LAGUNA NIGUEL, California – For his second Digital Living Room conference, technology journalist David Coursey has blended a sober examination of new consumer technologies with pure whimsy.
The carefully selected products in the display rooms lean toward home LANs, wireless networks, new communications tools, and products that allow consumers to access the Internet from a wide variety of unexpected places – including refrigerators and portable tablets consumers carry around the house.
See also: Digital's Long, Winding Road- - - - - -
Among the geegaws on display:
- Sprint Ion's system for carrying voice, video, and data over a single, broadband pipe in the home. The company is partnering with Radio Shack to install the systems initially in Denver, Kansas City, and Seattle. Service, which includes unlimited local and long-distance service and videoconferencing, will cost US$150 a month.
- Streaming email from radicalmail.com that automatically boots up an audio and video message when a user clicks on it. Consumers can click and buy products from the email, as well.
- A $400 Internet security appliance from SonicWall Pro, customized to allow cable modem users and DSL users to lock out hackers and distribute broadband access to a number of computers.
- A new, all-in-one voice, email, and fax product from onebox.com that solves some of the problems of JFAX and other email fax solutions. By using the Internet for transmission as opposed to the public switched network, communications are transmitted instantly – avoiding the delays of some competing solutions. Users can also forward their voicemails to anyone with an email address. The product, to be rolled out nationally by the end of the summer, is free. The company will make its money from consumers who pay $2.95 per month to integrate the voicemail capabilities with their home phone systems. It's-not-quite-there-yet department: Steven Kirsch, chairman and founder of Infoseek, will be the first to admit that his digital home isn't quite up to snuff – even though he's apparently spent tens of thousands of dollars on it. In a tongue-in-cheek video tour through his spacious quarters, he revealed some of the glitches:
- His automatic motion-sensing room lights tend to turn on when you leave the room.
- His high-tech safe needs two nine-volt batteries to run and if the batteries die, "it doesn't open."
- His $12,000 plasma wall television requires a noisy fan and sometimes gets "actually lower quality than I get on my $100 TV."
- One of the guys working on bringing his lighting system up to snuff has degrees from Stanford and Harvard.
- The problem with his new high-tech fish tanks is that "we haven't figured out how to feed the fish."
- He has 23 remote controls. Internet-enabled bad driving?: Claude Leglise, general manager of Intel's home products group, demonstrated his company's prototype for an Internet-enabled van, which could be on the market within 18 months. The driver can check out traffic conditions and routes to the desired destination on a screen in front, while the kids play games on screens in the back. Said one worried audience member: "I've already had enough problems with people who can't drive and talk on cellular phones at the same time. Frankly, I'm terrified."
Leglise sympathized, suggesting that lawmakers will need to decide whether it's appropriate for people to access the Internet while the vehicle is moving. On one point he was clear: "I don't think playing a DVD movie for the driver is a good thing to do, even though Silicon Valley has bad traffic jams."
National public retro: In a question-and-answer session via satellite on Monday night, MSNBC host and technology buff John Hockenberry revealed that Noah Adams and his former bosses at National Public Radio weren't interested in digitally editing his dispatches from the Middle East because they liked the way the older equipment "made it sound like I was really far away."
Quotable: "We firmly believe that some time soon, we will get TVs for free. We will get all consumer devices for free."
– Charles Wu, managing director of Panasonic Digital Concepts Center, predicting that other consumer-products companies will begin emulating cellular companies, which trade free phones for other services.
7.Sep.98
