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Microcap & Penny Stocks : DGIV-A-HOLICS...FAMILY CHIT CHAT ONLY!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RocketMan who wrote (21246)	8/11/1998 9:13:00 AM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Respond to of 50264

Speaking of "other services....there was a feature in the WSJ today about how Asian countries are requesting Multimedia feature such as video on demand. Asian Technology Video-on-Demand Feed Offers Clue To What Will Sells in Digital Future By WAYNE ARNOLD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL A FORMER MCKINSEY consultant with a doctorate in molecular pharmacology and genetic engineering, 37-year-old William Lo, offers an interesting case study for those trying to find a profitable way to build tomorrow's information superhighways. And the conclusion is as tested as it is potent: sex sells. In March, Dr. Lo, managing director of Hong Kong Telecommunications' Internet subsidiary, IMS, oversaw the launch of video-on-demand services on a sophisticated fiber-optic computer network called broadband. It's called broadband for its ability to transmit data many times faster than most Internet connections today. Critics of video on demand, which enables residents to order a movie from an on-line menu and view it at any time, pointed to unsuccessful trials in the U.S. as evidence that the concept would fail to unseat the videocassette recorder in the home-entertainment market. According to Dr. Lo, however, his iTV service has, in five short months, managed to sign up 52,000 paying subscribers, with another 50,000-odd just waiting to be hooked up. CASHING IN on the lowest-common denominator is, of course, nothing new in media technology. Voyeurism has driven the popularity of everything from motion pictures to cable television, videocassette recorders, video compact disks and the World Wide Web. But the comparison between the acceptance of broadband in Hong Kong and Singapore offers a valuable lesson not only for other companies gambling on similar services, but also for high-tech social engineers who consider broadband networks to be digital-age equivalents to highways and electricity in their importance to competition in the fast-moving, global economy. Singapore's Magix, for example, is the store-front for an ambitious government plan to connect every citizen to a high-speed network called Singapore ONE (One Network for Everyone). The aim is to make resource-poor Singapore a so-called intelligent island, keeping its work force on the leading edge of productivity and maintaining its allure to foreign high-tech investors. The government says it has already poured roughly $400 million Singapore dollars (US$229 million) into building the network, developing applications and subsidizing the cost of equipment customers must buy to use SingTel's Magix.Companies such as SingTel that come up with services taking advantage of Singapore ONE can count on the government to kick in 70% of their development costs. The project has attracted interest from a host of big presences in the high-tech industry, including Microsoft Corp., which has stationed several programmers in Singapore to develop broadband applications. "Singapore ONE is exciting because it's the closest thing to a community on a broadband network," explains Blas Garcia-Moros, Microsoft's regional director for South Asia.