billso.com

Yesterday, the Honolulu Advertiser published an article about digital TV conversion. On 17 February 2009, US television stations will stop broadcasting analog television signals. On that date, anyone in the US who uses an antenna to receive their television signal on their analog television will need a digital converter box to receive broadcast signals. Cable and satellite subscribers have or will get converter boxes as part of their service agreement. All televisions manufactured for sale in the US after 1 March 2007 are required to have a digital tuner, so these models don’t need a converter box. The AP has an article with additional details.

I’ve discussed the FCC’s 700 mHz auction on 18 March 2008 and 30 January 2008. When the analog television channels are abandoned, AT&T, Verizon and other companies will use those frequencies for mobile phone and data services.

The US Department of Commerce has a web site with information on the DTV conversion, as does the FCC. Government regulators and consumer activists fear that cable and satellite companies will use digital television to scare up new subscribers. Another AP article states that Hispanics are the ethnic group most likely to lose television service after the conversion, even as the Federal government gives away several million coupons for digital converter boxes. Hawaii has a diverse population, and getting the message out in multiple languages will be challenging. I expect to see more articles in the local papers, especially in early 2009, even though the Advertiser claims that only 5.5% of the state’s television viewers rely on broadcast signals.

Digital TV converter boxes won’t turn an old analog set into a higher-definition TV, of course. These boxes have a digital TV tuner that passes its output to an analog TV on channel 3 or 4, like a video game console would do.

Yahoo reports that broadcasters will be required to run public service advertising, in an effort to notify viewers well before the cutover. The coupon request page uses reCAPTCHA – the same system I use to screen out spam comments on this blog.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation earlier today, after he and his suppliers were found transferring large amounts of cash among their financial accounts. See Reuters and the New York Times for more details.

Reporting systems

In the US, banks are required to file Currency Transaction Reports when customers make large cash transactions. The regulation is supposed to discourage these transactions, while alerting the Federal government to possible criminal activities. As a lawyer who has prosecuted corporate crime, Spitzer knew about the US$10000 reporting threshold that triggers these notices – and he posted more than 150 transactions that fell just shy of that limit.

Spitzer also knew about the Mann Act, because he led a successful effort to increase New York State’s criminal penalties for international and interstate offenses, as described in this Times article. When the governor made his interstate date, he violated Federal law and a state law that he championed. RootsWeb has a brief discussion of the Mann Act, and there’s always Wikipedia.

People still matter

Important parts of these reporting systems are not fully automated. People have to take notice and action for these systems to work well. Read more about this in Larry Dignan’s article at ZDnet (via BoingBoing), and in the Wall Street Journal. The second figure in Dignan’s article is a handy flowchart of the system.

Updated 2000 HT 13 March 2008: A former student of mine passed along the following information, which I used to update the post. Banks file Suspicious Activities Reports (SARs) when they find a pattern of transactions:

FYI, there may have been some bad data in one of your sources. It’s not a 10K threshold for SARs. It’s a 10K Threshold for CTRs which is for any cash transaction. SARs are based on potential exposure due to suspicious transactions. The more common thresholds are 5K if you can name a suspect and 25K if you can’t.

I followed a link on BoingBoing to this Times of India article: Delhi is getting a 45-kilometer monorail system.

The technology panel will announce their selection for Honolulu’s proposed fixed guideway mass transit system tomorrow, according to this article in the Honolulu Advertiser. The five panel members are evaluating four technologies, including:

1. trains (steel wheel on steel rail)
2. buses (rubber tire on concrete)
3. monorail
4. magnetic levitation

The decision will also be announced on the Honolulu High Capacity Transit Corridor’s web site. The video simulation of the proposed Aloha Tower station is pretty good. Most of the site’s content is trapped in PDF files, however.

As I posted on 6 February 2008, I support the bus option. This option could create a two-lane elevated road that can also be used by emergency vehicles. The buses for this system might also be deployed on surface roads as demand warrants. The other three technologies are less flexible and more expensive. City councilmembers Donovan Dela Cruz and Ann Kobayashi appeared on the byline for this article in the Honolulu Star-Builletin on 26 August 2007. The article includes a picture of one bus model. Below is a promotional video for the Eindhoven bus system.

The platform wars are heating up in the mobile phone industry. It is very difficult for a mobile carrier to support several different handset operating systems. Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin estimated that his UK-based company supports 30 or 40 different OSes, according to this MacWorld UK report. Sarin is also quited in this Business Week article.

It takes a great deal of effort to establish a computing standard. Consider Apple, which became a new entrant with its iPhone. There are about 4 million Apple iPhones available or in use now, which is a respectable number when one considers its limited availability. There are no official iPhone providers in China or Japan yet, for example.

Google won’t make or market its own mobile phone, especially now that the company has dropped out of the 700 mHz auction, as reported by Forbes. The company’s Android mobile phone platform is based upon Linux, and over 30 companies have signed on to develop and support Android hardware. Prototypes of the Google phone were shown in Frankfurt at the Mobile World Congress this week. This CNET slideshow starts with a pic of one such prototype, which appears to be running and connected to a GSM network.

Microsoft used a similar approach to develop its Windows Mobile platform for PDAs and smartphones. The company expects that 20 million Windows Mobile phones from various manufacturers will be sold in the first half of 2008. None of these phones are Microsoft-branded devices.

Symbian claims to have the top spot, with 77 million units sold in the last year. Nokia is the main manufacturer that uses the Symbian operating system, along with Sony Ericsson. The latter company has started using Windows Mobile in its high-end smartphones, however.

For more information, see my earlier articles tagged as mobile, including:

• 11 February 2008: The modular mobile phone
• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 11 January 2008: BlackBerry vs iPhone
• 26 November 2007: Mobile devices for US census takers
• 24 September 2007: Do you want a PC on your iPhone?
• 23 April 2007: Samsung and Microsoft further their convergence goals

BusinessWeek reports on modu, an Israeli company that has developed a modular mobile phone around the size of an iPod Nano. The Associated Press reports the phone will be launched on 1 October 2008 in Italy, Russia and Israel.

As Reuters pointed out yesterday, telecoms and mobile phone manufacturers will be out in force at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Frankfurt, Germany.  Modu is only one of several hundred manufacturers who will use their booths to show off their latest hardware.

Modu has designed a basic GSM phone that could be used on its own, but the company wants third parties to license the technology and build “jackets”. These are devices like media players, mobile handsets and other gadgets that have a slot for the modu phone. The jackets provide a larger, more comfortable form-factor for everyday use, and provide opportunities to decorate, brand and extend the phone.

Founder Dov Moran has the experience and connections to pull this off, having sold his flash memory business, M-Systems, to SanDisk in 2006 for US$1.5 billion. He’s invested US$5 million in modu, according to Reuters, and believes his new company could generate US$1 billion in sales revenue by 2011. That would rival the largest mobile phone manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung, whose businesses rely on a traditional business model. Consumers buy a handset, use it for a while, and upgrade to a different model.

The modu concept would let manufacturers add mobile connectivity to a wide range of electronic devices. Digital cameras could have a modu slot, for example. Car stereo systems might include a modu slot, as shown in the concept video on the modu website. A modu-compatible media player would be an interesting rival for the iPhone.

Creating a consumer hardware standard is tricky. Video games are a good example. Cartridges and software from one system usually do not work with another manufacturer’s console.