KOLKATA: The country’s booming microwave oven market is expected to ring in good times in calendar 2007 as well. Consumer electronic majors like LG, Samsung, Whirpool and Haier, among others are targeting growth in sales numbers of anything between 10-65% over last year.
They are, in fact, looking at this segment, and in particular, the convection microwave oven category, as a major growth-driver this year. According to industry estimates, the projected size of the microwave oven market for 2007 is around 7.8 lakh units, up 25% from 6.25 lakh units in 2006.
In 2008, the market size is expected to go up further to 9.5 lakh units. Speaking to ET, Mr Girish V Rao, V-P, LG Electronics, said: “We are expecting a 30% growth from our microwave business this year, from around 2.25 lakh units last year to 3 lakh units this time around. While the numbers are getting driven by the solo range, the value growth will come in from the convection category.”
“Growing awareness on cooking benefits of microwave ovens rather than the mere reheating function coupled with growing affordability, have contributed to the growth of the convection category, specifically as the baking function is being increasingly used by consumers,” said Ravinder Zutshi, deputy MD, Samsung Electronics.
For Samsung, the contribution of convection microwave ovens to total Samsung sales was 27% last year and is likely to grow to 29% this year. Haier India, on its part, is expecting a 50%-plus growth from the convection category as well.
“We are looking at increasing our sales to 50,000 units in 2007, up from 28,000-30,000 in 2006. With the increasing shift towards the higher-end models, we are looking at a turnover of Rs 35 crore from the microwave category in 2007,” said Haier India COO Pranay Dhabai. Whirlpool of India is a new entrant in this burgeoning market.
“We are a small player now. In the last two years, the segment witnessed a lot of price competition. This year, the market has stabilised and we plan to beef up marketing strategies to make our presence felt. We are aiming at a 10% marketshare,” said Tamal Kanti Saha, V-P, sales, Whirlpool.
http://www1.economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Cons_Products/Microwave_oven_mkt_heating_up/articleshow/2067978.cms
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Microwave oven mkt heating up
KOLKATA: The country’s booming microwave oven market is expected to ring in good times in calendar 2007 as well. Consumer electronic majors like LG, Samsung, Whirpool and Haier, among others are targeting growth in sales numbers of anything between 10-65% over last year.
They are, in fact, looking at this segment, and in particular, the convection microwave oven category, as a major growth-driver this year. According to industry estimates, the projected size of the microwave oven market for 2007 is around 7.8 lakh units, up 25% from 6.25 lakh units in 2006.
In 2008, the market size is expected to go up further to 9.5 lakh units. Speaking to ET, Mr Girish V Rao, V-P, LG Electronics, said: “We are expecting a 30% growth from our microwave business this year, from around 2.25 lakh units last year to 3 lakh units this time around. While the numbers are getting driven by the solo range, the value growth will come in from the convection category.”
“Growing awareness on cooking benefits of microwave ovens rather than the mere reheating function coupled with growing affordability, have contributed to the growth of the convection category, specifically as the baking function is being increasingly used by consumers,” said Ravinder Zutshi, deputy MD, Samsung Electronics.
For Samsung, the contribution of convection microwave ovens to total Samsung sales was 27% last year and is likely to grow to 29% this year. Haier India, on its part, is expecting a 50%-plus growth from the convection category as well.
“We are looking at increasing our sales to 50,000 units in 2007, up from 28,000-30,000 in 2006. With the increasing shift towards the higher-end models, we are looking at a turnover of Rs 35 crore from the microwave category in 2007,” said Haier India COO Pranay Dhabai. Whirlpool of India is a new entrant in this burgeoning market.
“We are a small player now. In the last two years, the segment witnessed a lot of price competition. This year, the market has stabilised and we plan to beef up marketing strategies to make our presence felt. We are aiming at a 10% marketshare,” said Tamal Kanti Saha, V-P, sales, Whirlpool.
http://www1.economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Cons_Products/Microwave_oven_mkt_heating_up/articleshow/2067978.cms
They are, in fact, looking at this segment, and in particular, the convection microwave oven category, as a major growth-driver this year. According to industry estimates, the projected size of the microwave oven market for 2007 is around 7.8 lakh units, up 25% from 6.25 lakh units in 2006.
In 2008, the market size is expected to go up further to 9.5 lakh units. Speaking to ET, Mr Girish V Rao, V-P, LG Electronics, said: “We are expecting a 30% growth from our microwave business this year, from around 2.25 lakh units last year to 3 lakh units this time around. While the numbers are getting driven by the solo range, the value growth will come in from the convection category.”
“Growing awareness on cooking benefits of microwave ovens rather than the mere reheating function coupled with growing affordability, have contributed to the growth of the convection category, specifically as the baking function is being increasingly used by consumers,” said Ravinder Zutshi, deputy MD, Samsung Electronics.
For Samsung, the contribution of convection microwave ovens to total Samsung sales was 27% last year and is likely to grow to 29% this year. Haier India, on its part, is expecting a 50%-plus growth from the convection category as well.
“We are looking at increasing our sales to 50,000 units in 2007, up from 28,000-30,000 in 2006. With the increasing shift towards the higher-end models, we are looking at a turnover of Rs 35 crore from the microwave category in 2007,” said Haier India COO Pranay Dhabai. Whirlpool of India is a new entrant in this burgeoning market.
“We are a small player now. In the last two years, the segment witnessed a lot of price competition. This year, the market has stabilised and we plan to beef up marketing strategies to make our presence felt. We are aiming at a 10% marketshare,” said Tamal Kanti Saha, V-P, sales, Whirlpool.
http://www1.economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Cons_Products/Microwave_oven_mkt_heating_up/articleshow/2067978.cms
Game Boy Evolution: Rumour Rundown
As you may be aware, a war has begun in our industry. Our friends in the East have decided to take up their system of choice, as our American cousins have chosen their allegiance. With only weeks remaining prior to the launch of both the NintendoDS and Sony PSP in the UK, it’s time to look to the future! “You what?” I hear you cry… but I ask you to send your mind travelling back a year and two days, to January 21st 2004, and that original NintendoDS statement: “The NintendoDS is not the successor to the Game Boy Advance, but an entirely new concept; a third pillar in our strategy”.
NintendoDS(Istelf)45.JPG (11325 bytes) So with all the hype surrounding the NintendoDS, that screen, the launch, it seems that Nintendo have managed to sweep over what was actually the bigger revelation – that the successor to the Game Boy Advance is well into development, and we could be seeing it a lot sooner than expected. Now a lot of you will have read my article: NintendoDS: The Rumours Vs. the Facts and I should warn you; my evidence is even less concrete is this instance and although, for the best part, all the facts and figures pointed me in the correct direction most of the time during that piece, this article is different. This article is about sifting through the rumours to end up with a practical belief of what the successor to the Game Boy Advance SP could be, as opposed to reporting the stated press releases and analysing the contents. But that’s not an excuse. Read on - and find out that I still know what I’m talking about!
Upon deciding to write this article I began searching all my usual information alcoves, and, much to my disgust, could not find any direct news, quotes, press releases or even rumours surrounding the next Game Boy iteration with exception of the above NintendoDS statement. Delving deeper into the information abyss, I found that it was neither the fans concerned with the next console, as they had the NintendoDS and PSP to swoon over, nor the development community as they’re as busy as bees on the two systems also, but it was the outer circle of the industry. It’s the publishers, retailers, journalists and marketers that have been caring for this one, and they’ve already given it a name; Game Boy Evolution.
SPpink(Item).jpg (6422 bytes) It appears that, within these circles, it is the belief that the Game Boy Advance and its shinier brother the Game Boy Advance SP were in fact never supposed to see shop shelves. The rumour states that the Game Boy Advance was developed as a back-up machine, very quickly, as work on the Game Boy Evolution was not progressing quite as desired, and there were suggestions that Sony’s challenger was not too far off. With the PSP being considered a portable PlayStation2, Nintendo must have realised that launching a very similar product in a very similar timeframe (originally believed to be early 2004 in the east, reaching UK shores by Christmas 2004) would be a bad idea, and the Game Boy Advance was kicked out in 2001as a “stop-gap” for consumers, and a way to exploit the dual-console link plans that Nintendo had developed, and thought would be very successful (as we can see the dual-screen idea fused into the NintendoDS today). It is also believed that the design of the Game Boy Advance SP is actually the prototype design for the Game Boy Evolution, and Nintendo used this to house the Game Boy Advance technology soon after the original launch and saw it as a commanding opportunity.
So, on to the actual information about the system. Remember, all that follows is based on rumours, information leaks and a solitary press release; but sometimes, that’s all you’ve got. The processing unit is believed to be rather simple. Not simple as far as the technology it houses, but in the fact that it is simply a miniaturised version of the 485MHz IBM Gekko processor housed within the GameCube. Strangely enough, the Game Boy Advance SP is the correct width to allow a solitary disc to be inserted, should a slot be provided. gamecubedisc.jpg (6522 bytes)By now, you’d have guessed that it appears that Nintendo’s statement committing them to GameCube development long after the launch of the Revolution was no accident, and was again a hint at this technology. It seems more than feasible, as with Sony’s PSP touting the possibility (although we are yet to see it appear in any titles) to play a game on your PlayStation2, then take the save data onto your PSP to continue playing, that the Game Boy Evolution should allow for a similar principle, however with the reliability of Nintendo and Panasonic’s Proprietary 3-inch Optical Disc Technology, the same disc may be used for both systems, without the fear of freezing games or extended loading times etc. while the system is in motion.
The memory cards would obviously be directly compatible, but could also be the reason behind the development of the ill-fated Panasonic SD FLASH Adapter for the GameCube, as the Game Boy Evolution could have been originally intended to use SD FLASH cards. It’s known that Nintendo have been increasing research into control for some time and as leaders of the field it comes as no surprise to learn that Nintendo have been working away on some new analogue features. Rumours suggest “bubble”-esque analogue pads akin to roll-balls for PCs and some strange retro-feeling touch-panel D-Pad effects. We’ve already seen L and R triggers and the NintendoDS’s versions could obviously hold up to the GameCube’s.
With the PSP being a slightly less competent machine than the PlayStation2 in terms of effects (while the polygon count actually appears higher than that most commonly seen on the PlayStation2) it’s more than likely that Nintendo have been able to develop the exact chipset within the GameCube on a much smaller scale, and would be able to bring this to market at a sub-£100 price point already, given the current price of the GameCube and the fact that Nintendo are still making money on each unit sold.
The major problem would be the conflict with the NintendoDS. With such a recent launch the quick up-takers of the new system may already feel that their technology is out of date, no matter how much Nintendo insist they are different “pillars”. More time spent with the system only convinces you that it’s aimed squarely at the hardcore market and makes the recent sales rush even more astonishing. In order to convince the public, the Game Boy Evolution would have to launch with a retail price lower than the NintendoDS.
There is no solid evidence currently of what this system will be, but it is known that development is at the final stages, and has been for some time. With Nintendo still showing no signs of slowing down (contrary to popular belief) their expansion over the last five years has been tremendous and puts little doubt in my mind that they would be able to support three systems in this way, given the extensive back catalogue of GameCube games already available. Only time will tell for the story of Nintendo’s Game Boy franchise, but what rumblings are happening over at Kyoto internally right now is, as ever, anyone’s guess.
http://www.electronictheatre.co.uk/articles/archive/2005/gameboyevolution/
NintendoDS(Istelf)45.JPG (11325 bytes) So with all the hype surrounding the NintendoDS, that screen, the launch, it seems that Nintendo have managed to sweep over what was actually the bigger revelation – that the successor to the Game Boy Advance is well into development, and we could be seeing it a lot sooner than expected. Now a lot of you will have read my article: NintendoDS: The Rumours Vs. the Facts and I should warn you; my evidence is even less concrete is this instance and although, for the best part, all the facts and figures pointed me in the correct direction most of the time during that piece, this article is different. This article is about sifting through the rumours to end up with a practical belief of what the successor to the Game Boy Advance SP could be, as opposed to reporting the stated press releases and analysing the contents. But that’s not an excuse. Read on - and find out that I still know what I’m talking about!
Upon deciding to write this article I began searching all my usual information alcoves, and, much to my disgust, could not find any direct news, quotes, press releases or even rumours surrounding the next Game Boy iteration with exception of the above NintendoDS statement. Delving deeper into the information abyss, I found that it was neither the fans concerned with the next console, as they had the NintendoDS and PSP to swoon over, nor the development community as they’re as busy as bees on the two systems also, but it was the outer circle of the industry. It’s the publishers, retailers, journalists and marketers that have been caring for this one, and they’ve already given it a name; Game Boy Evolution.
SPpink(Item).jpg (6422 bytes) It appears that, within these circles, it is the belief that the Game Boy Advance and its shinier brother the Game Boy Advance SP were in fact never supposed to see shop shelves. The rumour states that the Game Boy Advance was developed as a back-up machine, very quickly, as work on the Game Boy Evolution was not progressing quite as desired, and there were suggestions that Sony’s challenger was not too far off. With the PSP being considered a portable PlayStation2, Nintendo must have realised that launching a very similar product in a very similar timeframe (originally believed to be early 2004 in the east, reaching UK shores by Christmas 2004) would be a bad idea, and the Game Boy Advance was kicked out in 2001as a “stop-gap” for consumers, and a way to exploit the dual-console link plans that Nintendo had developed, and thought would be very successful (as we can see the dual-screen idea fused into the NintendoDS today). It is also believed that the design of the Game Boy Advance SP is actually the prototype design for the Game Boy Evolution, and Nintendo used this to house the Game Boy Advance technology soon after the original launch and saw it as a commanding opportunity.
So, on to the actual information about the system. Remember, all that follows is based on rumours, information leaks and a solitary press release; but sometimes, that’s all you’ve got. The processing unit is believed to be rather simple. Not simple as far as the technology it houses, but in the fact that it is simply a miniaturised version of the 485MHz IBM Gekko processor housed within the GameCube. Strangely enough, the Game Boy Advance SP is the correct width to allow a solitary disc to be inserted, should a slot be provided. gamecubedisc.jpg (6522 bytes)By now, you’d have guessed that it appears that Nintendo’s statement committing them to GameCube development long after the launch of the Revolution was no accident, and was again a hint at this technology. It seems more than feasible, as with Sony’s PSP touting the possibility (although we are yet to see it appear in any titles) to play a game on your PlayStation2, then take the save data onto your PSP to continue playing, that the Game Boy Evolution should allow for a similar principle, however with the reliability of Nintendo and Panasonic’s Proprietary 3-inch Optical Disc Technology, the same disc may be used for both systems, without the fear of freezing games or extended loading times etc. while the system is in motion.
The memory cards would obviously be directly compatible, but could also be the reason behind the development of the ill-fated Panasonic SD FLASH Adapter for the GameCube, as the Game Boy Evolution could have been originally intended to use SD FLASH cards. It’s known that Nintendo have been increasing research into control for some time and as leaders of the field it comes as no surprise to learn that Nintendo have been working away on some new analogue features. Rumours suggest “bubble”-esque analogue pads akin to roll-balls for PCs and some strange retro-feeling touch-panel D-Pad effects. We’ve already seen L and R triggers and the NintendoDS’s versions could obviously hold up to the GameCube’s.
With the PSP being a slightly less competent machine than the PlayStation2 in terms of effects (while the polygon count actually appears higher than that most commonly seen on the PlayStation2) it’s more than likely that Nintendo have been able to develop the exact chipset within the GameCube on a much smaller scale, and would be able to bring this to market at a sub-£100 price point already, given the current price of the GameCube and the fact that Nintendo are still making money on each unit sold.
The major problem would be the conflict with the NintendoDS. With such a recent launch the quick up-takers of the new system may already feel that their technology is out of date, no matter how much Nintendo insist they are different “pillars”. More time spent with the system only convinces you that it’s aimed squarely at the hardcore market and makes the recent sales rush even more astonishing. In order to convince the public, the Game Boy Evolution would have to launch with a retail price lower than the NintendoDS.
There is no solid evidence currently of what this system will be, but it is known that development is at the final stages, and has been for some time. With Nintendo still showing no signs of slowing down (contrary to popular belief) their expansion over the last five years has been tremendous and puts little doubt in my mind that they would be able to support three systems in this way, given the extensive back catalogue of GameCube games already available. Only time will tell for the story of Nintendo’s Game Boy franchise, but what rumblings are happening over at Kyoto internally right now is, as ever, anyone’s guess.
http://www.electronictheatre.co.uk/articles/archive/2005/gameboyevolution/
Electronics for you, me and them
It is India's first country-wide chain of consumer electronics and durables. Croma, managed by Tata Group's Infiniti Retail, aims to offer its customers a unique shopping experience
There is a new hue in the Tata spectrum. Croma, India's first national large format retail chain for consumer electronics and durables launched in October 2006, has already begun to carve a place for itself.
Owned and managed by Infiniti Retail, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Sons, Croma receives technical and strategic sourcing support from Woolworths India, a subsidiary of Woolworths. The latter is an Australian retail giant with over 2,000 stores in 12 different formats in Australia.
The above 20,000 sq feet chain at Juhu in Mumbai retails products in eight categories. These are white goods, home entertainment, small appliances, computers and peripherals, communication, music, imaging and gaming software. In each of these categories, the buyer is spoiled for choice, with nearly 6,000 products and 180 brands to choose from.
Kitchen appliances on display at Croma
Says Ajit Joshi, chief executive officer, Infiniti Retail, "A study by Tata Strategic Management Group conducted two years ago revealed that there is no national player in the electronics and white goods retail business; only small regional players. A deeper study of nearly 22.7 million households showed low penetration of electronic items."
Simultaneously, the realisation that the market was ready for more, indicated good times for the organised retail industry in India. Joshi clarifies, "Currently organised retail is only 3 to 6 per cent whereas the total retail turnover in India was 250 million dollars last year. But organised retail is growing at a speed of 40 per cent. The pie is large enough." These facts were disclosed at an AT Kearney summit held in Mumbai recently.
Clearly the potential is huge. The market demanded a player that would be capable of fulfilling its needs in every region. It was the perfect stage for Croma.
Joshi is confident of his chain's prospects, especially of its ability to leverage the price advantage in Croma's favour. There are other measures that he hopes to use to attract the customer. These include job-related training and motivational programmes to ensure that the sales staff is able to give optimum service to customers, and extended warranties on products from Tata AIG General Insurance.
These measures help give further credence to Croma's claim of "We don't sell, we help you buy." Says Joshi, "We took a very different approach from the market. We want to try and understand customers' needs and then recommend the product that best suits them. A child's requirements from a phone differ from those of an adult. We are not in the business of merely selling brands. This approach has been really appreciated by our customers."
There have been times when Croma salespeople have visited clients' homes to measure the size of their bedrooms and recommend a TV. They have also visited kitchens to measure the space left by the architect for the fridge and recommend one accordingly. Croma also makes recommendations, based on the energy- and water-saving potential of the product. The chain, however, refrains from recommending one brand against another.
Refrigerators on display at croma
At the store, clients are encouraged to get a feel of the product they intend to buy. The mobile phones are
pre-activated and the 45-odd laptops and computers on display are Wi-Fi connected, so clients can browse the net and decide which one to buy.
In order to offer services of this nature, Croma needs to be assured of trained salespersons, who know the products thoroughly. "Finding the right people," says Joshi, "was not difficult. We support a lot of charities and NGOs. Our approach was also to recruit people from them. We also recruited from the ITIs (Industrial Training Institute). We believe that when an electrician sells you a TV, he is going to put his heart and soul into it, because he understands it. We are creating empowerment with this. We also go to BSc, BCom colleges to recruit Maths and Science students. We are also trying to work on a retailing course."
To prepare its people, Croma, with the help of Woolworths, devised a month-long training programme that addressed their needs. This was necessary, given that the electronics industry sees newer models being introduced and older ones being phased out, on a regular basis.
Washing machines on display at Croma
Besides equipping them for the exigencies of their job, the programme also offered help on yoga and breathing exercises to beat stress, tips on improving speech and diction, and the basics of the English language. The language lessons were significant as some of the salespersons came from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Joshi says, "As far as training and overall experience of the customer are concerned, we would like to copy our big brothers, Titan, Taj, etc. Whether you walk into a Taj hotel in Kolkata or Chennai, the experience of the rooms is the same. We too would like to deliver the same experience at all our stores."
Croma's willingness to sharpen its tools is justified by customers' appreciation of sales staff's methods and by the increasing number of footfalls in the store. Encouraged by the response, Joshi is making vigorous plans for rolling out 30 stores over the next 18 months. Upcoming stores will be located in Ahmedabad and Pune. Growth in the number of stores, however, is not the only thing to look forward to.
Croma is preparing to give after sales support on brands and products across categories. Joshi says, "No matter which product or brand you buy, you should call only one place for the after sales service and that is Croma. We are also talking to Tata Motors Finance for financing options for our customers." In serving as a one-stop shop, the chain will not only service products bought from the store, but also those bought from the competitors.
The store is also gearing up to solve the complaints of its customers. It has put in place a mechanism for gaining customer feedback and ploughing it back into sales. With so many plans and programmes in the offing, there is no doubt that Croma will succeed in painting the nation in its own special hue.
CROMA's offerings
Home entertainment: CTVs, music systems, VCD, DVD players, etc
Small appliances:Kitchen and domestic apliances
White goods: ACs, refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines, dishwashers, etc
Computers and peripherals: Desktops, laptops, blank media, cables, accesories, software, etc
Communication: Mobile phones and accesories, telephones, SIM cards, recharge cards, etc
Music: CDs, VCDs and DVDs
Imaging: Handycams, digital cameras, etc
Gaming software
http://www.tata.com/infiniti_retail/articles/20070305_croma_electronics.htm
There is a new hue in the Tata spectrum. Croma, India's first national large format retail chain for consumer electronics and durables launched in October 2006, has already begun to carve a place for itself.
Owned and managed by Infiniti Retail, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Sons, Croma receives technical and strategic sourcing support from Woolworths India, a subsidiary of Woolworths. The latter is an Australian retail giant with over 2,000 stores in 12 different formats in Australia.
The above 20,000 sq feet chain at Juhu in Mumbai retails products in eight categories. These are white goods, home entertainment, small appliances, computers and peripherals, communication, music, imaging and gaming software. In each of these categories, the buyer is spoiled for choice, with nearly 6,000 products and 180 brands to choose from.
Kitchen appliances on display at Croma
Says Ajit Joshi, chief executive officer, Infiniti Retail, "A study by Tata Strategic Management Group conducted two years ago revealed that there is no national player in the electronics and white goods retail business; only small regional players. A deeper study of nearly 22.7 million households showed low penetration of electronic items."
Simultaneously, the realisation that the market was ready for more, indicated good times for the organised retail industry in India. Joshi clarifies, "Currently organised retail is only 3 to 6 per cent whereas the total retail turnover in India was 250 million dollars last year. But organised retail is growing at a speed of 40 per cent. The pie is large enough." These facts were disclosed at an AT Kearney summit held in Mumbai recently.
Clearly the potential is huge. The market demanded a player that would be capable of fulfilling its needs in every region. It was the perfect stage for Croma.
Joshi is confident of his chain's prospects, especially of its ability to leverage the price advantage in Croma's favour. There are other measures that he hopes to use to attract the customer. These include job-related training and motivational programmes to ensure that the sales staff is able to give optimum service to customers, and extended warranties on products from Tata AIG General Insurance.
These measures help give further credence to Croma's claim of "We don't sell, we help you buy." Says Joshi, "We took a very different approach from the market. We want to try and understand customers' needs and then recommend the product that best suits them. A child's requirements from a phone differ from those of an adult. We are not in the business of merely selling brands. This approach has been really appreciated by our customers."
There have been times when Croma salespeople have visited clients' homes to measure the size of their bedrooms and recommend a TV. They have also visited kitchens to measure the space left by the architect for the fridge and recommend one accordingly. Croma also makes recommendations, based on the energy- and water-saving potential of the product. The chain, however, refrains from recommending one brand against another.
Refrigerators on display at croma
At the store, clients are encouraged to get a feel of the product they intend to buy. The mobile phones are
pre-activated and the 45-odd laptops and computers on display are Wi-Fi connected, so clients can browse the net and decide which one to buy.
In order to offer services of this nature, Croma needs to be assured of trained salespersons, who know the products thoroughly. "Finding the right people," says Joshi, "was not difficult. We support a lot of charities and NGOs. Our approach was also to recruit people from them. We also recruited from the ITIs (Industrial Training Institute). We believe that when an electrician sells you a TV, he is going to put his heart and soul into it, because he understands it. We are creating empowerment with this. We also go to BSc, BCom colleges to recruit Maths and Science students. We are also trying to work on a retailing course."
To prepare its people, Croma, with the help of Woolworths, devised a month-long training programme that addressed their needs. This was necessary, given that the electronics industry sees newer models being introduced and older ones being phased out, on a regular basis.
Washing machines on display at Croma
Besides equipping them for the exigencies of their job, the programme also offered help on yoga and breathing exercises to beat stress, tips on improving speech and diction, and the basics of the English language. The language lessons were significant as some of the salespersons came from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Joshi says, "As far as training and overall experience of the customer are concerned, we would like to copy our big brothers, Titan, Taj, etc. Whether you walk into a Taj hotel in Kolkata or Chennai, the experience of the rooms is the same. We too would like to deliver the same experience at all our stores."
Croma's willingness to sharpen its tools is justified by customers' appreciation of sales staff's methods and by the increasing number of footfalls in the store. Encouraged by the response, Joshi is making vigorous plans for rolling out 30 stores over the next 18 months. Upcoming stores will be located in Ahmedabad and Pune. Growth in the number of stores, however, is not the only thing to look forward to.
Croma is preparing to give after sales support on brands and products across categories. Joshi says, "No matter which product or brand you buy, you should call only one place for the after sales service and that is Croma. We are also talking to Tata Motors Finance for financing options for our customers." In serving as a one-stop shop, the chain will not only service products bought from the store, but also those bought from the competitors.
The store is also gearing up to solve the complaints of its customers. It has put in place a mechanism for gaining customer feedback and ploughing it back into sales. With so many plans and programmes in the offing, there is no doubt that Croma will succeed in painting the nation in its own special hue.
CROMA's offerings
Home entertainment: CTVs, music systems, VCD, DVD players, etc
Small appliances:Kitchen and domestic apliances
White goods: ACs, refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines, dishwashers, etc
Computers and peripherals: Desktops, laptops, blank media, cables, accesories, software, etc
Communication: Mobile phones and accesories, telephones, SIM cards, recharge cards, etc
Music: CDs, VCDs and DVDs
Imaging: Handycams, digital cameras, etc
Gaming software
http://www.tata.com/infiniti_retail/articles/20070305_croma_electronics.htm
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Gotcha: More Firmware Updates
Your high-definition DVD player--and other electronic gear--may require new firmware to correct problems.
Firmware updates for PC peripherals are nothing new. But when was the last time you thought to look for a firmware update of your living-room entertainment products? These days, it may be wise to check.
Cases in point: Three high-definition video players recently tested by PC World needed firmware updates to correct serious issues that surfaced after the players shipped to stores. One of them, the $1000 Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player, requires customers to request an update from the company, which then sends it on a disc. The other two models, both from Toshiba, offer a better alternative: The $499 HD-A1 and $799 HD-XA1 high-def DVD players have ethernet ports, so you can download their updates directly. See "An Elegant Player for High-Def Movies" for details.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126822/article.html
Firmware updates for PC peripherals are nothing new. But when was the last time you thought to look for a firmware update of your living-room entertainment products? These days, it may be wise to check.
Cases in point: Three high-definition video players recently tested by PC World needed firmware updates to correct serious issues that surfaced after the players shipped to stores. One of them, the $1000 Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player, requires customers to request an update from the company, which then sends it on a disc. The other two models, both from Toshiba, offer a better alternative: The $499 HD-A1 and $799 HD-XA1 high-def DVD players have ethernet ports, so you can download their updates directly. See "An Elegant Player for High-Def Movies" for details.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126822/article.html
Privacy Watch: Phishing Anxiety May Make You Miss Messages
Swarms of bogus electronic missives deter people from accepting legitimate e-mail.
"Washington Mutual Security Warning." "Verify Your PayPal Account." "Official Information From Wells Fargo." You've been bombarded by e-mail messages with headers like these so often that you may now assume that they're all phishing scams. But what happens if your bank or an online vendor does need to contact you by e-mail? Will you even open the message?
If you're like most people, you've probably grown so disgusted with the daily attempts to con you into divulging your personal data that you may now unwittingly throw out some legitimate messages along with the fraudulent ones.
The percentage of people who open legitimate HTML messages from companies--the so-called "open rate"--has dropped by 20 to 30 percent over the past year, according to MarketingSherpa, an online publication that covers the marketing industry.
"We have been noticing in general that open rates across HTML e-mail have been unexpectedly plummeting," says Anne Holland, MarketingSherpa's publisher. (There are no statistics available regarding how many people open plain-text marketing messages, because those messages can't be tracked in the same manner.)
You probably know the best defense against phishing: Don't click any of the links within a suspicious message. Instead, type the URL into your browser's address bar, log in as you normally would, and then check to see whether your account has problems.
But companies have to find better ways to communicate securely with their customers. Some businesses are using small dedicated applications to get messages to customers, Holland says. "If [banks] can get people to download an application for banking and keep that on their computer, that might get past phishing."
Another option is for a firm to post messages to customers in a secure portion of its Web site. That way customers can get important news when they log into their account and know it's legitimate.
Finally, more businesses need to adopt measures to counter phishing attacks. For instance, some bank Web sites can detect when a phishing Web site tries to load the site's graphics and can prevent the images from displaying properly in the victim's browser.
It's unlikely that anything will completely eliminate phishers, but if companies want customers to treat their e-mail messages seriously, they need to get serious about dealing with the problem.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122090/article.html
"Washington Mutual Security Warning." "Verify Your PayPal Account." "Official Information From Wells Fargo." You've been bombarded by e-mail messages with headers like these so often that you may now assume that they're all phishing scams. But what happens if your bank or an online vendor does need to contact you by e-mail? Will you even open the message?
If you're like most people, you've probably grown so disgusted with the daily attempts to con you into divulging your personal data that you may now unwittingly throw out some legitimate messages along with the fraudulent ones.
The percentage of people who open legitimate HTML messages from companies--the so-called "open rate"--has dropped by 20 to 30 percent over the past year, according to MarketingSherpa, an online publication that covers the marketing industry.
"We have been noticing in general that open rates across HTML e-mail have been unexpectedly plummeting," says Anne Holland, MarketingSherpa's publisher. (There are no statistics available regarding how many people open plain-text marketing messages, because those messages can't be tracked in the same manner.)
You probably know the best defense against phishing: Don't click any of the links within a suspicious message. Instead, type the URL into your browser's address bar, log in as you normally would, and then check to see whether your account has problems.
But companies have to find better ways to communicate securely with their customers. Some businesses are using small dedicated applications to get messages to customers, Holland says. "If [banks] can get people to download an application for banking and keep that on their computer, that might get past phishing."
Another option is for a firm to post messages to customers in a secure portion of its Web site. That way customers can get important news when they log into their account and know it's legitimate.
Finally, more businesses need to adopt measures to counter phishing attacks. For instance, some bank Web sites can detect when a phishing Web site tries to load the site's graphics and can prevent the images from displaying properly in the victim's browser.
It's unlikely that anything will completely eliminate phishers, but if companies want customers to treat their e-mail messages seriously, they need to get serious about dealing with the problem.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122090/article.html
Essentials of E-Mail Etiquette
Your table manners may be impeccable, but when was the last time you brushed up on e-mail etiquette? Follow our tips and avoid an electronic faux pas.
Your everyday communications may be sending the wrong message about your manners. For example, many people now consider an e-mail with a vague subject line to be the height of rudeness--the electronic equivalent of slurping soup. (Gulp!) Plus, thanks to PC viruses, many people now send all questionable e-mail straight to the Delete bin. To make sure your e-mail gets read and understood correctly, stick to these etiquette rules.
Is That Your Final Answer?
Thoughtful friends send notes just to keep in touch. However, over-worked people will send you e-mail only when they want something. These messages usually seek a specific answer to a question. When you write back, make sure you answer the question as best you can. Don't force the time-pressed message sender to ask the question again, or conduct a lengthy series of messages. You'd better not make them late for a double espresso date.
Avoid Abbreviation Frustration
PC users have their own shorthand language that uses expressions designed to save typing, such as "IMHO" (in my humble opinion) and "TTYL" (talk to you later). However, many people find these abbreviations as unintelligible as organic chemistry formulas. You can't assume everyone is familiar with the endless acronyms circulating out there. WIDLTO--when in doubt, leave them out.
PG-13 Is Keen
Many companies scan all employees' incoming e-mail for "R-rated" keywords and image file attachments. Not only can images be inappropriate, but they also hog space on the company's servers. Colorful messages, pictures, or jokes can violate e-mail policies and land recipients in trouble--or at the least, prompt an embarrassing discussion.
Reserve anything you wouldn't want the boss to see for personal e-mail accounts. When it comes to content, you may be surprised to find out that your "entertaining" messages can offend. So think twice before whisking off e-mails to everyone in your address book. You might think a certain topic is innocuous--but Auntie Marge might not.
Response Roulette
Must you respond to every e-mail message received? How quickly must you respond? According to the Emily Post Institute, every message other than spam or junk mail deserves a reply. Our theory: Nobody has that much time to spare. However, notes from people like your boss, your customers, people you care about, and people with whom you haven't spoken in a while always merit a reply. When sending e-mail, tell the recipient explicitly if you need a reply within a certain time frame.
Six Degrees of Attachments
File attachments deserve special scrutiny on the sender's part. For starters, don't send them to people you don't know. Chances are, the whole message will just be deleted without being read, due to virus fears. On top of that, large file attachments can take forever to download. Your son-in-law will not be amused when he's at the airport trying to get his e-mail and has to wait ten minutes for the photos from your birthday party. Also, try to compress large attachments, especially photos.
Fight the Good Fight
E-mail can be one of the coldest, most inhuman forms of communication possible. So stop before you type. If you're really angry about something, give yourself a cooling-off period (ideally at least 24 hours) before you write an e-mail. Also, be careful with criticism via e-mail. The mother who puts her arm around you and smiles before telling you "The Thanksgiving turkey was a bit dry" probably won't start a family feud. But the mother who writes an e-mail that says "Too bad about that overcooked turkey" may cause heirloom china to be thrown to its untimely demise.
Spammer? You?
Warning: You are now entering the zero tolerance area. Almost all of us end up on mailing lists of family members, school chums, and the like. When you reply to these messages, make sure you reply only to the sender--not the whole list. Also, if you forward one of these messages to someone else, just copy and paste the information into a new e-mail. Don't forward the message with that huge list of names on it. You don't want to be branded as tacky.
Another no-no: Don't assume that new acquaintances want to be included on all your mailings--if you do that kind of thing. Ask for their permission first.
The Brief and the Beautiful
Some people think e-mail messages should be long and elaborate, but the best ones are short and clever. Trim the message down after you write it. Don't bury important information. If you're sending an e-mail to express a particular point, make that point right away, in the first paragraph. You can add any delicious bits of unrelated news at the bottom of the message.
If you're sending a one-line response, consider using the subject line to carry the whole message--if it fits. That way, the recipient doesn't have to open your e-mail. For example: "Got your package of samples today, nothing broken. Thank you (no msg)."
Prevent Capital Crimes
Capital letters in e-mail messages make the writer seem arrogant or angry. So unless you want people to confuse you with LEONA HELMSLEY, don't use them. And don't tell yourself that the recipient won't care that your "Caps Lock" key was stuck. Capital letters also prove visually tiring for the recipient, even when it's happy news. So unless you've had QUADRUPLETS or you've really WON THE LOTTERY, skip the capitals.
Subject Matters
In days past, an e-mail could arrive wearing nothing more than a subject line reading "dinner." Today, a message must arrive wearing a focused ensemble, such as "Dinner with Laurie and Jake on January 18th downtown." Remember: People use subject lines to prioritize the order in which they read e-mails, to sort e-mails into holding folders--and to decide which e-mails to skip entirely. Make the subject line as specific as possible without being wordy. "Please comment on enclosed proposal today" beats "per our discussion." If the recipient won't recognize your e-mail address, try to be extra clear.
And don't label your e-mail "Urgent" too often, when it really isn't. You'll start to annoy recipients. Subject closed.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,80624/article.html
Your everyday communications may be sending the wrong message about your manners. For example, many people now consider an e-mail with a vague subject line to be the height of rudeness--the electronic equivalent of slurping soup. (Gulp!) Plus, thanks to PC viruses, many people now send all questionable e-mail straight to the Delete bin. To make sure your e-mail gets read and understood correctly, stick to these etiquette rules.
Is That Your Final Answer?
Thoughtful friends send notes just to keep in touch. However, over-worked people will send you e-mail only when they want something. These messages usually seek a specific answer to a question. When you write back, make sure you answer the question as best you can. Don't force the time-pressed message sender to ask the question again, or conduct a lengthy series of messages. You'd better not make them late for a double espresso date.
Avoid Abbreviation Frustration
PC users have their own shorthand language that uses expressions designed to save typing, such as "IMHO" (in my humble opinion) and "TTYL" (talk to you later). However, many people find these abbreviations as unintelligible as organic chemistry formulas. You can't assume everyone is familiar with the endless acronyms circulating out there. WIDLTO--when in doubt, leave them out.
PG-13 Is Keen
Many companies scan all employees' incoming e-mail for "R-rated" keywords and image file attachments. Not only can images be inappropriate, but they also hog space on the company's servers. Colorful messages, pictures, or jokes can violate e-mail policies and land recipients in trouble--or at the least, prompt an embarrassing discussion.
Reserve anything you wouldn't want the boss to see for personal e-mail accounts. When it comes to content, you may be surprised to find out that your "entertaining" messages can offend. So think twice before whisking off e-mails to everyone in your address book. You might think a certain topic is innocuous--but Auntie Marge might not.
Response Roulette
Must you respond to every e-mail message received? How quickly must you respond? According to the Emily Post Institute, every message other than spam or junk mail deserves a reply. Our theory: Nobody has that much time to spare. However, notes from people like your boss, your customers, people you care about, and people with whom you haven't spoken in a while always merit a reply. When sending e-mail, tell the recipient explicitly if you need a reply within a certain time frame.
Six Degrees of Attachments
File attachments deserve special scrutiny on the sender's part. For starters, don't send them to people you don't know. Chances are, the whole message will just be deleted without being read, due to virus fears. On top of that, large file attachments can take forever to download. Your son-in-law will not be amused when he's at the airport trying to get his e-mail and has to wait ten minutes for the photos from your birthday party. Also, try to compress large attachments, especially photos.
Fight the Good Fight
E-mail can be one of the coldest, most inhuman forms of communication possible. So stop before you type. If you're really angry about something, give yourself a cooling-off period (ideally at least 24 hours) before you write an e-mail. Also, be careful with criticism via e-mail. The mother who puts her arm around you and smiles before telling you "The Thanksgiving turkey was a bit dry" probably won't start a family feud. But the mother who writes an e-mail that says "Too bad about that overcooked turkey" may cause heirloom china to be thrown to its untimely demise.
Spammer? You?
Warning: You are now entering the zero tolerance area. Almost all of us end up on mailing lists of family members, school chums, and the like. When you reply to these messages, make sure you reply only to the sender--not the whole list. Also, if you forward one of these messages to someone else, just copy and paste the information into a new e-mail. Don't forward the message with that huge list of names on it. You don't want to be branded as tacky.
Another no-no: Don't assume that new acquaintances want to be included on all your mailings--if you do that kind of thing. Ask for their permission first.
The Brief and the Beautiful
Some people think e-mail messages should be long and elaborate, but the best ones are short and clever. Trim the message down after you write it. Don't bury important information. If you're sending an e-mail to express a particular point, make that point right away, in the first paragraph. You can add any delicious bits of unrelated news at the bottom of the message.
If you're sending a one-line response, consider using the subject line to carry the whole message--if it fits. That way, the recipient doesn't have to open your e-mail. For example: "Got your package of samples today, nothing broken. Thank you (no msg)."
Prevent Capital Crimes
Capital letters in e-mail messages make the writer seem arrogant or angry. So unless you want people to confuse you with LEONA HELMSLEY, don't use them. And don't tell yourself that the recipient won't care that your "Caps Lock" key was stuck. Capital letters also prove visually tiring for the recipient, even when it's happy news. So unless you've had QUADRUPLETS or you've really WON THE LOTTERY, skip the capitals.
Subject Matters
In days past, an e-mail could arrive wearing nothing more than a subject line reading "dinner." Today, a message must arrive wearing a focused ensemble, such as "Dinner with Laurie and Jake on January 18th downtown." Remember: People use subject lines to prioritize the order in which they read e-mails, to sort e-mails into holding folders--and to decide which e-mails to skip entirely. Make the subject line as specific as possible without being wordy. "Please comment on enclosed proposal today" beats "per our discussion." If the recipient won't recognize your e-mail address, try to be extra clear.
And don't label your e-mail "Urgent" too often, when it really isn't. You'll start to annoy recipients. Subject closed.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,80624/article.html
Consumer Watch: National Security vs. Online Privacy
The new antiterrorism law steps up electronic surveillance of the Internet.
By now, you've probably heard a lot of debate over the USA Patriot Act, the federal legislation passed in October to give investigators more tools for apprehending terrorists. Proponents of the law say we need it to protect ourselves. Opponents say it threatens our constitutional rights. But whatever position you take on these issues, it's important to know how the new law will affect your life online.
The Patriot Act is complex and powerful. It broadens the definition of terrorism and increases the penalties for terrorism.
Some of the more sweeping changes involve electronic surveillance. The act permits federal investigators to use more-powerful tools to monitor phone calls, e-mail messages, and even Web surfing. We all hope that means agents will be better able to arrest terrorists and foil their plans. But the changes also mean we now have even less guarantee of privacy on the Net. The new law, along with new surveillance tools, will create a dragnet wide enough that anyone's e-mail note, text chat, or search inquiry might be snared.
What are the implications of this new type of surveillance for your Internet privacy? It's difficult to say exactly. The Patriot Act is vague on many key points. And understandably, law enforcement officials aren't eager to reveal details about tools like the controversial Internet surveillance system, DCS1000 (more commonly recognized by its previous name, Carnivore). "One of the biggest issues with Carnivore is that we don't really know how it works," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy in Technology, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on preserving privacy and civil liberties on the Internet.
It's probably fair to say that joking in an e-mail about planting a bomb is a very bad idea these days. And researching biological terror techniques over the Internet could conceivably draw suspicion.
Watch What You Say
Am I saying that the FBI will break down your door if you run a Google search on anthrax? Of course not. Surveillance will naturally focus on people about whom authorities have a solid basis for suspicion. Investigators will treat most other traffic as just so much white noise. But the new security measures do make some old advice even more valuable: Never write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard.
The Patriot Act extends to Internet-based communications the use of pen-register and trap-and-trace orders, techniques designed in the '60s and '70s to capture numbers dialed to and from a particular telephone. Investigators can get permission to use the techniques fairly easily. They need not establish probable cause--reasonable suspicion that a targeted individual has been or will be involved in a crime--and judges are required to approve all reasonable requests related to criminal investigations.
Now that such surveillance will apply to Net communications, though, investigators could gather much more than just phone numbers. When a suspect sends an e-mail message, investigators could discover not only the recipient's identity, but also the subject line and perhaps even the body of the message. The act doesn't clearly define what constitutes electronic content that can permissibly be captured. The FBI's solution: Let federal agents make the decision and take responsibility for excising inadmissible material.
The new law opens the door for increased use of Carnivore and similar broad-based electronic surveillance systems. Used at an Internet service provider, Carnivore gives authorities easy access to all Internet communications to and from the ISP's entire membership. Although the act requires the FBI to work with the ISP, it places few restrictions on who can be monitored, so theoretically any subscriber identified by law enforcement as relevant to an investigation could be targeted. Investigators don't need to establish probable cause in advance.
The act also loosens the rules for roving wiretaps, conferring broad authority to listen in on a suspect's communications. Under previous laws, officials had to specify certain phone lines they wanted to monitor, along with proof that their suspect used them. Federal authorities said that the old rules were outdated, since many people have phone lines at home, a mobile phone, and Internet access at home, at work, and even at Starbucks. The act lets agents wiretap any phone line--again, without showing probable cause--and monitor everything on that line whether the suspect is using it or not.
Suppose that investigators believed a terrorist was using Internet connections on PCs at a library. Under the new law, authorities could monitor all PCs with Internet connections at that library and monitor the e-mail, Web browsing, and other traffic of everyone who used them--all for an indefinite period.
Our national security depends on improved electronic surveillance, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), a key player in crafting the new legislation. "To prevent future terrorist attacks, we must improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities, and make sure that intelligence about potential terrorists is shared with necessary actors throughout the government," Leahy said during a recent congressional hearing on terrorism.
Civil libertarians counter that the Patriot Act erodes fundamental freedoms and may even make some investigations more difficult. "First Amendment rights are also at stake since communications and associations will be chilled if they're subject to government snooping," says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and president of the American Civil Liberties Union. With the new law, Strossen says, investigators may be so deluged with data that spotting the real threats will be impossible. "This sweeping surveillance is at best inefficient, at worst counterproductive," she says.
If you're like me, you may find yourself agreeing, at least in part, with both Leahy and Strossen. Striking the right balance between security and individual liberty in these scary times is a difficult and contentious undertaking. It's a debate whose outcome we all have a stake in. Go to www.congress.org to contact your senators and your congressional representative.
The national tragedy of September 11 changed almost every facet of American life. It's sad--but not surprising--that it will change our virtual lives as well.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,68769/article.html
By now, you've probably heard a lot of debate over the USA Patriot Act, the federal legislation passed in October to give investigators more tools for apprehending terrorists. Proponents of the law say we need it to protect ourselves. Opponents say it threatens our constitutional rights. But whatever position you take on these issues, it's important to know how the new law will affect your life online.
The Patriot Act is complex and powerful. It broadens the definition of terrorism and increases the penalties for terrorism.
Some of the more sweeping changes involve electronic surveillance. The act permits federal investigators to use more-powerful tools to monitor phone calls, e-mail messages, and even Web surfing. We all hope that means agents will be better able to arrest terrorists and foil their plans. But the changes also mean we now have even less guarantee of privacy on the Net. The new law, along with new surveillance tools, will create a dragnet wide enough that anyone's e-mail note, text chat, or search inquiry might be snared.
What are the implications of this new type of surveillance for your Internet privacy? It's difficult to say exactly. The Patriot Act is vague on many key points. And understandably, law enforcement officials aren't eager to reveal details about tools like the controversial Internet surveillance system, DCS1000 (more commonly recognized by its previous name, Carnivore). "One of the biggest issues with Carnivore is that we don't really know how it works," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy in Technology, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on preserving privacy and civil liberties on the Internet.
It's probably fair to say that joking in an e-mail about planting a bomb is a very bad idea these days. And researching biological terror techniques over the Internet could conceivably draw suspicion.
Watch What You Say
Am I saying that the FBI will break down your door if you run a Google search on anthrax? Of course not. Surveillance will naturally focus on people about whom authorities have a solid basis for suspicion. Investigators will treat most other traffic as just so much white noise. But the new security measures do make some old advice even more valuable: Never write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard.
The Patriot Act extends to Internet-based communications the use of pen-register and trap-and-trace orders, techniques designed in the '60s and '70s to capture numbers dialed to and from a particular telephone. Investigators can get permission to use the techniques fairly easily. They need not establish probable cause--reasonable suspicion that a targeted individual has been or will be involved in a crime--and judges are required to approve all reasonable requests related to criminal investigations.
Now that such surveillance will apply to Net communications, though, investigators could gather much more than just phone numbers. When a suspect sends an e-mail message, investigators could discover not only the recipient's identity, but also the subject line and perhaps even the body of the message. The act doesn't clearly define what constitutes electronic content that can permissibly be captured. The FBI's solution: Let federal agents make the decision and take responsibility for excising inadmissible material.
The new law opens the door for increased use of Carnivore and similar broad-based electronic surveillance systems. Used at an Internet service provider, Carnivore gives authorities easy access to all Internet communications to and from the ISP's entire membership. Although the act requires the FBI to work with the ISP, it places few restrictions on who can be monitored, so theoretically any subscriber identified by law enforcement as relevant to an investigation could be targeted. Investigators don't need to establish probable cause in advance.
The act also loosens the rules for roving wiretaps, conferring broad authority to listen in on a suspect's communications. Under previous laws, officials had to specify certain phone lines they wanted to monitor, along with proof that their suspect used them. Federal authorities said that the old rules were outdated, since many people have phone lines at home, a mobile phone, and Internet access at home, at work, and even at Starbucks. The act lets agents wiretap any phone line--again, without showing probable cause--and monitor everything on that line whether the suspect is using it or not.
Suppose that investigators believed a terrorist was using Internet connections on PCs at a library. Under the new law, authorities could monitor all PCs with Internet connections at that library and monitor the e-mail, Web browsing, and other traffic of everyone who used them--all for an indefinite period.
Our national security depends on improved electronic surveillance, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), a key player in crafting the new legislation. "To prevent future terrorist attacks, we must improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities, and make sure that intelligence about potential terrorists is shared with necessary actors throughout the government," Leahy said during a recent congressional hearing on terrorism.
Civil libertarians counter that the Patriot Act erodes fundamental freedoms and may even make some investigations more difficult. "First Amendment rights are also at stake since communications and associations will be chilled if they're subject to government snooping," says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and president of the American Civil Liberties Union. With the new law, Strossen says, investigators may be so deluged with data that spotting the real threats will be impossible. "This sweeping surveillance is at best inefficient, at worst counterproductive," she says.
If you're like me, you may find yourself agreeing, at least in part, with both Leahy and Strossen. Striking the right balance between security and individual liberty in these scary times is a difficult and contentious undertaking. It's a debate whose outcome we all have a stake in. Go to www.congress.org to contact your senators and your congressional representative.
The national tragedy of September 11 changed almost every facet of American life. It's sad--but not surprising--that it will change our virtual lives as well.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,68769/article.html
Consumer Watch: National Security vs. Online Privacy
The new antiterrorism law steps up electronic surveillance of the Internet.
By now, you've probably heard a lot of debate over the USA Patriot Act, the federal legislation passed in October to give investigators more tools for apprehending terrorists. Proponents of the law say we need it to protect ourselves. Opponents say it threatens our constitutional rights. But whatever position you take on these issues, it's important to know how the new law will affect your life online.
The Patriot Act is complex and powerful. It broadens the definition of terrorism and increases the penalties for terrorism.
Some of the more sweeping changes involve electronic surveillance. The act permits federal investigators to use more-powerful tools to monitor phone calls, e-mail messages, and even Web surfing. We all hope that means agents will be better able to arrest terrorists and foil their plans. But the changes also mean we now have even less guarantee of privacy on the Net. The new law, along with new surveillance tools, will create a dragnet wide enough that anyone's e-mail note, text chat, or search inquiry might be snared.
What are the implications of this new type of surveillance for your Internet privacy? It's difficult to say exactly. The Patriot Act is vague on many key points. And understandably, law enforcement officials aren't eager to reveal details about tools like the controversial Internet surveillance system, DCS1000 (more commonly recognized by its previous name, Carnivore). "One of the biggest issues with Carnivore is that we don't really know how it works," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy in Technology, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on preserving privacy and civil liberties on the Internet.
It's probably fair to say that joking in an e-mail about planting a bomb is a very bad idea these days. And researching biological terror techniques over the Internet could conceivably draw suspicion.
Watch What You Say
Am I saying that the FBI will break down your door if you run a Google search on anthrax? Of course not. Surveillance will naturally focus on people about whom authorities have a solid basis for suspicion. Investigators will treat most other traffic as just so much white noise. But the new security measures do make some old advice even more valuable: Never write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard.
The Patriot Act extends to Internet-based communications the use of pen-register and trap-and-trace orders, techniques designed in the '60s and '70s to capture numbers dialed to and from a particular telephone. Investigators can get permission to use the techniques fairly easily. They need not establish probable cause--reasonable suspicion that a targeted individual has been or will be involved in a crime--and judges are required to approve all reasonable requests related to criminal investigations.
Now that such surveillance will apply to Net communications, though, investigators could gather much more than just phone numbers. When a suspect sends an e-mail message, investigators could discover not only the recipient's identity, but also the subject line and perhaps even the body of the message. The act doesn't clearly define what constitutes electronic content that can permissibly be captured. The FBI's solution: Let federal agents make the decision and take responsibility for excising inadmissible material.
The new law opens the door for increased use of Carnivore and similar broad-based electronic surveillance systems. Used at an Internet service provider, Carnivore gives authorities easy access to all Internet communications to and from the ISP's entire membership. Although the act requires the FBI to work with the ISP, it places few restrictions on who can be monitored, so theoretically any subscriber identified by law enforcement as relevant to an investigation could be targeted. Investigators don't need to establish probable cause in advance.
The act also loosens the rules for roving wiretaps, conferring broad authority to listen in on a suspect's communications. Under previous laws, officials had to specify certain phone lines they wanted to monitor, along with proof that their suspect used them. Federal authorities said that the old rules were outdated, since many people have phone lines at home, a mobile phone, and Internet access at home, at work, and even at Starbucks. The act lets agents wiretap any phone line--again, without showing probable cause--and monitor everything on that line whether the suspect is using it or not.
Suppose that investigators believed a terrorist was using Internet connections on PCs at a library. Under the new law, authorities could monitor all PCs with Internet connections at that library and monitor the e-mail, Web browsing, and other traffic of everyone who used them--all for an indefinite period.
Our national security depends on improved electronic surveillance, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), a key player in crafting the new legislation. "To prevent future terrorist attacks, we must improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities, and make sure that intelligence about potential terrorists is shared with necessary actors throughout the government," Leahy said during a recent congressional hearing on terrorism.
Civil libertarians counter that the Patriot Act erodes fundamental freedoms and may even make some investigations more difficult. "First Amendment rights are also at stake since communications and associations will be chilled if they're subject to government snooping," says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and president of the American Civil Liberties Union. With the new law, Strossen says, investigators may be so deluged with data that spotting the real threats will be impossible. "This sweeping surveillance is at best inefficient, at worst counterproductive," she says.
If you're like me, you may find yourself agreeing, at least in part, with both Leahy and Strossen. Striking the right balance between security and individual liberty in these scary times is a difficult and contentious undertaking. It's a debate whose outcome we all have a stake in. Go to www.congress.org to contact your senators and your congressional representative.
The national tragedy of September 11 changed almost every facet of American life. It's sad--but not surprising--that it will change our virtual lives as well.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,68769/article.html
By now, you've probably heard a lot of debate over the USA Patriot Act, the federal legislation passed in October to give investigators more tools for apprehending terrorists. Proponents of the law say we need it to protect ourselves. Opponents say it threatens our constitutional rights. But whatever position you take on these issues, it's important to know how the new law will affect your life online.
The Patriot Act is complex and powerful. It broadens the definition of terrorism and increases the penalties for terrorism.
Some of the more sweeping changes involve electronic surveillance. The act permits federal investigators to use more-powerful tools to monitor phone calls, e-mail messages, and even Web surfing. We all hope that means agents will be better able to arrest terrorists and foil their plans. But the changes also mean we now have even less guarantee of privacy on the Net. The new law, along with new surveillance tools, will create a dragnet wide enough that anyone's e-mail note, text chat, or search inquiry might be snared.
What are the implications of this new type of surveillance for your Internet privacy? It's difficult to say exactly. The Patriot Act is vague on many key points. And understandably, law enforcement officials aren't eager to reveal details about tools like the controversial Internet surveillance system, DCS1000 (more commonly recognized by its previous name, Carnivore). "One of the biggest issues with Carnivore is that we don't really know how it works," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy in Technology, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on preserving privacy and civil liberties on the Internet.
It's probably fair to say that joking in an e-mail about planting a bomb is a very bad idea these days. And researching biological terror techniques over the Internet could conceivably draw suspicion.
Watch What You Say
Am I saying that the FBI will break down your door if you run a Google search on anthrax? Of course not. Surveillance will naturally focus on people about whom authorities have a solid basis for suspicion. Investigators will treat most other traffic as just so much white noise. But the new security measures do make some old advice even more valuable: Never write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't write on the back of a postcard.
The Patriot Act extends to Internet-based communications the use of pen-register and trap-and-trace orders, techniques designed in the '60s and '70s to capture numbers dialed to and from a particular telephone. Investigators can get permission to use the techniques fairly easily. They need not establish probable cause--reasonable suspicion that a targeted individual has been or will be involved in a crime--and judges are required to approve all reasonable requests related to criminal investigations.
Now that such surveillance will apply to Net communications, though, investigators could gather much more than just phone numbers. When a suspect sends an e-mail message, investigators could discover not only the recipient's identity, but also the subject line and perhaps even the body of the message. The act doesn't clearly define what constitutes electronic content that can permissibly be captured. The FBI's solution: Let federal agents make the decision and take responsibility for excising inadmissible material.
The new law opens the door for increased use of Carnivore and similar broad-based electronic surveillance systems. Used at an Internet service provider, Carnivore gives authorities easy access to all Internet communications to and from the ISP's entire membership. Although the act requires the FBI to work with the ISP, it places few restrictions on who can be monitored, so theoretically any subscriber identified by law enforcement as relevant to an investigation could be targeted. Investigators don't need to establish probable cause in advance.
The act also loosens the rules for roving wiretaps, conferring broad authority to listen in on a suspect's communications. Under previous laws, officials had to specify certain phone lines they wanted to monitor, along with proof that their suspect used them. Federal authorities said that the old rules were outdated, since many people have phone lines at home, a mobile phone, and Internet access at home, at work, and even at Starbucks. The act lets agents wiretap any phone line--again, without showing probable cause--and monitor everything on that line whether the suspect is using it or not.
Suppose that investigators believed a terrorist was using Internet connections on PCs at a library. Under the new law, authorities could monitor all PCs with Internet connections at that library and monitor the e-mail, Web browsing, and other traffic of everyone who used them--all for an indefinite period.
Our national security depends on improved electronic surveillance, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), a key player in crafting the new legislation. "To prevent future terrorist attacks, we must improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities, and make sure that intelligence about potential terrorists is shared with necessary actors throughout the government," Leahy said during a recent congressional hearing on terrorism.
Civil libertarians counter that the Patriot Act erodes fundamental freedoms and may even make some investigations more difficult. "First Amendment rights are also at stake since communications and associations will be chilled if they're subject to government snooping," says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and president of the American Civil Liberties Union. With the new law, Strossen says, investigators may be so deluged with data that spotting the real threats will be impossible. "This sweeping surveillance is at best inefficient, at worst counterproductive," she says.
If you're like me, you may find yourself agreeing, at least in part, with both Leahy and Strossen. Striking the right balance between security and individual liberty in these scary times is a difficult and contentious undertaking. It's a debate whose outcome we all have a stake in. Go to www.congress.org to contact your senators and your congressional representative.
The national tragedy of September 11 changed almost every facet of American life. It's sad--but not surprising--that it will change our virtual lives as well.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,68769/article.html
My Plan To Get More From Multi Cores
There was a time when PC hardware struggled to keep up with PC software. Not anymore. At this point in the evolution of the personal computer, the hardware is so far ahead of the software that it's actually sad. For example, I now have close to 4 terabytes of disk storage at home, but I can barely push myself past 400 gigabytes of data and programs. Having such ridiculous amounts of storage space means that no one will ever do disk cleanup again. And that's great news for government snoops. With instant access to gigabyte after gigabyte of your personal records, they'll have no trouble finding what they need for your eventual conviction on trumped-up charges.
But it's this dual/quad/octo-core chip thing that's really the issue. The software needed to take full advantage of these chips continues to lag behind. It's like the old lady in the checkout line at the grocery store who's certain she has that much-needed penny in the bottom of her change purse but can't seem to find it. "It's in here somewhere. I just know it."
Nobody wants to face the fact that Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows XP, and Vista are based on OS designs that are as old as the hills. Sure, OS X and Windows have been gussied up with pretty icons and lots of colors, but that's just lipstick on a pig. The difference today between the Mac and the PC is that the Mac has better lipstick.
Meanwhile, none of these operating systems has the power to make multicore chips work as advertised. In the end, these chips are little more than novelties. Intel actually has the gall to claim that its extra cores can save power by automatically shutting down when they're not in use. This just means they'll be shut down most of the time. If the software could take advantage of these extra cores, there wouldn't be any need to shut them down.
With that in mind, I give you my CORE DEDICATION PROPOSAL. Why can't operating systems simply dedicate extra cores to housekeeping chores and cool background tasks? It's simple enough to work. Here are a few choice uses for core dedication. There are six of them, since we may see a six-core chip on the road ahead.
Disk Maintenance At one time or another, your PC's hard drive starts grinding away, doing God knows what. Sometimes, as you type on your word processor, your machine slows to a crawl, and each character takes its sweet time showing up on-screen (or they show up all at once, long after you typed them). Why not dedicate a CPU core to disk maintenance? That way, your machine can grind away without disturbing anything else.
Virus and Spyware Scanning One of the most painful PC experiences is when a virus or spyware scan begins in the middle of the night—and you're still trying to work. Everything stops. With some systems, this happens at boot time too. To heck with it. One core should be dedicated to continuous deep scanning—24/7. You'd never even notice. Except for the noise, that is.
YouTube Streaming The third core? It can be used to stream idiotic video clips from YouTube onto your machine. This core will just stay on YouTube. Forever.
Webcam-Casting You may as well use a core to stream a video of yourself onto the Web. People love to watch other people sitting at their computers typing.
Twittering Today, computers are mostly used for inane things such as Twitter—a blog-like environment where you report on your activities minute by minute. Thanks to Twitter, people can see what a fascinating life you lead and can live vicariously through everything you do. The fifth core will be for Twitter. And instant messaging.
Second Life Bots For all those fans of online virtual worlds like Second Life: You might as well have one core dedicated to your 3D avatar. Of course, it'll just sit around vegetating most of the time—kinda like what you do when you use Second Life.
Well, I'm out of cores. Can I have more?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2129596,00.asp
But it's this dual/quad/octo-core chip thing that's really the issue. The software needed to take full advantage of these chips continues to lag behind. It's like the old lady in the checkout line at the grocery store who's certain she has that much-needed penny in the bottom of her change purse but can't seem to find it. "It's in here somewhere. I just know it."
Nobody wants to face the fact that Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows XP, and Vista are based on OS designs that are as old as the hills. Sure, OS X and Windows have been gussied up with pretty icons and lots of colors, but that's just lipstick on a pig. The difference today between the Mac and the PC is that the Mac has better lipstick.
Meanwhile, none of these operating systems has the power to make multicore chips work as advertised. In the end, these chips are little more than novelties. Intel actually has the gall to claim that its extra cores can save power by automatically shutting down when they're not in use. This just means they'll be shut down most of the time. If the software could take advantage of these extra cores, there wouldn't be any need to shut them down.
With that in mind, I give you my CORE DEDICATION PROPOSAL. Why can't operating systems simply dedicate extra cores to housekeeping chores and cool background tasks? It's simple enough to work. Here are a few choice uses for core dedication. There are six of them, since we may see a six-core chip on the road ahead.
Disk Maintenance At one time or another, your PC's hard drive starts grinding away, doing God knows what. Sometimes, as you type on your word processor, your machine slows to a crawl, and each character takes its sweet time showing up on-screen (or they show up all at once, long after you typed them). Why not dedicate a CPU core to disk maintenance? That way, your machine can grind away without disturbing anything else.
Virus and Spyware Scanning One of the most painful PC experiences is when a virus or spyware scan begins in the middle of the night—and you're still trying to work. Everything stops. With some systems, this happens at boot time too. To heck with it. One core should be dedicated to continuous deep scanning—24/7. You'd never even notice. Except for the noise, that is.
YouTube Streaming The third core? It can be used to stream idiotic video clips from YouTube onto your machine. This core will just stay on YouTube. Forever.
Webcam-Casting You may as well use a core to stream a video of yourself onto the Web. People love to watch other people sitting at their computers typing.
Twittering Today, computers are mostly used for inane things such as Twitter—a blog-like environment where you report on your activities minute by minute. Thanks to Twitter, people can see what a fascinating life you lead and can live vicariously through everything you do. The fifth core will be for Twitter. And instant messaging.
Second Life Bots For all those fans of online virtual worlds like Second Life: You might as well have one core dedicated to your 3D avatar. Of course, it'll just sit around vegetating most of the time—kinda like what you do when you use Second Life.
Well, I'm out of cores. Can I have more?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2129596,00.asp
The Power of Negative Thinking
Accentuating the positive doesn't make products better.
Stephen Manes, PC World
It's guaranteed: whenever I say mean things about some third-rate bloatware that doesn't remotely live up to its hype--like, say, Windows Vista--I get a batch of e-mail berating me for being negative. And I'm not the only one: In online forums, fans of whatever item is under the microscope enjoy dissing "whiners" who pick apart the failings in products and services, from high-end hotels to nose-hair trimmers.
Sorry, Pollyannas, but you're missing the point. To borrow a phrase from Spiro Agnew's speechwriters, nattering nabobs of negativism--including professional complainers like me and savvy online amateurs--are all that keep us from a world where marketing and public-relations messages are the only ones that matter.
Vendors often give professional reviewers access to new products and services before their release, but many companies have adopted the clever strategy of announcing products long before they actually exist. The idea is to garner plenty of positive buzz before negative hands-on reviews can show up. When you read a report that "this slim device delivers driving directions throughout the U.S." without any evidence that the writer tried it, you can be sure that this bland information came directly from the company's literature. Only later will you learn that the unit takes forever to lock on to the satellite signals, is unreadable on sunny days, eats batteries, and takes a perverse pleasure in sending you the wrong way down one-way streets.
Hands-on experience is the difference between information and hype. Those of us who test products for a living often hear from vendors who don't like it when we point out the drawbacks of what they sell. But is Microsoft going to take out full-page ads to proclaim "Lots of incompatibilities remain"? Is your cellular provider going to erect a billboard trumpeting "New phone: Minor improvement, if that!" or "Entering dropped-call zone"?
And the Internet's ability to give every frustrated customer a soapbox has ushered in a Golden Age of Negativity--for which I am supremely grateful. When a recent Windows update led my audio software to deliver an error message every time my machine booted up, a ticked-off Slashdot post from another victim of the same glitch pointed the way to a fix. When you google an error message, the solution often comes from some sadder but wiser user rather than the offending company's support database.
Before I go on vacation, I head straight to TripAdvisor for the truth about the hotel room that's too small to turn around in or the "luxury resort" whose renovation means jackhammers at 6 a.m. Before shelling out for home theater components, I turn to AVS Forum to see what the unhappiest buyers are saying about devices whose HDMI connectors don't always connect. Before I buy a car, I seek out the least-satisfied customers I can find on sites like Edmunds.com to flesh out my worst-case scenarios.
Amazon.com customers who bestow five-star ratings on tech products can be worth reading, but first I want the no- and one-star reviews. Sometimes they come from outright cranks, but more often they're written by experts who snicker at the glowing notices from novices who think "640 by 480" is tech talk for high resolution--and then point out the flaws the newbies missed.
Everyone wants high-quality, high-value products and services. The truth is, you don't discover and encourage them by dwelling on the bright side.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/132073-1/article.html
Stephen Manes, PC World
It's guaranteed: whenever I say mean things about some third-rate bloatware that doesn't remotely live up to its hype--like, say, Windows Vista--I get a batch of e-mail berating me for being negative. And I'm not the only one: In online forums, fans of whatever item is under the microscope enjoy dissing "whiners" who pick apart the failings in products and services, from high-end hotels to nose-hair trimmers.
Sorry, Pollyannas, but you're missing the point. To borrow a phrase from Spiro Agnew's speechwriters, nattering nabobs of negativism--including professional complainers like me and savvy online amateurs--are all that keep us from a world where marketing and public-relations messages are the only ones that matter.
Vendors often give professional reviewers access to new products and services before their release, but many companies have adopted the clever strategy of announcing products long before they actually exist. The idea is to garner plenty of positive buzz before negative hands-on reviews can show up. When you read a report that "this slim device delivers driving directions throughout the U.S." without any evidence that the writer tried it, you can be sure that this bland information came directly from the company's literature. Only later will you learn that the unit takes forever to lock on to the satellite signals, is unreadable on sunny days, eats batteries, and takes a perverse pleasure in sending you the wrong way down one-way streets.
Hands-on experience is the difference between information and hype. Those of us who test products for a living often hear from vendors who don't like it when we point out the drawbacks of what they sell. But is Microsoft going to take out full-page ads to proclaim "Lots of incompatibilities remain"? Is your cellular provider going to erect a billboard trumpeting "New phone: Minor improvement, if that!" or "Entering dropped-call zone"?
And the Internet's ability to give every frustrated customer a soapbox has ushered in a Golden Age of Negativity--for which I am supremely grateful. When a recent Windows update led my audio software to deliver an error message every time my machine booted up, a ticked-off Slashdot post from another victim of the same glitch pointed the way to a fix. When you google an error message, the solution often comes from some sadder but wiser user rather than the offending company's support database.
Before I go on vacation, I head straight to TripAdvisor for the truth about the hotel room that's too small to turn around in or the "luxury resort" whose renovation means jackhammers at 6 a.m. Before shelling out for home theater components, I turn to AVS Forum to see what the unhappiest buyers are saying about devices whose HDMI connectors don't always connect. Before I buy a car, I seek out the least-satisfied customers I can find on sites like Edmunds.com to flesh out my worst-case scenarios.
Amazon.com customers who bestow five-star ratings on tech products can be worth reading, but first I want the no- and one-star reviews. Sometimes they come from outright cranks, but more often they're written by experts who snicker at the glowing notices from novices who think "640 by 480" is tech talk for high resolution--and then point out the flaws the newbies missed.
Everyone wants high-quality, high-value products and services. The truth is, you don't discover and encourage them by dwelling on the bright side.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/132073-1/article.html
Think You Have On-Site Service? Maybe Not
My purchase of an ABS Awesome 6300 PC in April 2004 included a three-year on-site service contract. So when my PC failed to start last November, I called ABS. A technician walked me through potential fixes, but none worked. I told him I had an on-site service contract, but he and a manager said the company that was supposed to provide the on-site service had gone out of business, and he and ABS could do nothing about it. I purchased the service contract from ABS, but I have received from them as yet neither service nor a refund.
Luis Garcia-Bunuel, Prescott, Arizona
On Your Side responds: According to ABS, Garcia-Bunuel's on-site service agreement wasn't actually with ABS, but with 2NET, a company that ABS partnered with for several years. Later, ABS terminated its relationship with 2NET, which has since gone out of business. An ABS spokesperson said the company clearly stated on its Web site and in material accompanying the PC that the service was provided by 2NET. Garcia-Bunuel says the only indication that his service was with 2NET was an item on his initial invoice. ABS gave free phone tech support to Garcia-Bunuel, and a company rep said he can call if he has more problems.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/131872-1/article.html
Luis Garcia-Bunuel, Prescott, Arizona
On Your Side responds: According to ABS, Garcia-Bunuel's on-site service agreement wasn't actually with ABS, but with 2NET, a company that ABS partnered with for several years. Later, ABS terminated its relationship with 2NET, which has since gone out of business. An ABS spokesperson said the company clearly stated on its Web site and in material accompanying the PC that the service was provided by 2NET. Garcia-Bunuel says the only indication that his service was with 2NET was an item on his initial invoice. ABS gave free phone tech support to Garcia-Bunuel, and a company rep said he can call if he has more problems.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/131872-1/article.html
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Mimio: Electronic Whiteboard Substitute
Virtual Ink Mimio
If you attend a lot of brainstorming sessions, you've probably wished for an electronic whiteboard to capture all those precious ideas. But the large ones are pricey, and even compact units, such as MicroTouch's sub-$500 Ibid 100, are heavy and unwieldy.
Virtual Ink's $499 Mimio isn't cheaper than smaller competitive offerings, but it solves the portability problem by retrofitting conventional whiteboards to record scribbles and sketches electronically on a PC. It consists of a folding 28-inch bar (14 by 7 by 2 inches when closed) that weighs under 2 pounds; four color-coded dry-erase marker sheaths; and a pressure-sensitive eraser. The bar holds position-sensing optics and connects by cables to the serial (or Universal Serial Bus) and mouse ports of a PC. The marker sheaths are wired for ultrasonic and infrared transmission. When you write, Mimio detects and records your pen strokes as images you can save for printing or perusal. You use the eraser to make corrections or to wipe out blocks of text.
Setup of an early preproduction unit was remarkably straightforward. The teal-colored bar attached by suction cups to the left side of my 3-by-4-foot office whiteboard. The mechanical kinks I ran into--suction cups giving way unexpectedly, and pens sometimes needing a lot of pressure to activate--should be fixed in the shipping version.
Virtual Ink says that Mimio supports boards as large as 4 by 8 feet and can be used with videoconferencing software, including Microsoft's NetMeeting, to share whiteboard notes remotely.
Mimio would be even more useful if it could convert handwriting to editable text. But if you can't justify the expense of a large electronic whiteboard, or even a smaller one that isn't comfortably portable, Mimio should fit the bill.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,10195/article.html
If you attend a lot of brainstorming sessions, you've probably wished for an electronic whiteboard to capture all those precious ideas. But the large ones are pricey, and even compact units, such as MicroTouch's sub-$500 Ibid 100, are heavy and unwieldy.
Virtual Ink's $499 Mimio isn't cheaper than smaller competitive offerings, but it solves the portability problem by retrofitting conventional whiteboards to record scribbles and sketches electronically on a PC. It consists of a folding 28-inch bar (14 by 7 by 2 inches when closed) that weighs under 2 pounds; four color-coded dry-erase marker sheaths; and a pressure-sensitive eraser. The bar holds position-sensing optics and connects by cables to the serial (or Universal Serial Bus) and mouse ports of a PC. The marker sheaths are wired for ultrasonic and infrared transmission. When you write, Mimio detects and records your pen strokes as images you can save for printing or perusal. You use the eraser to make corrections or to wipe out blocks of text.
Setup of an early preproduction unit was remarkably straightforward. The teal-colored bar attached by suction cups to the left side of my 3-by-4-foot office whiteboard. The mechanical kinks I ran into--suction cups giving way unexpectedly, and pens sometimes needing a lot of pressure to activate--should be fixed in the shipping version.
Virtual Ink says that Mimio supports boards as large as 4 by 8 feet and can be used with videoconferencing software, including Microsoft's NetMeeting, to share whiteboard notes remotely.
Mimio would be even more useful if it could convert handwriting to editable text. But if you can't justify the expense of a large electronic whiteboard, or even a smaller one that isn't comfortably portable, Mimio should fit the bill.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,10195/article.html
Electronic Whiteboard Kits on the Go
Electronics for Imaging EBeam, Virtual Link Mimio
How many times have you looked back on a meeting and wished you'd taken better notes? Electronic whiteboards can help by recording the scribbling of you and your colleagues, but they're expensive (more than $2500 for a 4-by-6-foot board) and too heavy to tote from room to room. Virtual Ink's Mimio and Electronics for Imaging's EBeam address both of these issues: Each unit costs about $500, fits inside a briefcase, and attaches to any conventional whiteboard with dimensions up to 4 by 8 feet.
Both products use sonic receivers to track movements on a conventional whiteboard. Regular marker pens fit into special holders that emit a very faint buzzing sound at a specific frequency whenever you press down to draw on the whiteboard. A special eraser works in a similar fashion.
Product setup and use are remarkably straightforward. Both Mimio and EBeam connect to a free serial port on your PC (EBeam offers an optional USB adapter). Both come with software for recording pen and eraser strokes, playing back or printing whiteboard sessions, attaching notes, and exporting screens to several file formats. You can even share your meetings with remote users via the Internet. There are a few hitches--pen holders sometimes require a lot of pressure to activate, and changing the angle at which you hold the pen will slightly alter how a line appears on screen. But these devices generally work quite well.
Mimio's receiver is a 28-inch bar that uses two large, lever-released suction cups to clamp onto the left side of your whiteboard (the bar folds in half for transporting). This product's capture software is better than EBeam's, with multiple levels of zoom, configurable pen colors, and a slicker overall presentation. For data sharing, Mimio's free software links with Microsoft's NetMeeting conferencing package to display whiteboard contents in real time. A software update (which should be available by the time you read this) will let Mimio write directly to the NetMeeting whiteboard. Also on tap are a $50 USB adapter and a $99 handwriting-recognition plug-in to convert your scribbles into editable text documents.
EBeam's more compact hardware--two small pods that attach to the top corners of your whiteboard--makes it the natural choice for travelers. The capture software lacks some of Mimio's polish, but it gets the job done. Remote users can obtain full-featured meeting access by downloading a free copy of the software, and a handy Java client permits anyone who has a Java-enabled Web browser to look in on the meeting.
NetMeeting users may prefer Mimio's more robust software, while people on the go should favor EBeam's more compact hardware and Java client. Either product offers an economical, portable alternative to an expensive, heavy electronic whiteboard.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,15364/article.html
How many times have you looked back on a meeting and wished you'd taken better notes? Electronic whiteboards can help by recording the scribbling of you and your colleagues, but they're expensive (more than $2500 for a 4-by-6-foot board) and too heavy to tote from room to room. Virtual Ink's Mimio and Electronics for Imaging's EBeam address both of these issues: Each unit costs about $500, fits inside a briefcase, and attaches to any conventional whiteboard with dimensions up to 4 by 8 feet.
Both products use sonic receivers to track movements on a conventional whiteboard. Regular marker pens fit into special holders that emit a very faint buzzing sound at a specific frequency whenever you press down to draw on the whiteboard. A special eraser works in a similar fashion.
Product setup and use are remarkably straightforward. Both Mimio and EBeam connect to a free serial port on your PC (EBeam offers an optional USB adapter). Both come with software for recording pen and eraser strokes, playing back or printing whiteboard sessions, attaching notes, and exporting screens to several file formats. You can even share your meetings with remote users via the Internet. There are a few hitches--pen holders sometimes require a lot of pressure to activate, and changing the angle at which you hold the pen will slightly alter how a line appears on screen. But these devices generally work quite well.
Mimio's receiver is a 28-inch bar that uses two large, lever-released suction cups to clamp onto the left side of your whiteboard (the bar folds in half for transporting). This product's capture software is better than EBeam's, with multiple levels of zoom, configurable pen colors, and a slicker overall presentation. For data sharing, Mimio's free software links with Microsoft's NetMeeting conferencing package to display whiteboard contents in real time. A software update (which should be available by the time you read this) will let Mimio write directly to the NetMeeting whiteboard. Also on tap are a $50 USB adapter and a $99 handwriting-recognition plug-in to convert your scribbles into editable text documents.
EBeam's more compact hardware--two small pods that attach to the top corners of your whiteboard--makes it the natural choice for travelers. The capture software lacks some of Mimio's polish, but it gets the job done. Remote users can obtain full-featured meeting access by downloading a free copy of the software, and a handy Java client permits anyone who has a Java-enabled Web browser to look in on the meeting.
NetMeeting users may prefer Mimio's more robust software, while people on the go should favor EBeam's more compact hardware and Java client. Either product offers an economical, portable alternative to an expensive, heavy electronic whiteboard.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,15364/article.html
Monday, May 28, 2007
Deconstructions: Nanochip
A memory chip the size of a white blood cell has profound implications for the future of computing.
This month Metropolis takes detailed looks at objects ranging in scale from the microscopic to the architectural. Links to the related stories can be found at the bottom of this article.
Earlier this year, two scientists announced that they had built a working memory chip about the size of a white blood cell. This was not only a computing breakthrough but something of a design accomplishment. Conventional memory chips are made exponentially smaller every year, Ã la Moore’s Law, but those are “just a smaller version of what Intel made five years ago,” explains James R. Heath, of the California Institute of Technology, who, along with UCLA’s J. Fraser Stoddart, created the device. Heath and Stoddart, by contrast, were designing on such a minute scale that they had to rethink completely what a memory chip could be. Indeed, the two men are chemists, not engineers, and they built their chips out of clusters of molecules instead of silicon.
The new chip is so small that they needed to devise molecules that would self-assemble in the required ways. Do terms like structure and architecture still apply at this scale? Heath says they do, noting that the chip’s circuitry, which is highly tolerant of defects, was based on some of the same principles as the Los Angeles freeway system’s. “When we first were exploring this, we actually made a computer [chip] that was designed along these levels—with streets, boulevards, and interstates.” Although the technology is about 15 years away from being integrated into your laptop, Heath is optimistic that the chip will ultimately have important applications. In the captions, he explains the details of his revolutionary design.
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2624
This month Metropolis takes detailed looks at objects ranging in scale from the microscopic to the architectural. Links to the related stories can be found at the bottom of this article.
Earlier this year, two scientists announced that they had built a working memory chip about the size of a white blood cell. This was not only a computing breakthrough but something of a design accomplishment. Conventional memory chips are made exponentially smaller every year, Ã la Moore’s Law, but those are “just a smaller version of what Intel made five years ago,” explains James R. Heath, of the California Institute of Technology, who, along with UCLA’s J. Fraser Stoddart, created the device. Heath and Stoddart, by contrast, were designing on such a minute scale that they had to rethink completely what a memory chip could be. Indeed, the two men are chemists, not engineers, and they built their chips out of clusters of molecules instead of silicon.
The new chip is so small that they needed to devise molecules that would self-assemble in the required ways. Do terms like structure and architecture still apply at this scale? Heath says they do, noting that the chip’s circuitry, which is highly tolerant of defects, was based on some of the same principles as the Los Angeles freeway system’s. “When we first were exploring this, we actually made a computer [chip] that was designed along these levels—with streets, boulevards, and interstates.” Although the technology is about 15 years away from being integrated into your laptop, Heath is optimistic that the chip will ultimately have important applications. In the captions, he explains the details of his revolutionary design.
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2624
An expert's look at RFID World 2007
The annual RFID World conference, held last week in Dallas, Texas, continues to draw a large crowd of vendors, developers and end-users interested in Radio Frequency Identification. The size of the show appeared to be marginally larger than last year, with more than 200 exhibitors and nine separate educational tracks focused on topics ranging from hardware advancements to real-time location tracking to security to mandate compliance.
Active RFID
While there were continued advancements in the EPC (Electronic Product Code passive RFID space (more on that later), the really interesting trend of the show was the increased presence of active RFID and sensor technologies. Gone are the days where people were impressed with being able read data from a simple tag and display it through an application. Today we are seeing some very innovative uses of sensors integrated into active tags that can wirelessly communicate the sensory data to backend systems.
For example, AXCESS Inc. was showing an active tag that incorporates a biometric fingerprint reader. This tag is used for high security environments where two-factor authentication is required for access control. When these tags are used, employees are no longer able to borrow a colleague's badge to enter a building as the tag is only "activated" by the fingerprint scanner.
Seeing this type of technology on a PDA impressed me several years ago. Seeing it on a tag not much larger than the size of a credit card truly shows how far sensor technologies have come.
Other interesting implementations of active RFID technologies included those combining temperature, light, and humidity sensors. The cost of active tags continues to decline as well, with tags projected to be as low as $5 to $25 -- depending on the capabilities -- making them a viable alternative to passive tags for certain applications.
Mobile and forklift RFID
Another trend is the continued focus on mobile and forklift devices. LXE announced two new certified software vendors for their RX2 vehicle-mounted terminal. The improved ability for these devices to work in disconnected mode, with on-device intelligence, is contributing to their increased usage in manufacturing, healthcare and related industries.
Going smaller was Wireless Dynamics' introduction of a low-frequency RFID Reader/Writer SD Card -- the SDiD 1210 -- that enables smartphones and PDAs to read and write low-frequency tags. Low-frequency tags are being used in several application types including animal identification, asset tagging and process compliance applications.
Passive RFID
On the passive RFID side there were several key announcements related to increased performance, lower costs and broader applicability of passive RFID technologies.
One of the announcements that caught my eye came from Alien Technology, which is making its LoadImage technology available for any UHF reader vendor. This technology will enable UHF readers to program and lock Alien's Gen2 tag in just 23 milliseconds -- up to ten times faster than the average time required to commission an RFID tag.
This may seem somewhat mundane, but being able to commission an RFID tag at production line speeds of up to 400 items per minute allows for item-level tagging of goods without impacting production levels.
Other items of interest related to passive RFID technology were its increased usage in asset location tracking. Vendors such as ThingMagic, Sybase iAnywhere (my company) and PDC all were demonstrating innovative technologies for asset tracking.
ThingMagic demonstrated the ability to use its Mercury line of RFID readers for asset tracking within a building, and incorporating this data into Google Maps. Sybase iAnywhere was showing how its software infrastructure, RFID Anywhere, can be used to incorporate multiple sensor technologies including passive RFID, active RFID, RTLS and environmental sensors to track mixed-value assets in a single system.
Finally, Precision Dynamics was demonstrating how its RFID wristbands can be used in amusement parks and other entertainment venues to provide a single solution for park admission, point-of-sale purchases (e.g., merchandise, arcade games, ride tickets, etc.), guest identification and even keyless entry into hotel rooms.
All three of these examples demonstrate how RFID solutions can provide real value to organizations outside of the mandates in the retail space.
More than just exhibitors
Outside of the exhibit hall, a number of keynotes, educational sessions, training opportunities, panel discussions and seminars provided the opportunity for attendees and vendors to learn about upcoming technology, real-world deployments, interesting RFID use-cases and other market trends and opinions.
Delivered by a variety of vendors, analysts, integrators, end users and other industry players, the educational component of RFID World 2007 jam-packed a lot of content into just a few days and had attendees of every type going away having learned a few new things.
It was truly impressive to learn about some of the innovative deployments of RFID technology such as the Spanish Postal Service's use of a system implemented by Sybase iAnywhere to audit and improve mail delivery and Kimberly-Clark Corporation's management of in-store product promotions by using mobile technology from ADASA.
The show was not without excitement outside of the technology spectrum. There were several marketing gimmicks that reminded me of the technology boom in the late 1990's, all meant to grab attention and draw people to the vendors' exhibit booths. These included promotions featuring Hooters girls (and chicken wings), Dallas Mavericks' cheerleaders and a chance to win tickets to the NCAA Basketball Final Four.
http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200704/00001966001.html
Active RFID
While there were continued advancements in the EPC (Electronic Product Code passive RFID space (more on that later), the really interesting trend of the show was the increased presence of active RFID and sensor technologies. Gone are the days where people were impressed with being able read data from a simple tag and display it through an application. Today we are seeing some very innovative uses of sensors integrated into active tags that can wirelessly communicate the sensory data to backend systems.
For example, AXCESS Inc. was showing an active tag that incorporates a biometric fingerprint reader. This tag is used for high security environments where two-factor authentication is required for access control. When these tags are used, employees are no longer able to borrow a colleague's badge to enter a building as the tag is only "activated" by the fingerprint scanner.
Seeing this type of technology on a PDA impressed me several years ago. Seeing it on a tag not much larger than the size of a credit card truly shows how far sensor technologies have come.
Other interesting implementations of active RFID technologies included those combining temperature, light, and humidity sensors. The cost of active tags continues to decline as well, with tags projected to be as low as $5 to $25 -- depending on the capabilities -- making them a viable alternative to passive tags for certain applications.
Mobile and forklift RFID
Another trend is the continued focus on mobile and forklift devices. LXE announced two new certified software vendors for their RX2 vehicle-mounted terminal. The improved ability for these devices to work in disconnected mode, with on-device intelligence, is contributing to their increased usage in manufacturing, healthcare and related industries.
Going smaller was Wireless Dynamics' introduction of a low-frequency RFID Reader/Writer SD Card -- the SDiD 1210 -- that enables smartphones and PDAs to read and write low-frequency tags. Low-frequency tags are being used in several application types including animal identification, asset tagging and process compliance applications.
Passive RFID
On the passive RFID side there were several key announcements related to increased performance, lower costs and broader applicability of passive RFID technologies.
One of the announcements that caught my eye came from Alien Technology, which is making its LoadImage technology available for any UHF reader vendor. This technology will enable UHF readers to program and lock Alien's Gen2 tag in just 23 milliseconds -- up to ten times faster than the average time required to commission an RFID tag.
This may seem somewhat mundane, but being able to commission an RFID tag at production line speeds of up to 400 items per minute allows for item-level tagging of goods without impacting production levels.
Other items of interest related to passive RFID technology were its increased usage in asset location tracking. Vendors such as ThingMagic, Sybase iAnywhere (my company) and PDC all were demonstrating innovative technologies for asset tracking.
ThingMagic demonstrated the ability to use its Mercury line of RFID readers for asset tracking within a building, and incorporating this data into Google Maps. Sybase iAnywhere was showing how its software infrastructure, RFID Anywhere, can be used to incorporate multiple sensor technologies including passive RFID, active RFID, RTLS and environmental sensors to track mixed-value assets in a single system.
Finally, Precision Dynamics was demonstrating how its RFID wristbands can be used in amusement parks and other entertainment venues to provide a single solution for park admission, point-of-sale purchases (e.g., merchandise, arcade games, ride tickets, etc.), guest identification and even keyless entry into hotel rooms.
All three of these examples demonstrate how RFID solutions can provide real value to organizations outside of the mandates in the retail space.
More than just exhibitors
Outside of the exhibit hall, a number of keynotes, educational sessions, training opportunities, panel discussions and seminars provided the opportunity for attendees and vendors to learn about upcoming technology, real-world deployments, interesting RFID use-cases and other market trends and opinions.
Delivered by a variety of vendors, analysts, integrators, end users and other industry players, the educational component of RFID World 2007 jam-packed a lot of content into just a few days and had attendees of every type going away having learned a few new things.
It was truly impressive to learn about some of the innovative deployments of RFID technology such as the Spanish Postal Service's use of a system implemented by Sybase iAnywhere to audit and improve mail delivery and Kimberly-Clark Corporation's management of in-store product promotions by using mobile technology from ADASA.
The show was not without excitement outside of the technology spectrum. There were several marketing gimmicks that reminded me of the technology boom in the late 1990's, all meant to grab attention and draw people to the vendors' exhibit booths. These included promotions featuring Hooters girls (and chicken wings), Dallas Mavericks' cheerleaders and a chance to win tickets to the NCAA Basketball Final Four.
http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200704/00001966001.html
TV Sales Show Mixed Picture
February brought bad news for plasma TV makers. Plasmas clocked their first year-over-year drop in sales with a 16 percent drop in dollar volume, according to the NPD Group. Pricing was down more than 35 percent with the average plasma selling for $1672. This is, of course, good news for consumers and we showed our appreciation by driving up unit sales 30 percent. Forty-two inch models are most popular though 50-inchers are gaining.
For LCD TV makers the outlook is more bullish, based on numbers from Quixel Research. LCD sales grew in both dollar volume, 125 percent, and unit volume, 134 percent, in 2006. (Note, however, that this timeframe is for fourth-quarter 2006 over the previous year, as opposed to first-quarter 2007 in the numbers above.) Again the growth was driven by dropping prices, with large-screen sizes selling for 17 to 20 percent less and small sizes for 15 to 17 percent less. LCD prices seem to be eroding (sorry, improving!) more slowly than plasma prices but the downward trend seems inexorable.
DLP-based microdisplays also did well in 2006, increasing 63 percent in unit sales over the previous year, says a press release from format licensor Texas Instruments. In the 50-inch size, DLPs shifted twice as many units as plasma, capturing a market share of 28.9 percent. DLP also has a majority market share in microdisplays (versus LCD-based rear-projectors). TI attributes the ruddy-cheeked robustness of DLP sales to reduced-depth models from Samsung and 1080p at a competitive price point. The proud parent's press release does not discuss the profitability of DLP.
http://www.hometheatermag.com/news/041207tvsales/
For LCD TV makers the outlook is more bullish, based on numbers from Quixel Research. LCD sales grew in both dollar volume, 125 percent, and unit volume, 134 percent, in 2006. (Note, however, that this timeframe is for fourth-quarter 2006 over the previous year, as opposed to first-quarter 2007 in the numbers above.) Again the growth was driven by dropping prices, with large-screen sizes selling for 17 to 20 percent less and small sizes for 15 to 17 percent less. LCD prices seem to be eroding (sorry, improving!) more slowly than plasma prices but the downward trend seems inexorable.
DLP-based microdisplays also did well in 2006, increasing 63 percent in unit sales over the previous year, says a press release from format licensor Texas Instruments. In the 50-inch size, DLPs shifted twice as many units as plasma, capturing a market share of 28.9 percent. DLP also has a majority market share in microdisplays (versus LCD-based rear-projectors). TI attributes the ruddy-cheeked robustness of DLP sales to reduced-depth models from Samsung and 1080p at a competitive price point. The proud parent's press release does not discuss the profitability of DLP.
http://www.hometheatermag.com/news/041207tvsales/
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Organic Electronics: Moving the Frontiers of Electronics
There is a close juxtaposition of biologically-active molecules, cells and tissues with convential electronic systems for advanced applications in analytical science, electronic materials, device fabrication and neuronal prosthesis
Bioelectronics—an offshoot of biotechnology and electronics—finds applications in at least three areas of research and development: bio-sensors, molecular electronics, and neuronal interfaces. Some scientists, who include biochips and biocomputer in the area of carbon-based information technology, suggest that biological molecules might be incorporated within a self-structuring bio-informatic system which displays novel information-processing and pattern-recognition capabilities. However, these applications are still in the speculative stage, but technically feasible nevertheless. Scientists working in this field of organic electronics are of the view that this carbon-based technology will replace inorganic electronics in use now, just as semiconductors replaced vacuum tubes.
Biosensors
Of the three disciplines—biosensors, molecular electronics and neuronal interfaces (which collectively constitute bioelectronics)—the most mature is the burgeoning area of biosensors.
The term ‘biosensor’ is used to describe two different classes of analytical devices—those that measure biological analytes and those that exploit biological recognition as a part of the sensing mechanism. It is the latter concept which truly captures the spirit of bioelectronics.
A biosensor is an analytical device that converts the concentration of an analyte in an appropriate sample into an electrical signal by means of a biological-sensing element intimately connected to or integrated into a transducer. Biosensors differ from existing analytical technologies in several important respects. First, there is an intimate contact between the biological component—be it enzyme, sequence of enzymes, organelle whole cell, tissue slice, antibody, or other receptors or binding protein and the transducer. Second, most new-generation biosensors are functionally small in size, thereby permitting small sampling volumes with minimum interruptions of bodily functions following implantation, or, if used with process streams, following insertion in-line. Third, the biological material may be tailored to suit medical or industrial needs.
Biosensors are simple to use, single-step, reagentless devices which are inexpensive, disposable and fully competitive with conventional data-processing technology. Fig. 1 illustrates the general principle of biosensors. Intimate contact between biological and electrochemical systems is usually achieved by immobilisation of the biosensing system on the transducer surface by physical restraint behind a polymer membrane, or within gel matrix, by chemical crossing with a bifunctional agent, or by direct covalent attachment.
The biological system is responsible for specific recognition of the analyte and will subsequently respond with a concomitant change in a physiochemical parameter associated with the interaction. For instance, if the biological interaction results in a change in H, uptake or release of gases, ions, heat or electrons on a perturbation of an optical parameter proximal to the transducer, the biological signal may be converted into electrical signal prior to amplification, digitisation and presentation of the output in the desired format.
Transducer
There are physiochemcial devices that respond to the products of the binding on biocatalytic process. The choke of the most appropriate transducer configuration will be conditioned largely by the nature of the biocatalyst system, the secondary products to be monitored and the potential application of the final device. The ideal transducer should display a moderately fast response time, be amendable to facile fabrication and miniaturisation, be reliable and be able to compensate for adverse environmental effects such as temperature dependency and drift.
The potential of an ion-sensitive electrode is a logarithmic function of the ionic activity, with a 59.2ml charge in the electrode potential per tenfold change in concentration of a monovalent ion.
Photoactive P-nitrophenylazides, photosensitive polyvinylalcohol with pendent stilbazolium groups as a photo-cross linkable enterphnent matrix and piezoelectric ink-jet devices have all been used successfully to generate active, small-area enzyme membranes. For instance, it has been demonstrated that it is feasible to generate monolytinic multi-enzyme modified FET biosensors by using photolithographically-patterned, enzyme-loaded polyvinylalcohol films, and a triple-function silicon-on-sapphire array with an on-chip pseudo reference electrode for the measurement of urea, glucose and potassium ion. Thus, despite some unresolved problems, biosensors, based on integrated solidstate devices, display considerable potential for miniaturisation of multifunction configuration.
Ampreometric devices—also known as current-measuring devices—offer a wider scope of applications than potentiometric techniques and are dependent on analyte concentration, thereby according a normal dynamic range and normal response to error in measurement of current. A solidstate hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) sensor has been fabricated and used in a glucose sensor.
Fig. 2 displays a typical calibration curve for miniaturised amperometric glucose sensor. Thin-film microsensors of this type are promising devices for H2O2 detection since these are widely applicable and display good sensitivity.
Solution Conductance
An alternative measuring principle, which is also widely applicable to biological systems, is the exploitation of solution conductance. The development and operation of an accurate microelectronic conductance biosensor, which operates in a differential mode by monitoring the change in conductance occasioned by the catalytic action of enzymes, has also been described.
Other on-chip measurement principles are also exploited in the fabrication of biosensors. For instance, it has been demonstrated that two temperature-sensitive devices, each consisting of three Darlington-connected npn transistors and CMOS and constant current circuits, can be used for differential calourimetric determination of glucose concentrations.
The difference in steady-state output voltage of enzyme-modified sensor compared to unmodified (after addition of 2-100 millimoles glucose) was related to catalytically-induced temperature changes and, thus, glucose concentration.
Furthermore, miniature piezoelectric sensors like quartz crystal and surface acoustic wave devices can be used directly in aqueous solution as enzyme substrate of immunochemical sensor. Excellent reproducibilities, coating lifetimes, response time and sensitivity are obtained.
Potential for Technology
Clearly, biosensors have evolved into miniaturised disposable solidstate devices, having the theoretical capability to cointegrate the signal-processing and signal-conditioning circuitries directly on chip and, thereby, obviate the requirements for traditional external instrumentation. A multifunction chip, comprising an array of biologically-sensitised gases deposited on a monolithic silicon chip, could also incorporate sufficient signal-conditioning capability to integrate each sensor. This, in turn, assesses outputs, compares with calibration-channel and releases the information on concentration, date, batch code, expiration date and operations code. However, the obstacles that remain are formidable.
Molecular Electronics
‘Molecular electronics’ is the term coined to describe the exploitation of bio-molecules in the fabrication of electronic materials with novel electronic, optical or magnetic properties.In biology one finds many examples of organised structures on an intracellular, cellular or intercellular level, and at even the molecular level has an analogy with conventional electronic data-processing. Biological systems, in fact, perform all the functions of interest to modern electronic industry—sensing, input/output, memory, computations—as well as functions not yet achieved like rapid, complex pattern-recognition and learning. It is more likely that the self-assembly property of proteins will be exploited to form a template or matrix for proper assembly of complex architecture for conventional electronic components. In fact, the razor-sharp incisors of rodents, which make them one of the most destructive pests, have now played a dramatic role reversal. They may hold the key to incalculable benefits to humanity by speeding up computer revolution. A team of scientists, led by Dr Venkatesan Ranugopal Krishnan at Harvard University, claims to have demonstrated that protein derived from the enamel of a rodent’s tooth could be used to make computer chips a thousand times more powerful than those used today.
Though computer already functions at high speed, complex number-crunching tasks, such as detailed weather prediction, still take hours to complete. The human body, for instance, houses an amazing network of electronic circuitry that conducts information in a flash to various organs. Understanding the structure of microscopic protein material that resembles the task of semiconductors in a computer would help scientists solve the problem of miniaturisation. The stumbling block has been the inability to find a protein capable of sustaining the harsh atmosphere of a computer and correspond to a computer’s logical structure of commands. That is critical because computers operate in the binary system where paths through a microchip either open or shut when stimulated by an electrical impulse. The flip-flop action—at present taking a few billions of a second—determines the speed with which a computer will process information.
When Dr Krishnan’s team isolated a protein called amelogenin from rodents’ tooth enamel, they found that it could not only withstand the engineering required to make computer chips but also remained stable under working conditions.The team found that proteins could be used for reading and writing data using lasers and offered enormous amounts of memory. A chip made from amelogenin also increases processing speed. This is because of its capability to alternate between open and shut states in a few trillionths of a second—a 1000-fold improvement, offering tetrabytes instead of the currently-available gigabytes of memory. In short, amelogenin promises far more efficient and reliable protein-based chips than anything developed previously. Still, these biochips need more development before they are ready for commercial use. This can safely be estimated to take place at least two decades hence. However, a prototype of hybrid protein is planned to bring the bionic computer—a perennial fantasy of science fiction writers—a lot closer to reality.
In addition, biological analogies are likely to suggest the development of novel structures and algorithms to achieve functions not readily accomplished by computing devices of present-day design. In addition, the analysis- sensitive membranes of ion-sensitive electrodes have been integrated with monolithic solidstate FET technology to introduce a range of ion-selective and substrate-specific FETs. For instance, an FET sensitive to penicillin has been constructed which responded to penicillin concentration of up to 50-60 millimole in less than 30 seconds. It displayed a lifetime of approximately two months and permitted automatic compensation for temperature and ambient pH. However, the buffer capacity of the analyte was found to have a profound influence on the sensitivity and range and linear response.
Similar limitations are experienced with enzyme-modified FET devicessuch as those responsive to glucose, urea, acetylcholine, adenosinetri-phosphate (ATP) and lipid, with the complementary enzyme glucoseoxidase, uncase acetylcholinesterase, adenosinetriphosphatase (ATPase) and lipase respectively immobilised to pH-responsive Si3N4 or iridium oxide (I203) gate materials. A co-integrated, coulometric-feedback system may circumvent these limitations. The electrolysis of water at a noble-metal electrode, spatially positioned close to urea-sensitive FET, generates H+ which can be used to balance the uptake engendered by enzyme activity.
Neuronal Interfaces
Finally, bioelectronics incorporates the development of functional neuronal interfaces which permit contiguity among neuronal tissues and conventional solidstate and computing technology. This is done to achieve applications such as avral and visual prostheses, treatment of paralysis and even enhancement of memory and intelligence.
The term biochip is sometimes used to describe an implantable system that would enable the interconnection of nervous tissues with conventional computers. However, like the construction of bio-sensor, the fabrication of a functioning neuronal interface or artificial synapse will require the development of appropriate reversible chemical to electrical-transduction processes. The development at neuronal interface is likely to acquire greater knowledge about chemical mechanism which govern synaptic communication.
The subject of bioelectronics has moved from mere conjecture to an experimental stage but further research is necessary to bring a commercial class to this technology. However, this is a high-risk and a high-investment field. Nevertheless, it is one of the most fascinating and promising fields and, once developed to an extent, will make bioelectronic systems very cheap.
http://www.electronicsforu.com/electronicsforu/Articles/ad.asp?url=/efylinux/efyhome/cover/additions/organic.htm&title=Organic%20Electronics:%20Moving%20the%20Frontiers%20of%20Electronics
Bioelectronics—an offshoot of biotechnology and electronics—finds applications in at least three areas of research and development: bio-sensors, molecular electronics, and neuronal interfaces. Some scientists, who include biochips and biocomputer in the area of carbon-based information technology, suggest that biological molecules might be incorporated within a self-structuring bio-informatic system which displays novel information-processing and pattern-recognition capabilities. However, these applications are still in the speculative stage, but technically feasible nevertheless. Scientists working in this field of organic electronics are of the view that this carbon-based technology will replace inorganic electronics in use now, just as semiconductors replaced vacuum tubes.
Biosensors
Of the three disciplines—biosensors, molecular electronics and neuronal interfaces (which collectively constitute bioelectronics)—the most mature is the burgeoning area of biosensors.
The term ‘biosensor’ is used to describe two different classes of analytical devices—those that measure biological analytes and those that exploit biological recognition as a part of the sensing mechanism. It is the latter concept which truly captures the spirit of bioelectronics.
A biosensor is an analytical device that converts the concentration of an analyte in an appropriate sample into an electrical signal by means of a biological-sensing element intimately connected to or integrated into a transducer. Biosensors differ from existing analytical technologies in several important respects. First, there is an intimate contact between the biological component—be it enzyme, sequence of enzymes, organelle whole cell, tissue slice, antibody, or other receptors or binding protein and the transducer. Second, most new-generation biosensors are functionally small in size, thereby permitting small sampling volumes with minimum interruptions of bodily functions following implantation, or, if used with process streams, following insertion in-line. Third, the biological material may be tailored to suit medical or industrial needs.
Biosensors are simple to use, single-step, reagentless devices which are inexpensive, disposable and fully competitive with conventional data-processing technology. Fig. 1 illustrates the general principle of biosensors. Intimate contact between biological and electrochemical systems is usually achieved by immobilisation of the biosensing system on the transducer surface by physical restraint behind a polymer membrane, or within gel matrix, by chemical crossing with a bifunctional agent, or by direct covalent attachment.
The biological system is responsible for specific recognition of the analyte and will subsequently respond with a concomitant change in a physiochemical parameter associated with the interaction. For instance, if the biological interaction results in a change in H, uptake or release of gases, ions, heat or electrons on a perturbation of an optical parameter proximal to the transducer, the biological signal may be converted into electrical signal prior to amplification, digitisation and presentation of the output in the desired format.
Transducer
There are physiochemcial devices that respond to the products of the binding on biocatalytic process. The choke of the most appropriate transducer configuration will be conditioned largely by the nature of the biocatalyst system, the secondary products to be monitored and the potential application of the final device. The ideal transducer should display a moderately fast response time, be amendable to facile fabrication and miniaturisation, be reliable and be able to compensate for adverse environmental effects such as temperature dependency and drift.
The potential of an ion-sensitive electrode is a logarithmic function of the ionic activity, with a 59.2ml charge in the electrode potential per tenfold change in concentration of a monovalent ion.
Photoactive P-nitrophenylazides, photosensitive polyvinylalcohol with pendent stilbazolium groups as a photo-cross linkable enterphnent matrix and piezoelectric ink-jet devices have all been used successfully to generate active, small-area enzyme membranes. For instance, it has been demonstrated that it is feasible to generate monolytinic multi-enzyme modified FET biosensors by using photolithographically-patterned, enzyme-loaded polyvinylalcohol films, and a triple-function silicon-on-sapphire array with an on-chip pseudo reference electrode for the measurement of urea, glucose and potassium ion. Thus, despite some unresolved problems, biosensors, based on integrated solidstate devices, display considerable potential for miniaturisation of multifunction configuration.
Ampreometric devices—also known as current-measuring devices—offer a wider scope of applications than potentiometric techniques and are dependent on analyte concentration, thereby according a normal dynamic range and normal response to error in measurement of current. A solidstate hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) sensor has been fabricated and used in a glucose sensor.
Fig. 2 displays a typical calibration curve for miniaturised amperometric glucose sensor. Thin-film microsensors of this type are promising devices for H2O2 detection since these are widely applicable and display good sensitivity.
Solution Conductance
An alternative measuring principle, which is also widely applicable to biological systems, is the exploitation of solution conductance. The development and operation of an accurate microelectronic conductance biosensor, which operates in a differential mode by monitoring the change in conductance occasioned by the catalytic action of enzymes, has also been described.
Other on-chip measurement principles are also exploited in the fabrication of biosensors. For instance, it has been demonstrated that two temperature-sensitive devices, each consisting of three Darlington-connected npn transistors and CMOS and constant current circuits, can be used for differential calourimetric determination of glucose concentrations.
The difference in steady-state output voltage of enzyme-modified sensor compared to unmodified (after addition of 2-100 millimoles glucose) was related to catalytically-induced temperature changes and, thus, glucose concentration.
Furthermore, miniature piezoelectric sensors like quartz crystal and surface acoustic wave devices can be used directly in aqueous solution as enzyme substrate of immunochemical sensor. Excellent reproducibilities, coating lifetimes, response time and sensitivity are obtained.
Potential for Technology
Clearly, biosensors have evolved into miniaturised disposable solidstate devices, having the theoretical capability to cointegrate the signal-processing and signal-conditioning circuitries directly on chip and, thereby, obviate the requirements for traditional external instrumentation. A multifunction chip, comprising an array of biologically-sensitised gases deposited on a monolithic silicon chip, could also incorporate sufficient signal-conditioning capability to integrate each sensor. This, in turn, assesses outputs, compares with calibration-channel and releases the information on concentration, date, batch code, expiration date and operations code. However, the obstacles that remain are formidable.
Molecular Electronics
‘Molecular electronics’ is the term coined to describe the exploitation of bio-molecules in the fabrication of electronic materials with novel electronic, optical or magnetic properties.In biology one finds many examples of organised structures on an intracellular, cellular or intercellular level, and at even the molecular level has an analogy with conventional electronic data-processing. Biological systems, in fact, perform all the functions of interest to modern electronic industry—sensing, input/output, memory, computations—as well as functions not yet achieved like rapid, complex pattern-recognition and learning. It is more likely that the self-assembly property of proteins will be exploited to form a template or matrix for proper assembly of complex architecture for conventional electronic components. In fact, the razor-sharp incisors of rodents, which make them one of the most destructive pests, have now played a dramatic role reversal. They may hold the key to incalculable benefits to humanity by speeding up computer revolution. A team of scientists, led by Dr Venkatesan Ranugopal Krishnan at Harvard University, claims to have demonstrated that protein derived from the enamel of a rodent’s tooth could be used to make computer chips a thousand times more powerful than those used today.
Though computer already functions at high speed, complex number-crunching tasks, such as detailed weather prediction, still take hours to complete. The human body, for instance, houses an amazing network of electronic circuitry that conducts information in a flash to various organs. Understanding the structure of microscopic protein material that resembles the task of semiconductors in a computer would help scientists solve the problem of miniaturisation. The stumbling block has been the inability to find a protein capable of sustaining the harsh atmosphere of a computer and correspond to a computer’s logical structure of commands. That is critical because computers operate in the binary system where paths through a microchip either open or shut when stimulated by an electrical impulse. The flip-flop action—at present taking a few billions of a second—determines the speed with which a computer will process information.
When Dr Krishnan’s team isolated a protein called amelogenin from rodents’ tooth enamel, they found that it could not only withstand the engineering required to make computer chips but also remained stable under working conditions.The team found that proteins could be used for reading and writing data using lasers and offered enormous amounts of memory. A chip made from amelogenin also increases processing speed. This is because of its capability to alternate between open and shut states in a few trillionths of a second—a 1000-fold improvement, offering tetrabytes instead of the currently-available gigabytes of memory. In short, amelogenin promises far more efficient and reliable protein-based chips than anything developed previously. Still, these biochips need more development before they are ready for commercial use. This can safely be estimated to take place at least two decades hence. However, a prototype of hybrid protein is planned to bring the bionic computer—a perennial fantasy of science fiction writers—a lot closer to reality.
In addition, biological analogies are likely to suggest the development of novel structures and algorithms to achieve functions not readily accomplished by computing devices of present-day design. In addition, the analysis- sensitive membranes of ion-sensitive electrodes have been integrated with monolithic solidstate FET technology to introduce a range of ion-selective and substrate-specific FETs. For instance, an FET sensitive to penicillin has been constructed which responded to penicillin concentration of up to 50-60 millimole in less than 30 seconds. It displayed a lifetime of approximately two months and permitted automatic compensation for temperature and ambient pH. However, the buffer capacity of the analyte was found to have a profound influence on the sensitivity and range and linear response.
Similar limitations are experienced with enzyme-modified FET devicessuch as those responsive to glucose, urea, acetylcholine, adenosinetri-phosphate (ATP) and lipid, with the complementary enzyme glucoseoxidase, uncase acetylcholinesterase, adenosinetriphosphatase (ATPase) and lipase respectively immobilised to pH-responsive Si3N4 or iridium oxide (I203) gate materials. A co-integrated, coulometric-feedback system may circumvent these limitations. The electrolysis of water at a noble-metal electrode, spatially positioned close to urea-sensitive FET, generates H+ which can be used to balance the uptake engendered by enzyme activity.
Neuronal Interfaces
Finally, bioelectronics incorporates the development of functional neuronal interfaces which permit contiguity among neuronal tissues and conventional solidstate and computing technology. This is done to achieve applications such as avral and visual prostheses, treatment of paralysis and even enhancement of memory and intelligence.
The term biochip is sometimes used to describe an implantable system that would enable the interconnection of nervous tissues with conventional computers. However, like the construction of bio-sensor, the fabrication of a functioning neuronal interface or artificial synapse will require the development of appropriate reversible chemical to electrical-transduction processes. The development at neuronal interface is likely to acquire greater knowledge about chemical mechanism which govern synaptic communication.
The subject of bioelectronics has moved from mere conjecture to an experimental stage but further research is necessary to bring a commercial class to this technology. However, this is a high-risk and a high-investment field. Nevertheless, it is one of the most fascinating and promising fields and, once developed to an extent, will make bioelectronic systems very cheap.
http://www.electronicsforu.com/electronicsforu/Articles/ad.asp?url=/efylinux/efyhome/cover/additions/organic.htm&title=Organic%20Electronics:%20Moving%20the%20Frontiers%20of%20Electronics
Friday, May 25, 2007
Green fever
The adverts for chip maker Intel’s latest multi-core processors are almost breathless with excitement, as they promise to open the gates to a Green IT Nirvana, where servers are “powerful, but not power hungry”.
Intel is not alone in pushing this eco-friendly vision: rival AMD, and server makers such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are all keen advocates of powerful computers that do not consume vast quantities of energy.
Such messages may appeal to any manager examining spiralling energy costs in the data centre, but it would be naïve to assume that the vendors’ concern is born purely out of altruism.
The chip and server manufacturers are only too aware that if they can convince business leaders that their new products will reduce operating costs while delivering better performance, the notion of a large-scale upgrade of legacy infrastructure would look so much more appealing.
But market watcher IDC remains stubbornly unconvinced. It recently lowered its predictions for the number of processors it expects will be shipped between 2006 and 2010. The reason? Multi-core processors.
IDC initially predicted that the volume of processors shipping inside of servers would rise by 25% between 2006 and 2010. It has now amended that forecast: it has kept the numbers the same, but with the important caveat that it is counting individual cores as processors. That is set to knock $2.4 billion off the revenues it sees being generated.
And there is more bad news for the server makers: IDC predicts that virtualisation software – which will help push up the astonishingly poor utilisation rates of much of today’s server farms – is also going to depress server shipments. IDC has reduced its server shipment forecast by 4.5 million shipments for the years between 2006 to 2010.
Elsewhere, environmental pressure group Greenpeace is attempting to place the green efforts of the computer makers in context. It is following the environmental efforts of some of today’s leading PC and mobile handset makers, and ranking them accordingly. The rankings can be seen here.
http://www.information-age.com/article/2007/april_2007/green_fever
Intel is not alone in pushing this eco-friendly vision: rival AMD, and server makers such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are all keen advocates of powerful computers that do not consume vast quantities of energy.
Such messages may appeal to any manager examining spiralling energy costs in the data centre, but it would be naïve to assume that the vendors’ concern is born purely out of altruism.
The chip and server manufacturers are only too aware that if they can convince business leaders that their new products will reduce operating costs while delivering better performance, the notion of a large-scale upgrade of legacy infrastructure would look so much more appealing.
But market watcher IDC remains stubbornly unconvinced. It recently lowered its predictions for the number of processors it expects will be shipped between 2006 and 2010. The reason? Multi-core processors.
IDC initially predicted that the volume of processors shipping inside of servers would rise by 25% between 2006 and 2010. It has now amended that forecast: it has kept the numbers the same, but with the important caveat that it is counting individual cores as processors. That is set to knock $2.4 billion off the revenues it sees being generated.
And there is more bad news for the server makers: IDC predicts that virtualisation software – which will help push up the astonishingly poor utilisation rates of much of today’s server farms – is also going to depress server shipments. IDC has reduced its server shipment forecast by 4.5 million shipments for the years between 2006 to 2010.
Elsewhere, environmental pressure group Greenpeace is attempting to place the green efforts of the computer makers in context. It is following the environmental efforts of some of today’s leading PC and mobile handset makers, and ranking them accordingly. The rankings can be seen here.
http://www.information-age.com/article/2007/april_2007/green_fever
Circuit City Struggles for Survival
Recent doings at Circuit City may be of interest in the wake of the mass firings reported here and elsewhere. The story became a Primedia trifecta—covered here, on the Stereophile site, and on the Ultimate AV site—in addition to wide coverage elsewhere including a stern editorial in the New York Times.
According to TWICE, the company is getting as hard-knuckled with business partners as it is with employees, renegotiating terms with vendors and service-plan providers. Marketing initiatives include a "basket of goods" that would add accessories, warranties, and installation to TV pricetags. And new store operating procedures will relieve surviving personnel of redundant tasks, leaving them more time to sell stuff, to the best of their abilities.
Perhaps the most notable news in Circuit's turnaround plans will be the opening of 65 new stores in 2007 and 100 more in 2008. And so the fight for survival continues in the increasingly Darwinian world of CE retailing.
http://www.hometheatermag.com/news/041807circuit/
According to TWICE, the company is getting as hard-knuckled with business partners as it is with employees, renegotiating terms with vendors and service-plan providers. Marketing initiatives include a "basket of goods" that would add accessories, warranties, and installation to TV pricetags. And new store operating procedures will relieve surviving personnel of redundant tasks, leaving them more time to sell stuff, to the best of their abilities.
Perhaps the most notable news in Circuit's turnaround plans will be the opening of 65 new stores in 2007 and 100 more in 2008. And so the fight for survival continues in the increasingly Darwinian world of CE retailing.
http://www.hometheatermag.com/news/041807circuit/
Trials and tribulations persist in Joint Tactical Radio
The military services are slashing by nearly two-thirds their expected buys of the Defense Department’s troubled joint tactical radio system.
As the program continues to lose support across the military services, Defense Department officials are engineering a last-ditch effort to save what is increasingly a shaky procurement plan. They also are backing away from earlier demands that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps stop buying their own service-unique radios in favor of a “joint” family of radios.
A decade after it was conceived — and $2 billion spent on research and development — the joint tactical radio system, or JTRS, is hanging on for dear life.
The original goal was to replace more than 500,000 military radios with a family of interoperable devices that carry voice and data communications. The most significant feature of JTRS radios would be their ability to be programmed, like PCs, with software applications called “waveforms.”
But the program got off to a slow start, and was beleaguered by bureaucratic infighting.
At the Pentagon, acquisition officials viewed JTRS as the poster child of joint programs, one that would finally allow the Defense Department to rein in the services’ disjointed hardware procurements. As JTRS development got under way between 1998 and 2000, government officials and contractors were predicting prototypes would be in the hands of soldiers by 2003. But as early as 2001, it became more apparent that JTRS was an appealing concept that would be harder to execute than anyone had foreseen.
By the time the Army marched into Iraq in 2003, no new radios were yet available, not even working prototypes. The service went to war with 1980s vintage radios, and supplemented those with commercial cell phones and satellite phones. After Army leaders realized they would be in Iraq for years to come, by late 2003 they began ordering thousands of tactical radios that vendors already were producing.
The highest demand was for handheld and vehicular radios. The Army before Iraq did not issue radios to each soldier nor did it install them on every humvee, because it was deemed too expensive. But that changed once commanders in Iraq began to demand thousands more radios to keep soldiers and Marines from buying off-the-shelf products to make up for shortages of military-issued equipment.
During the past four years, the services (mostly the Army) have spent nearly $4 billion on new radios. By comparison, between 1998 and 2001, their radio purchases amounted to less than $1 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. More than 60 percent of all radios procured are either individual handheld or squad-level manpack.
Before the war, the services were not allowed to purchase radios unless they obtained a “JTRS waiver” from the office of the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. The policy aimed to discourage purchases of non-JTRS radios.
But Army officials complained that the waiver was a bureaucratic burden that hindered their ability to rapidly deliver radios to troops in Iraq. The Pentagon subsequently agreed to suspend the waiver, although it recently approved a limited policy that only applies to single-channel handheld radios.
Radio manufacturers, who had envisaged a financial boon from JTRS contracts, gradually realized that they could make better profits by ramping up production of existing radios in response to the military’s surging demand. Some contractors privately admit they have soured on JTRS, especially once they saw that their customers in the armed services had begun to lose confidence in the program. Several industry representatives contacted by National Defense, who did not want to be quoted by name, voiced disappointment about disorganized management and scattershot decision making by those in charge.
As it is now structured, JTRS includes multiple radio variants for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Special Operations Command.
Just two years ago, the services had forecast they would buy nearly 458,000 JTRS radios — the majority of which were small form fit (184,000), four-channel ground vehicular (108,000) and two-channel manpack (104,000).
In February 2007, the services revised their expected buys down to 148,000 JTRS radios. The biggest drops are for the four-channel ground vehicular radio (from 108,000 to 5,700), the two-channel manpack (from 104,000 to 16,900) and the one-channel handheld (from 46,700 to none).
The 68 percent procurement cutbacks, while not entirely unanticipated, nevertheless sparked unease among JTRS program officers and contractors. Of most concern is that in smaller quantities, the new radios will be far more expensive and even less likely to survive future budget drills.
Despite the progressively bleak outlook for JTRS, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., who chairs the four-star Joint Requirements Oversight Council, lauded the progress the Pentagon so far has achieved in moving the program forward. During a recent hearing of the House Budget Committee, he told lawmakers that JTRS development costs had shrunk from $6 billion to $3 billion after the Pentagon agreed to downscale the project’s technical scope. Rather than be able to operate 33 waveforms, the radios will only run eight waveforms. “We could meet 80 percent of our requirements with eight waveforms,” Giambastiani said. Even tough JTRS has been scaled back, he added, “It’s a very important program.”
Currently overseeing the joint tactical radio effort is John Grimes, the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. In charge of managing the procurement of radios is the joint program executive officer, Dennis Bauman, who is based at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego.
At a February meeting of top Pentagon acquisition leaders and JTRS officials, Bauman said one of his “strategic priorities” was to bolster confidence in the program, according to briefing charts obtained by National Defense.
Other goals include better explaining JTRS technical requirements, informing members of Congress and establishing a defense-wide “tactical networking center of excellence.”
Many insiders questioned the decision two years ago to locate the JTRS program office thousands of miles away from the nucleus of military power in Washington, D.C. But the current plan is to expand the program’s footprint in San Diego even further. Officials at the meeting warned Bauman that moving all JTRS operations to San Diego will be a “challenge” but also potentially a benefit as “new blood” could be injected into the program.
Among the priorities that Bauman listed on the briefing charts are to “promote continued co-location of JTRS program elements to San Diego; encourage industry, government, academic, and international investment; shape the Department of Defense radio environment; strengthen the industrial base; educate and train the JTRS team; build morale and ‘esprit de groupe.’”
Bauman’s deputy, Howard Pace, who also briefed senior management at the February meeting, cautioned that unless the Defense Department can find a way to curtail the services’ escalating procurements of non-JTRS radios, the program could eventually perish. He cited figures of $9 billion to $16 billion spent on non-JTRS radios since 1998 — the largest expenditures occurring in 2004 and 2005.
“Conclusions can be drawn that policy, absent compliance and enforcement mechanisms, is at most partially effective,” Pace wrote in his briefing charts. “Without acquisition discipline and adherence to policy, there is far less chance of achieving JTRS program objectives.”
Kenneth J. Krieg, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, was in attendance at the meeting, sources indicated. He endorsed Bauman’s strategy as a “step in the right direction, but not yet revolutionary.”
One major topic of discussion was the notion of endorsing company-developed radios as official JTRS products.
Radios that were selected to become official JTRS-approved products include the Falcon III AN/PRC-152(C) handheld made by Harris RF Communications, and the JEM AN/PRC-148 handheld made by Thales Communications. Both radios were designed and developed by their manufacturers, outside the JTRS program.
Krieg directed Bauman to come up with a “contract vehicle” that would allow all services to purchase both radios under a consolidated arrangement. The Army, Air Force and Marine Corps currently are buying these radios but under separate contracts. Minutes of the February meeting note that Krieg disapproved of these disjointed procurements because they result in higher prices. Krieg suggested that the services probably are managing their own contracts independently because they do not trust the JTRS joint office to handle acquisitions in a timely manner.
Another concern is future JTRS costs. The downward projections in the quantities of radios that the services plan to buy could result in substantial per-unit cost increases. Most of the 148,000 radios identified by the services for future procurement are not funded in the Defense Department’s 2008-2013 budget, which includes $3 billion for JTRS research and development. Krieg asked for precise budgets that show procurement dollars allocated to JTRS and directed Bauman’s office to calculate the per-unit cost of future radios. A major concern is that if the unit price ends up being more than 15 percent higher than the original estimates, the program will be the target of a congressional review under the so-called Nunn-McCurdy legislation.
Apprehension about Nunn-McCurdy cost overruns, however, may be a moot point. So far, no JTRS radios are close to entering production. The Defense Department, critics argue, should be more alarmed by the fact that after billions of dollars in R&D, it has no combat-ready products to show for it.
A wavering commitment by the military services also could doom the program before it ever reaches full-rate production. The services by most accounts have yet to be convinced that they should forgo their acquisitions of existing radios in favor of yet-unproven technology.
“They are not willing to stop legacy procurements even though JTRS would be backwards compatible with legacy radios,” said one frustrated defense official.
It also has become apparent that within John Grimes’ office, JTRS is losing momentum. Ron Jost, who is deputy assistant secretary of defense for command, control and communications, is said to champion a shift away from government-developed software radios, in favor of products that companies already have designed and prototyped.
A spokesman for both Grimes and Jost at the Pentagon did not respond to several requests for comment.
At the February meeting at the Pentagon, Bauman acknowledged that there had been much confusion about the definitions of “JTRS compliant” and “JTRS approved.” He warned that many products claim to be JTRS compliant but are not.
To be certified as a JTRS product, a radio has to demonstrate that it can run version 2.2 of the Defense Department’s software communications architecture. The radio’s encryption technology also has to be certified by the National Security Agency. Radios, additionally, must get approval from the Joint Interoperability Testing Center.
Bauman’s briefing charts stated that both the JEM and the PRC-152 meet “some of the criteria” but were still given waivers so they could be considered “JTRS approved.” Both were certified by the NSA.
Manufacturers insist that the proprietary radios they have developed for military use are not to be confused with non-encrypted commercial radios. Many commercial products are being used by the Defense Department, such as Motorola handheld radios. Some radios developed for the Pentagon that are also sold in the open market are not necessarily considered commercial products, one industry executive said.
Some company-funded proprietary products may look and feel like JTRS radios but are not exactly the same. Supporters of JTRS fear that military customers ultimately may not care where the product came from, as long as it does the job.
The two-channel handheld, two-channel manpack and small form-fit JTRS radios, for example, add up to 21,000 requirements, according to General Dynamics, one of the JTRS contractors. The most demanding specs are in the area of encryption and network security.
Those who back the adoption of vendors’ proprietary radios as substitutes for government-developed systems contend that this approach saves the Pentagon R&D dollars in the near term. But JTRS advocates worry that the end result will be a mishmash of radios that may or may not be able to talk to users across all services, as JTRS was originally envisioned.
Observers who follow the program closely view the current woes as symptomatic of a wider issue — the absence of a staunch advocate within the Defense Department. The original architects of JTRS, who saw it as a linchpin of a “network-centric” military, have long departed. And it still remains unclear whether JTRS can regain momentum.
Meanwhile, JTRS supporters and contractors are making the case that “success stories” are being ignored. General Dynamics C4 Systems, responsible for the handheld/manpack/small form fit (HMS) radios, recently announced it had delivered working prototypes to the Army.
General Dynamics displayed a two-channel JTRS manpack at an industry trade show in February. But even as the contractor is publicizing the JTRS program’s first manpack prototype, officials from Bauman’s office are considering offering a stopgap radio — the so-called SINCGARS “sidehat.” The single-channel ground and airborne radio system, made by ITT Corporation, is used for single-band VHF voice communications. The sidehat, as the name implies, is an appendage radio that would operate the networking waveform so users can also send and receive video, maps and other data.
The problem with the sidehat, industry sources said, is that it is so far only a concept. Some factions within the Army would like to adopt the sidehat because it would allow the service to piggyback on its large investment in SINCGARS. The Army already owns 400,000, and requested an additional $2 billion for SINCGARS radios in the 2007 and 2008 war-emergency budgets.
A number of Army officials who oppose the sidehat concept believe the service should back the next-generation JTRS manpack, even though it may not be ready for another five years. But as more funds get poured into SINCGARS, the lesser the chances that there will be enough money to buy the new joint tactical radios.
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2007/May/Trialsandtrib.htm
As the program continues to lose support across the military services, Defense Department officials are engineering a last-ditch effort to save what is increasingly a shaky procurement plan. They also are backing away from earlier demands that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps stop buying their own service-unique radios in favor of a “joint” family of radios.
A decade after it was conceived — and $2 billion spent on research and development — the joint tactical radio system, or JTRS, is hanging on for dear life.
The original goal was to replace more than 500,000 military radios with a family of interoperable devices that carry voice and data communications. The most significant feature of JTRS radios would be their ability to be programmed, like PCs, with software applications called “waveforms.”
But the program got off to a slow start, and was beleaguered by bureaucratic infighting.
At the Pentagon, acquisition officials viewed JTRS as the poster child of joint programs, one that would finally allow the Defense Department to rein in the services’ disjointed hardware procurements. As JTRS development got under way between 1998 and 2000, government officials and contractors were predicting prototypes would be in the hands of soldiers by 2003. But as early as 2001, it became more apparent that JTRS was an appealing concept that would be harder to execute than anyone had foreseen.
By the time the Army marched into Iraq in 2003, no new radios were yet available, not even working prototypes. The service went to war with 1980s vintage radios, and supplemented those with commercial cell phones and satellite phones. After Army leaders realized they would be in Iraq for years to come, by late 2003 they began ordering thousands of tactical radios that vendors already were producing.
The highest demand was for handheld and vehicular radios. The Army before Iraq did not issue radios to each soldier nor did it install them on every humvee, because it was deemed too expensive. But that changed once commanders in Iraq began to demand thousands more radios to keep soldiers and Marines from buying off-the-shelf products to make up for shortages of military-issued equipment.
During the past four years, the services (mostly the Army) have spent nearly $4 billion on new radios. By comparison, between 1998 and 2001, their radio purchases amounted to less than $1 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. More than 60 percent of all radios procured are either individual handheld or squad-level manpack.
Before the war, the services were not allowed to purchase radios unless they obtained a “JTRS waiver” from the office of the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. The policy aimed to discourage purchases of non-JTRS radios.
But Army officials complained that the waiver was a bureaucratic burden that hindered their ability to rapidly deliver radios to troops in Iraq. The Pentagon subsequently agreed to suspend the waiver, although it recently approved a limited policy that only applies to single-channel handheld radios.
Radio manufacturers, who had envisaged a financial boon from JTRS contracts, gradually realized that they could make better profits by ramping up production of existing radios in response to the military’s surging demand. Some contractors privately admit they have soured on JTRS, especially once they saw that their customers in the armed services had begun to lose confidence in the program. Several industry representatives contacted by National Defense, who did not want to be quoted by name, voiced disappointment about disorganized management and scattershot decision making by those in charge.
As it is now structured, JTRS includes multiple radio variants for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Special Operations Command.
Just two years ago, the services had forecast they would buy nearly 458,000 JTRS radios — the majority of which were small form fit (184,000), four-channel ground vehicular (108,000) and two-channel manpack (104,000).
In February 2007, the services revised their expected buys down to 148,000 JTRS radios. The biggest drops are for the four-channel ground vehicular radio (from 108,000 to 5,700), the two-channel manpack (from 104,000 to 16,900) and the one-channel handheld (from 46,700 to none).
The 68 percent procurement cutbacks, while not entirely unanticipated, nevertheless sparked unease among JTRS program officers and contractors. Of most concern is that in smaller quantities, the new radios will be far more expensive and even less likely to survive future budget drills.
Despite the progressively bleak outlook for JTRS, Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., who chairs the four-star Joint Requirements Oversight Council, lauded the progress the Pentagon so far has achieved in moving the program forward. During a recent hearing of the House Budget Committee, he told lawmakers that JTRS development costs had shrunk from $6 billion to $3 billion after the Pentagon agreed to downscale the project’s technical scope. Rather than be able to operate 33 waveforms, the radios will only run eight waveforms. “We could meet 80 percent of our requirements with eight waveforms,” Giambastiani said. Even tough JTRS has been scaled back, he added, “It’s a very important program.”
Currently overseeing the joint tactical radio effort is John Grimes, the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. In charge of managing the procurement of radios is the joint program executive officer, Dennis Bauman, who is based at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego.
At a February meeting of top Pentagon acquisition leaders and JTRS officials, Bauman said one of his “strategic priorities” was to bolster confidence in the program, according to briefing charts obtained by National Defense.
Other goals include better explaining JTRS technical requirements, informing members of Congress and establishing a defense-wide “tactical networking center of excellence.”
Many insiders questioned the decision two years ago to locate the JTRS program office thousands of miles away from the nucleus of military power in Washington, D.C. But the current plan is to expand the program’s footprint in San Diego even further. Officials at the meeting warned Bauman that moving all JTRS operations to San Diego will be a “challenge” but also potentially a benefit as “new blood” could be injected into the program.
Among the priorities that Bauman listed on the briefing charts are to “promote continued co-location of JTRS program elements to San Diego; encourage industry, government, academic, and international investment; shape the Department of Defense radio environment; strengthen the industrial base; educate and train the JTRS team; build morale and ‘esprit de groupe.’”
Bauman’s deputy, Howard Pace, who also briefed senior management at the February meeting, cautioned that unless the Defense Department can find a way to curtail the services’ escalating procurements of non-JTRS radios, the program could eventually perish. He cited figures of $9 billion to $16 billion spent on non-JTRS radios since 1998 — the largest expenditures occurring in 2004 and 2005.
“Conclusions can be drawn that policy, absent compliance and enforcement mechanisms, is at most partially effective,” Pace wrote in his briefing charts. “Without acquisition discipline and adherence to policy, there is far less chance of achieving JTRS program objectives.”
Kenneth J. Krieg, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, was in attendance at the meeting, sources indicated. He endorsed Bauman’s strategy as a “step in the right direction, but not yet revolutionary.”
One major topic of discussion was the notion of endorsing company-developed radios as official JTRS products.
Radios that were selected to become official JTRS-approved products include the Falcon III AN/PRC-152(C) handheld made by Harris RF Communications, and the JEM AN/PRC-148 handheld made by Thales Communications. Both radios were designed and developed by their manufacturers, outside the JTRS program.
Krieg directed Bauman to come up with a “contract vehicle” that would allow all services to purchase both radios under a consolidated arrangement. The Army, Air Force and Marine Corps currently are buying these radios but under separate contracts. Minutes of the February meeting note that Krieg disapproved of these disjointed procurements because they result in higher prices. Krieg suggested that the services probably are managing their own contracts independently because they do not trust the JTRS joint office to handle acquisitions in a timely manner.
Another concern is future JTRS costs. The downward projections in the quantities of radios that the services plan to buy could result in substantial per-unit cost increases. Most of the 148,000 radios identified by the services for future procurement are not funded in the Defense Department’s 2008-2013 budget, which includes $3 billion for JTRS research and development. Krieg asked for precise budgets that show procurement dollars allocated to JTRS and directed Bauman’s office to calculate the per-unit cost of future radios. A major concern is that if the unit price ends up being more than 15 percent higher than the original estimates, the program will be the target of a congressional review under the so-called Nunn-McCurdy legislation.
Apprehension about Nunn-McCurdy cost overruns, however, may be a moot point. So far, no JTRS radios are close to entering production. The Defense Department, critics argue, should be more alarmed by the fact that after billions of dollars in R&D, it has no combat-ready products to show for it.
A wavering commitment by the military services also could doom the program before it ever reaches full-rate production. The services by most accounts have yet to be convinced that they should forgo their acquisitions of existing radios in favor of yet-unproven technology.
“They are not willing to stop legacy procurements even though JTRS would be backwards compatible with legacy radios,” said one frustrated defense official.
It also has become apparent that within John Grimes’ office, JTRS is losing momentum. Ron Jost, who is deputy assistant secretary of defense for command, control and communications, is said to champion a shift away from government-developed software radios, in favor of products that companies already have designed and prototyped.
A spokesman for both Grimes and Jost at the Pentagon did not respond to several requests for comment.
At the February meeting at the Pentagon, Bauman acknowledged that there had been much confusion about the definitions of “JTRS compliant” and “JTRS approved.” He warned that many products claim to be JTRS compliant but are not.
To be certified as a JTRS product, a radio has to demonstrate that it can run version 2.2 of the Defense Department’s software communications architecture. The radio’s encryption technology also has to be certified by the National Security Agency. Radios, additionally, must get approval from the Joint Interoperability Testing Center.
Bauman’s briefing charts stated that both the JEM and the PRC-152 meet “some of the criteria” but were still given waivers so they could be considered “JTRS approved.” Both were certified by the NSA.
Manufacturers insist that the proprietary radios they have developed for military use are not to be confused with non-encrypted commercial radios. Many commercial products are being used by the Defense Department, such as Motorola handheld radios. Some radios developed for the Pentagon that are also sold in the open market are not necessarily considered commercial products, one industry executive said.
Some company-funded proprietary products may look and feel like JTRS radios but are not exactly the same. Supporters of JTRS fear that military customers ultimately may not care where the product came from, as long as it does the job.
The two-channel handheld, two-channel manpack and small form-fit JTRS radios, for example, add up to 21,000 requirements, according to General Dynamics, one of the JTRS contractors. The most demanding specs are in the area of encryption and network security.
Those who back the adoption of vendors’ proprietary radios as substitutes for government-developed systems contend that this approach saves the Pentagon R&D dollars in the near term. But JTRS advocates worry that the end result will be a mishmash of radios that may or may not be able to talk to users across all services, as JTRS was originally envisioned.
Observers who follow the program closely view the current woes as symptomatic of a wider issue — the absence of a staunch advocate within the Defense Department. The original architects of JTRS, who saw it as a linchpin of a “network-centric” military, have long departed. And it still remains unclear whether JTRS can regain momentum.
Meanwhile, JTRS supporters and contractors are making the case that “success stories” are being ignored. General Dynamics C4 Systems, responsible for the handheld/manpack/small form fit (HMS) radios, recently announced it had delivered working prototypes to the Army.
General Dynamics displayed a two-channel JTRS manpack at an industry trade show in February. But even as the contractor is publicizing the JTRS program’s first manpack prototype, officials from Bauman’s office are considering offering a stopgap radio — the so-called SINCGARS “sidehat.” The single-channel ground and airborne radio system, made by ITT Corporation, is used for single-band VHF voice communications. The sidehat, as the name implies, is an appendage radio that would operate the networking waveform so users can also send and receive video, maps and other data.
The problem with the sidehat, industry sources said, is that it is so far only a concept. Some factions within the Army would like to adopt the sidehat because it would allow the service to piggyback on its large investment in SINCGARS. The Army already owns 400,000, and requested an additional $2 billion for SINCGARS radios in the 2007 and 2008 war-emergency budgets.
A number of Army officials who oppose the sidehat concept believe the service should back the next-generation JTRS manpack, even though it may not be ready for another five years. But as more funds get poured into SINCGARS, the lesser the chances that there will be enough money to buy the new joint tactical radios.
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2007/May/Trialsandtrib.htm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)