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| More Developments On The Consumer Front |
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posted by Editor on Friday October 15, @01:42PM
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Exhibitors at the Digital Lifestyles Expo showcased a variety of products designed to help consumers get a grip on the growing volumes of digital music, videos, and photos pouring into their systems from cameras/camcorders, personal video recorders, and the web. muvee Autoproducer automatically produces music videos from raw video footage and digital music files. Users choose one of 100 pre-selected styles for the video (i.e. "Acid" or "Black and White Time Warps"). Autoproducer then analyzes the video content and audio waveforms, discards the least interesting video sequences, and synchronizes the rest with the music, adding special effects to match the selected style. Streamload is a web service optimized for storing MP3s, movies, and digital photos on its hosted servers. The company has survived several now-extinct web-based storage competitors, helped by a formula for profitability: users can upload an unlimited amount of content, but pay for the ability to stream the content from any location or efficiently email it to others. Read on for some of the other highlighted products.
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Two hardware vendors offer improved solutions for consumers to back up their media on external storage. Maxtor has a new release of its One Touch external storage drive, which initiates backups at a touch of the button mounted on the front of the drive. The new models simplify the user interface for configuring the backup operations that should take place when the button is pushed. A different approach for external media storage comes from Mirra, which offers a consumer appliance that performs continuous and automatic backups for multiple PCs. It attaches to home networks and can be used to share content between PCs while protecting it. Mirra also offers a web service for emailing content to others directly from the appliance.
Other hardware products include AutoXray, which offers a device called EZ-READ that reveals information about the mysterious diagnostic codes that modern cars issue when something goes wrong. While these devices used to cost $700 and were targeted mainly at professionals, the company now plans to introduce a $100 model for consumers that they can use to make educated choices about repairs. Microvision is showing its unique projection display that can superimpose graphics over any transparent surface. It demonstrated the technology in a head-mounted display, but showed how it could also be used in head-up displays.
Representing the human element, Geek Squad is a nationwide customer support service that makes house calls. Users can call up and describe any problem they are having, and they are quoted a price to resolve the issue. If they decide to pay the fee, Geek Squad dispatches a "geek" to the user’s location to fix the problem. The company can achieve economies of scale because the vast majority of problems today are the result of well-known viruses. The company started out as a small local operation, but it has now expanded dramatically thanks to an alliance with Best Buy.
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< Digital Lifestyle Expo Reveals Trends In Consumer Devices | SCOPO Compact Wearable Display > | |
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