Business News Holding

Author: admin

  • G-Technology Launches Mac-friendly External Hard Drives


    Storage firm G-Technology is to offer a range of Mac-friendly external hard drives cast from aircraft grade aluminium.

    The four HDD models in the fanless G-Drive range come pre-formatted with HFS Plus – the Mac’s native file format – and support Mac OS X’s Time Machine automatic back-up system.

    The 2.5in Mini Combo G-Drive is available in 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacity options, with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 support.

    A second 2.5in option is the Mini Triple, which comes as either a 250GB or 320GB drive with USB and FireWire 400/800 connection capability.

    G-Tech’s two 3.5in HDD options, the Combo and the Q, are both available as 500GB or 1TB capacity drives.

    The Combo supports USB and FireWire 400, while the Q supports FireWire 800 and eSATA connections.

    Prices are from USD $170 (€125).

  • Pentadyne Promotes Kalev to CTO


    Flywheel energy storage systems manufacturer Pentadyne Power Corporation has promoted Claude Kalev to the position of Chief Technical Officer.

    Kalev was a co-founder of Pentadyne when the company was incorporated in 1998.

    But he only officially joined the company in 2002, as Vice President, Electrical Engineering.

    Kalev was also a co-founder and Vice President of Engineering at Quadradyne, a company established to provide testing services for high speed rotating machinery, state of the art magnetic bearing development, high vacuum system and molecular drag sleeve design.

    Prior to joining Pentadyne, Kalev was the Vice President of Engineering at Infrared Industries, Inc. where he led the development of a compact, portable 5-gas automotive analyzer.

    He also developed and patented a hand-held, high-speed, 5-gas analyzer for use as an on-board diagnostic and combustion tuning instrument. He also developed a state-of-the-art, automated calibration system for the analyzers.

    Other previous posts include roles at Capstone Turbine Corporation and Rosen Motors.

    Kalev is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Tau Beta Pi, and Golden Key Honor Society. He earned his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering from the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

  • Kingston USB Stick Reaches 64GB – And Climbing


    It wasn’t THAT long ago that anything over 1GB of Flash storage was considered impressive.

    Now Kingston Technology has launched its new DataTraveler 150, a 64GB USB Flash drive.

    This supercedes last month’s offering – a mere 32GB – as the largest in the outfit’s entire DataTraveler line.

    Jaja Lin, Kingston’s Flash business development manager, said the DataTraveler 150 takes transportable storage to the next level.

    "As file sizes increase with digital media content such as music and photos, the need for USB Flash drives with high capacities will continue to rise," said Lin.

    "The DT150 certainly addresses those needs today."

    The rising storage capacity of USB sticks comes at a time when the number of computers infected with viruses from USB flash memory drives is spreading.

    This has prompted calls for PC users to take precautions when sharing data with others via USB memory sticks.

    Measuring 77.9mm x 22mm x 12.05mm, the DataTraveler 150 comes with a 5-year warranty and works with any system with a spare USB slot, including Windows, OS X, Palm OS and Linux.

    The memory sticks come with a five-year warranty and are priced at USD $132 and $177.

  • US VoIP Calling Rises By 32%


    It may still not enjoy the popularity found in other parts of the world but there’s no doubt that Internet telephony is rapidly gaining ground among consumers in the US.

    According to responses from Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI) just released Fall 2008 Survey of the American Consumer, four per cent of respondents reported they had made an online phone call in the last 30 days.

    While this leaves VoIP calling still far from mainstream – especially compared to other Internet-related activities such as emailing – it does represent a year-to-year increase of 32 per cent.

    It also gives online phone calling one of the the biggest year-to-year per cent increases among adult Internet users, along with downloading TV programs and watching online videos.

    E-mail, news gathering and paying bills online continue to be among the most widely used Internet activities by US consumers.

    MRI began measuring Internet activities in 1997 and continually adds new Internet behavior questions to its survey.

    The fall 2008 data include four new Internet activities: sharing photos (done by one in four adults in the last 30 days); sending electronic greeting cards; watching a live TV program online; and uploading or adding video to a Web site.

  • Security tool for VoIP solutions released


    A new tool which allows enterprises to assess if their VoIP solutions are vulnerable to targeted eavesdropping has been released.

    UCSniff, from Sipera Systems’ VIPER Lab, is a free application which allows network managers find out how easy it is to imitate an enterprise VoIP phone, download a directory and then listen in on confidential calls.

    "UCSniff is an assessment tool that helps demonstrate vulnerabilities in VoIP design and implementation," said VIPER Lab director Jason Ostrom.

    "It was born from the concept of combining targeted attacks against VoIP users along with the corporate directory, intelligent VLAN support, and man-in-the-middle features."

    The results of a survey released last month revealed that security was one of the top-five concerns for respondents when investing in VoIP solutions.

    The security and regulatory compliance implications are significant for VoIP eavesdropping, especially given the ability for outside hackers to access corporate directories.

    Once done they can use that information to target and automatically record conversations between anyone from CEOs, CFOs, corporate counsel and outside law firms to accounts rReceivable dealing with customer credit card payments.

    The UCSniff tool is available now for SIP and SCCP signaling protocols. A future version will allow testing VoIP Video calls on the Windows OS.

  • VoIP Market Down 8% in 3Q08 as Telcos Scale Back


    A two-year "pause" in the overall carrier VoIP space is being forecast as the effects of the economic downturn spread globally.

    Large RBOCs and ILECs are scaling back on VoIP equipment purchases, helping bring down the worldwide service provider VoIP market 8% sequentially to $816 million in 3Q08, says market research firm Infonetics Research in a new report.

    The overall market weakness in 3Q08 was led by a steep decline in the high density media gateway segment, as well as a dip in the softswitch segment, according to the report, Service Provider VoIP and IMS Equipment and Subscribers.

    On the positive side, sales of session border controllers and media servers were up in 3Q08, although not enough to offset losses in other segments in the next gen voice market.

    Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, said third quarter service provider VoIP equipment sales confirmed what was had already been seen in the previous quarter.

    "In North America, carriers were already slowing their VoIP investments after completing major projects; in Western Europe and some parts of Asia, such as South Korea, inventories were already high," she said.

    "The quarter also reflects the global economic downturn, which is turning the expected VoIP deployment dip into a drop.

    "New VoIP projects will be postponed at best, and some may be cancelled altogether, as more consumers ditch their fixed lines, thus cutting the need for wireline upgrades.

    "As such, we are predicting a 2-year pause in the overall carrier VoIP space, with a pick up expected in 2011."

    Other highlights from the report:

    • Year-over-year (from 3Q07), softswitches, SBCs, and media servers are up
    • Cisco shook up the worldwide trunk media gateway market with a 37% sequential jump in revenue in 3Q08, propelling them to the #1 spot, followed by GENBAND and Huawei
    • Nortel maintains its #1 position in the worldwide softswitch market
    • Cable MSOs are likely to postpone PacketCable 2.0 deployments for residential VoIP due to tough economic conditions
    • Given how bad the current economic turmoil is, the 5-year outlook for service provider next gen voice is decent
    • Voice over broadband (VoBB) will continue to be the big driver across the board

    Infonetics’ report tracks VoIP subscribers and carrier VoIP equipment, including high-, mid-, and low-density trunk media gateways, SBCs, media servers, class 4 and class 5 softswitches, and IP Centrex/hosted IP PBX, IP trunking, and residential voice application servers.

    The report also tracks fixed-line and mobile network IMS core equipment, including HSS, CSCF servers, media resource function, breakout gateway control function (BGCF), application servers, and PSTN gateways.

  • The Future Of HD VoIP Is Video


    HD VoIP is rapidly gaining followers but the possibilities for excellent sound quality aren’t its only benefits.

    Jeffery Rodman, Polycom co-founder and CTO of the Voice Division, believes that video will quickly become a "must-have" feature of HD voice technology.

    In an interview on HD VoIP with smithonvoip he said the proliferation of HD calling was being driven by people’s need to communicate effectively.

    But as it became more mainstream the benefits of adding video to the mix would become glaringly apparent.

    "Because it’s an IP network, video is coming sooner than anyone thinks," he said.

    "It’s interesting how that works; seems like video might just be a frill, but when you actually see and use it, there’s a part of you that leaps forward and thinks ‘that’s what I’ve been missing’.”

    Rodman said virtually everything listened to today, from FM radio and CD’s, to television and even oven timers, is already wideband audio.

    The phone – a critical tool in business – had become the last holdout of poor audio.

    He said once people heard about HD Voice, they discover that it’s a simple, robust, and economical enhancement of the system they already have.

    "More and more VoIP telephones are including HD Voice in their basic function sets because it adds value and helps efficiency without significantly affecting cost," he said.

  • Ifbyphone Secures $4.6 Million in New Round of Funding


    Times may be tough but Ifbyphone has defied the apparent drought in venture capital funding and secured USD $4.6 million in a second round of institutional funding.

    The capital infusion for the hosted telephone application platform company was jointly led by Apex Venture Partners and Origin Ventures, who also invested in Ifbyphone’s first round of institutional funding.

    They were joined by three other venture capital firms:Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A and Blue Crest Capital Finance, L.P.

    Irv Shapiro, Ifbyphone founder and CEO, said the new round of funding was a strong endorsement of the company’s growth and expansion strategy.

    Ifbyphone provides small and medium-sized businesses with telephony features that enable them to create phone solutions.

    “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times,” he said.

    Ken Green, co-founder and managing partner at Spring Mill Venture Partners, said he believed Ifbyphone represented the next great wave of Internet-enabled business services.

    He said it allowed small and medium-sized businesses access to capabilities previously only available to their larger competitors.

    "This kind of service offers an opportunity to level the competitive playing field,” he said.

  • Zoran's New Processors Spell Thinner HDTVs


    HDTVs may seem wafer thin already but don’t expect the drive for even slimmer models to stop anytime soon.

    The Zoran Corporation has just announced a pair of new HDTV processors that should help set manufacturers shave a tad more off their future sets.

    Its new SupraHD processors eliminate multiple components from the DTV system design by integrating the TV microcontroller, 8VSB demodulator, audio codec, audio multiplexer, analog video multiplexer and a stack of other functions, including advanced audio processing and color management capabilities, into the single-chip solution.

    If that wasn’t enough, Zoran said its high integration enables a more energy-efficient design, which allows DTV manufacturers to meet the federal Energy Star requirements.

    Jun Kawaguchi, director of the HDTV product line in Zoran’s Home Entertainment division, said the continued integration of DTV functionality into one SoC had many advantages for both TV manufacturers and end users.

    As well as reduced costs and power consumption, he told hdtv.biz-news.com that another benefit of the new SupraHD-785 and SupraHD-775 processors was that they enabled improvements to set design.

    "Lower power, smaller PC boards allow design flexibility that permit thinner, smaller and lighter TVs," he said.

    Kawaguchi said that by integrating multiple components into one chip, the PCB dimension can be reduced and production costs minimized.

    He said reduced costs to manufacturers usually meant lower costs to consumers as well.

    Other factors included improved engineering cost and schedule, which meant TV manufacturers had less engineering development burden, as multiple functionalities can be addressed by one product.

    This reduces the engineering workload for manufacturer, and also accelerates engineering schedules, according to Kawaguchi.

    The SupraHD® 775 and SupraHD® 785 processors integrated functions include the following:

    • TV Microcontroller and unified memory design
    • Market-proven Cascade® ATSC / NTSC / QAM demodulator
    • Audio analog-to-digital converter with 6 stereo pair inputs
    • Audio digital-to-analog converter
    • Three HDMI v.1.3 inputs
    • Advanced audio processing including virtual surround sound and audio expansion capabilities
    • Advanced color management
    • Two 1080P YPbPr analog video inputs
    • WUXGA PC analog video input
    • Three S-video inputs and four composite video inputs with 3D comb filter
    • Integrated dual channel LVDS transmitters with xvYCC Wide Color Gamut support
    • Content adaptive 1080i deinterlacer for interlaced analog video inputs
    • Six stereo pair analog audio inputs
    • Two stereo pair analog audio outputs
    • Picture-in-Picture function
    • USB 2.0 input
    • MPEG noise reduction provides block-free reception of digital transmission

  • REVIEW BoinxTV: Mac-based Live Video Recording Studio

    Jordi Duran i Batidor, co-founder & CTO, of Biz-News.com, has road-tested Bonix Software’s new tool for video podcasters.

    In his interview with hdtv.biz-news Oliver Breidenbach, CEO and co-founder of Bonix Software, explained that he believed BonixTV is a “game changer” providing tools to create “TV-style” quality recordings at an affordable price.

    We had the opportunity to play with the application and here you have our first insights.

    As with any Mac Application, installation is straightforward – you simply have to drag & drop the application into the application folder.

    On the extras folder we can find a great introductory video (link to the video), some  interesting links and some sample files (Basketball Scores and Bonix Crawler).

    When starting the application for first time, it will run the installer, request a licence be installed, accept terms and conditions and we are done.

    The normal start-up screen shows several templates from which to choose. Some of the default ones are great, with everything from chroma, lower thirds, logo, ticker, and closing
    credits.

    We can also set up the output size, where they have conveniently pre-set the most common video formats.

    The application is devised in five zones:

    • a header zone with the logo of the company
    • a control button to manage the layers
    • a central clock to manage the timing with a record button
    • the sound bars and audio adjustment.

    • At the bottom of the application there is a folded window that allow users to find and define sources and layers.


    The central part of the application is split into three columns: on the left we can define the parameter of the current layer, in the middle we can see, organize and control the layers, and on the right there is a video player displaying the output.

    The system is really simple to understand and is based in layers that are applied one on top of the other, adding or modifying the previous signal. It is similar to what you find in photoshop.

    Each layer it has a red button or switch. When clicking on it we activate or deactivate the functionality of this layer. Also layers can be reorganized and we can save our layout as a template for future usage.

    There are plenty of layers in the default installation of BonixTV. We can find layers to manage: Video Input (Single video, Video Switcher up to 4 cameras, Interview with 2 simultaneous videos), Backgrounds, video backgrounds, Transitions, Efects, 3D effects Audio only, Clocks, Lower thirds,headline tickers, RSS tickers, Logo, etc

    Two promising layers are the Basketball scores and Weather Map. Those layers are made with the idea of demonstrating the possibilities of BonixTV. But the current customization interface for the layers doesn’t allow you to, for example change, the background map, so unless you want to do the forecast of Germany it will be useless for you.

    The good news is that those layers are programed in Quartz Composer – a free and easy to use developer tool that you can get if you are member of the Apple ADC program.

    Also if you don’t want to learn Quartz, Bonix has an option to request a customized layer for an introductory price of USD $999.

    Every layer has its own parameters, for example the weather layer asks conditions and temperature for the four regions in Germany, while the lower third lets us define the background image, the animation, position, text…

    Every layer can be activated via a shortcut, that can be defined. Also the layers can be activated via trigger, for example, when we click on "stop recording" the layer of credits can be activated automatically.

    Sources

    We have tested the application with two cameras, and several other sources like video files, images and audio files. Defining a new camera is quite easy, we connected a firewire camera while the program was running, clicked on sources, added devicdes, and then selected the video and audio device.

    A great addition to this program would be the possibility to use Internet video streams as sources. For example, if we want to interview somebody via skype, use the Skype video-in as source for the program. If Skype is too complex, they can use streaming protocols mostly used in live broadcasting site like Ustream.tv, or Kyte.tv, for example.

    Creating your own studio

    Hidden in the Extras / Links folder, there is a gem, a link to the Studio Equipment page. At that page, they feature two interestingoptions:

    • The first is the PowerKeys for iPhone, to remote control BonixTV by assigning keyboardshortcuts on a virtual iPhone keyboard.
    • The second one is a Firewire repeater or extender, allowing to connect firewire devices up to 65m from your computer thanks to a ethernet conversion (it uses a cross cable).

    Conclusions

    BonixTV is a great application, easy to use and powerful. We like the extensibility of the layers via Quartz Composer, but we would love to see sooner rather than later a less complex tool to manage weather maps, and basketball scores inside the BonixTV application.

    A missing functionality, is a strong streaming capability, in our opinion this tool is for live broadcasting, and has to make it easy to plug the output of BonixTV into Ustream.tv, kyte.tv and others.

    And as said before, it would be great if streaming video could be also used as camera. This could be used to do remote interviews, but also to use wireless webcams as input source.