Saturday July 29, 2006

An young actress moves in. A voice asks her if she ever has been in a casting before. The actress proves that she knows to play and demonstrates many emotions. Normal? Yes - for a movie casting absolutly. But not for a computer game! An impressive demo at this year's E3, "Heavy Rain" from Quantic Dreams grabbed the attention of a lot of curious show-goers thanks to its excellent visuals, believable actress, and the fact that it's an all-new adventure game from the same folks that brought us 2005's award-winning "Indigo Prophecy".

On IGN.COM Guillaume de Fondaumière (Executive Producer Quantic Dreams) says in an interview: "Initially, this demo was a purely internal technical prototype that was not supposed to be shown outside the company. Our original goal was just to define if it was possible to create a next-gen character able to express complex emotions and what it would take on a technical point of view."

For more info have a look at Edge magazin, where Founder and CEO of Quantic Dream, David Cage has given a big interview and more backgrounders about his work and his plan to get more emotions into computer games.

The movie can be downloaded here (Corporate / Thu 11 May, 2006).

Wednesday July 19, 2006

By end of June 2006 around 123 million people had been in internet, 2 of 3 using broadband access. That's still only 10% of overall population in China (around 1.3 billion people) - but if you look at the numbers, the market is growing and growing. According to a report China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has presented today the number raised by 20% compared to last year! The usage of broadband access has raised by 45% - for sure a result of China Telecom's enormous invests in new network infrastructure.

Internet shopping got more and more popular as well: 30 millions practice online shopping. That's an increase by 50%. And around 25 million chinese people use internet for searching new jobs. At this point 28 millions have already started their own blog!

Tuesday July 18, 2006

Have you ever heard about an Web OS? No? I too but now there's YouOS. A complete operating system "booted" in your browser! You can edit a document at home in a text editor and then go to school or work and instantly access the same text editor and document. In fact, you don't really even need to own a computer. You just need to borrow one on occasion. Working out of internet cafes or libraries? Your desktop, applications, and data travel with you from cafe to cafe, session to session. And tedious things like data backups and archiving? YouOS will take care of them for you.

YouOS and its applications run entirely within a web browser, but have the look and feel of desktop applications. An application's code and data reside remotely but are executed and modified locally.

Everything in YouOS is built upon a set of open RESTful server APIs. The default YouOS client implementation (AJAX), the developer portal, the IDE - everything is built on simple, open xml accessible through the http protocol. What does this mean? It means anyone can write a client of their own - whether it's in another web page, a Flash movie, Konfabulator, or even a native Windows client. Don't like the IDE? Build your own that fits your needs!

You like the idea? Use it and play around. It's still an experiment but runs already quite stable.

Do you want to have it for your company? Hm - why don't you got to Sun Microsystems and use their great Sun Ray technology. By this you get rid of the old platforms and get a ThinClient which isn't only a slim PC - it's really a complete different concept. The Sun Ray client is a compact plug-and-work device that processes only user input and screen output. It is a "headless" device that is compatible with standard VGA monitors, designed to allow leverage of existing IT investments. Not really new, but getting more and more traction day for day. Chck it out! Ask a Sun employee - he'll take you to one of our offices and will present how we work on these machines...

Tuesday July 11, 2006

According to ITU's "World Society Report 2006" more and more people are connecting to mobile networks than ever. Especially in China, Russia and India are driving this business, so International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reported. From worldwide 2.1 billion mobile subscriberin 2005 ITU is expecting more than 3 billion users in 2008 - pretty 50% of all people on earth...

Vanessa Gray, Telecommunication Analyst at ITU said in a press release that "there are now more ICT users worldwide and more people communicating than at any other time in history," said Gray. "By the end of 2004, the world counted a total of 3 billion telephone subscribers, 1.8 billion mobile subscribers and 1.2 billion fixed lines. Both the number of mobile subscribers and the number of internet users more than doubled in just four years. The world had over 840 million internet users, which means that on average 13 per cent of the world’s population was online."

Overall, the digital divide has been reduced. "Our statistics show that within four year, from 2000 to 2004, the gap separating the developing and the developed countries has been shrinking in terms of mobile subscribers, fixed telephone lines and Internet users", said Gray. The gap (or digital divide) is measured by dividing the ICT penetration rate in the developed world by the ICT penetration rate in the developing world. "Phenomenal growth rates in the mobile sector, particularly, have been able to reduce the gap from 9 in the year 2000, to 4 by the end of 2004. This gap has also been reduced in terms of fixed lines, from 6 to 4 in four years, and from 15 to 8 in terms of Internet users", Gray explains.

Yet, major differences persist in penetration levels. In 2004, almost one third of the population in Europe and the Americas was online, compared to 8 per cent in Asia and the Pacific. Europe has almost 15 times the internet penetration of Africa, where less than 2 per cent use the internet. In the Arab states, too, less than 6 out of 100 people are online. As for broadband access, Africa and the Arab states are lagging behind Asia and the Pacific, Europe and North America which account for 97 per cent of all subscribers.

Tuesday July 04, 2006

After auctioning Germany's UMTS/3G licenses for around 50 billion Euro the german government is working on the next round... Again there'll be an auction, again there are more bidder than licenses. But the technology is named now WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access). The auction will happen in this calendar year and will be held for each of 16 Germany's regions.

At the moment there are 1221 offers from 102 companies (Alcatel, Arcor, Deutsche Telekom, Broadnet, City Carriers like Netcologne and Kabel Deutschland (biggest TV cable provider)). 9 offers apply for Germany-wide services but only 3 companies can get this frequencies. Because german government doesn't see a chance for a compromise solution they have now decided to auction the frequencies. But will it be the same success story for the government like 2000 with UMTS? And will the companies make the same fault - paying to much money without a chance to amortise the invest?

Why is it so important for so many bidders to go for this auction? WiMAX is designated as the metropolitan area network (MAN) technology that can connect Wi-Fi hotspots with each other and to other parts of the Internet and provide a wireless alternative to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access. However, the field of uses is broader and overlaps those for mobile WAN (wide area networks) and WLANs.

It's not only "the last mile" - it's a bit more: The technology provides up to 50 km linear service area range and allows connectivity between users without a direct line of sight. This might be the opportunity to connect business or consumer housholds with shared data rates up to 70 Mbit/s, which, (enough bandwidth to simultaneously support more than 60 businesses with T1-type connectivity and well over a thousand homes at 1Mbit/s DSL-level connectivity!). While Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) wants to connect households and companies which are to expensive to connect with cable the incumbant's competition tries to get independant of DTAG infrastructure.