Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – December 6th, '03

[JackSpratts]

Quotes of the week: “Right now, we're in a battle where those with the most social and political power benefit at the expense of the rest of us. This means large corporations having free rein over information transfer where it benefits them, while they legally restrain its transfer where they sense a loss.” - Andy Oram, editor: Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies

"The hardest thing with my movies is getting people to see them…. [It's] not that people would want to steal them.” – Film producer Ted Hope.




Skype – The Voice Of File Sharers?

Could be. The press for Skype is generally positive but user reviews are sparse. However after seeing the AP piece and review while putting together this issue (below, along with another Skype article and an interview with company founder Niklas Zennstrom) I started wondering why I’m not using it, and immediately thought it could be the perfect thing for high bandwidth heavy users. Created by one of our very own P2P-Zone members it’s an ad free and spyware free giveaway. I haven’t given the beta a ring but they say it’s an easy set-up and an ease to operate. Interestingly, when it’s working the one big drawback is it’s biggest strength, especially for stealthy P2P’ers: it doesn’t connect to phone lines, it only calls other Skype users using decentralized peer-to-peer, and that means no having to hand out home phone numbers or other personal info bits. It also means all calls throughout the world are free.

I’m going to load it soon. Don’t know why I’ve been waiting so long. Probably because it doesn’t connect to telephones. But for WiR readers and keen peer-to-peer enthusiasts that may just make it the perfect comm tool.

Stealthy, global, decentralized, encrypted and free. Sounds perfect -

I’ll call you.

Seriously.











Enjoy,

Jack.









MP3.com Archive Is Destroyed Under New Owner C|net
Andrew Orlowski

Michael Robertson's attempts to save the million-song music archive of the company he founded, MP3.com, appear to have been unsuccessful. The MP3.com domain was bought by CNET, and Vivendi Universal had warned that the plug would be pulled.

"I had no luck in buying the content, paying for the content to be backed up or facilitating a relationship with Archive.org," Robertson told us today in email. Robertson had met with Vivendi, and as we reported, Archive.org's Brewster Kahle was only too happy to host the content.

The archive represents the work of 250,000 artists. Archive.org had ample bandwidth and storage to host the files, Kahle told us ten days ago.

Primetones, a Houston based music delivery company and Indie site Talentmatch.com had also offered to host the music.

"We're about to lose a museum filled with digital antiquities that are every bit as meaningful as their physical counterparts filling today's museums," Robertson had said.

CNET had yet to report on the destruction of the archive. We assume technical difficulties…
http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/34306.html


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Group Seeks Political Power For P2P
John Borland

A new nonprofit organization aimed at welding file-swapping and open-source computing advocates into a political force is launching online this week.

Dubbed "Click The Vote," an allusion to the successful Rock the Vote efforts focused at the MTV generation, the group hopes to make digital copyright and computing matters an issue in the 2004 election campaigns.

While not yet backing specific policies, the group's early statements include support for legalizing music sharing along with a mechanism for paying artists, and support of "open computing" as opposed to the "trusted computing" initiatives supported by Microsoft and others. These technology issues should be viewed as policy issues in a modern, digital world, the group says.

"Openness and free speech is what has made this democracy thrive," said organizer John Parres, a onetime advisor to Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz and co-founder of the influential Pho digital music e-mail discussion group. "We're concerned that things are going in the wrong direction, that we're heading towards closed computing, encrypting speech, and those things are not conducive to a thriving democracy."

The group hopes to tap into the momentum several online organizing efforts have gained this year, including the early stages of presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign, and the fundraising efforts of the political action committee MoveOn.

It's targeted at the technologically savvy audience of file swappers and open-source programmers--a demographic perhaps best represented by the extraordinarily active Slashdot technology news site community. That is a vocal group in online circles, but it has not yet been felt as a powerful political force.

This isn't the first attempt to turn the widespread dissatisfaction with digital copyright law--along with campaigns such as the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against file swappers--into political action.

In the declining days of the original Napster, the company beseeched its users to write their legislators and sing the virtues of file trading. The campaign did raise some awareness of the issue in Washington, D.C., but that did not save the company from crippling legal rulings and bankruptcy.

More recently, Kazaa parent Sharman Networks spent $1 million last month on a print advertisement campaign, touting its own organizing Web site.

Click The Vote is starting without corporate backers and will rely largely on donations for funding, Parres said. But the group is looking to focus on exerting influence through galvanizing voters rather than through political contributions.

"I think there is a pool of energy out there that we're going to harden and focus and bring to bear on these issues," Parres said. "What needs to happen to push this thing forward is for people to start communicating in a coherent voice with their legislators."
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5112886.html


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IP Justice Media Release

Jon Johansen Retrial Begins in Oslo Appeals Court

“DVD Jon” Publishes New iTunes Fair Use Computer Program

(Oslo) Norwegian Jon Johansen today faces the retrial of his acquittal for reverse-engineering DVD technology and creating DeCSS in 1999. DeCSS is computer software that Johansen and others wrote in an effort to build an independent DVD player for the Linux operating system. The publication of DeCSS onto the Internet spurred lawsuits against hundreds of web publishers living all over the world for its re- publication.

In January 2003, a three-judge panel in Oslo rejected charges brought by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) against Johansen for accessing his DVD movies using an independently created DVD player. OKOKRIM appealed the loss and Johansen’s retrial is scheduled to begin on December 2, 2003 in Oslo and end December 11, 2003. Since Johansen’s case is one of first impression, it is not unusual for the case to be retried on an appeal in Norway.

The court also rejected Hollywood’s claim that it has the right to control the way in which an individual views a DVD after purchase. “The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film,” the January 2003 ruling said.

The charges OKOKRIM filed against Johansen were brought under the Norwegian criminal code section 145.2, which outlaws bypassing technological restrictions to access data that one is not entitled to access. Johansen's prosecution is the first time that this law has been used to prosecute a person for accessing his own property. This data theft law has been used in the past only to prosecute those who illegally access another's bank or phone records or data that they have no lawful right to access. The penalty for violating this law is two years in prison. The Motion Picture Association filed the original complaint with OKOKRIM calling for Johansen’s prosecution in 2000, when he was 15-years old.

“If Johansen's acquittal is over-turned on appeal, it will become illegal for Norwegians to bypass DVD region code restrictions or technical restrictions that prevent fast-forwarding over advertisements, or otherwise circumvent digital controls on their own property,” said IP Justice Executive Director Robin Gross.

As a member of the European Economic Association, Norway is currently considering legislation to implement the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD), although the Norwegian draft would permit consumer circumvention for playback.

Johansen is represented on appeal by Oslo attorney Halvor Manshaus, who earned Johansen’s acquittal in January. “I am confident with regards to the final outcome of this case - the facts have not changed, and the legal principles stand even stronger as consumers understand the restrictive nature of the CSS license scheme,” said Manshaus. “Two expert judges from the commercial and the academic arenas have been called in to assist the court, all together consisting of seven judges,” added the attorney with Oslo firm Advokatfirmaet Schjødt AS.

In November 2003, Johansen published a new computer program called “QTFairUse” that allows consumers to make digital fair use of their Apple iTunes music collections by legally opening a music file and then saving it as an unrestricted file. QTFairUse is only foundational software since it leaves the music file in an unplayable format and needs additional software to actually play the music. But QTFairUse is published under an Open Source license enabling others to freely build upon it and incorporate the code into new applications and devices.
http://www.ipjustice.org/media_releases/120103jj.html


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RIAA Wins Round In File-Swapping Suit
John Borland

A San Francisco federal judge last week moved the venue for SBC Communications' lawsuit against the recording industry's file-swapping legal strategy, a potentially significant victory for record labels.

The decision, which was released late last Wednesday, transfers a closely watched legal battle over the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) dragnet for online music traders to courts in the nation's capital, where the industry group has already had success.

"We are pleased with the California court's decision to transfer the suit filed by SBC to the District of Columbia," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "Since the DC court has already addressed most of the challenges raised by SBC and resolved them in RIAA's favor, we believe that the decision to transfer the case throws a significant monkey wrench into SBC's case."

SBC sued the RIAA in California courts at the end of July. It contended that the record industry's subpoenas for information on subscribers to Internet service providers were unconstitutional. The RIAA has used the subpoenas it issued to most major Net service providers to identify file traders who allegedly shared copyrighted songs online and has sued more then 300 people for copyright infringement.

The telecommunications company's suit echoes a previous legal tussle between Verizon Communications and the RIAA. Like SBC, Verizon had claimed that the RIAA subpoenas were invalid, since they were not issued in the course of an ongoing lawsuit. In that suit, the Washington, D.C., federal court decided that the RIAA's subpoenas were legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

SBC says it is considering an appeal of Judge Susan Illston's ruling but noted that her decision did not affect the merits of their challenge.

"This ruling is procedural in nature and does not address the substantive issues we are raising about the recording industry’s continued misapplication of DMCA subpoena power," the company said in a statement. "SBC companies will continue to stand firm and continue our legal action in order to protect the privacy rights of our customers."

Illston also dismissed SBC's related claims against MediaSentry, a company that scans file-trading networks such as Kazaa for copyright violations and contacts ISPs on behalf of copyright owners, and Titan Media, an adult content provider that also sought identities of SBC Internet subscribers.

Illston said neither company actually had a subpoena-based legal conflict with SBC; its lawsuit against the companies was not warranted. MediaSentry had never issued a subpoena for the ISP's information, and Titan withdrew the only one it had sought, after SBC opposed it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5112408.html


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'Master' and 'Slave' Electronic Labels Raise Concern in L.A.

A county official has asked computer and video equipment vendors to consider eliminating the terms "master" and "slave" from equipment because they may be considered offensive.

"Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label," according to an e-mail sent to vendors on Nov. 18. The memo asks manufacturers, suppliers and contractors to change or remove any labels on components "that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature."

The county's 39 departments also were told to identify equipment with offensive labels.

"We got a note back from IBM saying thank you for bringing this to our attention and we'll take a look at this," said Joe Sandoval, who wrote the memo. Sandoval is division manager of purchasing and contract services for the county's Internal Services Department (search).

The term "master" and "slave" -- when applied to electronic equipment -- describes one device controlling another.

In May, a black employee of the Probation Department filed a discrimination complaint with the county Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after noticing the words on a videotape machine.

"This individual felt that it was offensive and inappropriate ... given the experiences that this country has gone through in respect to slavery," office director Dennis A. Tafoya (search) said.

The issue was solved by putting tape over the labels and replacing "master" and "slave" with "primary" and "secondary," Tafoya said.

Although Tafoya said his office did not find discrimination in the case, he added, "I think we constantly need to be conscious of these issues."

Sandoval said the county is making a suggestion, not trying to dictate political correctness.

"Knowing that it's an industry standard, there's no way that I'm going to stop buying that equipment," he said.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,104232,00.html


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Free Music

While legal downloads are selling well, Internet music merchants are not making money
Eugene Wee

FROM all accounts so far, the transition of downloaded music from free to fee has been a big hit.

Since Apple's iTunes Music Store was launched in April, it has sold well over 17 millions songs. Napster, formerly the music industry's worst enemy, sold more than 300,000 songs in its first week after relaunching as a paid service in October.

The numbers have even struck a chord with industry analysts, who are decidedly upbeat about the future of Internet music sales.

A Jupiter Research report released in July forecast that Internet music will grow from S$136 million, or 1 per cent of the total music market this year, to S$5.6 billion, or about 25 per cent in 2008.

But at least one man is singing a different tune.

Mr Michael Robertson, founder and former CEO of pioneer digital music site MP3.com, told The Sunday Times that companies which are following the beat of this new drum are likely to meet the same fate as the rats who followed the Pied Piper.

'Apple has announced that they cannot make money selling songs for US$0.99 (S$1.73). This means no matter how many songs they sell, they will not turn a profit,' said Mr Robertson, who is now CEO of Lindows.com, which distributes its own version of a Linux-based operating system.

Last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted during a financial analyst conference that his company makes no revenue from the iTunes Music Store, which is the current leader in digital music sales, as most of the money goes to the music companies which provide the music content.

'That is not a business success in my books. And it also is a signal that the music industry must change its pricing model,' said Mr Robertson.

His MP3.com, which was founded in 1997, was once the flag-bearer in the movement to turn the Internet into an avenue of music distribution for both signed and unsigned artists.

He sold it to music company Vivendi Universal for a whopping US$372 million (S$646 million) in 2001.

Some companies, such as Cnet Networks, seem to share Mr Robertson's pessimistic view about music's digital frontier.

The Internet media company has struck a deal to buy MP3.com from Vivendi Universal by the end of the year. But instead of continuing to distribute digital music, it will delete its entire catalogue of more than 750,000 songs and use the site's brand name to provide information about online music.

In Singapore, those who wish to buy digital music have to look to local sites such as PlanetMG ( www.planetmg.com ) and Soundbuzz ( www.soundbuzz.com ) because sites such as Napster 2.0 and iTunes do not serve customers outside the US due to music licensing restrictions.

One local industry insider told The Sunday Times that sales of digital music here have not been as hot as sales of CDs.

'Music downloads are not making money, but music companies have to try selling music online anyway,' said a content manager of a local digital music distribution website, who declined to be named.p> 'If they don't, those doing it illegally will have free reign.

'So I think at least some presence from the music labels must be felt online.'

The manager also revealed that because of this, local digital music websites have had to diversify, reaping most of their revenue from other services, such as ringtones for cell phones.

Still, others in the industry such as Ms Jami Yang, new technology manager of Asia's BMG Music, believe that there is a market of willing buyers for online digital music.

This despite the fact that this same music is often available for free, albeit illegally, from peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks such as Kazaa.

'With free file sharing or free downloads, you might spend a lot of time but end up with bad quality files or broken tracks that are not burnable, or even worse, infected with viruses,' said Ms Yang.

'With a legitimate online service, you can download high quality files in a secure environment.'

The CEO of Soundbuzz, Mr Sudhanshu Sarronwala, added that an easy-to-use service with compelling content and flexibility of use will clearly have a market, something that has been demonstrated by iTunes and Napster in the United States.

Paying for a good product is one thing. But Mr Robertson believes that this is not the case with the current breed of paid music sites.

That's because there are just too many restrictions that come with buying the product, he says.

For example, users of iTunes can only carry and listen to their paid-for music downloads using Apple's iPod player. Napster 2.0 users can't access the service using computers running on either the Linux or Macintosh operating systems.

Mr Robertson added that there are also many limitations on how users are allowed to duplicate the music they have bought, like burning them on to CDs.

On the other hand, if users get their music illegally from P2P networks, they have complete flexibility with the music they download.

'They can load it onto whatever computer they want, they can use any brand of portable player, they can make CDs anyway they wish,' said Mr Robertson.

'So you have a situation where people who pay money get less flexibility then people that do not. That's a reverse incentive. That needs to change.'
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/cli...222734,00.html


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Twilight of the PC Era?

Some commentators are proclaiming the end of the computer world’s glory days. But more chip power and connectivity might produce the biggest changes yet
Steven Levy

Nicholas Carr seems an unlikely candidate for the technology world’s Public Enemy No. 1. A mild-mannered 44-year-old magazine editor and freelance writer, he’s spent five years laboring for the Harvard Business Review, not exactly a hotbed of bomb-throwers. But now he finds himself branded a wild-eyed heretic and a threat to the underpinnings of the entire economy. His offense? Penning a 12-page article about the state of information-technology (IT) investment in the corporate world. Why has it jacked up the aggregate blood pressure in Armonk, N.Y., Silicon Valley, Calif., and Redmond, Wash.? Consider the title: “IT Doesn’t Matter.” DOESN’T MATTER? Tech consultants have been burned at the stake, even banned from the golf course, for less. Ever since 1979, when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented the electronic spreadsheet—and changed the way people in the business world worked—the unshakable wisdom in the corridors of commerce has been that nothing could possibly matter more than IT.
As personal computers landed on every desk, the Internet connected everything and an army of mobile devices made every shard of data accessible at any time, there seemed no reason to question the equation that a buck spent on technology would result in a bankroll soon thereafter. And with Moore’s Law (which propounds that every 18 months computer power doubles at no extra cost) still going strong, the reigning assumption is that such alchemy will only continue.
Carr begs to differ, claiming, in essence, that the innovations of the last couple of decades have succeeded too well—at least from the point of view of those peddling software. The very ubiquity of computer power makes it unremarkable, he says, and no longer offers a strategic advantage to companies employing it. The big innovations are over, the low-hanging fruit has been picked and “the IT buildout is much closer to its end than its beginning,” he writes. More and more, technology that once seemed unique has now been commoditized, and can be bargained for and bought in bulk like office furniture and paper clips. And in a suggestion that chills the soul of an industry based on first- movers and constant upgrades, he advises companies to spend less. “Follow, don’t lead,” he cautions.
When Carr’s article appeared in May, “it was greeted with horror here [in California],” says economist W. Brian Arthur. “It was like saying that Beethoven can’t play piano.” And the outrage continues. Shane Robison, chief strategist of HP, tells of a meeting with corporate information officers on its advisory board last month. “They were wrapped around the axle by that article,” he says. Peter Godfrey, the CTO of 3M, has a typical response: “It’s utter nonsense—so far from the truth that it’s laughable.”
During Microsoft’s analyst meeting last summer, Bill Gates was only the first of a parade of executives who, before PowerPointing their plans for an innovation-studded future, felt compelled to issue a Soviet-style repudiation of Carr-think. (“Hogwash!” cried CEO Steve Ballmer.) But Gates and the rest know that it isn’t just the word processor (on an iMac!) of a lone bespectacled observer that he has to worry about. Carr’s complaint is only one sign that a dangerous idea is afoot in the land, a philosophy of “good enough” when it comes to high tech. In a number of ways, the perpetual Saturday-night blowout in the tech world suddenly looks like Sunday Morning Coming Down. Here are some dispiriting signs:
Spending nose dives. The bleak economy has battered budgets everywhere, and tech buyers are getting by with less. In the post-bubble era, “there’s a ‘we won’t get fooled — again’ ” attitude, says Gary Beach, publisher of CIO magazine. A report by a Forrester researcher says the dismal spending trend isn’t supposed to improve through 2004. And the question that really terrifies tech vendors was asked by Bill Joy, then chief scientist at Sun, at last winter’s World Economic Forum in Davos: “What if the reality is that people have already bought most of the stuff they want to own?”
Trouble in PC-land. While consumers have found some reasons to buy new PCs, the corporate world has less incentive. “There’s never been such a gap between the IT world and the consumer,” says Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks. “In the corporate world, the bosses want to lock down the desktop so you can’t install or change anything. But at home the same users can hook up cameras and music devices, and find new uses for their PCs.” Meanwhile, PC makers are increasingly hedging their bets by selling more profitable electronics devices like TVs, cameras and digital jukeboxes.
High-tech dark side . No one disputes the benefits of technology. But people have learned that all too often tech comes with a downside. The biggest problem is security and disaster recovery, which that same Forrester report listed as the No. 1 priority for IT departments. It’s an expensive, labor-intensive pursuit that does nothing for productivity, but does keep the systems going. In fact, our reliance on virus- prone computers is itself a scary proposition: what would be the consequence of an Internet blackout? Another dark-side plague is spam. The time spent deleting all the come-ons makes you question the value of e-mail itself (see Soaking in Spam).
Is that all there is? We’ve had it drilled into us that we should love the increased productivity of high tech. But technology has enabled companies to eliminate jobs or smoothly outsource them to cheap labor in distant lands. And high-tech connectivity makes us available to our employers at any time of day, at any location. “For many people, the productivity is not apparent,” says Edward Tenner, author of “Why Things Bite Back.” “Despite technology, they’re not working shorter hours for more pay. They ask, ‘What does productivity mean for me ?’ Certainly there’s been no increase in self-reported happiness.”
But while the “end of the PC era” thinking seems to have hit a nerve (and launched a healthy re-examination of where we are in relation to our digital tools) there’s another, less dour way of looking at things. Every wave of innovation —the microchip, the PC explosion, the Internet boom—has built on those that came before. And every step of the way, technology touches more people, more deeply. Given that, it’s a little ridiculous to insist that the big breakthroughs are far from over—it’s actually easier for an act of genius to change everything. For example, a widespread penetration of the Internet, along with more powerful computers with lots of space on their disk drives, set the stage for 19-year-old college freshman Shawn Fanning to shock the world with his peer-to-peer file-sharing program, Napster. In turn, the unfettered party that followed help spread broadband even more widely, sold more computers, kick-started the digital music-player trade and, oh, almost shut down the entertainment industry. Putting piracy aside, the tech world is only beginning to exploit the legal uses of P2P—which in turn will create an environment for more innovations.
That’s why the more contemplative people inside the industry view this moment as an opportunity to take stock, but certainly not a fadeout for dizzying technological change. “I’ve been hearing about the end of innovation since the 386 chip [more than 20 years ago],” says Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief technology officer. “But we’re not about to go backwards.” Nick Donofrio, senior VP of IBM, concurs. “Our point of view is that we’ll see six magnitudes of improvement in the next 35 years,” he says.
Even Mitch Kapor, whose Open Source Applications Foundation is built on the premise that today’s high-priced software applications will one day be cheap or free, considers it absurd to imagine the end of big innovations. “Is our software so great now that it can’t be radically improved?” he asks.
What are the emerging innovations? Some of them don’t really sound earth shattering, but they get CIOs excited: Web services that promise to speed the information flow through a company and eliminate delays in the supply chain. (We’ll leave the details to CIO magazine.)
One new technology promises to send shock waves through corporate America and eventually alter the lives of consumers: radio-frequency identification, or RFID. The ability to put very cheap sensors on products and track them from manufacture to the consumer—and eventually tag all items so people can keep track of their stuff— will cause a lot of changes. (Privacy advocates are already concerned about the ability of snoopers to look inside your shopping bags.) Wal-Mart, a company that’s grown to monster size by embracing technology, is demanding that its suppliers adopt RFID. Developments like these confound Carr’s “Follow, don’t lead” advice. As Microsoft VP Jeff Raikes says, “Who would you rather be—Wal-Mart or Sears?”
Another compelling development is search technology —the success of Google shows that a business can be built on the ability to instantly locate information. As more and more data are warehoused in cheap storage devices, software to mine them will change not only the way businesses work, but the way we learn, archive and remember.
Microsoft itself has, as you might imagine, its own master plan to keep the good times rolling. This month Bill Gates and his top tech gurus will present a new “core vision” for the company based on what he calls “seamless computing”—a holistic means of using technology that delivers “rich interfaces and new experiences” no matter where you are and what device you use. “It’s all about the power of using advanced software to bring computers into your world, rather than forcing you into theirs,” says Gates. The flagship for the seamless-computing effort is the next operating system, code-named Longhorn, due to arrive in 2006.
Carr and other proponents of the twilight era have performed a service in puncturing some of the starry-eyed and self-serving cant of industry insiders. But the smart people who buy technology know that sooner or later, something will come along that compels them to bust their budget. Chances are that at this very moment there’s some unknown geek making a breakthrough that corporations everywhere will have to understand and utilize—or else choke in the dust of discarded motherboards. And then we’ll know, beyond a doubt, how much IT matters.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/999353.asp?cp1=1


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The Music Industry, Dinosaur soon to be extinct?
Sander Sassen

The music industry as we know it is slowly fading into oblivion, although the big execs with all of the major record labels are trying hard to prevent this from happening, there’s not much they can do to stop it. Sure, the music industry is frantically lashing out at users of peer-to-peer networks and blames them for their decline in profits. Others however say that the slump in their sales are caused by the weak economy, the lack of truly new and innovative material and the fact that singles seems to have disappeared completely, forcing the customer to buy the whole album. But let’s not forget about competition from things like DVDs and video games too as people obviously have a much broader selection to choose from for roughly the same amount of money.

The problem with the music industry is that it sees the sharing of MP3s as the root of the problem. They often use the point of the increased volume of MP3's being traded as evidence of customer demand, a demand that was supposed to be filled by these people legitimately buying records. But really, all that that point proves is that people are always looking for the best deal; because if it’s free and easy to get a hold of they’d rather go with MP3s instead, rather than pay a price premium for an album of which they only like two songs. I think a far better way to judge demand and how people like to listen to their music is by looking at the sales of playback devices, just look at any electronics store nowadays and you’ll see what I’m referring to.

Remember the last time you saw a stereo department in one of these stores? They have just about disappeared to be replaced with a big screen TV and a whole range of different home theatre setups. Furthermore, many stores now carry a broader selection of TVs and multi-channel speaker systems than they ever carried CD players or stereo sets. And when was the last time you heard somebody ask about a high-end CD player with 20bit DACs and 256x oversampling, these things are now taken for granted and people have moved on to DVD players that are perfectly capable of playing back their old CDs. DVD-audio and Super-Audio is claimed to revitalize the sales of these devices, but I doubt that, as the content featured on these DVDs/CDs in not innovative enough to justify a significant investment in the playback device. And to be honest, it is only a matter of time before generic DVD players also enable playback of these formats, we've seen the same thing happen with MP3 and SVCD playback.

Even car-audio is changing, while a CD player was a luxury upgrade over a tape-deck a few years ago, today TV sets and DVD players are becoming standard options on more vehicles every day. Thus I think it's pretty obvious that people have moved on to a more visual experience, whenever they’re in their homes or on the road. Most of the equipment being sold for listening to music is for mobile use and otherwise the home theatre has pretty much replaced the stereo-set. So the trend seems to be that people listen to music on the go, for that purpose they’re not going to carry around a bag full of CD’s if a 256MB MP3 device will carry the same amount of music in a much smaller size. So I think it is pretty obvious that with this increased mobile use of music, portable music formats have become very popular. With copy protection schemes popping up left and right things will only start to look worse in terms of sales as people are not able to use them in any other than their original form, thus severely limiting people in the choice how and where to listen to their music. This is also why protection schemes will fail in the end, partly because they’ll be circumvented but mostly because people will move on to better things if they can’t transfer their music to their format of choice.

The only workable solution I see, and I already mentioned that in a previous column about this subject, is some form of subscription service that allows for paid music downloads in a variety of different formats. It also has to be affordable; you can’t charge the same amount of money for a song you download off the internet as you would charge for the single. And if you want to tap into the budgets that are left over after people spent most of their money on DVDs and video games, it has to be relatively inexpensive. The other requirement is that there has to be a very broad range of titles available, not just the golden oldies, but also the latest top-100 songs. This is simply to give the consumer a choice; download the music off of some peer-to-peer network and possibly get a file of lesser quality, or pay a small fee and get it straight from the source. If the selection is broad enough and the prices are affordable, or rather, cheap, people will at some point prefer official downloads over shady peer-to-peer networks, just because it is less hassle and the quality is better. I think it is time for the music industry to drop their current business model and move on to greener pastures which this approach would offer, they’re fighting a losing battle here and if they want to stay afloat they’d better adapt to what the consumer wants or be doomed to fade into oblivion. The very same music downloads that they're vigorously fighting today could very well be what prevents them from going out of business tomorrow.
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1568/


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Telco Market To Pick Up
Tom Pullar-Strecker

Australian telco analyst Paul Budde predicts growth in the New Zealand telecommunications services market will accelerate to 6.7 per cent in 2004 after the market grew a modest 2.5 per cent this year.

He says the total value of the New Zealand telco market will top $6 billion next year, helped by a 10 per cent rise in data revenues to $900 million.

The mobile market will be worth $1.5 billion in 2004, he says, with Vodafone "further increasing its market share at the expense of Telecom". The economics of broadband in New Zealand is affected by the fact 90 per cent of content is hosted offshore, he says.

About 40 per cent of data is accounted for by peer-to-peer traffic – mostly MP3 music files, software and pornography.

The value of broadband is still not clear to a lot of consumers, he says.

Telecom knows what heavy residential users of the Net want, he says. "The challenge is providing what they want for the amount they are prepared to pay for it."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2743530a28,00.html


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He’s Still Having Fun
Bill Gates, for one, thinks that the digital era is far from fading. In fact, he thinks it’s only now getting interesting
Steven Levy

LEVY: What’s Microsoft’s next big push?

GATES: There’s a lot of breakthroughs we see coming in software to solve some of the boundary problems we think exist today: the boundary between you and your machine... in terms of how you use speech, do you use ink, does the machine remember how you like to do things, the boundary between the different devices. There’s never been a software company spending $6.9 billion a year tackling these problems. And so either [the critics] are right and those breakthroughs won’t take place and I’ll have to tell shareholders I’m sorry. Or they will in large part take place, in which case it’s a big win for people using this stuff and a great thing that Microsoft is willing to take the risk to drive it forward.

Your next big product is the new Windows operating system code-named Longhorn. Why are you saying that it’s a bigger step than anything in the last 10 years?

Well, the system today is in some ways quite fragmented. The way that you deal with your files is different than the way you deal with your e-mail, which is different than the way you deal with your address book, and you have to be pretty smart to understand how you navigate each of those, how you move them around between different machines or devices. And so [we’re] getting rid of a lot of the specialized systems that have grown up on the PC that make it just a lot harder to work with. And then we’re saying, hey, the photos will be there, so the way that you navigate photos and the way you navigate music will all be very rich and very common. That is the new storage system code-named Win FS, Windows File System. And that is probably the most ambitious, the most shocking advance that we’ve got in the system. You can find your stuff, search your stuff, share your stuff, and once people have gotten used to that they won’t want to go back to the fragmented, fairly simple world that they have right now. We [also] have a lot of things about real-time collaboration, peer to peer, the graphics richness of the system, the fundamentals of knowing when you install a piece of software it won’t mess anything else up. But I’d say Win FS is probably the biggest advance.

Microsoft recently announced a bigger dividend. You personally, as a big shareholder, get a big chunk of that, and now a change in tax law means your taxes on that will be lower. I’m curious how you feel about the government’s giving you that break.

I don’t consider myself an expert on tax policy. I certainly wasn’t lobbying for taxes to be changed up or down. I pay a lot of taxes every year. I pay enough that the numbers don’t fit on the normal IRS computer system, but I’m glad to do it.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/999480.asp


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Interest Renewed In Internet Micropayments
AP

An idea that seemingly evaporated along with dot-com mania is back: that the Internet would realize its full grass-roots potential if Web surfers could pay small amounts for tidbits of online content.

Several companies are again betting they can mine gold from ferrying around such "micropayments." Even credit card giant Visa USA is exploring the prospect.

Boosters believe people could sell countless new creations on the Internet -- from essays to advice -- if only mechanisms existed to facilitate small payments. For authors of popular content, all those pennies would add up.

The problem, as things currently stand: transaction costs make most credit card sales under $1 all but pointless.

By giving independent content providers an efficient way to collect money, micropayments could widen the Web's pool of things to see, hear and do, keeping the Internet from being dominated by media giants and other brand-name companies.

"We like to characterize ourselves as e-commerce for the rest of us," says Kurt Huang, co-founder of BitPass Inc., which carries small payments to 100 Web sites and plans to emerge from "beta" test mode in December. "What we're trying to do is enable diversity."

Micropayment handlers know they're treading over the skeletons of 1990s companies -- the likes of Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash and DigiCash -- that tried and failed to create virtual currencies. Back then, some hoped Internet currencies would evolve to eventually be spent as anonymously as pocket change.

Today's micropayment advocates say earlier attempts failed not just because they were cumbersome and lacked sufficient government and financial industry support. People preferred what was familiar, namely credit cards.

As well, bountiful advertising money and venture capital inflated the Web with so much free content in the late 1990s that there wasn't much point in charging 25 cents to view a comic strip.

With free stuff now fading, much more online material is available only by subscription.

"Times have definitely changed," said Ron Rivest, a prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology encryption researcher who co-founded micropayment provider Peppercoin Inc. in 2001. "I think the market is ready."

There also are far more broadband Internet connections today, meaning more people might be interested in buying bandwidth-intensive digital content a la carte. Witness the quick popularity of new online music services like Apple's iTunes, which charges 99 cents per song.

Those sites aren't using any special micropayment formula -- users often buy more than one song and establish prepaid accounts with a credit card.

But if competition pushes prices lower, and more individual artists want to sell tracks at their own Web sites, micropayment providers say they would be ideal helpers because they can track royalties and handle customer service.

"We're finding that music is just the tip of the iceberg," said Steve Elefant, president of Yaga Inc., which handles micropayments and larger transactions, including the $2.50 payments that Tribune Co. and Time.com charge for articles in their archives.

Eyeing such possibilities, Visa recently began exploring whether it ought to facilitate micropayments, too.

"While this segment is still small, we want to keep our eye on it," spokeswoman Randa Ghnaim said.

Micropayment carriers are using different technologies to collect, transfer and authenticate payments.

PaymentOne Corp., for example, lets consumers make several small purchases online and pay for them on their local phone bills. Some cell phones in Asia have software that turns the handsets into virtual wallets for vending machines and other small but cashless purchases.

BitPass and Peppercoin invite Web surfers to set up an account with as little as $3, which is charged to a credit card or PayPal, the popular Internet money-exchange service. A user's online micropayments are deducted from that larger amount, without the hassle of entering credit card information each time.

Here's the advantage for content providers: If you wanted to sell a poem for 20 cents, you wouldn't accept Visa or MasterCard, because the fees involved would drain most, if not all, of your 20 cents. Similarly, PayPal takes 2.9 percent of a sale plus 30 cents, so selling your 20-cent poem would be a dream deferred.

But with a micropayment carrier, you could expect to give up 15 percent. Your 20-cent poem would bring in a healthy 17 cents. And micropayment providers can make life easier by paying you $17 for every 100 poems, instead of 17 cents after each sale.

The trick for micropayment companies is to convince Web surfers that there's so much good online content available for nickels and dimes that it's worthwhile to bother stocking a prepaid account with a few bucks.

But some critics believe that will never happen en masse because of fundamental economic psychology: Few people are willing to spend time deciding whether to buy things individually, like newspaper articles, for pennies. That is why subscription models that bundle a huge amount of content are attractive.

Such doubts have kept PayPal from breaking into micropayments.

PayPal would figure to be a micropayment gorilla if it altered its fee structure for cheap items. With 35 million users, PayPal is the dominant peer-to-peer means of sending money online, especially at the auction site run by its parent company, eBay Inc.

"The problem with micropayments, is, they're micro," said Todd Pearson, PayPal's managing director for merchant services. "Nobody's going to make a lot of money off these things."

A different kind of skepticism rules at RedPaper.com, which should be a micropayment carrier's dream. Sort of like an eBay for the written word, RedPaper launched in July and has 26,000 members who buy and sell prose, poetry and essays that each cost less than $1.

Members have to put at least $3 in an RedPaper account that gets docked or credited when they buy or sell material on the site. RedPaper takes 5.25 percent from sellers.

RedPaper set up its micropayment engine all by itself. Founder Mike Gaynor said it took only about a week's labor by one programmer.

"Micropayment technology in and of itself is about as interesting as new and improved dish soap," Gaynor said. "Anyone who has content worth purchasing is not going to give a chunk of their revenue to somebody like BitPass if they could build the technology themselves."
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...siness/2260839


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Music Industry: Stop Shirking

Don't say theft when you mean rational avoidance of moral hazard.
Umair Haque

Every major label is drooling over the money-making prospects of having its own iTunes or Musicmatch. But they are all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, "born to lose, and destined to fail." Why? The music industry's problem is fundamental: the implicit contract between music companies and listeners is no longer viable.

The music industry fails to understand that a primary reason that consumers illegally share music files is that they want insurance against the music industry itself. File sharing is as much about risk sharing as it is about the theft of value. Technology makes file swapping possible - but the music industry's business model, which is at odds with the implicit contract it signs with listeners, is what makes it probable.

The contract between record labels and music listeners follows basic economics: The labels assume market risk in exchange for value. They take on the risk of talent search, artist development, and distribution costs, in exchange for profits.

Alternatively, we can say that labels are agents hired by music listeners, or principals, to perform a function they do not have the time to do: find interesting and entertaining musical artists. In every such transaction, there are always additional costs incurred. Economists call these costs agency costs.

The problem with such a simple contract is that it creates massive information asymmetries. There is no monitoring mechanism, so listeners cannot tell what the labels are doing; conversely, labels cannot really tell what listeners' preferences are. Even worse, listeners cannot influence labels unless they can coordinate amongst themselves.

Furthermore, the labels' biggest buyers - the big music and electronics retailers - have forced them to standardize prices. In most markets, prices convey meaningful information about value and risk. This point is intuitive: think of the price of blue-chip stock, for example. But because every CD costs roughly the same, prices do not serve their usual function of providing an informational feedback loop between labels and listeners.

So what if, under such a contract, the interests of the record labels (the agent) diverge from the interests of the listeners (the principal)? What if, for business reasons, the labels are more interested in their own economies of scale and brand identity than providing listeners with music they value?

In an extreme case, the labels might begin to impose costs beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interesting in paying just to feed the bottom line. That is exactly what the recording industry did well before file sharing existed. The result? Alienated and disgruntled customers.

With the rise of peer-to-peer services, consumers found it more efficient to take on their own search costs and avoid the inefficient middleman, the record company. Many people were more happy to spend time searching for new music on the Net and compiling their own collections - a service previously performed by recording companies - than they were simply buying the goods the industry selected and promoted by the record labels.

Economists have a name for this problem: moral hazard. Moral hazard happens when the actions of agents can be hidden from principals, creating "agency costs" because agents are able to shirk and not deliver on their end of the bargain. In this case, the moral hazard is the shirking behavior of the record industry. It chooses artists and music collections not based on listeners' preferences, but based on production, marketing, and distribution efficiencies - adding massive agency costs and no longer offering the search value it is supposed to provide. The problem is compounded because music is an experience good - its value is not directly knowable to buyers until they have begun to consume it.

The way to change the incentives implicit in this contract is straightforward: Just add insurance. Insuring a contract can help offset moral hazard because principals have to compensate agents if they do not deliver on their end of the bargain - so it is in their best interest not to shirk in the first place. In this case, insurance means that consumers do not have to pay the costs charged by the music industry for selecting acts or music cuts that no one wants to hear. This creates an incentive for the recording industry to choose or compile the things that listeners really value.

But doing so creates a double moral hazard. Listeners might take advantage of the insurance, and renege on buying music altogether, as is often the case with users of Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus. If the industry offered consumers the ability to simply return any music they did not like, consumers might return all of their music - even the music they did like - after having copied or consumed it. It would be as though restaurants offered money back guarantees you could exercise after having eaten your entire meal and you claimed you were dissatisfied.

But this has been exactly the impact of the Net. By opportunistically grabbing free music, listeners operate under their own moral hazard, because now the record companies' lack of information about how people are using their music online means that listeners can shirk on their end of the bargain. So the Net offers a major opportunity to renege on buying music goods that are produced under moral hazard, and completely eliminate the risk listeners ordinarily would take by, say, buying CDs they cannot sample ahead of time. That's why the real problem is that the Net offers listeners insurance against the music industry itself. File sharing is not simply theft. Rather, file sharing is risk sharing.

In fact, we could go even further - saying that file sharing is a way for principals to modify the bad behavior of agents who are operating under extreme moral hazard by withholding the ultimate economic reward: cold, hard cash.

Is there a way out of this mess? Can the record industry offer it's own insurance, so listeners do not have to file share? Can it do so without creating a double moral hazard? Yes - by shifting to a more sophisticated contract.

One way is to offer listeners a contingent contract with a payment scheme dependent on the provider meeting a certain set of conditions. You sell a contingent contract every time you order from Domino's: if it's not there in 30 minutes, your pizza is free. The music industry might offer rebates or free music when quality indicators, such as when sales of a label's top artist's latest album is less than expected.

Another way is to offer what are termed "multilateral contracts", which in this case might mean that labels would offer downloads from a given artist at a discount - but only if enough people offer to buy the good. Schemes like this make private information and expectations public, allowing people to pool and share their risk.

Such contracts let consumers hedge the risk they take entering into contracts under conditions of extreme moral hazard. Right now, consumers only have one viable way to eliminate the moral hazard - by parceling it out, and sharing it with other listeners, via file sharing.

However the industry decides to help listeners hedge risk, it is important to note that the mechanism used should make strategic sense, rather than just rely on price competition, which is what might happen under iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster 2.0, or Musicmatch schemes. Such a system might, for example, reimburse listeners for a certain amount of music that they find unsatisfactory with cash, free music, or music vouchers. Alternatively, it might let listeners exchange a fixed number of tracks for tracks from a list of similar music, providing consumers limited insurance within a genre. The additional value created by such features takes the competitive focus away from price competition, because such features can be traded for dollars - and listener loyalty.

Umair Haque is a London-based entrepreneur. He has worked for the World Bank and was previously chief science editor for the Friday Times, one of South Asia's largest independent newspapers.
http://www.herring.com/ForumPage_111903-04.aspx


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Broadband Availability Pushes Piracy Into Hyperdrive
Johor Bahru,

Malaysia - A handwritten sign at the entrance to a tiny shop in southern Malaysia's busiest city sums up the music industry's colossal problems in Asia.

"1 CD for 7 ringgit," it beams in bright blue ink. This sum is equivalent to US$1.80.

As two policemen direct traffic just yards away, the shop's teenage manager brags of even better bargains, running a hand along makeshift shelves lined with hundreds of compilations -- from pop princess Britney Spears to Taiwanese idol Jay Chou.

It is just one of a dozen shops brazenly selling knockoff pop music CDs and DVD bootlegs of Hollywood films in a single neighborhood in Johor Bahru, only a few minutes' drive from Singapore -- and one of thousands scattered across Asia.

But as Washington presses Asia to curb the sophisticated piracy syndicates equipped with CD-burning technologies and stacks of blank discs that supply the shops, a bigger battle is brewing online against Web pirates in the fast-growing region.

The rollout of high-speed broadband Internet in India, China and Indonesia, three of the world's most populated countries, could expand the number of people downloading free music off the Web by millions a month.

To fight back, labels are releasing more hits to fee-based online music services in Asia, accelerating growth in an embryonic industry now dominated by just two companies -- Soundbuzz.Com and Sony Corp's Planet MG.

"The digital music medium is coming of age in Asia," said Sudhanshu Sarronwala, 38-year-old chief of Singapore-based Soundbuzz and former managing director of MTV Networks Asia.

Four-year-old Soundbuzz has licensing agreements with 65 record labels in the region and operates in 12 Asian markets in eight languages -- from Chinese and Korean and Japanese to the Bahasa languages of Indonesia and Malaysia.

Its clients include Web portals run by Microsoft Corp's MSN and Yahoo Inc. "We build the storefront look and feel for the client," said Sarronwala.

Asia was once prized by record labels including Time Warner Inc's Warner Music Group, EMI Group Plc, Universal Music and Bertelsmann unit BMG for its potential for growth as US and European markets mature.

Instead, recorded music sales in Asia are sliding faster than in the US and Europe, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) says.

Asian music sales slid 13 percent in the first half of the year to US$2.59 billion, a fifth of the world's total, outpacing a fall of 10.9 percent globally. South Korea's fall of 23.1 percent was the worst, followed by Taiwan's 21 percent and Japan's 13.5 percent -- Asia's three biggest music markets.

In Taiwan, which accounts for 80 percent of Mandarin language music sales worldwide, around half of all music sold in the past two years was pirated, while nine of every 10 recordings in China are fakes.

Analysts say growth in legal music download sites in Asia's vast, upwardly mobile markets, in tandem with broadband Internet, could help stabilise the world music industry.

But whether paying sites take off depends on how quickly so-called peer-to-peer networks such as Grokster and KaZaa -- where surfers can download an entire 10-track album in 15 minutes -- are shut, said Simon Dyson, senior analyst at Informa Media.

"If they don't get that control, and broadband increases, then you can see music sales going right down," said Dyson.

Much depends, he says, on whether record labels win their appeal of a potentially precedent-setting April decision by a US federal judge who ruled Grokster and other file-swapping networks were not liable for what their downloaders are doing.

"The opinion is that they will probably win that. If they do win that, then obviously they can start encroaching on file sharing networks," he said.

Music copyright lawsuits are also flaring around Asia. Taiwan's music industry has taken legal action against two Taiwanese sites -- www.kuro.com.tw, which has about 500,000 subscribers, and www.ezpeer.com with 300,000 members.

South Korean free music site www.soribada.com, which counts 6 million members and gets about 1.5 million hits a day, is also being sued. A court told Soribada to shut its server in February but it switched to new servers and is open.

"Record companies all over the world are struggling with this," said Terence Phung, managing director of Sony Music Entertainment Singapore Pte Ltd. "It is hurting all of us. There is no solution available to stop this. It is a huge problem."

Although copyright infringement is a crime in Singapore, a 2001 government survey showed 500,000 of its four million people used the Web to download music. Internet service providers are sending letters to downloaders of pirated music on behalf of the recording industry but they do not initiate legal action.

"We encourage our customers to feed back to us on these allegations by the copyright owners. We will then advise the copyright owners accordingly," said Mervin Wang, a spokesman at Pacific Internet Ltd, a Singapore Web service provider.

Sarronwala says the opening of Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store this year was a turning point, spurring labels into releasing quality music online. Though he doubts piracy will vanish he reckons legal online music can thrive alongside it.

As sales fall across the industry, Soundbuzz went profitable on a quarterly basis this year after growing revenues for the past four years, said Sarronwala.

Swee Wong, senior vice president at BMG International based in Sydney, said the appetite for legal music downloads in South Korea and Taiwan was growing.

"They are ahead of the game," he said. "But it's not happening as fast as I would like.

"China remains the wild west," he adds. But even if just 10 percent of China's sales are legitimate, that is still a huge market, he said. "The potential market in one city could be as big as or bigger than Hong Kong or Singapore."
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/.../30/2003077860


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Chatterbox.

Canada & Finland Agree


To all startrek enterprise fans

Don't know but the new music that accomp st enterprise this year suck bad!

any thought?

- miss_silver
__________________



Sucks real bad.

- tg

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=18046

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What they’re saying:

IT Business Tips -

Building IT Alliances

To derive maximum benefit and lasting competitive advantages from collaboration, content managers must seamlessly make information and service exchanges between companies. This not only leads to investing in relationships, between the client and your business but creates added value and service -raising imposing competitive barriers and creating a win-win opportunity. The business process that takes place within these communities and extends beyond company boundaries is referred to as collaborative business alliances. Collaborative business enables enterprises to make the most of up-to-date content and related services for their clients and therefore leveraging the Internet to the fullest. Alliances are also an often faster and less capital-intensive way to gain access to products, customers, and business capabilities than building them or researching this information from scratch. P2P (peer to peer content sharing) is only one example of how to apply this alliance development concept. When a client or end-user accesses your site for content, they would see the linking of other related articles and content from other sites as an added service of your site, if made available. This client will, after making great use of your service, refer you site and articles to his network of associates. Thus raising the profile and viability of your site and making it more attractive to your sponsors.“By using the Internet to bundle products with related information and services, creative companies can improve their effectiveness and efficiency of their clients’ businesses. By doing so, they will be able to forge strong, long-lasting client relationships that will de-emphasize product price and exchange- based transactions.” Harvard Business Review, Beyond the Exchange, November-December 2000 Collaborative alliances not only enrich business- to-business relationships by boosting site stickiness, facilitating transactions, optimising communication channels, disseminating information, but effectively connect information and services to the end user through effective market dynamics. Here are several reasons why you should consider building alliances into your business and Internet site:

· Alliances extend your range of content and services.
· Alliances elicit and collaborate with information and services which would not be accessible and remain untapped.
· Alliances create opportunities for people to network, communicate, mentor, and capture, formalize, and diffuse tacit knowledge.
· Alliances build boundaryless communities for information dissemination and increase a company’s overall competitive advantage.

Indeed, the question isn’t whether building alliances will add value to a company and their site but rather what kind of content, products and services are suitable and what steps does the company need to take to acquire these. Clearly defining roles and relationships is essential for successful collaborative alliances. Once these are defined - the Internet, and in particular the ProActive platform, can utilise a variety of protocols to support this relationship such as events calendars, I-Framing and linking, surveys and polls, emails, send this article to a friend, just to mention a few. In the next few years, collaborative alliances will support more complex relationships to ensure that its customers and trading partners can all work together in a profitable relationship network, securely sharing structured and unstructured information. And the underlying key to all of this is to drive everything from a customer perspective. Start from the very top of the business. Check your ego at the door; act like you work for your customers and partners, not vice versa. Dare to share vital business information with partners and customers. Work through inevitable security issues and occasional missteps. While you're learning, however, be smart about the risks you do take. Remember, it's still about people. At the core of successful relationships, networked or otherwise, are real people of flesh, blood and emotions whose main question is: "What's in it for me?" Better have an answer ready. In the collaborative future, customers will reap rewards by receiving the products, services and interaction experiences that they want at an affordable cost. Partners -- true value-added intermediaries -- will earn the loyalty of both customers and suppliers. And the enterprise will gain the sustainable competitive edge it needs to win in the Customer Age.
http://www.inbusiness.com.au/articles.php3?rc=87


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RIAA Actions Spawn New Product Designed to Help Parents and Others Avoid Lawsuits

ShareControl Application Helps Users Comply With RIAA and MusicUnited Guidelines
Press Release

Starting today, Music-Amnesty.com is providing parents, grandparents, schools and businesses with a simple way to check for the top 10 Music File Sharing programs known as "Peer-to-Peer" or "P2P" products. The software ships under the name "ShareControl" and is available for under $20.00.

In addition to looking for and reporting the presence of the most popular P2P products, ShareControl checks for the presence of music files known as "MP3" files and allows the user to delete them as well. "I think most people want to comply with the RIAA ruling but just don't know enough about their computers. This application focuses on P2P software, sharing attributes and MP3 files -- the same things the RIAA is also concerned about when they file lawsuits," says Mark Andrews, co-founder of Music-Amnesty.com. "The key advantage we give users is the ability to police themselves. Users decide if they want to delete these programs, turn sharing on or off, delete or keep music files -- we don't impose our values. People are capable of deleting, installing or adjusting settings -- our software just validates or verifies their choices. If a parent deletes or turns off sharing for a program and then someone else in the household installs a different program or changes these settings, there is now a quick and easy way to check for this."

Highlighted Links

MusicAmnesty Website

"Our research shows that when parents delete one Peer-to-Peer product, their sons or daughters often download another product and start downloading music again. Parents need to know if these products are on their computers and what their potential liability is," says Mr. Andrews. With over 750 subpoenas per day, there is good reason to worry -- each song illegally download or uploaded can result in a fine of $750 to $1,250. "Most people don't realize that there are over sixty different file sharing programs available on the internet today. Even parents who know about Kazaa or Morpheus may not know about DICE, iMesh, Grokster or BearShare," says Roy Feague, co-founder of Music- Amnesty.com. "Any one of these programs can create significant financial liability. ShareControl can identify all of the most popular programs, so parents can make informed decisions and have peace of mind knowing that they are fully compliant with the law."

ShareControl™ is available for download for $19.95 from Music-Amnesty.com. For more information, including a full list of all the software supported by Music-Amnesty.com, visit their web site at www.music-amnesty.com.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=60599


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Koala Acquires P2P Software

Koala International Wireless, Inc. (OTCBB:KIWI), a developer and integrator of web-based, wireless network applications and wireless device technology, announced today it has acquired 100 percent of a proprietary peer-to-peer software developed by Dylan Morris Software ("DMS") of Los Angeles California on a performance and milestone payment formula totaling 1,000,000 common shares of KIWI stock. Dylan Morris will commence formal employment as Senior Vice President, Software and Process Design with KIWI focusing primarily on completion of a proprietary peer-to-peer Internet, Wireless and Cellular based transport method for voice and data referred to in KIWI's business Plan as KIWI Internet Protocol -- Peer-to-Peer Communications ("KIP-PPC").
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=44334


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Interview

Skype's VoIP Ambitions
Declan McCullagh

Niklas Zennstrom may be Sweden's most famous serial entrepreneur. The 37-year-old Stockholm resident co-authored the legendary software used in the Kazaa file-sharing network. After he and his partners sold the rights to Kazaa last year, Zennstrom turned his attention to Joltid, which sells a caching technology to help network providers deal with the growing amount of peer-to-peer traffic.

Now Zennstrom and Kazaa co-creator Janus Friis have launched their most ambitious effort so far: Skype, a start-up that hopes to convince people to use voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology instead of the traditional phone system.

CNET News.com recently spoke to Zennstrom, Skype's chief executive, in Stockholm about VoIP, privacy, security, and the lessons he's learned from his other start-ups.

Q: What's different about Skype? Lots of instant-messaging clients already offer voice communications.
A: We don't see them as competitors. We see our competitors as being Deutsche Telecom, British Telecom, AT&T and Verizon. We think there's going to be a migration from circuit-switched telephony services to Internet telephony.

This is a second kind of driver for broadband. P2P file sharing has been driving broadband adoption. I've been meeting a lot of Internet operators in Europe and they say users aren't getting broadband to check their e-mail. Broadband penetration in Europe is around 10 percent to 12 percent. The U.K. is only around 4 percent. It has a long way to go to reach dial-up. One way to do that is to make it more useful.

Are you hoping to sign distribution deals with Internet providers?
Absolutely. We're speaking to a few broadband operators right now. They're quite interested in offering Skype to their users.

Will Skype continue to be free?
Now it's free--it's free in the beta phase. When we launch it'll continue to be free. We think it's very, very important that people can use it for free and for the momentum to grow. We want people to spread it around. We have to be very good in up-selling users to premium services like voice mail and conference calling. That's what people are asking for.

One of the great things about P2P for this product is that we don't have any incremental cost for a new user. There's no marketing because we don't run marketing campaigns. It's being spread virally by users. We don't have any operational costs because they make calls peer-to-peer. It doesn't cost us any more.

You permit mirror sites?
Yes. We're encouraging people to spread this to each other. Then we have an established base of users. If we can encourage a few percent of people to get premium services, that's an advantage to us.

What we're saying is that telephony is just an application. You can use this software application that does all the call setup and routing, which traditionally has been done by big company switches. Telephony is software. It's not big software in a centralized system. It's software that people run on their laptops at home.

What we're saying is that telephony is just an application.
How do you keep track of who's logged in and able to receive voice calls?
We have a distributed database on the P2P network that keeps track of your IP address, firewall condition, and so on. We've taken (Kazaa's) FastTrack concept of supernodes and taken it one step further.

Are there any privacy implications to this public database approach?
There would be a privacy consideration if you and I are talking to each other and it's being proxied through John. That's why calls are being end-to-end encrypted.

I can check my e-mail from anywhere in the world and senders don't know where I am. I can answer my cell phone from any GSM country and callers don't know where I am. But when I connect to Skype to receive phone calls, my IP address becomes public, which tends to reveal details about my physical location.
The way for me to find your IP address would be when I set up a phone call to you, I see your IP address if it's a direct connection. If you're using a proxy server, I won't.

Let's say I'm trying to track someone--in a divorce case, I want to prove that a spouse is in Stockholm when he or she is supposed to be in New York City. If I monitor the public Skype database over time, I can roughly follow their movements secretly.
It's not an "anonymized" system. For some people it could be labeled as a privacy issue. That has never been any design goal.

Your advice for divorcees?
I would recommend that you set up all your Internet connections through a proxy server.

How many downloads have you had?
We've had 1.6 million downloads. That's not 1.6 million people. I think there are around 900,000 registered users.

People are downloading multiple versions?
This is the same ratio that you see at Download.com (Download.com is owned by CNET Networks, publisher of News.com). There are usually about twice as many downloads as users. People are either downloading multiple versions or initiating the download again. Compare that to Free World Dialup. It's growing considerably faster than that.

When will you have a gateway to the telephone network?
We're working on it...It's something that's going to be much later on.

When?
The interesting thing is that in the feedback we get from users this is not the highest priority. They're more interested in conference calling and voice mail. People are much more comfortable with using the Internet for communications. People are being much more mature with the Internet. They say, "This is my primary way to communicate. The people that I'm calling I'm encouraging them to get on Skype." People are quite happy with that.

If you had to set a date?
Next year.

How much have you received in seed funding?
We haven't disclosed how much we raised. But it's the normal seed funding. We haven't raised tens of millions.

Are you funding any of this yourself?
No. Just hard labor and things like that. We had the Draper family--Bill Draper--as investors from the beginning.

You said Skype is different from IM voice clients. How about P2P voice clients, such as PGPfone, which is encrypted, free, open source, and has been available for years?
When we're talking about peer to peer it's much more today. It's a self-organizing network that can adapt itself to different firewall configurations and network address translation boxes. You cannot set up a direct connection in most cases.

The problem is that there are a lot of different configurations. Some routers allow outgoing connections but not incoming. Some others allow UDP (User Datagram Protocol) connections. Others allow TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). Most existing Internet telephony applications don't work that well in consumer environments.

How does Skype get around that?
We're setting up hot standby connections. We set up four, maybe five standby paths. When both parties are behind NATs (Network Address Translation), they can't actually set up a connection between each other. It's being synchronized. It works sometimes.

Sometimes?
It only works sometimes. It depends on the routers.

What lessons have you learned from your experience with Kazaa and FastTrack?
It's quite amazing that when you do something that catches on over the Internet you get people all over the world to use it.
Several lessons. One thing is that the whole viral effect--when you do something that works virally you can get a lot of people using it. It's quite amazing that when you do something that catches on over the Internet you get people all over the world to use it.

You should not try to do things that are artificially viral like an "Invite a friend to use this service" feature. Those don't really work. We've had that feature on Skype but it doesn't really bring in the users. The product has to be fundamentally viral in itself.

How many supernodes share the Skype database?
It grows. There are a few hundred clients per supernode.

How do you become one?
You have to qualify to be a supernode. You have to have enough memory, bandwidth, and a good uptime. Then you're connected to supernodes. If they feel that they're getting too much load they tell the other clients around them, "Can you help me out?" It's a distributed process which is not centrally run.


What happens if someone sets up a malicious supernode with false "phone number" data?
First of all, the data is populated by the users themselves. What we do in Skype is have all users' identities protected in a public key infrastructure. In order to avoid malicious supernodes or people saying, "I am Nicholas," they have to do a challenge response saying that the keys are correct. What you want to avoid is identity theft.

What happens if someone creates and distributes, say, Skype Lite, which recognizes user IDs "minted" by someone else?
That's so much fun. On Slashdot, people are saying, "I'm not going to touch this," saying they don't want the advertisements (on Skype) and will wait for Skype Lite. But there are no advertisements. OK, say someone makes a hacked version. You and I wouldn't be able to set up calls with each other. We'd both need the hacked version.

Are you afraid of intruders targeting your server that signs user ID keys?
The signing server is like Fort Knox.

Where's it located?
I won't tell you. That's kind of a sensitive part of (the company). It's very, very secure.

Will we ever see a Skype telephone?
We have a phone that plugs into the USB port that's working now.

How about an 802.11 Wi-Fi phone running Skype?

That's a natural step to take later on.

On cell phones too?
The cellular phone is a relatively closed platform. I have a Nokia phone with Java but it doesn't give you access to the IP stack. (For competitive reasons) they're going to make sure that the telephone is very, very closed--though 802.11 phones are eventually going to be affordable in the next year or so.

Where do you hope to make money from Skype users?
This is software. Our business model is to sell value-added services. It doesn't matter what client you're going to use--whether it's a Windows client or a PDA client or an embedded client.

Any plans for Macintosh or 'nix versions?
That's one of the things we have on our wish list. We don't have any release date planned.

Are you targeting business users as well as individuals?
We're starting with individuals. We're doing this bottom up. It's grassroots for businesses too. It's being used by business clients already but not through the IT departments.

News.com ran an article a few months ago talking about how the FBI wants to force VoIP providers to make their networks subject to wiretaps. If it gets adopted, what would this proposal mean for you?
The landscape is changing. In the old world you had issues like lawful interception of telephone calls. In Sweden the police can get a court order and wiretap a telephone call if the crime would lead to six years in jail or something like that.

And if the Swedish police came to you?
We cannot do anything because we don't have access to the data stream. The old way of thinking was easy. You'd go to the local telephone company and they'd get a wiretap. That's not a problem because the telephone service owns the infrastructure, provides the service, and operates in one country. The Internet is a bit different. What you would have to do is to go to the Internet service provider.

Assume the police can get a court order and conduct the tap. But the Skype conversation is encrypted and they only can hear gibberish.
I'm just trying to say in general what the issues are. I don't have a solution. In general it's not as clear cut as it was in old POTS (plain old telephone service) days. My point is that it's not as easy as it was before.

Have you been contacted by any law enforcement or national security agency?
No. What if we got contacted by the Chinese government, or the U.S. government, or North Korea, or the Swedish? If you're operating something that's only available in one country it's an easy clear-cut case. But if it's available worldwide, that's different.

Even Phil Zimmermann, inventor of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), has said he's concerned about terrorists using his software to plot crimes. He concluded, though, that the benefits outweigh the negatives. How about you?
The Internet is great. There's a lot of bad things happening on it but it's still great. If you were a sophisticated criminal and you really wanted to hide away, then you should probably not use something that is a commercially closed source system such as Skype. I don't think this is an issue.

If the FBI or Europol came to you and said, "We order you to include a secret backdoor for unencrypted wiretapping in the next version of Skype," what would you do?
I don't have the answer to that. Obviously we would work with authorities in whatever jurisdiction we would be subject to. Sure, we would sit down and talk to them. But we would not just say here's the backdoor and just bluntly do it.

Currently Skype is not subject to telecommunications regulation, therefore we do not have any legal obligation to provide any means for interception. This is software that's not any different from e-mail or chat.
http://news.com.com/2008-7352-5112783.html


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Beware Skype's Hype
Brian Livingston

Wouldn't it be great if vendors always got their standards together before shipping products? Sometimes this happens; sometimes it doesn't. When it does, as with USB 1.0 and 2.0, adoption is rapid. You can hardly buy a PC or laptop these days without finding a couple of USB ports.

When it doesn't, it can create a slow-motion train wreck that we can watch but can't prevent.

Take the case of rewritable DVDs. With their multigigabyte capacities, they can be a handy storage alternative. But contention over DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM and more has delayed mass adoption by individual users and enterprises alike.

Today, the technology that most suffers from this problem—and is already careening off the tracks— is voice over IP. VOIP promises to revolutionize the way we make phone calls. Ultimately, no one will use wired, land-line phones. New mobile phones will use VOIP over corporate or home Wi-Fi connections when in range and seamlessly switch to slower cellular- type networks everywhere else. (VOIP is such a terrible acronym that henceforth I'll call it "Internet calling.")

Internet calling has been possible for years, but only the latest technologies deliver good quality. Compatibility fell into place through the efforts of the Internet Engineering Task Force and its adoption in June 2002 of a detailed standard, Session Initiation Protocol, which allows the integration of Internet calling with Web services, digital video, instant messaging and e-mail. As a result, everything from Microsoft's Windows XP to its Live Communications Server 2003 to IBM's Lotus Instant Messenger supports SIP.

This harmonious bubble was burst 13 weeks ago by a new, free, peer-to-peer Internet calling program. Skype, a made-up name that rhymes with hype, is the creation of the same two young Scandinavian entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who in 2001 released Kazaa, another P2P program that's now a much bigger music-and-file-sharing network than Napster ever was.

People who download the software—perhaps onto your company's network—can make free Internet calls to any other Skype user in the world. Although corporate firewalls often block this kind of traffic, Skype's makers built in clever technical workarounds that they say allow their packets to pass right through.

But Skype isn't compatible with SIP. You could wake up one day to a nightmare in which some of your offices have adopted SIP while others have downloaded Skype. Users couldn't rely on the incompatible services to call one another.

Worse, having unmanaged voice packets zipping through your firewall poses the risk that a malicious hacker could some day find a buffer overrun or other flaw that can exploit Skype software.

Steve Johnson, president of Ingate Systems, which makes SIP-capable firewalls and network appliances, says SIP should be respected. "We believe that having industry standards is the way to go with new technologies," Johnson said. "Skype has many limitations. You can make a point-to- point call between two people who've downloaded the software, but you can't make conference calls and other things that are important for business."

In response, Skype's co-founders told me in a joint e-mail, "We believe in interoperability, we are looking into it, and we are open to discussion with other companies."

Skype's home page states, "Works through all firewalls," but this isn't true. Skype cannot connect through proxies, authenticating firewalls or firewalls that manage outgoing UDP packets.

I advise you, however, not to use this weakness to try to simply block the independent-minded Skype pioneers in your company. Make SIP- compliant Internet calling widely available to your employees instead. SIP calls with good manageability should be just as attractive to users as Skype. And going with SIP-based software might encourage Skype's founders to bring their software into SIP compliance. That would keep your users speaking to one another.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1401510,00.asp


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AP Finds Skype To Have Some Shortcomings
Michael Tarm

TALLINN, Estonia -- It's the moneysaving potential that's likely to draw your attention to Skype, the Internet phone software whose creators are bent on displacing the POTS, or plain old telephone system.

Certainly, there is no disputing the cost savings. The software is free, created by the same anti-establishment programmers who wrote the music file-sharing application Kazaa. Free versus whatever you're now paying for more traditional phone service is, on the surface, an unbeatable deal.

The question, though, is whether that makes up for some of the frustrations I experienced using Skype, which, granted, is still in beta, or test phase. On balance, it does.

On a good day, with a faultless broadband line, Skype's sound quality is awe-inspiring, especially considering that the communication is wholly decentralized. It is near and sometimes even surpasses the quality of run-of-the-mill landline or mobile phones.

Skype's also a breeze to set up.

Armed with an online PC - one running Windows 2000 or XP - a microphone and headset, you can be calling (or "skyping," in the lingo of aficionados) just five minutes after downloading the program from www.skype.com.

Skype can also be used with Windows 95 and Windows 98, though compatibility's not a sure thing. There are no Mac or Linux versions.

Users enter a password and some contact details for Skype's user-friendly online phone book - indexed by country of origin, user name and 12 other categories. With its search tool, it's a cinch to locate and call friends, relatives and associates.

You can only talk to people who also are using Skype, but if you reach them on a good line, Skype works like a dream. Knowing you're paying next to nothing - even if you chat for half the day to friends halfway around the world - makes this doubly thrilling.

Other times, it's considerably less fun.

Slower Internet connections or ones that keep slipping offline cause the sound to deteriorate or conk out completely. An inferior link can produce delays of several seconds - giving users a sense that they're speaking with someone on the moon.

So unless you can use Skype on faster lines, don't bother at all. Even with better connections, quality can occasionally be erratic - with the volume fading in and out or with the sound taking on a tin-can quality.

Skype is also subject to that variable so often at the root of life's failings - other human beings.

Headphone sets not plugged in or turned up properly by technically challenged users can foil attempts to talk to your party - even when Skype signals you've reached them successfully.

You're also dependent on the person you wish to call being at his or her computer. If they're not, you may be reduced to calling them on that Plain Old Phone and asking them to log on - which rather defeats the purpose of having Skype in the first place.

Of course, since you can only call other Skype users, anyone determined to use it to order a pizza is sure to go hungry.

Similar to peer-to-peer Kazaa, Skype exchanges data packets directly from one personal computer to another - not via a central server. It purportedly directs that data through the quickest networks so quality isn't degraded. Skype works through most firewalls, software used by many firms to monitor traffic in and out of its computers. And privacy is assured by encryption.

I saw no signs of spyware. Skype, in a nod to the scads of it found with Kazaa, proclaims it to be free of both spy- and adware.

To be sure, several other services have used the Internet to carry phone calls cheaply or even for free.

One, Free World Dialup, promises to connect its 75,000 users not only to other members but also to users of certain other Internet-based services. Free World Dialup requires special hardware or a software "SIP phone" that turns conversations into data packets and vice versa.

Skype, meanwhile, has a dramatically expanding universe, with 3.3 million people having downloaded it just three months after its launch. At that pace, it could eventually break into the same league as Kazaa, which - to the horror of the recording industry - has a whopping 300 million users.

According to Skype's online directory, virtually every country on earth now has a budding Skype community - from Afghanistan to Peru, from Swaziland to China.

It's easy to see how cash-poor students studying far from home and some phone-reliant firms with branches abroad could embrace this program even with its shortcomings.

Others, quite rightly, may approach Skype with a bit more skepticism.

But if executives at traditional phone companies aren't losing sleep over Skype, they might soon. Skype's creators have vowed to iron out kinks and add new capabilities, including enabling calls to mobile and landline phones from Skype.

Skype may yet live up to its revolutionary billing.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...Test%20 Skype


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FBI Seeks Wiretap Capabilities for Phone Calls Made Over the Internet

The agency and the Justice Department ask the FCC to ensure that law enforcement can eavesdrop on online communication.
Jube Shiver Jr.

Concerned that terrorists and criminals can easily communicate without being caught, the FBI wants to tap into online phone calls.

As federal regulators Monday debated how — or whether — to regulate the fast-growing technology of Internet phone service, the FBI and the Justice Department sought to ensure that law enforcement has the same ability to eavesdrop as it does on virtually every other form of communication.

Exempting Internet telephony from the wiretap provisions of federal law would "jeopardize the ability of federal, state and local governments to protect public safety and national security against domestic and foreign threats," Patrick W. Kelley, the FBI's deputy general counsel, and the Justice Department's John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission.

Reached by phone Monday, Kelley declined to elaborate on his written remarks.

FCC officials characterized the FBI's concerns as "serious." They said the FCC, which already had begun a proceeding to address the potential economic harm that Internet telephony poses to traditional telephone service, was examining the wiretapping concerns of the Justice Department and the FBI.

It's not that law enforcement can't tap Internet calls. It's just difficult.

The unregulated technology of so-called voice-over-Internet protocol chops calls into digital packets and sends them over the Internet like e-mail. The packets are reassembled at their destination as speech.

Because Internet telephony largely circumvents traditional phone lines, it promises to save users billions of dollars in fees that carriers traditionally charge to route calls over the public phone network.

But calls are hard for law enforcement to intercept because, unlike a traditional phone network, Internet telephony is diffuse and travels along the Internet backbone. All a person needs to make an online call is an Internet connection, some software and a computer or dedicated Internet telephone that is sold by companies such as Cisco Systems Inc.

The FBI and Justice Department want the FCC to classify Internet-based telephony as a traditional telecommunications service, which would subject it to federal laws requiring carriers or software companies "to develop intercept solutions for lawful electronic surveillance."

Internet calling accounts for only about 1% of overall telecommunications revenue, but it is growing rapidly, and even traditional phone companies use the technology to route some calls.

Since Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, federal law enforcement officials have battled the telecommunications industry over efforts to extend federal wiretapping laws to new technologies. The act established a process that allowed the FCC to order standards to facilitate wiretapping.

In the past, the government has required phone companies to install electronic monitoring capability in their networks to allow the government to eavesdrop on private data communications for law enforcement and national security reasons.

The FCC recently required wireless companies to install technology to both eavesdrop on and track the location of cellphone users.

Civil liberty experts draw the line at the current effort, saying it potentially gives law enforcement too much control over how computer networks are built. They fear it also could lead to efforts to outlaw powerful data encryption if Internet telephony users begin encrypting calls.

"This represents a great threat to privacy and free speech," said Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

He said the FBI effort could stifle innovation and make communications less secure for all Americans because, in many cases, there's no phone company to act as an intermediary between law enforcement and customers.

"The government has always banked on the fact that when it comes to electronic communications, there's always a middleman" like the phone company, added Tien. "But Internet telephony has the potential to make that middleman go away and make conversations a lot more secure from government eavesdropping."

The FBI's concern emerged as the FCC began a series of highly anticipated meetings on the future of Internet telephony. Chairman Michael K. Powell told industry officials and policymakers Monday that the government should try to avoid regulation because it might hamper growth.

"Regulatory medicine can be poison to an otherwise healthy technology," Powell told the standing-room-only audience at the meeting. "No regulator, federal or state, should tread in the area without compelling justification to do so."

Fellow Republican FCC Commissioners Kathleen Q. Abernathy and Kevin J. Martin also called for regulatory restraint at the meeting. Abernathy said the technology required only "a light regulatory touch."

Democrats Jonathan S. Adelstein and Michael J. Copps, however, expressed concern about the technology's effect on public safety and the maintaining of universally affordable phone service. Traditional phone companies are required to provide universal service, subsidized by all customers.

Experts say the technology could transform the $300-billion telecommunications industry within the next decade. Equipment revenue at companies providing Internet- based telephone service totaled $3.3 billion last year and is expected to rise to $15.1 billion by 2007, said Thomas Valovic, a program director at technology researcher IDC, a unit of Boston-based International Data Group.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology