Brown Knose

A New Home

2004-01-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

This is the final entry I’ll be posting on my current Blogger page, and have transferred all my materials over to a new home at www.richardsviewpoint.com, where I hope to be able to try out some interesting new ideas for creating and distributing content. Please change the bookmark in your browser accordingly!

CES Day 1

2004-01-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

It certainly was an action-packed first day at CES. The highlight for me was, of course, our press conference with Apex Digital at which we announced the ApeXtreme PC Gaming Console based on the VIA Glory Personal Gaming Console Platform. With its ability to play thousands of PC games as well as a wide array entertainment capabilities, including watching DVD movies, listening to digital music, and running slideshows and home movies, this is a really exciting product and I am sure that it will do extremely well when it comes onto the market towards the end of the first quarter. For more information about the ApeXtreme, please visit our website at www.via.com.tw.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to visit the show today. I hope to do that tomorrow!

VIA Embedded Platforms Division

2004-01-07T06:10:00.000-08:00

Wow! I can’t recall ever having started a new year with such a flurry of major announcements. It’s all been extremely exciting, but at the same time very exhausting for the members of my team who have been working really hard over the holiday period to put together all the materials. I really appreciate their wonderful support.

I won’t go into the details of the announcement we made that we will be adopting IBM as the foundry for manufacturing CPUs using their state-of-the-art 90 nanometer process, except to say that this is a clear sign of our long-term commitment to our processor business and of our determination to become a major player in the market.

We have made great progress towards achieving this goal over the past couple of years with the introduction of innovative products like VIA Eden and the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX, and with the formal establishment of the VIA Embedded Platforms Division we are further strengthening our focus on developing innovative platforms for what we now call Smart Connected Digital Devices, such as Telematics Systems, Digital Entertainment Centers, Personal Gaming Consoles, and even Wireless Mesh Networking Systems. These are the high-potential products of the future, and with our new Spearhead Platform Initiative, we have the right vehicle for enabling our customers to bring them to market quickly and cost effectively.

It was a great pleasure to see Richard Lander of LocustWorld again this week when he kindly came over to Taipei for our press conference, and very encouraging to see how quickly their wireless mesh networking solutions are taking off. LocustWorld are now almost at the stage where they are pretty much announcing the establishment of at least one new wireless mesh somewhere in the world each and every week. The latest one is in the idyllic village of Lauris in Provence, France.

Personal Gaming Consoles that run the thousands of PC games that are already available also provide an extremely interesting opportunity, and we are very excited to be working with Apex, the number one player in the US DVD market, on the introduction of their new Apextreme PC gaming console. I’ll write more about that after the official launch of the product on Thursday.

CES 2004

2004-01-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

Now that the holiday season is almost over all roads lead to CES, which starts on Thursday 8 January. According to the press reports I've seen, it's going to be a massive show this year with over 120,000 attendees and all the major IT and Consumer Electronics vendors present. I have no reason to doubt these numbers, given the difficulties I had in finding a hotel room - just like it was during the glory days of Comdex.

Even now, I can imagine all the stimulating conversations I'm going to have about the difficuly of finding taxis:)

2004 Tech Trends

2004-01-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

Work on the new front end and back end for this blog is progressing well, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to go online with the new design on Monday. This weekend I'm going to have to spend a few hours familiarising myself with the new content engine: it's a lot more complex than Blogger, but I guess that's inevitable given the greater number of features it provides.

Forbes have posted an interesting article predicting the Top Tech Trends of 2004. I totally agree with their contention that "the laptop's steady march to overtake the desktop as the face of the PC" will be the "defining tech trend of 2004", and I'm confident that VIA will play an increasingly significant role in driving this transition with our VIA Antaur processor based mobile platforms. You'll be hearing a lot more from us on that subject in the coming months.

Forbes is also predicting that Video Blogs will be a major trend in 2004, as new products such as video-capable cell phones become more widely used. As I mentioned in my 31 December entry, I've been working on some videos myself, which I'll start posting next week. But don't expect anything too exciting here. As Forbes concludes, "now we'll get to see the boring moments in people's lives, instead of just reading about them."

The Return of The King

2004-01-01T01:19:00.000-08:00

I've been looking forward to seeing the Return of the King, the final episode of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, ever since I saw the Two Towers. The long wait proved to be more than with it, for it far away exceeded my initial (already high) expectations. What a wonderful conclusion to a wonderful story! I was blown away by the marvellous acting and the amazing special effects. Now I can't wait for the DVD to come out, so that I can watch all three Lord of the Rings movies in a single sequence from the comfort of my sofa.

As the makers of the films have noted on a number occasions, it wasn't until recently that there was enough computing power available to enable them to create all the necessary special effects, most notably for the massive set-piece battle scenes in the second and third films. So now that all this computing power is finally at hand, I wonder what other stories the world's film-makers can bring to the big screen in similar grand style. Off hand, I can't really think of anything, with the possible expection of a couple of Greek myths. One thing is for certain, though: it's going to take a long time before someone produces a film as maganificent and as epic in scope as the Lord of the Rings!

New Year Resolutions

2003-12-31T03:18:00.000-08:00

Today being new year's eve, my thoughts have been meandering their way towards the subject of resolutions for 2004. Like many people, my record in sticking to previous resolutions has been less than stellar, but I guess that shouldn't stop me from trying again, and if I don't succeed, well, there'll always be the following new year.

My wife has been making some unsubtle hints that I need to improve my rather sedentary lifestyle by buying me a membership to a health club that recently opened up nearby. In fact, it's only five minutes walk away from home, so I can hardly make any excuses about it being inconvenient to get to (which is probably her point). Still, the idea of submitting to a daily regime of exercise on the treadmill or in the swimming pool makes me feel all queasy after nearly two decades of watching sport rather then playing it. On the other hand, my middle age spread is becoming increasingly apparent, so I guess I'll have to do something about it next year.

Of course, if I'm serious about doing more exercise next year, the next logical step would be to give up smoking. But here I draw the line. As obnoxious as many people find the habit, I really enjoy smoking and find it the most effective way of dealing with the numerous pressures of my job. I simply cannot imagine substituting my cigarettes for chewing gum or jelly beans. Besides, they don't exactly mix very well with the numerous cups of coffee I drink.

Caffeine and nicotine also provide much of the fuel that powers this blog, and improving the site is my number one resolution for next year. I have had a lot of fun posting my (almost) daily entries, but I feel that there is so much more I can do with it. As the first step, my colleague Tim Brown is designing a new front and back end for me so that my entries will be searchable and I can put up links to other sites that are of interest to me. In addition, I'm working on developing more multimedia content such as photos and videos that I hope will liven the site up a bit, and there'll be a feature that will enable readers to post your comments.

I'm looking forward to an interesting 2004. Happy New Year to you all!

PowerPoint is Ev

2003-12-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, a certain individual who shall remain nameless sent me a 66MB PowerPoint file, which took me around 45 minutes to download even over a high-speed ADSL connection. This was quite an achievement, particularly as the presentation consisted of only twenty slides - an average of over 3MB for each one.

I am not one of those people who blame PowerPoint for a host of social evils, but I do find myself nodding my head in agreement with this wonderful comment from Peter Norvig, 46, engineering director at Google, in an article on CNN today: "using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."

Mr Norvig made his comments as part of the "PowerPoint is Evil" debate that was set off by the publication of a coffee table art book by former Talking Heads vocalist called "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information". Ironically enough, Byrne's original intention for the book was to SPOOF the way business people use the PowerPoint, but very soon he got drawn into the program, finding that "it communicates within certain limited parameters really well and very easily. The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use. I learned it in a few hours, and that's the idea."

Byrne's conversion shouldn't come as such a surprise really. Much of the world's great poetry has been written within strict parameters for rhyming, scansion, etc, and artists have found these constraints to be liberating rather than confining. Meanwhile, Byrne has sold out the initial print run of 1500 copies of his book at an amazing $80 a pop. To paraphrase Mr Norvig: "using PowerPoint is like having an empty canvas and a set of paintbrushes and paint on the table: You can do wonderful things with it."

Broadband Home of the Future

2003-12-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine has posted an excellent article on the growth of the Broadband Home and the impact this is having both on consumers and PC and Consumer Electronics companies.

Accrding to Anderson, more than a fifth of US households - around 23 million - now have an always-on high speed broadband connection, and an increasing number are now extending its reach "from the last mile to the last room" using either wireless or wired networks. The three major trends that are driving this are:
1.) The growing ubiquity of digital media
2.) The massive popularity of home theatre systems (an amazing 30% of US homes now have a home theater, defined by the Consumer Electronics Association as at least four-speaker surround sound and a 27-inch or bigger screen)
3.) The achievement of Critical Mass in usage, particularly among 18-34 year olds, who have grown up with computers and now look to the Internet rather than the TV as their primary source of entertainment and information.

In fact, it is because of this critical mass of tech-savvy users that "consumers are leading business in technology adoption", embracing new standards such as Wi-Fi much faster than the corporate world.

Anderson comments that this transition towards digitization is having a profound effect on the traditional consumer electronics companies, as they rush to learn a totally new skill set. He himself believes that the PC industry will take over from the CE manufacturers as the "kings of the living room": "And why not? The technology of digital media is the technology of computers: memory, processors, hard drives, and flat-screen monitors. Nobody knows them better - or can assemble them cheaper - than a PC maker. Which is why your next home theater may come from Dell...."

It's perhaps a little early in the game to make such a bold prediction, but the trend is very clear: the broadband home is finally here!

Personal Servers Revisited

2003-12-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

A while ago I wrote about two very interesting new Personal Server products from, the Axentra Rumba and the Mirra, which enable you back up all you data across a home or small business network and access it from remote locations. I was lucky enough to be given a full demonstration of the Ruma at our Lunch@Piero's event in November in Las Vegas and was really impressed by how easy it was to install and use.

I haven't had the chance to view a Mirra yet, but Extremetech put the machine through its paces and published a detailed review in early December. Their conclusion: "Mirra is a very cool product for the tech-unsavvy user. We set up several people with Mirra access, both locally and over the Internet. They 'got it' much more easily than some of the techheads who've seen it."

So if you're looking for a solution for backing up all those digital photos and videos that you took over the Xmas holiday, Mirra might just be it.

Penang

2003-12-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

Living in Taiwan, we're quite spoilt for choice when it comes to tropical holiday locations. Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia are all just a four or five hour flight away, and all of them offer a huge choice of affordable, high class resort destinations.

A couple of years ago we went to Bali for Xmas and had a wonderful time, interspersing days on the beach with excursions to the island's historical and cultural attractions such as the famous Monkey Temple and other Hindu monuments. It was very sad to see how badly the bombing in Kuta last year almost devastated the island's tourist based economy, although I'm relieved to hear reports that business is starting to get better again.

This year, we decided to try a different location: the island of Penang in Malaysia. Virtually uninhabited until 1786 when it was established by Francis Light as the first British trading post in the Far East, Penang has manged to retain a lot of its old colonial charm while building up a modern economy based on tourism and the high-tech industry. As you drive from the airport you quickly see long lines of factories bearing most of the most famous names in the business, including Intel, AMD, Seagate, and Dell, most of them engaged in back-end tasks such as packaging, testing, assembly and logistics.

The drive from the airport to our hotel took nearly an hour, and once we got beyond the industrial estates we found ourselves snaking along the coastal road past many of the island's beaches and resorts. While not as spectacular as some of the ones we saw in Bali, they were very pleasant nonetheless, as was the lush verdant foliage that covered the hillsides leading to the interior of the island.

The hotel we stayed at was called the Mutiara Beach, a large resort nestled in a small bay right next to the beach. The rooms were extremely luxurious with a balcony looking over the sea, and its other facilities such as a sauna/health club, the Sinbad Kids' Club, and four restaurants were excellent. The highlight, however, was the large swimming pool nearby the beach, where we spent most of our time swimming and lounging around. The beach itself was quite nice, but the sea itself was less than crystal clear and was more suited to sailing and boating rather than swimming.

Unlike Bali, Penang doesn't have a great number of cultural attractiions, so we only ventured out of the hotel twice during the week. The first time, we went to the island's capital, Georgetown, which has some quaint colonial era buildings and open-air markets. On the seond occasion, we went to a butterfly farm and the Botanical Gardens, which were pleasant without being anything spectacular.

Overall, Penang was a relaxing place to spend a family holiday, but if you're looking for a bit more fun and variety I'd definitely recommend that you go to Bali.

Book Reviews & Benchmarks

2003-12-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

If you've sometimes questioned how objective reviews of processors, chipsets and graphics chips really are, you should at least console yourself with the thought that the writer has generally drawn his or her conclusions from the results of the benchmark programs that were run on the product to test its performance. Sure, one can argue that all benchmark programs are biased or unfair in some way (especially if your chip scores badly in them!) but they do at the very minimum provide a baseline standard for comparing equivalent products.

If only there was a similar benchmarking methodology for book reviews! No longer would I be conned into handing over my hard earned cash on the latest hot novel based on the

2003-12-26T23:20:00.000-08:00

It's good to be back in Taipei after my vacation. After a week sat by a swimming pool with a gentle sea breeze coming in from behind me, I feel wonderfully refreshed and ready to re-enter the fray. I have to admit that there were times when I found it difficult to handle the idea of NOT having any work to occupy my time with, but as the days went by my body and mind gradually adjusted to the slower - albeit temporary - pace of things. It's probably a good job that we left when we did though, or I might have found myself becoming rather too fond of this new lifestyle.......

I did actually take my notebook with me, but because the hotel didn't have broadband I couldn't be bothered to deal with the hassle of setting up a dial-up connection and waiting for the slow downloads. The machine did come in very handy, though, because I got a little over-excited about using my new digital camera and ended up taking over 300MB of photos - more than double the capacity of my memory stick. It was very convenient being able to upload all my new photos onto my notebook every night when we got back to our room and catalogue them in almost real time. It was relief, too, being able to leave the hotel room every morning without having to worry about whether I had enough "film" left for the day ahead.

A few months ago, Tim Handley, who is in charge of our processor marketing, suggested just such a scenario when we were working on our launch plans for the VIA Antaur mobile processor, and I have to say that I was quite sceptical about the idea at the time. Now, having tried it out, I'll never leave home without my notebook again.

2003-12-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going on a long-needed vacation tomorrow for a week, so I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy festive season and all the best for next year.

Before heading off I couldn't resist pointing you to this Anandtech review of motherboards for the AMD Athlon 64 FX processor, which concludes: "The VIA K8T800-based boards are clear winners at stock speed in our Socket 940 shootout. Perhaps just as important, the top overclocker in the 940 shootout is also the VIA K8T800-based Asus SK8V. In fact, the SK8V's ability to run very well at a 225 setting forces a re-examination of our assumptions about how VIA manages the PCI/AGP bus on the Socket 940 design."

We have worked very hard to bring the best chipset solution for the AMD Athlon 64 processor to the market, and it's nice to be recognized for it.

S3 Graphics DeltaChrome

2003-12-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

As many of you may already have seen by now, yesterday we announced the availability of graphics cards featuring the new S3 Graphics DeltaChrome GPU from Club-3D.

It's very exciting to see the first DeltaChrome graphics card hit the market, and with its excellent DX9 graphics performance, cool imaging features using the Chromotion programmable video engine, and low power consumption, I'm sure that the product will be very successful.

A number of DeltaChrome previews have already been posted on the web, including this one from Tech Report and this from Firing Squad. Enjoy!

DDR2

2003-12-17T17:20:00.000-08:00

Just as the industry has agreed that PCI Express will be the next generation I/O interconnect standard, it has also determined that DDR2 will be the next standard for DRAM. As a result, we are extremely unlikely to see a repeat of the huge debate that erupted over the relative benefits of PC133 and Rambus.

DDR2 will offer higher speed and lower power consumption than the current mainstream DDR SDRAM, and as we saw at VTF2003 in September all the major DRAM makers are supporting it. Designed to reach speeds of 400MHz, 533MHz and 667MHz, DDR2 will not only run at higher frequencies than DDR SDRAM but will also further boost performance by prefetching 4 bits per clock cycle and then internally pipelining their output. This is double the prefetches of 2 bits per clock cycle delivered by DDR memory, and allows DDR2 to effectively access and output twice the amount of data than DDR at a given time. Running at 1.8V, DDR2 also offers lower power consumption, making it ideal for rapidly emerging new segments such as Small Form Factor PCs and notebooks.

We are working on the integration of support for DDR2 in our forthcoming PT890 chipset and in the second half of the year will put the feature into our next generation of IGP chipsets, the PM890 and PN890. VIA traditionally has had an excellent track record in our memory controller technology, so I'm keeping my finfer crossed that we will be able to continue this tradition by rolling out the fastest DDR2 chipset on the market!

PCI Express Continued

2003-12-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday, it has been over a decade since the PCI bus was first introduced into the market. That's a very long time for a standard to exist in the PC industry, particularly if you compare it with the huge advances that have been made in CPUs, graphics, memory, Gigabit Ethernet, and other I/O connectors such as ATA-133, Serial ATA, USB, USB 2.0, and 1394 over the past ten years.

Looked at in another way, this means that while the speed at which data is being processed and transferred within a PC by components such as the processor, graphics card, hard disk, and and memory has dramatically increased, the PCI bus still runs at the same old 33MHz moving data at 133MB/s. This has resulted in a growing number of internal bottlenecks that slow down system performance and which have only been partially alleviated by standards such as AGP and proprietary interconnects between the North and South Bridge such as our own V-Link.

The primary objective of PCI Express is, therefore, to create a new generation internal PC I/O architecture that will remove these bottlenecks and provide a scalable solution that has the headroom required for future upgrades. Unlike the parallel PCI bus, PCI Express is a two-way serial connection that transfers data in packets - in much the same way it is handled over Ethernet connections. Its architecture consists of individually clocked lanes that carry data upstream and downstream at rates of 2.5Gb/s in each direction a huge leap from the current 133MB/s.

Up to 32 lanes can be combined to create a parallel interface of independently controlled serial links, and these lanes can be stacked together to increase the amount of bandwidth available to specific areas of the I/O system. PCI Express Graphics cards will, for example, require 16 lanes, while other components such as PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers will only need a single lane.

The adoption of PCI Express will deliver significant benefits to motherboard makers, most notably because it reduces the amount of trace routes required on a board and hence will ultimately lead to reduced production costs. In addition to desktop PCs, PCI Express will also be adopted in a full range of different products, including desktops, notebooks, servers, and communications devices.

As an open industry standard that is supported by all the major players, I expect that this technology will be adopted by the industry quite rapidly next year, first in desktops and then later on in other devices. VIA is already working on our PT890 and K8T890 PCI Express chipsets for the Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 processors respectively, which we hope to debut in the first quarter of 2004. Our competitors have of course announced similar plans, so it's going to be an interesting race as we work to move the PC into the PCI Express Fast Lane.

PCI Express

2003-12-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

I still clearly remember my interview with FIC, a Taiwan motherboard maker, where I had applied for a job as marketing specialist. After keeping me waiting for just under an hour the VP of sales and marketing came into the room and without even saying hello launched into his first and only question: "What are the advantages of the VL-Bus over the PCI Bus?" At that time, the only buses I was familiar with were red, double deckered, and drove around London, so with a heavy heart I decided that no amount of bullshitting would get me out of this situation and answered that I had no idea.

To my great surprise, this response seemed to impress the VP and he offered me a job immediately. The rest, as they say, is history, and as my inititiation into this wonderful industry I was plunged into the "bus wars" that were raging over which new 32-bit internal I/O data path standard would replace the aging 16-bit ISA infrastructure. Would it be the VL-Bus, which was being pushed by the VESA industry consortium, or would it be PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), which was being promoted by Intel in conjunction with its new Pentium processor? To begin with, the VL-Bus had a small lead, mainly because it was supported by a number of (now bankrupt) graphics chip makers, but as we all know now PCI soon forged forged ahead and once the smoke had cleared was rapidly adopted as the industry standard.

Fast forward over a decade, and we are now approaching the transition from PCI to PCI Express, the next generation I/O interconnect standard. This transition promises to generate a lot less controversy than the previous one from ISA to PCI because the whole industry has agreed on the specification and there are no competing standards being touted. All the same, it should be an extremely interesting transition, and I'm sure it will provoke mountains of discussion in print and on the web as to what are the best ways of implementing the standard at the core logic, motherboard, and system level.

I'll explain more about what PCI Express is and the benefits it will bring tomorrow. In the meantime, I hope you'll forgive me for taking a few moments out to reminisce about how I got my start in this business....

2004 Trends

2003-12-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

As this is the last full week before the festive season kicks into full gear, I thought it would be a good idea to give you an early glimpse of some of the new technologies and products you can expect to see next year. Although we covered many of these subjects at VTF2003 in September this year, technologies such as PCI Express and DDR2 are now a lot closer to making the leap from PowerPoint to being integrated into actual products on the market.

PCI Express, in fact, promises to be the most significant new technology to be introduced onto the market in many years and will have a huge impact on the way that PCs will be designed in the future. I'll talk about the reasons for this in tomorrow's Blog entry.

Digital Photography

2003-12-13T22:07:00.000-08:00

Although I've enjoyed some success with my digital video camera over the past couple of years, I've never had much luck with still image digital cameras. The early models I bought were difficult to use, had short battery life, and, most important of all, didn't produce very good quality pictures (though I do have to admit that this may not have been entirely the fault of the cameras). So, after initial bursts of enthusiasm I ended up hiding them away in some drawer, while my wife smugly stuck to using her good old film-based camera for taking pictures at all our family occasions.

Encouraged by the results of my experiments with my digital video camera, however, I've been thinking about giving digital still photography another try for quite a while now, and so I treated myself to a new 5 Mega Pixel Sony Cybershot as a personal fortieth birthday present. I'm glad I decided to take this step, because I'm really impressed with how the technology has advanced since the last time I bought a digital camera. Not only is the device a much greater pleasure to use, but it also produces images of truly stunning quality, particularly when photos are taken at the highest resolutions. I can't see any reason at all to continue to use film anymore for the types of pictures I want, and all I have to do if I want to print them out is take my memory stick down to the photography store five minutes down the road.

Although it lacks many of the features I have on my digital video camera, the Cybershot also shoots some pretty decent video (with audio) as well - good enough certainly for short clips of my kids decorating the Xmas tree in our house or running around the park. So, while I don't think it'll ever replace my digital video camera, it's definitely useful for those situations where I don't want to carry its bulkier and heavier counterpart around.

I'm afraid I'm not really qualified to comment on the technical merits of the camera and how it compares with products from competitors such as Cannon and Kodak. All I can say is that I've really enjoyed using it so far and am very pleased with the pictures that it has taken. My only advice is to purchase as much additional memory as possible with whatever camera you choose to buy, so that you have enough capacity to store all the video and high resolution photos you shoot. From my own experience I've found that I take far more photos with a digital camera than a film camera because I can look at them on my PC first before choosing whether to go the expense of printing them out. You don't want to be caught short at that vital moment because you've filled up the measly 32MB memory stick that was originally included with the device!

2003-12-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

Although I've had a lot of fun using my digital video camera for nearly two years now, for some strange reason I've only had disappointing experiences with digital still cameras that I've bought before. Picture quality always seemed to be poor (though this may not have been entirely the fault of the camera), battery life was terrible, and I had trouble finding my way around the various feature menus.

Having regained some confidence from using my digital video camera, I decided to treat myself to a new 5 Mega Pixel Sony Cybershot as personal fortieth birthday present in order to see how the technology has advanced and whether digital photography really lives up to all the hype that now surrounds it.

I'm pleased to report that the results I've achieved so far have exceeded my initial (low) expectations by a long way. The camera is very easy to operate and quality of the still images it produces is

Plaxo

2003-12-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

I suppose it seems like a good idea at first sight: instead of wasting your own precious time updating all the details of the people in your Contacts section of Outlook, why not sign up for a service like Plaxo that will automatically blast out emails to all the entries in your database demanding that they do the updating for you? After all, they'd be more than happy to do this for you, wouldn't they?

The only problem is, what happens when your contacts are too busy or not inclined to update their information for you? Your wonderfully automated Plaxo system keeps bombarding them with emails reminding them to do this and is kind enough to tell them exactly how many times it has already requested you to update their information. Hence, I am now getting messages from Plaxo telling me that this is the FIFTH TIME I have failed to update my contact detail for XXX who I met at a tradeshow a number of years ago and haven't corresponded with since.

Maintaining an up-to-date contact list is hassle even with the latest technological tools and the best of intentions. But this is a task that is your own responsibility - not somebody else's. So on the one hand, I'm thinking of declaring my in-box a Plaxo-free zone in protest; on the other, however, I do admit that I'm curious to see how long it will take for me to get my 10th or even 100th update reminder.....

Out of the Living Room and Into the Kitchen

2003-12-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

Perhaps all our industry hype about the living room box has been misplaced, and the real action is in the kitchen.

The New York Times has a fascinating article (registration required) on how more and more people are installing PCs in their kitchen and how these machines are becoming a focal point for family life. As Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for Communication Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, points out: "The kitchen is the room in the house people inhabit the most when they're awake.. .... It's where people look at their mail, where the answering machine is. It's the room people go into during TV commercials. And it makes sense you'd see the PC or the Internet move into the kitchen."

One of the key drivers behind this trend is the proliferation of broadband connections and wireless networks. This not only means that people can keep their PC connected to the Internet all the time, making it very easy to quickly access information, but also enables family members to work on the kitchen table using Wi-Fi enabled notebooks. Many of the users surveyed by Mr Cole report that this inevitably leads to increased family interaction and communication.

So, who knows? Perhaps one day the cliched stereotype of the teenage boy with zero social skills slinking off to play games alone in his bedroom will disappear and be replaced by one of mum, dad, son, and daughter sat together at the kitchen table all happily working, playing, and talking with each other while busily tapping away at their computers.

Issues, Controversies, & Statistics

2003-12-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a fresh new "issue" combined with a "statistic" or two to stir up a "controversy" and spur people into action. That, I imagine, must have been the motivation behind Kofi Anand's comments in his speech at the World Summit on the Information Society that world is now suffering from "a content divide. Much of the information on the web is not relevant to the real needs of people".

Not suprisingly, perhaps, the culprit is English: nearly 70% of Internet sites are produced in this language, "at times crowding out local voices and needs."

It's hard not to get cynical about comments like these: How does one, for example, define what are the "real needs of people"? Or how does the proportion of "relevant" content published on the Internet compare with amount of "relevant" content published in traditional print and broadcast media. Do the endless reports of government leaders attending meetings or making speeches that are pumped out ad nauseum on many state controlled TV channels throughout the world count as "relevant" or "irrelevant" to the "real needs of people"? Unfortunately, the Secretary General is strangely silent on such issues.

The sad irony is, of course, that the Internet, PCs, and cellular phone networks are providing the most convenient and lowest cost vehicles for generating and distributing content in our history. The results of presidential elections have been impacted by mass SMS messaging through cell phones in quite a number countries, and a US presidential candidate has shot into prominence as a result of the savvy use of blogging and email.

It's very disappointing that the Secretary General doesn't seem to understand the real communications revolution that is happening in the world and prefers instead to indulge in empty rhetoric.

Earthquakes

2003-12-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

Just as I was composing my latest entry a few hours ago, Taipei got hit with a nasty little earthquake. At only 2 points on the Richter scale, it wasn't particularly strong but nonetheless it made the building shake and sway. In addition, it seemed to go for an uncomfortably long time.

Even after living in Taipei for over 15 years, I can't say that I've ever got used to earthquakes, so while other colleagues calmly went on with their work I was ready to dive under the desk at the earliest sign of trouble. Not that that would have been much use if a really massive quake had hit.

This event has quite upset the train of thought I was following when writing my original entry today, which concerned the UN's World Summit on the Information Society, which is starting in Geneva today. So I'll move on to that tomorrow. In the meantime, I recommend you visit the BBC website, which has some very interesting coverage on the event in its Technology Section.

2003-12-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

I can't say that it's been easy dealing with the allegations that have been made against senior VIA executives over the past few days and reading all the negative reports that have appeared about the company in the media. Under such circumstances, the best you can do is try and be open as possible with people about what actually happened and not let the hostile questioning or negative comments upset you. All I can say is that I fully believe in their innocence and that I have no doubt in my mind that the charges will prove to be totally unfounded.

2003-12-03T20:53:00.000-08:00

Hyperion Drivers

2003-12-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

I'd like to apologize for any problems that people have experienced with the Hyperion 4in1 4.50 drivers that were released last week,

These drivers were removed from the download page on VIA Arena and from the VIA Arena ftp once we started receiving reports of the drivers causing problems. These drivers were officially tested and certified by Microsoft and VIA to work correctly and efficiently with Windows Operating systems that have Microsoft certified drivers installed.

After detailed investigation of the issues that have been reported, we found that they only occur with systems configured with 1GB or more of memory and an ATI graphics card where the AGP aperture has been set above 32MB.

We are currently working on a new revision of the driver that changes the default size of the AGP aperture to 32MB, and will also be posting more information about this issue on VIA Arena this afternoon.

Once again, I'm very sorry about this.

2003-11-30T21:08:00.000-08:00

Setting up your own company takes no small amount of courage, not to mention a large dose of creativity, vision, and entrepreneurial spirit - particularly if you are planning to enter the fiercely competitive high-tech business. In his article on "how to build a robotics company", Thomas Burick, President of Whitebox Robotics, gives a fascinating account of how he was inspired to create the prototype of the 912 PC-Bot and enter the robotics market.

For Thomas, the key to taking this momentous step was finding a flexible standard platform that would help minimize development costs and enable high volume production. "We were searching long and hard to develop some kind of standard that people would quickly feel comfortable with," he recounts, but then came the 'Eureka' moment": "The elusive answer was under my nose the whole time. I own a small chain of computer stores in Pennsylvania. While working on a PC one afternoon, I innocently thought to myself 'why can't robots be as easy to build as a white box PC?' Just then a light bulb came on with the intensity of a nuclear bomb. From that moment on I was focused as a bullet."

Having worked on the development of a number of prototypes, his goal now is to "position the 912 as "the" industry standard mobile platform. By using standard off-the-shelf PC parts, it allows all of us to be on the same page. That standard propelled the PC industry 20 years ago, now it's our turn."

With a clear vision like that, who can doubt the Thomas will be successful!

India Rising

2003-11-29T06:37:00.000-08:00

Having visited India quite a few times over the past couple of years, I can't say I've been too surprised to see the recent rash of articles that has appeared in the mainstream news and business media about the country's rapidly growing importance in the global economy. There are a lot of exciting developments going on there, particularly in the IT industry, many of them involving a lot more than setting up call centers and offering low cost IT services.

For a comprehensive analysis of what is happening in India and how this is impacting the US economy, you should check out the latest edition of Business Week. Its article on the Rise of India makes for some extremely interesting reading.

In Search of Stupidity

2003-11-27T20:57:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters", which was kindly given to a me as birthday present, and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about the history of our glorious industry. Not only is the author, Rick Chapman, extremely funny in the way he recounts the numerous fiascos that have occured in this business over the past two decades, but, having worked for a number of software companies himself in a variety of high-level product marketing positions, he is also very knowledgeable about the industry and its inner workings.

It is this insider's view that enables him to balance the humorous asides with insightful analysis and to give some very convincing (not to mention scary) descriptions of how companies like Lotus and Novell so quickly lost a seemingly invincible leadership position as a result of a few bone-headed decisions by a clueless management.

My only complaint about the book is that Chapman is a lot less sure-footed when he covers the hardware side of the business than he is writing about software companies. Intel's notorious bunnymen were a mere twinkle in the company's eye when the infamous Pentium bug hit, and were not sprung on an unsuspecting world until the MMX version of the processor was launched.

That aside, this is a wonderfully entertaining book. For more information, please visit the In Search of Stupidity website, which is full of reviews, videos, cartoons, and a lot of other fun stuff.

The Many Shapes of Tomorrow's PC

2003-11-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

ZDNet has posted a very interesting article from Business Week on "The Many Shapes of Tomorrow's PC". It predicts that "the PC as we know it may be on the cusp of an historic transformation", and goes on to outline the key trends that are driving this change.

One very important point it makes is that, as the x86 architecture proliferates, we are going to see the emergence of more specialized PC-like devices targeted at specialized tasks such as playing digital movies and music and handling communications over the Internet, and it goes on to predict that these devices will be "similar inside but look wildly different on the outside."

We are of course beginning to see this very trend taking shape with the plethora of different devices that are being developed using our VIA EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard. Sometimes I still find myself shaking my head in wonderment that something so small could be turning into something so big!

2003-11-25T21:06:00.000-08:00

If you're wondering whether our recent talk about PC-Bots emerging as a new market category is pure PR hype, I strongly recommend that you download the presentations and accompanying audio files from the Robotics panel we held at Piero's in Las Vegas last Tuesday, which have just been posted on the VIA website.

We had a very distinguished group of speakers on the panel, including Dan Kara from Robotics Trends, Paolo Pirjanian from Evolution Robotics, Fred Nikgohar from RoboDynamics, Cosma Pabouctsidis from RoboteQ, Scott Friedman from SEEGRID Corporation, and Thomas Burick from White Box Robotics , as well as our Robotics Program Manager Tim Brown. And they all delivered the same key message: robotics is no longer confined to the realms of science fiction - it is happening now!

One of the key reasons for this is that most - if not all - the enabling technologies required for building PC-Bots are now in place, including low power x86 processors such as our own VIA C3, wireless technologies like 802.11b, motion sensors, image processing, voice/speech recognition, and software tools and applications for functions like navigation. By bringing some these technologies together on a reliable, low power, and affordable platform such as the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX and adding in some industry standard components such as a web cam, then suddenly the cost barriers to innovation are lowered and wonderful things start to happen like the 912 from White Box Robotics, the IO PC Bot from Robodynamics, and the RoboteQ mobile robot that we had on display last week.

Naturally, we are still in the very early stages of the development of the PC-Bot market, but that's what makes it extremely exciting. There are no limits, as far as I can see, to the levels of innovation that can be achieved by combining a standard x86 platform with ingenuity and imagination.

2003-11-24T17:27:00.000-08:00

The first day in the office after a long trip is always tough to deal with. There are so many things that can be communicated much more effectively face to face rather than through email, instant messaging or a phone conversation, and they tend to accumulate while you are away.

My major task over the next couple of weeks is to put together our marketing strategy for next year. This is no simple task these days given our ever-growing product portfolio and all the new businesses we are entering. Quite a few reporters and analysts I met during my trip commented that they were having trouble keeping up with all the developments in VIA. Simply put, we have to do a much better job of communicating what exactly we are doing and why exactly we are doing it. Easy to say, but not quite so easy to do...

LocustWorld have posted a short report and some nice photos of our event in Las Vegas last week. You can find it here.

Mini-ITX.com also has a gallery of pictures of the "robot petting zoo" here. More on the rise of the PC-Bots tomorrow....

2003-11-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

I'm still recovering from England's victory over Australia in the Rugby World Cup Final. The Aussies certainly made our boys work hard for it - and the tension was excruciating. By the time the match was finished, I was totally exhausted.

Two excellent reviews of sound cards from M-Audio and AudioTrak on Soundcardcentral and TechConnect. It's not often that our products pick up three awards in one weekend!

Slowly but surely I can feel the momentum growing behind our audio, and I'm confident that next year we'll be in a position to really start challenging Creative.

2003-11-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

Got back to Taipei late last night. There used to be a time you could fly direct from SFO, but these days you have to go through Tokyo - adding an extra four or five hours to the schedule.

It's nice to be home, but I can only focus on one thing: the Rugby World Cup Final pitting England against Australia. It would be great to see England win a world championship for the first time in nearly forty years....

2003-11-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Am returning to Taipei this morning, so I have a nice 17-hour flight (including all the connections) ahead of me. Can't say I'm exactly looking forward to it.

We've posted a few pictures of the Lunch@Piero's event on the VIA website at http://www.via.com.tw/en/events/pieros2003.jsp. There are a lot of very interesting devices, including the MediaREADY 4000 Series Internet/DVD Entertainment Platform from Video Without Boundaries and the children-friendly EyeQ system featuring a school bus chassis. In addition, there are a number of photos taken during the robotics seminar, including the new 912 PC-Bot from Whitebox Robotics.

The PC-Bots are also featured in an article on CNN and will be on one of CNN's shows this weekend. I for one will be watching out for it!

Comdex Part 2

2003-11-18T23:17:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of my earlier posting regarding our community networking session at Lunch@Piero's.

The technology behind Locustworld's mesh networking is quite amazing, enabling it to automatically adjust traffic loads across nodes without the need for intervention by an administrator. Security levels are also very high as a result of advanced data encryption protocols.

So what's the motivation behind Locustworld's strategy? According to Richard: "There's nobody that doesn't want broadband" (a sentiment I would wholeheartedly agree with!), and his goal is to bring broadband to places that wouldn't otherwise be able to have it. Already, customers have set up networks in villages in the UK, a university in Malaysia, and even Vivian, Louisiana, with a lot more projects in the pipeline.

There are a number of factors that have enabled Locustworld to move so far so quickly, including the availability of our EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard, open source software that is more robust than many commercially available packages and is also being constantly reviewed and improved by an army of volunteer testers, and a low cost business model that enables both Locustworld and its customers to make money. Last but not least, Richard ascribed the company's growing success to "a couple of guys with the willingness to work hard and break the rules."

It is this very combination of a powerful entrepreneurial spirit and the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom that is making many of our embedded customers successful and provides the best source of hope for the industry's future development.

Comdex Part 1

2003-11-18T05:59:00.000-08:00

Even if the crowds weren't as big as before at Comdex this year, I certainly had a very interesting day. The highlight was the Lunch@Piero's event we participated in during the morning. I was very excited by all the amazing new products our partners had on display there. From digital media centers and and mesh network routers to educational consoles and robots, there was just about everything - except for a conventional white box PC!

A common refrain I heard from our customers was that they were able to take a VIA EPIA Mini-ITX platform and combine it with industry standard components such as a web camera and create a unique product at almost zero cost. Never have the barriers to innovation been lower!

The community wireless networking seminar we held at the event proved to be absolutely fascinating - not to mention highly educational for me. Terry Schmidt, the founder of NYC Wireless, gave a highly entertaining account of how his non-profit organisation has been working to build a free wireless networking infrastructure in New York. NYC Wireless has set up quite a number of connections throughout the city in places such as Byrant Park, and Terry claimed that wherever you may be in Manhattan you are only five minutes away from a free connection. For more information, please visit www.nycwireless.net.

While Terry has been focusing his energies on building up a free wireless infrastructure in one of the largest cities in the world, Richard Landis of LocustWorld laid out even an even more sweeping vision in his presentation on wireless mesh networking. A company that has been in operation for less than two years, Locustworld is dedicated to creating a worldwide movement that will enable the implementation of vast wireless networks that are cheap to deploy, secure, and intelligent. In other words, as Richard so aptly described it, the holy grail of networking.

(More to follow in my next entry)

2003-11-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

Great to see that England beat France and is now in the Rugby World Cup Final. Can't wait to watch the game against Australia next weekend.

We have provided an EPIA CL Mini-ITX motherboard to the Linux Router Project. This looks like a very interesting potential application for the board, which comes with two integrated LAN ports. Please click here for the full details.

Slashdot is also hosting a lively discussion on Project GigaQube, which has the objective of "Transform(ing) a relatively useless Cobalt Qube into a small, quiet, and cool looking Unix server with gobs and gobs of storage." Naturally, this also uses a VIA EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard!

Comdex

2003-11-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

I'm preparing to fly to Las Vegas tomorrow for Comdex, and while this year's show promises to be only a shadow of its former self, it seems that a lot of people from the industry will still be gathering there.

This year we will not be having a booth at the show, but will instead be showing a number of "Inspired by VIA" product innovations at a press-only Lunch@Piero's event on Monday and Tuesday, including digital media entertainment centers, mesh networking routers, and PC-Bots. In addition, we'll also be hosting seminars and panel discussions on WiFi: Community Networks and Security on Monday and Robots: The New PC Convergence on Tuesday.

Wireless mesh networking is a subject I have covered in a previous blog entry and one that excites me greatly, because of the potential it has to provide remote communities with high bandwidth Internet access. In addition to examining the technical and commercial feasibility of community networking, the session will also look at some of the key challenges faced in building next generation networks, such as security.

As for robotics, this is becoming a hot topic with even the the United Nations Economic Commission predicting a ten-fold growth in the Personal and Service Robotics sector over the next few years, and we will be looking at how to translate this potential into commercial reality. We'll also be showing a number of very interesting PC-Bots designs based on our VIA EPIA Mini-ITX Mainboard from companies entering the robotics market. So please watch out for more details early next week.

For more information about our activities in Las Vegas, you can also visit the VIA website at: http://www.via.com.tw/en/events/pieros2003.jsp

VOIP Telephony

2003-11-14T08:52:00.000-08:00

Good to be back on the slightly warmer and less windy West Coast. The ascent out of Washington Dulles last night was extremely bumpy as a result of the heavy winds - not an experience I'd like to repeat!

I had a very interesting time yesterday with the people from Nimble. The most impressive demo I saw was when they made a Voice Over IP telephone call to California on the Nimble V5 using an application called SymPhone made by a company called Telesym. The beauty of this software is that it enables you to make a VOIP call to ANY cell phone or land line number in the US or overseas (if you are calling from the US) - rather than only being able to hook up with other people running the same application on their computer, as is the case with many other similar VOIP programs.

The sound quality of the call was absolutely wonderful, certainly as good as what you would get from a land line and better than many US cellular connections. This was to a large degree helped by the echo-free audio system on the Nimble V5, which also enables you to make calls without having to wear a headset - thereby overcoming yet another limitation of VOIP telephony on PCs, which generally don't have the right audio features to do this.

I still feel I am quite a novice when it comes to the world of VOIP telephony, but after yesterday's eye-opener I'm certainly beginning to wake up to its possibilities!

Nimble V5

2003-11-13T07:36:00.000-08:00

I'm in Washington today, the first time I've visited the US capital, but unfortunately I don't have any time to visit the major sights because I'm busy with a customer promoting their Nimble V5 system.

A full-featured small form factor PC with a full duplex echo-free speaker that makes it ideal for video conferencing, the Nimble V5 is one of the most innovative products that has been developed using our VIA Eden platform. However, perhaps because of its very uniqueness, it is proving quite a challenge to communicate the product's benefits to an audience that has been "educated" for so many years as to what a PC should like like.

The first major communications challenge is presented by the product's size. Measuring just 5.2cm x 19.5cm x 19.5cm, the Nimble V5 is extremely small compared to a PC or even one of the new small form factor boxes such as those from Shuttle. As a result, the first question many people ask when they see the device is: "does it run Windows XP?" And even when you say it does, you have to demo the machine to them before they really believe you.

The second major challenge is explaining how the system has been optimized for video conferencing and Voice Over IP technology with its full duplex speaker that has been built into the front of the chassis to deliver great echo free sound and easy to use controls. Again, seeing (or in this case listening) is believing!

Last but not least, what should we call the device? As I mentioned above, The Nimble V5 is a PC so we don't want to confuse people by removing any mention of that. But it's also a communications device. Perhaps Nimble have got it right by calling it a Personal Communicator + Computer - or PC2 for short. I for one can't think of anything better than that.

Here's hoping that one day I'll be able to match the engineering innovation with my own marketing innovation. In the meantime, any ideas you may have would be warmly welcomed.

Seasonal or Fundamental

2003-11-13T00:13:00.000-08:00

I had fun at the Gartner techinvestor summit yesterday, and met a lot of interesting people. I had to spend a lot of time answering the same old question, though: is the current strong demand seasonal or fundamental? My own opinion is that we are just at the start of a resurgence in the high-tech market rather than in a mere seasonal blip, but this is based as much on intuition as it is on raw data. It won't be until the first half of next year until I know whether I'm right or not.

Gartner Tech Investor Summit

2003-11-12T01:59:00.000-08:00

Arrived in New York yesterday evening, and will be presenting today at the Gartner techinvestor summit. This is the first time the event has been held, and I am greatly looking forward to it. It'll be interesting to see what kind of mood investors are in as well. Wall Street really hasn't made up its mind on the future outlook for the tech industry.

WSIS

2003-11-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

While I was on the road last week, a colleague sent me a link to this article on the BBC about the forthcoming UN world summit on the information society, to be held in Geneva from 10 - 12 December.

The piece neatly summarizes some of the challenges faced in bridging the so-called digital divide between developed and emerging countries. As I suppose should be expected, however, money - not technology - is at the heart of the problem, with many emerging countries asking for the creation of a digital solidarity fund to cover the cost of their programs and developed countries favoring private investment and the redirection of current aid.

While additional funding may be appropriate in certain circumstances, I've heard far too many horror stories of grandiose IT aid projects that have failed to believe that sinking large sums of money into this area will help solve the problem. Opportunities for potential abuse and waste are too great in even the most well-intentioned projects, and the failure to take into local conditions can result in such absurdities as the installation of computers in schools without electricity!

A more approach would be to focus on small-scale projects that can be implemented quickly and cheaply, and most important of all deliver tangible benefits to the target community, such as enabling video classrooms with teachers in cities or real-time doctor consultations. Once experience has been gained, then the projects can be scaled out to meet the needs of even more people.

My hope is that the delegates at the WSIS will focus more on these type of issues rather than on empty rhetoric and political grandstanding. It is going to be very interesting to see what happens at this conference.

2003-11-10T05:13:00.000-08:00

Time to get back to some serious posting on this blog. I've been suffering from a creative block over the past couple of weeks, induced perhaps by the impending approach of middle age. Anyway, I reached the big "four-oh" yesterday, so now I can put all that angst behind me and start finding out whether it's true that life begins at forty!

QBM

2003-10-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

Despite a couple of reports that have appeared on the web saying that VIA is dropping support for Quad Band Memory, we are in fact continuing to work on enabling this technology in our chipsets. Unfortunately, I don't have any detailed information right now, but will post an update as soon as the situation becomes clearer.

Mike Kanellos has a fun piece on CNet covering the top seven conspiracy theories "run(ning) rampant in the high-technology industry". Still, these seem pretty small beer compared to the controversy raging over the England fielding a "16th man" in its match with Samoa last Sunday...

Urban Wireless Traffic Jams

2003-10-23T22:38:00.000-07:00

Remember the Y2K bug that was going to send all our computer systems down? Well now, if you live in a city, you've got something new to worry about: the coming urban WiFi crash of 2004!

In ominous, stentorian tones that would make Nostradamus proud, Aberdeen Group is predicting that there will be "a massive wireless traffic jam in urban and suburban areas by 2004, rendering the unwired experience with more aggravation than reward". This is because "the confluence of dense living (e.g., apartment houses) and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi LAN technology have reached saturation in some places."

The report goes on to note that increased radio interference will be the major cause of this forthcoming crisis as more and more wireless networks spring up next to each other and compete for the limited spectrum used by 802.11b and 802.11g networks.

From my history lessons at school I still remember the name of Thomas Malthus, a 19th century clergyman who famously predicted that population growth would outstrip available resources, raising the specter of mass starvation if reproduction among the "lower classes" was not controlled. Malthus' dire warnings never came to pass, however, for a number of reasons, one of the most important being the technological advances in food production that came about during the agricultural revolution and significantly increased the available food supply.

In the same vein, I can see no reason why there won't be technological fixes to these wireless network issues as they arise. Many of the brightest minds in the industry are already working on them.

In any case, I'm certainly not planning to move to the countryside anytime soon to escape the urban WiFi crash of 2004 - even though I live in one of the most densely populated areas on earth. For one thing, there aren't that many rural areas yet that have high speed broadband connections....

The Stealth Computer

2003-10-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

It's not every day I get my name in the New York Times (well, it's the first time actually), so today I am luxuriating in the afterglow generated by this article on The Stealth Computer. (Free Registration is Required).

As I am quoted in the article, the biggest suprise we had when we introduced the Mini-ITX form factor was the incredibly positive response we received from the enthusiast community. Given the board's limited performance when compared to a P4 or Athlon XP, we never expected it would be embraced so warmly by the community and used in so many creative projects. In recent months, other companies have identified the "gaming enthusiast" as a key in driving the adoption of new technologies. In a sense they are right, but once someone has the fastest machine available and tweaked it to its limits, what can they do next? As we have learned from our experience with the Mini-ITX, many people want to build a second or third machine to add to their network and they want to have fun doing it and channel their energies in new directions that go beyond overclocking.

I wish I could claim that the growing popularity of the Mini-ITX has been the result of some brilliant pro-active marketing strategy that one day will be turned into a Harvard Business School case study; but in reality it's been a case of listening to the feedback we receive from the market on our platforms and trying to respond as fast as we can to the requests we receive from our customers.

So, after enjoying a relaxing afterglow cigarette, it's time to get back to business.

Wireless Mesh Networks

2003-10-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

How do you extend the reach of broadband to small distant communities? Laying down more high-speed pipes is of course one solution, but particularly in the case of remote areas this can be prohibitively expensive and in the eyes of most telecommunications companies wouldn't generate the appropriate return on investment.

A company called LocustWorld has come up with a very interesting solution to this problem with the Meshbox, which enables the creation of 802.11 wireless mesh networks. Potential applications for this product are simply enormous in both developed and emerging economies, and it is already being used for a number of British community networks in places as far apart as Devon and Scotland. Check out this Community Networks link for more information.

New Computing

2003-10-19T22:24:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking quite a lot over the weekend about the comments I quoted in my previous blog entry from Ben Schneiderman, author of Leonardo's notebook.

The idea of computing being about "what people can do" and "creativity and empowerment for everyone" is an extremely powerful one, and although I agree with his comments about the industry needing to improve the quality of the computing experience I do believe that we have made great strides in this regard over the past few five years or so.

Blogs are a perfect example of the kind of creativity and empowerment that the computer has enabled. For almost zero cost, people now have the opportunity to express their thoughts and share them with a massive potential audience - without the need to undertake the huge financial risk involved in launching a traditional paper-based publication.

It's not just text based creativity that the computer has liberated either. Video is another great example. Now, for the price of a digital video camera and an editing application such as ULead Video Studio, you have all the tools you need to create high quality videos. About the only major expense you'll incur is the time you spend on learning the application and tuning your skills. Talk about breaking down the barriers to entry of what was until only a very few years ago an activity that was almost the exclusive province of professionals and well-off individuals.

In fact, for all the issues that the industry faces, I would say that the new computing has already begun. The challenge we face as an industry now is to proliferate it so that eveyone can enjoy its benefits.

2003-10-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to go on a short trip, there's one thing I'd love above all others: a universal power adapter that I could use for my phone, Pocket PC, notebook, and digital video camera. Just imagine how much space that would save, not to mention time spent on untangling wires!

I've noticed quite a bit of coverage on the web of a new book called Leonardo's Laptop, which talks about the need for a new approach to computer hardware and software interface design. In an interview with the MIT Press, the author Ben Schneiderman makes some very interesting points:

"The old computing is what computers can do; the new computing is about what people can do.

Our experience with information and communications technology could be dramatically better. It's time to get angry at the quality of our computing environments: too many crashes, too many confusing designs, too many frustrations. We need to pressure software, hardware, and network developers to work together to develop more reliable and comprehensible products.

The new computing is also about creativity and empowerment for everyone. Effective designs should be usable by young and old, novice and expert, well and poorly educated, owners of new and older computers, speakers of English and other languages. Universal usability can improve the experience for all users.

The new computing is about enabling us to concentrate on our personal needs and support our relationships with others. We appreciate information and communication technologies most when we can accomplish our goals with a sense of safety and mastery. The new computing technologies will enable us to calmly communicate, create and explore."

Definitely one for my shopping cart the next time I make a trip over to Amazon.

Product Launches

2003-10-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

Even though I've been in this business for a long time and been involved in hundreds of product roll-outs, I still get butterflies in my stomach before a major announcement. Will the media cover the story? Will they accept the positioning of the part? How will the performance come out? Have we provided decent collateral and materials? These are some of the questions that stop me from sleeping on the eve of a launch - and they always seem to find a way of piercing my brain no matter how I try to repel them.

So it was a pleasant relief to turn on my computer this morning and review all the coverage on the web of our VIA Eden N processor launch. Now I can sleep a little easier at night, at least until the next major announcement!

Security

2003-10-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

As has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Henry, the head of our Centaur processor design team, will be announcing a new processor core at Microprocessor Forum in San Jose tomorrow. Without going into too many details, probably the most interesting aspect of this core is its new embedded hardware security features that have been added to address the growing concerns about data protection, identity theft, etc among corporate, government and home users.

The industry's track record in security has been very mixed so far, to put it very politely, and we hope that through our hardware based approach we can make a contribution towards resolving some of the key issues that need to be addressed in this area. However, having the highest performance hardware encryption features on the planet is of zero value if there are no software applications to take advantage of them. As a result, a key focus of our strategy is to step up our engagement with the developer community in order to enable applications that can be quickly and cheaply deployed by the customer. We have already started to make encouraging progress in this regard, as we will demonstrate at the Microprocessor Forum, but there's still a long road ahead of us.

Server Appliances

2003-10-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, a second new mini-itx based server product to mention in one week. Could this be the beginning of a major trend, I wonder?

Described by its maker Axentra as a Multifunction Server Appliance, the Rumba Server enables you to share your broadband connection over all the PCs and peripherals on your home network, protect your files and network with its inbuilt security features, create and manage your own web site and email accounts, and remotely access your files from any Internet connected PC when you are on the road. Rumba is run using Axentra's own Linux-based OEone Server Operating Environment, and comes with an additional bundle of graphics and web and desktop publishing applications. It can be ordered from the Axentra website at a price of US$499.

While two swallows do not a summer make, there is definitely a large potential market for affordable "servers in a box" like the Rumba and Mirra, provided of course the software is easy to use and network configuration is simple. The growing popularity of home wireless networks and the increasing complexity involved in managing larger and larger amounts of digital data make this trend almost inevitable. I wish both companies the best of luck with these exciting and innovative new products.

Great to see England's commanding victory against Georgia in the rugby today. Next stop South Africa.

Telecommunications Industry Coverage

2003-10-11T05:22:00.000-07:00

Both The Economist and Business Week have in-depth features on the telecommunications industry in their latest issues, coinciding no doubt with the ITU Telecom World event taking place in Geneva next week.

To me, the single most interesting statistic that came out of the articles is that more people now carry mobile phones (1.3 billion) than have fixed telephone lines (1.2 billion). With the number of mobile users expected to increase to 2 billion by 2007, wireless will clearly continue to be one of the industry's key growth drivers. However, that doesn't mean that fixed lines will go away, particularly if the telecommunications carriers can step up broadband deployment and start offering more value added services such as Voice Over IP telephony. Unfortunately, the broadband roll out is not as fast as it could be or should be: South Korea, which is cited as the most global leader in broadband deployment, has just over 20 households per hundred with high speed internet connections, while for called advanced economies such as the UK and Germany the number is less than five households per hundred.

I'm trying not to let myself get too distracted by the Rugby World Cup, but so far have been unable to resist the temptation of watching the games. Naturally, I expect England to win, but have seen too many false dawns before to have total confidence in their prospects. Besides, the French looked awfully good against Fiji today....

Double Tenth

2003-10-09T22:50:00.000-07:00

Today is the so-called "Double Tenth" holiday in Taiwan, which celebrates the founding of the Republic of China on 10 October 1911. When I first came here over 15 years ago, this was still a very important occasion with a large military parade taking place near the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei accompanied by an address from the president, but celebrations to mark this event are a lot less militaristic these days as the political landscape and peoples' attitudes have changed.

Although there is still a huge gap in political terms between the governments of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, economic and social ties have never been closer. Indeed, as I have seen at first hand in the high tech industry, a natural synergy has grown between both sides as they have come to depend on each other. Taiwan's motherboard and notebook makers would not be able to maintain their global competitiveness without having low cost, high volume manufacturing operations in China, while China would not be able build up its industrial, technological, and human resources infrastructure without the capital and management and technological expertise provided by Taiwanese investors. This is a win-win situation for both Taiwan and China, and I can only see both economies becoming more closely aligned in the future.

Personal Servers

2003-10-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

Recently, there's been quite a lot of talk in the media about Personal Servers becoming a hot new product category, but amid the hype there's very little real information detailing what such a device should look like or how it will actually be used.

Some vendors, for example, see the Personal Server as a portable device that you can use to carry around all your information with you and hook up to a screen in, say, the airport or shopping center, whenever you need to. On the surface, this may sound quite an interesting interesting idea, but building up the infrastructure to make this happen would require much higher levels of investment than are currently being made in wireless hotspots. LCD screens on open display are a lot more expensive -and more fragile - than a wireless router hidden away in back room somewhere.

In any case, with wireless notebooks gaining in popularity and mobile phones becoming developing more sophisticated data handling features, my own feeling is that most people would prefer a more efficient way of ACCESSING their personal data when they are away from their home rather than carrying it around with them in a separate device.

This is the approach that has been taken by a company called Mirra, which has recently announced their new Mirra Personal Server. Based on our VIA EPIA Mini-ITX Mainboard, Mirra automatically backs up all the files you create on the PCs on your home or small business network and allows you to access them remotely and securely from any Internet-enabled PC. The software also lets you share photos, videos, and other files with friends and family members through password protected accounts, eliminating the need to send out emails to them with massive file attachments.

With a personal data management system currently consisting of my notebook and an external USB 2.0 Hard Disk Drive for back up, I can see huge potential value in this product and can't wait to get my hands on one. It helps, too, of course that it is based on a VIA platform!

2003-10-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

For a taste of the atmostphere at Computex and VTF, you can go to the VIA Cinema page of our website and download a video that we took of the goings-on at both events. We've also posted a couple of fun promotional videos for our VIA Antaur processor and VIA K8T800 chipset. I hope you enjoy them.

Talking of the K8T800, as reported on HardOCP, AMD has posted a list of their recommended motherboards for the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor, the majority of which are based on our chipset. It's very enouraging to see the strong support we have received from our motherboard partners, and with the positive reviews that the products have been receiving in the web and print media, I'm sure that we'll be able to maintain our leadership on the AMD64 platform.

Microprocessor Forum is less than a week away, and Glenn Henry, the head of our Centaur design team, is gearing up to make his keynote there. The focus of his address will be slightly different than in previous years, and he has some very interesting announcements to make. It's taken us a while to properly learn the CPU business, but now I feel that we have finally defined our space in it.

2003-10-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just when I was wondering what to write about tonight, I was rescued by today's ZDNet newsletter, which features a link to this Web Economy Bullshit Generator. Judging by the large number of e-words and strange hybrids like "vortal", it's been around a while I would guess, but at least 90% of the entries remain full-fledged members of the high-tech marketing lexicon.

The front page of the site also has a link to a fun webpage called Ten Second Films which, surprise, surprise, hosts movies that are ten seconds long. In these days of instant news and entertainment, I guess that's about the average attention span:)

The Quiet American

2003-10-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched The Quiet American on DVD. What magnificent performances by Michael Caine as Thomas Fowler, a cynical and hard-bitten correspondent for the London Times, and Brendan Fraser as Alden Pyle, a young and idealistic CIA operative, who compete for the love of a young Vietnamese beauty called Phuong against the backdrop of the communist uprising against the French colonial rulers of Vietnam.

Based on a novel by written by Graham Greene in the early 1950's, the story is uncannily prophetic of the problems that America would run into later as it stepped up its intervention in Vietnam following the defeat the French, and the film's cinematography is absolutely stunning, wonderfully evoking the majesty and mystery of the country.

I'm surprised that the film didn't do very well at the box office. Based on Caine's performance alone, I would strongly recommend it.

Affordable Computing for India

2003-10-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

There's an interview with Professor Pathak of IIT Mumbai on Infoworld in which he talks about his vision of affordable computing for India. With only seven computers per thousand people, India is a long way behind China, which has 37 PCs per thousand, in terms of PC penetration, and the country needs to accelerate adoption amongst both businesses and consumers if it is to increase its global competitiveness.

To help address this issue, VIA has sponsored the establishment of an Affordable Computing Lab in IIT Mumbai as part of our empowered connectivity strategy. This is a project which I am closely involved with personally, and I'm very excited by the progress that has been made so far. India has tremendous software expertise, and we believe that our low power hardware platforms are ideal for harnessing its untapped potential.

VTF 2003

2003-10-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

This year's VIA Technology Forum was a great success, with excellent attendance at all three events and some very interesting keynote and technology track presentations covering a wide variety of topics concerning the industry. You can now download copies of these presentations in pdf format from our website at http://www.via.com.tw/en/vtf2003/vtf2003keynotes.jsp and http://www.via.com.tw/en/vtf2003/vtf2003speakers.jsp.

For me personally, the most stimulating presentation was given by Dr Deepak B. Phatak, the Subrao M. Nilekani Chair Professor & Head at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, who talked about the Indian Experience in Affordable IT Solutions. Professor Pathak's goal is simple yet ambitious: to double the current PC user base of 500 million people to a cool one billion, with the majority of those new users coming from Asia and Africa, including 100 million from India. The key to achieving that goal is to continue to drive down the total cost of ownership of computers by developing a more affordable client/server architecture that meets the needs of emerging market economies and enables local companies and organisations to create local value by creating new devices, applications, and services.

It will, of course, take time to achieve Professor Pathak's vision, but in a world where computers are playing an ever more integral role in delivering communication, education, information, and entertainment services, access to PCs and the Internet is increasingly becoming a social issue as well as an economic one. It's not much good MIT putting all its course materials on-line if only a small proportion of the global population can view them.

In his keynote, VIA CEO Wenchi Chen also addressed this subject when talking about our empowered connectivity strategy, the goal of which is to develop the appropriate platforms that will give the billions of "digital have-nots" access to the world of digital information. Over the past two or three years, we have made some encouraging progress in this direction through the development of our mini-itx motherboard platforms, but this is only the beginning. There's a long way to go before we reach the magic number of one billion.

Gaming Goes Mainstream

2003-09-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

To me, the most fascinating (and I am sure unintended) consequence of the AMD Athlon 64 processor launch, and to a lesser extent the Intel Pentium 4 Extreme introduction, has been the validation of gaming as a legitimate market segment not just in the eyes of the industry but also the mainstream media. While there has been some coverage of events like Quakecon in mainstream publications in the past, these were mainly technogeek or human interest stories. But as the Athlon 64 launch drew near, you suddenly started seeing articles appear in serious publications like the Wall Street Journal examining the gaming enthusiast from a business angle and talking about the rise of companies such as Falcon NorthWest and Voodoo that have been specifically set up to service the needs of these customers.

Overall, I believe that this is a healthy trend. The gaming community deserves a huge amount of credit and thanks for the role it has played in driving and validating the adoption of new generations of hardware and software technologies ever since the beginnings of the PC industry. But at the same time I am concerned that now gaming has been recognized as mainstream, the term will quickly become no more than a high-tech marketing cliche, blindly wandering around the same murky netherworld alongside words such as innovation in search of its original meaning. With the launch of the Athlon 64 FX and P4 Extreme, we already have the world's first "gamers' chips". I wonder what will be next!

2003-09-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

I've spent the day tidying up the loose ends from Computex and reviewing the coverage of the show on the web. It was good to see so many international reporters there despite the limited travel budgets, and judging by the articles I've seen they certainly found plenty to write about - not just the products but also the "booth babes" who were out in force on the showfloor.

If there was one single theme to the show it was that - although the desktop PC remains important - convergence is the next Big Thing. Virtually all the major motherboard companies were showing small form factor living room PCs, and no booth was complete without massive flat panel displays. Indeed, I don't think it's too fanciful to predict that in three to five years time that the major focus of Computex will be Consumer Electronics rather than computers. All the signs point in that direction.

For VIA, the centrepiece of Computex was our VIA Technology Forum, a full day event which took place last Wednesday in the Hyatt and included keynotes and tech tracks from such leading industry luminaries as Morris Chang, Chairman of TSMC. In fact, Dr Chang presented our CEO Wenchi Chen with the one millionth wafer produced by TSMC for VIA at VTF. One million wafers are equivalent to roughly 400 million chipsets, and represent quite a milestone in the development of VIA. Now the race is on to reach the next million....

Computex 2003

2003-09-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

Computex is finally over, and all I can say is 'what a week!' I'd originally thought that the show would be a lot slower than in previous years because of the switch from June to September, but it turned out that a lot of people I talked to prefered the new date because they could nail down the final details of their Xmas business and make sure that their vendors were meeting their delivery schedules. It helped a lot, too, that the weather now is so much cooler than in June, and that the prospects for the fourth quarter are looking a lot more positive than over the past couple of years. There's nothing like an uptick in business to improve the mood!

2003-09-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

As the Inquirer has already noted, VIA will be having a booth for the first time at the Intel Developer Forum, which starts later today. We'll be showing our new PT880 chipset with dual channel memory support and the new S3 Graphics DeltaChrome DX9 graphics controller. So if you happen to be in San Jose for the event, please check out our booth.

Yesterday, we announced our new VIA Envy24 HT-S audio controller for 8-channel sound cards. Products featuring this chip are already available from customers like Mad Dog Multimedia through stores such as CompUSA at very reasonable prices. Audio may not be quite as glamorous as graphics, but it's just as important given how many people use their PCs to listen to music or Internet radio, and I'm very encouraged by the response we are receiving to our audio products on the market.

2003-09-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

With Computex and VTF only a week away, I've got an extremely busy few days ahead of me. No matter how far you plan ahead, there are always a lot of last minute emergencies that need to be dealt with and last minute changes that need to be made to booth layouts, presentations, and press releases. Fortunately, I've already stocked up with enough nicotine and caffeine to see myself through the long days and nights, and - much more importantly - I have a great marketing team working alongside me.

2003-09-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

I first got the inspiration to write a blog when I met Rajesh Jain, who runs a company called Netcore and maintains his own blog at www.emergic.org, in which - among other things - he expounds his vision for bringing affordable computing to India and other countries. Rajesh is a very eloquent speaker and an equally elegant writer with some incredibly creative ideas for extending the reach of technology to the billions of people that so far haven't benefitted from it.

While driving down the costs of the hardware will of course be one of the key requirements to achieving this objective, affordable computing is about a lot more than simply driving down the prices of PCs even further. You also have to be able to add value to the machines through, for example, the integration of wireless technologies and the innovative use of video and other multimedia formats. In my trips to India, I've seen a lot of innovative work being done in this area but there's still a long way to go before many of the proposed devices are ready to hit the market. Hopefully after Computex and VTF are over, I'll have more time to devote to some of these projects.

On another subject, the author William Gibson has "LAST POSTCARD FROM COSTA DEL BLOG" but he does end with the words: "Perhaps I’ll be back, one day, somewhere on the far side of whatever it is I’m about to start writing."

I've greatly enjoyed reading his cryptic comments over the past few months, but if his next book is anywhere near as good as Pattern Recognition then I guess it'll his absence from the blogging stage will be worth it.

Half Life 2

2003-09-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

When I did a tour of US tech investors in August, I was quite surprised that hardly any of them had heard of QuakeCon let alone the forthcoming Half-Life 2. But maybe they'll start waking up to the importance of gaming to the high-tech business now that Fortune just published a cover story on the video game industry, and maybe - just maybe - they'll even recognise the name of Gabe Newell of Valve Software one day.

While I'm sure that Gabe had no plans of turning himself into a household name, the comments he made about the performance of Nvidia's graphics chips running Half-Life 2 during the presentation he gave at ATI's "Shader Day" have set off a firestorm of controversy and made him the talk of the hardware websites. For more information check out the excellent coverage of the issues involved on Anandtech and HardOCP.

All I can say is that I'm glad I can sit this one out. Core logic marketing battles can be tough at times, but they're a walk in the park compared to what goes on between the graphics guys!

Interestingly enough, judging by the slides I've seen, Gabe's PowerPint presentation was done using the default template featuring black text on a white background. Even the performance graphs are rudimentary at best and there's not a single clip art or photo in sight. A lesson indeed on how to give good PowerPoint!

PowerPoint

2003-09-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Have pretty much built my career on my ability to use PowerPoint, I've gained a certain amount of affection for the program over the years and am almost beginning to sympathise with it for the serial abuse this humble application has suffered at the hands of inept users. At one extreme, there are "form over function fiends" who are so enamoured by the richness of the program's features that they feel no deck of slides is complete without a full-blown animation, cute clip arts and photos, and multicolored graphs and pivot tables. While on the other extreme, you get the "you should be grateful I'm here" crowd who are so poorly prepared for their presentation that they simply read every word on each slide and go into each graph and diagram in mind numbing detail.

What both extremes (and almost everybody in between) seem to have forgotten is that people don't go to a presentation to look at the PowerPoint slides; they go to see and listen to the speaker. And if the speaker can't talk knowledgeably about the subject of his or her presentation, they are not going to be impressed no matter how pretty or detailed the slides are. In other words, PowerPoint is simply a tool to help you organise your thoughts and assemble the necessary information before you give your presentation; it is a starting point of a conversation with your audience - not the destination.

I have a few simple rules for giving good PowerPoint. The first and most basic one is that I always try to write any presentation myself rather than relying on my staff to do it for me. That enables me to get my thoughts together and develop a clear narrative for the presentation. Secondly, while I do use some graphics, for example diagrams and product photos, I try to keep them to a minimum and only use multimedia such as videos when I think they are really necessary. Third, I never give out printed copies of my presentation to the audience beforehand. If you do that, half of the audience will already have read through slides before you've even started and won't feel the need to pay attention while you are talking. Last but not least, when I speak I try to maintain eye contact with members of the audience. This can feel a little unnatural at first, particularly if you are in a large room, but it makes the audience feel you are paying attention to them.

So the next time you have to sit through a long and boring presentation don't curse poor old PowerPoint. It's the speaker who is to blame.

Chinese Mid Autumn Festival

2003-09-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a traditional holiday in China and Taiwan that takes place on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month to mark the coming of the autumnal equinox. To celebrate this event, families come together, eat mooncakes (disgusting concoctions in my opinion made of such exotic ingredients as bean paste, egg yolk, lotus seeds, dates, pineapple, walnuts, almonds, and sesame) and gaze at the full moon.

Unfortunately, it's raining today and there is heavy cloud cover, so I pretty much doubt we'll get to see the moon. But at least I have a day off to spend with the family and give my batteries a final charge before the run up to Computex and VTF. With all the work that still needs to be done, the next week and a half promises to be brutal.

MIT OpenCourseWare

2003-09-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

There's a very interesting article on the BBC home page describing the huge success that MIT has enjoyed with its OpenCourseWare project that offers free online access to the institution's courses. Over 100 million hits have been recorded since the site was opened a year ago, and the number of courses available online will have risen from 50 to 500 by the end of this month.

What is most interesting about this project is that it doesn't offer degrees or diplomas, but simply makes the course materials freely available to anyone who wants to use them as an aid to their own studies. Currently, MIT is the only university to offer this kind of service, but hopes that other institutions will follow its example. Just imagine the benefits that would be generated if all the world's leading universities made their course materials freely available on the Internet and created a virtual educational version of the Library of the Congress. Instead of confining their knowledge to a small and highly privileged group of a few hundred students, the world's greatest professors and teachers could share their expertise with a much wider global audience that can make use of it in their own careeers and communities.

Amateurisation

2003-09-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

"Amateur" is one of those unfortunate words whose original meaning has been so distorted and diluted over time that it has almost been lost to people alive today. Based on Amare, the Latin verb to love, amateur originally referred to someone who did something for pleasure, such as writing poems or playing a game like soccer or cricket, but as people began to be paid for their ability at sports it became an antonym of the word "professional". As a result, terms such as "amateurish" are now pejorative, as if somebody who does something for money must by some mysterious force of nature be better at this activity than someone who does it for mere (or should I say pure) enjoyment.

But after reading Tom Coates' piece entitled (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything.... , it struck me that the word amateur has an excellent chance not only to reclaim its original meaning but also gain some revenge for the rough treatment it has received at the hands of so-called professionalism. Coates argues forcfeully that the "rise in the power of computers and a drop in the price of sophisticated software" has led to an explosion in the "unprofessional production" of personal media content because "because the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years." Or in more practical terms:

"Today we have applications that are supplied free with our computers that allow us to assemble video footage into forms that can be burnt onto DVDs and played on our home televisions. Other free applications allow us to touch-up photographs or be our own DJ. There's a vibrant culture in making animations with Flash or Director while for a few thousand pounds it's possible to download enough high quality applications to record and mix music in the home - or even to compose it. Professional video-editing software and high-powered computers have dropped to such a price that now it's possible to create broadcast-quality TV shows with little more than a DV camera, an Apple Powerbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro... Weblogging software is an almost trivial example of this process - but while the technology that lies behind weblogging is more basic - the power it provides is just as real..."

The implications of his words are extremely exciting. The creative opportunities opened up by the PC and the Internet are limited only by people's imagination. And you don't need to be a professional to take advantage of them.....

2003-09-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times has a fascinating article (registration required) about a new book called "Shakespeare, Co-Author," in which the writer shows strong evidence that five Shakespeare plays feature contributions from other playrights. If this claim is indeed true, one is tempted to wonder whether the Bard was the world's first Open Source Author or Intellectual Property Pirate. Perhaps some enterprising lawyer could trace the playrights' lineage and file a test case in court on behalf of their living descendents. The royalties that have accumulated over 400+ years must be in their trillions of pounds by now, and I'm sure there'd be at least a million pounds left at the end of it after the lawyers have been paid their fees.

2003-09-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

We were very excited to be able to announce today two new home entertainment systems based on our VIA embedded platforms at the IFA show that is currently taking place in Germany. Both systems from TEAC and 4MBO not only embody the living room design values that we have been evangalizing over the past couple of years or so with their great looks and low profile form factors, but also showcase how the x86 platform can enable advanced new capabilities and applications such as digital video recording, time shifting, and the easy management of digital music, photos, and video in home entertainment centers.

It has taken quite a while for the industry to turn vague notions centred around the digital home into real products and services that consumers are willing to pay for, but now I can feel that the momentum is moving in the right direction and all the disparate elements are starting to come together. Of course, it's still early days yet, but it's very encouraging to see such positive initial progress. The Totally Connected Home is one of the key subjects that we'll be covering at our VIA Technology Forum on 24 September, and we'll aslo be posting a lot of information about our future strategies and roadmaps on our website.

2003-08-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I bought a copy of the DVD of The Two Towers, the second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has just been released. My favorite part of the film is the assault on Helm's Deep by the massed forces of evil from Isengard, and I found myself watching the scenes of their attempts to take the fortress time and and time again. The special effects are absolutely outstanding, enabling you to experience the noise, the violence, and the sheer chaos and terror of medieval siege warfare from the viewpoints of the attackers, the defenders, and the helpless women and children cowering in the back of the keep. Although there have been some great open battlefield scenes in films such as Zulu and Waterloo, I cannot recall ever having seen such a realistic depiction of a siege as this.

The producers of the Lord of the Rings have been quoted as saying that they couldn't have made the film even five years ago because the graphics and computing technology simply wasn't powerful enough to do all the digital effects that they wanted, and now I can appreciate why. It would have been impossible (not mention extremely expensive and dangerous) to shoot such a complex scene using only actors, and there's no way that such rich levels of realism could have been achieved.

Still, having the ability to do brilliant special effects is next to useless if you don't have a good story, and this year's crop of movies shows that right now Hollywood's levels of creativity are lagging way behind the technology it has at its command. I wonder what it will be able to come up with once the third and final part of Lord of the Rings comes out at the end of the year.

2003-08-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

Summer is now almost officially over, and the industry's Autumn events schedule is moving into full swing, first of all with the Intel Developer Forum in a couple of weeks and then Computex and our own VIA Technology Forum. There are still a lot of question marks over Comdex, but I'm pretty sure that there'll be quite a large number of industry people who find an excuse to be in Las Vegas in November.

Of all the industry tradeshows, Computex is by far my favorite. It's a lot more initimate and friendly than the massive CeBIT event, and the show's relatively small size makes it a lot more convenient to meet up with the media and customers and find out what is really happening in this business. It helps too, of course, that Computex is home territory for me, so I know all the good places to go to in the evening.

This is the fourth year we have held our VIA Technology Forum, and I am confident that we will have a very interesting program. With VIA now involved in so many different product areas, it can sometimes be difficult for me - let alone our customers and the media - to keep up with all the latest developments. VTF provides a great opportunity for us to take a snapshot of where we are with all our product groups, and lay out all our future roadmaps and strategies. We've also got great support for the event from many of the industry's leading companies such as Microsoft, AMD, Micron, Elpida, and Maxtor, so VTF should provide a very interesting picture of where we are headed as an industry.

2003-08-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

Got back to Taiwan just in time to speak at our 1H 2003 Investor's Conference, held at the Howard Plaza Hotel in Taipei. Naturally, the key question on many people's minds was whether the current upturn in the market is for real or merely seasonal; and, just as naturally, it was impossible for us to provide a definitive answer. My own gut feeling (and it's only a gut feeling) is that the market is poised for steady - if unspectacular - growth over the next few quarters, driven mainly by increases in consumer demand as home broadband and wireless deployment gathers pace. In the US, for example, there are already 20 millions households with a broadband connection and I only had to watch the TV for a few minutes to see ads from the Telco and Cable companies touting the benefits of ADSL and cable services. As I know from my own experience, once you have broadband you never want to go back to dial up, and you never lose an opportunity to bore your friends and colleagues to tears with tales of how fast your connection is!

I generally try to avoid using trendy catch phrases as much as I can (though how successful I am at this is open to question), but I do see this 20 million number as a "Tipping Point" - at which enough critical mass has been built up to drive broadband into the mainstream. With so many companies now promoting broadband, it's simply a question of how quickly the technnology will proliferate.

2003-08-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling guilty for not having updated my blog over since Saturday. I was getting into quite a nice rhythm, but even after just three days of not writing I am starting to lose it.

Am leaving for Taiwan tonight, and am looking forward to going home. Still, there's a a tough few weeks ahead of me in the build up to VTF and Computex.

Moneyball

2003-08-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

How do you compete with a richer and stronger rival? That is one of the challenges that many of us face in our business lives, and it is a question that the writer Michael Lewis tries to answer in his new book Moneyball, which has the appropriate subtitle of “The art of winning an unfair game”.

Famous for his previous bestsellers Liar’s Poker and The New New Thing, which chronicled the excesses of Wall Street and Silicon Valley during the boom times of the late nineties, Lewis spent the 2002 baseball season with the Oakland Athletics to find out why one of the poorest teams in baseball was able to win so many games on a budget of less than $40 million - only about one third of the $120 million or so spent by the New York Yankees. Or, put another way, why the club only spent $500,000 per victory compared to nearly $3 million for the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers.

The central character of the book is Billy Bean, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, a volatile figure who failed to live up to his potential as a Major League player and has succeeded in management only by going against the conventional wisdom that has been built up over more than one hundred years of baseball tradition and history. Utilizing new statistical measures that have been devised and collated by a varied group of baseball enthusiasts, Wall Street analysts, statisticians, and others, Bean and his colleagues have developed the ability to identify and recruit high potential players that have been missed by richer clubs using conventional methodology. As a result, they have been able to sign players for much lower salaries and easily replace them after they move on to greater riches when their contracts are completed.

Bean’s methodology has of course upset many of baseball’s traditionalists, not least the scouts and managers who prefer to keep on operating according to the old methods, but it does appear that other owners are beginning to wake up to its effectiveness. And while the thought of Harvard MBAs such as Bean’s right hand man Paul DePodesta crunching mountains of data on their notebooks may at first sight seem to eliminate some of the “romance” and “mystique” from the game, the reverse is actually the case. By focusing so strongly on the numbers, the Oakland A’s have enabled quite a number of players who were overlooked by the big clubs because they were too fat, too slow, or ‘didn’t look the part’, to finally get their chance in the majors. I can’t think of anything more romantic than that!

While reading the book, I couldn’t help drawing parallels between my own company, VIA, and the Oakland A’s. Like them, we have limited budgets to play with and are up against extremely strong competitors with huge resources. But that in itself is no excuse for not being successful. The creativity and tenacity shown by the management and players of the A's in the face of heavy odds are truly inspirational.

2003-08-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

It's nice to finish off the week in San Francisco after a tough schedule of meetings in New York and Boston. The weather here is glorious and people seem to be winding down in preparation for the weekend. As is usually the case when I come here, I'm spending most of my time in Starbucks connected to their wireless network as I plough through my inbox. What interests me is that each time I come to Starbucks, I more and more people are doing the same. Today there are four people in here with notebooks, plus a family crowded round another machine; last night there were two guys with Macintosh notebooks who seemed to spend more time showing off their machines and bullshitting about their performance and features than actually using them. But I guess you can hardly blame them: In terms of looks at least, those Titanium models put my Sony to shame.

I know that there are still a lot of doubters out there about the viability of Hotspots, but I'm a believer.

CNet has posted a great video report of the Centibots at LinuxWorld last week, and HardOCP has some excellent additional coverage of Quakecon, including pictures of our forthcoming PT880 chipset. I was quite surprised that none of the fund managers and analysts I talked to this past week had ever heard of the event. And these guys are meant to be covering our industry!

Have a good weekend.

2003-08-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

As my staff will no doubt readily attest, patience is not one of my strongest virtues and what little reserve I have of it gets sorely tested when I'm on the road. There's nothing like a long check in line at the airport or hotel to really get me going.

What never ceases to astound me is how poorly both airlines and hotels use information technology to keep their customers happy, particularly during key processes such as check-in. Yesterday, for example, there were about thirty people waiting in the check-in line for American Airline's flights at Logan Airport and only three counters open to serve them. One would have thought that AA would be able to get a pretty clear idea of how many peope would be checking in at that time just by scanning their flight passenger lists, and staffed the counters accordingly. Instead, the hapless check-in attendants had a long line of angry customers to deal with. There are signs, though, that AA and other airlines are trying to address this issue by making it possible to print out boarding passes using the Internet and through the self service check-in machines that have been installed in numerous airports. The irony is of course that many people are still too uncertain to use them, and the airlines have to deploy staff to walk passengers through the process. But as the machines become more widely used, I'm sure that this will eventually become unnecessary.

Hotels, on the other hand, seem to be positively Luddite in their use of information technology. Although some of the luxury chains have advertised their ability to understand customers' needs by, for example, tracking the number of bananas their guests eat from the complimentary fruit bowl or whether they order a spicy vindaloo at 3:00am after a heavy night's drinking, they still haven't figured out how to speed up the long and laborious check in process. Why they can't copy the airlines and install automatic check-in machines that spit out a key and room number after you've punched in a booking number is beyond me. And if the airlines are already doing this, they can hardly claim that security concerns are stopping them from installing such machines.

Quakecon Coverage

2003-08-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of excellent coverage of Quakecon on the web by both mainstream media and enthusiast sites. Naturally, the mainstream media such as CNN has focused more on the gamers themselves rather than the components inside their boxes, but it's good to see that they are finally waking up to the fact that gaming is a serious pastime that is not just practised by teenage boys. From a professional point of view, I was also interested to see the coverage on the enthusiast websites, including articles on HardOCP, Tech-Report, and www.amdmb.com. Quakecon provided the ideal forum for us to demonstrate our Opteron and forthcoming AMD Athlon 64 chipsets, not to mention our EPIA Mini-ITX solutions, and we were very pleased with the reponse we received from the show's attendees.

Looking back, definitely the highlight of the event for me was the [H]ardware Workshop, run by Kyle Bennett of HardOCP. Both he and Anand from Anandtech did a magnificent job of answering all the questions that were thrown at them by the very knowledgeable audience and made even the most arcane topics such as CPU registers interesting and fun.

Quakecon

2003-08-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

Even though I'd heard and read a lot about Quakecon before I went, I have to admit that I was totally unprepared for the sheer scale of the event. The sight of nearly two thousand systems laid out in endless rows across one vast room was quite simply incredible, as was the electric atmosphere. Quite a contrast to your standard industry tradeshow such as CeBIT and Computex!

I was honoured to be asked by Kyle Bennett uberwebmaster of HardOCP to participate in his [H]ardware Workshop yesterday afternoon, and take questions from the audience of over 600 people. It was was very gratifying to see such high levels of interest from the gaming community in what we are doing at VIA and our plans for the future. Yes, I've definitely had a lot of fun at Quakecon, but more important than that it's been a real learning experience for me.

2003-08-16T05:15:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Dallas at midnight yesterday, and couldn't help noticing quite a number of Quakecon attendees wandering around the hotel. Should be a lot of fun today; I'm really looking forward to it.

The flight over from Taipei was very good - with the exception of the transfer in LAX. Why is it that I always have to go through the additional security check line when I fly American? It takes ages and I can't understand the logic, particularly as I had just gone through US Immigration and Customs.

"What criteria do you use to select passengers for additional security checks?" I asked the female supervisor.

"It's totally random," she replied with a well practised smile.

"So why is it that I have been asked to do a check the last FIVE times I've flown on American?" I pressed.

"I'm sorry, I don't know," she replied. "The procedures are secret."

"Of course," said. "Next time I'll fly United."

And fly United I will in the future. I've never had any problems with them, even though (or perhaps because) I fly the friendly skies a lot more with them.

I'm going to try and avoid LAX as well in the future. I couldn't see any Centrino Hot Spot signs anywhere. so there was no way of picking up my email. There were plenty when I arrived in Dallas, however. No wonder Hollywood still doesn't understand digital media.

2003-08-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

The usual last minute rush before I leave for Quakecon tonight. It's almost a good thing that the flight will take over fifteen hours. That should give me plenty of time to sleep. I'm going to need it!

Names & Logos

2003-08-12T18:35:00.000-07:00

For a snapshot of how much pressure we high-tech marketers are under, all you have to do is look at yesterday's announcements by AMD and Transmeta of the Athlon 64 logo and the new name of the forthcoming Astro processor, respectively. No longer is it enough to simply announce a product; you have to generate excitement (and hopefully pages and pages of ink) through a carefully coordinated build-up campaign much in the same way that Hollywood uses trailers, "exclusive" interviews, and preferably a romance between the two leading co-stars to create buzz before the introduction of a new movie.

I'm not sure how much the new logo will help the launch of the Athlon 64, but at least it shouldn't do any harm - unlike Efficion, the new name for the Astro. My sympathies went out to Mike DeNeffe, director of marketing at Transmeta, as I read his brave defense of the indefensible in his interview with Mike Kanellos of CNet. Sure, these days it's extremely difficult to find a name that you can trademark everywhere, and it's a pity that Astro is the name of the dog in the Jetsons cartoon that is owned by Hanna-Barbera. But why not stick with Crusoe rather than spend all the money and time that will be required to build up acceptance for Efficion?

Still, I guess we marketing types have to try and show our value. I've been pushing for ages to rebrand our chipsets but my efforts have been firmly but politely rebuffed by my colleagues in engineering. Their reasoning is that if the product is good people will automatically like its name. So if the Astro lives up to the hype that Transmeta has been building around it, I guess there may be some hope for Efficion.

Quakecon 2003

2003-08-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

I don't have much time for playing games on my PC, but even if I did I suspect I wouldn't be very good at them given my poor dexterity (much to my mother's consternation I wasn't able to tie my shoe laces until I was well into elementary school). Still, I am looking forward to attending QuakeCon for the first time this coming weekend. This is the second year that VIA has sponsored the event, and I'm sure it'll be a great learning experience for me as well as a lot of fun.

VIA has enjoyed wonderful support from the gaming community over many years, and sponsoring this event is one way of showing our appreciation for this. It also provides a great way of meeting people face to face and hearing their opinions about our company, our products, and services. So if you are at the show on Saturday or Sunday please drop by our booth and ask for me. I'd be more than happy to talk.

Digital Video Editing

2003-08-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Inspired perhaps by Andy Grove's fine words in his interview in Business Week, I've been hard at work upgrading my own digital infrastructure today. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but I did install a new digital video editing program on my notebook to replace the Pinnacle Studio 7.15 application that I have been using for about a year now. It wasn't that I was particularly dissatisfied with the Pinnacle program, which has served me well over the past twelve months. It was just that I felt I'd outgrown it and needed something a little more sophisicated with more advanced trimming, overlay, and audio features. I could have gone for the Pinnacle Studio 8 Series, but after my positive experiences with Ulead DVDFactory2 decided to try out Ulead Studio 7 instead.

The program was easy to install and has a nice look and feel to it. It also comes with a great video tutorial that shows you how to use all the main features, which enabled me to get up to speed very quickly while editing a short movie of a softball competition we went to yesterday. It's too early to decide how much better the program is than Pinnacle Studio, but so far I'm impressed. Given the quality and ease of use of the editing tools that are available these days, I'm quite surprised that you don't see more people toting digital video cameras. Perhaps they've got something more interesting to do on their Sunday afternoons than I have.

Andy Grove Interview

2003-08-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

It's great to see Andy Grove in such a boisterous mood in an interview published as part of a Business Week special on the Future of Technology. While reocognizing that the IT business is still in turmoil, he takes some well aimed shots at the media and analyst communoity for its uncritical acceptance of today's doom and gloom scenario and makes a strong case for industry growth in the future.

Here's my favourite quote from the interview. Not a trace of PR spin!

"..(industry) people are in s---ty mood. We are dealing with people whose stock prices are down 90%, who went from genius to bum to unemployed in a handful of quarters. Both they and their observers and their investors find it easier to accept that it is due to some cosmic trend, such as 'information technology is tired and spent' than to others..... There are huge, huge things going on and we are too myopic to notice."

I suspect that one of the "huge, huge things" he refers to is a process he calls "digital representation" in an answer to another question. The implications of this are absolutely enormous, and to my knowledge very few people are even beginning to seriously think about them.

"The world is being turned into a digital representation. Distance means nothing if you have a digital infrastructure. Anything digital is borderless. You cannot put obstacles in the way of digital technology flowing everywhere. Everything that has an information element can be digital, increasingly inexpensively.

That leads to wholesale personalization of everything. MP3 players are personalization. Digital delivery allows you to make your own playlist. Same thing is happening in television, with personal video recorders like TiVo. The same thing is beginning in medicine, with diagnostics and personalization of treatment. This is information technology. And I submit to you, it is very, very early. We can't even glimpse IT's potential in changing the way people work and live."

2003-08-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

There was quite a bizarre scene this morning as the Taiwan media converged on our office to get some coverage of staff reactions to the news that our Chairman and CEO had married. I can't recall having thirty cameras pointed at me typing on my computer before, and I do wish they'd given me time to cleanup the mess on my desk. Still, I did feel some sympathy for the assembled camera crew multitude as they desperately tried to get some footage to justify their trip, and was quite relieved when one of my team consented to be interviewed. "We're delighted" he said (or something to the effect) with a nice smooth smile on his face in answer to the reporter's enquiry as to how he felt about the news, just like a footballer pronouncing himself "over the moon" after a victory. So after further shots of people working in the office and close ups of a printed out copy of the announcement that was posted in our employee portal, the media hordes left with their "story" for the lunchtime news.

And to think that this was a minor event compared to the huge media circus surrounding Kobe Bryant's court appearance, with no detail considered too small or too insignificant to go unreported. But I guess this is a sign of progress: just a few years ago there were only three channels in Taiwan telling the same story; now there are close to forty!

Centibots Video

2003-08-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

We've posted a fun video on the VIA website showing the Centibots in all their glory. They are truly amazing machines.

LinuxWorld

2003-08-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is the first time that VIA has participated at Linux World, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, so it's going to be very interesting to see what kind of response we receive from the open source community at the show.

The initial signs at least look favourable, fuelled to a large degree no doubt by the press release we put out at the end of last week about the SRI Centibots that we are showing at our booth. The Centibots will also be conducting a search and rescue mission for a lost Linux penguin through an obstacle course. What better way to showcase their ability to communicate with each other and locate objects amid, for example, the debris of a building that has been burned down?

But our booth is about a lot more than robots. We also have on display a number of exciting new Linux based products featuring our VIA EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard, ranging from a home entertainment centre and music jukebox to a Voice Over IP solution and the ultra-compact Mini-Box for small footprint servers and computers. When we launched the EPIA eighteen months ago, I would never have imagined that it would end up being used in such diverse applications. The creativity and ingenuity of the Linux developers we work with is a true inspiration.

Video Conferencing: The Next Killer App?

2003-08-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

I still remember very clearly Intel's aggressive efforts in the early nineties to promote videoconferencing as the next killer application. Andy Grove, in particular, was reported to be almost obsessed by the technology and missed no opportunity to promote it. Grove may have been uncharacteristically wrong in his timing, but I for one no longer have any doubts that he was right about its potential. It's just taken the rest of the world over ten years to even start to catch up with his vision, and it'll probably take another decade to achieve it.

I must admit that for a long time I was very extremely sceptical about videoconferencing, not so much because of the technological issues that needed to be resolved, but more because of the human ones. Even now you read articles asking whether people will want to be seen in their underwear when on a video conference call from home. But that's just a dumb question: the simple answer is that they would get dressed and even made up for their moment in front of the camera just as they would for a day in the office. Besides, to paraphrase some advice a wise old Swiss executive once gave me early on in my career, you can communicate far more effectively when you see the face of the person you are conversing with than when you are a talking to an invisible stranger on other end of the line. That way, for example, you can discern the meaning of those pregnant pauses by observing the other person's body language and facial expressions rather than having to rely on guesswork or intuition.

Three of the key barriers to the proliferation of videoconferencing have up to now been cost, poor video quality due to low bandwidth connections, and clunky, difficult to use software applications. But if you try out the videoconferencing component of MSN Messenger over a broadband connection, for example, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the experience. The video and voice quality is excellent, even when calling overseas, the software interface is very friendly and includes such useful features as whiteboarding and viewing PowerPoint presentations, and the cost of the conference call is virtually free. The only question I have is: why don't more people know about it and use it? It took a recent demonstration from a customer to wake me up to the power and possibilities of the application, and even now I'm only making very limited use of it.

But then again I'm not so sure that it will be the so-called advanced economies that will drive the widespread proliferation of videoconferencing. Instead, this trend might very well take off first in emerging countries that are not burdened by expensive legacy infrastructures, just as has happened with mobile phones. For an example of why I think this may be possible, you should check out this article on the Indian website rediff.com. It describes how IIT Chennai has developed an application called Oops for low bandwidth videoconferencing using the standard TCP/IP protocol over conventional landlines and the various uses it is being put to by people in 150 villages. Applications include video classrooms, in which rural students are taught by teachers in the Tamal Nadu capital, Chennai; video clinics for rural healthcare; and video and voice messaging with overseas relatives and friends. Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-Madras, one of the key backers of the project, has huge ambitions for the future; he hopes eventually that 100 million such connections will be provided in India's villages. In the meantime, Devendra Jalihal, an associate professor at IIT-Madras, is more focused on how the project can help deliver practical improvements people's lives: "We are looking at the possibilities to improve the educational standard of the village children. With Oops I see, all that the village classroom needs is a PC, a Web cam and a dial-up connection. A qualified teacher from a city can take classes for the children and that too, interactive ones,".

Whether it's in qualitative or quantitive terms, the future for videoconferencing looks bright. And we are only just beginning to explore the possibilities......

2003-08-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

There's a quite wonderful story in today's Observer describing how a documentay maker tracked down a writer who published his one and only novel over thirty years ago. Amazingly enough, Mark Moskowitz, a film maker, actually bought the book "The Stone of Summer" when it was published in 1972, but couldn't handle its dense prose and left it in his bookcase until he took it on a flight a few years ago because he had nothing else to read. Inspired by his second reading, Moskowitz went off in search of the writer, Dow Mossman, finally locating him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, living in his childhood home. Now the book has been reissued and Moskowitz has enjoyed great success with The Stone Reader, the film he made of his search.

I can't help wondering how many other novels have been lost in the perilous journey from author to publisher to audience. As this story shows, no matter how marvellous your prose it can count for nothing if you don't have the right luck or timing.

2003-08-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased and somewhat relieved that the slideshow and video project I did the other day received the full stamp of approval from my girls after they returned from their holiday. It's my experience that my daughters love ANY video as long as they are featured in it, so I guess I shouldn't get too carried away! But their approval has certainly inspired me to do more projects in the future. If nothing else, making these CDs helps me archive my video and photo files a lot more effectively than on my hard disk, and evokes wonderful memories of fun family trips we've taken in the past.

I'm also finding that watching my movies (if I can call them that) on the TV is making me take a much more critical approach to the way I edit the files. While two and a half minutes doesn't sound very much, it can seem like an age if all you have are long boring zoom shots of mountain scenes! So now I'm trying to keep my clips to a maximum of two minutes, though some experts I know reckon they should be no longer than 30 seconds.

2003-08-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

It was nice to be able to leave the office today with at least a hint of a smile on my face instead of the usual worried frown. This morning I had a fun session with Michael Cady, Nick Coons, and Mr. Modem of the PC Chat Computer Radio Show in Phoenix; then this afternoon we announced a 45% month on month increase in our revenues, ending a losing streak that has gone on for much longer than I care to remember. But as the old saying goes, one swallow does not a summer make, and we have no illusions at all about the huge task we have ahead of us.

2003-07-31T05:33:00.000-07:00

Having built up a fairly extensive collection of digital photos and videos on my PC over the past couple of years, I've been planning for quite a while now to try out one of those programs that promise to let you put photo slideshows and movies on a VCD or DVD and watch them on the TV. So when I was given a copy of DVD MovieFactory2 from Ulead a couple of days ago I thought I'd put it to the test, if only see whether all the marketing hype about this type of digital home application lived up to the reality.

Installing DVD MovieFactory2 was a breeze, and it has a reasonably simple and attractive interface that makes it very easy to carry out your project. All I had to do was import a video file and a few photos of a recent trip, select some music from a pre-set menu, and choose an appropriate background, and I was ready to export the file to a rewritable CD. The program can also record files to a recordable DVD if you have a DVD burner, and supports both PAL and NTSC broadcast formats. The image quality of both the photos and video on the TV was excellent, and the background music added a nice little extra touch to the slideshow. With my girls away on vacation this week with their grandparents, it was wonderful to see their smiling faces on the screen in front of me.

There are still a few rough edges that could be smoothed out in the program. It can only import a limited number of video file formats, for example. Unfortunately, these do not include Windows Movie Files, which was a little irritating for me because I publish most of my videos in wmv format. But overall I was really impressed by the program's features and will definitely explore them more deeply in future projects. As for whether this will be one of the killer apps for the digital home, I'll wait for my daughters to get home before I issue my verdict!