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Gladys Knight might serve chicken, but she don't play with chicken heads. Gladys is suing, after the Georgia Department of Revenue raided Glady's Chicken and Waffles and arrested her son for stealing money.
According to TMZ:
Gladys wants the person now running the restaurants previously managed by her son,Shanga Hankerson, to 86 her from signs and promotions for the chicken and waffle joints.
Gladys says she gave the green light to use her name and image for the restaurants back in '99, but put the kibosh on the deal a few months ago after the eateries were raided by the Georgia Department of Revenue. Her son was arrested for allegedly pocketing a million bucks.
And one more thing … in addition to money and an injunction, Gladys wants all her memorabilia adorning the restaurants returned to her.
Wow, if you can steal from you parent you can steal from anyone.
What are your thoughts?
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A Brain/Mandala from "Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain" by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) which can be found on: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13485.abstract?sid=ee14b21d-873d-4556-8bad-c9e5ea715cdf
BioHarmonizing '17 eCourse
BioHarmonizing 2017
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Here, you find inspirations about cultivating joyful living for the benefit of all beings. Please, take a look at book "BioHarmonizing: How To Flourish And Cultivate Peace" and eCourse "BioHarmonizing 2013". THANKS!

subset: commoncrawl


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After a very prolonged 'pause', I am so happy to once again be typing up another 'Magazine of the Moment' post. Admittedly, the ferocity with which I have been consuming new 'indie' magazines has diminished a lot since my last post, as I both came to realise that I couldn't keep up with all the magazines I was purchasing and I was probably spending a little too much of my money on them (I know *shock horror*. I never thought I'd type those words either...). I'm now focusing on buying the magazines I truly love and leave me hungry for more the minute I finish reading the final page.
One of these magazines is The Happy Reader. A quarterly publication, the fundamentals of this magazine are refreshingly simple. Each issue is split into two halves: the first half consists of an in-depth interview with a prominent celebrity or figure and the second half consists of an in-depth analysis of a piece of literature. Being a collaborative project between Fantastic Man and Penguin Classics, The Happy Reader is a marriage of exquisite style and literature. But for me, what makes it so unique, is it invites readers to further explore their own curiosity.
In the information/media saturated world that has seen our attention spans grow ever thinner, The Happy Reader is a welcome reprieve from all the noise. The interview half of the magazine is very extensive - more so than any other feature I have read in other publications. The issues I have read so far featured incredibly prominent people within their fields (actors, curators, artists), although they were still people of which I was personally unaware. This was no detriment to my reading experience though; I got to learn so much about the handful of people in the most organic way possible. The interviews are conducted as if the interviewer and interviewee are merely good friends talking the afternoon away. Of course, books are a regular and reoccurring topic of conversation, but the interviews also delve into the areas of art, music and cinema. On the occasions that I have found myself reading these interviews (at a cafe, on public transport and even in the bath) I have always been enraptured by the insights that the interviewees gave and eagerly noted down every reference to things that inspired them in some way.
The second half of the magazine is a pastiche of essays, opinion pieces, artworks and, in the case of the latest issue, activities that relate to the chosen classic of that issue. I particularly enjoyed the second half of Summer 2016, which focused on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Favourite articles of mine included: 'On Big Ben', which discussed the sound and significance of the iconic bell of London, 'Ten Men I Should Have Married', which sees the writer take apt inspiration from Clarissa's constant wondering of what might have been had she married Peter Walsh, and 'My First Great Book', in which author Michael Cunningham discusses how Mrs Dalloway changed his life and helped shape his career. These pieces are indicative of the ways that literature can shape people; their ideas, livelihoods, careers and every day life. Reading it, I not only became more curious about the impact of great works of literature, but the varying ways in which we interpret them and attach individual meaning.
The Happy Reader is an absolutely delightful magazine that provides food for thought at a very reasonable price (8 pound for a yearly subscription or, if you are lucky enough to find a local stockist like I have, about $6 per issue in Australia). If you happen to live in London, I also urge you to send through your interest to attend their book club events which coincide the release of the newest issue. I was so lucky to have been able to attend the second Joseph x Happy reader Book Club. It was an evening of enlightening discussion with like minded readers and lovers of Virginia Woolf accompanied by bottomless gin and tonics. It was one of the highlights of my trip to London, and I think for that reason, I will always have a soft spot for The Happy Reader.


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Silambarasan(Simbu) latest film Osthi which is released worldwide with highest number of prints is rocking at Box-Office.
The tickets for all shows are sold out online in all the Multiplexes. The movie got positive reviews from almost all websites and media.
Osthi is doing good business at box-office. As per the trade reports Osthi has collected around Rs 7 Crore world wide on first day. This is highest first day grosser in Simbu's career.
Business Statistics
Budget: Rs 24 Crores
Overall First Day Gross Collections world wide: Rs 7 Crores
Trade analysts say that, next 3 days collections may even go up due to weekend holidays. Osthi may get huge collections from overseas as the movie is running in 100 screens.


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Our World
Scientific reasoning is on based repeatedly testing and refining theories. In the pursuit of the objective truth, the singular reality of a solution, academics and scientists generally curtail their own biases. This action attempts to eliminate subjective truths, realities that we believe in but are not always true. With mathematics and the sciences this system works out well. In the liberal arts these efforts can inhibit academic progress.
The Problem
These liberal arts confound the limits of mathematics and empirical reasoning. While scientists file case studies and field reports those in the liberal arts compile ethnographies, qualitative research design aimed at exploring cultural phenomena. However, cultural forces are immeasurable. I believe with the liberal arts there is no objective truths, only subjective truths. I reason that while a math equation will only have one answer there are a thousand unique and personal interpretations to even the simplest of poems. All of these interpretations all equally valid, on the condition they can be supported, because there is no single answer for questions of culture.
Issues arise with the liberal arts; they are using the methods of the sciences to attempt to explain issues which confound those very sciences. This leaves academics in quite the pickle, as they hurt the findings of their works in their attempts to remain unbiased.
The Solution (Sometimes)
The autoethnography : this adaptation of the ethnography takes the qualitative rigor of the original while allowing for the unique viewpoint and experiences of the author to replace desensitized studies. While this would be laughable to apply to the fields of math and science ( 2+2=5 because I feel it should) it works quite well in the liberal arts. Many of the fields were formed to fulfill and debate opinions birthed from a cultural yearning. There is no way to empirically calculate the value a degree in English, Women's Studies, or Art, but culture would grow quite stale if even one of these actors was missing. Bridling the autoethnography gives every liberal arts academic the best tools to express themselves. In doing so they will better be able to capture culture and we will all be able to appreciate it better thanks to them.


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When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf, The love of reading
Nella foto Lesley e Julia Stephen; sullo sfondo Virginia Woolf, allora ancora Virginia Stephen.
Postato da: IM


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Having read the article "Why Websites Still Can't Predict Exactly What You Want" by Kaiser Fung, I am inclined to agree with his conclusion that companies are looking at their data the wrong way.
Instead of looking for commonality between groups of customers and making generic offers based on that, companies should be looking at the individual's transaction history and profile to make offers that are better suited to individuals. In this case, offers do not have to be specials or discounts in the traditional sense, but simply suggestions that might be useful in the context of the transaction.
Where to next?
As to Kaiser's point – Is it being ignore because it's too simple? It's not like the data doesn't exist to make this possible. I believe it's simply a case of companies not looking at personalisation through the eye of the customer.
The few good examples I have come across are in the travel industry, but these customised offers are generally made via email instead of online at the time of transacting. But there are more and more companies investing in personalising offers to customers, more notably in the retail space.


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Monday, December 24, 2007
Two facets of San Diego's healthy economy
The first story was covered by Tuesday's U-T, which noted that the median sale price of a San Diego County home had dropped to $440,000 in November, off 15% from the peak of $517,500 exactly two years earlier. An accompanying graph shows that prices had returned almost exactly where they were in March 2004 in nominal dollars (actually lower after adjusting for inflation). Rather than gloat, the Voice of San Diego's resident housing bear used the occasion to predict even further price drops.
Both the U-T and VoSD speculated about how to interpret the much more rapid price drop today versus 15 years ago. In the 1990s, middle class machinists and other General Dynamics and Rohr workers were getting laid off as California paid the peace dividend. Some dumped their houses quickly to follow their jobs to Arizona or Colorado, but the rest hung on, hoping prices would return to their 1991 peak.
Economists have long observed that real estate prices are rapidly marked to the market on the way up, but are "sticky" on the way down — as homeowners hold their house off the market rather than accept a lower price than their reference price. That's why I graduated form Point Loma High. My parents moved out of San Diego in December 1963, but couldn't sell their house due to an aerospace recession so they rented it out; by the time prices had come back in spring 1967, my parents were looking to move back to San Diego — so we went back to our home in Point Loma.
The correction in housing prices (however painful for speculators and highly-leveraged first-time homebuyers) will be healthy for the San Diego high-tech economy. For a while, it looked as though San Diego housing prices were approaching the stratospheric levels of Silicon Valley or New York. The problem is, local wages wouldn't support such prices — San Diego wages and housing prices have always been lower than Los Angeles. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2002, San Diego prices were rising to Silicon Valley levels, but now at $440k, they are only slightly more than half the Santa Clara County/San Mateo County average of $800-820k, and thus about the same ratio as during much of the 1980s and 1990s.
As it is, housing costs have been a challenge for the San Diego high-tech economy for more than 20 years. Back in 1983, San Diego was up against Austin to land the Microelectronics and Computer Technology (MCC) R&D consortium, but lost due to quality of life issues — primarily housing costs (there's no beach in Austin, while the climate is considerably harsher). With MCC, Austin won the second largest concentration of semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in North America.
The second story was that the state Department of Finance Wednesday released its estimates as to the net population changes in California for 2006-2007. Newspapers in San Jose and Los Angeles wrote up stories on their respective population shifts. The U-T website (don't know about the dead tree version) carried only the AP's generic California population trend story, which notes California's population is up 11.5% since 2000, at 37.7 million placing us behind Poland but ahead of Canada. The state's three largest counties — LA (10.3 million), SD (3.1 million) and OC (3.0 million) — now contain 44% of the entire state population.
All the stories noted that California is gaining population because births exceed deaths, and immigration from foreign countries exceeds the net out-migration by Californians to other states. The stories also noted that the fastest growing county is Riverside County (and the rest of the Inland Empire), up 3.3% from July 2006 to July 2007. Of course, the common denominator for both domestic migration patterns is housing affordability: equity-rich Californians feeling to cheaper parts of the state, or to other states.
Looking at the state's raw numbers, 38 of California's 58 counties had a net in-migration. However, the out-migration (led by 114,638 fleeing L.A. county) meant that the state overall lost 88,761 people to the rest of the U.S. But with 9 people coming from overseas for every 4 moving inland, the net effect is that the state continues to grow.
The in-migration estimates for San Diego County made it 4th in the state, with 2,982 new residents from elsewhere in the U.S. It was second overall (after Riverside) in terms of total net immigration (foreign and domestic) with a gain of 16,049.
My guess is that much of the in-migration to San Diego is from elsewhere in California, whether from LA, Orange (21,935 people leaving) or the Bay Area (all but 2 counties losing population). Again, housing affordability must be a key factor. Of course, this doesn't say anything about jobs, but (except for retirees) people follow jobs and housing.
I don't know why the U-T didn't think the numbers were worth studying. Back when I was a beat reporter, we welcomed the chance to take some hard data like this, spice it up with a few quotes to come up with an easy story about the state of the local economy.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Qualcomm's temporary reprieve
As reported, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed to hear Qualcomm's appeal of the ITC order, and on Tuesday stayed enforcement of the ITC ban on handsets containing Qualcomm's chips (but not the ban on Qualcomm's chips). The surprise victory — in time for the Christmas selling season — is the first Qualcomm success since they changed legal counsel a month ago.
Reading the appeals brief (graciously provided by the UT), there were some interesting points:
- Qualcomm was joined in its appeal by five handset makers (Motorola, Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Sanyo) and two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile). Verizon was absent because they cut a side deal, but Sprint was conspicuously absent; AFAIK most of the Sanyo phones imported into the US are sold by Sprint. That the GSM carriers are the ones supporting Qualcomm suggests how well they have done in cracking the W-CDMA market.
- The appeals court's ruling suggests that they are leaning towards reinstating the Administrative Law Judge's finding that banned import of Qualcomm's chips but not phones containing those chips — since the phone makers were not parties to those proceedings and thus not found to have infringed Broadcom's patent. Broadcom had asked that phones also be banned, and the ITC (unlike the ALJ) agreed with Broadcom.
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
Saturday, September 8, 2007
InterDigital sells Apple a 3G license
Of course, Apple's US iPhone is limited by the Cingular's 2G (aka "2.5G") slow EDGE network, so even at the new cheaper price many US buyers are hoping for a HSDPA version. But analysts agree that a European iPhone will require a 3G phone.
Presumably Apple will need a license from Qualcomm's larger patent portfolio. One way would be to use Qualcomm's 3G chipset. The existing iPhone has an Infineon GSM/EDGE chip, but thus far Infineon has not been a factor in HSDPA/USDPA RF chips. Other than Qualcomm, thus far the main suppliers of WCDMA chips are Nokia and Ericsson — but it's not clear how either side of the deal would feel about selling using such chips for a competing product.
Technorati Tags: 3G, Apple, iPhone, patents, InterDigital
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Cricket-eating MetroPCS
Both are "all you can eat" CDMA carriers, and both are adding subscribers at far above the national rate (45% and Leap — a 1998 Qualcomm spinoff — got their first, but its growth was long stalled due to poor timing of buying expensive equipment (with expensive vendor financing) near the peak of the bubble, eventually resulting in recapitalization through bankruptcy. MetroPCS came along in 2002 and has had an uninterrupted run of success over the past five years.
With its concentration on major metro markets, MetroPCS is slightly bigger overall, while Leap has more licenses in more cities. Both have roaming problems — lacking the coverage of a Verizon or even a T-Mobile. But the Leap has partially addressed that by clustering nearby markets (like Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Cruces and El Paso or Phoenix-Tuscon), to solve the most likely roaming needs of a subset of customers.
The MetroPCS investor presentation shows the combined markets covered by the two firms, including a strong cluster of licenses in California. Together the two firms would have licenses (if not coverage) in nearly all of the top 25 and top 200 markets.
The two are obviously stronger together, and MetroPCS (ticker: PCS) is bigger than its prey, with a $10 billion market cap vs. $5.5 billion for Leap (ticker: PCS). Other than prior bad blood over alleged patent infringement, executive egos and layoffs at Leap's San Diego headquarters, it seems like all that's left is haggling over the price. Red Herring notes that investors bid prices above the offering price in anticipation of a better offer, despite the efforts by Metro's CEO Robert Linquist to convince the market that the Leap stock price has included an acquisition premium since April.
The only thing that went beyond the normal range of hyperbole is that the merger creates "a fifth national wireless carrier." As of June 2007, the combined companies would have barely been the sixth largest carrier in the US with 6.2 million subscribers, versus 12.2 million for Alltel and 6.0 million for U.S. Cellular. (Both CDMA carriers). So while MetroLeap might have more licenses, it would have rather thin penetration.
If they pull it off, the more important question may be: what's the endgame? The one thing protecting MetroLeap from being squashed like a bug is that the big boys can only compete on price by cannibalizing existing revenues, something they are loathe to do. So who would be the next MetroLeap merger? Would either Alltel or U.S. Cellular be willing to shift to a flat-rate model to enable a nationwide attack on the big four? And since the national market has consolidated from six to four carriers (or perhaps 5½ to 3½), can the market really support another national carrier?
Technorati Tags: CDMA, Leap Wireless, MetroPCS, mobile phones
Saturday, August 18, 2007
The forthcoming Qualcomm blog
Do you see a need for a message board or a blog on QUALCOMM.com?My question is: why? Is Qualcomm working on a blogging policy? Is CEO Paul Jacobs going to start blogging like Sun Microsystems' CEO, Jonathan Schwartz? What benefit would such a blog bring?
( ) Yes
( ) No
If QUALCOMM.com did offer a blog, what type of information would you like to see? (check all that apply)
[ ] Executive blog
[ ] QUALCOMM media updates
[ ] QUALCOMM technology news
[ ] General technology news
The only executive blog that I find plausible is that of Bob Sutor, the IBM VP for standards and open source. How many employees are in his chain of command? 10? 100?
Conversely, does anyone believe that a CEO writes his own blog? Would this be the best use of time for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company with billions in revenues and 8,500 employees?
Is this hypocritical? I'm a tenured faculty member, managing 0 people, trying to flog a book. Given Paul's total compensation (not counting stock options) was $2.7 million last year, my opportunity cost must be less than 5% of his.
Technorati Tags: Qualcomm
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Throw Lou under the bus
A graduate of Stanford law, Lupin had been with the company since 1995 and general counsel since October 2000. But after last week's terrible legal news — not only the final ITC decision but a stringing rebuke over misleading a Federal court — it was clear something had to happen. As the LA Times reported:
"It's not a big stretch to guess that Lou took the hit," said Mark McKechnie, a telecommunications equipment analyst with American Technology Research. "Qualcomm was a bit embarrassed the court held against them essentially for misconduct."Whether he fell on his sword or was pushed, Lupin's action gives Qualcomm's CEO some badly-needed breathing room.
As an added bonus, Qualcomm named a famous interim counsel from its bench: Carol Lam, the famous (and somewhat controversial) former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. Fortunately for Qualcomm, Lam today is best known for being fired by the Bush administration (thus winning sympathy with Bush-hating judges) and not for anything she did or did not do as U.S. Attorney. Every U.S. news story seemed to mention this, as in the UT account:
Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, said Lam, 48, will be a benefit to Qualcomm because she is well-respected in the legal community. He said many see Lam's ouster as U.S. attorney – part of the Bush administration's controversial firing of eight U.S. attorneys – as a "raw deal."Judicial sentiment notwithstanding, the change of counsel is not going to change Qualcomm's dependence on enforcement of patents and patent royalties as the cornerstone of its IP-based business model, nor the determination of its various major rivals — Broadcom, Ericsson, Nokia or TI — to reduce or eliminate paying such royalties.
"Mostly she enjoys a really good reputation," he said. "That fact could help improve the confidence of the judges."
In particular, nothing in the change of counsel (whether with Lam is the interim or permanent replacement) will make Nokia any more willing to negotiate an end to the current standoff, in which it has been shipping CDMA phones without paying Qualcomm royalties for the past 4 months.
While a change in counsel is not a change in management or a change in Qualcomm's business model, it could change three things: Qualcomm's legal strategy, how well that strategy is executed, and the advice that the top executives are getting. While Lam isn't a patent attorney, perhaps she will end the rash of miscalculations (or poorly executed courtroom strategies) that brought the company to this point.
Technorati Tags: Qualcomm
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Unable to escape the shadow
In a CNN interview published Friday, Jacobs admitted that he may never escape the shadow of industry legend and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs:
Q: You joined the company established by your father in 1990, in your late 20s. Was there ever an issue for you, do you think, about whether or not to join the family firm?The last line of Moses' stone tablets notwithstanding, I have been known to envy the successful tech executive who was in the right place at the right time. Perhaps here's the cure.
Jacobs: Oh sure. I was trying to make a decision about whether I wanted to be a professor and go into academia or actually go into industry but you know that I decided I loved having the ability to see my ideas turn into products that other people were using, so that led me to go into industry and I figured that, if I was going to do that, Qualcomm was the best place to go.
Q: As you say, your father's an icon, he is a bit of a legend really in the industry, which makes it all the more difficult for you. How or when do you remember that you thought to yourself I am out of his shadow, I am my own person running this company now?
Jacobs: Oh I don't think that I will ever feel that way. I think he will always cast some shadow. I mean he is the person who built the foundation for the business and it is really up to me to take that platform and take it to the next level.
It's hard to see how one could envy Paul Jacobs, who will always be compared to Irwin Jacobs, an impossible act to follow. Yes, it's tough for the children to measure up (think Ford or Motorola). But even without the nepotism charge, successors to a larger-than-life founder are but a pale imitation (think Apple or HP).
Jacobs fils can't win. If he does "take it to the next level," everyone will take Qualcomm's continuing growth for granted or credit its initial trajectory. If it falters on his watch — whether the problem is maturation or incipient problems not visible at the time of the 2005 handover — shareholders and employees (and perhaps family) will say it was his fault.
On the other hand, Paul Jacobs doesn't really have an alternative. This is the job he's been training for for 20 years, and it's been in the works since mid-2000 (with employees pointing to the (aborted) split between QCT and QTL as a plan to make Jacobs a CEO). There is no graceful way to give up reins of the company, unlike say the founder CEO who decides to become CTO. As Jacobs notes, this is really the only company he can work for in industry: he certainly can't quit and go work for a competitor. Meanwhile, his older brother Gary been toiling since 1999 as a social entrepreneur, so even that domain would invite comparison.
It's clear that the only thing Jacobs can do is to tough it out. Since most of the problems seem to be legal, the key thing would be to hire the best patent attorney around, both to retaliate against rivals and to give advice as to how to change the business decisions.
Technorati Tags: Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm
Monday, August 6, 2007
Strike three for Qualcomm
There's no way to spin this. Qualcomm lost, it's bad for Qualcomm, it's bad for Qualcomm's future market share, it's bad for Qualcomm's patent-based business model, and it's bad for Qualcomm's customers. Sure Qualcomm still hopes to appeal the patent validity but that seems even less likely to succeed.
Qualcomm pulled out all the stops, commissioning bigshot economists (The Brattle Group) to say that the ban will cost consumers billions. Now it will be interesting to see if that proves to be true (since both Brattle and Qualcomm will lose credibility if it doesn't).
About the only good news for the home team is that (after more than a year) Qualcomm finally has a workaround to avoid infringing the patent.
Despite their huge win, it's hard to believe much in the Broadcom press release, which seems more about threatening Qualcomm's shareholders and customers (to increase pressure for a settlement) than actually commenting on the legal ruling. Quoting General Counsel David A. Dull, the press release proclaims:
"According to the IEEE Spectrum, Broadcom possesses one of the world's most powerful semiconductor patent portfolios," Mr. Dull said.Let's see. Since when is a magazine article an authoritative source of how important is a company's patent portfolio? "One of" could refer to top 20. Even if it was "top 1," what proportion of the patents relate to mobile phones? And how does this relate to the relevance of Broadcom's portfolio to Qualcomm's products, or the relative importance of the Broadcom and Qualcomm 3G patent portfolios?
I could go on. Broadcom still thinks it will get $6/chip from Qualcomm until patent 6,714,983 expires. Qualcomm obviously has no intention of paying — perhaps hoping to find some outside entity to put a reasonable value on the patent.
As best I can tell, the patent in question was invented by employees of Intermec Technologies of Cedar Rapids Iowa more than 12 years ago, and the patents were acquired by Broadcom as part of 150 patents it bought for $24 million from Unova in 2002. (Apparently the Wall Street Journal reported this in June, as did the Seattle Times. It took me longer to write this paragraph than it took me with Google to identify the Cedar Rapids inventor of the patent as working for Intermec and tie those patents to the Broadcom/Unova deal). Buying patents makes Broadcom a savvy investor and a clever patent troll, not an innovative company.
Still, Broadcom is winning under the current rules. Qualcomm was first sued by Broadcom in May 2005, and seems to have consistently underestimated the business consequences ever since. If I were a large institutional shareholder (or a customer like Verizon, Sprint or AT&T), I would ask what Qualcomm has been doing for the past two years. A smart lawyer, R&D manager (or CEO) would have ordered a full re-examination of all Qualcomm products to see if they might infringe any of the Broadcom patents claimed, to make sure that a work-around was forthcoming.
Six months ago, Qualcomm appointed a recently retired U.S. Attorney to be VP and legal counsel. If she can't change their luck, it would seem as though some more significant management change would be due.
Technorati Tags: 3G, Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
InterDigital entering the product business
The difference is that Qualcomm decided not to spin off the chip-making business (after it settled its last patent dispute with Nokia 5 years ago) and thus it has two major divisions: QTL (technology licensing) and QCT (fabless chips for CDMA, cdma2000 and WCDMA).
I had not realized that IDCC's business model is based on large one-time settlements. Here's how Mock explains it:
Revenue. On average, analysts look for InterDigital to report $52 million in revenue this quarter, way below the $297 million last year, but that number was inflated with a one-time gain.What was really really fascinating was the S&P summary of IDCC's financials:
Earnings. The average analyst expectations vary wildly but average out to a $0.01-per-share loss for the quarter. …
Significant one-time settlements have anchored the bulk of InterDigital's past revenue.
Motley Fool's readers are very bullish on the stock. But from what I've seen, the stock has a cult following like a lot of other thinly traded stocks. IDCC is tiny compared to other 3G telecom suppliers. Qualcomm is #317 on the Fortune 500, with Motorola #61; Samsung is #63, Nokia #135 and Motorola #152 on the Forbes Global 2000).
Now IDCC wants to get into the baseband ASIC business for 2G and 3G phones — making IDCC's business model an exact copy of Qualcomm's. (I suppose the Qualcomm loyalists would say "a pale imitation of Qualcomm's.") While depressing margins, this should smooth out revenues and give somewhat of an insurance policy against patent problems going forward.
But, as Mock points out, that will put them into direct competition with Qualcomm, TI and Broadcom. Even with foundries, I would imagine such chip design is complex, and its three major rivals have a big headstart. As the newcomer, it will be interesting what sort of competitive advantage IDCC will have to offer.
Technorati Tags: 3G, business models, patents, semiconductors
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Qualcomm: Broadcom doesn't want to deal
Jacobs, speaking during a conference call to discuss its quarterly report, said Broadcom wants its customers to be exempt from paying Qualcomm licensing fees for a large chunck of its intellectual property portfolio as part of a settlement.Obviously we're not getting the whole picture about what's being offered behind the scenes — but clearly Qualcomm believes that settling on the current terms would undercut its business model.
"That is unacceptable," Jacobs said. "We continue to believe the rulings are wrong."
President Steve Altman said that Broadcom is arguing that since it is exempt from licensing fees, it's customers should be, too.
But David Rossman, who heads of up intellectual property litigation for Broadcom, said, "a solution with Qualcomm will not eliminate their licensing program."
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
Thursday, July 26, 2007
We're #1! We're #1!
Its legal troubles notwithstanding, Qualcomm has supplanted Texas Instruments(TXN) as the world's leading supplier of integrated circuits for mobile devices, according to data from market research firm iSuppli.iSuppli credits Qualcomm's monopoly on EV-DO chips (where TI is not currently supplying product) as well as its W-CDMA chips. Of course, TI's CDMA line traces back to its 2000 acquisition of San Diego-based Dot Wireless for nearly $500 million.
This reshuffling marks the end of, or at least a pause in, Texas Instruments' long reign at the top of the mobile semiconductor market. The first quarter of 2007, according to iSuppli senior analyst Francis Sideco, "marks the first time that TI has not occupied the leadership position in this area since iSuppli began tracking handset market share in 2004."
So this is certainly good news for TI. At some point I do need to figure out one discrepancy: everyone has been listing TI as tops in the mobile phone IC market. However, ARM-licensed microprocessors are in more than 80% of all mobile phones being sold (one figure has it above 95%), so who could have more market share than that? So yes, TI is a licensee of ARM and today some of its most popular products are the OMAP application processors containing both a C55x DSP and an ARM9 core.
TI's own claims are:
- today the company has the majority of market share in GSM/GPRS mobile devices.
- Additionally, more than half of 3G WCDMA handsets use TI basebands, and
- even more use OMAP applications processors.
Graphic: courtesy Fujitsu.
Technorati Tags: mobile phones, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, semiconductors
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Broadcom cracks CDMA front
Qualcomm turned down a similar deal three weeks ago because it could cost $2 billion. Instead, Qualcomm was reportedly hoping for a $100 million fee plus a future cross-license. (The Bloomberg article claims Qualcomm offered a royalty-free cross-license, which would be dramatically out of character for either Qualcomm or the industry).
For six patents, Broadcom could be making more per CDMA phone than Qualcomm makes (~ 5% of the price) for more than 1,500 patents. Of course, Verizon gives Broadcom another $200 million with which to sue Qualcomm (or perhaps even file more patents that block Qualcomm). (We do not know whether Verizon still has to pay the royalties if Broadcom's patent claims are somehow dismissed or settled.)
If the Americans bought 143 million new phones last year, then Verizon's 26% share would sell the 33 million phones in about a year before royalties were paid up. (It might take a little longer because royalties are capped at $50 million/quarter).
I'm guessing that Verizon — in a neck-and-neck market share war with the iPhone-equipped AT&T (27% share) — feels this would be a bad time to let its number #1 rival gain an advantage in new handsets and thus customer additions. This shows how much Verizon is willing to pay for certainty. It also means that Verizon no longer has a reason to support Qualcomm's appeal of the ITC decision.
This is a very dangerous time for Qualcomm: if it loses the ability to charge royalties for firms that hold any 3G or GSM IPR, then it would probably lose the majority of its patent royalties (and as much as half of its net income). Nokia, Broadcom and others are hoping this will happen, and right now Qualcomm's enemies are more powerful than its allies. For a decade, Qualcomm's IP business model has counted on having the facts and IP law on its side, but the last year or two has reversed that trend.
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm, Verizon
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Writing a book backwards
The working title for our book remains Digitizing Communications: From MIT to Qualcomm. Since Caroline & I first discussed doing the book 2½ years ago, the outline for the main chapters has been chronological: it starts with Claude Shannon, eventually gets to Linkabit, talks about the early Linkabit spinoffs, a chapter dedicated to Qualcomm and then the 1990s telecom boom. We will then have some wrapup chapters generalizing about the cluster, and a final chapter looking forward.
In the Fall of 2000, I started writing my various Qualcomm cases. The first one, "Qualcomm in China," was written to teach political risk in my Fall 2000 UCI international business class. It was eventually published in two parts by the Asian Case Research Journaland the University of Western Ontario. That's where Dave Mock got the China story for his book The Qualcomm Equation.
Then I wrote a second series of cases ("Qualcomm 2000," "Qualcomm 2001" and "Qualcomm 2002") for teaching standards competition to another UCI MBA class; those ended up with the European Case Clearinghouse in 2002.
Meanwhile, Caroline was working on her dissertation, cataloguing the hundreds of wireless startup companies in San Diego from 1980-2003. We presented a paper from her dissertation at a 2003 conference in Denmark, a paper that now and again gets us calls from interested parties (and was also cited by Mock). Other material from her dissertation bears on the spinoff chapters, since (AFAIK) Caroline has the only complete database of some 240 startups (plus 100 branches of other companies) founded in the region.
When writing her dissertation, Caroline found — as has anyone who's studied the San Diego telecom industry knows — that all roads lead to Linkabit. We wrote a paper on Linkabit in 2005 that we presented in June 2006 at the Babson entrepreneurship conference.
Sabbatical in hand, last summer I sat down to write up the Linkabit chapter for the book. As I wrote it, I tried to figure out what Andy Viterbi (S.B.,S.M. '57) and Irwin Jacobs (ScD '59) and starting Linkabit in October 1968. Like a thread on a knit sweater, I gave a tug and it kept unravelling. Six months later, I had a chapter on MIT and another chapter on information theory in NASA communications (which led to talks at MIT and NASA, respectively), but no Linkabit chapter.
Now I'm working on Chapter 1, about Claude Shannon and the birth of information theory. Hopefully I will finish the chapter in the next week, and then can start writing the book the way it was meant to be read: front to back.
Graphic: M.L. Escher, "Drawing Hands" (1948)
Friday, June 22, 2007
BREW in Europe, too
Thus far, BREW's major operators have been Verizon (US), KDDI (Japan) and KTF (Korea), and China Unicom (China). In the US, Verizon Wireless rebrands the service as Get It Now®. BREW is also supported by two of the smaller US CDMA carriers, Alltel and US Cellular, but not the #2 US CDMA carrier (Sprint).
|Launch Date
|13 million
|Verizon Wireless
|61 million
|Get It Now®
|29 million
|30 million
|Escritório Móvel Brew
|China Unicom
|150 million
|UK and 9 other countries
|13 million
Qualcomm has a previous deal with O2 — a competing UK carrier — but that's only for uiOne, the BREW-derived interface that carriers like because it allows a common look-and-feel for a carrier's handsets. So if 3 allows European subscribers to download BREW applications, it could mark the first major Qualcomm revenue source in Western Europe.
Carriers have launched some 3G (and 2G) CDMA networks in Eastern Europe, but the only CDMA west of the former Iron Curtain are the tiny Radiomovel Telecommunications in Portugal, and Nordisk Mobiltelefon's proposed cdma2000 service in the five Nordic countries using the former NMT 450 MHz spectrum.
Foul tip
In its clutch appeal, Qualcomm got support from the CTIA and the top four US carriers: AT&T (née Cingular), Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. It also said that its MediaFLO deployment for AT&T and Verizon — the preferred mobile TV solution for 53% of US cell phone subscribers — could be delayed by the ban.
The final possibility is a presidential veto, which (AFAIK) would have to come sometime in early August if it is coming at all.
Mike Dano of the industry's oldest trade journal, RCR News, mocked the Qualcomm position:
Qualcomm is asking for a presidential veto on the ITC ban. That's right: Rather than pay Broadcom a simple patent-licensing fee (a payment most other businesses would consider standard), Qualcomm is going to petition the world's most powerful leader for a veto. I'm sure that President Bush has plenty of time to deal with this situation, seeing as how the immigration thing fell through and all.I agree with Dano that it would take some significant prompting for president Bush to intervene. Is he likely to listen to Qualcomm and its allies?
Anyway, I guess I can sort of understand Qualcomm's position: In the interest of its shareholders, the company feels the need to exhaust all options possible. No word yet on whether Qualcomm is going to secede from the United States and form its own independent government where the only valid patents are those developed by Qualcomm—which, to me, is the next logical step if a presidential veto doesn't work.
I'm sure they will call it "The Confederate States of Qualcomm," and Paul Jacobs will rule with a gentle, kind hand, much like Aragorn, crowned as King Elessar, ruler of Gondor.
CEO Paul Jacobs' former bosses — dad Irwin M. Jacobs and co-founder Andrew Viterbi — were known as donors to Democrats, at more than $300k and $50,000 respectively. Irwin Jacobs got his National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton in 1994.At this point, Pres. Bush is not running for re-election and his ties to the GOP party machinery weaken by the minute. However, his party and campaigns have strong ties to home state telephone monopoly SBC (er, AT&T), and according the left-leaning Center for Public Integrity, the phone companies and SBC in particular were among the largest Bush donors.
Irwin Jacobs' counterpart, Broadcom chairman and co-founder Henry Samueli (and his wife Susan) seem to mainly spend their political money on state races, in addition to $75 million spent buying the Stanley Cup.
If Bush backs Qualcomm and most of the industry over Broadcom, is that politics or good policy? Would Clinton have done any different (I think Clinton clearly would have favored Jacobs, particularly as a lame duck). Conversely, if the European Commission backs most of its telecom manufacturers — and Broadcom — over Qualcomm, is that politics or good policy?)
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
China's 3G plans
When I finished the visit (and the research), the one thing I was itching to follow up on was China's plans for its own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. It was obviously a big issue: direct efforts by the Chinese government to delay 3G deployment and protect access to its market to help Chinese firms develop a national (and nationalistic) technology, to help Chinese firms gain privileged market access and (as with DVDs) pay less in foreign patent royalties.
Also interesting was the role of Siemens. By then, it was already an also-ran in the global mobile phone industry and thus were transferring technology to the Chinese in hopes of gaining market access; since then, they sold their handset business to BenQ (a business that then went bankrupt) and transferred their infrastructure to a joint venture with Nokia.
I really wanted to follow up on this — it was a top goal of mine, since this was obviously the next big standards battle, both in terms of market size and also as a technology policy issue. But I lacked the funds, time and language skills to pursue it, so put it aside to do "someday."
This week I'm attending DRUID, the main European academic conference on the economics of innovation. I was fortunate to meet Hui Yan (or as they would say in Singapore, YAN Hui), a doctoral student of my friend Prof. Bent Dalum at Aalborg University in Denmark. Hui spent 4 years working for mobile phone companies in China, including Motorola and Nokia.
Hui is doing her dissertation on TD-SCDMA development and policy, focusing on the complex interactions between the Chinese government, domestic operators, domestic manufacturers and foreign manufacturers. At the DRUID conference on Wednesday, she presented a paper summarizing her findings thus far. She describes the long complex path that the Chinese government has taken in nurturing and protecting TD-SCDMA.
Today, China has no 3G service, while more than 450 million subscribers are using 3G in 134 countries worldwide. GSM carrier China Mobile once hoped to roll out WCDMA service in 2004. As with CDMA carriers in Japan and Korea, China Unicom could presumably upgrade from cdmaOne to cdma2000 at any time it wants.
Hui reports that both major carriers would prefer to use the upgrades to their existing technology (presumably because they prefer proven solutions than relying on the unproven new technology.) However, she reports that China's MII has again delayed 3G another year to 2008 (or later) so that TD-SCDMA will be viable before any 3G licenses are awarded. Writing as from a Chinese perspective, she laments that this "Chinese" technology only has 7% of its patents held by Chinese firms, versus 66% by the three big European manufacturers (Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens).
As with the rest of the world, 3G is being pushed by manufacturers looking to sell multibillion dollar infrastructure upgrades; in this case, this is the shared interest of foreign and domestic manufacturers, even if they prefer different technologies. Meanwhile, absent proven demand for 3G services, the Chinese carriers would prefer to just keep growing their market penetration.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Qualcomm's W-CDMA/cdma2000 chipset
The whole global roaming argument seemed like a nonstarter, as a few people said at the time. Sure, Europeans wander around within the EU and perhaps to Mediterranean beaches, but how many go to the US or Asia? How many Americans travel enough outside North America to care about GSM (W-CDMA) coverage? I can't imagine it's more than 5%.
But without a single standard, there was an interest in having dual-mode phones — more from the CDMA subscriber sides than the GSM side, since there are lots of W-CDMA only countries and only a few that are exclusively or dominated by cdma2000. Thus for years, Qualcomm has been planning and now offering MSM chips that support both the W-CDMA and cdma2000 variants of 3G technology.
Reading the Financial Times last month, I saw a brief (and glowing) review of the Blackberry 8830 "World Edition", which uses the Qualcomm chips to provide a dual mode capability. It also got a generally positive review by InfoWorld. and from CNET. Someone said that there have been other dual mode phones (presumably by LG, Samsung or Sanyo), but if there have, they have not been visibly marketed in the US.
The original US reviews were with Verizon, but now Sprint is advertising that this phone is "coming soon." So both companies have an attractive alternative to the claims of AT&T (née Cingular) promoting world phones.
Friday, June 8, 2007
Qualcomm's Hail Mary
Thursday's press release responding to the decisions was posted after business hours. It begins:
Although all of the Commissioners agreed that a disruption in the supply of EV-DO and WCDMA handsets would negatively impact the public interest and public safety, the remedy fashioned by the majority does not protect the public interest or public safety. QUALCOMM will ask the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to stay enforcement of the ITC's order and ask the President to veto the ITC's decision. QUALCOMM maintains that Broadcom's patent is invalid and not infringed.Hmmm... If the patent is invalid and not infringed, shouldn't there be an action in a court of law to win a determination to that effect?
The press release continued:
Having chosen not to develop an EV-DO solution and having failed in the marketplace to generate interest in its WCDMA products, Broadcom brought this litigation against QUALCOMM but has used it as a vehicle to attack the U.S. cellular industry, even though Broadcom has never accused any wireless manufacturers or operators of infringement or any other wrongdoing. The public injury that would result from the remedy imposed by the Commission is grossly disproportionate to any benefit flowing to Broadcom from such broad enforcement of a recently-purchased patent. Broadcom does not make or sell EV-DO chips, and Broadcom's claims that it can supply WCDMA products for the United States have been rebuffed by WCDMA operators in submissions the operators made to the ITC.Qualcomm lost by a 4-2 vote — 2 commissioners did not favor a ban. Last October, when the ITC administrative law judge ruled against Qualcomm, it praised the judge for not recommending a "downstream" remedy; I can't verify this, because the judge's report does not appear to be on the ITC website. Still, the ITC enforces its orders via an import ban, unlike a Federal court that imposes fines or other remedies.
Its press release continues:
QUALCOMM and the U.S. wireless industry will seek an emergency stay from the Federal Circuit and a Presidential veto of the ITC's ruling on several grounds, including that Broadcom's ITC action will harm U.S. consumers, impact public safety and national security and harm the U.S. economy by stunting mobile broadband deployment. By punishing completely innocent cellphone manufacturers and wireless operators that were given no opportunity to contest Broadcom's infringement claims, the ruling also raises serious issues of due process and fairness.The Verizon and Sprint websites are silent, although CTIA (representing all the carriers) says:
CTIA-The Wireless Association® believes today's decision by the International Trade Commission will cause enormous undue harm to tens of millions of American wireless consumers, and urges President Bush to veto the ITC importation ban. The ITC decision unnecessarily decreases competition, and denies millions of consumer's access to innovative wireless broadband products. This decision flies in the face of public policy that encourages the availability of broadband services and products, and could have the unintended effect of impairing the wireless industry's efforts to improve communications in areas such as public safety. Consumers should not have to pay the price for a legal debate that could be settled by other means.Whilte the UT reports Sprint Nextel as being focuced on a work-around, it quotes Kyocera Wireless (Qualcomm's former handset division) as supporting the veto, as does Verizon:
"This is a bad order for the industry, and it's a bad order for wireless consumers," said Verizon spokeswoman Nancy Stark. "It would freeze innovation."Still, this seems like a longshot effort; as one lawyer's site says, "a presidential veto is extremely rare."
The UT and others note that Qualcomm is working on a work-around, but it will take time. Since they lost before the judge almost eight months ago, I don't know why they didn't start a crash project back then. The UT also says the patent expires in three years, suggesting Qualcomm would like to stall until then.
Meanwhile, Broadcom is just waiting for Qualcomm to settle — presumably one that would give it access to Qualcomm's portfolio:
We simply want to be adequately compensated for the use of our intellectual property. To that end, we have made it clear to Qualcomm that we are open to discussions regarding the potential for licensing of our patent. The ball is in Qualcomm's court.
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Broadcom 3, Qualcomm 0
Yes, existing models are grandfathered in, but the impact of the ruling is still dire for Qualcomm. The ban will not only prevent LG and Samsung from introducing new CDMA phones in the US, but it will also cause AT&T (or T-Mobile) to rule out any W-CDMA phones with Qualcomm chips.
Needless to say, Broadcom was quite pleased with the ruling, and used it to spin its position that the commodity chip producer was wronged by the company that invented CDMA:
In this case, Qualcomm and its customers have been importing products that use Broadcom's valuable intellectual property without permission. As Broadcom continues to develop cutting edge wired and wireless communications and multimedia products that enable the convergence and communications trends that are touching consumers in their daily lives, we are gratified to know that the results of our investments and hard work will be protected from infringers like Qualcomm.With a gun to Qualcomm's head, Reuters reports that "Broadcom Corp. said on Thursday it is open to discussions for Qualcomm Inc. to license its technology patent." Broadcom's goal has always been to break Qualcomm's business model — to get it to budge on its full-royalty-for-all policy. The ITC victory is its best shot ever to do so.
No word on how hard it would be for Qualcomm to invent around the one patent (6,714,983), i.e. produce a non-infringing chip. Last month, Qualcomm also lost a Federal case (litigated on Broadcom's home turf) over three other patents (6,847,686; 6,389,010; and 5,657,317).
Qualcomm must comply with the ITC order while appealing the original verdict, so now it faces the dilemma of solving the immediate problem vs. continuing to fight in hopes of an eventual win.
No word on what Qualcomm said at its 3:30 p.m press conference, but the stock lost about $2 billion in market cap today. Overall, the stock is down about 9% since its peak last month at slightly over $46.
Technorati Tags: Broadcom, patent infringement, Qualcomm
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Robots at NEL
In 1945, the Naval Electronics Laboratory was founded on Point Loma. By 1954, as the photo archive demonstrates, Building 33 (right) was already the central "topside" building. NEL was renamed to NELC in 1968, which is what it was called when I first visited the lab's Building 33 in 1975 as a high school student attending the citywide physics contest.NELC remained up at the end of the point through 1977, when it disappeared once and for all. (Actually, the buildings, missions and people remained, but it became NOSC in 1977 and SPAWAR Systems Center - San Diego in 1997). For decades, NELC (and NOSC) were big on C3 (command, control, communications). But today the buzzphrase is C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance).
Tuesday I went back to Building 33 for the first time in more than 20 years, for the SDTC Military SIG event "Rise of the Machines 2: A Field Trip to the Center of Excellence for Small Robots". The program focused on the robotics research being done by the Navy and the DoD's Joint Robotics Program.
In contrast to the Terminator 3 movie evoked by the program title, the Navy speakers emphasized the ongoing human control of the various aerial, land, sea surface and underwater robots. Still, one of the major advancements is to have robots go to a location (or patrol a pattern) without direct human interaction, to improve the labor efficiency so that one driver can manage more than one UAV/AUV. (For robots doing IED disposal, it appears that the robot occupies the attention of at least one operator).
One interesting thing is that the Navy (and the rest of DoD) are using some off-the-shelf commercial platforms for some missions. Some of the land-based robots are based on iRobot products (makers of the Roomba). The mine searching robot (with side-scanning sonar) came from Hyroid — a spinoff of MIT's Woods Hole Oceanographic Instutite — which makes the Remus AUV that can be yours for only $250K or so.
The computing issues were also in many ways similar. The Navy is putting existing legacy apps into XML wrappers, so that a SOA will allow users to access data from a wide range of sources. No more word-of-mouth (or piece-of-paper) relaying results between different screens.
The communication problems, however, seem very different. Unmanned vehicles at the fringes of a carrier battle group (or a Littoral Combat Ship) go in and out of range of the combat IP network. Once they come in range, they need to authenticate and upload data quickly (before they leave again) rather than spend a few minutes rebuilding perfect routing tables as a commercial product does.
The Navy also faces unique reliability concerns. One speaker noted that the Navy needs to learn from the ad hoc denial of service attack mounted by Russian hackers against Estonia that shut down its Internet access for days, causing considerable economic damage. The attacks should be theoretically impossible if the military ships are not connected to the public Internet, but then again how do sailors get e-mail from back home?
The creation of MilSIG and integration of CommNexus with local Navy research and contractors is being led by SDTC director Vice Admiral Walter R. Davis, USN (Ret). Davis is a former F-4 and F-14 pilot who became a commander of a carrier and then a carrier battle group. It appears he ended his career as the head of the Navy's communications networks in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations (N6), which seems a fitting position for someone trying to bring the Navy's communications concerns before the San Diego telecom industry.
Technorati Tags: network security, robots, US Navy
Friday, June 1, 2007
In praise of cheap wide pipes
The conference has a very international flair. One session I attended was about the (under) adoption of mobile TV in Korea and the UK. Another was a multi-country study on attitudes towards mobile data adoption.
Given the concerns of the industry for revenue growth, it's not surprising that mobile data is a big topic here. Why aren't more users using mobile data? What are the killer applications? What kind of content will create demand and make money? What is the relative mix of short content (e.g. 30 second clips) vs. long content (entire TV shows or movies)?
And what will be the pipes? Will they be the 3G cellular pipes? Or will they be one of the alternatives, such as personal Wi-Fi, business Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi hotspots, municipal Wi-Fi or WiMAX?
Both for transport and for content, there were many concerns about business models because winning business models for wireless data are few and far between. The one exception is that Japan's DoCoMo (reportedly) collects a 9% charge for billing/invoicing all m-commerce transactions.
Given the location, it was appropriate that the first plenary session focused on video entertainment. The panelists for the session entitled "Mobilizing Digital Hollywood" were:
- Derek Broes, Senior VP Digital Entertainment, Paramount Pictures (ex-Microsoft)
- Chris Brunner, VP Mobile Content and Services, Univision, Online — selling TV content
- Neil McGinness, IMG — mainly selling sports content through deals with various sports leagues
- Mark Young, Disney, VP Business Development and Strategy
- Bill Sanders, Sony Pictures Television International, VP Mobile Networks Programming and Digital Product Development (formerly with HBO)
- The bandwidth for individual users. 3G is now offering a megabit/second, as does Wi-Fi, but fiber to the home is offering tens of mbps.
- The efficiency of the bandwidth. In an earlier session, Dave Tilson's paper on mobile TV noted that in one of the UK trials, cellular networks could only support 6 mobile TV users per cell. Sony's Sanders said that carriers see mobile data like a health club membership: "They want you to pay your monthly fee but not show up too often"
- Pricing. For single professionals and students, switching from a home-based broadband to a PCMCIA-based broadband (each at $30-$40/month) is realistic. But otherwise, Elizabeth Fife reported that for the US respondents of the Worldwide Mobile Data Service Study, the most popular answer was that users were willing to pay about $5-20/month for mobile data service.
Still, both 802.11/802.16 alternatives have problems. The hopes and claims of municipal Wi-Fi systems have not been proven, and most (if not all) are failing to hit their financial and adoption goals.
WiMax has been sponsored by Intel as a direct attempt to bypass Qualcomm and cellular carriers. However, the business models have not yet been proven. I wonder about the capacity — if each antenna only supports 60 concurrent connections, how many antennas do you need to build to cover a city? If you are building cells (with backhaul), how are the economics different than cell phones?
One way to increase capacity is to go Back to the Future: instead of unicast, go to a broadcast ("multicast") model (i.e., the 1950s TV model). Usually this means moving the traffic off the network to new spectrum: terrestrial VHF or UHF (like MediaFLO) or direct satellite broadcast (as in Korea's S-DMB). For something like live broadcast of the World Cup, it's hard to imagine another solution that will offer the economic or spectral efficiency. One of the Hollywood panelists (didn't see who) specifically praised MediaFLO and its economic efficiency as potentially changing the whole mobile content industry.
There is one other example of mobile video — in its infancy — being like TV of 60 years ago. Particularly in the US, cable TV, direct broadcast satellite and the Internet have fueled a fragmentation of media industry, ending the dominance of the "big three" TV networks that reigned for the first two decades of US television. But as I listened to the presentations today, it was clear that there will be limited capacity for mobile video — just as there were no more than 12 VHF channels in the US (typically 3-6 per metropolitan region) in the 1960s, and only 2-4 TV channels in Japan and most of Europe through the 1980s.
I asked about this in another session. Sanjay Pothen is COO of Metroworldwide, a company responsible for product placement that is trying to do product placement and sponsored content for mobile phones through its Pliq subsidiary.
So, I asked Pothen, is mobile TV going to be like cable and the Internet — a fragmented, niche-oriented market? Or is the limited bandwidth going to mean that mobile only succeeds in mass markets. His reply: "We're betting on the masses. I'm spending no time on niches."
In the US, MediaFLO is the mass media pipe for the two largest carriers (Verizon and Cingular) that have 53% of the market. Sprint (not quite 24%) is planning on using WiMax (based on the Korean WiBro) for its next generation broadband. It may be that Sprint has to target unicast niche markets, while the big carriers deliver the mass market content more cheaply.
Photo credit: Picture of Derek Broes, Bill Sanders and Marc Young © by Marc Davis of Yahoo, via Flickr.
Technorati Tags: broadband,LA GMR, MediaFLO, mobile phones, video, Wi-Fi, WiMax
Friday, May 25, 2007
BREW developer harnesses The Force
Last summer's interview of CEO/co-founder Jim Kaskade by UT telecom reporter Kathryn Balint shows a classic "scratch an itch" startup:
Balint: How did Eyespot get started?Eyespot has a two-pronged approach. The Eyespot.com website allows editing online, while Eyespot Mobile Share (announced a year ago at Qualcomm's annual BREW developer conference) allows such editing to be done on BREW-based cell phones (i.e. Verizon and BREW operators in Japan and Korea).
Kaskade: David Dudas and I both have families, and we both shoot video with a digital video camcorder. But we were both asking what do you do with the digital video after you've captured it? I hadn't done anything with it, to be honest. I didn't have the time to learn complex editing tools. This is the typical situation of a lot of consumers. So David and I said, "This is a pain point that needs to be addressed. We need to take advantage of the fact that the Internet is becoming the operating system and instead of having an application run on your desktop, you can have a hosted application running on the Internet."
Today's big announcement is that Eyespot has been selected by Lucasfilm to provide the tools for Star Wars fan(atic)s to create their own clips based on the 6-part movie saga, whether short parodies or longer mini-movies. Lucasfilm is providing some 250 clips of up to one minute or less that visitors to StarWars.com can combine using the Eyespot web-based software, and then post to the website (linked from a dedicated blog). This is in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars — I still remember waiting outside a Westwood movie theater to see the first (4th) episode) back in 1977.
There are limits, as mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article (but not the press release):
The mash-up project will come with rules, however. While it won't stop anybody from assailing characters or casting them in unexpected lights, Eyespot has set up a program to make sure none of the doctored clips contain nudity, pornography, and the like. As a backup, a team of screeners based in Costa Rica will watch each video before it goes live.Still, this marks a courageous effort by Lucasfilm to utilize the power of user innovation and confront head-on the threat of BitTorrent, YouTube etc. facing all of Hollywood. The commentary by MaryAnn Johanson shows how big a shift this is for Lucas:
George Lucas, creator of "Star Wars," has never hesitated to protect his intellectual property, which is why some call him "Lucas the Litigator." …This sort of deal also helps Eyespot avoid the the GooTube copyright dilemma. It is only the latest deal by Eyespot with licensed content, including Paramount Pictures and the NBA.
This is smart, on Lucas's part. He's trying to take control of the crazy, pop-culture-commenting creativity all the kids are into these days. I predict this will fail, wildly, from Lucas's perspective (though fans will love it). If I may paraphrase what Princess Leia told Grand Moff Tarkin: The more you tighten your grip, Lucas, the more mashups will slip through your fingers.
Kaskade and co-founder/CTO Dudas seemed to have had both a great vision and executed right on building the key content partners. With both VC and blue-chip angels like Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs and Linspire (née Lindows) chairman Michael Robertson, it appears they've built a small team that (at least until recently) was working out of a home.
This is the second startup of Kaskade, who in 1998 founded Incep Technologies, a Mira Mesa-based firm that developed IP to improve semiconductor packaging and connections. The company won more than $10 million in VC funding before it was acquired in September 2004 by Molex, Inc., a Fortune 1000 component company.
Graphic credit: Original 1977 Star Wars poster from Starstore.com
Technorati Tags: BREW, movie industry, Web 2.0, YouTube
Day 45, Qualcomm held hostage!
Obviously Nokia wants to permanently reduce its royalty payments to Qualcomm — and perhaps pick up ammunition for its ongoing fight with InterDigital. And Qualcomm is most concerned with not setting a precedent that will lower payments by other parties and destroy its business model. I'm not sure what's taking so long, but perhaps they're negotiating patent-by-patent. (Not clear how many that is — 2½ years ago, they bragged about 1,266 issued patents but the chart is now woefully out of date).
Who's held hostage? Nokia can't legally ship its W-CDMA phones to the U.S. without Qualcomm patents, but OTOH Nokia's attempt to break Qualcomm's business model has certainly put it in peril.
Sony Ericsson, Nokia's major ally, was quoted at a Reuters conference last week as saying the negotiation is a really big deal.
"My thinking is that it is going to have quite a big impact on the industry as a whole," Sony Ericsson's head Miles Flint said at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris on Wednesday [May 16].Wow. That's deep.
"If it was just a row between those two I think they might have settled it earlier. It goes quite deep," Flint said, but noted it was difficult to estimate the exact ways it would impact the sector.
Despite the lull in public posturing, not all is sweetness and light. TelecomTV quotes some harsh remarks from Nokia's CEO:
Nokia's CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, upped the ante yet again last week when, speaking at the annual general meeting of shareholders [May 3] in the Finnish mobile handset and telecoms equipment manufacturing company, he said that to do so would be tantamount to handing to Qualcomm "dictatorial reign over the entire wireless industry."The comments seem newsworthy, so that no one else carried these remarks suggests that Nokia intended them only for domestic consumption.
Mr. Kallasvuo added, "Talks are ongoing, the situation is open, but I have to say agreement cannot be reached before both parties are in accord. It's completely clear that we cannot give one company, in this case Qualcomm, a chance to dictate rules for the whole industry. The issue is not Qualcomm versus Nokia, it's more about Qualcomm versus the rest of the industry."
Meanwhile, Qualcomm's #2 cheerleader is sanguine. In a Fool-ish commentary, Dave Mock wrote Wednesday:
The only real threats to the continued stream of cash flowing in to fund these perks are lawsuits and antitrust complaints pushed by Nokia and Broadcom. Nokia, in particular, is attempting to break the royalty dynasty that Qualcomm has enjoyed for 15 years by refusing to license next-generation technologies on terms similar to its original patent license agreement. Nokia is hoping that it and other equipment manufacturers such as Ericsson and Texas Instruments will be largely relieved of paying royalties to Qualcomm going forward.I would think shareholders would be more pleased to hear that Qualcomm is not only spending money on lawyers, but also a €100 million for European venture investments to align small companies to its business — much as Intel Capital invests to grow its market and to keep startups loyal to it rather than rival AMD. $134 million might seem a lot to you or me, but it is only about 20% (or less) of the Qualcomm Ventures funding.
But with the $200 million that Qualcomm intends to spend on legal defense this year, the company is going to great lengths to ensure that it can keep giving back to shareholders.
Its first investment, in French startup Streamezzo, seems intended to support its MediaFLO mobile TV service. Streamezzo makes content authoring tools for the Nokia-backed DVB-H, but presumably MediaFLO tools will now be forthcoming.
Technorati Tags: Nokia, patents, Qualcomm, Qualcomm Ventures


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FaltyDL You Stand Uncertain
To be honest, it has been difficult to write about FaltyDL's second full-length record, but not because it disappoints—on the contrary, You Stand Uncertain might be one of the most exciting records to come out this year. The New York resident (a.k.a. Drew Lustman), whose earliest productions were classified as IDM and dubstep, has been expanding his sound effortlessly since the release of his 2009 debut full-length, Love Is a Liability, and nowhere is this sonic widening more evident than on this latest effort.
In more ways than one, Lustman seems to be following in the footsteps of Cornwall's most famous son, Richard D. James; perhaps one of the only differences is that Lustman eschews James' tactic of using many aural aliases. For example, a piece like "Lucky Luciano," with its rapid-fire changes in rhythm and tone, is very much in line with James' work as The Tuss. The record's title track, with its Detroit-meets-garage framework, sounds like a long-lost slice from James' early days or the Analord series, and "It's All Good" is an IDM offering of moody bass wobblings, washed-out high-frequency samples, and lush notes drawn out to blissful ends. Sure, pieces like the skittery "Brazil" most definitely fall under the rubric of dubstep, but they're preceded by the distorted funk of "Open Spaces," and often followed by the Theo Parrish-like slow-motion techno of "Voyager." What's more, the record doesn't feel like a cobbling together of disparate styles—it flows beautifully.
In short, it is rare to find a producer who can craft many types of tracks so consistently well, but with You Stand Uncertain, FaltyDL has cemented himself as such.


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Question of the Week
How do I look after the cyclamen I received as a gift?
Cyclamen like to be slightly dry between watering. Provide indirect sun and a cool location while in bloom to prolong the blossom time. Use 20-20-20 water soluble fertilizer mixed at half-strength every three weeks.
"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."
According to Kathleen Wynne — Ontario Minister of Agriculture (and Premier of Ontario) — the vision of this current government is to "feed local economies . . . support great jobs and . . . help our communities grow and thrive." This quote is in reference to the newly minted Local Food Act.
On the same day that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford made his first public pronouncement about substance abuse, the Ontario government passed the new act in an effort to give the local food movement a lift. The story did not receive a lot of attention that Tuesday in early November.
Yet I am here to feed you some nutritious, satisfying news.
The Local Food Act should be of interest not just to Ontario farmers but to everyone who loves to eat and who aspires to improve their health through diet. For a generation or more, the idea of eating local food has been gaining traction.
As a result, there has been an explosion in the number of farmers' markets across the province which are now in excess of 350. Not only do we have greater access than ever before to more locally grown food, we also have access to information about how to prepare it, store it, present it and celebrate it.
We can thank the "slow food" movement and impassioned community groups for this progress evidenced by a growing number of community gardens, allotment gardens and good old-fashioned backyard gardens. Not to mention an abundance of books, websites and blogs on the subject of local food. It only makes sense that our minority provincial government, with support from opposing parties would make a commitment to local food.
But, what does it mean? For answers I connected with Susan Murray, senior communications advisor to Minister (and Premier) Wynne.
How will this Act support existing farmers' markets and encourage more?
The Act will complement the support the ministry already provides to farmers' markets. In 2008 the government invested $4 million over four years for an Ontario Farmers' Markets Strategy.
Last year the Local Food Fund was announced. It provides up to $30 million over three years to support innovative local food projects that will help celebrate, support and promote Ontario food.
I need to point out that the Local Food Act will not actually kick in for another year. That is, the Act provides for a lag-time for the ministry to create a strategy that sets out aspirational goals and targets with respect to food literacy, local food access and the use of local food by public sector institutions.
Who will determine the plan for the $30 million that the Act sets aside?
We will meet with stakeholders to determine details of those targets, which need to be implemented within on year of proclamation of the Act. There is a provision in the Local Food Act that provides for a non-refundable tax credit to farmers who donate excess produce to a not-for-profit food distribution organization like a food bank. The limit is 25 per cent of the farmer's gross income.
Can someone with a large crop of, say, apples in the city donate them to a local food bank and be eligible for the credit?
According to the Act, donations go to an "eligible community food program," which is defined as a person or entity that is engaged in the distribution of food to the public without charge in Ontario and is a registered charity under the Federal Act. Farmers are defined as those who carry on the business of farming in Ontario.
(Cullen note: Take this to mean that your donation of zucchini, fresh from your backyard, does not qualify for a provincial tax credit, unless you pay taxes as a farmer. Oh well, I tried.)
My friend — and perhaps the best authority on the issue in the province — David Cohlmeyer, a consultant on sustainable good foods believes the Local Food Act can only produce good things. He points out that local agriculture and food is already the largest contributor to the economy and with some help "could become larger." The Local Food Act makes provisions for a $30-million investment over three years and the Local Food Fund provides for an additional $30 million.
Between the two Acts, there will be greater access to locally produced food in public hospitals and universities, more local food hubs and distribution points and capacity-building grants to help install tried-and-true practices that facilitate effective decision-making.
If you are a farmer who needs to be guided through the process, David is here to help.
If you are a consumer with an interest in gaining greater access to local food and wish to learn more, get his free newsletter by contacting him at email@example.com . Alternatively, you can access the Act itself and the many electronic links to more information at www.ontario.ca/omafra.
As I have mentioned before in this column, we are going to hear a lot more about the issue of local food. This is not a fad but a trend that is moving upwards with permanence written all over it.
Fran Lebowitz, American author, Metropolitan Life
Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster and garden editor of Reno and Decor magazine. You can sign up for his free monthly newsletter at markcullen.com, and watch him on CTV Canada AM every Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. You can reach Mark through the "contact" button on his website and follow him on Twitter @MarkCullen4 and Facebook. Mark's latest book, Canadian Lawn & Garden Secrets, is available at Home Hardware and all major bookstores.


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Water Treatment Options for The Really Big One
Turning Filth into Potable Drinking Water with a Filtered Water Bottle
Attaching the Frontier Max In-Line Water Filter to a Hydration Pack
How to Use an In-Line Water Filter for Backpacking or Traveling
New In-Line Water Filter for 2015
Water Filter Flow Rates Improved
Ebola and Water Purification
Tired of pumping? Hop on a bicycle.
Micron Ratings and Water Filters: Aquamira Sets the Record Straight
The other day I sat through a Mountain Travel and Rescue Clinic on Water Treatment in the Backcountry. I listened to the presenter talk about micron ratings, pore sizes and how an effective filter needs to have a specific micron rating. When I began to question some of the information presented,...


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The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been collected, and, incidentally, to suggest some helps for tracing out their history. Naturally the few pages into which the story has to be packed will not give room for any one episode to be treated exhaustively. Enough if I succeed in rousing curiosity and setting some student to work in a field in which and immense amount still remains to be discovered. —M. R. James (1919) —The Wandering and Homes of Manuscripts (Tertullian)
Great Scott, this is exactly the kind of article I spent about an hour or so looking for yesterday. Thanks for posting it, Eric.


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Pebble Smartwatch Review
Pebble Smartwatch Review
What's a smartwatch?We've heard for some time about this small gadget and the rising interest a great deal of people have revealed, but what's a smartwatch and what exactly does it do?
Well, a smartwatch appears like a standard wristwatch however, besides revealing the specific time, it includes"intelligent" capabilities. You'll need to link it to a smartphone or tablet computer so as to get into the wise functions.
Smartwatches arrive with numerous applications and configurations but the most frequent features are the chance to read mails, text messages, take photos, behave as GPS and far more.
To be able to get into the software of other intelligent devices, the smartwatches normally connect through Bluetooth.
Why do I require a smartwatch?
If you do not like to look at your telephone every 5 minutes and fancy the notion your watch will alarm you when you get mails, keep up with important information, assess your societal feed or other crucial services that you might have subscribed to, after which the smartwatch is the best instrument for you.
Basically you'll be less distracted than you'd be when assessing a smartphone, you won't be disrupted from your job and as soon as an important telling arrives you'll understand about it. Apart from this, smartwatches are utilized widely due to their physical fitness programs.
We managed to catch your attention so let us take a look at a few of the very best and non expensive smartwatches readily available, the Pebble Smartwatch.
Notice: The Pebble SmartWatch took arrival because of some very successful Kickstarter effort that was able to increase over 10 million bucks in about five months.
Display and design
In the very first glance, the Pebble Watch resembles a standard watch. It's a simple, yet elegant appearance, without being heavy or bulky. The casing is made from vinyl and has a comfy and sturdy strap.
On the ideal side you'll come across the up-down and choose buttons and onto the left side one menu button alongside a pair of connections to the magnetic power connector.
The Pebble Smartwatch isn't delicate and is able to withstand temperatures between 14 to 140F and can operate even if it's submerged up to 160 ft in water (that is fantastic for explorers! ) ) .
The screen features a 1.26at 144×168 Sharp Memory LCD e-paper, it's white and black and can be coated with a plastic lens which may reflect light. Though the viewing angle isn't a full 180 degrees, you'll have the ability to observe any other running display program with no backlight throughout the day rather easily.
Comparing to its rivals, the display is a small low point however, it does its job correctly.
The Pebble Smartwatch comes with an ARM Cortex-M3 chip and 512 KB on-chip storage which are going to have the ability to keep some programs and customizable watch faces. Aside from the principal specs, the watch comes with a magnetometer, a nearby light plus also a three-axis accelerometer.
The programs ought to take advantage of this attributes and make a fantastic user experience.
As a result of its tiny low-resolution screen along with also the 140 mAH battery, the Pebble watch is able to continue to five times of use and over a week of intermittent use.
Notice: Pebble watch doesn't have a battery indicator.
To be in a position to be watertight, the Pebble view could be charged by linking a bespoke cable into the little magnets on the face of this watch.
iOS and Android
After downloading the Pebble program, first we analyzed the watch together with an iPhone. It ended up being a small hassle to make it operate, as iOS does not really look like it attempted to earn a fantastic direction for Pebble but once we configured it correctly, the watch functioned flawlessly across the iPhone.
We could obtain new watch faces or accessibility contact service but it does sounds like what happened in the iOS degree (iOS acted as a placeholder).
The Android encounter is rather different. The settings on the particular platform appeared to be in position and the programs made more sense. Assessing to iOS that the Android appeared more open and using a good deal more software to select from.
In the long run we could synchronize with both programs and we could get emails alarms, revenue calls or text messages thanks to the Pebble shop we can successfully customize the screen, download cool programs as well as some games (such as Flappy Bird) regardless of if it had been created together iOS or even Android.
Notice: The Pebble Smartwatch can be used with iOS 6 or greater and Android 4.0 or greater.
As a conclusion we could say that Pebble didn't make the exact same mistake that lots of manufacturers make when seeking to construct a smartwatch, they didn't attempt and make a little wrist retractable smartphone. Rather they left among the very best smartwatch configurations, by developing a light, easy and competent device that place smartwatches from the list of a few of the most desired apparatus at the moment on the planet.


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Founded in 1971 by a group of women from the Church of the Good Shepherd with a heart to help others in need, Good Shepherd's Corner is a consignment and retail shop that benefits the community in several ways. It has given thousands of dollars in charitable donations to the ministries of the Church, as well as to missions around the city of Corpus Christi.
Today, Good Shepherd's Corner serves those in need in the nearby neighborhoods by selling gently used men's and women's clothing, accessories, jewelry, shoes, appliances, and household items at significantly reduced prices. Men and women benefit by being able to buy quality goods for just a few dollars. Some customers use the store as a means of income, by bringing in items for consignment and collecting small proceeds from the sales each month. Most of the clothing and resale items are donated, so the Corner itself makes a generous profit, which it donates to charities and missions. The governing board, "The Committee of Seven", meets annually to receive grant requests and decide on how donations will be disbursed.
It takes many volunteers to receive, mark, categorize, and display the merchandise. The Corner is always looking for more volunteers. The women who work at the Corner enjoy lively fellowship plus the blessing of being able to interact with the customers and help those in need.
Good Shepherd's Corner
1809 S. Alameda Street
Corpus Christi, Texas 78404-2932
Click here for map and directions
Follow us on Facebook –� Click Here
If you would like more information about Good Shepherd's Corner, and how you can get involved, please call the Church Office at 361-882-1735.


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All fields in Burnaby and North Vancouver have been closed through the weekend of Feb 24/25.
All matches scheduled this weekend (Feb 24/25) have been cancelled.
The BMSL is a men's soccer league, with all games played within Burnaby BC, mainly at Burnaby Lake Sports Complex West (near Kensington and Sprott)


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A flood advisory has been issued in Southern Moffat County through Tuesday. The National Weather Service says rises in the Yampa River are due to heavy runoff of mountain snow melt as temperatures remain above normal. Warm temperatures will continue into early next week keeping water levels high. A peak in river levels are forecast to occur near Craig by this morning, reaching Maybell and Deer Lodge Park by tomorrow evening and early Sunday morning. A slow decrease in river levels is forecast to then occur through early next week. Minor flooding of low lying areas near the river can be expected. Those areas include Craig, Maybell, Juniper Springs and Sunbeam.
Flood Advisory Issued for Moffat County
This entry was posted in News and tagged Craig, Deer Lodge Park, Flood Advisory, Juniper Springs, Maybell, Moffat County, National Weather Service, River levels, runoff, snow melt, Sunbeam, Yampa River. Bookmark the permalink.


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Howard McCullum (Vocals, Bass)
Rocco Calipari (Guitar)
Pete Galanis (Guitar)
Jim Christopulos (Drums)
Band Bio
Chicago, a city steeped in blues history, is where the band have honed their chops since their inception in 1988. Howard & the White Boys have established a reputation as one of the city's favorite attractions and regular appearances at Buddy Guy's Legends have afforded them an opportunity to display their wares before locals and out-of-towners who come to Legends to hear the best the city has to offer in blues entertainment. Indeed, Buddy Guy has been their unofficial mentor and his support for the band has been instrumental in exposing them to a wider audience. He has taken them on several major Midwestern tours as his opening act, and has often jumped onstage to jam with them when they appear at Legends. He also gave them the ultimate endorsement by making a rare guest appearance on their third release The Big $core. He plays some scorching guitar and sings a duet with Howard on a remake of the Sam & Dave classic "I ThankYou." Guy told the L.A. Times, "These guys deserve whatever they get and more. And I tell these guys, 'If you ain't gonna do it, you know I will, so don't let me down now.' And they haven't!"
Howard & the White Boys formed in 1988 and began jamming together just for fun, but their fast-growing popularity soon convinced them they could make a career of it. After only a few months, they got their first big break by opening for B.B. King. Their reputation grew in Chicago and they began performing with the biggest names in blues: Koko Taylor, Otis Rush, Albert King, Junior Wells, Lonnie Brooks, Luther Allison, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry.
Between 1994 and 1997, the group made two highly acclaimed recordings, Strung Out On The Blues and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, for Los Angeles based Mighty Tiger Records. They began traveling extensively across the United States and their growing popularity captured the attention of Philadelphia based Evidence Records. The Big $core was the first of three successful discs released by Evidence, and the band wasted no time in promoting it via the first of many trips to European countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and England. Riding the ever-growing wave of popularity both at home and abroad, the group then released a well-received live CD for Evidence entitled Live At Chord On Blues. In 2007, Evidence released the critically acclaimed Made in Chicago which showcased the group's versatility and encompassed the funk, R & B, and rock styles that have become Howard & the White Boys trademarks.
Rosa's Lounge bears witness to the power of the group when they perform live, and also lends credence to the Chicago Sun-Times' recent statement, "You can't see this high-energy, good time band at a club without leaving with a smile on your face." The band is now focusing on touring to support the new CD and working on material for their next one.
Booking: Rocco Calipari @ (219) 916-5445 Evidence Records: (610) 832-0844
Publicity: Doug Deutsch @ (213) 924-4901 Mighty Tiger Records: (800) 724-2730