The Closed Skype Needs Openness

Recent Articles

• DigiBnetwork Launches First DAB+ DIN Car Radio Receiver

  March 22, 2010 in Uncategorized

  A new receiver is always good news for an emerging technology like DAB. A more interesting aspect of this launch though is the context that made it possible. DigiBnetwork, a commercial broadcaster in Malta, convinced a manufacturer to produce a new DIN car receiver. DigiBnetwork went as far as to create and own this new [...]

• Live Traffic Information on GPS Devices in Canada

  December 9, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, public broadcasting

  In my recent reflexions about the new potential for hybrid radio based on FM I identified RDS-TMC as an incentive to maintain and even expand the FM (RDS) infrastructure in Canada. While speaking about that at a meeting last week I learned that Corus Entertainment was deploying RDS-TMC traffic for Garmin devices in major cities [...]

• My eComm 2009 Talk Now Available on Video

  December 2, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Mobility

  I’m happy that my eComm talk finally got published online, 8 months after the conference. Events sponsors got published much earlier but hey, that’s fair for a professionally produced clip. I must admit that the AV infrastructure and the team at the event were excellent. My talk was titled: “Mobile Digital Broadcasting: An Infrastructure for [...]

• Livio NPR Radio

  November 26, 2009 in Consumer devices, Industry, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting

  Livio announces its NPR branded Internet Radio Appliance. This device will offer a specialized menu to easily access NPR’s 800 radio stations. Of course, all other Internet radio stations can be accessed as well. Are such “specialized” devices the future? We’ve seen the WikiReader recently which only does one thing: portable unconnected access to Wikipedia. [...]

• Challenges for GPRS and 3G Radio

  July 24, 2009 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media, public broadcasting

  There is a nice post on the Public Radio Player (PRP) blog about some challenges for Internet radio when distributed over mobile wireless networks and some strategies used in the PRP. “A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public [...]

• Royalty-Free Public Domain – A path towards Ubiquity

  July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures

  I read this excellent story some time ago in Vanity Fair titled “An oral history of the Internet“. I believe that one of the reasons why the Internet is what it is now comes from the fact that the Web is a royalty-free technology. And that does not happen by itself. To produce RF-tech these [...]

• Broadcasting the Twittersphere

  July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, User Generated Media

  I think that Twitter and micro-blogging in general have properties that could be exploited along with broadcasting services. I’ll write my thoughts about this later on. As a first step in this reflexion, I’d like to estimate the total bandwidth of Twitter, that is, how many kilobits per second are being Tweeted on average. I [...]

• FLOSS Media Centers

  July 7, 2009 in Consumer devices, Networked media

  Media centers could become the main interfaces to media content in home networks . The Telematics Freedom Foundation recently released a short report on Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) options here. The report compares features of projects like XBMC, MythTV, freevo, Moovida (Elisa) and so on.

• Ads worth more on the net than on TV

  June 30, 2009 in Applications, Industry, Networked media, Services

  PC world reports that for the first time, advertising during a specific “TV” show will cost more on the net than on traditional TV channel: If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. [...]

• FemtoDAB

  June 24, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Services

  According to this article, Vodafone will be next week the first mobile network operator to launch a femtocell product in Europe: “Looking like a home router, femtocells give 3G coverage indoors, and use home broadband to connect calls across the Internet to the mobile network.” “… will be available on different price plans… Essentially, the [...]