In debt to his ears, Sardinian entrepreneur Nichi Grauso is selling his Cagliari-based online service, Video On Line. And despite having told Wired last year that "[print] journalists are standing on the deck of a sinking ship" (see "The Berlusconi of the Net", Wired 1.07, page 63), Grauso has chosen that ship as his life raft. The money from the sale is taking him into the bulk-paper business. Pulping trees for newsprint, apparently, strikes Grauso as a more lucrative opportunity than offering Net access and commercial Web services in Italy's sluggish online marketplace.
At least, that's how it looks at the moment to Mr Grauso. By buying his service, Telecom Italia - one of Grauso's main creditors - seems to be betting the other way. Like telecom companies all over Europe, it's beginning to think that the Internet market looks promising enough to take an interest in.
The true value of the deal was not clear as this article went to press - auditors Coopers & Lybrand were slaving away to try and assess it. It appears that once Grauso's 5 billion lire (£2.14 million) phone bill is deducted, the sale will make around 35 billion lire for the Sardinian entrepreneur's media group, which is in dire financial straits. Its foray into Poland was disastrous (Grauso still owns the loss-making Warsaw daily Zycie Warszawy) and its debts are now estimated to be between 70 billion lire and 120 billion lire.
Video On Line - which never provided video, but did offer Internet access with some bells and whistles, including multilingual browsers - had set itself the target of 150,000 subscribers by the first quarter of 1996. The company is refusing to reveal how many have actually signed up to date as it "might affect negotiations", but unofficial estimates put the figure at around 25,000. A recent survey by the Italian statistical institute Eurispes estimated only 37,500 paid-up Internet accounts in Italy at the end of 1995; the Italian service providers' organisation AIIP, however, puts the real number of users, from the most committed to the most occasional, at nearer half a million. Both figures may be correct; it looks as if Grauso's "surf now, pay later" approach to business has been torpedoed by the tendency of his fellow Italians to do just that. It seems unlikely at this stage that Telecom Italia will carry on the Video On Line policy of access in 20 languages, or live up to Grauso's promise of free access for schools and prisons, though the Italian telecoms monolith has undertaken to "respect the professional competence, the commercial partnerships and the physical location" of the company. But if African languages like Ibo, Chokwa and Wolof are axed from the VOL agenda, Telecom may still be interested in servicing some of the more powerful language areas such as Germany, where Grauso has been active in recent months.
The only obstacle to the takeover is Italy's monopolies commission, known as l'Antitrust, which has to decide whether Telecom - owned by the giant holding company STET - is cornering too much of the online market. Already the company has two Internet offshoots: InterBusiness, offering IP connections direct to corporate customers as well as to other service providers, and Telecom Online, which sells ISDN-only access mainly to businesses. The purchase of Video On Line, most of the subscribers of which are home users, was the logical next step.
Telecom Italia is following the Eurotrend in this. Deutsche Telekom already has Internet access businesses. BT recently dawdled into the home-Internet market in the UK, and France Telecom just announced a new Internet service called < A HREF="http://www.wanadoo.fr/">Wanadoo, which offers everything on the Minitel network as well as full Net access and, soon, an electronic mall with secure payment. With this and a Frenchified version of Yahoo! ("Youpi!") it hopes to capture 30% of France's Internet and online market quite quickly. The idea is to provide most of what works in the rest of the world with a French spin and a lot of muscle and marketing. This doesn't look like the most promising of times to be an independent ISP in France.
Meanwhile, Grauso says that he is "extremely disappointed" by the failure of his online adventure. As a self-proclaimed anarchist whose interest in the Internet was fired by its inherent resistance to takeover bids, Grauso must find the fact that Telecom is the beneficiary of his downfall particularly galling - but he says that he "had no other choice" than to sell.
Now he is buying 34,000 hectares of Sardinian forest - a purchase not unconnected with his recent leasing of a dormant local paper mill, the Cartiera di Arbatax, which once supplied 80% of the paper used by the Italian press. Since the price of paper soared last year, the mill now has the potential for profit. (And if paper should take a dive, Grauso can always fall back on the 870 billion lire set aside by the European Union for reforestation in Italy.) So next year's Web backlash stories could be printed on a one-time Net visionary's dead trees. Meanwhile, it is the big boys in telecoms who will see whether they can really make a business out of the unprinted word.
In April of this year, in a meeting room at Heathrow, 60 people took another step towards the emergence of a responsible, commercialisable Internet - or hammered another nail into the coffin of Net innocence, depending on your point of view. These individuals, many of whom represent ISPs, were members of the UK's Net naming committee. They decided at this meeting to form a company.On the Internet, every computer has a domain name. Wired's UK domain name, for example, is wired.co.uk. The naming committee oversees the registration of names in the .co.uk and .org.uk domains, running more or less on a first-come, first-serve basis. And among easy-going types, that has worked just fine. But when a large company gets on to the Net and finds that someone else already has its name registered, that company becomes less than easy-going very quickly.
This reaction, amplified by the eager attentions of m'learned friends, lies behind the incorporation of the naming committee. Dr William Black, currently the overall "trustee" of the .uk name space, issued a stark warning at the Heathrow meeting: he and the other members of the committee faced unlimited liability should they be sued for registering domain names in breach of a company's trademark. The first such suits are already moving towards the courts.
That is why, this summer, the management of the .uk name space will pass to a newly formed, not- for-profit, limited-liability company. The switch will mean the introduction of a charge of around £50 per year for all names registered after June 1st 1996. Existing names will be required to pay an annual fee from June 1997. As with any issue requiring the cooperation of ISPs, the meeting was not without its fractious interludes. A vociferous minority of smaller ISPs objected strongly to the proposals on the grounds that the new company's all-powerful steering committee would be dominated by a cartel of larger ISPs. The voting structure decided upon for the steering committee, however, makes these malcontents look rather paranoid.
Dr Black's integrity won over most of those with misgivings. One of these, Larry Block, is managing director of domain-name registration specialist NetBenefit. He put it thus: "I went into the April 11th meeting deeply sceptical. I left with a feeling that the people setting this company up were doing so for the right reasons, and had the interests of the whole UK Internet community at heart."
Those disturbed by the change seem, in the end, to be upset mostly by the new imperatives emerging now big that money is at stake on the Net. As Rugby Union has demonstrated, big money and amateur organisations mix badly. Going professional is hard, but necessary. This is a first step.
- Tom Loosemore
You'll be surfing through all the radio stations and shipping forecasts and police broadcasts, when suddenly you'll come across this computerised voice, a sort of robot woman, like the London Underground announcer, reeling off these endless lists of numbers. It's actually quite distressing to listen to." Robin Rimbaud, who under the name "Scanner" uses samples taken from mobile-phone stations in his music, is one of many to be held in thrall to these siren voices and their arithmetic chants.These "numbers stations" can be found from anywhere as low as 2Mhz on the shortwave band to as high as 26Mhz. They broadcast in a number of languages. Spanish predominates in the US, English, Russian and German in Europe. Some stations broadcast year round. Others broadcast less frequently, and some apparently broadcast at random.
The only plausible reason for these stations to exist is communication with spies. Mike Chace, who keeps a numbers stations page on the Web (itre.uncecs.edu /radio/numbers.html), points out that shortwave radio is perfect for this job. The equipment is small and innocuous, and a spy can simply purchase a new radio in each new location. Listener folklore has already matched some stations to their governments: the "Lincolnshire Poacher", supposedly run by MI6, is named after the English folksong it uses as a theme tune; the CIA's "Counting Stations" are named for the slow count at the start of each message; and the MOSSAD "Phonetic Alphabet" stations feature a female voice reading out a three-letter phonetic call sign (Alpha, X-ray, Tango...) followed by a one (no message follows) or a two (message follows). That the messages are secret seems clear. But how are they being expressed ? Perhaps a code - but some suspect that the numbers station traffic is broadcast simply to keep a frequency open for long periods of time. The true message might be encoded in background noise using "spread spectrum" techniques.
Theories about number stations abound, but actual evidence will soon be easier to obtain. Some of the number stations are now being recorded by Irdial-Discs, which is due to release a CD-ROM of its findings sometime this year under the title of The Conet Project ( www.ibmpcug.co .uk/~irdial/conet.html). Be sure to listen for the German station that transmits using a female child's voice. Spooky.
- Cooper James
Back in 1955, Jean-Pierre Audebert's idea of a good time was hanging out and playing pinball in an arcade called Paris Swing. Then the usual factors of career, car and kids kicked in, and the silver ball faded out of his life - until his son came home with a copy of Pinball Dream on CD-ROM. You could see the lights a-flashin', you could hear those buzzers and bells, but from the feel of a keyboard, he might as well have been playing by sense of smell. So the old pinball wizard (and ex- IBM engineer) put a big flipper button on each end of the key-board, and added some electrical contacts to act as motion sensors, to detect tilt. Both work in parallel to a normal key-board, with any pinball game, without special drivers.If it sounds simple, that's because it is. But someone had to think of it, and, hey, having thought of it, they might as well patent it. Cherry is now manufacturing the "Keyflip", and talks are on with Packard Bell about rolling it out. Jean-Pierre's new company, also called Keyflip, expects to sell them from September.
- Steve Shipside
We don't want to be on the Internet!" Not something you hear very often these days. But it was Chanel's answer when Stig Harder, publisher of fashion e-zine Lumière (HTTP://www.lumiere.com"> www.lumiere.com), called to ask if he could publish a couple of photos online. Alas, Chanel was to be thwarted. Harder had to inform the company that he had already seen its entire spring collection on the Web.The latest Paris fashions are sneaking off the catwalk right into cyberspace. Normally, fashion magazines only receive permission to publish a few photos from each collection per issue, and television can only broadcast three minutes of catwalk coverage. But Internet fashion sites are reproducing images without playing by any rules. Less than 24 hours after appearing before one of the world's most exclusive audiences, photos of the entire collections of Christian Dior, Gianni Versace and a dozen other top designers were posted on the Internet. Firstview ( www.firstview.com), one of the new sites, is receiving 4.5 million hits a month.
After the call to Chanel, the French Federation for Couture and Ready to Wear, a trade organisation for the leading designers and dressmakers of Paris, held a power meeting. They decided to impose a limit on the number of images published from each collection on the Internet. Relations between the paparazzi and Paris designers are now becoming strained as the Federation seeks to enforce the new rules, which state that runway images are "only for journalistic information and may not be sold or given to anybody.... No diffusion on Internet or any other multimedia network is allowed." Under French copyright law, designers own the rights to their designs, and even to photos of their designs.
Jacques Mouclier, president of the Federation, was quoted in the French newspaper Liberation as saying the Federation will use "every legal weapon at our disposal." Internet publishers don't sound too worried - and they certainly don't see themselves as a resource for design pirates. People in the business of producing imitations are more likely to use black-market videos of shows than still images. Harder, whose Lumière has become the only e-zine accredited by the French Federation, points out that heavyweight designers are in the red and thinks that might help explain the recent Net-piracy hysteria.
But there is also a more subtle conflict between fashion designers' in-crowd attitudes - where the position of your little gold chair by the catwalk determines your social status - and the egalitarianism of the Net. Maybe someday women will be able to decide for themselves what to wear - instead of having fashion foisted upon them from Paris.
- Brent Gregston
Why should a club be just one space ? Why should the dancing be all in one place ? Global communication has always been high on the techno agenda; electronic-music makers take great pride in transcending cultural boundaries with their international language, and reaching corners of the globe that have never understood the point of skinny boys thrashing electric guitars. With this background, it's hardly surprising that studio geeks have been among the most enthusiastic participants in Net culture, setting up innumerable Web sites, IRC channels and mailing lists to spread the bleepy word. And one day all that virtual linking had to turn into something more concrete.For its second birthday, the Fuse Club in Brussels linked itself to London's The End to swap hard beats and digital pictures over a dedicated ISDN line. This club-world first featured Detroit techno aristocrats Robert Hood (in London) and Derrick May (in Brussels) playing two-hour sets to crowds located several hundred kilometres away from their respective DJ booths. The high-quality audio was accompanied by lower quality images, which made the event feel like a very loud evening with John Logie Baird. Now that it's been done once, expect these events to become more sophisticated, and expect ever more experimentation. Already bands like London's Future Sound are performing concerts over ISDN, and at least one person is doing weekly Web gigs using CUSeeMe software - dressed as an alien ( netmare.southern.net/arc-angel/). Rumours of SGI-driven audio, video and VR feeds from this summer's festivals are as yet unsubstantiated, but watch this space.
- Hari Kunzru
Kathy Acker's latest novel - Pussy, King of the Pirates - is Treasure Island with lesbian buccaneers, rocking with laughter at a squalid, English landscape of lost souls, sawdust pubs and doomed erotic questings. But it's not just a novel. There's also a bizarre punk pantomime show with music by the Mekons, who have just cut an album of her readings backed by a strange, folk-pirate ambient score. Naturally, there's a CD-ROM in the works, too. And perhaps most intriguingly, Acker has also been invited by the University of Florida to participate in the creation of erotic MOOs.The funny thing about this is that, for all the sex, hype and literary outlaw-hood, Acker is really just an old-fashioned Romantic novelist with a lifelong admiration for the French symbolists, particularly Verlaine, and for mad '40s playwright and poet Artaud, who appears as a character in Pussy. Or at least Acker is old-fashioned in content; the structure of her work is already a perfectly non-linear fit for the digital age.
Acker predated much of today's interest in non-linear, interactive entertainment with her taste for cut-ups, for allusions and borrowings, for dreams instead of stories. In her MOO she's interested in computers as interactive manifestations of the imagination. She wants to make dreams come true, to dismantle the power structures of the novel and to give new meaning and value to individual acts of imagination.
Acker points out that computers are already freeing up people's communications; look at the number of people who normally don't like writing letters but who email each other like mad. "It's energy, and that's all writing is: energy and words. That's how you can have sex online: by using words and energy."
- Igor Goldkind
Michael Parrella is looking for partners in peace. His company, Noise Cancellation Technologies Inc., has developed the first generation of tools designed to transform irritating background noise into a solemn hush. "We can take out the noise and leave the signal," brags Parrella. "Our anti-noise technology can measurably improve society in my lifetime."Anyone who has sampled NCT's Noisebuster headphones won't dismiss Parrella's boast. The company's anti-noise processors all but cancel out unwanted lower-frequency sounds by creating inverse acoustic waves that neutralise offending clatter. The net result is the sound of near-silence. Now Parrella is calling on makers of planes, trains and vacuum cleaners to integrate NCT's anti-noise systems into existing products.
Intrigued CEOs will first want to visit Parrella's demo facility. Helicopter noise is all but nullified in a "zone of quiet" easy chair; static vanishes from an AM radio; and an assistant manipulates a computer using voice-recognition software from a distance of eight feet - with a screaming vacuum cleaner at his side.
The voice-recognition magic comes courtesy of NCT's new Adaptive Speech Filter, the culmination of five years of research and tinkering. With it, NCT hopes to become the Dolby of digital communication - and, eventually, the unwired world as well. NCT has also developed quieter car mufflers and airplane cabins.
But what, I ask, can you do about a barking dog ?
Parrella shoots back a quick answer: "Use a .45."
- David Shenk
Do you own the information in your databases ? It's a question worth pondering, at least if you live or work in Europe. Right now, the contents of databases aren't covered by the same intellectual property rights that protect information - factual or otherwise - stored in books, videotapes and other traditional media. That should change by 1998, when a new European Union directive will ensure that creators of databases will own the facts that fill their archives. Businessmen are already breathing sighs of contented relief.In America, facts are beyond the scope of the intellectual property laws that exist to protect creativity. But facts aren't creative. So, in a 1991 decision, Feist v Rural Telephone, the United States Supreme Court allowed Feist to copy all of the names and numbers in Rural Telephone's white pages - much to the chagrin of Rural Telephone, which had invested much time and money in gathering and checking the names. British law, by contrast, has traditionally tried to extend copyright protection to protect the effort that compilers of databases put into gathering their facts, whether or not the databases are creative. Now the EU is creating a middle ground.
In hopes of encouraging would-be database builders to invest more in gathering facts, the EU has directed its 15 member governments to legislate a new type of intellectual property law. Anyone who can show that they have devoted "substantial effort" - in time or money - to collecting facts can, for 15 years, prevent anybody else from copying their horde, or even from rummaging through it without permission.
Companies spending millions to build up fantastically tedious but useful collections of consumer trivia will be the biggest beneficiaries of the new laws, which will secure their defences against prying competitors. Creators of Web indices could also feel the impact; while the text of Web pages is copyrighted, the underlying collection of URLs that makes them useful falls into the database category. Database vendors themselves, though, may find it hard to keep too tight a grip on their creations - if customers cannot sample vendors' creations, how will they know whether or not these creations are worth buying ?
- John Browning
There are four or more data channels reaching into your home that compare favourably in bandwidth with a high-speed modem. They deliver up-to-the-minute news and information; you can use them for shopping; people pay to advertise on them; and they've been there for decades. They are the vertical blanking intervals on TV networks - the empty spaces between the umpty frames a second of imagery. Each channel, be it broadcast, satellite, or cable, has a VBI with a capacity of about 240Kbps. That's a lot of bandwidth.At the moment, that bandwidth is used in only two ways: for teletext services and for closed captioning for the deaf. Neither uses more than a fraction of the capacity. Various companies are looking at new uses: Canal Plus in France uses it to distribute software (see "It's Raining Software", Wired 2.05, page 24); Intercast uses it to transmit Web pages. And the incumbents, too, are starting to look into new avenues. Teletext is, in a modest and slightly shaky way, going interactive.
It's easy for webophiles to sneer at teletext, but its clunky pages have charms the Web cannot yet offer. It delivers a huge audience: there are currently more teletext viewers in the UK than there are Web users in the whole world. With 56% of televisions equipped to decode it, UK teletext has a potential audience of 30 million people. Its weekly reach is 17 million viewers, a genuine mass audience with well-known demographics.
Up-to-the-minute news has been delivered via Ceefax, the BBC's teletext service, since the mid-1970s. "We have a wry smile when people say they've got this great idea to put something on the Web," says Aidan Stowe, deputy editor of Ceefax, "because we've been doing it for 20 years." Go into any newspaper newsroom and you'll see a TV tuned to teletext: it's still the place where news appears fastest. And it doesn't get any slower when 10 million people try to access the same page at once.
Commercial teletext services have banner ads, called signposts, and can also offer interleaved editorial and advertising on a rotating page called a multipage. They have proved particularly popular with the travel industry. John Swindell, managing director of Airline Network, a travel company that advertises through both teletext and Web pages, says, "I see them as complementary - we're trying to cover all the bases." Using new "interactive" teletext facilities, his company will soon be offering direct sales through both systems. "Given that people currently access teletext for information on our services, and we're one of the biggest travel advertisers, they're already used to finding our information, so the booking system is a logical step forward," he says. "The number of people who have PCs is small compared to the number of people who have TVs - so far."
Interactive teletext services appeared last summer. They rely on a clever kludge to teach a 20-year-old dog new tricks, and tap into the interactive zeitgeist: viewers use their telephones, via a premium-rate number, as crude input devices, and a specially allocated page displays information as they type it in. The bandwidth is so meagre that the system can only support a few dozen users at once, but it delivers two things that Web marketeers would kill for: a per-second revenue stream from interactive services while maintaining free pages the rest of the time - and secure transactions. Sky's InterText service also provides precise data about individual users derived from Sky's subscriber database, which saves viewers the trouble of typing in name and address details via an unwieldy telephone keypad.
Sky has run a fantasy football league over InterText. It now offers a bulletin board for buying and selling second-hand cars and for cross-channel ferry bookings. It hopes to provide home banking and insurance quotations in the near future. Teletext Live, the rival interactive service on the ITV network, offers services including classified advertisements, personalised greetings and a bulletin board.
Graham Lovelace, the editorial director of Teletext UK, believes that teletext has taught his company a lot that will be applicable to the Web. "We believe we have the skills to do it, because what we've been doing, what we're good at, is managing huge amounts of fast-moving information," he says. "We know what services people use, how they use them, and when they use them." His company has a travel-oriented Web site set for a summer launch.
Nobody really expects teletext to escape being steam-rollered by the Web - or, in the age of digital TV, to become a rather poorly interactive enclave of it. But with mass audience advertising, home shopping and interactive services available on teletext today that are still some way off on the Web, there's life in the old dog yet.
- Tom Standage
In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, mysterious monoliths litter the solar system, waiting for mankind to uncover their secrets. If Avery Associates Architects ( marcus @wilshere.demon.co.uk) gets its way, 2001 will come to the United Kingdom a year early. The firm is behind a scheme to greet the new millennium with a network of monoliths - "Ecological Beacons" - across the country, tying it together.Every beacon will be fitted with a couple of phonecard-operated interactive screens that will provide local environmental read-outs from the beacon's own built-in sensors, or global ecological data beamed down from satellite or fed in by land-line. The screens will also be able to access local information services: updates on local conservation groups, for example, or electronic notice-boards and maps of the area.
The beacons will also have symbolic value. They will feature a variety of materials and designs; artists from each beacon's locale will customise the monoliths and "blend them into any surrounding". But each will conform to a basic structural design: 9.27m high, rising from an equilateral triangle at the base to a narrow rectangular strip at the top. They will be capped by a 15mm-thick piece of stainless steel: the height of the beacon represents the radius of the earth, and the capping proportionately represents the thickness of the earth's crust. Rather neatly, if in-stead you take the height of the beacon to represent the time our planet has exist- ed, then that 15mm cap represents the amount of time that hominids have been wandering about on it - and Homo sapiens itself has only been around for the last millimetre.
AAA has applied to the Millennium Commission for funds to build the first couple of beacons. It's already received permission for a site in Milton Keynes, and is now looking for sponsors to help the project go nationwide.
- James Flint
Researchers at Sussex University are developing a better breed of robot. Their most successful creations are not much to look at - a tangle of Lego, wire and circuit board - but they are capable of dealing with dynamic, real-world environments. These aren't the result of crafty algorithms or clever engineering, but nature's own grand designer: evolution.The team's flagship bot is a two-wheeled, sonar-sensing fellow called Mr Chips. The secret of his success is in his hardware control system. The architecture of his integrated circuits has been not designed but artificially evolved to produce an optimal configuration. How is this possible ? Every circuit is instantiated in a type of programmable ROM, which is then placed in a robot. Each robot's navigational performance is measured, and the best are selected for "breeding". In the same way that genes are mixed during sex to form offspring, the bit-string blueprints from pairs of robots are combined to produce new robots, so spawning the next generation.
The laborious process blurs the distinction between hardware and software, and so makes it possible to exploit the physical properties of the material of which the circuit is made. Human designers cannot do this, at least not at the moment, because their design vision is too abstract to take account of the peculiar physics of integrated circuits. This allows Mr Chips to dispense with the internal clock that forces the circuits of most chips to work in rigid lockstep. Doing away with the rigid clock means that Mr Chips need not alternate between looking, thinking and doing - it can do all three more or less at once.
So what does it do, this pinnacle of robot evolution ? It's more what it doesn't do. Mr Chips can wander around a maze without bumping into the walls. This is a significant achievement for one of today's robots - which demonstrates that robots really do have a long way to go. Still, Adrian Thompson of the Sussex team thinks evolution will take robots a long way: "In nature, control systems are always adapted to the manner in which they are implemented, because their evolutionary success is determined by their effectiveness as real implemented systems." He even speculates that by evolving circuits in this way it may be possible to come up with an architecture that functions in an "intelligent, brain-like" manner. Such an architecture would be better suited to silicon than are neural networks, "which may be a bad use of integrated circuits, which are very fast but have severe constraints on interconnections because of their planar nature."
"At this stage, robots like Mr Chips are doing fairly straightforward navigation," says Inman Harvey of the Evolutionary Robotics Group at Sussex. "But soon we might have the first artificial insect on our hands." So will it be alive? Harvey doesn't think we need to worry about this just yet. "That's a question we don't need to ask until we start to hesitate before turning off the power," he says.
- Jon Miller
The world's most powerful radio stations reach around the globe, yet have no transmitters or antennae. Cyberradio has arrived, allowing listeners to tune in via their PCs to more than 3,000 hours of news, sports, business, music and comedy programming. Admittedly, 3,000 hours isn't much, and the sound quality is none too hot. Furthermore, the PC is hardly convenient for the car, much less for the bath. But despite this, there are some who believe that audio broadcasts on the Net have a viable commercial future.The first Web radio sites - simple retransmissions of broadcast pro- grammes - were launched in the US last year. A number are now starting to broadcast live. Minneapolis-based net.radio started from scratch as a 24-hour-a-day Internet radio station. For the most part they use RealAudio software, which allows the user to listen in real time rather than downloading the whole thing first. RealAudio is free, and was downloaded by more than two million people in 1995 ( www.realaudio .com), prompting over 100 radio stations from more than 14 countries to launch a cyberservice. And this despite the currently poor sound quality - similar to a conventional service broadcast on mono AM or good shortwave - and with the ever-present threat of signal break up when the Web is busy.
As an alternative to reaching for the tranny, it sounds like a non-starter with a bit of novelty value. But as a supplement it may yet have something to offer. Net radio allows stations to broadcast to special interest groups previously ignored because of transmission costs or location, according to Sebastian Sandys, managing director of British gay and lesbian broadcast Freedom FM . "It's much more than a gimmick," he insists. "For commercial radio like us - broadcasting only to a specific group - you can use the technology to build new (gay and lesbian) communities in other countries where established structures don't already exist."
As well as freeing radio from the tyranny of geography, the Internet can also loosen the shackles of timing. With enough server capacity, there's no reason why everyone should listen to the same thing at once. The technology could eventually offer people the ultimate convenience of hearing the The Archers and other radio favourites when they choose, wherever their computer may be. Although the technology to deliver audio-on-demand services over the Web is not yet widespread, it soon will be.
"Undoubtedly, the potential is there," observes David Campbell, chief executive of Virgin Radio, which went live on the Net in March . "Although there must surely be a question mark over the demand." As with video on demand, listeners would be expected to pay for the pleasure. Two subscription audio services already operate in Europe - DMX and MC Europe supply over 100 themed, music-only radio stations via cable TV networks, he says. "Both companies are finding it hard to make a good business out of this on cable at the moment. While they can sell the concept to the cable companies, it is convincing the listener which counts. Why would it work any better on the Net ?" Freedom would argue that listeners value community more than they value music; and in dispersed communities, that may be true.
But perhaps the biggest hurdle is the simplest: research shows people generally listen to radio while doing something else. Internet radio may be good as a background to working at a computer, but it's not well adapted for listening while ironing, or driving, or whatever. A bit of gadgetry that could download high-quality audio onto cassettes without supervision might break that barrier. At the moment, though, it's small wonder if the tranny makers are not yet quaking in their boots.
- Meg Carter
Ever bought a dud CD-ROM ? You know the sort - the ones you get bored of in less time than they take to install ? Of course you have. In France, so many people are dissatisfied with their disks that French chain store FNAC, which sells around a quarter of all CD-ROMs in France, has introduced a certification scheme for all of them. Only products passing a series of stringent tests will qualify for FNAC's Gold Arrow - the rest are consigned to wallow in a sea of mediocrity.As well as losing marks for complicated installation procedures and poor documentation, the products are judged on their content. Quality of graphics and the intuitiveness of the interface are scored, and the too-rarely asked question of whether it was really worthwhile adapting the material to CD-ROM in the first place is well to the fore in the minds of the testers.
According to FNAC, around 60% of discs are failing on technical grounds, mostly as a result of Windows-induced glitches. And don't imagine that it's just one-man-and-his-dog developers that are struggling to reach par - Microsoft's Cinemania and Encarta products were both refused arrows, although not, FNAC stresses, on technical grounds. Instead, both titles were judged badly adapted for the local market. So much for Microsoft's much-vaunted localisation strategy....
- Steve Shipside
If ever a government programme were filled with good intentions, that programme must be the European Union's Esprit. Esprit disburses about £350 million pounds of taxpayers' money each year, gathered from across the EU, to create basic knowledge, to promote cooperation among European countries and to beef up Europe's high-tech industries. Unfortunately, as Esprit has spent over a decade painfully discovering and rediscovering, these goals are mutually contradictory.Its latest good idea, to bring would-be users of new technology into the groups which create it, sounds sensible. But like so many of Esprit's other sensible ideas, it may end up merely leaving everyone more disappointed at the end of the day.
Esprit was born in 1982 to confused and frightened parents, who knew what their child should be able do but didn't know how to teach it. The programme was conceived out of the palpable terror that Japan was about to conquer the world technologically. Japan's threatened "Fifth Generation" of intelligent-computing technology never materialised.
But it was still enough to engender massive R&D spending programmes throughout the West. Britain, then still an IT player, launched its Alvey programme to accelerate the pace of technology development. US industry formed the Sematech alliance and enjoyed the huge subsidies of Reagan's Star Wars program. Europe launched Esprit and other initiatives. Almost any sort of R&D, however marginal or farfetched, seemed like a good idea at the time.
Esprit, however, aimed to do more than just R&D; it also promised to promote cooperation among European researchers. Promising more different results to more different people may have helped Esprit to survive even as other early-1980s government R&D programmes have quietly been closed down. But doing so has also gained it a reputation for putting politics above achievement. To qualify for Esprit funding, R&D projects must involve researchers from more than one European country - and the more countries, the better. The classic politically-correct Esprit project, jokes one European industrialist, involves "a Greek university, an Irish small business and somebody from each of France, Germany and the UK." No wonder projects become so fragmented and hard to manage that they rarely produce tangible results.
Although concrete information on Esprit's performance is extremely hard to get, the European Commission admits that it has had a string of bad investments over the years. Among these were some of the projects aimed at developing CAD/CAM systems, compiler technology and new computer operating systems as well as a variety of "pre-competitive" research projects undertaken largely by universities. More recently, in the '90s, came the ACRI project: meant to create a Euro-mini-supercomputer that would allow Europe to compete with the US and Japan, it went down in flames after blowing 30 million Ecus (£20 million) of Esprit money (see "What a Waste", Wired 2.01, page 38). The occasional success - like the ARM microprocessor built in Cambridge and used in the Apple Newton, among others - only highlights the general gloom.
The senior European officials now trying to reform Esprit are well aware of the notorious reputation they have inherited. "We don't need any more white elephants," says Stefano Micossi, director general of DG-III, the European Commission's department of industry. The Esprit program was moved into his domain in 1992, from DG-XIII (telecoms and technology), in an effort to make it more results-oriented. "I wondered for a while if Esprit wasn't just a bureaucratic operation. But now it's a core priority that it be made to work. [Esprit is] a key part of our industrial policy."
Micossi speaks frankly and with passion, a welcome exception to Brussels diplomatic double-talk. He refers to Europe's now-dead dream of technological self-sufficiency in microchips as "a hallucination that lasted for too long. Now we have realised we've got to stick to what we do best." Where Europe can win, Micossi believes, is in lower-cost, brain-intensive enterprises like software, specialist chips and architecture design where economies of scale are not so essential. Europeans are less likely to succeed - as their track record shows - in producing PCs, micro-chips and other mass market hardware.
The move to DG-III has done more than just to shift the programme towards a tighter focus on short-term results. More grants are given these days, and they tend to be smaller; about half of all funding now goes to start-ups and small enterprises. All this effort would be more useful, though, if the grants did not take so long to approve. From proposal to approval of an Esprit grant now takes 12 months. While this is better than the 15 months it took a few years ago, it makes the programme useless - if not actually counterproductive - for companies trying to compete in the fast-moving niche markets in which Mr Micossi hopes to help Europe excel. Product life cycles for chips and software average around 18 months, and in some sectors whole new generations of product emerge in less time than it takes to get an Esprit R&D grant.
"We're slow," admits George Metakides, head of Esprit. "That's a real deterrent to small or medium enterprises. Approval and launch time are far too long. The problem is systemic." Metakides is pushing to simplify the application process. But more radical innovations may be called for, such as an autonomous, single grant-approval committee, one not answerable to the EU member states that now seem chronically unable to resist the temptation to make sure that every country has a finger in every grant.
But instead of simplifying to focus on improving its R&D results, Esprit is trying to bring more constituencies into its fold. "Today, 40% of all Esprit partners are technology users," says Metakides. "Getting users involved is arguably more important than R&D itself." Typically, a small company seeking to develop a product contacts potential users before applying for Esprit funding. Users are then paid to provide advice on system functionality and to assess prototypes. They may also be offered some proprietary share of the technology. The hope is that this will create more marketable products.
Not all member states are convinced. "We're already being accused of becoming unfocused," confides Micossi. "They say we're throwing too many seeds and not getting enough crop." But if Micossi wants to stem such criticism, and make Esprit the success he wants it to be, surely the first thing he must do is to decide upon what Esprit should focus. Product development ? Basic research ? Market research ? International cooperation ? These are all worthwhile goals; these are all Esprit's goals. But they are also mutually contradictory goals. Now that Esprit is a teenager, and an expensive teenager at that, maybe it's time for it to decide what it really wants to do with itself.
- Richard Evans