Apple and Google have been attempting for years to entice customers to ditch cable television for set top boxes that deliver TV shows, movies and more via the internet. For the past year or so, Intel has also quietly been working on a top-secret set-top box that could not only be better than what Apple, Google, and even Microsoft offer today, but also kill the cable industry as we know it.
This set-top box, said by industry insiders to be available to a limited beta of customers in March, will offer cable channels delivered “over the top” to televisions anywhere there is an Internet connection regardless of provider. (Microsoft Mediaroom, for example, requires AT&T’s service, and Xbox has limited offerings for Comcast and FiOS customers). For the first time, consumers will be able to subscribe to content per channel, unlike bundled cable services, and you may also be able to subscribe per show as well. Intel’s set-top box will also have access to Intel’s already existing app marketplace for apps, casual games, and video on demand. Leveraging the speed of current broadband, and the vast shared resources of the cloud, Intel plans to give customers the ability to use “Cloud DVR”, a feature intended to allow users to watch any past TV show at any time, without the need to record it ahead of time, pause live tv, and rewind shows in progress.
Intel had hoped that GoogleTV and AppleTV would spur demand for Intel chips, but that having failed they poached much of Microsoft’s Mediaroom team. Much of the direction of Mediaroom came from the leadership of Jim Baldwin, who is now VP of this Intel initiative.
At Microsoft, Jim demonstrated that the technology to enable customers to watch TV over the internet using any device was feasible, but content licensing, the goals of ISP’s and bandwidth limitations previously stood in the way.
“In creating Mediaroom, we brought together key emerging technologies to create the world’s most modern television system: better video compression, higher access network bandwidth, lower cost single-chip devices, cloud computing; and added to it some great software to make it all work together seamlessly with a great user experience. Our goal was to provide technology to operators that will continue to delight consumers as the world of internet-delivered content unfolds.”
According to an Intel job posting, Jim joined Microsoft in 1997 as a part of the WebTV acquisition, and Jim has been a key architect of digital video technology for various products including the WebTV Plus, Echostar Dishplayer, DirecTV UltimateTV and Microsoft TV.
Along with hiring the right key players with the expertise needed to develop a revolutionary set-top box, Intel also has the technology to create a product unlike its competitors. Intel has been providing chips for set top boxes since the days of Akimbo, which had a similar vision as far back as 2005. Back then, though, no one had digital rights to content – and up until now, no one wanted to risk unbundling the channels. This is clearly the biggest barrier for Intel – but since Intel is used to betting billions on chip design, it has allocated a budget significantly larger than Apple or Google’s. While Silicon Valley measures investments in tens of millions, Hollywood often drops more than $100 million into a single movie. Intel came to the table knowing this, and so was able to negotiate the licensing agreements with Hollywood that other tech giants have never been able to.
Intel has made it clear to Hollywood they are serious about this product and dedicated to its longevity. Intel is also prepared to invest heavily in making it a success. In contrast, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have always viewed Hollywood as something of a hobby. (Steve Jobs even said as much of Apple TV). As Intel has approached Hollywood with much more dedication (and dollars), this is likely the single reason that Intel, more than any company before it, has the potential to really bring to consumers the things we have never seen in online content before, such as live sports, release schedules that match broadcast, and first episode through current libraries for video on demand.
Intel is scheduled to hold a press event at CES, where Intel will likely officially announce this new product. However, while industry insiders say a working version is scheduled to be ready for CES, it will likely be only for limited demos.
Why Intel's New IPTV Service Will Do What Google, Apple, and Microsoft Can't - Forbes
Monday, December 31, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf
SAN FRANCISCO — It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft’s stronghold — businesses.
But his prime motive in choosing Google, he said, was online collaboration. “As people in their daily lives become more electronically social, they want to bring that into the office,” Mr. Nielsen said. “Video is more appealing than a written letter.”
Google, he said, is “constantly making it better for teams to work, inside and outside the company, with controlled access.”
By QUENTIN HARDY
Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf - NYTimes.com
Virginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times
Jim Nielsen, center, of Shaw Industries calculated that using Google instead of similar Microsoft products would cost, over seven years, about one-thirteenth Microsoft’s price.
Google’s software for businesses, Google Apps, consists of applications for document writing, collaboration, and text and video communications — all cloud-based, so that none of the software is on an office worker’s computer. Google has been promoting the idea for more than six years, and it seemed that it was going to appeal mostly to small businesses and tech start-ups.
But the notion is catching on with larger enterprises. In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.
One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.
Many companies that sell software over the cloud add features without raising prices, but also break from traditional industry practice by rarely offering discounts from the list price.
Microsoft’s Office suite of software, which does not include e-mail, is installed on a desktop PC or laptop. In 2013, the list price for businesses will be $400 per computer, but many companies pay half that after negotiating a volume deal.
At the same time, Microsoft has built its business on raising prices for extra features and services. The 2013 version of Office, for example, costs up to $50 more than its predecessor.
“Google is getting traction” on Microsoft, said Melissa Webster, an analyst with IDC. “Its ‘good enough’ product has become pretty good. It looks like 2013 is going to be the year for content and collaboration in the cloud.”
Microsoft has also jumped on the office-in-the-cloud trend. In June 2011, it released Office 365, and now offers its software in both a cloud version and a hybrid version that uses cloud computing and conventional servers. Office 365 starts at a list price of $72 a year, per person, and can cost as much as $240 a person annually, in versions that offer many more features and software development capabilities. Microsoft says it offers more than Google for the money, but the product has not won many converts from Google.
In a recent report, Gartner, the information technology research company, called Google “the only strong competitor” to Microsoft in cloud-based business productivity software, though it warned that “enterprise concerns may not be of paramount importance to the search giant.”
Google is tight-lipped about how many people use Google Apps, saying only that in June more than five million businesses were using it, up from four million in late 2011. Almost all these companies are tiny, but in early December Google announced that even companies with fewer than 10 employees, which used to get Google Apps free, would have to pay.
Google’s revenue from Apps, according to a former executive who asked not to be named in order to maintain good relations with Google, amounted to perhaps $1 billion of the $37.9 billion Google earned in 2011.
Shaw Industries, a carpet maker in Dalton, Ga., with about 30,000 employees, switched to Google Apps this year for communication tools like e-mail and videoconferencing. Jim Nielsen, the company’s manager of enterprise technology, calculated that using Google instead of similar Microsoft products would cost, over seven years, about one-thirteenth Microsoft’s price.
Shaw is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, run by Warren E. Buffett, but the close friendship of Mr. Buffett and Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, did not sway Mr. Nielsen. “When you add it up, the numbers are pretty compelling,” he said.
In addition to the lower price, Google has simplicity in pricing. Mr. Nielsen said he had to sort through 11 pricing models to figure out what he would pay Microsoft.
But his prime motive in choosing Google, he said, was online collaboration. “As people in their daily lives become more electronically social, they want to bring that into the office,” Mr. Nielsen said. “Video is more appealing than a written letter.”
Google, he said, is “constantly making it better for teams to work, inside and outside the company, with controlled access.”
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat. Google “has not yet shown they are truly serious,” said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. “From the outside, they are an advertising company.” In 2011, 96 percent of Google’s revenue came from advertising.
Even though Microsoft sells a similar product, she said most companies did not want to depend exclusively on clouds for documents and communication. Microsoft now has some of its own workers entirely online, she said, while others use both local computers and the cloud, to get a feel for how various companies work.
Although she would not break out numbers, Ms. White said Office 365 was “on track to be our fastest-growing business.” She said that Google, to be a threat, would need to “provide a quality enterprise experience” in areas like “privacy, data handling and security.”
But according to the General Services Administration, out of 42 federal government contracts for which Google and Microsoft competed in 2012, Google won 23 deals, and Microsoft 10. The rest went to another company, Zimbra, which is owned by VMware, a maker of cloud software.
Microsoft’s biggest and most profitable sector, its business division, brought in nearly $24 billion in the 2012 fiscal year that ended in June. Almost none of that came from Office 365, but from the familiar older-style software that depends on computers located within the corporation.
As the two behemoths slug it out in the enterprise market, their cloud-computing software is changing the way businesses operate. Internet-based computing makes it easier to communicate both within and outside a company. Fixing software and adding features can be done automatically, the way consumers get the latest version of Facebook when they go to its site.
“People were looking for cheap e-mail at first, but now it’s about collaboration, calendaring and data storage online,” said Ms. Webster of IDC. Over time, her firm says, software revenue will be at least 50 percent from the cloud, which could challenge the complex way Microsoft prices and discounts its products.
Ms. White, the Microsoft manager, said Google “helped amplify a lot of the conversation around cloud productivity.” That is a far cry from last February, when Microsoft put a video on Google’s YouTube Web site lampooning Google with a parody of the old television show “Moonlighting.”
Google, the video suggested, would automatically change around a buyer’s software. But cloud-based software is supposed to issue automatic updates and feature changes. Microsoft has issued several updates to Office 365, though, unlike Google, it lets customers delay the changes for up to a year.
By QUENTIN HARDY
Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf - NYTimes.com
World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China
HONG KONG — China began service on Wednesday on the world’s longest high-speed rail line, covering a distance in eight hours roughly equal to New York to Key West, Florida, or from London across Europe to Riga or Belgrade.
By KEITH BRADSHER
World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China - NYTimes.com
Bullet trains traveling 300 kilometers an hour, or 186 miles an hour, began regular service between Beijing and Guangzhou, the main metropolis in southeastern China. Older trains still in service on a parallel rail line take 21 hours; Amtrak trains from New York to Miami, a shorter distance, still take nearly 30 hours.
Completion of the Beijing-Guangzhou route is the latest sign that China has resumed rapid construction of one of the world’s largest and most ambitious infrastructure projects, a network of four north-south routes and four east-west routes that span the country.
Lavish spending on the project has helped jump-start the Chinese economy twice: in 2009 during the global financial crisis and again this autumn, after a brief but sharp economic slowdown over the summer.
The hiring of as many as 100,000 workers per line has kept a lid on unemployment even as private sector construction has slowed down because of limits on real estate speculation. And the national network has helped reduce toxic air pollution in Chinese cities and curb demand for imported diesel, by freeing up a lot of capacity on older rail lines for freight trains to carry goods instead of heavily polluting trucks.
But the high-speed rail system has also been controversial in China. Debt to finance the construction has reached nearly 4 trillion renminbi, or $640 billion, making it one of the most visible reasons why total debt has been surging as a share of economic output in China, and approaching levels in the West.
The high-speed trains are also considerably expensive than the heavily subsidized older passenger trains. A second-class seat on the new bullet trains from Beijing to Guangzhou costs 865 renminbi, or $138, compared with 426 renminbi, or $69, for the cheapest bunk on one of the older trains, which also have narrow, uncomfortable seats for as little as 251 renminbi.
Worries about the high-speed network peaked in July 2011, when one high-speed train system plowed into the back of another near Wenzhou in southeastern China, killing 40 people.
A subsequent investigation blamed the crash on flawed signaling equipment. China had been operating high-speed trains at 350 kilometers an hour, or 217 miles an hour, and cut the top speed to the current rate in response to that crash.
The incident crystallized worries about the haste with which China has built its high-speed rail system. The first line, from Beijing to Tianjin, opened a week before the 2008 Olympics; a little over four years later, the country now has 9,349 kilometers, or 5,809 miles, of high-speed lines.
China’s aviation system has a good international reputation for safety, and its occasional deadly crashes have not attracted nearly as much attention. Transportation safety experts attribute the public’s fascination with the Wenzhou crash partly to the novelty of the system and partly to a distrust among many Chinese of what is perceived as a homegrown technology, in contrast with the Boeings and Airbus jets flown by Chinese airlines.
Japanese rail executives have complained, however, that the Chinese technology is mostly copied from them, an accusation that Chinese rail executives have strenuously denied.
The main alternative to trains for most Chinese lies in the country’s roads, which have a grim reputation by international standards. Periodic crashes of intercity buses kill dozens of people at a time, while crashes of private cars are frequent in a country where four-fifths of new cars are sold to first-time buyers, often with scant driving experience.
By KEITH BRADSHER
World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China - NYTimes.com
Monday, December 17, 2012
Twin NASA spacecraft deliberately crash into moon
Associated Press/NASA - This graphic provide by NASA shows the projected paths into the moon by spacecraft Ebb and Flow. The twin craft on Monday, Dec. 17, 2012, is expected to slam into a lunar mountain near
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — A pair of NASA spacecraft tumbled out of orbit around the moon and crashed back-to-back into the surface on Monday, ending a mission that peered into the lunar interior.
Engineers commanded the twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, to fire their engines and burn their remaining fuel. Ebb plunged first, slamming into a mountain near the moon's north pole. Its twin, Flow, followed about a half minute later and aimed for the same target.
By design, the final resting place was far away from the Apollo landing sites and other historical spots on the moon.
After the double impacts, mission chief scientist Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the spot has been named after team member Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, who died earlier this year.
"It's really cool to know that when you look up now at the moon there's this little corner of the moon that's named after Sally," said Ride's sister, Rev. Bear Ride, adding that she hoped schoolchildren will be inspired.
Since the crash site was in darkness, the final act was not visible from Earth. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon will pass over the mountain and attempt to photograph the skid marks left by the washing machine sized-spacecraft as they hit the surface at 3,800 mph.
After rocketing off the launch pad in September 2011, Ebb and Flow took a roundabout journey to the moon, arriving over the New Year's holiday on a gravity-mapping mission.
More than 100 missions have been flung to Earth's nearest neighbor since the dawn of the Space Age including NASA's six Apollo moon landings that put 12 astronauts on the surface.
The demise of Ebb and Flow comes on the same month as the 40th launch anniversary of Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon.
Ebb and Flow focused exclusively on measuring the moon's lumpy gravity field in a bid to learn more about its interior and early history. After flying in formation for months, they produced the most detailed gravity maps of any body in the solar system.
Secrets long held by the moon are spilling out. Ebb and Flow discovered that the lunar crust is much thinner than scientists had imagined. And it was severely battered by asteroids and comets in the early years of the solar system — more than previously realized.
Data so far also appeared to quash the theory that Earth once had two moons that collided and melded into the one we see today.
Besides a scientific return, the mission allowed students to take their own pictures of craters and other lunar features as part of collaboration with a science education company founded by Ride, who died in July of pancreatic cancer at age 61.
Scientists expect to sift through data from the $487 million mission for years.
Obtaining precise gravity calculations required the twins to circle low over the moon, which consumes a lot of fuel. During the primary mission, they flew about 35 miles above the lunar surface. After getting bonus data-collecting time, they lowered their altitude to 14 miles above the surface.
With their fuel tanks almost on empty, NASA devised a controlled crash to avoid contacting any of the treasured sites on the moon. Mission control at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory applauded when controllers lost signal from the spacecraft.
The last time the space agency intentionally fired manmade objects at the moon was in 2009, but it was for the sake of science. The crash was a public relations dud — spectators barely saw a faint flash — but the experiment proved that the moon contained water.
| Associated Press
Twin NASA spacecraft deliberately crash into moon
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Voyager 1 probe leaving solar system reaches "magnetic highway" exit
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - NASA's long-lived Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is heading out of the solar system, has reached a "magnetic highway" leading to interstellar space, scientists said on Monday.
Voyager 1 will be the first manmade object to leave the solar system.
Scientists believe Voyager 1 is in an area where the magnetic field lines from the sun are connecting with magnetic field lines from interstellar space. The phenomenon is causing highly energetic particles from distant supernova explosions and other cosmic events to zoom inside the solar system, while less-energetic solar particles exit.
"It's like a highway, letting particles in and out," lead Voyager scientist Ed Stone told reporters at an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
Scientists don't know how long it will take for the probe to cross the so-called "magnetic highway," but they believe it is the last layer of a complex boundary between the region of space under the sun's influence and interstellar space.
"Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years away," Stone said.
Voyager 1 hit the outer sphere of the solar system, a region called the heliosphere, in 2004 and passed into the heliosheath, where the supersonic stream of particles from the sun - the so-called "solar wind" - slowed down and became turbulent.
That phase of the journey lasted for 5.5 years. Then the solar wind stopped moving and the magnetic field strengthened.
Based on an instrument that measures charged particles, Voyager entered the magnetic highway on July 28, 2012. The region was in flux for about a month and stabilized on August 25.
Each time Voyager re-entered the highway, the magnetic field strengthened, but its direction remained unchanged. Scientists believe the direction of the magnetic field lines will shift when the probe finally enters interstellar space.
Other clues that Voyager has reached interstellar space could be the detection of low-energy cosmic rays and a dramatic tapering of the number of solar particles, Stone said.
Voyager 1 and a sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977 for the first flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Voyager 2, traveling on a different path out of the solar system, has experienced similar, though more gradual changes in its environment than Voyager 1. Scientists do not believe Voyager 2, which is about 9 billion miles (14.5 billion km) from Earth, has reached the magnetic highway.
(Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
By Irene Klotz | Reuters
Voyager 1 probe leaving solar system reaches "magnetic highway" exit
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