The WAVE Report on Digital Media
3D --- Media Creation --- Shared Space
---Published by 4th Wave, Inc.---
Issue #0343------------------12/23/03

 

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0343.1 Hot Topics

0343.3 3D

0343.4 Semiconductor

0343.5 Wireless

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0343.1 Hot Topics

***TechniCon to Integrate HOOPS 3D Application Framework from TSA
(December 18)

TechniCon Corp., provider of product configuration systems, and Tech Soft America, provider of component graphics technology announced a licensing agreement whereby TechniCon will incorporate HOOPS-based visualization into their CustomCommerce platform.

With HOOPS 3D Application Framework the base infrastructure for building 2D/3D applications for Windows, UNIX, LINUX, Windows CE devices or the Web is available.

CustomCommerce allows TechniCon’s customers to get data into online catalogs and so that they can be set up for product selection. This is now possible with the OpenHSF format HOOPS-based web viewer.

http://www.technicon.com
http://www.hoops3d.com


***AWR to Supply RF & Analog Design Tools to Taiwan's Nankang SoC Design Park
(December 22)

Applied Wave Research, Inc., and the SoC Technology Center of Industrial Technology Research Institute announced a partnership whereby AWR will provide radio-frequency EDA tools and services to a new system on chip design center in Taiwan, the Nankang SoC Design Park. AWR is the only RF EDA vendor selected for participation in the design center in the initial stage, which will be used by new fabless design houses in Taiwan.

AWR is providing the design center with the company's set of tools, including the Analog Office software for analog and RFIC engineers, Microwave Office simulation, layout, and electromagnetic analysis suite used by monolithic microwave integrated circuit, RF, and microwave engineers and the Visual System Simulator communications systems design suite used by system engineers.

http://www.stc.itri.org.tw.
http://www.mwoffice.com

***S3 Graphics, Club-3D Announce Partnership to Bring DeltaChrome Desktop PC Graphics to the European Market
(December 18)

S3 Graphics Inc., announced that Club-3D is their first PC board partner in Europe to announce graphics cards featuring S3Graphics’ DeltaChrome Hi-Def DX9 graphics processor.

Club-3D’s first DeltaChrome board will feature 256MB video memory, DirectX 9.0 games support with hardware pixel shaders ver2.0+ and hardware vertex shaders ver2.0+, native Hi-Def HDTV, the Chromotion programmable video engine, 2D-XP for no-compromise acceleration for Windows XP best appearance modes, DVI, CRT, and DuoRotate that enables the concurrent support of dual portrait and landscape displays.

The DeltaChrome based card will be available online and in leading electronic retailers in Europe in early Q1 of 2004 for an estimated retail price of EUR155 for the 256MB model.

http://www.club-3d.com
http://www.s3graphics.com

0343.2 Story of the Issue

***NGN 2003
By John Latta

November 4-7
Boston, U.S.A

NGN has been the conference to sample the reality of the networking and telecommunications sector. We estimate the attendance up by 50% while the exhibit area was down by 50%. More important, NGN Ventures is dead which has traditionally been held in April in Silicon Valley. This has been replaced with NGN Policy to be held in Washington, D.C., from April 19 – 21, 2004 at the Park Hyatt.

The major presentations and highlights of the event included the following.

John McQuillian gave his introductory comments which included:

NGN has focused on packet and broadband developments for 17 years. There have been many successes as packet technology has impacted the backbone, metro, desktop and access. However, vendors have lower employment levels and profit margins while service providers have to scramble to stay in business.

John stated that we may never “finish” building the net but we are getting close. The analogies are with the power grid and the interstate highway system. These are both “finished.” Most of the action is in using the infrastructure and not making it bigger and better. The action is in the enterprise and residential networking areas.

As follow-up David Passmore brought his perspective.

Voice is undergoing a metamorphosis. With SIP it is possible to make a phone call, virtually for free, from any packet port. “Anyone” can be a phone company. This leaves the carriers in trouble. One out is for them to provide a mediation layer that can include: SIP proxy servers, media gateways, directory services and multicast services. A new security model is emerging which is based on both Exclusion and Inclusion.

Jeffrey Blumenfeld of GrayCary stated a position that the content providers will not be able to solve its legal problems, i.e., online delivery, without a new business approach. He finished with a quote from Russell Simmons: “You can’t run a business on the assumption that your customers are not only wrong when they tell you what [they] want, [but] they’re also liars and thieves…. We’ve got to figure out a way to make this work.”

Roland Van der Meer of ComVentures spoke of an “Enriched consumer experience” which included Real Net surfing, file swapping and music and video downloading.

Howard Anderson of YankeeTek Ventures stated that this sector will not get better until 2006 when excess capacity is used. Much of this was fanciful with a comment such as “Air travel would be illegal. The only way to “travel” would be via videoconference link.”

Sean Maloney, EVP and GM, Intel Communications Group presentation had the following keynotes:

Wireless hot spot growth is predicted to reach 140,000 by 2005.

By 2007 it is expected that there will be 32m access points. Currently a new AP is added every 2.5 seconds.

By 2007 cameras in cell phones will be selling at 300m per year. Already there are uses for these phones in e-commerce. While shopping individuals are taking a picture of the bar code, sending it and then purchasing that item automatically online.

By 2005 3G phones will be selling at a rate of 100m units.

From 1993 to 2003 the number of Internet uses went from 7m to 600m. Sean predicted that the number of access points would grow from 8m in 2003 to 700m in 2013. “The 00’s will be the wireless decade.”

Gary Weis, CEO Cometa Networks, stated in his keynote that Cometa would be testing 802.16e in a Mobil environment that would be co-located 802.11 hot spots in 2004 – the trial will be in Seattle. More importantly, future implementations of these wide area “hot city” implementations, using both standards, would be accessible with software agile radio chips that support both standards. His market predictions included:

Today there are 4.2m Americans on WiFi and this will grow to 31m in 2007.

Today there are 22.3m devices enabled for WiFi devices and the number of enabled devices will grow to 40m by 2005.

98% of laptops will be WiFi enabled by 2007.

A very interesting illustration was shown of a MacDonald’s restaurant. In it was WiFi everywhere – much deeper than we have seen before. It is or will be used for cashless payments, e-Learning for the staff, online games, and sales data reporting. A requirement of MacDonald’s is that their wireless implementation support two different and secure uses at the same time.

Rob Poor, Founder and CTO of Ember pushed the notion that what is important is Wireless Embedded Mesh Networks. Several of his points were that:

Silicon devices get cheaper but wires, connectors and labor do not decline in price. Thus, use silicon radios for communicating networks.

There are 150m CPUs produced in 2001 for processors including PCs and Notebooks. But there were 7.5B microcontrollers manufactured that same year. This is more than the population of the world. These are embedded devices. Thus, if we are to consider mass markets they must be embedded. Today few of the embedded processors are networked.

The future of the mass market is to have embedded radios with embedded microcontrollers. These will also be enabled in mesh networks.

Tod Riedel, Co-Founder of Millennial Net, spoke of WSN, Wireless Sensor Networks. These are networks which collect information from attached sensors and pass the data to a network, and as Tod suggested a mesh network. He stated that the potential exists for 100m’s of deployed sensors.

Paul Sereikok President, Seniscast Systems, advocated low power wireless sensor networks. Examples of these networks were given in agriculture and security. A key point made is that there is a need for OS to control these networks and sensors. Paul cited the TinyOS effort and an example of such as OS.

Devabhaktuni Srikrishna, CTO, Tropos Networks, took a more conventional approach and sought to show how a mesh topology could help tie together 802.11 hot spots. He appealed for us to think in terms of not Hot Spots but HotZone and HotCity.

Matt Hicks, Director of Corporate Development, Amperon, stated that in the US the opportunity is in the Medium Voltage distribution market. This is from the substation to the Low Voltage transformer. Amperon has adopted 802.11 as a part of its distribution strategy to the home in lieu of the use of Low Voltage as the means of entering the home.

In his keynote, Mike Gallagher, Acting Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, DoC stated that the development of National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace called for an IPv6 task force. The task force will seek public comment and the report is due to be released by Spring 2004.

Wave Comments

For 17 years this has been the futures conference on networking. There has been a continuous parade of new technologies as IP and the Internet emerged and challenged the establishment. We have gone to some 5 of these events and over the last two events the black cloud of the bubble gone bust hung over the event, and its sister, NGN Ventures. One of the most telling signs was that NGN Ventures was put on “temporary hold” and replaced by NGN Policy. If there was one bright star at NGN it was wireless. Over and over presenters gushed with the promise of a high growth market. Yet, we came away wondering – have we seen this before, circa the Internet Bubble? What is troubling is that many of the same factors lining up behind wireless. The most important is the recognition that there are no business models behind wireless. Making money in IP transport is near impossible and now the same transport goes over the airways. At NGN we saw the same enthusiasm for VoWLAN and can only wonder – landline voice is declining, cellular voice is a brutal business and if VoLAN is the union of the two does this imply a sustainable market?

0343.3 3D

***Art Recon Inc. Released New Version of RECON3D™ Content Collections
(December 17)

Art Recon Inc., Developer and Publisher of 3D Content Collections, announced new version of RECON3D™ Content Collections Vol.1 Greek and Roman Art and Vol.2 Medieval Art.

Three products are offered today:

RECON3D™ Vol.1 Greek and Roman Art in 3ds, 3dm, dxf, lwo, obj formats. It covers Minoan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan Styles with over 250 3D objects.

RECON3D™ Vol. 2 Medieval Art in 3ds, 3dm, dxf, lwo, obj formats.
This collection covers Romanesque and Gothic Styles with over 350 objects.

RECON3D™ Bundle of Vol.1 and Vol.2 in 3ds, 3dm, dxf, lwo, obj formats. It covers Minoan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, Romanesque and Gothic Styles with over 650 3D objects.

The single license of RECON3D™ Vol.1 or Vol.2 is listed for US$249.00.The license of the bundle of RECON3D™ Vol.1 and Vol.2 format is priced at US$449.00.

http://www.artrecon.com.

0343.4 Semiconductor

***Yamaha to Provide SMAF Sound Decorator as Free Download
(December 22)

Yamaha Corporation, announced that SMAF Sound Decorator will be provided free of charge through http://smaf-yamaha.com from December 23. SMAF Sound Decorator enables users to create new ring tone melodies in Yamaha's Synthetic music Mobile Application Format with simple data conversion from Standard MIDI Files.

The SMAF Sound Decorator is produces SMAF music data that can be played on mobile phones equipped with Yamaha's MA-3 (40-note polyphony) or MA-5 (64-note polyphony) synthesizer chips.

http://www.global.yamaha.com/

0343.5 Wireless

***SMC introduces New Wireless Print Servers
(December 22)

SMC introduced two new EZ Connect 2.4GHz 11Mbps Wireless Print Servers -- one for USB printer connection, one for parallel printer connection.

With a built-in Ethernet port and 11Mbps 802.11b wireless client on board, SMC's new Print Servers allow access to a printer through a regular wired Ethernet LAN connection or by 802.11b Wireless LAN connection. Used as a wireless enabled print server, it supports both Ad-Hoc mode (point-to-point wireless networks) and Infrastructure mode (via an existing Wireless access point). The SMC2621W-P then provides connectivity to parallel printing devices; the SMC2621W-U, to USB printing devices.
The Print Servers are available now, at MSRPs of $129.99 each.

http://www.smc.com

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