|
BROADCASTERS TARGET THE OFFICE WORKER
Broadcast television is eyeing its future, and sees offices full
of PCs. "As the TV marketplace continues to fragment and flatten,
broadcasters are looking at new ways to extend their reach," says
the president of UltimateTV. To do that, they're looking at all
those office workers stuck in front of all those PCs all day. Jeff
Garrard, executive producer for CNN Interactive, says if CNN can
reach people with information relevant to their work, via streaming
media on the Web, it will have maintained its reach, even if those
same people watch less CNN on TV at home. And on the Web, broadcasting
companies can run a lot of the content that ends up on the cutting
room floor -- a byproduct of the tyranny of 30-minute television
programming. Not only that, but TV companies can bring the kind
of production values to the Web that consumers have come to expect:
"They bring the level of quality people have assumed watching the
color-TV box at home for 30 years," says the president of Internet
Television Network. (TechWeb 12 Nov 98)
STUDY
PREDICTS CONTENT WILL COST
A report titled "Internet Service Providers, Proprietary Content,
and the Battle for Users' Dollars" says that as prices for Internet
access decrease, fees for information and other content on the Web
will increase. Prepared by the William Simon School of Management
in Rochester, NY, the report predicts that the rise in fees for
content will parallel the growth of "900" telephone services. In
addition, the study cites an increasing trend toward taxing Internet
access, which already is taxable in 10 states and District of Columbia.
(Information Week 9 Nov 98)
INFO
TECH WORKERS WOULD RATHER SWITCH
A survey from George Mason University indicates that information
technology workers are almost twice as likely as the general college-educated
population to switch careers, with one in three anticipating doing
so in the future. The survey polled 400 college graduates between
the ages of 30 and 55 who are currently employed and have been out
of school at least 10 years. Half of the respondents said they had
already experienced one career change since college, and 40% reported
at least two. Forty percent of IT workers said if they were starting
over, they would study something different as undergraduates, with
most of them citing the liberal arts. "The results suggest that
employees are more restless than in the past and that companies,
especially in the critically short-staffed high-tech industries,
may want to take a hard look at their retention efforts," says Alan
Merten, president of GMU. (CIO 1 Nov 98)
CONCERN
FOR THE Y2K READINESS OF OTHER COUNTRIES
Department of Defense officials are worried that foreign early warning
systems could malfunction and falsely indicate an attack, and former
U.S. Senator Sam Nunn warns, "We have a huge stake in Russia's early
warning systems working properly." A Pentagon official promises,
"We're working with all the nuclear powers we have a relationship
with, to physically share people. Their people will sit in our control
centers and our people in their control centers to keep the communications
open." (USA Today 14 Nov 98)
PUBLIC
COLLEGES MUST DISCLOSE Y2K PROBLEMS
A notice announced in a technical bulletin by the Government Accounting
Standards Board requires most public colleges and universities to
begin disclosing how they are handling any Year 2000 problems that
may affect their campuses. Board officials say the requirement applies
to any public university or college that reports financial information
to a city or state, as well as any private college that has issued
bonds, under the Securities and Exchange Commission's guidelines.
Schools need to report what they've spent on upgrading systems,
what could happen if the problem is not fixed, and how they've handled
the problem so far. "I think that most governments and universities
have already done an assessment and are in the process of fixing
most issues," says a project manager for the accounting board. "Now
they need to make sure they have a report." (Chronicle of Higher
Education 13 Nov 98)
SEGA
LOSING SLEEP OVER DREAMCAST
Sega's having serious production problems with its new Dreamcast
console, and will be able to deliver only 50% of its original target
number for sales the month and during the all-important holiday
season. Full production will not be possible until February, says
president Shoichiro Irimajiri. The game console, which is powered
by a 128-bit chip, is critical to Sega's survival after its previous-generation
product, the Sega Saturn, lost out big to Sony Playstation and Nintendo
64. For the past five months, Sega has been priming Japanese consumers
with ads that show children telling senior Sega officials: "Sega
sucks. We prefer the Playstation," with the implied point being
that Sega officials have heard the message and responded. Mr. Irimajiri
says: "Sega may have sucked in the past. But Dreamcast outperforms
everything on the market." Sega Dreamcast will be available in the
U.S. and Europe next year. (Financial Times 11 Nov 98)
LESSON
LEARNED FROM MICROSOFT TRIAL: E-MAIL CAN HURT
With old e-mail messages playing an important role in the charges
and countercharges being leveled in the Microsoft antitrust case,
organizations are busy reminding their employees to think before
they type (and then always clean up after themselves). One example
is the Amazon.com company, which created an event called "Sweep
and Keep" to reward employees for purging e-mail messages no longer
required for business or legal reasons. This "documentation retention"
policy [Orwell, where are you?] was followed by a "documentation
creation" policy that said: "Quite simply put, there are some communications
that should not be expressed in written form." (New York Times
11 Nov 98)
ANDREESSEN
INVESTS IN "THE BROWSER FOR TV"
Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen is becoming an investor in and
board member of a Palo Alto, Calif., company called Replay
Networks Inc., which is one of two companies developing a new
digital technology to replace the traditional home videocassette
recorder. (The other company is Tivo Inc., in Sunnyvale, CA.) The
new Replay TV system, scheduled to ship in December for under $500,
will include an interactive programming guide, and will allow the
viewer to do things such as this: automatically record all programs
that meet a specific criterion (e.g., all Yankee baseball games
or all movies featuring Danny DeVito); intelligently skip all commercials;
and record an entire program that is already in progress, by going
back to the part that was missed. Andreessen says: "ReplayTV will
do for TV what the browser did for the Internet. It's the browser
for TV." (New York Times 9 Nov 98)
BROADCOM
UNVEILS INTERACTIVE TV CHIP
Broadcom Corp. has debuted a single
graphics chip capable of integrating high-resolution digital
images, graphics and broadcast video. Industry observers say that
by packing the circuitry needed for Web-page and television viewing
together on one chip, Broadcom is expected to cut dramatically the
cost of home equipment needed for interactive TV. "Today, one of
the major problems is that the images look really bad, and until
now, you couldn't have a broadcast and a Web page together on the
same screen," says a principal analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group.
"This Broadcom chip lets you do that with one chip, not several."
(Los Angeles Times 9 Nov 98)
MATSUSHITA,
PHILIPS OFFER DTV-FOR-PC TECHNOLOGY
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Philips Electronics say they
will sell circuit cards that enable personal computers to receive
digital-TV signals. Matsushita's Panasonic unit has been working
with Compaq Computer to design its DTV accessory for PCs, and
Continued next column
|
|
continued
from previous column
Compaq
says it will offer the card as an option to consumers early next
year. The computer company says it won't make the card standard
on its PCs until digital broadcasting becomes more popular. Meanwhile,
Philips Semiconductors' product says it has developed a design for
the cards that it plans to license to others for manufacturing and
marketing. By assigning most of the DTV signal decoding duties to
the PC's microprocessor, the Philips design uses fewer chips and
will cost less than the Panasonic model. (Wall Street Journal
10 Nov 98)
411
EVERYWHERE
Pending tariff approval, Bell Atlantic is rolling out a service
that everyone will appreciate -- in early January callers will be
able to dial 411, the traditional information number, and get directory
information for any city in any state. Charges will be based on
whether the listing is local or long distance, but callers will
not need to know the area code of the residence or business they're
trying to reach -- a handy feature in these days of rapidly proliferating
area codes. (Information Week 2 Nov 98)
BETTING
ON TUT TECHNOLOGY
High-tech companies, including Compaq, Lucent Technologies and Advanced
Micro Devices, are licensing technology from tiny Tut
Systems that uses telephone wires to create a household network.
The technology, called "Home Run," will be built into phone-networking
modems, which will sell at less than $100 each. Other technologies,
such as electrical power lines and radio waves, will undoubtedly
also make inroads into the home-networking market, but Home Run
has a head start -- the first modems will begin showing up on shelves
in time for Christmas. "For the next three to five years, the phone
line is the way to go in terms of price and functionality," says
the business development manager for Lucent Microelectronics, who
adds: "Wireless in the long term may be the big winner." (Wall
Street Journal 6 Nov 98)
IS
THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE?
With new support from Sun Microsystems, the SETI@home project is
proceeding with its plans to use the idle processing power of 50,000
or more personal computers to search for signs of extraterrestrial
life. A project base at the University of California-Berkeley will
serve as data collections and distribution point (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu).
(Newsbytes/USA Today 6 Nov 98)
DESPERATELY
SEEKING A BUSINESS MODEL FOR ONLINE EDUCATION
Different financial arrangements are developing within the various
academic institutions that are busy developing online course offerings.
Two examples: Penn State is splitting revenues with the faculty
members who develop courses and their departments, whereas New York
University will hold ownership rights for its online courses. Is
there a lot of money to split up? NYU's Gerald A. Heeger, dean of
continuing and professional studies, warns: "Online is a big, important
field in higher education, but it does not have a business model
that works. The dirty little secret is that nobody's making any
money." However, he thinks someday that will change. (New York
Times 2 Nov 98)
"RISING
EXPECTATIONS AND EXPLODING DEMAND" FOR TECHNOLOGY
The Campus Computing Project's 1998
national survey of information technology in higher education
says that classroom use of e-mail is up substantially (to 44.4%),
that almost half of the institutions are using student fees to cover
information technology costs, and that more than a third of research
universities have some type of policy addressing faculty-developed
intellectual property on the campus. Project director Kenneth C.
Green says, "Campuses are doing more with technology, and they are
doing it better than in the past. But the real challenge at most
institutions is to improve resources and services given both rising
expectations and exploding demand."
PORN
IS PEAKING ON THE WEB
A Forrester Research analyst estimates that the online adult business
is close to peaking, after generating 40% annual growth for the
last few years. "The astronomical growth is set to top out," he
says, adding that "there is commerce activity at all ends of the
adult spectrum." Forrester gauges overall Web commerce at $4.8 billion
in 1998, with pornography sites contributing almost $1 billion to
that total. And while lawmakers are trying to muzzle online pornography,
observers are dubious about the ultimate impact of such legislation:
"You can use all sorts of screens to keep kids out, but the majority
of sites choose not to use them." However, another potential obstacle
might be more effective: American Express is considering shutting
off service ties for such sites, and other credit card companies
could choose to follow their example. (Broadcasting & Cable
26 Oct 98)
E-MAIL
RESPONSE-MANAGEMENT PACKAGES DEBUT
Manually routing and answering e-mail is time-consuming, with one
Internet research company placing the cost of dealing with each
message at $2.75. With that in mind, two companies are poised to
introduce new software packages next week that are designed to improve
response automation and personalization. Aptex Software's SelectResponse
3.0 uses technology that can interpret the meaning of unstructured
text to provide quicker and more accurate answers to e-mail queries.
Brightware's Contact
Center software generates automated answers for a predetermined
set of questions and routes other messages to the appropriate company
contact when a question requires a more complex response. "The Internet
can be either the least expensive or the most expensive customer
channel, depending on the level of automation you have," says Brightware's
CEO. Using such software should bring the cost of dealing with e-mail
questions down to as little as 25 cents apiece. (InternetWeek
3 Nov 98)
COMPUTER
SUPPORT, STAFFING TOP LIST OF COLLEGE CONCERNS
A survey of 58 members of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges
(CLAC) indicates that the top issue for the majority of those polled
is providing adequate support for campus computing during a time
of "increased expectations" by students and faculty members. Second
on the list is finding, training and retaining qualified information
technology personnel. One issue that doesn't seem to bother the
CLAC members much is the Year 2000 problem, which may be explained
by the high percentage of Apple Macintosh ownership on liberal-arts
campuses. Macs are not as susceptible to Y2K problems as computers
running Windows and Unix. The colleges in the survey have an average
enrollment of about 1,800 and average information-technology expenditures
of $1,950,000. (Chronicle of Higher Education 30 Oct 98)
"HACKTIVISTS"
SAY: "THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DIGITIZED"
Two political activists in New York, of cofounders of the Electronic
Disturbance Theater, are organizing "virtual sit-ins" and recruiting
programmers to attack the Web sites of persons or organizations
they believe responsible for oppression. "We see this as a form
of electronic civil obedience," says Stefan Wray, one of the two
leaders of this effort. National Information Protection Agency chief
Michael Vatis says, "I wouldn't characterize vandalizing Web sites
as cyber-terrorism, but the only responsible assumption we can make
is that there's more going on that we don't know about." Some activists
agree with that assessment, but for different reasons; they think
such methods are unproductive because they will antagonize the general
public. (New York Times 31 Oct 98)
EPA'S
"WORST-CASE SCENARIO" SITE UNDER HEAVY CRITICISM
The FBI, the CIA, the chemical industry, and key members of Congress
are among those alarmed at a Environmental Protection Agency plan
to use the Internet to post "worst-case scenario" data for potential
disasters at all major U.S. chemical plants. The data would include
chemical inventories, detailed information on how chemical releases
could occur, and how far released chemicals could travel and the
populations that would be affected. Opponents of the plan say that
it would give terrorists a blueprint for attacks. (USA Today
30 Oct 98)
Edupage
is free, and is distributed 3 times a week by electronic mail. To
subscribe, send a message to: [email protected]
with the text "subscribe edupage" |
|
