Business Day (Johannesburg)
21 October 2009
Johannesburg — UP TO 85% of technologies developed around the world never enjoy a commercial launch.
They flounder in the vast chasm that separates a clever idea from a product that is actually useful, says consulting company Frost & Sullivan.
Many ideas that do reach the market often have consumers puzzling why, and quickly disappear. Others leave people wondering how they ever survived without them. In between are a plethora of smart new gadgets that find a comfortable niche market.
One such is the Pulse Smartpen, developed in the US by Livescribe and brought to SA by Circuit City Electronics.
The slightly fat pen has a processor, a camera and a battery. When you use it on a special paper , the camera captures images of what you write.
Placing the pen in a docking cradle lets the images be downloaded to a computer and displayed on screen. That converts into a word processing application, saving you having to type up your notes, says Circuit City Electronics managing director Steve Nossel.
The pen also records what is being said and links the recording to the written words. So when you click on a sentence, it replays the audio recorded at that moment.
Nossel says it is popular with college students in the US, as they can record their lectures and capture their notes simultaneously. The price in SA precludes most students, but Nossel expects it to be popular with lawyers, brokers and doctors who need to record and archive notes.
Archived notes can also be downloaded to a Livescribe website for sharing online.
The cost is R2800 for a pen with 200 hours of recording capacity, special paper and software to turn written words into a text document.
Another hot technology arriving in SA this week is the Kindle, a device from the online retailer Amazon that wirelessly downloads books, magazines and newspapers for viewing on a 15cm screen.
Readers can download a book in less than 60 seconds from 230000 choices in the Kindle Store, although it uses the cellular 3G signals, so coverage is widely available but may get congested. The device costs 279 plus shipping and taxes.
The display reads like printed words on paper as the screen uses real ink and no backlight, eliminating glare.
Readers can customise the text size and an experimental Text-To-Speech feature lets it read the words out loud. Another technology that may eventually catch on after years of unfulfilled promise is mobile TV, which chip developer Qualcomm is taking so seriously that it has created a spin-off called FloTV to evangelise television on the small screen.
FloTV already operates a 13- channel service for AT&T and Verizon cellphone customers in the US for 15 a month, and it is negotiating with operators around the world .
It has approached Multichoice in SA, but Multichoice opted for a rival technology, DVB-H, for a pilot mobile TV project with MTN ahead of the 2010 World Cup.
MTN is monitoring a variety of technologies , but the industry regulator has only awarded test licences for DVB-H so far.
SA-born Neville Meijers, the GM of FloTV, is disappointed that FloTV isn't coming to SA yet. He acknowledges that the demand for mobile TV is currently low, but believes it has serious potential.
"We are starting to see growth and understand what consumers want," he says. Every country consumes a huge amount of TV, with the average American watching a mind-boggling five hours a day.
"Television in the mobile is the next logical expansion of where people want to get their content. People want to take their content with them."
FloTV says the current subscribers watch about 25 minutes a day on their cellphones, which spiked considerably during live events such as the US Open and Michael Jackson's funeral.
Encouraged by that, FloTV has launched a handheld unit for 250 that does nothing but screen TV shows.
"Live events are really driving the demand for mobile TV," says Dan Novak, Qualcomm's vice- president of global marketing. "Where it's been launched it's been well received but it's very early days. Because mobile technologies move fast you tend to be a little impatient with new technologies, but it takes time because a lot of processes have to come together."
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