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Recently in Salon Technology

Something for nothing?
On freebie sites you can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard you just might get something free.
By Lydia Lee
[12/17/99]

Books
Legends in their own minds
Two new books try to lionize warrior-entrepreneurs battling in Microsoft's shadow, but leave us wondering where high tech's heroes are.
By Thomas Scoville
[12/16/99]

Microsoft, Mahir and money, money, money
A software superpower is declared a monopoly, free software rakes in billions and money makes the world go round: The year in tech.
By Janelle Brown, Mark Gimein, Andrew Leonard and Kaitlin Quistgaard
[12/15/99]

Review
MP3: Here, there, everywhere
The latest digital music players let you play MP3s on your home stereo, in your car or on the run -- but are they any good?
By Janelle Brown
[12/14/99]

Technology: View from the top
High-speed Net access that's out of this world
John Koehler retired from a career at Hughes Electronics and the CIA to build fast Net connections on satellites already in orbit.
By Mark Compton
[12/13/99]

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That may not be the first thing we do. The story of the Web has been utility and convenience. There's nothing more convenient than a mobile phone. What are the kinds of video that would help when you are on the go? Imagine a device that is smart enough to know when you are in a new city, so it gives you a video city tour to orient you to the place.

Another example: I'm at the San Jose airport where my flight is delayed. What am I missing on television tonight? I click "What's on TV tonight" on my wireless PDA and start getting promos for the evening lineup of TV shows. Let's say there's an episode of "Dawson's Creek" I really want to record. I click the TiVo button at the bottom of the screen. It sends a message back through the network to my TiVo box at home and instructs it to record that episode. That's a huge application.

Let's say you're driving around town with some friends. One says, "Let's see a movie. What's on?" You click on "movies" and a full color movie trailer pops up for a film like "The Cider House Rules." You click on "Show me a theater." Because it's wireless, we kind of know where you are by triangulating between towers. We can give you the local theaters and even a map that shows you where the theaters are located -- and a button that allows you to purchase a ticket.

It's bundles of tightly integrated services like that that could be incredibly useful to people. That's the way life should be.

What is the "secret sauce" in PacketVideo's core technology?

The whole trick to PacketVideo's technology is that it's scalable mpeg 4. It happens to be optimized for delivery over wireless networks, but you could deliver it over terrestrial networks as well. What "scalable mpeg 4" means is you're encoding once. That's very different from the way video is encoded today, where you have to code separately for 14.4, 28.8 and on up to super broadband speeds. When consumers go to a video site today they have to click on their connection speed. It's kind of crazy to expect people to know what their connection speed is. PacketVideo removes the need to do that.

Why should the cell phone be an all-purpose device? Are people really going to be able to use all that functionality on the run?

Data storage is an issue for PDAs today. Even with miniaturization, storage takes up space. People worry about losing their PDAs and the data they contain. Well, the right thing to do is leave all that data on a server. You don't need to carry the data, just access to the data.

Blue Tooth is a wireless protocol for devices to talk to each other in a localized area without plugs. Imagine I'm coming to your office to do a Power Point presentation. I don't bring my computer. Instead I bring a Blue Tooth-enabled cell phone. Let's say I need to make a change in the presentation. My Blue Tooth-enabled phone talks to the Blue Tooth-enabled keyboard in your office and brings up my presentation on your Blue Tooth-enabled monitor. I can use that keyboard to make changes, which are keyed to my phone and delivered to the server where the data is stored. That means you have all the functionality of a computer without having to carry all that crap around. What you're going to have is a world where you don't need to have a personal computer anymore.

Next page | Do people really want picture phones?