A German electrical engineer who helped make MP3 players a reality has turned his attention to making “dumb devices” act smart.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, now a professor at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany, is backing Perfect Stream technology that lets computing power in the Internet “cloud” do the thinking for simple devices.
“When I first met these guys it sounded crazy to me,” Brandenburg said while courting partners for Perfect Stream at a major Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that ended on Sunday in Las Vegas.
“But I have a fondness for crazy ideas because when we started MP3 it seemed crazy to everyone as well,” he said.
MP3 is now a nearly ubiquitous format used for digital content online and in mobile devices such as smartphones and music players.
The idea with Perfect Stream is to have digital video and audio tailored to individual tastes and delivered as a service to essentially any gizmo that can talk to the Internet.
Perfect Stream has proven itself in Germany and the company was at CES to license the technology to Internet service providers in the US.
“This technology works and now we are trying to internationalize it,” Nikolas Samios of Perfect Stream said.
Services can be programmed with a person’s preferred shows, news sources, music, Twitter feeds, or other Internet content and the data can be routed to digital picture frames, in-car navigation systems, feature phones, game consoles and more, Brandenburg said.
“It bridges the different technologies,” Samios said.
“These are all walled-garden devices that usually never talk to each other,” he said.
Personalized Internet streams can flow seamlessly to sophisticated online electronics or to “any kind of stupid phone, a US$50 phone with a prepaid plan,” Samios said.
The key is in processing digital content on servers “in the cloud” and then feeding it to gadgets that need only receive and decode the data, Brandenburg said.
Perfect Stream demonstrated the service on a series of devices, including an inexpensive Internet radio and a Philips TV with basic Internet connectivity.
CLASH OF WORDS: While China’s foreign minister insisted the US play a constructive role with China, Rubio stressed Washington’s commitment to its allies in the region The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday affirmed and welcomed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio statements expressing the US’ “serious concern over China’s coercive actions against Taiwan” and aggressive behavior in the South China Sea, in a telephone call with his Chinese counterpart. The ministry in a news release yesterday also said that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had stated many fallacies about Taiwan in the call. “We solemnly emphasize again that our country and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other, and it has been an objective fact for a long time, as well as
‘CHARM OFFENSIVE’: Beijing has been sending senior Chinese officials to Okinawa as part of efforts to influence public opinion against the US, the ‘Telegraph’ reported Beijing is believed to be sowing divisions in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture to better facilitate an invasion of Taiwan, British newspaper the Telegraph reported on Saturday. Less than 750km from Taiwan, Okinawa hosts nearly 30,000 US troops who would likely “play a pivotal role should Beijing order the invasion of Taiwan,” it wrote. To prevent US intervention in an invasion, China is carrying out a “silent invasion” of Okinawa by stoking the flames of discontent among locals toward the US presence in the prefecture, it said. Beijing is also allegedly funding separatists in the region, including Chosuke Yara, the head of the Ryukyu Independence
UNITED: The premier said Trump’s tariff comments provided a great opportunity for the private and public sectors to come together to maintain the nation’s chip advantage The government is considering ways to assist the nation’s semiconductor industry or hosting collaborative projects with the private sector after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on chips exported to the US, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. Trump on Monday told Republican members of the US Congress about plans to impose sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, steel, aluminum, copper and pharmaceuticals “in the very near future.” “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said at the Republican Issues Conference in Miami, Florida. “They
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
RSS