Media Goes Mobile at DEMOmobile

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA -- The beat plays on at this week's DEMOmobile 2001 conference, as vendors scramble to show off the latest wares for putting music and video into the palm of your hand.

Companies began to unveil new products on Wednesday, including hardware and software designed to make multimedia content more accessible on handheld devices and Internet-enabled car entertainment systems. Many of the new technologies strive to make streaming video more fluid, music files more portable, and wireless content delivery more cost effective.

Media No-Names Shine

Although big names like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard are expected to steal the limelight with updates to their flagship handheld products, a number of smaller companies showed on Wednesday that they are in the innovation business as well.

For consumers looking to ease their commutes, SimpleDevices plans to unveil its SimpleAuto digital audio receiver, which transfers music and other media from a PC to a car. Park the car in the garage, and the SimpleAuto device makes a wireless connection with a PC inside the house, pulling in CD collections or downloading specific types of content such as news or sports programming from Internet-connected radio stations. Users can even set up automatic daily downloads, telling the device which programs should be loaded onto the SimpleAuto product.

"For your daily commute, you can preprogram things like horoscopes, sports shows, and the local weather or traffic report," says a SimpleDevices spokesperson. "Every day [the device] will stream fresh content."

The company plans to offer two versions of the product, one with a 10GB hard drive and a higher-end model with a 20GB hard drive. The product will be available early next year in models priced between $400 and $500.

Packet Choice, a software product from NewsTakes, allows Internet content providers to set up different pricing schemes for streaming video for wireless devices, based on video quality. Designed to be integrated into Internet portals and other content sites, Packet Choice lets users choose between a full stream of video or cut-down versions of the stream that show periodic slides. In every case, the audio portion streams in its entirety, says a company spokesperson.

NewsTakes' software uses a set of rules to determine which frames of video should be dropped out. The company relies on audio and video descriptors that are part of the MPEG-7 media format.

Already used by Matsushita Electric, the Japanese consumer electronics giant better known by its Panasonic brand name, Packet Choice is now available to NewsTakes customers in the United States.

Smoother Video on the Go

CelVibe will demonstrate its switch-like CelFeed device, which evens out video streams on cell phones and other handheld devices. As users travel with their wireless devices, the bandwidth often fluctuates, causing streaming video to skip and appear choppy. The CelFeed product addresses this problem by measuring bandwidth changes and adjusting the quality of the video to match the available streaming speed.

The company plans to sell to telecommunication carriers in the first quarter of 2002. A top-of-the-line CelFeed device can handle as many as 24 channels of content and stream to 1000 concurrent users, says John Marchioni, vice president of business development at CelVibe.

BeVocal plans to show off a VoiceXML application built on top of its BeVocal Cafe--a development platform that helps other companies build voice-enabled applications. One application developed by MusicPhone lets users dial a toll-free number, say the name of a musician, and hear information about the artist, including song clips, concert dates and ways to purchase CDs, says Jennifer Deitsch, a BeVocal spokesperson.