorry.
Here's what we're doing to fix it: I've got a new, much more scalable infrastructure designed and currently being built. I'm committed to having it up and running by the end of the month, just in time for Technorati's first anniversary. This will be the third generation of our infrastructure, each designed to be more scalable and flexible than the last. After stability, the next priority is response time - we're gunning for a response time of under 1 second.
Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.
Amid recent revelations that elite athletes may be abusing human growth hormone to build muscles and break records, a large and flourishing practice on the fringe of American medicine has also been promoting its use among aging and affluent Baby Boomers hoping to feel young again.Human growth hormone has never been approved as a muscle-building agent or as an anti-aging tonic, in part because of the dearth of evidence that it is safe to use over a long period. Some research suggests that it might in fact be harmful in any number of ways.
Still, there is no shortage of doctors willing to prescribe human growth hormone for "off-label" use -- and no shortage of potential patients hoping to fend off the effects of advancing age. According to one estimate, one-third of the $695 million a year in U.S. sales is for unapproved uses. That amounts to what one longtime critic called an enormous, unregulated medical experiment.
Sir Howard Stringer sheepishly conceded that his Sony Corp. of America is to blame for the mysterious disappearance this fall of males age 18 to 34 from network television, his old stomping ground."They are playing on my devices. They are taking their content in different forms and in different ways, and we've got it," he proclaimed. "Who needs a network?"
Indeed, the former CBS chief executive, who was recently named vice chairman of Japan-based Sony Corp., a rare honor for a Westerner, has endured years of criticism for not buying ABC or CBS and because he did not merge with NBC when he had the chance several years ago.
... "Whatever dwindling attention spans [older generations] have are more than matched by this generation. They have a lot more options-video games and digital downloads and the Internet. All of those alternatives are connected to this company," Mr. Stringer told TelevisionWeek. "We have what is going to take entertainment into this next century."
As far as acquiring a broadcast network is concerned, "there was always a good reason why something didn't happen," Mr. Stringer said. It appears now that patience and autonomy have paid off. Sony stands a better chance today of emerging the victor by relying on its own content, electronic devices and wits, he said.
..."Our network is the networked game-like EverQuest-where the average player spends 20 hours a week online playing-that's what's hurting the broadcast and cable networks."
The convergence vision that has carried Mr. Stringer and his boss, Sony Corp. Chairman Nobuyuki Idei, for the past eight years is the driving force behind the company's new Transformation 60 plan to downsize and reposition its content and electronics for a wireless, interactive broadband world.
...A goal of more than doubling its operating margins to 10 percent by 2006 will require Sony Pictures Entertainment to bring its more than 4,000 films and more than 80,000 hours of TV programs to a new generation of devices in new ways.
... There are a growing number of retail store outlets selling Tolkien and Moorcock-esque wargaming figures and an apparently strong appetite for buying them. There are a number of successful online Internet multiplayer games, Everquest, for example, has over two hundred thousand total players.Now add massively multiplayer interactive soap opera style games to the mix. Reality TV meets mobile phone game.
That's what Swedish games producer, "It's Alive", are launching. Their new game, Supafly, is a lifestyle virtual soap opera game aimed at attracting a 50% young female audience, where the goal of the game is to become a virtual celebrity. Game actions are generated by SMS commands, and picture messaging can be used to see how characters look. It's Alive know about multiplayer potential, based on the success they had with the Russian launch of their first title, BotFighters. Over 7% handset penetration in a matter of weeks and generating an extra 1million SMS messages per month.
That's serious incremental revenue for so much fun.
In these games almost every action requires an SMS message, and your character is always in the game, so if you don't check in on frequent basis who knows what might happen to your character. New WAP and Java clients in handsets will make the games more interactive and compelling to a wider audience. This might reduce messaging revenue potential, but will increase other forms of network traffic, so even this should be welcomed by operators.
Then there's pervasive gaming. If you thought MMOG was strange, this is where Kansas goes bye-bye, as we enter the Matrix gaming platform from It's Alive. Pervasive gaming is all about location. The gameplayer's location in the real world maps onto their location in a parallel gamespace. Now before you reach for the blue pill, think about this. Location services. "Find my nearest X or Y" and "show me the way to Z" will only generate a small level of location services traffic, even if mobile phones replace A to Zs and the Yellow Pages. Gameplay could generate a huge increase in demand for location based services.
San Antonio Express:
This past Saturday, 512 "boys," most of them in their 20s and 30s, converged on La Villita for the ultimate Saturday afternoon video game session — the Madden Challenge.
The challenge is a national, 32-city competition to determine the best player of the top-selling game Madden NFL 2004, named after John Madden, the award-wining football commentator and fabled Raiders coach.
The majority of Saturday's participants have spent their entire lives mastering the X's and O's — as well as the triangles, squares and several other buttons — of video game football.
"Right now there is a lot of following for Madden," game enthusiast Carl Zepeda said as he challenged a friend to a practice game the night before the tournament.
Guardian Unlimited:
Early next year, Kuma Reality Games plans to launch a service that will allow players to re-enact contemporary news events. Kuma's first product - centred on the war in Iraq - will brief players with information derived from real-world news reporting, and then allow them to play out missions based on actual troop deployments. On its website, Kuma claims the new game "presents our soldiers' acts of patriotism and bravery as never before possible". Then the kicker: "In a world being torn apart by international conflict, one thing is on everyone's mind as they finish watching the nightly news: 'Man, this would make a great game.'"
Last year, a federal judge ruled that games did not enjoy first amendment protection [guaranteeing freedom of expression] because they did not express ideas. This summer, a higher court overruled that decision. The political importance of games has been demonstrated again and again as groups struggle over how - and whether - the Iraq war should be represented through games.
No sooner did the Bush administration identify Osama bin Laden as the likely culprit than a wave of amateur games popped up across the internet, giving players the chance to maim and manhandle the terrorist leader. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation created international controversy when it released a web-based game, Under Ash, which it argued showed their perspective on the Middle East conflict. The night the bombs fell on Baghdad, Sony trademarked "shock and awe" with the idea of using it as the title for a (since abandoned) Iraq war game. The most recent controversy centres on a CIA proposal to develop a game that would allow operatives to "think outside the box" by adopting the role of a member of a terrorist cell.
CSMonitor:
... In such fantasy worlds, players who've never met in person form tight allegiances - and the ties are based on tests of individual character, not gender, class, or race. While critics decry the violence in many of these games, or worry about the social maladjustment of adolescents who spend hour upon hour playing them, the popularity seems rooted in the fellowship of the players, not in the virtual mayhem and carnage. In fact, even as video games become less violent and more interactive, more and more players are logging on.
This contradicts the widely held belief that violent onscreen images are what draw kids to video games.
It is a contradiction that stems from the culture gap between gamers and education experts, says Nicholas Yee, an independent researcher who conducts online surveys of people who play MMORPGs - "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" - the hottest on the market. "You need to know the language and understand the culture before you can understand the [attraction]," he says.
In MMORPGs, real people play together in real time; they make lasting friendships and crushing animosities; they're tested in the heat of battle and the calm of peacetime. The goal is to strategize, not just to kill and subsist.
CSMonitor:
... Videomakers dismiss the thesis that violent videos can generate aggressive behavior in viewers. But scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Two Iowa State University psychologists, Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman, conclude in an article in the journal Psychological Science that "violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults." They note that in three recent school shootings, the shooters were "students who habitually played violent video games." For instance, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School students who killed 13 people in Littleton, Colo., enjoyed playing a bloody video game, "Doom." Eric even created a customized version with extra weapons and victims who couldn't fight back.
Mr. Bushman, now at the University of Michigan, conducted a statistical review of 85 separate studies of video violence. He told me in a phone interview: "There's no question that exposure to violent videos stimulates aggressive behavior. It's incredibly troubling."
Three years ago, the US Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on the problem. Government funding for additional research was urged, but nothing appears to have been done. Bushman says a new pitch is being made for funding through the National Institute of Mental Health to study long-term effects of video violence.
Mr. Anderson and Bushman found that, on average, youths between 8 and 18 spend more than 40 hours a week using electronic media. While TV is most frequently used, electronic video games are rapidly growing in popularity, and, they note, the "most heavily marketed and consumed games are violent ones."
CSMonitor:
The Chamber of Commerce types in Chatham County used to talk about tax incentives and injection-moulding plants as the answer to Siler City's downtown blight. Today they gossip about mixed media and the virtues of salt glaze.
Instead of getting a new car dealership on the 1940s-era Chevy lot, they're installing a smithy. In an old photography studio will go a glassblowing kiln. And on Friday, officials here cut the ribbon on the first studios of Siler City's "arts incubator" - three blocks that locals hope will transform Siler City from a dark, desolate farm town to a brightly lit, Left Bank-on-Cape Fear with original 1950s storefronts. If all goes well, it will be the largest such artists' quarter in the world - built in a place where no artists have ever shown their work.
After the tobacco leaf, after the cotton, after the furniture factories, come the potters. Tapping into a century-old social movement to help country craftsmen get their goods to the city, Siler City's incubator, starting in a former hardware store, is the most exciting thing to happen here in 30 years. The purchase of a dozen downtown buildings to create an urban artists' colony may revitalize a town that economists say is "dying on the vine." But perhaps more important, in an economy shedding jobs like wool shorn in springtime, Siler City's gambit is a sign that officials are beginning to take seriously an underground market worth some $50 billion a year - with hints of possibility for artists across the Heartland.
CSMonitor:
But now, eight years after a federal move to buy back oil leases in the vast Bay, residents and state officials are doing what would have seemed unthinkable not long ago: inviting oil firms back.
The reversal reflects the fallen fortunes of Alaska's once-powerful salmon industry, and the economic challenges facing rural Alaska.
"The fishing industry is failing so badly.... We've got to do something else," said Nels Anderson, a former state lawmaker and native leader spearheading the push for energy development. "We just can't afford to live out here."
Despite Bristol Bay's salmon bounty, commercial fishers have been hit by the rise of cheap farmed salmon. Last year's Bristol Bay commercial salmon catch was worth only $29.8 million, less than a quarter the 20-year average. And there are few moneymaking alternatives for residents, largely Yupik Eskimos, Athabaskan Indians, and Aleuts. The economic problem affects other fishing-dependent areas of Alaska as well.
So, as local energy costs soar - fuel is so expensive that fishermen say they can't even afford to make ice to chill their salmon - the once-rejected oil and gas industry is being wooed as a potential paycheck savior.
Some of the biggest fans [of malls] are visiting less. In 1996, 14- to 17-year-olds visited malls 54 times on average, for 90 minutes per visit. In 2002, they visited malls 52 times, at 84 minutes per visit. In 1996, seniors 65 visited malls 50 times on average, at 85 minutes per visit. In 2002, they visited malls 45 times, for 81 minutes per visit.
For young people, this equates to a six-hour per person per year (10%) reduction in time spent in malls. Could the same phenomena that is driving the mysterious fall off in television viewership amongst 18-34 year-old male viewers also be driving the reduction of time in malls?
-Tim
Ever wish you could save a TV show with your digital video recorder and take that recording with you to watch elsewhere? Now you can with Pioneer Electronics' new DVD recorders. Besides playing and recording DVDs, they also incorporate TiVo, a service that operates a digital video recorder, which is like a VCR but uses a hard drive. Pioneer's DVR-810H comes with an 80GB drive and costs $1,199, while the DVR-57H has a 120GB drive and carries a $1,800 price tag. Both include TiVo basic service. Record onto DVDs directly from the hard drive and create a portable library of your favorite shows each season.
NYT:
... The competition in the Salt Lake City area mirrors that in towns and cities from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me. It pits behemoth cable companies against telephone companies, and both against a growing number of small entrepreneurs who want to use wireless technology to bypass the telecommunications infrastructure. All of the contenders are struggling to reach people like Mrs. Washburn, knowing that whoever arrives first has an advantage.
About 14 percent of American households have broadband, amounting to a third of those with Internet access. They pay $30 to $60 a month for the service. Growth prospects for the market are strong, according to Patrick Mahoney, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a market research firm. Revenue from high-speed Internet service is expected to increase to $20.8 billion in 2007 from $7.4 billion in 2002, he said.
Technology industry analysts say high-speed computer links are being adopted more quickly than virtually any technology in American history. Still, other countries are ahead. The United State ranks 10th in the world in terms of the percentage of inhabitants with high-speed access behind Canada, South Korea and Japan.
... The cable industry has spent some $80 billion to upgrade its systems for high-speed access, including $10 billion this year, according to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group. Comparable figures on the phone companies are difficult to separate from overall industry investment, according to the Yankee Group. Mr. Mahoney said the telephone figure was probably less but that the industry required less of an upgrade to prepare it for high-speed traffic.
NYT:
... The movie theater shorts are a little more compelling. They try to combat the idea that Internet file-sharing is a victimless crime by presenting, in the person of Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Perry and their co-workers, some of the potential victims. The people most visibly associated with the movie business — the studio executive with a house in the Hollywood Hills, the movie star with a $12 million price tag and a first-look production deal — might not elicit much sympathy.
Indeed, the problem of piracy arises in part from the way our love of, and fascination with, movies is laced with entitlement and resentment. The spots offer a kind of social realism unusual for Hollywood, and thus a reality check: behind the magic for which stars and directors receive credit, and studios reap profit, are working stiffs like us.
NYT:
Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner, has held preliminary discussions with executives of the T-Online division of Deutsche Telekom about a possible merger or joint venture involving Time Warner's America Online division, two company executives said yesterday.
The talks have apparently ended without a deal. The discussions were reported yesterday by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the chief executive of Deutsch Telekom, Kai-Uwe Ricke, has publicly denied them.
... The revenue and profits of America Online have shrunk significantly since the height of the Internet boom as the apparent demand for its online advertising evaporated and its users defected to higher-speed Internet services. Time Warner says it hopes the division will return to growth next year, but AOL's business remains in flux and its future is hard to predict.
As consumers have gravitated to high-speed Internet connections provided by cable and phone companies, America Online has responded by shifting its focus from selling low-speed dial-up Internet connections to selling a version of its service as an addition to a high-speed connection. But its new service remains untested, leaving doubts about its ability to expand. Questions about its performance are a pivotal variable in investors' expectations for Time Warner.
NYT:
... But the general problem, he explained, is that much printed or online travel information, especially for a complex extravaganza of a city like Las Vegas, is out of date, insipid, wrong, useless or insufficiently detailed.
To address that, the Greenspun Media Group created a Web site, Vegas.com, that positions itself as the leading source of reliable, detailed and up-to-date information about Las Vegas. Greenspun Media is part of the publishing and real estate empire founded by the late Hank Greenspun, the swashbuckling local newspaper publisher.
...The site is crammed with information of every sort about Las Vegas. But one of its most important functions is to provide the Las Vegas visitor with a kind of virtual concierge, able to get into a restaurant that's turning away customers or a nightclub show that's supposedly sold out.
"It used to be in Vegas, if you weren't a high roller being pampered by a casino, you had to have what was called a 'Guy' to get those things," Mr. Lefkowitz said. "I used to have a Guy named Minnie. I'd call and say, 'Minnie, can you get me into this place? Can you get me a ticket to that show?' Inevitably, Minnie would deliver."
Vegas.com eliminates the need for a Minnie, Mr. Lefkowitz said, adding, "We're the Guy for every person, because not everyone knows a Minnie."
...Mr. Lefkowitz tapped at his computer keyboard to show how it works. One of the most popular late-night clubs in Las Vegas is called Rain in the Desert. "O.K., let's try for a party of six - tonight. Head-of-the-line pass, of course," Mr. Lefkowitz said.
Getting that imaginary party of six in on short notice was no problem. And the extra cost for head-of-the-line passes was $10 a person - about what Minnie would have expected.
NYT:
... NBC has determined that a disproportionate amount of the falloff in viewing levels among young men, a decline of 11 percent so far this season, can be tied to the decision of Nielsen Media Research to add a significant number of Hispanic viewers to its national survey.
Because many of these young Hispanic men may not be participating in the button-pushing process that determines TV ratings, the decline in viewing levels may be exaggerated. NBC executives argue that, as a result of the changed statistical sample, comparisons to last season's ratings are skewed.
NBC's possible solution is of potential great importance to a television industry that takes in billions in advertising revenue annually based on ratings information - and which can owe advertisers tens of millions of dollars in free commercials when ratings fall short of expectations, as they have this fall.
Nielsen immediately disputed how NBC was interpreting its ratings numbers. The dispute reflected the almost surreal position television industry executives find themselves in when dealing with Nielsen, which has a monopoly over television ratings information.
Miami Herald:
It's just another chapter in the TV's dysfunctional marriage to the Nielsen ratings, where breaking up would be more painful than staying together.
Nielsen Media Research's claim that prime-time viewing among men aged 18-to-34 has dropped by 7 percent this season is hotly disputed by TV networks, where overall viewership is down this season. The debate has renewed long-running tensions between broadcasters and the company they pay to measure their audience.
Given Nielsen's monopoly, the clash is inevitable. The research company's numbers decide where billions of dollars worth of advertising is spent and whether TV shows - even entire networks - live or die.
Several broadcast executives wonder whether Nielsen is unfit for a wired world with hundreds of networks, digital video recorders and impatient channel surfers.
"I do worry about technology's advances being ahead of Nielsen's ability to measure it," said Alan Wurtzel, research president at NBC, which has lost, on average, more than a million viewers a week from last year. "I do believe that has everything to do with being a monopoly."
... One of the industry's top number-crunchers, CBS chief researcher David Poltrack, believes this autumn's ratings drop can be tied to 105 men who aren't pushing enough buttons.
Nielsen gathers its ratings through a sample of 5,100 homes nationwide. Among men aged 18-to-24, where the bulk of the viewership decrease is concentrated, that's just 600 people. Poltrack wants Nielsen to investigate whether a subset of these men - just 105 of them - are unreliable because they really don't want to participate in Nielsen's study.
NYT:
A coalition of advertising organizations is lashing back at Commercial Alert, an advocacy group that last month called the practice of product placement "an affront to basic honesty" and demanded new government regulations like advisories superimposed on screen during television programs that display products in exchange for payments.
In letters to the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the Freedom to Advertise Coalition in Washington argued against the demands by Commercial Alert, which the coalition said "border on the ludicrous" and would make television "virtually unwatchable." The coalition is made up of industry associations like the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers.
Commercial Alert, based in Portland, Ore., had asked both commissions to require the regulations for all product-placement deals. The trade commission said it would review the petition to determine if action was warranted.
NYT:
... Wipo says a consensus exists on the need to upgrade broadcasters' rights to take account of technological developments including cable and distribution of programmes over the internet. A growing signal piracy problem and the hacking of digital television subscriber codes have also increased pressure from broadcasters for improved protection.
Digital transmission makes piracy easy because computers can download perfect reproductions of programmes for onward transmission via the internet or for copying on to DVDs.
Updated pacts extending rights for music performers and record companies to the internet were adopted in 1996 - but broadcasters and audio-visual performers continue to be covered by a 1961 treaty known as the Rome convention, which the US has never ratified.
Discussions on the rights of audio-visual performers have stalled over transatlantic differences on how these rights can be acquired by producers, but talks on broadcasters' rights have progressed since 1997.
The most contentious issues centre on the level of rights broadcasters should enjoy and whether webcasting programmes exclusively through the internet should be covered as well as traditional and cable broadcasters (which may also transmit web programmes).
NYT:
... Mr. Thornton is one of more than 43 million people in the United States who lack health insurance, and their numbers are rapidly increasing because of ever soaring cost and job losses. Many states, including Texas, are also cutting back on subsidies for health care, further increasing the number of people with no coverage.
The majority of the uninsured are neither poor by official standards nor unemployed. They are accountants like Mr. Thornton, employees of small businesses, civil servants, single working mothers and those working part time or on contract.
"Now it's hitting people who look like you and me, dress like you and me, drive nice cars and live in nice houses but can't afford $1,000 a month for health insurance for their families," said R. King Hillier, director of legislative relations for Harris County, which includes Houston.
Paying for health insurance is becoming a middle-class problem, and not just here. "After paying for health insurance, you take home less than minimum wage," says a poster in New York City subways sponsored by Working Today, a nonprofit agency that offers health insurance to independent contractors in New York. "Welcome to middle-class poverty." In Southern California, 70,000 supermarket workers have been on strike for five weeks over plans to cut their health benefits.
The insurance crisis is especially visible in Texas, which has the highest proportion of uninsured in the country — almost one in every four residents. The state has a large population of immigrants; its labor market is dominated by low-wage service sector jobs, and it has a higher than average number of small businesses, which are less likely to provide health benefits because they pay higher insurance costs than large companies.
NYT:
It has been a busy year for what you might call lifestyle terrorism. S.U.V.'s were blown up, set ablaze and otherwise vandalized in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Texas. A homemade incendiary device was found at a spring-water pumping station in western Michigan — a comment, the group claiming responsibility said, on the commodification of water.
More recently, activists with statements to make on topics from urban sprawl and animal rights to gas-guzzling recreational vehicles set fire to a condominium complex under construction in San Diego, fire-bombed a Hummer dealership east of Los Angeles, exploded homemade bombs at biotech and cosmetics companies, and vandalized the home of a famous chef known for his foie gras, to protest the force-feeding of ducks.
Things have gone way beyond trees.
Although the frequency of such acts has ebbed and flowed for years, experts who track extremist activity regard the recent surge as a potentially ominous upping of the ante. This suggests, they say, that at least some part of the eco-fringe is being driven, rather than inhibited, by the post-Sept. 11 vigilance against any kind of political crime, even if it is directed against property, not people. The attacks have legislative wheels turning and mainstream environmentalists alarmed about possible damage to their causes.
"In the last two years the movement seems to be gaining momentum," said Gary A. Ackerman, senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., whose two-year study of environmental extremism will be published in a coming issue of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. "The ideology of viewing humans as no more important than animals or the environment leaves open the possibility of making bigger statements," he said. "They're not the devil incarnate, but they're not benign either."
Honolulu Advertiser:
... So how does the church nurture a generation of singles who may be disaffected by organized religion? The Internet, for one. Thousands of Christian singles are flocking to Christian-based matchmaking services looking for spiritually correct connections.
Then there's the good, old-fashioned youth ministries and church socials.
PCMag:
Of the PCs you look at this and holiday season, many of the offerings in the $1,000 to $2,000 range will be running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004. Combining all the features of a Windows PC with a TV tuner, DVD player (and often DVD burner), personal video recorder (PVR), and media hub (to store and play music, photo, and video files), Media Center PCs scream, "Buy me as the big family gift!"
The good news is that almost every major PC maker now offers a Media Center model, and these machines come with more features at lower prices than they did a year ago. It's possible to buy a Media Center PC for just under $1,000 (complete systems that are more nicely equipped cost about $2,000). That's $500 to $1,000 cheaper than the fall 2002 offerings.
As we said in the First Looks review of the Windows XP Media Center 2004 in our issue of October 28, television picture quality remains the sticking point. The tuners in the four Media Center PCs we tested for this story are better than they were a year ago, but we still found the images less crisp than is typically delivered by a standard TV's built-in tuner. The quality is like watching a movie on VHS.
That said, DVD playback quality is comparable with a typical set-top DVD player, and the PVR software built into the Media Center OS is easy to use. And unlike TiVo, there's no subscription fee.
ADAge:
Media advertising does the worst job of any marketing discipline in proving return on investment and network TV is the worst of those media, according to an exclusive survey of leading advertisers.
... Media advertising was cited by more than one in four respondents as the worst for proving ROI, followed by public relations, at 25%. Product placement was third with 13%.
The top media offender was network TV. Despite inventory sellouts and spiraling rates during the recent upfront, it was chosen by 32% of respondents as the worst medium for proving ROI. Non-network TV was seen in a better light; cable was cited by only 5% of respondents as doing the worst job of proving ROI, while spot TV was chosen by 3% and syndicated TV by 2%. Larger spenders are more likely to blast network TV; 44% of advertisers with budgets over $100 million ranked it as the worst medium.
Least favored after network TV for proving ROI was out-of-home advertising (cited by 14%), followed by Internet and radio (8% each), then newspapers and magazines (7% each).
Second best: the Internet
Overwhelmingly seen as best medium for proving ROI is direct mail, cited by 42% of respondents, more than a 2-to-1 ratio over the second-best medium, the Internet, at 19%. No other media discipline was cited by more than one in ten respondents.
ADAge:
... In fact, TiVo and other PVRs are a boon to marketers. It's only the broadcast networks that are in trouble.
The good news: PVRs allow viewers to skip TV commercials. You read that right. It's good news. Marketers have needed some form of tough love to wean them from "spot-centric" marketing -- a reflexively easy strategy for companies to follow, but one premised on waste, appropriate perhaps when markets are immature and growing exponentially (as in the two decades after World War II) but not for mature markets in times of stress.
... Marketers know it. As this magazine reported in its lead story on Oct. 13, an exclusive Ad Age survey supported by the Association of National Advertisers found that "media advertising does the worst job of any marketing discipline in proving return on investment and network TV is the worst of those media."
But PVRs are good news for positive reasons as well. They change the marketing-entertainment dynamic in a way that can benefit both marketers and consumers. Because PVRs can be used to bring programming -- and even entire "micro-networks" -- to audiences, marketers can collaborate directly with entertainment companies to craft and deliver offerings to specific segments, without having to give pieces of the pie away to mere intermediaries. Such PVR programming (first posited in this space on Oct. 16, 2000) has advantages broadcasting cannot match: It is opt-in, and it is measurable -- the reasons behind Coca-Cola Co.'s decision, disclosed earlier this month, to offer an original, 25-minute music program to TiVo subscribers.
Embedded PVRs
Similar announcements will likely become familiar in the months to come as cable and satellite TV operators roll out the newest generation of set-top boxes with PVRs embedded. (If Coke can distribute its own music programming, why can't Progresso do an Italian cooking show, or Gillette send the Rugby Channel directly to viewers?) This fall, Time Warner -- the largest media company without a major broadcast TV network to protect -- entered the fray, rolling out the new Scientific Atlanta 8000 box in New York and other cable markets. Because of this development, analysts now estimate PVRs will be in one-quarter of TV households within four years
ARNNET:
The next step is the home media server, says Rob Pait, the director of global consumer electronics marketing at Seagate. This takes the concept of the intelligent DVR and adds the ability to control and catalogue any digital media.
"I see a few technologies converging, such as online digital music purchasing and wireless home video over 802.11g networks," Pait says. "The high end trend is to have one home media server per house and control all the media on it from any TV. In the future it could be e-books and e-newspapers too."
The hard disks used in this type of server are different from those used in data applications, he adds. "With a PC drive, you want to push as big a burst out as possible, but for digital media it's how consistently you can match the throughput to the application's needs. If you fill the buffer too fast, it rejects data and the drive has to resend it."
Hard disk manufacturers have offered tweaked AV (audio-visual) drives for years, but the tweaks were proprietary. That is changing now, as earlier this summer ANSI's T13 committee approved a new standard command set to support streaming media applications.
This standard will make it easier to develop software for new devices, Pait says: "DVRs have a hundred different operating systems and environments - Microsoft is trying to move in but so are others. Most development is still in-house."
He adds, "80GB is the sweetspot for DVRs, 40GB is entry level, and there's a lot of interest in 160GB drives."
The immediate challenge is high definition TV (HDTV), as it requires nine times the bandwidth of conventional TV. This needs faster hard disk interfaces such as Serial-ATA 2, and either bigger drives or multi-drive systems.
SMH.com:
Kazaa publisher and distributor Sharman Networks has said it will sell a full-length feature film online using secure peer-to-peer technology.
A media release said a distribution agreement between Sharman's partner Altnet and filmmaker Aum Creates would make the full-length Hindi-language thriller Supari available for purchase to Kazaa's estimated 60 million users worldwide for $US2.99.
The release said Altnet's technology allowed Aum Creates to be paid each time the movie file was shared and purchased via Kazaa.
Kazaa users can also download free movie trailers, production footage and music videos, as well as purchase songs from the movie soundtrack for 90 US cents each.
Nikki Hemming, the chief executive officer of Sharman, said P2P technology offered the film industry a huge opportunity to massively enhance its distribution and generate revenue.
Singapore Times:
... Mobloggers use mobile devices like mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA) and laptops to post up-to-the-minute updates wirelessly on their blogs sites from wherever they are. And since many mobile devices now have built-in digital cameras, snapshots of their daily lives make up a huge chunk of the moblogger's daily posts.
Do a search with the word 'moblog' on Google, and you'll be invited to share in the lives of thousands of mobloggers - from inane entries to more poignant ones like a car accident where a child was hit crossing the road.
Since its first blip on the Web radar less than a year ago, the popularity of moblogging has been quickly picking up speed.
Mr Todd Courtois, creator of a free moblogging tool for mobile devices called Kablog, believes it is the spontaneous element of moblogging that has got regular bloggers hooked.
'When blogging first started, people thought of it as a kind of online diary or journal where you might write down your thoughts at the end of the day,' said Mr Courtois, a software developer.
'But now that moblogging has brought a sense of immediacy to blogging, it's really about documenting the moment, documenting what you and your friends are doing right now. Moblogging brings freshness to blogging.'
Miss H.L. Goh, a 20-something administrator, is one of many Singaporeans bitten by the moblogging bug.
'Sometimes you are inspired to write something while on the go, but you can't write it down on paper to save for later because you just have to blog about it,' said Miss Goh, who writes under the pseudonym Idle Days.
'It's a way for the average person to let their opinions be known to friends or strangers, which may be difficult to say in words.'
Daily Times:
Online advertising revenue in Asia is projected to grow more than 400 percent to $1.62 billion by 2007 from $304.3 million in 2002, International Data Corporation (IDC) said Thursday.
Search advertisements and online classified advertising will power the growth, said IDC in a press statement.
“The trend among consumers during the next three years will be to search online for information, whereas in the past they would ruffle through a newspaper or the yellow pages,” said Nathan Midler, manager research at IDC. “Recognizing a shift in consumer habits, savvy Asian media organizations are already investing in internet technologies to integrate internet advertising with their business operations.”
Forbes:
In move that could touch off a wider price war, Comcast Corp. the nation's largest cable operator, has begun steeply discounting its high-speed Internet service in certain areas to steal lucrative customers from the Baby Bells.
Comcast is targeting customers who use fast Web connections over traditional phone lines, known as digital subscriber lines, in certain Verizon and SBC Communications territories in California, Illinois and Maryland. Comcast is offering high-speed Internet service for $19.95 for the first 12 months if they switch.
A Comcast spokesperson stressed the offer was limited in scope, targeted by e-mail to existing DSL customers. Comcast's regular broadband rate is $42.95.
The "DSL Switch Campaign," as it is known, is analogous to the "dish win-back" campaigns the cable industry has used to compete against satellite broadcasters DirecTV and Echostar.
"They're going to compete on broadband just like they did on the video side," said Kaufman Bros. cable analyst Mark May, who predicts cable prices for new customers will decrease 10 percent, on average, in the coming year.
InfoWorld:
... Hispanics spent an average of 26.5 hours online in September 2003, up 24 percent compared with October 2002, while visiting on average 30 percent more pages, an indication that "the Internet is playing an increasingly important role in Hispanics' lives," the market researcher said a statement Wednesday.
The study also reiterated that companies must have content in English and Spanish in order to fully serve U.S. Hispanics, 52 percent of which prefer sites in English and 21 percent in Spanish. The remaining 28 percent are bilingual and have no preference.
Time Warner nabbed first place in reaching U.S. Hispanics by drawing 76 percent of them (9.7 million) to its network of Web sites in September. It was closely followed by Yahoo (9.6 million) and Microsoft (9.4 million).
Among Spanish-language sites, Terra Networks SA's network of sites ranked first among U.S. Hispanics in September, followed by Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft's YupiMSN.
The study also found a significant increase in online banking use among U.S. Hispanics.
There were about 12.6 million U.S. Hispanic Internet users as of September 2003, up about 6 percent from October 2002, a comScore Media Metrix spokesman said.
WorldPress.org:
Cut off from government funding but still run by the state, China Central Television (CCTV)—the country’s only national network—has run a completely uncensored foreign television series for the first time. Band of Brothers, co-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, is not some light-hearted family drama or love saga—it’s an Emmy award-winning serious World War II epic.
... Any young Chinese person may have grown up watching and loving Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Their enthusiasm for American television seems to have grown only stronger over the years. Shortly after Band of Brothers premiered on Oct. 25, bulletin boards and Internet chatrooms were filled with lively discussions about the show. “This is an incredible piece of work: American television can be addictive!” one viewer commented on the bulletin board of the popular Beijing-based portal www.sina.com. The mainstream Chinese media was quick to catch on. Major newspapers, especially the youth-oriented and urban evening papers, devoted considerable space to the show, with topics ranging from Tom Hanks’ serendipitous discovery of the Ambrose book to CCTV’s hard-nosed negotiation with Warner Bros. over the deal.
... To the horror of many Hollywood studios, their popular TV shows have long made their way to China in the form of pirated DVDs. As in the United States, Sex and the City is Chinese urban women’s favorite, while 24 hours is a hit among men. Neither show has been officially imported.
Now that the CCTV version of Band of Brothers has further whetted people’s appetite for American television, the Chinese are clamoring for more. An Oct. 30 story in Business Times/Shidai Shangbao reported that early orders for the official Band of Brothers DVD, to be released by Warner Bros. in partnership with CCTV, have reached a record high. Shidai Shangbao saw this as “an indication that pirated DVDs wouldn’t have been so popular in China if the Chinese film and television market had been more open.”
Importing foreign television series might be pretty straightforward business practice in many countries. But in China, where the entertainment market is still comparatively closed, it involves a complicated process to obtain bureaucratic approval. The Chinese Communist Party has made a clear distinction between television and film in terms of their role as propaganda organs. Viewing film as a largely non-threatening cultural medium, Beijing is often willing to import crowd-pleasing Hollywood blockbusters to “enrich the masses’ cultural life.”
Online Journalism Review:
The rapid spread of Internet cafes, wireless phones and online chat has given the Chinese unprecedented freedom of expression and access to "unofficial" information. But the government recently seized control of the Internet cafes and is making other moves to reign in those new freedoms.
You might not have the highest opinion of the lowly online chat room. Perhaps your experience is colored by teenagers flaming each other, old men posing as young girls or a seamy vibe reminiscent of the neighborhood pickup bar.
But in China, online forums and e-mail lists are the lifeblood of an underground movement of journalists and citizens who are sharing information the Chinese government would rather suppress.
China recently developed a vast new technology infrastructure that brought the Internet and wireless phones to millions of people. With these tools came a new ability to read alternate news sources like the BBC and The New York Times, and to discuss politics and other taboo subjects with each other -- and with others around the globe.
China has tried to limit these new freedoms by blocking sites and monitoring online discussions, but as more users go online, controlling access to information and freedom of expression grows increasingly difficult. An estimated 70 million people use the Internet in China; there are 200 million mobile phones in use China.
Canada.com:
CanWest Global Communications Corp. will transform itself from a media company to a marketing company in order to adapt to changing technology and markets, chief executive Leonard Asper said yesterday.
In a speech to the Economic Club of Ontario, Asper said technology is taking viewers away from conventional television, and that is among the main reasons CanWest has diversified from its broadcast roots into print.
CanWest Global owns a chain of daily newspapers, including The Province, the Vancouver Sun and the National Post, and is building a radio and outdoor advertising division and developing its Canada.com web portal.
Asper said the company wants to allow viewers decide when, where and how they see news and entertainment.
For example, digital cable and satellite viewers can now pick up shows intended for audiences in other provinces if the time suits them.
"For media companies, this has changed our world," said Asper.
BruneiDirect:
... Some evidence exists that games stimulate the same areas in the brain as alcohol and other drugs, psychologists, sociologists and others were told at a conference.
But unlike the addictive substances, there was no medicine to deal with compulsive gaming behavior, they heard.
"Is (the popular online game) Everquest addictive? Well, it's no more addictive than school or work. The time invested in those also make them addictive," said Florence Chee, a research student at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Scientific interest in the multi-billion dollar computer games industry has mushroomed in recent years, after teenagers in several countries killed themselves and others after playing violent games.
Economic Times:
The list of top ten toys, conducted by Yahooligans (http://www.yahooligans.com), was compiled from 130,000 votes from kids aged 7 to 12 years old.
The top 10 toys in order of popularity: 1. Xbox: Microsoft's video game console.
2. Game Boy Advance SP: An updated version of Nintendo's popular handheld video game system. The screen is foldable and backlit.
3. PlayStation 2 System: Sony's video game playing console.
4. Sty'l It Bratz Dana: One of the newest dolls from MGA Entertainment.
5. Bounce Around Room: An inflatable room for kids to jump in. Inflates in 45 seconds. By Spin Master.
6. The Dog Feature Plush Beagle: A barking, tail wagging tail Beagle from Play Along's The Dog collectible line.
7. Bratz Karaoke with TV Screen: MGA Entertainment's karaoke machine, includes a video camera.
8. Real Meal Oven: Kids can make chocolate chip cookies, soft pretzels and macaroni and cheese with Hasbro's miniature oven.
9. Fur Real Go Go, Puppy: Hasbro's electronic plush puppy that has movements, sound effects and mannerisms like a real dog.
10. My Scene Chillin' Out Barbie: A hipper version of Mattel's Barbie for older girls.
JoongAngDaily:
Online game providers cannot collect money from minors if their parents have not given the children permission to buy the games.
A special committee affiliated with the Ministry of Information and Communication imposed a fine of 24 million won ($20,440) yesterday on Nexon, a game company that failed to comply with the committee¡¯s ruling last year that requires parents¡¯ permission before children are allowed to play online games.
The committee yesterday ordered 14 online game providers, caught for the first time this year, to correct their practices and warned that they would face fines of tens of million