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Welcome to the December 2005 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
STORIES
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The once-ubiquitous consumer technology is on that slow road to niche status already traveled by record players, cassette players and (dare we say?) 8-track decks.
Of course, the death of VCRs and the VHS format has been long expected, but sales numbers are now starting to back up that prediction.
Holly Vershum, a manager in Blockbuster's brand public relations department, noted that revenue from rentals of VHS tapes was 31.7 percent in full year 2003, but was only 5.5 percent for the second quarter of 2005. By the same comparison, revenue from DVD rentals throughout the company skyrocketed from 57.3 percent to 84.1 percent. Nonetheless, the death of VHS is hardly something that will happen overnight--if ever. After all, there's still a collectibles market for LPs. And a few diehards still use the Betamax videotape format, simply because it can be cool in some circles to own something that's so uncommon.
Most of the tapes cost less than $5, with many selling for less than $3. A complete set of the "Star Wars" trilogy on VHS goes for $9.95. Its DVD counterpart downstairs costs $44.95. A used copy of "Traffic" on DVD sells for $9.95, while the VHS version fetches only $3.95.
Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, like many health care facilities in the U.S., always considered patient complications an unfortunate but inevitable result of prolonged hospital stays.
Individuals admitted for organ transplants, cancer treatments or emergency care would often end up contracting some altogether different, potentially life-threatening illness, despite the fact that they were under the close supervision of a team of top doctors. A new intensive care unit technology, however, has worked wonders in one critical corner of the hospital, helping Swedish Medical and others in the often information technology-averse hospital field improve patient safety, reduce complications, and, as a result, shorten patient stays and save money. Many of the more than 100 hospitals around the U.S. that have bolstered their intensive care units with the virtual or eICU facilities designed by venture-backed Visicu say they are confident the technology has saved lives by reducing the incidence of often-deadly hospital-related infections.
Visicu's virtual eICU enables staff doctors to monitor all of the ICU patients from five computer screens in a command center that is sometimes built inside the hospital, or sometimes set up miles away. One U.S. military hospital in Hawaii has even used the technology to oversee ICU operations at an affiliated Navy hospital in Guam. The eICU center collects a battery of subtle and not so subtle vitals--everything from a slight dip in blood oxygenation or hemoglobin levels, to things that can be observed with the naked eye, like dilated pupils or even a patient who is about to fall out of bed. Through a series of cameras, videoconferencing equipment and computer software installed at the patient's bedside and fed to the command center, the on-duty clinician at the eICU can alert doctors and nurses on the ground when intervention is needed.
Hewlett-Packard is expected to announce its first blade servers that use Intel's Itanium processor.
HP is currently the second-place blade seller after IBM, and together the companies account for the lion's share of shipments and revenue for the thin servers. Right now, one difference between their products is that IBM's Power processor-based blade can run the company's version of Unix, AIX, but HP's machine can't run its own take on the operating system.
That will change with HP's Itanium blades, which can run the HP-UX version of Unix. Itanium-based computers also can run Linux and Microsoft Windows. In the second quarter of 2005, blade server revenue grew 49 percent to $419 million compared with the overall server market's 4.7 percent growth to $12.2 billion. The next Itanium, a dual-core chip code-named Montecito, has been delayed until mid-2006.
How big is your laptop? Fifteen inches? Seventeen inches? How about a massive 19- or 20-inch wide-screen LCD model?
With so many DVDs featuring letterboxed or wide-screen versions of films, consumers' fascination with larger screen sizes is changing the size and shape of the laptop industry.
The wide-screen format, found in only 39.2 percent of laptops expected to ship this year, will become dominant in mid- to late 2006. It will nearly eclipse standard screen dimensions by the end of 2009, the market research firm estimates.
The IDC report doesn't refer only to the larger sizes, however. IDC predicted that 12-inch ultraportables and 14- and 15-inch wide-screen displays will fuel 62.5 million notebook shipments this year. That number, IDC forecasts, will climb to 114.6 million in 2009. In addition to watching movies or playing games, customers are appreciating that wide-screen formats let them view documents and spreadsheets side-by-side instead of scrolling up and down. But are consumers ready to lug around a 20-inch laptop? Predictions for future sales point in a positive direction.
The market for DSP chips is dominated today by the communications and consumer segments. However, 2009 revenue market segment shares are expected to show a small shift away from these segments in favor of the industrial and mil-aero segments.
The market trend indicates that floating point DSPs are expected to lead revenue increases over the next five years, growing from US$1.0 billion in 2004 to approximately US$2.2 billion by 2009. The communications market segment is expected to represent 61% of the market in 2009, losing approximately 5% share compared with 2004. The combined segments of industrial and mil-aero will increase purchases as part of updating and extending the capabilities of their equipment. They will pay higher prices however due to their demands of higher performance and lower purchasing power increasing by 6% their market share, bringing up the combined revenue percentage of both to 20% of the total market in 2009.
The production of computer, peripheral and storage devices increased 0.4 percent, the fourth consecutive sub-par monthly change. Semiconductor production, in contrast, rose 1.7 percent. This was weaker than recent monthly changes and almost certainly random rather than a weakening growth trend. Telcom equipment production was 2.7 percent higher. This was well above the improvements in August and September, but it's also not likely a change in trend in this unusually volatile industry. Overall, U.S. manufacturing production increased 1.4 percent in October from September. This offsets the 0.7 percent hurricane-caused drop in September and keeps factory output growth on the expected 4 percent plus annual growth trend.
October production slipped in other electronics end markets, except aerospace where activity rebounded to the pre-Boeing strike level. Motor vehicle production was 0.6 percent lower as aggressive discounting ended. However, deep discounts were back by early November, so an offsetting rebounded is expected by year's end.
Industrial machinery production was marginally lower. This is temporary. Record lean manufacturers' inventories and record high-order backlogs assure above average growth in machinery production well into 2006.
The power train of a car is a complex electrical, mechanical, and chemical system, and improved performance requires pressure sensing at many points. Gasoline engines need the MAP (manifold absolute pressure) from a sensor that must unavoidably reside in an area that exposes it to gas. Increasingly, these fuel systems are also measuring air flow, which a rugged version of the well-established hot-wire technique (with no moving parts) must sense. Diesel engines, in contrast, use the BAP (barometric absolute pressure); their requisite sensor can reside in a control module, which is a less hostile environment.
To ensure the success of the test in 3 Scandinavia's WCDMA 3G network, Nokia will provide selected push to talk handsets, including Nokia 6280. Push to talk is a fascinating new service for business users in particular. Chief Technology Officer of 3 Scandinavia pointed out the company's interest in offering innovative services to appeal to all our customers. He said, "We chose to test push to talk with Nokia because their end-to-end solution will be compliant with the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) standard, and because of Nokia's service commitment and capability to support the PoC platform."
Bob Bird, Vice President, Nokia Networks also feels confident that this test strengthens Nokia's position as a leader in push to talk worldwide. Nokia's end-to-end push to talk solution offers a full feature set, and will be compliant with the OMA standard. Nokia's solution is compatible with the IP Multimedia Subsystem as standardized in 3GPP, and it will be capable of supporting various push-to-media, such as video. With commercial contracts for 45 PoC service offerings, and several operator tests ongoing, Nokia is leading the market for Push to talk over Cellular in GSM. Nokia has launched 30 PoC handsets, out of which 20 are available in Sweden and 5 are 3G terminals.
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