NewsScan Daily, 26 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 26 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Global Battle Over DVD Standards Heats Up
        IBM and Philips Team Up on RFID Tags
        Call It the Alta Vista Social Club
        Manual Overload
        Amazon Peddles Politicians

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Chuck Jones

GLOBAL BATTLE OVER DVD STANDARDS HEATS UP
      The U.S. Department of Justice is looking into the activities of the 
Blu-ray industry group led by Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial and 
Philips Electronics, which is challenging another group over 
next-generation DVD standards. The conflict is shaping up to replay another 
major format battle, which pitted Betamax proponents against the VHS 
standard in the early VCR market of the 1970s. In this case, the competing 
standard -- known as HD DVD -- is being heavily promoted by Toshiba and 
NEC. The two camps have tried to sort things out through the DVD Forum, an 
official standards-setting body for DVDs that includes hardware and 
software companies, and the Justice Department's inquiry focuses on whether 
the Blu-ray group potentially acted in concert to impede the forum's 
technical progress. The forum's steering committee voted to endorse the HD 
DVD standard last November, but the members of the Blu-ray group within the 
forum abstained from voting, effectively blocking the Toshiba-NEC proposal. 
Meanwhile, U.S. companies are jumping into the mix, with Hewlett-Packard 
and Dell siding with the Blu-ray coalition and Microsoft lobbying forum 
members to endorse using its Windows Media software for storing movies on 
high-definition DVDs. Critics say prolonged wrangling could cause consumers 
to postpone buying the next-generation DVD players, which will remain 
prohibitively expensive until they can be produced in mass quantities. 
(Wall Street Journal 26 Jan 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107505718085410861,00.html (sub req'd)

IBM AND PHILIPS TEAM UP ON RFID TAGS
      IBM and Philips Electronics are moving ahead on an emerging 
computer-based logistics system that is expected to help retailers reduce 
their inventory-tracking costs. Philips will manufacture the RFID (radio 
frequency identification) tags that can be attached to items ranging from 
clothes to milk cartons, while IBM will provide the computer services and 
system. Analysts predict that in a few years' time, RFID tags will come 
down in price to just a few cents apiece or less, and will be capable of 
storing information such as a product description, packaging and expiration 
dates, color and price. Research groups say that excess inventory of 
consumer goods and retail items valued at $40 billion is in the supply 
chain at any given time and they estimate that use of advanced tracking 
systems such as RFID could help reduce theft and excess inventory levels by 
25%. According to Applied Business Intelligence, the RFID market could 
reach $3.1 billion by 2008, while IDC estimates that retail demand alone 
will be $1.3 billion within four years. (Reuters/CNet News.com 25 Jan 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-5147085.html?tag=nefd_top

CALL IT THE ALTAVISTA SOCIAL CLUB
      A new mixture of search engine and social club has emerged as the 
latest personal networking opportunity. In an unusual twist, Eurekster 
tailors its search results to reflect the search habits of a group of 
proclaimed friends. Once a group of pals has signed up, the site takes note 
of which search results are clicked on and how long the members linger on 
each site. If a minute or more is spent perusing a particular site, 
Eurekster assumes it was useful and subsequently elevates in the results 
delivered the next time someone in the group makes the same query. And 
while it's unclear whether one's friends are the best judges of a site's 
utility, Shaun Ryan, CEO of Eurekster co-founder SLI Systems, says a recent 
pilot test showed that people loved another feature of the Eurekster site 
-- the ability to see what searches their friends conduct (although 
individual identities are not revealed). "It's a way of finding out 
information your friends might not otherwise have told you," he says. 
(Washington Post 25 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43760-2004Jan24.html

MANUAL OVERLOAD
      Tech gadgets are getting more complex all the time, but what's really 
driving consumers crazy is the oversized manuals that accompany them. One 
hapless cell phone buyer found he had to consult his new cell phone's 
146-page manual just to find out how to turn the darn thing on. (Hint -- 
push the red "end" button twice to start it up.) Design guru Jakob Nielsen 
says the trend toward tome-sized manuals reflects today's tendency toward 
feature-rich devices. "The more a product could do, the more that could go 
wrong," says Nielsen, who complains about the 35 buttons on his DVD 
player's remote control: "The button I use the most -- pause -- is the 
smallest and in the middle of five other buttons." Sound familiar? The 
tendency could have dire consequences, according to a Yankee Group study, 
which indicates about 50% of buyers postpone making a consumer electronics 
purchase because they think the device will just be too difficult to use. 
Fixing that perception won't be easy, warns Nielsen. "The simpler it looks, 
the harder it is to build," he says. (AP 26 Jan 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040126/D80AI1K80.html

AMAZON PEDDLES POLITICIANS
      Amazon shoppers now have something new they can spend their money on 
-- the presidential candidates of their choice. The new feature, which 
allows visitors to make contributions of up to $200 to their favorite 
candidate, is an effort "to take the friction out of grassroots 
contributions to presidential candidates," according to the Amazon Web 
site. For that reason it is not endorsing any candidates and is charging 
each campaign its usual processing fees, which will be donated to a 
nonprofit, non-partisan group. "For us, we think this is an interesting but 
natural extension of what we do every day. Our goal here was to make it as 
easy for people to make contributions to presidential campaigns as it is to 
buy the latest Harry Potter book," says an Amazon spokesman. To check it 
out, go to www.amazon.com/gp/misc/flag.html (not all candidates have 
registered yet on the site). (Reuters 24 Jan 2004)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=QHXYLIKKSIWJGCRBAELCFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=4199880

*****

FLASH CARD
      "One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they 
have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element 
they live in." (Marshall McLuhan)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: CHUCK JONES
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Oscar-winning movie animator 
Charles (Chuck) Jones (1912-2002), who created some of Hollywood's most 
famous cartoon characters including the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and 
Pepe Le Pew. Jones was also a member of the animation teams that concocted 
the zany antics of the likes of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and 
Elmer Fudd.
      Winner of three Academy Awards for his Looney Tune films and a fourth 
Oscar for Lifetime achievement, Chuck Jones made more than 300 films. Along 
with Winsor McCay (creator of the first animated movie cartoon) and Walt 
Disney, he was among the first inductees into the Animation Hall of Fame. 
In contrast to the often sentimental world of Disney, Jones's cartoons 
possessed a rather darker humor.
      Born September 21, 1912 in Spokane, Washington, Jones grew up in 
Hollywood, where he worked with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a 
child extra in silent comedies. After graduating from Chouinard Art 
Institute in Los Angeles (now the California Institute of the Arts), he 
drew pencil portraits and sold them for a dollar each on the street. In 
1932 he got his first job washing cels, or transparent sheets of celluloid, 
in the fledgling animation industry. Four years later he became an animator 
for the Leon Schlesinger Studio, later sold to Warner Bros., where he was 
assigned to the team that made "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" 
cartoons. He directed his first animated film, "The Night Watchman," at age 
25. The six-minute cartoon used 5,000 animation drawings.
      Following the closing of Warner Bros' animation studio in 1962, Jones 
moved to MGM Studios. He is generally acknowledged to have no peer as a 
creator of cartoon characters that are readily recognized and fondly 
remembered worldwide. Jones was 89 years old when he died of congestive 
heart failure at his home in Corona Del Mar, California.

See http://www.AmericanRoyalArts.com/chuckjones.htm for Chuck Jones' work 
in "Animation Art" -- or look for it in your favorite library.

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, 
send mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the 
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe 
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) 
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have 
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************