So last week I ordered a Garmin model 265WT from Tigerdirect.ca (170$). The “T” at the end of the model number indicates that the FM RDS-TMC is included in the box. With such package, traffic information seems to be included for free for the whole life of the device. I’m not quite clear about that but for some reasons, Garmin also sells lifetime traffic information for 50$ on their website. Maybe some devices have to be activated before traffic information works?

Anyways. I received the device yesterday and was eager to try it. That’s what I did on my way home last night. It was very simple to install. In fact, nothing special has to be done. The lighter power cord must be plugged into the device and the car (the FM RDS receiver is part of that cord) and that’s it. When I launched the device, it took just a few seconds before I could see a little “traffic icon” on the maps.

Pressing on that icon revealed two types of traffic information. I took a picture (shown below) of the traffic situation last night at around 7pm in Ottawa. As we can see, there was heavy traffic on the main highway in Ottawa… and that was no surprise to me… it was perfect timing for my experiment: hockey night! And every time its the same thing: the highway gets jammed at the “Scotiabank Place”. So that’s the red segment on the map here.

The other traffic display shows a list of the various problem zones. This is shown on the second photo I took:

So very positive experience for me. I’m impressed. It works well and is very easy to use. The next step will be to see how real-time navigation and re-routing works considering the traffic. In the meantime, I guess canadians will want a new Garmin for Christmas because they certainly understand that traffic is a major enhancement on a GPS device.

If you wonder where exactly the service is available, have a look at this page on the Navteq website. A quick scan over the list shows following regions: Hamilton-Burlington, Montreal-Laval, Oshawa-Whitby-Clarington, Ottawa-Gatineau, St. Catharines-Niagara Falls-Welland, Toronto-Mississauga and Vancouver-Surrey-Burnaby.

! UPDATE, WARNING: I was told that the service has not been officially launched yet. I guess that this means it may be unstable or could even be stopped anytime. Please consider this if you think of buying yourself a new Garmin for Christmas.

My talk was titled: “Mobile Digital Broadcasting: An Infrastructure for One-to-Many Converged Services”. We took this opportunity to officially release our Openmokast open source software framework. I was happy that my live demo worked as expected!

We had prepared a clip just in case the “demo effect” would hit on me on stage. Luckily this was not the case but the clip (which is more detailed than the live demo) can still be seen on our crcmmb Youtube Channel or here below:

And here are the slides I used for this presentation:

eComm was also for me a great occasion to meet with David Burges who presented his OpenBTS project live using the USRP as well. His demo looked incredibly like mine except he demonstrated live cell phone communications going through his GSM open source base station. There are lots of commonalities between our projects but essentially, both are about democratizing communications technologies to catalyze innovation.

“A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public radio program and have it suddenly cut out….”

Some challenges can be expected:

• loss of signal while roaming from cell to cell. Networks are optimized for voice calls but not for data yet.
• minimal bitrate like 32 kbps is desirable but connection is still not guaranteed and sound quality is no great
• buffers have to be implemented in receiver to mitigate signal loss.

Results of a survey made by PC World suggest that 3G coverage may not be adequate for the delivery of sustained bitrates in major cities in USA. Like this table shows, networks speeds can be impressive but their reliability vary greatly so that live radio transmissions may be hard to achieve.

There is certainly a lot of room for experimentation here in this new area but I tend to believe that it could take a while before we see 3G replace true “physical layer” broadcast networks for live transmissions.

This could change thanks to so-called “in-car WiFi routers” which are designed to provide Internet access through 3G mobile telephony networks.

AutoNet Mobile offers such device and service combination:

we create a Wi-Fi hot spot that allows everyone in the car to connect multiple devices to the internet, in and around the car! it’s the next step in in-car entertainment and productvity. we make internet in your car easier than ever because we provide both the in-car router and the monthly service. our affordable monthly service plans start at only $29 per month.

This still represent an expensive proposition for radio though. One hour daily consumption of good quality Internet radio content could easily reach the 29$ 1Gb limit.

Isn’t that the case with FM radio? Will it truly benefit from going digital?

One of the compromise I find attractive is starting to emerge: enabling mobile phone handsets to receive FM AND RDS. Such an effort led by GSS and Silicon Laboratiroes is reported here at RadioWorld.

GSS believes that cell phones that can receive FM without cumbersome headphone antennas will not only be more popular with consumers but can then put RDS capabilities into the hands of many more consumers, which in turn will better support the penetration of emergency alerting systems like its Alert FM.

As we mention in our recent EBU paper, new functionality in handsets will be done in software. This is quite new in the mobile world but we are definitely used to this principle with our personal computers. We buy software for them. That’s what makes them extremely flexible, evolutive and thus useful. This paradigm emerges on mobile phone platforms now because they are evolving as generic and powerful computing platforms too.

This trend was identified early on by Apple (as usual) who created the AppStore as part of the iPhone ecosystem. The AppStore creates a marketplace for developers and end-users. Developers offer their new creations through the system, typically for a small fee, while end-users shop for applications through iTunes. The whole process of purchasing, installing and removing applications has been streamlined to provide a “frictionless” end-user experience, apart from the few dollars that one has to leave on the table!

I believe that the key benefit from these new marketplaces for applications is innovation. A democratized marketplace for innovation.

Before, application innovation was limited to MNOs and key partners of the mobility value chain. Now, anybody can create new applications. New applications will come from the masses, like Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube came from new players and non-incumbents.

Also, with more open marketplaces comes increased competition. That is good for consumers. End-users are only one click away from competing applications.

And what if the competing application is free? Such platforms will make “free” and “pay for” applications equally accessible. Could this lead to the erosion of the software market? Many think so. In order to sell their apps, developers will have no other choice but to offer leading edge products with truly exclusive features.

What does this mean for broadcasting? At the moment not so much I guess. The perspective is attractive though. What if moving from DAB to DAB+ could simply be achieved through a new software app. A broadcaster would announce the move and asks its listeners to go buy the 2$ piece of software on the app store. In exchange, end users get more channels. Click, pay, download, … voila! What if all new broadcast applications could be offered this way? EPG, Slideshow, TPEG traffic overlay for google maps,… and so on. In fact, we don’t know what the mobile broadcast applications of the future will be. But we know it will be in software. We just need broadcast receivers in those handsets.

“RAJAR’s recent figures were upbeat about listening to the radio on mobile devices. (They only monitor ‘listening via mobile phones’, despite many MP3 players also having FM radios built-in)”

Competing business models between mobile network operators and broadcasters prevent broadcast receivers from being integrated into mobile phones. At CRC, we work on a project that would allow broadcasters to sponsor and eventually develop their own receivers. The project is called Openmokast. We published our thoughts and results about this in a paper released as part of last month’s EBU Technical Review.

We suggest that innovation in mobile digital broadcasting (including digital radio) will happen with the event of open source platforms like Android and Openmoko.

“BCE unit Bell and Telus both announced Friday they would be making a significant investment in upgrading their networks, adding high speed packet access, or HSPA, cellular technology to their third-generation networks.”

This could have an impact on the mobile broadcasting technology that will be deployed in Canada. The natural link between CDMA and MediaFLO is quite strong since both technologies belong to Qualcomm. Could this mean less chances for MediaFLO to establish in Canada?

Technorati Tags: bell, telus, mediaflo, mmb, broadcasting 2.0

Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the Internet: people submit links to the ‘Incoming!’ page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page.

Last week I spent at least one hour watching front page entries and I must admit I was laughing to tears. After that I called my friend (over Skype) and I told him to have a look at the best clips. As I expected, I heard him laugh a lot but I was missing the possiblity for us to view the clips simultaneously.

It becomes also clear with such a service that It will be essential to be able to "bomb" media content on-the-go somehow with the portable media player. This information could be uploaded to the network at the next PC sync. opportunity.

PanAmSat Holding Corp. is starting a new business that will sell and distribute ethnic programming for television in the United States, a move that the company hopes will pave the way for other new initiatives that get the satellite company into more consumer businesses such as Internet video and mobile phones.