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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28141)	1/15/1998 4:20:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Penty of these satellites will need headends............................ skyreport.com Firm Predicts $121 Billion Satellite Market Jan. 15, 1998 The Teal Group, in its first "Worldwide Satellite Market Forecast: 1998-2007" publication, said 1,697 satellites will be launched worldwide over the next 10 years, the value of which is estimated to be $121 billion. Teal estimates 1,201 future satellites will be put into commercial operation, representing a market value of about $58 billion. The remaining satellites will be for military, civil, Earth observation and scientific uses as well as imaging satellites. The market value of those satellites is expected to be about $62.6 billion. The Teal Group is a defense and aerospace market analyst firm in Fairfax Va. It provides competitive intelligence to industry and government.

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28141)	1/15/1998 4:46:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Cube customer.................................. maruda.com VCD 2.0 Player is very popular in the world of entertainment. Altough you can find many band of VCD player in the market, you will find only MCV-102 can satisfy most of your desire. It is using the newest Mpeg 1 technology and compliant to VCD2.0 specification. It is using C-Cube Mpeg decoding technology for the video and audio decoding. It is using Philips Autocalibrate Digital Servo Control technology and Double speed Technology for the CD servo control. That's why you can get superior performance and excellent playability when comparing with only VCD players. A Karaoke system has been built in giving you Key Change Control, Digital Echo, Vocal Cut function. MCV-102 allows two Mic-inputs simultaneously. Full On Screen Display(OSD) and interactive menu driven control. Slow motion 1/2,1/4,1/8,1/16 is common in many machines. But 2x high speed playback is another superior feature to enable you to watch programmes in much shorter time. DiscView is implemented in our VCD player to help you finding your favourite programmes or songs through the 9 preview windows on screen in pages. It uses only 4 alkaline batteries to operate. You can also use our a.c. adapter to operate for non stop entertainment. Find more information in this page and give comments or enqiries any time.

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28141)	1/15/1998 5:38:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

What's the difference between the porn producers and the rest? The porn producers always seem to make money. Next tech winners Richard Folkers 01/19/98 U.S. News & World Report Page 66 (Copyright 1998) The Consumer Electronics Show is a playground for pitchmen and spokesmodels. New products featured at this Las Vegas extravaganza, whether they are wide-screen digital televisions (they're everywhere) or talking car stereos (they listen, too), are touted as "breakthrough products" or "new paradigms." Not every innovation soars, despite presentations staged like fashion shows or music videos. All too often, the hot product at these shows is later ignored by wary consumers who see no pressing need for mini-disk digital audio players or convection ovens. The hype at this year's show is especially feverish. The industry hasn't found a must-have product since the videocassette recorder gained popularity more than a decade ago. This year sees the debut of digital television and the maneuvering in the battle for supremacy between the digital video disk, or DVD, and a CD-size medium called Divx (for Digital Video Express) as the replacement for the videotape, CD, and CD-ROM. DVD and Divx have a key difference: You own a DVD, and can watch it as often as you like. With Divx, you will pay $4.50 for the disk, but must call for a digital key to unlock it for future viewings, renting the content each time. To the chagrin of the mainstream electronics industry, the winner and loser could be determined by the adult-entertainment industry, whose customers eagerly adopt new technologies, like the Internet. "Pornography launched the VCR boom in the '80s," says Ken Michaels, associate editor of Adult Video News. It helped popularize CD-ROMs. X-rated material makes a lot of money on the World Wide Web, Michaels says, just one part of an adult industry that generated $8 billion last year. Most electronics marketers stay away from porn's isolated pavilion, except for an occasional foray to gawk at the provocatively dressed starlets, who sign autographs and smoke. Electronics-industry publications don't come by for interviews. There's even a sign warning the squeamish that they are about to use the same restroom as porn-industry people. Tangled Web. So what is the adult industry banking on this year? Producer Adam Glasser says his videotape business is shrinking but his Web site is booming. Glasser predicts that Web TV and other devices that use a TV set will bring the Net to the family room. Porn, he says, helped the mainstream realize the Net's entertainment value. The home medium to watch, says Joe Giarmo of Metro Inc., is "DVD, and that's it." Metro, one of the few publicly traded adult-video companies, will use the DVD's capacity to add extra camera angles, interviews with actresses, and a "director's cut" of the film. Giarmo predicts the industry will shy away from Divx, because of fears that with the call-in requirement, someone could track a viewer's risque tastes. Rob Black, a director for Elegant Angel Video, is about to make his first DVD. Black, 24, shoots on digital videotapes but sometimes mixes in images from film. What's the difference between the adult-entertainment industry and the mainstream industry? he asks. The porn folks always seem to make money. Judging from porn's track record, it's a good bet the mainstream will be watching. Picture: No caption; Drawing: No caption (Illustration by John Ueland for USN&WR)

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28141)	1/15/1998 9:53:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Europe..................................................... nikkeibp.com Alfred Vollmer, Munich Asia-Pacific to Play Multimedia Developer Role "The Asia-Pacific is in a transition phase from being a mass production area to playing an important role on the multimedia development side," said Rainer Hoffmann, marketing manager multimedia at the German semiconductor manufacturer Intermetall GmbH. In order to satisfy this demand, Intermetall is investing in the Asia-Pacific by opening new offices and sending application engineers from their central labs in Germany to the Asia-Pacific. "Today we have a very strong interaction between our US application lab and our customers in the Asia-Pacific area, as many of the reference designs that we do are in cooperation with US companies like NVidia, Trident or Rendition 3D Labs to name just a few," Hoffmann added. "Regarding design activities, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea are trying to catch up with the US," said Paul Bromley, director of SGS-Thomson Microelectronics' (ST) PC strategic unit. "The US is still leading, however, with many Asia-Pacific companies having design centers in the US." Hans Schwendner, executive director and general manager of Siemens AG's Semiconductors' Image and Video Department, observes a global multimedia convergence covering the entire application spectrum from television (TV), video cassette recorders (VCR) and set-top boxes to PCs, videophones and car navigation. "A supplier of multimedia chips must have the relevant system know-how, flexibility and component prices to allow his customers to meet their time to market with the system cost the market allows," says Schwendner. In terms of terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T), Uwe Binnenbruck, director business development at Siemens Semiconductors, sees a similar tendency: "Normally, design-ins for DVB-T are made in Japan while production is in the Asia-Pacific or Europe. However, we also have a Japanese lead customer whose design-ins as well as the production are both in the Asia-Pacific." As there are already DVB services via satellite available in the Asia-Pacific, this is an important market for satellite digital video broadcasting (DVB-S). According to Bruno Graf, manager at Motorola Semiconductors' New Media Marketing in Europe, the presence of the DVB committee in Geneva, Switzerland means that Central Europe is a center of competence for this application area. "Being an American company Motorola designs several DVB-compliant devices for digital set-top boxes in Munich, Germany," says Graf. "The majority of manufacturers of digital set-top boxes from the Asia-Pacific have already opened R&D centers in Europe to be close to the DVB standardization committee." <Picture> Philip's Trimedia Processor in a Kiosk ÿ Chip Design in A-P European semiconductor companies are also designing multimedia chips in the Asia-Pacific. For example, ST designed its Omega family (STI55xx) for set-top boxes in Singapore. These family members combine MPEG audio and video with transport functions on a single chip. The monitor and personal digital assistant (PDA) chipsets of Philips Semiconductors are designed in the Asia-Pacific as well and according to Walter Conrads, director international marketing and sales at Philips Semiconductors, "Philips is extending its chip design activities in the Asia-Pacific." One focus area for Siemens Semiconductors is Web TV. For this application Siemens currently offers a 16-bit two-chip solution that is capable of displaying Chinese characters as well. A single-chip solution manufactured using the 256-Mbit DRAM technology will be available at significantly lower prices in 1998. These Web TV chips are designed in Singapore. "Our Web TV solution will enable add-ons for TVs at a retail price of around US$70-80," claims Schwendner. "Ease of access is key for the success of Web TV." In the entire multimedia range Schwendner sees a new scenario: "More and more functionality is handled by software and less by hardware. This means we need scalability in the controller area." Conrads of Philips observes the same trend: "The required flexibility to bring new products to the market quickly drives the need for programmable devices. Traditionally a function was highly integrated and then manufactured at a very attractive price. This system does not work any longer. You need to react to market needs very quickly which means that not only digital but also programmable devices are an absolute must." On the other hand, Paul Bromley from ST sees a slightly different tendency in the multimedia business: "Meeting the right price-performance point is the key challenge for multimedia silicon system vendors. Especially in the multimedia PC business, companies like to design their own ICs but generally they buy the chips. With these short life cycles the PC companies are fading away from a vendor/buyer relationship and some of them design their own chip which is then manufactured by a foundry. The key solution for semiconductor companies are systems on a chip where software customizes the design." A typical example for such a system on a chip is ST's single-chip PC STPC - a 486 core which has a PCIbus interface as well as a direct bus with a width of 64 bit to connect to graphics or D/A converters. In terms of applications both Siemens and Philips see a strong demand for videoconferencing and video telephony chips in the Asia-Pacific. Conrads of Philips sees videoconferencing as one of the first and fastest growing multimedia applications in Asia-Pacific. "This is not a real surprise if you consider that this is one of the areas where the three multimedia basics come together to be used in one application. Most of the video-conferencing design-ins for our Trimedia processor were achieved in Asia-Pacific - mainly in China," he said. Philips Semiconductors' Trimedia processor performs up to four billion operations per second and offers a synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) interface capable of running data transfer rates of up to 400 Mbytes/s.

To: Stoctrash who wrote (28141)	1/15/1998 10:15:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

Bangkok Broadband deployment delayed.......................... nikkeibp.com Chris Burslem, Bangkok BKK Broadband Network Hitting Financial Snags TelecomAsia Corp Plc's (TA), a subsidiary of the Chareon Pokphand Group, grand scheme to build a cutting edge multimedia network in Bangkok appears likely to be delayed as the company struggles to raise the necessary capital amid an economic downturn in Thailand. Publicly, TA officials say they are confident work on the Bt20 billion scheme will begin early in 1998 but privately they concede finding the credit in a tight market is proving difficult. The network, to be based on hybrid fiber coaxial technology, will allow service providers to offer cable TV, broadband internet services, video conferencing, teleshopping, tele-medicine, video-on-demand and a host of other multimedia services. Vallobh Vimolvanich, a TA director said Asia Multimedia Co, as the company that operates the network will be known, will provide services that will benefit both business and society, such as long distance learning and telebanking. Technically, the network is a mixture of hybrid fiber optic coaxial lines that can operate radio signals in the range of 5MHz to 750MHz, and which are capable of handling both analog and digital transmissions. ÿ Connecting 2M Homes, Firms Once up and running, the network will connect two million households and businesses in Bangkok. Nearly all of the lines will be installed by TA, the largest fixed-line telephone concession operator in Thailand. The director said the company was courting operators of other types of infrastructure including satellite, microwave and wireless networks as shareholders and strategic partners. "Our partners may be from unrelated businesses but have synergy or be involved in other types of telecommunications infrastructure," he said. According to Asia Multimedia company's mandate, however, operators of telecoms infrastructure must come to an agreement on network mergers with the firm.