12 August 2002

Vodafone's J-Phone says camera phone users exceed 6 million The key numbers: c 20% of subscriber growth has come in the last 2 months; 47% of its subscriber base now have cam-phones. (How much are they using them?) 7:25:48 PM     comments

SIP becoming the de facto signalling standard for voice? SIP gains traction as de facto signalling standard for packet-based voice as Cisco, Nortel, Alcatel etc rollout products. Analysts like its simplicity compared with H.323. Issues: in order to use it, will we need to throw out the billions of handsets that are already out there? there's a need to map its email-style addressing to numeric addresses so its less complicated for 12-button keypads security - needs to work with firewalls etc. Related: Schneier's security concerns about VOIP re-uniting the voice and data channels (which are currently separate in current, non-VOIP technology) 7:24:44 PM     comments

Celldar: mobile phones make cheap radar Siemens research unit demonstrates passive radar using mobile base station signals. Piggy-backing off existing wireless network infrastructure means it's potentially much cheaper than conventional military radar systems, and presumably quite resilient. 7:23:45 PM     comments

Speechtech talks to 20/20 Speech, stealth UK speechrec company 20/20 Speech is a JV between QinetiQ (formerly DERA – the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) and NXT Plc (the licensors of flat-panel loudspeaker technology), and does medical and defence ware on proprietary speech recognition and synthesis platforms. 4:17:43 PM     comments

Speechtech: Nuance and Newfound picked for air traffic training system The voice-controlled, multimodal system enables students to verbally guide aircrafts into and out of assigned radar sectors. 4:15:54 PM     comments

Speech recognition provides CNN viewers with real-time links to related audio-video content Dremedia, the UK broadcasting technology group, has signed a partnership agreement with CNN which will use its voice recognition software to enhance the news group's broadband internet content. In short: Dremedia uses speech rec from SoftSound and search/automation tech from Autonomy (both companies have investment from Autonomy) to search content in real-time and find related stories. Useful for broadband viewers and broadcasters. Dremedia's white paper on the technology is at Broadcast papers, and includes some interesting comments on the limitations of other approaches (eg managing assets via meta-tagging, indexing). 3:46:47 PM     comments