Ritva Saarinen
Helsinki University of Technology
Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory
ritva.saarinen@ntc.nokia.com
We live in the changing environment where huge information we got from different media flows over us. One of these new trends is the explosive growth of the Internet and the other is the proliferation of mobile communication (/1/ Luderer, G., 1996). The third is all kind of computer games and entertainment both in the computer world as well in the TV/VCR-world and fourth is the huge growth of microcomputers capacities. The fifth is an emergence of broadband networking. Driving forces for the new world and new applications of consumers and business users are the technological improvements of microcomputers and networks (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996)." By 2010 the major parts of computers will be laptop-size and speeds will be gigahertz rather than megahertz. PCs will have high-definition TV-screens and TVs will have computers behind them. Computers will all have telephones and video cameras attached. The microcomputer may become a multipurpose device controlling many kind of tasks at home " (/3/ Horward, 1997). "Telephones are small computers and they encompass sending, receiving, and interacting all media other than video, in wireless environments, within 10 years " (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). Because of these huge and rapid technological changes all kind of longlife learning is needed and this will be one of the business products which also will push other applications. For team and organizational learning we need new kind of applications which better support the flexible and virtual environment where people can interact and cooperate with each others (/4/ Sugarman, B. 1996). This need for cooperation and interacting will push new applications for consumers and business users and we can work at office as well at home. For instance Rank Xerox is looking for new ways how teams can cooperate and work together at separate places at same time (/5/ Bauer, R. 1997). And Helsinki Telephone Company Ltd (HPY) has introduced a multimedia network supplied by Nokia Telecommunications. The key feature of this network is that it is integrated into the telephone network (/6/ HPY&Nokia, 1997). Multimedia networks offer new, improved broadband Internet services for residential and business customers. Today some enterprises already have the ATM-connection to teleoperators (/7/ Ahlstrom, 1997), and we can see Ice Hockey World Championships in 1997 in the intranet at speed 30 Mbps (/8/ TELE, 1997). Fixed and wireless accesses of multimedia networks offer capabilities to new multimedia applications which can combine the most useful functions of television sets, telephones, computers, and game machines. Outlining the future of networked multimedia applications of the Internet is based on the knowledge of past and current patterns (/9/ GVU’s WWW Survey, 1996) and the technology improvements in the future (/1/ Luderer, G., 1996, /2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996; /3/ Horward, 1997). If we look at back about fifteen years and remember what kind was the PC with the 286 processor and compare it with new PCs, the difference is huge. New PCs are easy to use and they have graphical interfaces and much more commuting powers than earlier ones. As same way we can look back the development of the Internet. It has at the same type changed from the text-based difficult to understand interface to the graphical easy to use interface and at same time the users of the Internet have growth dramatically as well the host computers (/10/ General Magic, 1997). What kind of future we can draw when the network bandwidth and speed will growth from today’s common home modem connection 33.6 Kbps to the broadband connection 10 - 30 Mbps and at office from 2 Mbps to as much is need with ATM-connections? This paper will outline from these backgrounds when and how will these new applications be deployed. The time interval will be 10 -15 years ahead and the channels that will carry these new applications will be all kind of webcasting applications and collaboration tools so that we can interact the proper media using telephones, computers, game machines and TV sets or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Personal Intelligent Communicators (PICs) and public computer-telephone kiosks.
Networked multimedia applications will give users the possibility to interact all kind of media. These media can consists of text, graphics , images, audio ,video, and animation. When adding network to connect users we have capabilities to new merging applications. When we add networked multimedia to the environment where telephone, computer, television, publishing, education, movie, and consumer electronics industries are converging to the new digital information industry, this will provide us new ways to use telephones, computers, televisions and all kind of home electronics. It offer us new possibilities to interact and cooperate. Using together the Internet and the World Wide Web, mobile phones, high resolution TV, high quality VCR and DVD, we can draw a light glimpse what the future can offer us when converging of different media will continue and the network speed and bandwidth will increase. Computer networks and especially the Internet gives us the opportunity to share our visions, ideas, thoughts and all kind of information and knowledge with other colleagues, students and friends, and acquaintances all over the world. Networks when added with face-to-face meeting give us a very idle pattern for the communication (/11/ Saarinen, 1997). Let us imagine that you want to know how a mobile phone operates and how to use it connected to a laptop computer and to a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). You have your computer connected to your university and to the Internet. You start to communicate with your tutor at your university using e-mail. Soon you both realize that it is worth doing more collaboration work with this question. You volunteered to be a co-ordinator to the team trying to make a picture about the mobile phone systems connected to laptop computers and PDAs. You want more sophisticated Internet-based tools than e-mail and you organized chat sessions and video conferencing over the net. You and your tutor help students from your university take part into the virtual meeting and you invited some business people to attend to the meeting to give valuable knowledge about this question. At same time in the other university the same question has aroused in other side of the world and using your personal contacts you and your tutor invited these students and their tutor to join the virtual meeting. Arranging the meeting you find it would be good to use video and audio and graphics to make proactive dialogues and to make a learning environment where every one joined the virtual meeting can gain in his or her business. The arranging and preparations for the virtual meeting have been rewarding. As end result there are new marketing materials for mobile phones systems, technical support for them, the new course of mobile phones systems and of Personal Digital Assistants, and help guides how to use these new mobile phone systems and PDAs. How far we are from this vision? "If you call your friend while sitting on your sofa, holding a wireless remote control unit, and watching a large screen, you are likely to feel that you are using a television set." (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). You do interact and the large screen will give you the natural three dimensional space, the virtual reality. We can imaging similar kind of interacting and collaboration at home and at office. The most important thing is that we have applications which provide us to interact the proper media and to be connected to other people so that we can share our ideas, thoughts and create new ones. Collaboration and sharing ideas is idle for developing new products and services and rearranging processes to match better new flexible and virtual environments. Interacting will increase our pleasure and many kind of entertainment, edutainment, infotainment, and sociotainment applications and products are coming.
In the future the computers and communication will show the tendency to converge. There are also a third trend the television, entertainment and video technology with the content providers which will have the impact to the convergence of computer and communication industry. There will also be a shift from computing to the networking and virtual environment in the global enterprises. The deregulation of telecommunication and digitalisation will burst new operators and end-user customers. Enabling technologies are new broadband networks fibre optics, adsl, hdsl, atm transmission and new microelectronics with processing high speed and low cost. Where we believe the technology will be in the next 10 to 15 years.
By 2010 the major parts of computers will be laptop-size and the speeds of computers will be gigahertz. The screens of personal computers will be high-definition TV-screens and all computers will have telephones and video cameras attached (/3/ Horward, 1997). Also television sets will have computers behind them. Small microcomputers will be telephones and telephones will also be Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Personal Intelligent Communicators (PICs). The microcomputer may become a multipurpose device controlling many kind of tasks at home. In business environment the PCs of 2010 will be the notebooks but much lighter than of today’s ones. Their thin displays will be almost as large as the lid of each machine. They will have brilliant colour, high resolution, and probably "zoom resolution" features to allow users to zoom in a small details. By 2010 voice input will be widespread and voice input will be easy, natural, and accurate. Computer will also be your full-time wireless telephone, with deep integration between computer and telephone functions. At home the big television set in the living room or den will serve as a computer display, and vice versa. Right next to your main TV will be a computer that can function as a controller for all your home stereo and home theatre components, VCR and VDV and multimedia terminal (DVB). You have also connection to the network and so to the Internet. In you living room you do have a multimedia centre. The TV display will likely have an elongated ratio of 16 inches wide to 9 inches high-close to that of wide-screen films-rather than the 4:3 ratio of today’s TV and computer screens. The big-screen PC/TV will encourage collaborative computing in the family (/3/ Horward, 1997). There will be other computers at home, perhaps a PC will be present in every bedroom and in the kitchen and there will be a network connecting all the PCs and computer devices in the house. Most will be smaller and more compact than today’s PCs, with fewer wires connecting the pieces. The telephone (unquestionably cordless) may be a telephone/PC/organizer in its own right. Lift the handset from the wall and it’s wireless phone. Walk down the block with it and the phone switches to the cellular network. This handset may also control lights around the house and some functions of kitchen PC burglar alarm. There will be a computer in a car and there is connection to the Internet.
Networks will have increased capacity and speed and the fast connections to networks will be common in the business use (/1/, /2/ and /3/). At home two-way cables will give us enough speed and bandwidth and where cables are not possible there are fast modems and ISDN. However, long lines composed of fibre-optic cables now cost much less to install and maintain and, as result, have rapidly replaced the other types of connections. Even for local loops, which do not need the enormous bandwidths of long fibres, fibre optics may now be slightly less expensive than copper twisted pairs, partly because fibre’s higher reliability reduces the lifetime cost of running a few fibres to each neighbourhood relative to the cost of running and maintaining traditional bundles of many copper twisted-pair wires. Network companies are not enthusiastic about using technological improvements to provide the same service for lower and lower prices, thereby decreasing their revenues and profits. They need applications that require customers to transmit more and more high-bandwidth content, so that the companies can charge customers the same or higher tariffs for more and more service, which companies can provide for approximately constant costs. Multimedia applications promise to make use of all foreseeable increases in network capacity. You will find a multimedia-capable computer wherever you now find a telephone, including in airports, in libraries, on street corners, and in places of business. Entering your password or scanning your charge card will not only establish your ability to pay, but will also personalize the device’s interface to you. Dialling a friend by entering "Jim" will work as well from a gas station telephone booth as from a home telephone, expect for the problem of hearing JIM over the traffic noise (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). As an extreme case, video communications might become so familiar that we would refer to plain old video service (POVS) in the same casually respectful way in which we talk about today’s plain old telephone service (POTS). Suppose that you could use POVS to do everything with video that POTS can do with audio and images. You could use POVS to establish a two-way, full-motion, full-screen, full-colour connection with anybody else in the country or the world.
The interactive networked multimedia (e.g. Internet/intranets/extranets) is a good expedient to come closer to customers and to penetrate deeply into customer’s processes, so that we can make productive co-operation. These products and services bring added value to customer’s present platform investments. We can create a situation where we can offer total networked solutions and have customer’s confidence in a long partnership. We can also create totally new services to customers in new media business and be one of the key players in the new media market providing Internet, multimedia and mobile solutions to customers. The deregulation of telecommunication and digitalisation will burst new operators and end-user customers. With partners we can improve our mutual competitiveness using this new media to fight from the business in the fast changing market where telecommunication, computer technology and media are converging. Networked multimedia offer us interaction by sending and receiving multimedia e-mails that includes audio and video, as well as text, graphics, and images. We can communicate with other people by sending and receiving video as well as audio, sharing and selecting information from a world of entertainment, educational, and business fields. Networked multimedia affords you to interact with media, both actively controlling what you see and hear and creating your own media Creating your own media is more interactive than using existing content (Auletta and Gilder, 1995), and collaborating with others in the creation of media is still more interactive. New digital technologies will converge the most best features of telephones, computers and TV sets and connecting with networks we can have multimedia products which look like telephones, computers and TV sets but which have quite new capabilities. Consumers prefer evolution to revolution and they will view multimedia as enchancing devices with which they are already familiar, such as television sets, computers, and telephones. Several telephone companies are gearing up for POVS under names such as video dialtone (VDT) or switched digital video (SVD).
Imaging that we have at home the large TV screen, the effective computers and telephones and fast connection to the net as we discussed in the Chapter 3 when we were outlining the future within 10 -15 years. The large TV connected to the effective computer and remote control as telephone will open us new capabilities to communicate. While sitting in our favourite easy chair, we can dial to our friend and see her or him on the TV screen in real-time, we can chat and play games, do homework together helping each other, share cooking receipts or share knowledge of our cars. We can watch movies by renting a movie we want, or we can attend to a learning course we are interested or need to improve our skills. If we have medical problems we can call our doctor and see her or him on the TV screen helping and giving advice us. We can drop in the digital libraries and rent a multimedia book or any piece of multimedia information we need. We can even make window shopping examine furniture, clothes or whatever we are interested, and if we will we can bye them. In the evening we can remember our remote aunt on the other side of the world by sending her a multimedia e-mail with a video about our family. After doing this good thing we can sleep good because of computers keeping gard our security at home. Before dropping off to sleep we can check with our telephone our tomorrow’s schedule which will display on the telephone screen and after sending our colleague a report we have forgotten, we can put the telephone to wake up us in the morning. After having breakfast and watching morning news on the kitchen computer-TV I can take my car (which of course has a computer) and drive to our new important customer. I prefer the real face-to-face meeting to virtual video meeting because this is the first time I will meet our customer. Before leaving the car I review our information from the customer using my laptop computer, call by laptop my colleague to help and encourage me (I actually see him) to capture this new important customer. Knowing that I have everything under control I am ready to do business. While we discussing my our new customer will know about such features about our new product that I do not have them. But I remember that we have a video about the features on our server so I retrieve it and show it to our customer and the customer is convinced when he actually see the product features operating. After visiting the new customer (he does is our new customer now) I drive to the gardens and using my laptop I take an one hours training course about the important features of our product. Then I drive to our office to see my colleagues and to work at office.
Technical improvements are the most driving forces to developing networked multimedia as we discussed in the chapter 3. "Perhaps surprisingly, the next strongest driving force behind multimedia is the negative effect of technological improvements on corporate revenues and profits. Continuing improvements require personal computer manufacturers themselves to run furiously in order to keep up with technological progress. Competitive pressures will then drive the average price of their products lower and lower, causing their revenues and profits to drop unacceptably. Computer companies need applications that will encourage increasing numbers of customers to purchase increasingly powerful products, thus preserving or improving the companies’ revenues and profits. Multimedia applications promise to make use of all foreseeable improvements in computer performance." (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996) Somewhat less well known than the effects of improved digital electronics on the computer business are the effects of improved digital electronics on the computer business are the effects of improved fibre-optic cables on the network business. As a solution to computer companies’ excess performance and network companies’ unused capacity, multimedia is almost too much of a good thing. Multimedia replaces companies’ problem of how charge for more performance and capacity by the problem of how to make near-term products and demonstrations look good enough to whet consumers’ appetites for capabilities that will become affordable over the next decade. To the extent that multimedia products and services move into the realm of high-volume consumer items, these products and services will attract providers other than traditional computer and networking companies. Customer demand is a third, far weaker, force driving distributed multimedia. Some demands exist. One is the demand for educating students and training employees in classrooms that are remote from teachers. There is demand for accessing a wide variety of movies, sports, news, and other video programming at times that users select. There is demand for business video conferences. However, in essentially all such cases, the real demand is for a function such as improving education, expanding entertainment options, or reducing travel and traffic. Users can meet such demands in many ways that do not involve multimedia. Customers will use and pay for multimedia only if it provides better solutions at lower costs than available alternatives. Relatively few multimedia solutions now have higher quality and lower cost than alternative solutions. A few potential customers have seen impressive demonstrations of high-quality functions that are already technically possible but that the customers will not be able to afford for 5 to 10 years. Other potential customers have great difficulty demanding functions that they cannot even imagine. Technological advances have made it possible to transmit all the different media in digital form on one network. Converting information to digital form thus lowers barriers among networks that carry different types of media, leaving a set of network requirements such as for bandwidth, reliability, billing, and security. There is reason to believe that a converged network would be more valuable than the sum of the pre-existing networks.
Alexander Graham Bell is said to have invented telephones for the purpose of delivering concerts to mass audiences(/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). The new systems may turn out to be completely unsuitable for the purposes that the systems’ creators have in mind and, conversely, the systems’ major uses may include some that the networks’ creators rejected out of hand. The only way to predict the extent to which people will use a specific application with a specific price structure is to make the application available to a representative sample of people and measure usage.
There is a possibility that some killer application will appear outside all of our categories. Moreover, the categories overlap. Perhaps some important applications will form a killer suite of uses that invoke an unexpected synergy among applications in several categories. From a user’s point of view, an application is everything that user sees of both the software and the hardware, including the delivery network and any other support services. It is helpful to view multimedia applications as a convergence of today’s content and titles, such as movies and books, of today’s computer application programs, such as word processors, and of today’s network services, such as POTS and on-line bulletin boards. A multimedia book should have the following features. Besides text, the book has other media that the author created, including not only text, graphics and images but also audio and video, to make the book’s content clearer or more enjoyable. Programs should be build-in to help a user navigate through the author’s media (besides tables of contents and indexes that merely assist page flipping). With other programs, such as expression evaluators and simulators, users can experiment with the book’s concepts (as opposed to dry formulas, static graphs, and nonoperating flow diagrams). A network interface would allow the user obtain further details about any desired part of the book’s material (unlike a list of references) and obtain recent postpublication information as well. The multimedia book should incorporate a creation tool that a user can use to add related content while maintaining the book’s style and tone, either for the user’s own benefit or for others. Also valuable is a notepad into which the user can copy and paste notes, which automatically generates citations for information selected. With a corresponding network interface any user of the multimedia book may become a partial co-author of a subsequent edition, derivative work, or sequel. Arguably the most far-reaching collective impact of multimedia applications will thus be the blurring and gradual disappearance of lines that now separate readers from authors, moviegoers from produces and directors, program users from programmers, and, in general, amateurs from specialists. Multimedia makes only a few new fictions possible for specialists, but multimedia makes many functions easy and economical for amateurs. Multimedia lowers the admission fees to clubs that only specialists used to be able to afford. A successful multimedia application must be both economical and easy to use. Again without proof, we assert that the very best multimedia applications are likely to result from empowering millions of amateurs to contribute applications to the world of on-line information. That world must therefore be open to amateurs who create applications.
However, because only consumer applications can draw enough revenue to pay back necessary investments in infrastructure, consumers do hold veto power over the deployment of large-scale interactive video networks (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). Individual users envision working with applications that allow them to append their comments, insights, questions, and requests to documents. These documents range from letters and business reports to family album. Users envision applications that are far easier to use than existing ones. Users envision applications that help them make personalized choices and execute the resulting transactions without re-entering information. Users want to feed back to their applications how well they liked each choice so that the applications can become increasingly helpful to them making their choices in the future. Users also want access such applications when and where they need them. A single application to access and manipulate information from many sources would be desirable. Among these sources should be live, human, on-line help as well as stored information from competing on-line information suppliers and information about competing products. Users want to be able to select either only the information of immediate interest to them or background and contextual information as well. They want information presented in the most appropriate media that include graphics, images, audio, and even full-motion video, as well as text, without incurring exorbitant delays or expenses. Users envision that either applications come with a virtual community or it will be easy to find the associated virtual community. They refuse to spend hours learning to use a tool, or relearning the use of a tool after being away from it for a month. Perhaps most important, users envision seeing a single system image, rather than seeing a collection of unnecessarily different applications. They do not want to know that different information is in different data files, that different programs manipulate those files, that different operating systems support those programs and that different hardware runs it all. Users want one simplified hypermedia bill or invoice for their use of applications even if many providers are involved. Users may want to see additional details that are available through the hypermedia links.
Businesses, that is companies, envision different advantages from distributed multimedia applications, depending on whether the companies are commercial content providers or commercial users (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996).
Commercial content providers envision leveraging their expertise by feeding multiple end-user devices, such as personal computers and interactive television sets, over all available networks. They want standards that will allow their titles, and all other sorts of multimedia applications, to play on computers and set-top boxes from all manufactures. The resulting large sales volumes will enable providers to make acceptable profit margins despite high costs of developing interactive content and despite the need to keep consumer prices low. New content providers will emerge. Some will be entirely new companies. Others will be new parts of traditional publishing houses, movie studios, and personal companies. Still others will be partnerships, such as between telephone companies and companies in other industries.
Businesses envision using multimedia applications to interact more efficiently and effectively with employees, customers, suppliers, and other companies. They want to expand their markets and market shares by gaining access to the rapidly growing on-line community. They hope to market to millions of people, concentrating on people who are actually potential customers, and targeting appropriate advertising messages to particular groups of potential customers. Especially in retail and service sectors, business hope to combine marketing with completing transactions, both to take advantage of impulse purchases and to reduce their operating costs. A typical task requires co-operation from employees at several sites who are in several organizations, often in separate companies. However, a typical task lasts too short a time for a company to recover the expenses involved in moving employees or even in reorganising. Companies envision using multimedia applications to create virtual locations and virtual organizations that cost little to create and that nevertheless work about as well as moving employees to a common physical location under the same organisational unit. Experience indicates that challenging requires formal effort and appears to be expensive, one employee will tend to guess about what other employees are doing. By creating a virtual location, in which one employee can see other employees and ask casual questions, distributed multimedia applications can avoid the expense of straightening out results of wrong guesses. In general, companies also envision expanding their use of multimedia for training and video conferences.
Webcasting is a new term /18 Cortese 1997/ which a loan-word from broadcasting media. Broadcasting a TV program means that the program is sent to many spectators from the broadcasting company. It is not much individual. Internet-style broadcasting has some unique advantages compared to traditional broadcasting, on the Internet programs can be targeted to a particular group or individual. "The combination of broadcasting and personalization is really a new world," says Eric Schmidt Sun Microsystems Inc. The "old" webcasting program is PointCast which sends full articles, Web pages, and animation to your PC. "Instead of having to spend hours scouring the Web, news, entertainment, and other Web fare is delivered automatically to your desktop. These new software programs also deliver rich visual images and animation that approach TV quality."/18 Cortese 1997/. The quality is not yet TV quality and there are bandwidth and computer limitations but the main point in these new webcasting programs is that Webcasting offers services by collecting, arranging, joining and analysing information and knowledge. Doing these works for us Webcasting will save our time and money, and we can concentrate to do more sophisticated operations and to work up knowledge and information we have got. Welcome to the world of Webcasting. "Just as the browser opened the door to the Internet, "push" will bring another fundamental way of communicating to the Net," says Christopher R. Hassett, chief executive of Webcasting pioneer PointCast Inc. Adds J. Neil Weintraut, a partner of 21st Centuray Venture Partners: " It makes the Web relevant to the masses." Companies such as Amoco and Fruit of the Loom are pushing industry news and other data to employees’ desktops. They’re also setting up in-house channels on their own networks, or intranets, to make sure employees get the latest announcements and corporate communiqués. And because any digital information can be Webcast, the new approach is a natural for distributing software programs, applets, and updates - saving time and money. "This kind of push technology is going to be a big thing, "says William Stewart, co-chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade’s Internet Advisory Committee, which is looking at push delivery to reach ot’s 4 000 members. Webcasting is almost deceptively simple. In most cases, it works like this: When you register for a service, you specify the channels you want and the specific topics you’re interested in. You also choose how often you would like updates, which can arrive continuously and seamlessly on corporate networks. Other Webcasting programs, including PointCast, take the liberty of sending full articles, Web pages, and animation’s to your PC. You may not realize it, but when you pause to look at a Web page, which leaves the line free, these Webcasting programs grab the line and start downloading files onto your hard drive. When you click on a sports score for more detail, there’s no World Wide Wait: The full story and a video clip can appear on your screen instantly. Indeed, Webcasting offers the best hope yet to build a business on the Net through advertising and delivering customized content that people might finally pay for. "We’re huge believers," says Time Inc. New Media General Manager Bruce Judson. The Internet is already a direct-marketer’s dream. Now, instead of waiting for Web surfers to stumble onto their sites and banner ads, marketers can send animated ads directly to the desktops of target customers. Retailers such as Lands’ End Inc. and Virtual Vineyards are dabbling with such in-your-face methods to notify subscribers of promotions and send them order forms. Merchants can approach live sales prospects and not just couch potatoes. "It’s not about cost per thousand, but just cost per lead, "says J. G. Sandom, director of Ogilvy & Mather World-wide Inc.’s Interactive business. PointCast offers still more: access to the corporate market. "It’s the first medium to ever reach people at work in a meaningful way," says John Nardone, director of media and research services at Modem Media, an interactive ad agency in Westport, Conn. "You can literally say, ‘We had 3 000 people from Microsoft looking at your ad yesterday’," crows Nardone. For these reasons, Webcasting could quickly grab a sizeable chunk of the Internet economy. By 2000, Webcasting and related push technology will generate a third of the $14 billion in Net advertising, subscriptions, and retail revenues, projects Yankee Group Inc. Last November, poincast came out with a fix. With a new program called I-server, companies can have PointCast content sent once, Then rebroadcast it to employees. That cuts down on Net traffic going through the corporate security firewall. Another plus: Companies can set up their own channels to broadcast internal news. So far, Hassett says, more than 1 000 orders have been placed for the $1 000 package. For all the activity, the hottest market right now for push programs is not Web sites but corporate intranets. It makes sense. Business professionals rely on up-to-date information, and they typically have high-speed, full-time connections to the Net. "It helps raise the corporate I.Q.," says Patrick Flynn, vice-president for systems development at Fruit of the Loom, which has PointCast installed on 250 employees’ desks. After spending last year putting up intranets, corporations are becoming as cluttered as the public Web. By setting up their own channels, they can make sure that important company news and announcements get out to employees. NationsBank, for example, is developing a system it calls NationsCast, using software from Wayfarer Communications. It will broadcast corporate news, product information, and the bank’s stock price (a keen interest since the bank recently granted employee stock options) to 23 000 headquarters staff. Mitch Hadlay, vice-president of NationsBank’s Strategic Technology Group, says someday such technology could even be used to push information to customers at kiosks or ATMs. What’s more, these systems can be tied to corporate databases and programmed to Webcast alerts automatically. Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. is evaluating Wayfarer’s software for a system that would alert managers when the company’s perishable inventories drop below a certain level. Companies are just beginning to explore the possibilities.
Today, most of us get a combination of news, materials and information from inside our companies, and also from outside. There is rarely a clear priority between inside and outside information, with every medium demanding our attention. Webcasting solutions that combine information from public Internet and corporate Internet sources empowers mangers to "push" relevant information to employee desktops by delivering headlines of pertinent company information, personalized so that the right people get the right information /19 INCISA, 1997/. INCISA will deliver your important information and messages. direct to specific groups or individuals; and to conserve precious networks resources. It uses headlines - headlines plus information links - in combination with real-time push and local storage of event information to deliver dramatic reductions in transmitted data, traffic bursts, and network overhead. It has advantages of targeting and narrowcasting. The ability to target every message to unique groups and individuals means that content is more relevant and actionable than broadcast models. It provides a powerful narrowcasting infrastructure that matches the natural boundaries of your organization. Customizable and extensible client software. The INCISA appearance, user interface and animation’s can be easily customized for an individual company’s brand image - without altering its base software. In addition, developers can be extended the client or server software to add support for new media types, INCISA’s two-way communications facility, and other advanced capabilities. It allows a company to make strategic choices about the importance of information: what should everyone be aware of? What should specific groups or individuals be aware of? This shared information builds a sense of community. Suddenly, everyone has seen the latest product update, read the CEO’s message, and knows who topped the sales charts this month. News is delivered, and get read NOW. The halls are full of people who know what competitors did today, discussing how to respond. Shared information flow becomes a strategic advantages, as everyone has a similar exposure to breaking news. INCISA is built around the idea of combining a variety of information sources - corporate and public - into a single, well-filtered flow. This adds structure to a chaotic process, and helps people find more of what they need. INCISA creates a single point of focus up-to-the-minute headlines capturing what is important to the organization: news, announcements and data. A typical INCISA installation will combine critical internal data (such as inventory levels or sales data) with external news, company stock price updates, and many individuals throughout the company using INCISA Reporter to write ad hoc departmental or company-wide messages. Given the volume of information that we each must process, more details is not necessarily better. INCISA delivers headlines - headlines plus links to detailed information - that are easy to read and evaluate. INCISA users can then determine for them selves what news and data are relevant right now, and follow the headlines for full details. This approach makes employees more efficient, rather than sending them "surfing" the Internet in search of late-breaking news or bombarding them with scores of complete memos to read. Finally, INCISA’s ability to direct every message to a distinct set of recipients keeps it hard-hitting and relevant. Each department or team receives news of immediate value, and each individual can select the categories of real-time content that matter most. Manufacturing can be tracking inventory re-order points while Marketing tracks competitor activities and Sales applauds quota leaders. INCISA keeps your message from being lost in the blizzard of unfiltered material. In summary, the major business benefits of INCISA are:
Combining Public Internet and Corporate Internet Sources. INCISA is built around the idea of information sources: real-time and periodic data or text forwarded to specified INCISA users. Wayfarer customers have implemented a wide variety of sources, which typically fall into four categories:
A typical INCISA customer will combine critical internal data (such as inventory levels or sales data) with external news, company stock price updates, web changes, and INCISA Reporters throughout the company for company for writing departmental and company-wide messages. This creates a single point of focus for up-to-the-minute headlines, capturing what is important to the organization. Each DataBridge result is associated with at least one INCISA animation, assuring that the resulting data headlines will have enough graphic appeal to be noticed. Built with Macromedia’s Director and Shockwave products, these animation’s can be produced in-house or through Wayfare’s extensive network of design partners. By using Director rather than a proprietary animation format, Wayfarer opens up INCISA for unlimited customer creativity. By automating these SQL requests, sending out "headlines" to relevant users, IS team can eliminate frequent paper reports that are routinely late. In addition, with a CLICK ME button that opens up a more complete data analysis tool local on users’ PCs, selected end users can become more self-sufficient - following up with detailed queries only when the "headline" data shows the need to get more information.
There are applications in the Internet which will give you capabilities to control your projects and improve your processes /20 WebProject, 1997/. This kind of collaboration and information arranging in the intranets will increase because in the flexible and virtual environment we need new tools to arrange and mange projects and work.
Desktop video conferences with collaboration involve transmitting live real-time video and audio over a network. Transmission may be two-party (one on each end) or multipoint (many participants). Users can see and modify common shared visual materials, such as photographs, word processor screens, and spreadsheet screens. Many network operators charge more or less in proportion to bandwidth as well as in proportion to the time for which a user ties up that bandwidth. Second, video conferences require a network to provide a constant delay, because each of video and audio is an isochronous medium and because these media must be synchronized with each other. Third, video conferences require a network to provide a short delay, because this is a real-time application. People can interact with other people over a network that has a total delay of less than about ¼ of a second. Some early uses for video conference applications are general meetings, technical problem solving, training, customer support, engineering design, and marketing and sales. For the real-time video over network it is important the bandwidth is enough and the network is bi-directional, and support isochronic and synchronic video stream. As fibre-optic cable networks (ATM and cableTV) will be more common, also Videoconferencing with collaboration will be more common.
"Cynthia Lemon is reviewing and annotating Tom Keefe’s chapter from a book for which she is overall editor. She uses her multimedia e-mail system to enter audio for general comments. She uses text, graphics, and image to mark up corresponding media in tom’s chapter (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). After working through the chapter, Cynthia uses video to make a sandwich in which the bread is tasty, even if the meat is tough. She makes a video clip of her face and voice as she starts with an encouraging summary of her comments that Tom will see and hear before he reads her detailed annotations. She makes another video clip that Tom will see and hear afterwards. In this video, she compliments his work and prioritises the areas on which he should concentrate, to insure that his next draft will be his last draft. Cyntia combines the two video clips, Tom’s original chapter, and her annotations into an ordered compound multimedia document and sends the result through her local service provider’s gateway onto the Internet and then to Tom’s local service provider. Tom can access the document at his leisure, play it over as required, and clip pieces out of it as he updates his chapter." (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996) Mail can tolerate a network that has low bandwidth and that introduces long delays. Although quick delivery is more valuable than long-delayed delivery, only the actual playback must present isochronous media at the correct rate and must synchronize audio and video with each other and with text, graphics, and images. When we do not need real-time videos, the use of audio and video and images over the networks will come already today, if we have fast network connections and the enough commuting power at the receiving end, attractive. We can send and receive (or download from the net) movies and games quickly. But this kind of e-mail and downloading will give us much wider perspective, which we discuss later. Today Internet’s Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) handles network multimedia mail for Internet users. Several types of multimedia can be transferred in a multimedia mail. The MIME system is standardizied (RFC-1521 and RFC-1522). With MIME-compliant e-mail software such as Eudora or Pegasus for personal computers at both ends, it is possible to send any medium by attaching the medium’s binary file to an e-mail message and dumping the pair into a file. The MIME system give a standard environment to sending and receiving multimedia e-mails.
Because we like most the natural environment to interact (/15/ Their 1994) the use of audio and video have been attracted the Internet users today even if users do not have fast connections to the Internet. Also animation’s which will give us the three dimensional space, are captivating as we can see from the popular of computer games and TV-movies. We can imaging what kind of the communication environment will be if the connections will be 30 Mbps, and we can have a glimpse of the multimedia communication today at the Hartwall Arena during Ice Hockey World Championships in 1997 (/8/ TELE, 1997). This is such a growing area for one-way and two-way audio and video applications (see e.g. /16/ D Jock 1997) that we can expect from the popular to produce and use them that audio and video will be a part of new networked multimedia products. Today there are also two-way applications for video conferencing and sharing ideas and data , also using telephones on the net is possible. As an extreme case, video communications might become so familiar that we would refer to plain old video service (POVS) in the same casually respectful way in which we talk about today’s plain old telephone service (POTS). Suppose that you could use POVS to do everything with video that POTS can do with audio and images. You could use POVS to establish a two-way, full-motion, full-screen, full-colour connection with anybody else in the country or the world. Several telephone companies are gearing up for POVS under names such as video dialtone (VDT) or switched digital video (SVD) (/1/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). Full-screen full-motion video, of the sort found on CD-ROMs, requires a data rate of at least 1.2 Mbps. Real-time symmetric compression and decompression on consumer-grade computers give only quarter-screen full-motion video at 1.2 Mbps. This is the baseline number for judging the quality of digital video in a video conference (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). The quality of service using real-time video is demanding because interactive video and audio are voluminous, isochronous, and synchronous. These services require a wide variety of network bandwidths or digital storage because of great amount or volume of data they need to give a correct meaning and contents to the information. These services also need to satisfy real-time constraints, e.g., delay (/10/ Gao, C& Meditch, J 1996; /2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996) Real-time video and audio services require compression and decompression and this process causes delay. Network delays will further reduce the allowed maximum delay that compression and decompression can add. G. de Veciana and G. Kesidis have studied the real-time VBR Video Conferencing over ATM networks (/11/ Veciana, G & Kesidis, G. 1996) and the session 46 Video performance in ATM Networks ICC ’96 (/12/ ICC’96) describes MPEG video over ATM networks. Audio and video are isochronous because it is important to present either of these media at exactly the extended rate, rather than too fast, too slow, at a varying rate, or with gaps. Audio and video are synchronous because, in most important applications, it is also important to present these media in the correct time relationship to each other and to the other media. For example, video of a speaker’s lips must match audio of the speaker’s voice. Adding interactively to audio and video makes them vastly more demanding, as well as more promising, than noninteractive audio and video (/1/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). As a potential consumer product, interactive digital video is important because of the chip technology that enable compress and decompress digital video already is inexpensive and will cost only a few dollars by the late 1990s.
Because of seeing, hearing and moving and interacting are our natural environment the mobile solutions for these needs are still popular also in the future. Toady there are yet connections from GSM, PDA and other Web-enabled device to the Internet and users can access complete voice, fax, e-mail and Internet services over GSM networks (/15/ Oracle, Nokia 1997). In the future mobile telephones are small computers and they encompass sending, receiving, and interacting all media other than real-time video, in wireless environments, within 10 years (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996).
An application in the shopping and advertising category targets some portion of the catalogue shopping market, which is approaching $100 billion annually in the United States. Many applications in this category reach a consumer in her home; others apply to in-store kiosks. Both sides want the consumer to interact with the application (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). In Finland there is for instance different kind of SOLO-applications (MERITA Bank) and at least one Dental Clinic applications Medident.
Why to use webcasting in a learning organization at all levels which are individual, team and organisational learning? The Web is rather learning oriented than teaching, in a learning organization the responsible of learning is the learner (the student). The leaders, teachers, tutors, coaches, guides, help learners to gain more insightful view of reality. Interaction between learners and teachers, schools, universities, libraries, classes, Internet, professors, etc., improves learning. The Web tools for learning offers a collaborative learning environment where we can work in teams to negotiate the problems and processes, actively share information, ideas, knowledge and skills, try to solve problems together and find answers and achieve the outcomes desired or unexpected ones. Internet-based training (IBT) (/21/), or how it is also called Web-based training (WBT), is an innovative approach to deliver training to individuals, teams and organizations anywhere in the world at any time. Existing Web browses support 3-D virtual reality, animation, interactions, chats and conferencing, and real time audio and video. When combining IBT with human teachers, tutors, leaders, coaches, we have a learning environment which feeds our needs to get support, security and feedback. Internet-based training is still at its early stage. There are much to do to reach the visions of an Internet-based learning environment but early indicating are promising. IBTauthor is used for the course planning. There is still a way to go for using wider real time audio and video on the net because of the quality but they are in use and serve e.g. the customers occupied on the day time and thus not capable of using TV. You find much material and sites about this thing on the net, e.g. /22, Anon. 1997/. Moreover, traditional classroom lectures are becoming more expensive at the time as alternative delivery mechanisms are becoming less expensive. Unlike lectures, distance learning or on-line education can provide education when and where necessary. Elementary and high school educators began using interactive multimedia on laser discs long before other potential users discovered multimedia. Multimedia training is one of the most successful multimedia business applications. In Finland in the city of Lappeenranta Telecom Finalnd has experiences of networked training /23, TELE. 1997/. Some businesses have been able to justify distributed multimedia expenditures for use in either creating or using multimedia computer-based training. Several companies reported that multimedia gave students excellent results, in comparison to conventional training methods. Results included more consistent learning, higher comprehension and retention rates, learning in a shorter time, and more convenient scheduling.
People can learn continually through their life time if this ability to learn is fed. Learning as individuals, teams and organizations is the heart of our growth. We can get the experiences of success and mutual support as individuals, as members of teams and organizations. We can increase our capacity to change, grow and thrive in an open, flexible, innovative and virtual organization which gives visions, sources and fluid, and even chaotic learning environment. In a sound learning environment we can make mistakes and learn about our past mistakes. This ability to remember and to change is very important for organizaional learning. We can think a organization like a tree which has its roots, the trunk and branches, and we expect it will yield it fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. To do this the tree needs water, nutrients and a good soil. A successful learning organization needs visions, sources, canals and a good learning environment as well as memory, feedback, and a lot of experiences. In a learning organization leaders are like creators or designers who helps members to share and assimilate visions and new ideas interacting and communicating in teams. In a secure and confident learning environment we can open up and give our own beliefs, ideas and thoughts to others to be tested. This testing beliefs, ideas and thoughts with others will give a good ground to improve the visions and goals the creators and designers of a organization have set. It is like a graft of the tree by knowledge and skills and experiences. Both individuals and organizations have a basic instinct to build up interpretations about the environment. We can think that individuals, organizations and members of organizations build networks where they act according formal and informal rules and norms. Informal networks cut across various boundaries within organizations and between organizations. Each person build his or her network link-by-link. These link which are ties or relationships between members in a network create many other potential links. /4, Sugarman 1997/ We build networks with customers and clients, with other employees, with students and teachers, with people with same hobbies. In our network we share common interests, exchange information, knowledge and skills, and we have built the norms, rules and sanctions. In a hierarchical organization it is difficult to cross the boundaries of each groups at separated levels in the organization. This causes so called the chimney effect which make it difficult to change ideas, knowledge and skills, information, visions, and mutual understanding between people. /24 Willard 1994/ Such a kind of an organization is very fruitful for unwanted informal groups which make their own norms and interact across organization boundaries. In such an environment the visions and goals of the parent company or another institute will not be adapted to the visions and goals of individuals and teams but they are replaced with the visions and goals of the informal group. We can describe these kind of informal groups like cancer cells in the body. We must change this kind of oganization more flexible and support more individual thinking and working and interacting in teams so that there is found room for system thinking. In a sound organization we can think to be a part of the body. The body, the organization, is a unit, though it is made up of many parts. The body needs each part to operate properly and to be in excellent condition. We can simply think that learning is making contact, we can be educated and educate each other. We can be interactive - acting on one another. We can help this interaction designing a learning environment where computers support our memory at the individual, team and organizational level and where computers and networks help us to participate to a learning process by making responses, by exchanging information, ideas and visions, knowledge and skills between each other.
A digital library application allows users to interact with a large body of on-line information expressed in appropriate media. Users of such an application employ a network to select information, to access information, and moreover, to add information. By far the most fundamental difference is that distributed multimedia will make it vastly easier for almost anyone to contribute content to the world’s aggregate digital library, just as almost anyone can now post a note on a computer bulletin board or contribute to a forum. A user’s interaction with a digital library may include not only accessing what others created but also contributing content for others to access. Such content can include not only new content but also commentary on existing content. Adding a user’s information is by far the most sophisticated way in which a user can interact with a body of information (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). The world-wide digital library could accumulate masses of content that no editor has culled and no peer reviewer has blessed. A digital library might decrease a user’s difficulty of adding information and increase a user’s difficulty of selecting valuable information from a mass that is irrelevant, illiterate, or even erroneous. The next most fundamental difference is that a digital library supports much more frequent interaction than does a paper library. A digital library’s typical user may select a new piece of information several times per minute and may select as little as one paragraph or one image at a time. A digital library’s users tend to assemble their own electric virtual books. A user who is searching for information may read a paragraph here and a chapter there. A professor who is preparing a text for her class may select seven chapters from seven books or select from content that never formed part of any traditional book.
"At work, Marla uses telehealth and telemedicine facilities to give patients in their small and remote hospital many advantages that otherwise would be available only in a large metropolitan hospital. Telehealth helps her provide health services and related services; telemedicine helps her deliver clinical services. Marla acts as a physician’s extender for both primary care and speciality services. She talks to and examines local patients and communicates with remote physicians. Along with improving the quality of care, she finds that telehealth saves patients money by significantly reducing relocation to tertiary care centres. She also finds that telehealth reduces her feeling of isolation and gives patients confidence in her rural hospital (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996)." Health care is a growth industry, if for no other reason than the demographics of an ageing population. It is also a service industry that uses vast amounts of critical information. Multimedia applications that involve interacting with multiple media promise to make information more accessible to the service providers. The multiple media make information more meaningful. The interactivity allows service providers to focus in rapidly on information they need. Networks help consolidate and distribute information that various workers generate and use in different locations both within one hospital and around the world. Services that telehealth has delivered successfully include radiology, pathology, paediatric cardiology, psychological evaluation, sharing of patient data, information services from medical libraries, continuing staff education, and administrative teleconferences.
Consumer edutainment, infotainment, and sociotainment begin with education, information, and socialization; they all end with entertainment. Entertainment helps consumers distinguish these applications from work, even when the results are useful and productive (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). In many homes that have personal computers and modems, using on-line networks to communicate with other people now people now consumers more time than does watching television. Television increasingly plays the role of providing provocate conversation subjects for such on-line communication, adding a social dimension to television’s entertainment role. On-line newspapers, WWW home pages to access to information and education, games, on-line services. As seen of the sources (/6/ HPY&Nokia, 1997) and (/8/ TELE, 1997) the entertainment applications are coming to be popular as was discussed in the introduction.
"Paul is spending a cold evening at home watching interactive video. He selects a news program that concentrates on technical developments about India’s telecommunications industry, he requests in-depth background information, then return to the point at which he had digressed from seeing the news commentator. He doesn’t mind paying high fees for this unique vedeo stream, because his livelihood depends on information about technical developments. Paul’s wife Angie comes in from the den, where she has been using a network to teach a distance-learning course on the social effects of multimedia. Several of her regular students, including one in Japan, participated in a live video conference in which they asked questions and discussed answers. The video-on-demand application recorded the entire session, including the students as well as Angie and her presentation materials, so that other students could subsequently demand the material at their convenience. This is particularly convenient for one student who is asleep in Greece and a local student who works evenings. Those students will record their comments as video that Angie can demand later. After completing the semester’s work, Angie plans to add hypermedia links to her recorded material. After she electronically published the resulting multimedia textbook, students will be able to interact with the book much as if they had been able to interact with Angie during the original live sessions." (/2/. Agnew&Kellerman, 1996). A video-on-demand (VOD) application offers a user the opportunity to select exactly the one video stream the user wants, even if no other user wants the same video stream at the same time. Without interfering with any other user, the user can change that video stream, such as rewinding to see a good part again. The user can select a completely different video stream, as frequently as several times per minute. Because no conceivable or affordable infrastructure of broadband communications and video servers could support as many separate video streams as there are potential users, video on demand relies heavily on the fact that users can greatly reduce their bills by settling for less interactively or near-video-on-demand (NVOD). Of all distributed multimedia application categories, video on demand, meaning movies over broadband networks, attracts the most hype. Potential users can easily imagine combining a television channel, which is convenient, with a videotape rental store, which provides a wide variety of content, with a VCR, which provides a degree of interactivity. In any case, video on demand may turn out to be a loss leader that customers can understand and that draws customers to other, more profitable, services.
With Virtual Reality we can create a world where people can move on. Huge information on the Internet is a leverage to develop a more powerful and practical user interface between a computer and a human being. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) brings a third dimension to the Internet - the space. The real world is three dimensional and with VRML we can make it happen on our computer screen /26 Smith, Boyd, Scott 1996/. With VRML we can make links to other 3D-object, or any kind of HTML-document or a part of any HTML-document and also including URL-addresses, or other MIME-data. VRML provides us a 3D-hypertext, we can create more than a mere space with VRML. We can offer the context to information so that the user can see, hear and touch the thing from different point of view, she or he can move on it and get more accurate and detailed view of the thing. VRML can give us more useful knowledge, in the 3D-world we can also practise skills we need by doing ourselves. In the three dimensional world we can examine and look at larger amounts of information and see how these are related to each other. The three dimensional world give us also natural communication media where we can interact more versatile than in two dimensional world. VRML like HTML is independent of computer platforms. VRML can give us dreams and views of the future progress and we can let our imagination soar. We need easy-to-use software programs to develop new 3D-world for the net, programs which can utilize good graphics programs. You can get the whole picture of The Virtual Reality Modeling Language, version 2.0, ISO/IEC CD 14772 August 4, 1996 from /25 Anon 1996/ and for instance in the reference /26 1996/ you can get some ideas and visions how to utilize this new three-dimensional world on the web. To create the three dimensional world we need much more imagination than to create the two dimensional one. Rethinking and rearranging our present computer world to receive more natural way to communicate help us to orient ourselves to Virtual Reality. Thus we can make use of it when considering it only as one good tool to create a learning environment.
If we look forward about 10 years we can see that networked multimedia applications of Internet type offer an opportunity to create new services to customers in new media business and in the new media market we can provide Internet, multimedia and mobile solutions to customers. With partners we can improve our mutual competitiveness using this new media to fight from the business in the fast changing market where telecommunication, computer technology and media are converging. The main advantages of new media products are in business Fast Track: - We speed , we respond quickly our customers’ needs, we improve their business and exploit them to new areas and improve our mutual processes. End-users: business customers, their customers and consumers. They are the driving force for the new products and services and through them we can co-operate with the operators, we can also create new needs for end-users. Virtual careware: We can work as a virtual team to take care of our customers. Virtual team uses networked teams, media and services. For our strategic planning to the networked multimedia product area we need the customer benchmark centre where we can get experience and create visions together with our customers. We need the demo centre where we can develop and produce new products, services and processes. Success in mutual competitiveness needs the deep partnership and understanding. We offer our customer education and training to harness our customer with new capabilities and possibilities to meet the future challenges in the changing environment. We can offer consulting services to our customers. We build up the network of knowledge and experts where our role is the mastering this new networked multimedia business area.