***CeBIT 2004
By John Latta
Hannover, Germany
March 17 - 20, 2004
Sony Defines Digital Home Market on its Own Terms
It was only a matter of time. Sony would turn every corporate
screw in its business and skill chest to mold the home digital
market to its maximum advantage. No less than Kunitake Ando,
President and Chief Operating Officer, Sony, came to announce its
strategic directions at a press event. He also gave the first
keynote by a CE company that has ever opened CeBIT. In the past
Sony called this the Ubiquitous "Value" Network now it is "Next
Generation." He drove his points with:
Sony is creating an easy to use home networking environment.
Sony is revitalizing its products in a BB convergence era.
IT, Communications and CE are coming together. 2004 will be
seen as the beginning of BB convergence.
Three key factors in our products are:
Digital
Wireless, and
Personal
With that, Sony announced a slew of products and a service to
drive home these points.
Sony Announcements
Sony announced a service for cell phone operators that allows
them to sell songs. It is called Personal Media Assistant, and
there will be a name change at launch. This is a mobile music
streaming service that is to be provided by mobile phone
operators that use GPRS/3G. TeliaSonera Finland has been trials
for 2 months and will be the launch operator in the second
quarter of 2004. Sony stated they are in discussions with
virtually every operator in Europe. Additional Nordic operators
will roll out in the second half of 2004. A demo was shown of the
user interface and it is very customer centric and includes many
options for personalization. Note that the music is streamed from
a server and not stored on the phone. This is a Symbian-based
application that runs on Series 60 and UIQ phones. Financial
details were not disclosed.
An electronic music service called Connect was announced which is
very similar to iTunes. Songs from all music companies will be
available. It will begin with 300,000 songs in the UK, France and
Germany in June. The format is ATRAC3 and the cost is .99 Euro
per track. Connect works with SonicStage 2.0. When asked about
the support for ATRAC3 on other than Sony devices, the answer was
not clear; but it was clearly stated that this will not work with
iPod.
A memory disc technology called Hi-MD was announced that will
provide 1GB of storage for 10 Euro. This appears to be Sony
proprietary. A walkman that uses this media was also announced
called Hi-MD Walkman.
A DVD Handycam model DCR-DVD201 was announced that uses DVD
recordable media. The video format is 16:9. It is also a still
camera.
A new digital camera was announced called Cyber-shot DSC-P100
with 5m pixels.
In a boastful announcement Sony claimed to be doing the next
generation desktop PC, which they called the VAIO V1. This is a
PC integrated into the TFT LCD display. It has an internal
digital video recorder. Excellent ID.
At the center of the home network was the Vaio Home Server. One
illustration showed this on a PC with connection in the home
through either Ethernet or wireless.
A very impressive thin and light notebook was shown - the model
x505 extreme.
Sony then showed how all these devices would interact together.
This is Sony’s strength. Next it showed where broadband fits.
This includes both home BB and mobile BB. From Sony Music to the
home to the mobile phones by Sony Ericsson Sony has a product for
every part of the market. In spite of the announcement that the
Connect service is for music Ando-san stated video was coming.
Ando-San stated during the evening keynote that open standards
are essential for this era of broadband. He specifically cited
the Digital Home Working Group.
During all the Sony presentations, only once was PS2 mentioned
and then obliquely.
NFC – DOA Press Conference
Sony pumped it up. Philips pumped it up. The room was packed. NFC
is another wireless "standard" for Near Field Communications. It
is to enable close proximity communications of two devices. This
can enable commerce, control of devices, DRM validation, mutual
exchange of information and many other applications. The intent
is that many phones, read Nokia, will have this capability. A
simple animation was shown of e-commerce with a NFC device that
bought a hotel room on line, checked in, opened the room door and
did this with apparent ease. Money just flowed seamlessly from
the device. The presentation was devoid of technical details. In
spite of the presence of 5 executives from these companies they
could not answer simple questions.
How is authentication done?
Will another wireless standard confuse consumers?
Why cannot this be done with existing wireless technologies?
How much will this cost?
What is the bandwidth supported?
Will consumers have to learn another PIN number for their
phones?
See: http://www.nfcforum.org/
Maybe they need another year to get their act together.
Siemens
In the futures section of the Siemens booth they had:
GSM phone in the form of a pen that did character
recognition;
A pen interface to the phone - same as above but without
character recognition and phone;
A virtual keyboard, that is a projected keyboard on to a
flat surface, with the projector build into the phone.
Finger Systems (Korea) provided the pen technology. It remains to
be seen what will fly in this phone-HID category as Siemens was
seeking feedback at CeBIT to determine product direction.
In a market where every penny counts, Siemens went against the
grain, and showed creative use of technology applied to the
phone. The most outstanding was the PenPhone. This integrates a
pen, phone, character recognition and Bluetooth in one device
that is slightly larger than an ordinary pen. The ID was well
done. Details include:
The phone recognizes strokes that make up a character or
number. The end of a character is determined by the distance
between the pen tip and the surface. Above a certain
threshold the character recognition process stops - this is
probably 5mm as per the discussion with Finger Systems
below. Note that the tracking engine is relative and not
absolute thus the short distance and span of one character
for recognition – no more. In this application, this does
not seem to be a major limitation.
The primary application is the handwriting of phone numbers
to be called or SMS messages.
There is an internal display at the top of the pen shell
that shows the results of the stroke recognition. (In the
booth, the recognition was shown on a PC monitor apparently
using the Bluetooth interface). This is a simple problem
compared to general handwriting recognition. But what we saw
had a number of errors in recognition.
The surfaces that one can write on cannot include all white
or all black because it confuses the tracking engine. It was
claimed by Siemens that this will be improved in a few
months.
Presently, if one wants to send information from the pen to
a more traditional cell phone, this can only be accomplished
by dialing from the PenPhone to the GSM phone; in other
words, the Bluetooth interface does not work between the
PenPhone and another phone. Siemens recognizes this as an
issue but how it is resolved will await their evaluation of
the potential for this product concept.
At the top end of the phone is a speaker that means that the
phone does not need to be held to one’s ear to be heard.
There is a microphone near the tip of the pen.
The phone was well integrated.
It took one year to develop the phone.
Right behind this display stand was virtually the same pen but
without the character recognition. It was actually an input
device for a Bluetooth cell phone. We saw illustrations being
drawn on the face of the phone. It was quite good and we wonder
is this is a better application of the pen than the PenPhone.
Next to the PenPhone is a phone which has the projection module
built into the top of the phone. When this Virtual Keyboard phone
is stood up with its built in stand – the back of the phone just
folds out – the typical projected red keyboard outline is seen on
the table surface. Certainly one of the better uses of this
technology that we have seen before – including our report at
CES.
There was also shown PockServ. Actually, it is a hard disk with
Bluetooth interface and USB. It thus can interface to the phone
or can be a shared drive on the PC. This was quite small and
likely used the MicroDrive. Even given all this, it was a slick
application of a hard drive.
Overall, Siemens has to be given an A for trying to shake the
phone human interface mind set. It remains to be seen if this
goes anywhere. They tried two years ago with the OTM technology
to mate a pen with the phone, and that died. The larger problem
has nothing to do with technology, it is a business model. Buyers
expect the phone price to be subsidized and basically cost next
to nothing, i.e., $10. This makes it very difficult to bring
creativity to the market. The major exception right now is the
photo phones. We doubt that the same market momentum will happen
with built-in HID.
Finger Systems - Another A for Trying
For some reason Siemens would not state openly that Finger
Systems did the technology for the PenPhone. They did say - go to
building 24. That we did and Finger even had examples of the
Siemens PenPhone on display. So much for CeBit secrets.
We took the opportunity to bore in more on the technology. Here
are the details.
The tracking technology is similar to that used in the
optical mouse. That is, a movement vector is formed based on
the relative movement between looks at the surface. This,
however, appears very simple and no-where as sophisticated
as mouse tracking has become. For example, when we asked –
do you have an ASIC for tracking and the answer was no.
There was a "standard" IC used for the imaging and an
I/F IC for USB.
It was claimed that the depth of focus is 5mm compared to
most optical mice that will only operate to 1mm. The value
of this is that tracking is still possible above the
surface.
Logitech - Charting its Future
Logitech discussed its future at a CeBIT press event.
We sold 65m mice last year.
It is important to recognize that the PC is a commodity.
This is really a shrink wrap of Microsoft and Intel
technology. The issue is - How can consumers make the PC
personal again? Consumers make it personal by what they
place around the PC.
To respond to this desire for personalization we have to
make the decision very simple. This is where brand is
critical. As the price points for the products decrease,
brand becomes all the more critical. Customers want to be
certain about the purchase. We also have a "super premium
brand" in this a low price category.
In the past we have been a "last inch" company but we have
grown into the living room. And we have entered the mobile
market. But I am very concerned about diversification. We
might lose our DNA. This means we much be focused on what
consumers like and what are the hot markets. A testament to
the success of our brand is that more than 90% of our
consumers will recommend our products to friends.
Logitech is in high volume markets. There is a very
important link between OEM and retail, and this has been
reinforced in the last several months. OEMs want to see us
driving retail. This provides a strong support for the OEMs
selling. We have seen this in the Web cam market and the
wireless products. Increasingly we see where OEMs want to
associate with our name.
Logitech is most proud of its performance. We have sustained
revenue growth for 5 consecutive years, and closed 2003 with
$1.223b in sales, 16% above last year. Our profits have
shown an even greater rise. Last year they rose 28% to
$120m.
We have sold 500m mice. Given that the total number of PCs
is 1.3b, since they were first manufactured, that is a lot
of mice. In 2003 we sold 110m products. There are very few
companies that have sold that many products. Of that 110m,
more than 50m were under the Logitech brand.
We have extended our brand into the game console market.
We work in three types of markets:
Those that we develop.
Examples where this applies are cordless, webcam
and consoles;
Those that we take share.
This includes: audio, pointing devices and PC
gaming. The PC gaming market is in decline but we
feel that it will come back again. This is a
cyclical market. With our market share we are in a
very strong position when it returns.
New applications
Examples include digital writing and mobile
headsets. We intend to grow the IO pen market and
will have more on this in the future.
There is a huge opportunity for cordless. We estimate that
500 - 600m cordless devices will be sold. In 5 - 6 years all
PC owners will want cordless.
We believe that the market is ready for mass adoption of
cordless. This is also what we hear from OEMs. Our product
introductions are consistent with this to drive to increase
the adoption of cordless.
The video IM market is growing rapidly.
As of 2/04 there have been 4.5m video sessions per day
and growing, and
There are 16m unique users per month.
Nokia -
We were impressed with the depth of product at Nokia. Here are
some examples.
7610
This has a 1mp camera and will take both stills and
video. The camera has a 4X zoom. It supports multimedia
messaging and has Bluetooth built in. The keyboard is
of a new more modern design - not sure it is easier to
use however.
6230
Active Matrix TFT display and with Bluetooth. Email
client. Support for streaming video and includes an MP3
player. Built in FM stereo radio. Also includes a voice
recorder.
6600
Integrated camera and video recorder. GUI interaction
on the TFT LCD screen.
Medallion I & II
Neck jewelry. Will store pictures and display them on a
screen which hang around the neck. Resolution is 96 X
96. Price is 289 Euro. Very surprised that the picture
transfer means between the bracelet and the phone is
IR, not Bluetooth.
7600
This hardly looks like a phone but more like a square
hockey puck. However, it has a built in camera and
video recorder. Support video and audio streaming. Has
an XHTM browser and e-mail client.
SFC Smart Fuel Cell AG - Selling the First Fuel Cells
Tucked away in a small booth was this company with a product
called SFC A25, one of the first fuel cells on the market. It
sells for $2800 and has an output of 50Ah per day. The down side
is that it will only last 1,000 hours. They have plans to sell
the SFC PowerBoy for notebooks, portable TVs and PDAs. This is
expected to go on sale in 2005.
Is Wireless CE the Future?
The CE story line of digital home networking is not new. We have
been to the best early market indicator event, CEATEC, and noted
the emergence of home networking technology for the past 2 years.
Certainly Sony has been one of the most vocal. There was
extensive home networking show at ITU Telecom World in Geneva.
We took the opportunity at CeBIT to test the reality - what are
these CE companies showing or selling in the way of home
networking.
We were surprised.
Sony
There was a demonstration of a Windows Media PC that
had 802.11g for wireless. We saw no wireless
televisions, only a converter that took the RF signal
and then provided the signal to the television.
It is important to note that in the past Sony was
showing 802.11a and this shift to g is only quite
recent.
Also note that one of the first wireless products, the
Sony Airboard, was not present here.
Panasonic
There was a demonstration area for Home Networking\
Ideas. Most of the communications about the home were
using power lines. There were some 802.11a bridges
present but these were only used for extended room
wireless access, not between rooms. Wireless was not
integrated into any device but security cameras. Media
server is of Panasonic design.
Panasonic has long been showing 802.11a technology and
this goes back as far as 2 years ago at CEATEC.
Samsung
Shown was one LCD TV being fed with 802.11a but the
wireless interface box was next to the display and
nearly as large as it. Also shown was the "First
wireless plasma display" but no one could say what the
wireless technology was. This is due to be sold in a
few weeks.
In a demonstration, Samsung was showing an AV Home
center. This basically has a Samsung media box
connected via wires to AV clients around the house. The
only value of this network was the concentration of
content in the media center.
It should be noted that Samsung was showing wireless
embedded into to a plasma panel at CES 2003 using the
chips of Magis Networks. But Magis Networks Inc. filed
for Chapter 11 in late December 2003 and as of January
was going into Chapter 7 in spite of raising $62m.
Thus, if we compare what was seen here at CeBIT with what was
noted at ITU Telecom in Geneva, just last December, the digital
home networking is not as well developed as the talks and press
events would indicate. Certainly, Sony is farther along with the
wireless story but there are still important components missing -
such as embedded wireless. The trials of Samsung are a good
example as cited above.
Wave Issue 0414 /16/2004 Article 2-01