Technology360

Radio for the deaf and hard-of-hearing

On election night, National Public Radio Labs, Harris Corp., Towson University, WAMU and WGBH's Media Access Group are teaming up to simulcast captioned NPR coverage of that night's results to the deaf and hard-of-hearing.  The demo will take place in at NPR here in Washington (via WAMU's digital transmission) and at NPR member stations Colorado Public Radio (Denver), KJZZ (Phoenix), WGBH (Boston), and WTMD (Baltimore).  On election night, anyone can view the captioning at www.npr.org and www.harris.com.  Link:  NPR news release.  --Dennis

The remote control as platform

I've written here before about how, increasingly, remote controls need to be considered media platforms in their own right rather than mere appendages to other devices.  The wonderfully intuitive TiVo remote is one example and Nintendo's Wii remote is another (the Comcast DVR remote is IMHO a frustrating counter-example).

Pictured to the right is the Freespace™ from Hillcrest Labs.  The Washington Post Thursday carried a story about how Hillcrest had filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and a suit against Nintendo in U.S. District Court for patent infringement.  The gadget blog, Gizmodo, had more details, and earlier had a very positive review about Hillcrest's loop-shaped remote control which characterized it as better than the Wii.

I don't know anything about the merits of this complaint, but think there's a bunch of room for innovation in this space.  Now, if they can just get Comcast to license them.  --Dennis

Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition

My favorite toy is Nokia's N810, a diminutive WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled Linux-based touchscreen tablet computer.  It connects super-easily to hotspots, has a decent if unremarkable pair of speakers, and runs a wide variety of open source Maemo applications.

Of late, I've used it a few times with my Verizon EVDO USB card, a Cradlepoint Technology battery-operated wireless router, and my Jeep's sound system to create a mobile Internet radio (together, they're smaller than most portable radios).  I've driven from downtown Washington, DC to both Dulles and BWI airports listening to my former station in Washington State without a dropout.

Now I see that Nokia has introduced in the U.S. a WiMAX edition of the N810, and better yet it supports the 802.16e, the mobile flavor of WiMAX.  It's intended for use on Sprint's Xohm network (Washington, DC will be, or perhaps already is, a test market).  So since its range should be similar to EVDO when it's rolled out, one might be able to omit the mobile router.  According to the Xohm article in Wikipedia, the intent is to merge it with Clearwire.  I was a Clearwire customer back in the Northwest and loved it.  It uses an early flavor of WiMAX and I was able to get good WISP service five miles from the transmitter using only a small indoor antenna perched in a window.

Lastly, my Jeep's sound system already has a USB port on the front panel, and Cradlepoint's technology makes connecting 3G or 4G cards very easy, so adding EVDO or WiMAX capability to car radios is just a matter of software and should be a no-brainer.  I've written here previously that I think a great path to that is marrying it with HD Radios using SMIL and listeners can be their own programmers.  --Dennis

"Defeat Dementia" campaign

The tech community has a wonderfully constructive attitude about solving the world's problems in ways that apply its methods to things that might otherwise seem unorthodox.  One of my great professional privileges was meeting and working for two years on Open Media Network with Silicon Valley legend Mike Homer, who has been laid low for more than a year with a fast-moving dementia called Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD).  Mike's friends in the tech community raised $7 million for CJD research at the University of California San Francisco.  Now, the UCSF Memory and Aging Center has entered a partnership with YouTube kicking off UCSF's "Defeat Dementia" campaign, inspired by Mike's situation but encompassing several other dementias that devastate victims' lives and their families across the globe.

All Things Digital/BoomTown's Kara Swisher has a very nice column on this today and it has several links to information about this effort.  Please take the time to check it out.  Link:  BoomTown.  --Dennis

The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007

Blogger John Bracken, whose day job is at the MacArthur Foundation, sent me and a bunch of others a request to name the most influential media writing of 2007.  In spite of a reminder, I couldn't come up with anything on a par with Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that I and many others nominated last year.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur was quite influential, largely as a provocation to the new media cognoscenti, and David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous has also been influential for more positive reasons.  Both are in my to-read stack, but I hadn't gotten to either of them so didn't feel comfortable nominating them.

Fortunately, others on John's list weren't as lacking in imagination as I and this year he's put together another great list.  I look forward to exploring the ones I've not yet read.  --Dennis

First Monday has moved

The excellent online peer-reviewed journal about the Internet, First Monday, has moved from www.firstmonday.org to Open Journal Systems at the University if Illinois at Chicago.  Its new (unmemorizable) URL is www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ and it now requires a free registration.  Its archives have been moved here also.  In a big step forward, it now has RSS and Atom feeds, so I've subscribed in Bloglines and will be seeing new things as they're posted rather than every few months when I happen to remember I haven't visited the site in awhile. 

From the September 2007 number, check out Desperately seeking the consumer: Personalized search engines and the commercial exploitation of user data by Theo Röhle.  Here's the abstract:

With reference to surveillance studies theory, this paper critically assesses the role of personalized search engines as a mediator between advertisers and users. It first sketches the economic and technical background of online marketing and personalized searches. Then, it engages in an in–depth discussion of two examples of personalized search engines with regard to the data collection process used and the way in which this data is used for advertising purposes. The discussion shows that users’ information needs, as well as their personal data, are subject to a growing pressure in terms of commercial exploitation. Essentially, search engines now fulfill the task of translating information needs into consumption needs.

Link:  First Monday.  --Dennis

Video-to-go on a thumb drive

Here's an interesting idea.  Porto Media lets you download a movie to a thumb drive from a kiosk or ATM in about a half-minute.  IBM has a video profile (transcript also).  Link:  IBM.  --Dennis

Why "Good Enough" Is Good Enough

In an article that reinforces one of Clayton Christensen's observations, Stephen Baker writes:

... Are communications getting worse? Not by a long shot.  We're surrounded by miraculous machines and services, most of them calibrated to a level software engineers have long called "good enough."  In the right circumstances, good enough is great for the entire economy.  A marketplace that's not hung up on fail-safe standards is open to risk and innovation, and drives down prices. Ever since the dawn of the PC--the archetype for a good-enough machine--inventors have been freer than ever to piece together and launch their visions.  Some are brilliant, some are half-baked, many are a blend of the two. A precious few are up and running 99.999% of the time--Bell's old standard. But they cost far less to build.  ¶   The rise of good-enough technology raises different questions for do-it-yourselfers and major corporations alike.  It's no longer whether we can afford a technology, but more often whether we can afford the disruption if and when it fails.  Is it critical?  Do we have backup in place?  Many of us face this question every time we venture from our office with a cell phone.  We don't have "one machine that works all the time," says Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda Inc., a New York advertising company.  "We have lots of alternatives that work most of the time. ...

Link:  Business Week.  --Dennis

Single-frequency network proposed for over-the-air transmission in New York City

ION Media Networks (formerly Paxson Communications Corp.) and Richland Towers have announced the completion of successful testing of a single-frequency network (SFN) for New York City.  In brief, a SFN uses multiple synchronized transmitters at different locations, operating on the same frequency, to replicate the coverage of a traditional "big stick" single-transmitter system.  At least one such system for digital television broadcasting is operating in an initial configuration for public television station WPSX at Pennsylvania State University.  From the ION press release:

... The Richland DTx single frequency network consists of a main, high-powered “hub” site in West Orange, N.J., providing coverage to most of the market area; and five low-power DTxT sites that serve the remainder of the area. Multiple rounds of testing were conducted at the main West Orange site and a transmitter site at 4 Times Square in Manhattan. The test teams obtained field measurements from the two sites and compared them to measurements taken from five stations transmitting from the Empire State Building. Field strength, signal quality, reception and all other parameters for the DTx network were comparable to or better than those from the Empire State stations. The test results are being made available to other interested broadcasters. ...

Link to the related article in Broadcast Engineering. 

Public television stations frequently operate with transmitters that are not located at the cluster of antennas used by commercial television stations in a market (my Pullman, Washington station is one such) and therefore operate at a disadvantage in terms of receive antenna orientation.  SFNs offer a solution to this problem.  --Dennis

Transition to Media Systems Engineering

It's a rare broadcast engineer who becomes a GM, and if the GM didn't come up by that route, the engineering department is pretty mysterious.  Still, most CEOs are aware of the sea change in broadcasting technology toward information technology.  In an interesting unsigned article in Broadcast Engineering, the author states that "neither broadcast engineering nor IT are absorbing the other; in reality a new engineering discipline is being born."

Still, the changes underway have a profound impact on the capabilities and capitalization requirements of an organization.  The author discusses how using the Capability Maturity Model and Six Sigma can help broadcasting management understand and manage this development.  The article ends with a half dozen links to resources on these two models.

Link:  Broadcast Engineering.  Thanks to Ralph Hogan for the tip.  --Dennis