Piracy Continues

First there was Napster who opened the door for others to follow and now we find that there are now a large number file sharing sites and their business is growing at an alarming rate.

Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor was requested by the US Chamber of Commerce to identify trends and rogue sites and monitored the illegal traffic levels on 43 file-sharing sites. They claim that these sites now generate 146 million page views per day or over 53 billion visits per year. The top three sites; RapidShare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com, generate 21 billion visits alone. Even the least-visited sites in the study were driving some 781 million hits per year.

Two-thirds of the sites are located in North America or Europe and the study was only on a relatively small sample which could suggest that the problem is in fact much bigger.

How can authorities control the activities of these sites as they become more popular and an acceptable way for many to share their music and films? The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) accuses the Rapidshare, a Swiss-based file-hosting firm for carrying a large volume of pirated content, but a German Regional Court has ruled that Rapidshare does not have to install piracy filters and that the firm was taking "reasonable measures" to fight piracy. Rapidshare's terms of service specifically prohibits "works the download of which violates third-party copyrights".
Of course, the above sites don’t openly support piracy and will remove pirated material where they are notified or find it but this reactive approach just puts the onus on rights owners to trawl the web to discover infringement and is somewhat like akin to shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.

This conflict may only get more muddled as Illegal file-sharing becomes incredibly complex and trying to police it get increasingly difficult and expensive.

Enter Intel who may not have a comprehensive solution but point to a potential new direction in securing content. Intel’s, the new line of processors called Sandy Bridge are focused on consumer activities such as content consumption, gaming, and transferring content between devices.

The chips' QuickSync capabilities can convert video from one format to another at speed and has new integrated graphics capabilities that are able to handle big-graphics games.

However, it is a new inbuilt IntelInsider technology that may offer a new way to protect content. IntelInsider claims to apply DRM (digital rights management) to certain media. This may appear to be a smart move by Intel that effectively bakes DRM into chips, and could ensure rights are cleared before a user can play a major film, TV or even piece of music. Intel's Sandy Bridge chips however will only activate protection in very specific circumstances such as streaming high-definition, late-release content and only from certain Intel ‘partners’. A movie in HD on CinemaNow can be streamed by a user and with Intel's DRM in Sandy Bridge, it is now fully protected from piracy.

However, it may be the restricted way in which IntelInsider appears to work in controlling the link between the file provider and the computer that determines whether it has legs. We must remember that a file only has to be broken once and the cat’s out the bag. Also Intel is not the only chip player in town and is not a dominant force in the mobile market as it is in PCs.

It is clear that piracy is not going away but increasing and that the existing DRM solutions are not working.

Intel Buy McFee

A good friend was recently sitting down in California with the guys at Intel advising them on the future. He watched with interest how they communicated openly on their iPhones within the room. He was asked what he thought about the future of Intel. He simply asked them what chip was in their mobiles and the penny sank in that they were missing the mobile market.

We are not saying he influenced today’s news that Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, has agreed to buy the security technology firm, McAfee for $7.68bn cash, but it is interesting to note.

McAfee, are a leading security technology firm and would enable Intel to build security features into its microprocessors which go into products such as laptops and phones. This in turn could differentiate them in the market. As the internet becomes even more pervasive the associated security risk grow. Intel also probably recognises that the laptop and desktop market is migrating to mobile devices and with it the security risk increase and get more complex.

Not bad if you have a spare $7.68bn in cash.

The £1,500 eReader

VentureBeat review gave us something to think about, the $1,500 digital reader from Intel.

We automatically think is this like comparing apples and oranges , or eInk lookie likies with netbooks or elusive tablets?

The chunky device is not aimed at the average reader but millions who have eyesight problems and need something more suited to their needs. The market is huge but so is the challenge of getting adoption to a device that is aimed at being a reader of all matter; books, t a restaurant menu, a timetable, or a web site. It has a 5-megapixel digital camera that can capture text and read it back. It can read text in the DAISY format, plain text, as well as play other formats such as MP3 music files. The issue is capturing the text as that may sound simple to many but as a task may itself be daunting to some with sight challenges.

An optional book scanning system, the Intel Portable Capture Station, enables users to digitize books with ease, but again why not sort the problem at source and in particular digitize more books and create more audio books for this sector?

Here’s a video of the Intel Reader in action:



I asked my mother in law what she thought of the idea given she is a book lover, an author of some 34 published novels and a winner of woman of the year as she is registered blind. She says she has been shown a similar device that cost £450 but that she only wanted it for the portability but when out she finds it more enjoyable and sociable to get someone to read things such as menus out to her. She also found she just couldn’t be bothered to ‘faff around’ when she is out. She does a lot of reading at her desk, but has a auto focusing camera and scanner set-up which she uses and I will vouch for that even when the images are huge with the characters 6” high! She also has a total PC environment that works 100% on voice recognition.

So there is a need and these devices are as important as others but we must ensure we compare apples with apples.

What's in the Name - Netbook?

We can’t use the term netbook and will find another word for it. Perhaps; spacebook, notebook, mini-laptop, handtop, handbook, whatever.

Apparently Psion trademarked the term in 1996 for their Palm 5 palmtop replacement the Palm 7. Obviously the name nettop just didn’t work. Psion launched the netBook in 2000 and a further netBook Pro was added later. Now the term is in wide use and some 38 vendors use it to describe their devices.

Psion has convinced Google to ban the term from adsense ads, and it filed a large number of ceast and desist orders against a great many companies threatening more aggressive action if competing firms didn't stop using the term. Dell has now filed a suit against Psion to be joined by Intel with a strongly worded broadside filed in the US District Court in the Northern District of California. Intel who own the domain netbook.com, which is linked to their Atom marketing site, demands an immediate judgment to cancel the trademark.

Lets just create a new name and ensure its public and avoid those lawyers fees and costly settlements. We think ‘smartbook’ may work as it halfway between a smart phone and a ***book but that looks to be taken too!

Malaysian Fedral Government to Equip Primary Schools with ebooks

As Malaysians prepare to welcome the lunar Year of the Ox, the NS Times reports that the Teregganu state's ebook pilot programme, to furnish all its Primary Five pupils with an ebook, is to be extended throughout the country to solve the problem of primary school pupils having to carry heavy textbooks.

Many may ask where Terengganu is? The Malasian state is located some 500 kilometers northeast of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. The Federal Government started with a pragmatic programme equipping a 100 pupils and hopes to equip all it primary school pupils with a laptop-like device costing RM1,300 each in the next two years and are even creating a factory to assemble the devices and state government has been given the rights by manufacturer Intel to sell the devices.

The programme is expected to cost the state government RM30 million, which will be funded by money from oil royalties.

A Conflict of Interest

We have written before about Nicholas Negroponte’s , One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) mission to develop and deploy a laptop for under $100 that could be distributed to millions in the developing world bringing them education, enlightenment and information. The laptop has been with us now for a short while and has morphed into the XO. The technology deployed is ground breaking not only in its cost but its innovation. So why have only hundreds of thousands and not millions been ordered and used?

Yesterday’s Sunday Times article, ‘Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop’ tells the story of how the big technology companies effectively set out to undermine and squash the project. Why - To protect their own economic models and self interest.

The lesson we should note is that self interest often works at odds with others and when something radical appears that could potentially threaten the instinct is often to squash it. Publishing today has many Gorillas in its mist. We need to ensure that their objects and goals are understood and that they do not unduly conflict with those of the market and industry.

We also have to be aware of the huge potential the XO has to bring digital content to all and even change what we think about ebooks and ereaders.

MIDs ( Mobile Internet Devices) to Rule OK?

Just when we thought that there were two clear platforms; the laptop and the mobile, the chip giant Intel starts to redefine the world. We read an article in the New York Times that they are hoping to build on the success of the iPhone and other smartphones with new computers they are calling Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs.

The previous PDA (personal digital assistant) market of Palms has nose dived with the introduction of smartphones and continual shrinking of the laptop. However it is claimed that new MIDs are scheduled to begin showing up in consumer electronics outlets in June driven by an offer to provide low cost, highly portable laptop.
Intel believes that their MID chips will be fully compatible with the laptop and desktop processors and its data, making them compatible with the vast majority of today’s Web software. What we can envisage as a result is a revolutionary step change to new devices such as ultra compact laptops and tablet-size web browsing and social networking devices.

The question is which technology will be the driver voice or web / data? Voice remains dominant today but will that continue or is its strength today merely down to its mobility and size and therefore under threat as others achieve the same breakthrough?

The key in this interesting battle is over the ultra low energy chip market and whether the winner will come from the smartphone market and players such as ARM, who have sold over 10 billion ARM chips through more than 200 licensees and who claim that more than eight million chips a day are being used in cellphones, smartphones and hand-held devices, or from Intel. Intel is currently working on consolidation of this under a new generation processor, code-named Moorestown.

We can also see the death of the ebook reader as we know them today. Although storage prices are dropping who wants to carry around 200 books when you are always connected through a single device?

What is clear is what we have all known for some time – convergence, convergence, convergence.

Another Giant Technology Step Forward

Intel last week announced a tiny drive called Z-P140 that could help bring the power of desktop computers to handheld devices.

The flash-memory-based hard drive, is bout the size of a thumbnail and weighs than ‘a drop of water’. It is one of the smallest on the market competing with similar chips from Samsung, which store data in gadgets such as Apple's iPod nano and iPhone.

It currently comes in two- and four-gigabyte aversions, which are available to manufacturers for use in handheld devices. The first products featuring the new chips will be available in January. However the Intel chip has been developed with a standard electronics controller built in, making it easy and inexpensive to combine multiple chips into a single, higher-capacity hard drive of 16 gigabytes today. Only two gigabytes is required to run some operating systems, such as Linux, along with software applications and it will work well with Intel processors, which make it useful for the ultramobile-PC market.

In 1999, the flash-memory market was nonexistent, but in 2007, it amounts to $15.2 billion and is expected to continue expand at pace offering much to the technology convergence and the potential one device fits all dream. One flash criticism is with respect to memory cells, which hold the electrical charges that represent data, tend to wear out quickly. However, Intel says that the new memory cell can have data written to it and erased from it up to 100,000 times and therefore no single cell gets overused.