Tech News Wrap Up for The Week Of February 05, 2007
Households With High-Definition Television To Triple
The number of households around the world with HDTV will triple over the next five years as viewers switch to its clearer, more vivid picture, according to a report on Friday.
The transition to HDTV has been called a landmark move for the industry, similar to the shift from black-and-white television to color. According to Informa Telecoms and Media, the number of homes taking the product will jump to 151 million worldwide by 2011 from 48 million at the end of 2006 when an estimated 1.2 billion households had a television.
The report said some 58 percent of HD homes were currently found in the United States and 20 percent in Japan, with Britain, Canada, China and Germany also high on the list. “The falling price of high-definition sets has really caught the public’s imagination, and consumer uptake is impressive,” Adam Thomas, the report’s author said.
But he also said some customers were disappointed with the product as, on some services, there is not always enough content to watch. The report said it expected this to change and highlighted the situation in the United States, Japan and Australia where governments had set deadlines for broadcasters to deliver a quota of programming in HD.
Company Vaporstream Offers Self Destructing Email
At VaporStream, the most important element of Stream Messaging system is its recordless nature. What this means by recordless is that, once a message is sent and ultimately read, no record remains on any computer or server-not on Vaporstreams, or on the recipients. This is very different from email which leaves a permanent record on both computers and servers.
VaporStream has a feature that separates the header of the message, the who, what and where, from the body of the message. They never exist together and can never be seen together; there is no record connecting the VaporStream subscriber with the content of the message. One also cannot print, cut and paste, forward or save a stream. Once a message is opened and read, it is gone.
VaporStream can also be accessed on the go via mobile devices. Soon you will be able to use your VaporStream on any Blackberry Device or any Windows Mobile platform.
Electronics A Big Part of This Year’s Largest Toy Convention
Preschoolers will be able to access the Internet safely, while older children might have more fun learning to play guitar, thanks to new toys due to be unveiled next week at one of the world’s biggest toy fairs.
As an estimated 14,000 buyers from 7,000 retailers descend on the annual American International Toy Fair in New York over the next week, they could be forgiven for thinking they walked into the Consumer Electronics Show by mistake.
After years of watching children abandon their toys at earlier ages for MP3 players, cell phones and video games, toy makers should still be able to eke out some sales growth this year after deftly managing to combine elements of traditional toy play with electronics, industry experts said.
U.S. toy sales in 2006 crept up to $22.3 billion from $22.2 billion, driven by 22 percent growth in the youth electronics category, market research firm NPD Group said this week.
“One of the big trends continues to be electronics and especially music,” independent toy industry consultant Christopher Byrne said. “You’re looking at kids who want to be involved in music. They want to be rock stars.”
Byrne said the success of Walt Disney Co.’s pop music acts “Cheetah Girls” and “Hannah Montana” bodes well for Mattel Inc.’s “I Can Play Guitar System,” which teaches children to play guitar by matching colored images shown on a TV screen.
Zizzle LLC is introducing a guitar of its own as part of the “Electric Rockerz” music maker, which it said allows youngsters to create music as part of its electronic toy line inspired by Disney’s “High School Musical” — a made-for-TV movie and franchise that has aired on 26 Disney Channels worldwide, reaching more than 100 countries.
Meanwhile, Mattel’s Fisher Price line has made a way for preschoolers to go online with its “Easy Link Internet Launchpad.”After connecting the pad to a computer, children can plug figures of characters like Elmo or Barney into the pad, and visit a corresponding Web site where they can play games.
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