Trade in and Save $50 with HPDespite all the hype and bluster of industry giants such as Intel and Microsoft, the promise has to date only been realised by the small percentage of the market that can afford high end products and services from specialist integrators, and a handful of technical folk armed with the skills necessary to install their own kit.
Even people with a reasonable grasp of networking can struggle when installing equipment in the home. Things like conflicting IP addresses, the assigning of ports or knowing what a 'subnet mask' can be very daunting for the uninitiated.
Networking vendor D-Link claims to have come up with a solution, an over-arching product strategy it calls D-Life.
"Until now, a user goes to set up a media player, and they are asked to choose a Static IP address or DHCP," explains Michael Scott, technical media manager at D-Link. "Thats where my mom and dad throw their hands up in the air."
"The thought behind D-Life is to get rid of all that - get rid of the IP addresses, the acronyms, the confusing numbers and jargon. It is about making products that people can plug in and just make it work."
Under its D-Life strategy, future home networking products from D-Link, be they media players, security web-cams, network attached storage, dual-mode phones, digital photo frames, wireless printers and the like, all come with a unique pin and serial number. When a user buys one of these products, they log in to a free account at www.d-life.com and punch in the serial numbers of the new product they are attempting to install (the serial number comes as a sticker on the base of each device).
This activates the D-Link products to configure themselves, as it gives them an awareness of what other nodes/devices are on the same network. If a web-cam or media player detects that a camviewer screen or a digital photo frame is added to the network, it assumes that the screen is the destination for its content and configures itself accordingly. If a device is added to the network that has the same IP address as another, it dynamically changes its own address to ensure there is no conflict.
At present D-Link only has a limited range of D-Life ready products available in the US. Scott expects the rest of the world (including Australia) to follow within six months. Then the vendor will carry the D-Life strategy throughout its next generation of home networking products into the foreseeable future.
The D-Life family of products
(Credit: D-Link)The catch? The system is only going to be easier for the average user if you all the products in the network are D-Life products. Add a product from Linksys or Netgear, for example, and you may need to sharpen up those networking skills after all.
In that sense D-Life is a clever way that D-Link can encourage customers into buying a complete suite of its (relatively inexpensive) products.
Scott says users need not fear being 'locked-in' to the D-Link brand.
"One of the criteria when we were developing this is that it cannot be proprietary," Scott said. "It has to work with Netgear or Linksys router. The products are self-aware enough that is a D-Link camera joins the network on the same IP address as a Netgear router, it reconfigures itself."
The technology, patented by California and Florida-based start-up eJamming, was among several new collaborative tools demonstrated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini on stage at his CES keynote, with a little help from pop group Smashmouth.
I cornered eJamming chairman and president Alan Glueckman at the Showstoppers event later in the day to discuss how the technology works.
"We literally connect musicians in real-time, synchronizing audio streams from multiple locations so they can play together," Glueckman says. "You might have a musician in China, another in Australia, one in Brazil and one in United States that can all jam together in real-time. Not only can they play together, they can write and create together or teach each other."
A screenshot of musicians collaborating online with eJamming
(Credit: eJamming)The magic behind the scenes, Glueckman says, is a compression technology that "thins the audio data so it can be shoved through broadband pipes but still sound pleasing to a musicians ear."
Geographically-dispersed musicians can also turn eJamming into a virtual recording studio, he said.
"The really cool thing is that their performances can be recorded locally in full fidelity," he said. "Then you later can exchange a time-stamped full-fidelity track based on these local versions. [Mixed together] you get a better-than-CD-quality recording of the jam session."
Traditionally, even when multiple musicians are recording together in the same room (multi-tracking), there are often problems with latency if the system recording the tracks doesn't have enough memory or compute power. The thought of pushing such huge files in real-time over the Internet sounds like a pipe dream at the speed of most connections.
But Glueckman insists that eJamming's compression technology, coupled with software that synchronizes audio streams in real-time, means that musicians can hear each other performing in high quality audio (at least as rich as MP3) across the Internet.
It does, of course, require some decent recording gear at each end, works better with MIDI-interface sounds than actual stereo audio tracks, and requires very high broadband speeds to ensure the latency issue doesn't plague the process.
But with both home recording technology and broadband connectivity continually dropping in price, it might not be long before the technology is available to even the most humble of home studios.
Glueckman says eJamming eventually intends to bring the magic of live performance to fans dispersed across the web. At the end of the quarter, his company will launch 'jamcast' - an opportunity for acts to stream a live performance to any computer, mobile internet device or smart phone connected to the web.
"The excitement of live performance is liberated from the venue," Glueckman said.
A jamcast, he said, would be particularly fruitful for those acts that have developed relatively small fan bases that are distributed globally using social networking sites like Myspace or e-commerce sites like iTunes. A broadcast of their performance might be far more viable than a tour.
At present, eJamming's revenue model is charging a (roughly eight to ten dollar) monthly subscription to use eJamming's technology.
With Jamcast, both the musicians and eJamming will be able to share the revenue gained from from paid subscribers to a performance.
But that was precisely the atmosphere in Las Vegas tonight as he both opened this year's CES conference and closed a final chapter of his career.
Thousands of journalists and technologists queued for some four hours in snake-like lines that wound around several floors of the Venetian Hotel and Casino to hear him give his tenth and final CES keynote.
In just under six months, Gates will retire from full-time work with the software company to devote his time and energy to his philanthropic project The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims for global equity in healthcare and education. As several Microsoft devotees said during the long wait to see the show, Gates' last CES keynote is a significant event. This was the man that revolutionised desktop computing and in the process influenced the career opportunities for millions of IT support workers around the globe. And for the very dedicated few among the 140,000 people in Las Vegas for this year's CES, it is likely to be the last time they will see him talk.
Gates isn't a dazzling stage-performer by any stretch. His squeak of a voice has nothing of the immediacy or intensity of some of his peers (Cisco's Chambers comes to mind), and he hardly appears the rock n' roll type with his daggy blue sweater and slacks.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates adrresses CES 2008
(Credit: CES)Thankfully there were plenty of stars at hand to liven up the event.
Early in the address, Gates was treated to a pre-recorded tongue-in-cheek send-off that included appearances by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, former vice president Al Gore, U2's Bono, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and actor George Clooney, all joking at Gates' expense as to what he might get up to upon retirement.
Among the frivolity, there was the business. Gates discussed the next "digital decade" as being one in which high definition content will be pushed to all manner of devices. He then touted the further development of the natural/human user interface - making an example of Microsoft's touch-based 'Surface' Table Computer, but not mentioning the Nintendo Wii or the Apple iPhone, both pioneers in the field.
Gates predicted that PCs will again grow this year at double digit growth rates, and announced that Microsoft's latest Vista operating system now has some 100 million users. He also announced that broadcaster NBC will be offering some 3,000 hours of footage from the Beijing Olympic Games online using Microsoft's Silverlight and Live software technologies.
In gaming, Gates' colleagues announced that the company has shipped some 17.7 million X-Box games consoles, claiming that more cash is spent on XBox games than games for both Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation put together.
The company also showcased new innovations in the digital home and for the portable music player Zune and demonstrated ways in which Microsoft technology can be used to improve the communications and entertainment experience while driving in a car.
There would be no major product announcements, nor any emotional farewell.
Instead his keynote closed, as perhaps the long wait to see Gates speak deserved, with some real rock n' roll royalty - a live Guitar Hero jam-off with Guns N Roses guitarist Slash.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates summons Slash for a Guitar Hero duel
(Credit: CES)Then Gates, unassumingly, walked off the CES stage for the last time.
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