India remains bright spot for flat panel TV market growth

AUSTIN, USA: According to results from the DisplaySearch India's TV Market: The Final Frontier of FPD, the India flat panel TV market outlook is promising, with the region accounting for more than 30 percent of forecast Asia Pacific flat panel TV shipments in 2013.

FPD TV shipment growth in India slowed to 80 percent from 100 percent growth in the last four years, but in comparison to other regions, the slowed growth is still impressive, with the exception of the China flat panel TV market.

Fig. 1: India's FPD TV Share in Asian Pacific RegionSource: DisplaySearch’s India's TV Market: The Final Frontier of FPD

A growing middle class, coupled with a low penetration of flat panel TVs, will fuel the transition from CRT to LCD TVs with LCD TVs overtaking CRTs in 2012. India has 230 million households and only 115 million of them have TVs—mainly CRT TVs—providing significant opportunities for market expansion.

“With a booming economy, rising discretionary income and government purchase incentives, the India flat panel TV market remains a bright spot for continued flat panel TV growth over the next five years,” noted Indrajit Ghosh, DisplaySearch Director of India and South Asia Research.

"In a global economy where some regions are saturated, India represents one of the biggest populations with the biggest potential for ensuring continued growth in the flat panel TV industry.”

India aims to position itself as the next TV assembly and manufacturing destination. The India government also has reduced panel import duty by 50 percent in an effort to help attract TV manufacturing and assembly within the country. As a result, large global OEMs are already considering this region, based on success stories in mobile handset manufacturing in India.

It’s “Game On” for GNi and Dolby

AUSTIN, USA: GNi, a leading provider of IaaS hosting solutions, announced it is aligning with Dolby Laboratories Inc. to integrate Dolby Axon™ In-Game Communication technology into GNi’s platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Dolby Axon technology enables a realistic 3D voice experience that matches the game environment and greatly expands game-play possibilities. GNi’s infrastructure is now Dolby-approved and the two companies worked closely to ensure that gaming and virtual worlds developers can rapidly access and deploy games incorporating the Dolby Axon technology.

“Dolby Axon represents a new benchmark for online voice communications by enabling users to understand their in-game environment through audio. The reliability and scalability of GNi’s IaaS ensures a consistently immersive experience of our enhanced voice technology, which is vital to both the developers of virtual worlds and the people who inhabit them,” said Matt Tullis, Senior Marketing Manager for Games at Dolby Laboratories.

Online gaming and virtual worlds are increasingly sophisticated, and users constantly look to enhance the immersive experience. By mapping users’ voices to the game environment, Dolby Axon adds unprecedented realism and immediacy.

For example, players can now follow the movements of teammates and enemies simply by listening to their voices or footsteps. Objects, such as a wall or a closed door, affect sound volume, and sounds can even appear to becoming from around the corner of a building.

“Voice chat is a critical feature for Jumpgate Evolution,” said Hermann Peterscheck, Lead Producer on NetDevil’s upcoming space combat MMO. “After evaluating other products and considering building it ourselves, we determined Dolby Axon is the best solution in terms of value, ease of integration and audio quality.”

“Online businesses require infrastructure that delivers cost-effective application availability, performance, and scalability,” said Lydia Leong, Research Director at Gartner.

“Next-generation gaming places even greater demands on infrastructure, requiring persistent session continuity, the ability to scale flexibly and dynamically to serve changing audiences, and high reliability, all of which must be delivered within tight cost parameters.”

GNi IaaS satisfies the strictest demands for network connectivity, resiliency, and redundancy, and provides pre-built state-of-the-art hosting environments with the highest level of technical specifications, delivering an unprecedented level of reliability and scalability.

Dolby Axon In-Game Communication enables true-to-life voice communication in 3D surround sound, mapping voices to the game environment and allowing players to alter their voices to match their in-game personas.

“The interoperability, reliability and high performance of Dolby Axon on GNi IaaS enable online gaming and virtual worlds developers to quickly launch on one of the most exciting and advanced technologies available today,” said Arun Gowda, Vice President of Business Development for GNi. “Our partnership with Dolby clearly makes it easier than ever for developers to launch on the Dolby Axon technology while continuing to broaden GNi’s appeal to the gaming industry.”

MPEG LA and ULDAGE reach historic agreement

DENVER, USA: World's leading patent pool licensing administrator MPEG LA, LLC, and Japanese patent pool administrator ULDAGE Inc. announced a cooperation under which ULDAGE will offer MPEG LA’s MPEG-2 Systems License along with ULDAGE’s ARIB license to companies based in Japan that sell mobile TV handsets for Japan’s One-Seg mobile terrestrial broadcasting service.

One-Seg mobile TV handsets use both the Transport Layer of the MPEG-2 Systems Standard covered by MPEG LA’s MPEG-2 Systems License and the ARIB One-Seg digital broadcast standard covered by ULDAGE’s ARIB License. Therefore, One-Seg handset manufacturers need coverage under patents essential to both standards and would benefit from both licenses.

"This collaboration marks two firsts," said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn. "It is the first time that two joint licensing administrators have joined forces. It is also the first time that a joint license has been offered covering patents essential to multiple standards utilized in a single product.

"We are especially thrilled to be able to do this with ULDAGE, whom we hold in the highest regard for its successful licensing of the Japanese market. We share a rich history and common values serving our customers and the market with licensing products of increasing convenience.”

"Doing this venture with MPEG LA holds special significance for us," said ULDAGE President and CEO Yoshihide Nakamura. "MPEG LA ushered in the age of patent pool licensing bringing new efficiencies to the patent licensing market. Now together we usher in the age of product licensing. In response to market demand, through the co-operative effort of our companies each representing the gold standard in joint licensing, we are bringing new licensing products to market that will benefit the industry and its consumers."

One-Seg is a mobile terrestrial digital audio, video and data broadcasting service used in Japan. ULDAGE’s ARIB Essential Patent License provides a license under Japanese Digital Broadcasting Standards including One-Seg that were developed by the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (“ARIB”).

The MPEG-2 Systems Standard defines how to format the various components of multiplexer programs and combine them into a single program or transport stream. Where the standard is used without licensed MPEG-2 video encoders or decoders, such as in One-Seg handset and other mobile television and audio receivers and certain set-top boxes and cameras, MPEG LA’s MPEG-2 Systems Patent Portfolio License provides coverage under essential patents.

WirelessHD Consortium experiences significant growth

CEDIA EXPO 2009, SUNNYVALE & ATLANTA, USA: The WirelessHD Consortium, currently comprised of leaders in the consumer electronics and personal computing industries, today announced that several WirelessHD consumer products have successfully passed the rigorous compliance tests and are now available in Asia, North America and Europe.

Adding to this momentum, Philips, Best Buy and others have also joined the Consortium bringing membership to over 40 companies. These key achievements highlight the rapid growth in membership and products, application development and interest in the Consortium.

Products from Panasonic, LG Electronics, Gefen and Monster Cable Products, Inc. with WirelessHD technology will be showcased at CEDIA Expo in Atlanta, Georgia through September 13, 2009.

WirelessHD Certified and Compliant Products Available Worldwide
Compliance Certification Services (CCS), the first WirelessHD Authorized Test Center (ATC), recently conducted the first of many product tests under the WirelessHD Compliance Test Program using Agilent’s WirelessHD electronics measurement and test equipment.

The following companies, many of whom had previously considered other technologies, have rallied around WirelessHD and are showcasing their products at this year’s CEDIA Expo in Atlanta, Georgia

Panasonic: Panasonic’s Z1 plasma TV series with WirelessHD technology is available now for sale in North America, Asia and Europe (Booth #2836).
LG Electronics: LG Electronics’ LH85 and LHX LCD TVs are also available in North America and Asia (Booth #2623).
Gefen: GefenTV Wireless for HDMI 60GHz Extender can be seen in their booth (Booth #1219).
Monster Cable Products Inc.: Monster is demonstrating their WirelessHD transmitter/receiver adapter pair (Booth #609).

Additional products from several manufacturers are expected to roll out later this year, including a WirelessHD Adapter set from Rocketfish, a Best Buy private label brand.

“The availability of the WirelessHD compliance test and test equipment is a key enabler in accelerating the availability and adoption of WirelessHD technology,” said John Marshall, President and Chairman of WirelessHD, LLC.

“Adopters can easily take advantage of leading-edge testing tools from Agilent and CCS, the world’s first WirelessHD 60GHz test center, to verify compliance of their designs to the WirelessHD specification. This is essential in bringing to life the promise of interoperable WirelessHD technology as the best wireless home entertainment experience.”

AMAX releases series of servers with Intel’'s Xeon 3400 processors

FREMONT, USA: AMAX, the leading provider of custom servers, storage and HPC solutions launches a new series of Foxhollow based servers utilizing Intel’s latest Xeon 3400 Series (Lynnfield) processors.

AMAX ServMax Lynnfield Servers provide optimized cost and lower power consumption using 45 nm Nehalem microarchitecture with Integrated Memory Controller and PCI-Express 2.0 I/O.

With support for DDR3 ECC memory, AMAX ServMax Lynnfield based servers deliver 50 percent more performance, lower power consumption, and lower cost compared to the previous generation servers.

“We continuously work to expand our ServMax family,” explains Jean Shih, President of AMAX. “With Lynnfield based servers, AMAX is offering reliable, high performance solutions that are both cost effective and energy efficient.”

Laptop sales pave way for rumored Apple tablet

SUNNYVALE, USA: Laptop demand is enjoying strong growth this back to school season according to the Retrevo Pulse, a publicly-available index that maps daily price and demand trends in the consumer electronics industry across 40 categories and more than 4,000 products.

Despite a 20 percent decline in the average selling price of laptops, August demand in terms of dollars was up 40 percent from July. During last year’s back-to-school season demand was up only 20 percent.

“With the economy under stress and the growing popularity of netbooks, one could expect laptop sales to suffer but that does not appear to be the case,” says Vipin Jain, Retrevo CEO.

“The Pulse Report suggests that shoppers have an appetite for affordable laptops and that netbooks are fueling that appetite. Innovation from Apple could easily accelerate the adoption of portable computers if they decide to introduce a low-priced tablet-like computer.”

Retrevo’s Gadgetology study, released earlier this month, indicated 58 percent of students would spend less than $750 on their next laptop. Jain says, “An innovative product like the rumored Apple Tablet has the chance to hit a home run if Apple can find the right price point. Let’s just hope their market success goes the way of the iPhone, and not the Newton.”

“With the upcoming release of Windows 7 from Microsoft, many believe that netbook and lower-priced laptop sales will continue to increase,” says Jain. “Good technology at affordable prices is good news for consumers. Retrevo will be closely watching the Pulse demand index to report any market shifts resulting from these innovations.”