Social Machines Social Machines
By Wade Roush August 2005
(Editor's note: While writing this feature for the magazine, senior editor Wade Roush added notes to the story. He also solicited reader feedback, which was incorporated here. Throughout the article, readers can mouse over the bold text to see what early readers contributed. If you are unable to click on the link in the contribution, simply click on the bolded word in the article, which will take you to the appropriate page.)
My boss, Jason Pontin, caused a minor ruckus in May while attending D3, the Wall Street Journal's third annual "All Things Digital" conference outside San Diego. The editor in chief of Technology Review, like many executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, and students these days, doesn't go anywhere without his wireless gear--meaning, at a minimum, a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and a cell phone. At D3, Jason was using his laptop to file blog (or Web log) posts "live" from the conference floor, summarizing talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and other computer-industry celebrities. But on the third day, he couldn't find a signal. The Wi-Fi network he'd been accessing was on by mistake, a conference staffer told him. She explained that the hosts of the conference--Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, two of the Journal's technology writers--had decided that no one should have Internet access from the main ballroom.
Jason, naturally, wrote a new blog post
Blog post: See pontin.trblogs.com/archives/ 2005/05/d3_suppressing.html.
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about the incident (from the hallway this time). Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, "seems a very retrograde move." Mossberg responded hours later. "It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else," he explained. "We merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences--near universal checking of e-mail and surfing of the Web during the program."
Other bloggers
Other bloggers: Including me. See www.continuousblog.net/2005/05/ disconnected_at.html.
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soon pounced on the minicontroversy. Some commended Mossberg's decision and warned against the perils of "continuous partial attention,"
Continuous partial attention: A phrase coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice president and a widely respected authority on human-computer interfaces.
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the state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources. Others extolled the social benefits of "always on" connectivity. "During conferences the back channel can and does enhance the fore channel, especially if I'm able to look up information that would be too tedious, basic, or digressive to ask about during a Q&A," wrote Gardner Campbell, an assistant vice president for teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. "I can also share the experience, and be newly energized, by being in touch with staff and friends and family who are not able to attend with me."
Both sides had a point. But the most telling thing about the debate was that it happened at all. Without much hoopla, many conference centers and university and corporate campuses--even entire metropolises, in the case of Philadelphia and a few other cities--are being turned into giant Wi-Fi hot spots. Trains, planes, airports, and libraries are also installing wireless networks to serve customers carrying wireless gadgets. As a result, many businesspeople, students, and Starbucks addicts now expect cheap, easy access to the Internet as a matter of course. Losing it can feel like being stranded.
Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis,
Wikis: Web pages that allow users to add content or edit existing content.
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photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell. There are trade-offs: this new information stream can indeed draw attention away from the here and now. But many people seem willing to make them, pleased by the productivity they gain in circumstances where they'd otherwise be cut off from their offices or homes. There is meaning in all of this. After a decade of hype about "mobility," personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We're using this newly portable computing power to connect with others in ways no one predicted--and we won't be easily parted from our new tools.
Continuous Computing
To grasp how rapidly things are changing, consider all the things you can do today that would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago: you can query Google via text message from your phone, keep an online diary of the Web pages you visit, download podcasts
Podcasts: Amateur radio shows without the radio. Podcasters produce MP3 recordings on whatever subjects interest them and publish the files on the Internet, where listeners can subscribe to shows, download files to their computers, and then transfer them to their portable music players, such as the Apple iPod.
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to your iPod, label your photos or bookmarks with appropriate tags at Flickr
Flickr: The photo-sharing site of choice for many digital photographers. One of its trademark features is the ability to add descriptive words, or "tags," to photographs, so that the photographer or others can find them more easily later. See www.flickr.com.
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or Delicious,
Delicious: A "social bookmarking" site created by freelance software developer Joshua Schachter. Users can store URLs, personal comments, and descriptive tags that will help them identify Web pages they want to find later. See del.icio.us.
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store gigabytes of personal e-mail online, listen to the music on your home PC from any other computer connected to the Net, or find your house on an aerial photograph at Google Maps. Most of these applications are free--and the ones coming close behind them will be even more powerful. With more and more phones carrying Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, for example, it's likely that companies will offer a cornucopia of new location-based information services; you'll soon be able to find an online review instantly as you drive past a restaurant, or visit a landmark and download photos and comments left by others.
This explosion of new capabilities shouldn't be mistaken for "feature creep," the accretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing--continuous in the usual sense of "uninterrupted," but also in the sense that it's continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness.
The arrival of continuous computing
Computing: Blog reader Hannu Leinonen comments: "I feel uneasy about the word 'computing.' It sounds like counting. In Spanish the word for computer is 'ordinador' and in Finnish it's 'tietokone.' Tietokone translates to 'knowledge machine.' We are not there yet, but have we passed computing?"
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means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable "information field." This field is created by constant, largely automated cooperation between
1. the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players,
and camera phones,
2. the wireline and wireless networks that serve people's locations as
they travel about, and
3. the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools
for finding information and communicating and collaborating
with other people.
People: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "In your definition of continuous computing, you might consider adding '4) and the devices they encounter along the way, such as situated displays, networked entertainment systems, printers, and connected vehicles.' We are just around the corner from these situated networked devices' becoming active participants in our digital experience. I wonder if you also want to pull in physical-tagging notions (RFID, bar codes, semacodes, visual tags, etc.) as the 'physical hyperlinks' that bring everyday objects into the digital mix. In the same spirit, GPS and other location technologies are starting to make physical place a first-class element of the digital experience. Oh, and can we all please work on a better term, one that doesn't use 'computing'? It's so not about that."
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This information field enables people to both pull information about virtually anything from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto the Internet--without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer. Armed with nothing more than a smart phone, a modern urbanite can get the answer to almost any question; locate nearby colleagues, friends, and services; join virtual communities that form and disband rapidly around shared work and shared interests; and self-publish blog entries, photographs, audio recordings, and videos for an unlimited audience.
The ingredients of continuous computing have emerged piecemeal. Japanese companies, for example, have long been testing new social and personal uses for cell phones. Model smart homes
Smart homes: A leading example in the United States is the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory, a three-story home outfitted with people-tracking sensors, gesture-sensitive remote controls, and other widgets. Part of the Aware Home Research Initiative funded by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, and the National Science Foundation, the Residential Laboratory is a classic instance of computing research that starts with a perceived need--assisting the elderly with complex, information-intensive tasks, for example--and invents gadgets and software that supposedly address the need. But as we'll see, continuous computing is an emergent phenomenon--a complex pattern of social behaviors that arises from the use of a variety of simpler digital tools. It advances in unexpected directions as people find innovative ways to put these commercial and open-source technologies to use in their social lives.
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that demonstrate how intelligent appliances will converse with each other are a perennial favorite in both Japan and the United States. But the final pieces fell into place only recently. These include the spread of Wi-Fi and other types of wireless access to millions of offices, homes, airports, and cafés; the enormous popularity of camera phones and mobile audio players; free or inexpensive voice-over-Internet phone calling; the rise of blogs as a means of both personal and political communication; personal and professional social-networking sites; tagging and social bookmarking; collaboration tools such as wikis and Microsoft's Groove Virtual Office; new tools for gathering chunks of media "microcontent" into something resembling a personalized electronic newspaper; location-based services and other applications tied to specific geographic coordinates; and new computer languages and standards that make it easy to offer powerful, personalized software services over the Web. What makes all these tools different from the computing styles of the past is that they fit more naturally into our real lives--meaning, for example, that they adapt more readily to our locations, our preferences, and our schedules.
One analyst who writes about these issues is Alex Pang, a historian of science and former managing editor of the Encylopædia Britannica who now works as a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA, think tank. Software engineers, he says, have discovered that computer science's decades-long effort to make computers smart enough to understand humans is simply irrelevant; they can make computing truly personal and social using simple Web-based programming tools. After all, we don't really want to talk with computers--we want to talk through them. "The brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati
Technorati: A search engine built by software developer David Sifry that scans millions of blogs and displays the most recent posts relating to any given keyword or tag.
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," Pang says, "is that they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different meanings of certain words, like 'depression.' They devote computing resources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying to substitute for them."
The Computer That Wouldn't Disappear
While continuous computing is now a practical reality, it has been a long time coming. The first serious work on it began 17 years ago at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). That's where computer scientist Mark Weiser set out to study the notion of ubiquitous computing,
Ubiquitous computing: Weiser’s original Web pages on the subject are preserved at www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html.
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which he defined as "activating the world"--creating networks of small, wireless computing devices that permeated the physical structures around us, where they would supposedly anticipate our needs and act without requiring our attention. Weiser's earliest experiments, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, involved a network of infrared sensors scattered around PARC. The sensors communicated with prototype "tabs"--small, wireless displays that functioned as labels or sticky notes--and with tablet-sized handheld computers and large display boards. Weiser envisioned hundreds of these devices installed in rooms, homes, and office complexes, where they would eventually become "invisible to common awareness," as he predicted in a 1991 article for Scientific American. "People will simply use them unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks," he wrote.
Tragically, Weiser died of cancer in 1999, at age 46. But by then, others had taken up his call, including the famed product-design consultant Donald Norman, who squeezed an entire thesis into the title of his 1998 book, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. People might be more efficient if their spaces, work flows, and communications were fully digitized, but this wouldn't happen until improved technology relieved them of the sense that they were interacting with "computers" at all, Norman argued. He called for a new generation of "information appliances" that would facilitate specific activities--such as teleconferencing, shopping, photography, or exercise--without calling attention to themselves. Echoing Weiser, Norman wrote that these appliances would "become such an intrinsic part of the task that it will not be obvious that they are there. They will be invisible
Invisible: Blog reader Gardner Campbell comments: "These are compelling essays and concepts, but a small worry persists: will the grail of invisible, continuous, ubiquitous computing turn out to be a cognitive deadener, too? Some things work best when they’re visible and a little recalcitrant: writing, for example, or thinking, for another example. If we use symbols effortlessly, there’s a risk we’ll settle for the path of least resistance automatically rather than go for the more ambitious and difficult goals, the computer equivalent of a set of grunts and gestures instead of a language, which involves a fair amount of work to acquire and use well but has rich payoffs in terms of semantic density."
Author’s response: I agree. That’s why I point out in this section and elsewhere that continuous computing is not about making computers invisible.
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like the embedded processors in the automobile or microwave oven."
Researchers got busy building these appliances at places like MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (since folded into one large lab). In 2000, the lab launched a five-year, industry-funded initiative called Project Oxygen,
Project Oxygen: See oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html.
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so named because the founding scientists believed that computation would eventually be "freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe." Like Weiser, the Oxygen researchers have focused on a combination of handheld devices and networks of sensing and communications equipment embedded in the environment--cameras, microphones, displays, wireless transmitters and receivers, and the like. Their most famous prototype is the Intelligent Room, a conference room rigged with sensors and displays that responds to voice commands, saves audio records of users' discussions, and calls up presentations or recordings of prior meetings. The idea, according to the MIT researchers, is to automate as many aspects of human collaboration as possible.
Ubiquitous-computing research continues at PARC, where researchers are working on technologies such as embedded sensors trained to zero in on specific conversations in busy rooms so that people watching by videoconference can join in. And in Europe, a three-year, $28 million "Disappearing Computer" initiative from 2001 to 2003 resulted in several ongoing projects on "ambient computing," the idea of augmenting everyday objects with small, wirelessly networked sensors.
But here's the surprise: the tools that are actually bringing us continuous computing aren't invisible. In fact, they are the very technologies Weiser and his successors were trying to sideline: off-the-shelf computing devices such as laptops and cell phones,
Cell phones: They’re now constant companions for 1.7 billion people worldwide. According to market research firm IDC, more than 690 million phones were shipped in 2004 alone. In the first quarter of 2005, vendors shipped 8.4 million "converged mobile devices," meaning phones that also function as PDAs and can run many types of software applications—an increase of 134 percent over the first quarter of 2004. More than 182 million people in the United States subscribe to cellular services, and in 2004 they spent more than a trillion minutes using their phones.
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both of which allow users to tap into Web-based social-software systems built in a largely unplanned way by people using common programming languages and shared, open communications protocols and development tools. These systems don't have to be designed as unified, integrated systems, like Project Oxygen's Intelligent Room, in order to be useful tools for social computing; they can just as well emerge from the bottom up, the way peer-to-peer networks and the Web itself did. (Indeed, one reason that projects at PARC, Project Oxygen, and other labs have never really blossomed into commercial systems may be that they are too heavily engineered
Too heavily engineered: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "I agree with your assessment and would add that in many cases, they are technology solutions in search of a problem. What is the question to which ‘ubicomp’ is the best answer?"
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for preconceived uses.) And we don't really need computers to disappear into the woodwork, or to have elaborate spoken-word interfaces. In fact, today's social-software boom rests on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, and portable music players.
"One of the things that really blew my mind was a trip last year at Christmastime to a mall in the DC suburbs," says Thomas Vander Wal,
Thomas Vander Wal: Best known for popularizing two concepts, the "infocloud" (the aggregate of one’s personal digital data, which increasingly resides on networks rather than on desktop PCs or permanent media) and "folksonomies" (the knowledge structures that emerge in place of hierarchical taxonomies when groups of people tag digital data using an -unconstrained vocabulary).
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an Internet-application designer whose writings are widely followed by developers of social-software applications. "Which is, as places go, a little bit more technically advanced than the more rural areas at the center of the U.S., but it's still not the Bay Area or New York. But I was seeing people 50 and older waiting in line to get their packages wrapped and staring at their mobile devices. I don't know if they were text-messaging their kids or browsing the Web or what, but their mobile devices were being used for more than just calling somebody. It was at that point that I thought, 'We're almost there'--wherever 'there' is."
The Enabling Technologies
Three broad technology trends are making computing continuous. The first, as noted earlier, is easy, inexpensive Internet access. The second is the spread of inexpensive, wireless computing devices. Above all, this means wireless laptops. Only a computer capable of running a full-blown Web browser allows access to the full range of Web-based software applications, which are, as we'll see in a moment, the third major source of technologies making computing more social. But laptops can't be carried everywhere, and smaller devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, voice recorders, portable CD and DVD players, MP3 players, PDAs, pagers, GPS receivers, and wearable gear like Microsoft's wireless SPOT (for "Smart Personal Object Technology") watches have the important function of maintaining the information field when there isn't a computer at hand. Then, of course, there's the smart phone--in essence, a miniature computer juggling tasks that formerly required half a dozen separate devices.
Separate devices: PalmOne’s Treo 650, for example, is styled like a phone but also acts as a still and video camera, an e-mail and instant-messaging platform, an MP3 player, a game player, a personal organizer, a Web-browsing device, an e-book reader, and a short-range communicator (using the Bluetooth wireless standard).
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The smart phone is "an ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing," writes Russell Beale, director of the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham, England. It's "a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is highly personal, and is almost always available... ."
The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most important and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a platform for personal publishing and social software. The examples are as diverse as informational sites such as blogs, craigslist, and Wikipedia
Wikipedia: An online encyclopedia built using wiki software, meaning that anyone may add entries or edit existing ones. With1.8 million articles written by 51,000 contributors in 109 languages, it is the world’s most comprehensive (though perhaps not its most reliable) reference work. It may, in fact, be the largest collaborative literary work in history. (See "Larry Sanger’s Knowledge Free- for-All," January 2005.)
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and services such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Delicious. All of these are examples of what software developers and Internet pundits have begun to call "Web 2.0": the transformation of the original Web of static documents
Static documents: Web 1.0 consisted largely of text files jazzed up with browser-readable HTML instructions on how to display the text and where to find related files. Web 2.0 is more like a collection of programs that talk to one another.
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into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full-fledged computing platforms. These Web-based services are proliferating so fast because they can be built using shared, standardized programming tools and languages developed, for the most part, by the open-source-software community.
The list of popular social-software applications is almost overwhelming. The oldest examples include text messaging on phones and pagers, instant messaging between computers, and good old e-mail. But while these technologies may be familiar, they are being radically upgraded to work with the Web. Classic circuit-switched landline and cellular telephony, for example, faces growing competition from packet-switched systems, including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) networks such as Vonage and Skype. Calls placed within Skype's peer-to-peer network are free, which has made the service a favorite among startup companies with employees in far-flung locations. Adam Curry, a former television-show host on MTV who coinvented the idea of podcasting, gushes frequently about Skype in his own podcasts, saying it's the main way he conducts business at Podshow.com, a podcasting network he is launching soon. "Skype is going to be the phone company," Curry intones.
Wi-Fi cell phones that let people use Skype even if they're away from their computers may soon hit the market, and new techniques for handing active calls from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network will allow people with dual-band phones to switch to the lowest-cost service available at any given location. Meanwhile, the Short Messaging System (SMS) for text messaging is giving way to the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS), which can handle pictures, sound, and video in addition to text. Then there's Google's Gmail service, which offers a practically unlimited amount of storage online and an extremely efficient search mechanism for rummaging through it. Some users consider Gmail to be at least as powerful as client-side e-mail programs such as Outlook and Eudora (which store e-mail locally on a desktop machine), with the added advantage that it is accessible from any computer with a browser.
Tools that turn private individuals into Internet broadcasters are another booming application. When blogs were first emerging, publishing one was a tedious and forbidding process that involved rewriting HTML code and manually uploading files to a Web-hosting service. But with the advent of Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress, and other services, the task of blog publishing has been reduced to writing something cogent and clicking on a couple of buttons. As a result, blogs have become the personal launching pads for millions of Web users' social activities online--the place where they gather their own thoughts and artistic creations, invite others to react, and share links to and commentary about content they find elsewhere on the Web. Lately, it's become cheap and easy to publish audio and video blog entries. And new tools for transferring audio blog posts to portable digital-music players like the Apple iPod have created a platform for podcasting,
Podcasting: Podcasters don’t agree on much about their craft—both Adam Curry and software guru Dave Winer claim to be the technology’s godfathers, for example—but they do seem to agree that the term "podcasting" was coined by Ben Hammersley, a writer for British newspaper the Guardian, in an article published February 12, 2004.
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an entirely new form of personal publishing. In 2004 there were only a handful of regular podcasts; now there are several thousand, ranging from the sexually graphic "Dawn and Drew Show" to "The Catholic Insider," in which Father
Roderick Vonhogen, a priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, the Netherlands, ruminates on the new pope, run-ins with airport security guards in Rome, and Revenge of the Sith.
But bloggers and podcasters wouldn't have much to publish without a constant stream of incoming information, and another set of Web technologies is helping Internet users to personalize that stream. Even before the Web, futurists predicted the advent of the personalized newspaper. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, called it "The Daily Me," a collection of items plucked from a variety of media outlets by your home's main computer, which would supposedly learn your preferences by watching what you read and what you ignore. But Negroponte's future has arrived: one of the most earthshaking developments in information management in the past half-decade is a straightforward Web-programming hack called RSS.
RSS: There is some contention over who invented RSS and what the name actually stands for. In 1999, as part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s effort to build a Resource Description Framework (RDF) to support Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the Semantic Web, engineers at Netscape created a document-mining tool called "Rich Site Summary," but they abandoned it in 2001. Meanwhile, programmer Dave Winer wrote a script for publishing chunks of one site’s content on another, and called it "Really Simple Syndication." This is now the most commonly accepted meaning of RSS, but the Netscape definition still has its proponents, and still others say RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."
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It's a way of packaging Web items such as blog entries in a stripped-down, XML-based format so that they can be imported into other Web pages. Most blog-hosting services automatically create RSS versions of blog posts. That means bloggers can "syndicate" their content across the entire Web, while readers can subscribe to RSS feeds
Feeds: An RSS feed can be created for just about anything. RSS is a key technology behind podcasting, which is essentially a method of delivering audio files via RSS subscriptions. And social-bookmarking services such as Delicious and Rojo let users subscribe via RSS to the links their friends save and annotate as they voyage around the Web.
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from all of their favorite blogs or news sites, and view them in a single place using an "aggregator" service such as NetNewsWire, NewsGator, or Bloglines. These services make it easier than ever for people to monitor developments in their areas of interest. (On the downside, perhaps, aggregators also allow people to filter out news and ideas that don't accord with their views.)
The most radical ideas in Web-based software, however, are flourishing in an area that might be called "social knowledge management," represented in part by sites like Friendster, LinkedIn, and Ryze. Such social-networking sites
Social-networking sites: See "Internetworking," April 2004.
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generated a wave of venture investment and new users in 2004. At their best, they are like human search engines: they exploit the "six degrees of separation" concept to help people make connections with friends of friends of friends who may share similar interests or business goals. Now a twist is on the way: a Boston startup called Proxpro is testing a cell-phone-based service whereby a traveling businessperson can register a change in location with an SMS message; if a potential contact who matches the traveler's prespecified areas of interest (say, Oracle databases) is nearby, both parties are notified, and they can use SMS to arrange a meeting.
The social-networking sites, in fact, were only a preview of what Web 2.0 technologies will make possible. Using a few basic building blocks such as XML, open-source database software, simplified programming languages and environments like Ruby on Rails, and protocols, like SOAP and REST, for exchanging data between Web applications, Web developers can build elaborate yet practical "social services" that collect and redistribute the knowledge of large communities of people. (See the box on page 52 for a tour of some of the most interesting new services.)
The more people who use the new services, the more powerful
More powerful: This is one manifestation of Metcalfe’s Law, the observation by Ethernet inventor (and Technology Review board member) Bob Metcalfe that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes in the network.
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those services become. That's because they're all about cooperation: people are usually happy to share their knowledge, experiences, creations, schedules, and locations if it means that they can learn what the people who are important to them are thinking and doing. The most successful services are always about shared interests; Jyri Engestrom, a PhD student in the Department of Organisation, Work, and Technology at the Lancaster University Management School in Britain, calls this the rule of "object-centered sociality." "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people," Engestrom wrote in a much-cited entry on his blog, Zengestrom.com, in April. "They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object," such as the photographs they upload to Flickr, the URLs they bookmark at Rojo or Delicious, or the articles they write for Wikipedia. Of course, social software can also be put to less community-minded uses: the same Internet-based services that keep businesses and families connected can be used to arrange casual sexual encounters, distribute pornography, or run terrorist networks.
Terrorist networks: See "Terror’s Server," February 2005.
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But in a way, the fact that the technology can support the full spectrum of human enterprises--whether socially productive or not--only underscores its power.
Computing Is Real Life
It's clear that new technologies are making computing continuous--meaning both "always on" and "smoothly shading into our real lives." But what's actually new about the experience of continuous computing? How is life changing for those with the money
Money: It must be said that in many parts of the globe, low incomes and political restrictions mean that citizens are very far from achieving a state of continuous computing. At the same time, however, cellular networks cover an increasing portion of the planet, efforts such as Nicholas Negroponte’s Hundred-Dollar Laptop project may bring cheap computing to many markets currently underserved by major manufacturers, and countries without an entrenched infrastructure of landline telephones are often leapfrogging to broadband wireless networks.
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to buy a few mobile devices and the time to sign up for Web-based social services?
At bottom, the shift is bringing computing far closer to our everyday experience. We've just seen how social software can give us new ways to tap into the collective wisdom of the people in our social groups. But that's only one consequence of continuous computing. On a more personal level, for example, the portable devices that sustain the information field are more respectful of our bodies and our perambulatory nature. No longer do we have to slouch over desktop computers all day to stay connected to the Net: computing devices have become so small, light, and ergonomic that we can take them almost everywhere.
Almost everywhere: There is, however, one limitation still tethering us to the grid: battery power. Even today’s best nickel-metal-hydride, lithium-ion, and lithium-ion-polymer batteries will keep a laptop running for only eight to 10 hours, and a cell phone for about five hours (assuming continuous talk). Compact fuel cells could quintuple these times, but they aren’t expected to be widely available until 2010.
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Visit any airport, beach, or city park and you'll see people carrying laptops, cell phones, and dedicated devices such as cameras and music players as naturally as if they were part of their clothing. For people who must take their cell phones absolutely everywhere, there are even "ruggedized" devices like Motorola's new i355 handset, which meets U.S. military specifications for resistance to dust and blowing rain.
Mobility, in turn, has created a demand for software that's sensitive to our ever changing locations. Already, many cell phones sold in the United States contain systems such as GPS receivers that report users' whereabouts during 911 calls. So far, few carriers have created ways for third-party software developers to put this location information to other uses, but in time, navigation tools and automatic-access location-specific shopping or dining information will become standard fare for cellular subscribers. In this area, Japanese and South Korean companies are, as usual, showing the way. Tokyo-based cellular provider KDDI, for example, sells phones that use GPS and onscreen maps to guide urban pedestrians to their destinations.
The new technologies also allow people to create more-detailed, true-to-life online identities. A decade ago, it was common for consumers opening online accounts to disguise themselves behind fanciful usernames like "Sk8rdude." But today it makes little sense
Little sense: Blog reader Erik Karl Sorgatz comments: "I disagree to the extent that there is an old maxim about the system: ‘If you build it...they will hack it!’ Disguise, deception, and outright identity theft are also amplified by the very same tools that can bring us together in our creative phases. In some ways, this dependence upon a technology-based infrastructure makes us both stronger and weaker. It might be better to blend this all with a little self-reliance, some non-computer-based learning, a little apprenticeship involving real mechanical skills—they don’t even teach the kids shop classes anymore."
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for a blogger or a member of a photo-sharing or social-networking community to stay anonymous; after all, taking personal credit for the viewpoints we express or the creations we share is often a way of gaining clout and attracting new acquaintances.
The best continuous-computing applications also mesh with our lives by understanding our preferences. Think of Amazon.com's recommendation engine, which suggests products based on the purchase histories of other customers with similar tastes. Newer Web tools apply the same idea to other types of content; for example, Bloglines, owned by search company Ask Jeeves, analyzes a user's RSS subscriptions to come up with a daily list of new feeds that might be of interest. The creators of Backpack, meanwhile, built in many ways for users to adjust the site's behavior to their needs. For example, users can publish files and to-do lists from their cell phones if they aren't at a computer, make their pages public or restrict them to specified associates, and program the system to send SMS reminders to their phones at general times like "next Tuesday" or at specific moments like "30 minutes from now."
Which leads to a final feature of continuous-computing technologies: they adapt to the chronology of our lives. Shared calendars like EVDB and Upcoming make it easy to synchronize our activities with those of our friends and colleagues. Soon, our mobile devices may even track our activities, extract patterns,
Patterns: Blog reader Ian Wells asks, "How do we teach ourselves and our children to develop a rhythm of communication that is helpful to our relationships and our human pace of life? What patterns of communication will drive us crazy? What helps our families? What helps our relationships? Why do so many people spend so much time watching TV instead of doing something active with real people? We had part of the same issue with cheap phone calls, with continuous TV, with broadband Internet. Now we go up a level of choice. Because we can communicate continuously, should we? What do conscientious parents teach their children about healthy continuous computing? Are there healthy limits?"
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and predict what information or services we need at specific times of day. That's an area being explored by Nathan Eagle, a postdoctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. "There are patterns in when you go to Starbucks, when you go out to the bar, and when you call your mom, to the point that you can start predicting what the person is going to do next," Eagle says. A phone sensitive to your schedule and your location might realize, for example, that the office is always your next stop after the coffee shop and would start gathering your e-mail and voice-mail messages from the Internet as you take your first sip of latte.
Of course, you don't need futuristic gadgets
Futuristic gadgets: Blog reader Jim Haye comments: "Very interesting, but I’m surprised at the lack of coverage of the devices we interact with each day that have the most computing power of all—automobiles. The typical car today has numerous microprocessors operating over several networks and runs incredibly complex software in a highly risky environment. Sure, you don’t carry them in your pocket, and they’re transparent to most users, but automotive information systems are a big computing application."
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like this to create a personal information field. Just look at Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a company that sells Web-based collaboration software based on wikis. The 34-year-old serial entrepreneur lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two children. Until Socialtext obtained venture-capital funding this spring, Mayfield's office was entirely virtual. But even though the company now has a real headquarters, Mayfield still carries a small armory of digital devices around with him, including a Treo 600 smart phone, a 17-inch Macintosh PowerBook G4 laptop ("It sounds like it wouldn't be portable, but it is," he says), an Olympus 5060 digital camera, an Apple iPod with an iTalk attachment for recording voice memos, a Jabra wireless headset, a Wi-Fi network detector, an Apple Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station, a USB memory key, and, of course, the obligatory tangle of power cords and chargers.
Together, these devices ensure that Mayfield is never out of touch with his colleagues or his family. For one-to-one communications, Mayfield says, he uses the Treo, Skype's free VoIP service, and the e-mail system built into Socialtext's own software. To conduct company meetings and client calls, he uses the conference-calling services at FreeConference.com. When he's at a convention, a hotel, or a rented meeting room, he connects the Airport to the local network, which creates his own Wi-Fi zone and gives him access to the Web, Skype, instant-messenger software, and his company's always-on
Always-on: Blog reader Daniel Barkowitz writes, "This ‘hands-on’ participatory back channel even now pertains to the world of college admissions. At MIT, we are conducting our own social experiment with blogging about the college admissions and financial-aid process with our incoming MIT freshman class. The experiment has been a tremendous success, providing students a much more interactive way to get their questions answered and their issues addressed. As the director of financial aid at MIT, I walk around with my AIM channel always open on my cell phone and constantly am monitoring the blog for feedback. Not only does the technology exist to allow this, but the next generation of customers is expecting it."
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IRC channel. He also advertises his whereabouts by registering his temporary Wi-Fi zone with a service called plazes
Plazes: A Web service based in Cologne, Germany, that allows users to set up new "plazes"—representations of local networks complete with pictures, maps, comments, and lists of the people online —wherever they go.
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and by describing on EVDB the events he's attending. He uses Movable Type and TypePad to maintain multiple blogs, including one for his employees, one for the public, and several restricted to his customers. He bookmarks interesting Web pages on Delicious and sends them out on his personal link feed, titled "Linkorama." He reads the news and follows his favorite blogs using the NetNewsWire and NewsGator RSS aggregators, which also supply him with regular podcasts. Almost daily, he uploads photos from the Treo and the camera to Flickr, where anyone can view his photo stream. He even has a dedicated wiki for his family.
Though Mayfield is a self-confessed early adopter, he isn't using all these socialcomputing technologies just for the sake of being wired.
Being wired: Blog reader Pete Sulick comments: "Are we taking the first steps toward digitizing our lives, or is this just an inevitably more efficient way to share information, like e-mail, TV, the telephone, radio, the pony express?"
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They're "rewarding in all kinds of ways," he says. He uses Skype to save money on long-distance calls; he announces his location to increase the chances of meeting useful business contacts; he posts photos on Flickr because he wants his family and his friends to know what he's been up to; and he blogs because it's an efficient way to keep his employees up to date, care for his customers, and get his message out to the larger world.
And this, in the end, is what's truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We've used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that's changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent "on the computer" no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn't: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on--even though they're the only things making the world clear.
Wade Roush is a Technology Review senior editor based in San Francisco.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Socialized Computing
Socialized Computing
By Craig Newmark August 2005
My title at craigslist is "customer service rep and founder," and my customer service role is at least a full-time gig. A CEO runs the actual organization now. I've always had difficulty articulating why I have this obsession. I work anywhere from two to ten hours a day, seven days a week, doing stuff like deleting "bait and switch" posts from New York apartment brokers, moderating discussion boards, and sharing community suggestions with the team. If you e-mail me about the site, I'll probably write back--quickly, too.
Craigslist was originally a very simple e-mail list for my friends, focusing on arts and technology events in San Francisco. People suggested doing more, like job and apartment listings, so I did that; then I got more feedback--so I did even more stuff. Today, craigslist helps people in more than 100 cities in 24 countries with everyday needs, like finding a place to live or getting a job or selling furniture. With nine million unique visitors a month, it's a big site, though a simple one. We have a pretty good culture of trust and goodwill.
I figure that reasonably good customer service is part of the social contract between producer and consumer. In general, if you're going to do something, you should follow through and not screw around. As a nerd, I have the tendency to take things pretty seriously, so if I commit to something, I try really hard to stay committed.
This isn't altruism or social activism; it's just giving people a break. Pretty much all world religions tell us that one moral value is to help other people if you can. I feel that customer service, even when you get paid for it, is an expression of that value, an everyday form of compassion.
Also, I've learned from the open-source movement that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigslist, we've turned over a lot of control over the site to the people who use it. We seriously listen to suggestions and actually change the site in response to them.
Anyone who feels a posting on our site is wrong, for whatever reason, can flag it for removal; if enough people agree, the ad is removed automatically. A similar philosophy is embodied in the Wiki movement, particularly in Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia whose roughly two million entries are created and corrected by the site's users). We plan to turn over even more control of our site to the people who use it. Mainly, we need suggestions about what to do next.
Currently, we're trying to figure out how to charge the New York rental agents for apartment listings (they've suggested this as a way to improve site quality) while giving a break to the smaller agents.
I feel that all this is a deep expression of democratic values. From a business point of view, of course, it makes good sense, too: it lowers our costs and improves the quality of what's on our site. Finally, it helps keep management in touch with what's real--or at least that's what we hope.
Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it's because they lack empathy.
I speak with a lot of workers at many companies, and for the most part, they really want to provide good customer service. But they tell me they're often prevented from doing so because service is seen as a cost and not something that contributes to profits.
Me, maybe a lot of my motivation derives from the name of our site; I take things personally. Maybe sometime this year I can go part time as a customer service rep, and I could use a day off, maybe a Sunday. But I plan to be doing customer service forever.
No matter how hard I try, sometimes we screw up. Then we apologize and fix it. My lingering concern is that I'm missing something big, and that I need to hear about it from my team and the community. What am I missing?
Craig Newmark is a Web-oriented software engineer, with about 25 years' experience in coding. In 1995, he started craigslist, a community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Today, tens of millions of people use the site for free. In high school, he really did wear a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses, taped together.
By Craig Newmark August 2005
My title at craigslist is "customer service rep and founder," and my customer service role is at least a full-time gig. A CEO runs the actual organization now. I've always had difficulty articulating why I have this obsession. I work anywhere from two to ten hours a day, seven days a week, doing stuff like deleting "bait and switch" posts from New York apartment brokers, moderating discussion boards, and sharing community suggestions with the team. If you e-mail me about the site, I'll probably write back--quickly, too.
Craigslist was originally a very simple e-mail list for my friends, focusing on arts and technology events in San Francisco. People suggested doing more, like job and apartment listings, so I did that; then I got more feedback--so I did even more stuff. Today, craigslist helps people in more than 100 cities in 24 countries with everyday needs, like finding a place to live or getting a job or selling furniture. With nine million unique visitors a month, it's a big site, though a simple one. We have a pretty good culture of trust and goodwill.
I figure that reasonably good customer service is part of the social contract between producer and consumer. In general, if you're going to do something, you should follow through and not screw around. As a nerd, I have the tendency to take things pretty seriously, so if I commit to something, I try really hard to stay committed.
This isn't altruism or social activism; it's just giving people a break. Pretty much all world religions tell us that one moral value is to help other people if you can. I feel that customer service, even when you get paid for it, is an expression of that value, an everyday form of compassion.
Also, I've learned from the open-source movement that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigslist, we've turned over a lot of control over the site to the people who use it. We seriously listen to suggestions and actually change the site in response to them.
Anyone who feels a posting on our site is wrong, for whatever reason, can flag it for removal; if enough people agree, the ad is removed automatically. A similar philosophy is embodied in the Wiki movement, particularly in Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia whose roughly two million entries are created and corrected by the site's users). We plan to turn over even more control of our site to the people who use it. Mainly, we need suggestions about what to do next.
Currently, we're trying to figure out how to charge the New York rental agents for apartment listings (they've suggested this as a way to improve site quality) while giving a break to the smaller agents.
I feel that all this is a deep expression of democratic values. From a business point of view, of course, it makes good sense, too: it lowers our costs and improves the quality of what's on our site. Finally, it helps keep management in touch with what's real--or at least that's what we hope.
Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it's because they lack empathy.
I speak with a lot of workers at many companies, and for the most part, they really want to provide good customer service. But they tell me they're often prevented from doing so because service is seen as a cost and not something that contributes to profits.
Me, maybe a lot of my motivation derives from the name of our site; I take things personally. Maybe sometime this year I can go part time as a customer service rep, and I could use a day off, maybe a Sunday. But I plan to be doing customer service forever.
No matter how hard I try, sometimes we screw up. Then we apologize and fix it. My lingering concern is that I'm missing something big, and that I need to hear about it from my team and the community. What am I missing?
Craig Newmark is a Web-oriented software engineer, with about 25 years' experience in coding. In 1995, he started craigslist, a community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Today, tens of millions of people use the site for free. In high school, he really did wear a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses, taped together.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
2009年 美邁入全數位電視時代
2009年 美邁入全數位電視時代
■ 編譯廖玉玲／綜合十三日電
美國電視業者12日表示，他們接受2009年以前停止類比訊號廣播的最後期限，屆時全美觀眾將只收看高品質的數位電視節目，而眾多的非數位電視機都將走進歷史。
美國電視業者過去一直抗拒聯邦政府的要求，不願轉換成數位訊號。如今他們突然轉向，願意配合政府。支持者表示，這一步的影響不亞於40年前電視畫面由黑白變成彩色的那一刻。
全美廣播協會（NAB）主席富里特（Edward O.Fritts）說：「電視廣播業者已經接受國會2009年起將強制讓類比廣播結束的事實。而我們也已經準備好。」美國參院與眾院目前都在考慮將完全傳送數位電視訊號的最後期限訂在2008年底或2009年初。
數位科技傳送的影像清晰、色彩生動、音質良好，而且類比訊號停用後，會釋放出價值數十億美元的廣播頻譜。但對廣大的電視觀眾而言，卻代表需要花好幾十萬美元錢換新機器。
由於現有的電視機大部分無法直接接收數位訊號，所以消費者勢必要花至少50美元至75美元購買特製的轉換器。接下來的問題是：政府可以出售釋放出的頻道，那這筆錢是否應該拿來補助民眾轉換數位電視時的成本？
目前全美逾1,500個電視頻道，同時傳送類比和數位兩種訊號。這些業者何時得停止傳送類比訊號，也是一個大問題。
美國聯邦政府1997年就要求電視台，2007年起得轉換成全數位訊號，但業者一再延宕。他們表示，改造設備的成本太高，也會因此流失負擔不起新設備的客戶。
業者不願配合，直接影響數位電視的製造和銷售，因為消費者搞不清楚政策為何，就不願投資新機器，消費電子製造商自然繼續生產市場較大的類比式電視。
如今廣播業者已不再堅持，受惠頗多的電視製造商莫不喜出望外，表示這對消費者最有利。
資料顯示，全美大約有12%至15%的家庭收看無線類比訊號頻道。若干人士指出，負擔不起轉換成本的觀眾大有人在。消費者聯盟（Consumers Union）資深幹部齊莫曼（Gene Kimmelman）說：「現在最大的問題，在於如何協助消費者使用他們現有的電視機，接收數位訊號，而不用另外花一大筆錢買新設備。」
【2005/07/14 經濟日報】
■ 編譯廖玉玲／綜合十三日電
美國電視業者12日表示，他們接受2009年以前停止類比訊號廣播的最後期限，屆時全美觀眾將只收看高品質的數位電視節目，而眾多的非數位電視機都將走進歷史。
美國電視業者過去一直抗拒聯邦政府的要求，不願轉換成數位訊號。如今他們突然轉向，願意配合政府。支持者表示，這一步的影響不亞於40年前電視畫面由黑白變成彩色的那一刻。
全美廣播協會（NAB）主席富里特（Edward O.Fritts）說：「電視廣播業者已經接受國會2009年起將強制讓類比廣播結束的事實。而我們也已經準備好。」美國參院與眾院目前都在考慮將完全傳送數位電視訊號的最後期限訂在2008年底或2009年初。
數位科技傳送的影像清晰、色彩生動、音質良好，而且類比訊號停用後，會釋放出價值數十億美元的廣播頻譜。但對廣大的電視觀眾而言，卻代表需要花好幾十萬美元錢換新機器。
由於現有的電視機大部分無法直接接收數位訊號，所以消費者勢必要花至少50美元至75美元購買特製的轉換器。接下來的問題是：政府可以出售釋放出的頻道，那這筆錢是否應該拿來補助民眾轉換數位電視時的成本？
目前全美逾1,500個電視頻道，同時傳送類比和數位兩種訊號。這些業者何時得停止傳送類比訊號，也是一個大問題。
美國聯邦政府1997年就要求電視台，2007年起得轉換成全數位訊號，但業者一再延宕。他們表示，改造設備的成本太高，也會因此流失負擔不起新設備的客戶。
業者不願配合，直接影響數位電視的製造和銷售，因為消費者搞不清楚政策為何，就不願投資新機器，消費電子製造商自然繼續生產市場較大的類比式電視。
如今廣播業者已不再堅持，受惠頗多的電視製造商莫不喜出望外，表示這對消費者最有利。
資料顯示，全美大約有12%至15%的家庭收看無線類比訊號頻道。若干人士指出，負擔不起轉換成本的觀眾大有人在。消費者聯盟（Consumers Union）資深幹部齊莫曼（Gene Kimmelman）說：「現在最大的問題，在於如何協助消費者使用他們現有的電視機，接收數位訊號，而不用另外花一大筆錢買新設備。」
【2005/07/14 經濟日報】
Monday, July 11, 2005
TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
2005.07.11 工商時報
科技論壇 TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
吳筱雯
大陸為了推展自有3G標準TD─SCDMA，近來頻頻透過兩岸科技交流論壇，對國內廠商釋出攜手開拓新局的訊息。雖然雙方都有合作意願，但相對於大陸國內的一頭熱，台灣廠商對於TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化運轉，大多還是抱持觀望態度。
由於大陸一直希望自訂的3G標準TD─SCDMA能夠跨向全世界，因此官方從一開始即表明，現行三項3G標準WCDMA、 cdma2000、TD─SCDMA，在大陸市場上都可以商用化，而且為了降低系統服務業者、消費者選用TD─SCDMA標準的心理障礙，該標準在制定時，也設計成與現有的GSM、GPRS標準完全相容。
自訂標準．廣結善緣
相較於之前大陸為推廣自行發展的WLAN標準WAPI，將 IEEE認定的WLAN規格排拒在外，最後導致全球業者、美國政府，一致抵制WAPI的情況，可說是大相逕庭。
在前年大陸官方進行3G頻段規劃時，TD─SCDMA一口氣贏得一五五MHz的非對稱TDD頻段，而WCDMA、cdma2000兩項技術，卻只各得六十MHz對稱的FDD頻段，當局對於TD─SCDMA成龍成鳳的期望，可見一斑。
除頻段規劃外，大陸官方還積極為TD─SCDMA，爭取國際輿論和技術支持，前年四月，促使歐盟轉變對TD─SCDMA的態度，同年六月下旬，進一步獲得3G國際標準組織3GPP的接納。
另外，大陸官方也表示，將投入七億人民幣資金以支持TD─SCDMA的發展，在大陸信產部3G外場測試中，有意爭取3G執照的六大系統服務業者均被要求測試TD─SCDMA。由此可見，大陸官方為了確保這項技術商用化成功，對於系統服務業者選用3G技術的意向，也積極「指導」。
大陸官方．積極指導
隨著主導TD─SCDMA設備發展的大唐電信，陸續完成各項測試，大陸3G執照最快可望在年底發放，外界盛傳，採用TD─SCDMA技術的執照，將會領先WCDMA、cdma2000發放。可以確定的是，大陸六家有意爭取三G執照的系統服務業者中，未來必定有超過一家將採用這項技術。
然而在資金、技術、系統服務業者均到位後，TD─SCDMA的市場接受度，還得視支援此一標準的手機效能、價位與款式能否符合消費者的需求。
TD─SCDMA雖然系統端晶片與設備漸趨成熟，但手機端相較之下，卻相當不成熟。目前還沒有哪個國際晶片大廠，願意為TD─SCDMA開發手機晶片組，提供手機晶片組都是大陸本土的IC設計公司，目前以擁有德儀資金的凱明、擁有聯發科董事長蔡明介個人資金的展訊，及天碁為主。
不過，即使是擁有國際大廠資金的大陸IC設計公司，在TD─SCDMA手機晶片組開發上，迄今成效不彰，甚至有一說認為，TD─SCDMA六月間數據服務測試結果不盡理想，就是因為手機端接收靈敏度太差，大陸希望在射頻晶片上尋求更多外援。
拉攏台商．強化戰力
也因此，過去只對大陸廠商開放的TD─SCDMA聯盟，最近才急著打開大門，五、六月間先通過迪比特（大霸在大陸經營的手機品牌）與英華達的入會申請，又透過兩岸技術交流論壇，對國內廠商頻頻釋出善意。
不過，對於台灣廠商而言，由於TD─SCDMA目前只有大陸採用，市場無法放大至全球，加上國際間3G服務尚未真正勃興，未來 TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化、廣被用戶接受，也還在未定之天。因此，業者對於是否投入TD─SCDMA手機或晶片組的開發，雖不排除，但也始終存在許多疑慮。
科技論壇 TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
吳筱雯
大陸為了推展自有3G標準TD─SCDMA，近來頻頻透過兩岸科技交流論壇，對國內廠商釋出攜手開拓新局的訊息。雖然雙方都有合作意願，但相對於大陸國內的一頭熱，台灣廠商對於TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化運轉，大多還是抱持觀望態度。
由於大陸一直希望自訂的3G標準TD─SCDMA能夠跨向全世界，因此官方從一開始即表明，現行三項3G標準WCDMA、 cdma2000、TD─SCDMA，在大陸市場上都可以商用化，而且為了降低系統服務業者、消費者選用TD─SCDMA標準的心理障礙，該標準在制定時，也設計成與現有的GSM、GPRS標準完全相容。
自訂標準．廣結善緣
相較於之前大陸為推廣自行發展的WLAN標準WAPI，將 IEEE認定的WLAN規格排拒在外，最後導致全球業者、美國政府，一致抵制WAPI的情況，可說是大相逕庭。
在前年大陸官方進行3G頻段規劃時，TD─SCDMA一口氣贏得一五五MHz的非對稱TDD頻段，而WCDMA、cdma2000兩項技術，卻只各得六十MHz對稱的FDD頻段，當局對於TD─SCDMA成龍成鳳的期望，可見一斑。
除頻段規劃外，大陸官方還積極為TD─SCDMA，爭取國際輿論和技術支持，前年四月，促使歐盟轉變對TD─SCDMA的態度，同年六月下旬，進一步獲得3G國際標準組織3GPP的接納。
另外，大陸官方也表示，將投入七億人民幣資金以支持TD─SCDMA的發展，在大陸信產部3G外場測試中，有意爭取3G執照的六大系統服務業者均被要求測試TD─SCDMA。由此可見，大陸官方為了確保這項技術商用化成功，對於系統服務業者選用3G技術的意向，也積極「指導」。
大陸官方．積極指導
隨著主導TD─SCDMA設備發展的大唐電信，陸續完成各項測試，大陸3G執照最快可望在年底發放，外界盛傳，採用TD─SCDMA技術的執照，將會領先WCDMA、cdma2000發放。可以確定的是，大陸六家有意爭取三G執照的系統服務業者中，未來必定有超過一家將採用這項技術。
然而在資金、技術、系統服務業者均到位後，TD─SCDMA的市場接受度，還得視支援此一標準的手機效能、價位與款式能否符合消費者的需求。
TD─SCDMA雖然系統端晶片與設備漸趨成熟，但手機端相較之下，卻相當不成熟。目前還沒有哪個國際晶片大廠，願意為TD─SCDMA開發手機晶片組，提供手機晶片組都是大陸本土的IC設計公司，目前以擁有德儀資金的凱明、擁有聯發科董事長蔡明介個人資金的展訊，及天碁為主。
不過，即使是擁有國際大廠資金的大陸IC設計公司，在TD─SCDMA手機晶片組開發上，迄今成效不彰，甚至有一說認為，TD─SCDMA六月間數據服務測試結果不盡理想，就是因為手機端接收靈敏度太差，大陸希望在射頻晶片上尋求更多外援。
拉攏台商．強化戰力
也因此，過去只對大陸廠商開放的TD─SCDMA聯盟，最近才急著打開大門，五、六月間先通過迪比特（大霸在大陸經營的手機品牌）與英華達的入會申請，又透過兩岸技術交流論壇，對國內廠商頻頻釋出善意。
不過，對於台灣廠商而言，由於TD─SCDMA目前只有大陸採用，市場無法放大至全球，加上國際間3G服務尚未真正勃興，未來 TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化、廣被用戶接受，也還在未定之天。因此，業者對於是否投入TD─SCDMA手機或晶片組的開發，雖不排除，但也始終存在許多疑慮。
Sunday, July 10, 2005
美科學、工程學 優勢恐不再
美科學、工程學 優勢恐不再
■ 編譯曹前／路透華盛頓九日電
華盛頓全國經濟研究所（National Bu-reau of Economic Research）8日公布的研究報告說，美國科學和工程學大學畢業生的數量已少於歐洲和中國大陸與印度等開發中國家，使美國可能失去領先這些領域50多年的優勢。
撰寫該報告的經濟學家佛利曼（Richard Freeman）警告，全球科學和工程學就業市場的改變，需要相當長的時間。國際公司把資訊科技、高科技製造和研究發展工作移往低收入的發展中國家，是長期調整過程的先兆。
佛利曼說，美國必須採取緊急措施，以確保美國科學和工程學教育和研究下滑不致影響美國在全球的經濟地位。這兩個領域的教育和研究是1990年代美國生產力迅速成長與復甦的動力。
二次世界大戰以來，美國在科學和技術方面處於大幅領先地位。美國人口僅占世界總人口5%，但雇用世界近三分之一的科學和工程學研究人員，研究和開發經費占40%，科學和工程學研究出版物則占35%。
世界頂尖高科技公司中有許多設在美國，政府在國防相關科技方面的開支，也確保美國軍事科技在戰場上的支配地位。
然而佛利曼說，這種領先地位的根基可能受侵蝕。歐洲和亞洲大學科學和工程學畢業生的人數大幅增加，而美國大學的人數卻未見增長，使美國在這些領域所占的比率相對減少。
研究報告說，2000年的美國大學學士學位中，17%是科學和工程學，相比之下，世界的平均數是27%，大陸為52%。先進科學研究的博士學位的情況更驚人，2001年歐洲聯盟大學授予科學和工程學博士學位的人數比美國多40%；到2010年，領先率預料將達到近100%。
報告說，年輕科學和工程學畢業生的工作機會減少和薪水相對不高，使美國出生的學生不願讀這些學科。
【2005/07/10 經濟日報】"
■ 編譯曹前／路透華盛頓九日電
華盛頓全國經濟研究所（National Bu-reau of Economic Research）8日公布的研究報告說，美國科學和工程學大學畢業生的數量已少於歐洲和中國大陸與印度等開發中國家，使美國可能失去領先這些領域50多年的優勢。
撰寫該報告的經濟學家佛利曼（Richard Freeman）警告，全球科學和工程學就業市場的改變，需要相當長的時間。國際公司把資訊科技、高科技製造和研究發展工作移往低收入的發展中國家，是長期調整過程的先兆。
佛利曼說，美國必須採取緊急措施，以確保美國科學和工程學教育和研究下滑不致影響美國在全球的經濟地位。這兩個領域的教育和研究是1990年代美國生產力迅速成長與復甦的動力。
二次世界大戰以來，美國在科學和技術方面處於大幅領先地位。美國人口僅占世界總人口5%，但雇用世界近三分之一的科學和工程學研究人員，研究和開發經費占40%，科學和工程學研究出版物則占35%。
世界頂尖高科技公司中有許多設在美國，政府在國防相關科技方面的開支，也確保美國軍事科技在戰場上的支配地位。
然而佛利曼說，這種領先地位的根基可能受侵蝕。歐洲和亞洲大學科學和工程學畢業生的人數大幅增加，而美國大學的人數卻未見增長，使美國在這些領域所占的比率相對減少。
研究報告說，2000年的美國大學學士學位中，17%是科學和工程學，相比之下，世界的平均數是27%，大陸為52%。先進科學研究的博士學位的情況更驚人，2001年歐洲聯盟大學授予科學和工程學博士學位的人數比美國多40%；到2010年，領先率預料將達到近100%。
報告說，年輕科學和工程學畢業生的工作機會減少和薪水相對不高，使美國出生的學生不願讀這些學科。
【2005/07/10 經濟日報】"
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
放在這裡是因為Jobs應該是科技人，不過很明顯地，分類有所不足！
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
以下是蘋果電腦公司與Pixar動畫製作室執行長SteveJobs在2005年
六月12日對全體史丹佛大學畢業生的演講內容。
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
今天，有榮幸來到各位從世界上最好的學校之一畢業的畢業典禮上。我從來沒從大學畢業。說實話，這是我離大學畢業最近的一刻。今天，我只說三個故事，不談大道理，
三個故事就好。
第一個故事，是關於人生中的點點滴滴怎麼串連在一起。
我在里德學院（Reedcollege）待了六個月就辦休學了。到我退學
前，一共休學了十八個月。那麼，我為什麼休學？
這得從我出生前講起。我的親生母親當時是個研究生，年輕未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我。她強烈覺得應該讓有大學畢業的人收養我，所以我出生時，她就準備讓我被一對律師夫婦收養。但是這對夫妻到了最後一刻反悔了，他們想收養女孩。所以在等待收養名單上的一對夫妻，我的養父母，在一天半夜裡接到一通電話，問他們「有一名意外出生的男孩，你們要認養他嗎？」而他們的回答是「當然要」。後來，我的生母發現，我現在的媽媽從來沒有大學畢業，我現在的爸爸則連高中畢業也沒有。她拒絕在認養文件上做最後簽字。直到幾個月後，我的養父母同意將來一定會讓我上大學，她才軟化態度。
十七年後，我上大學了。但是當時我無知選了一所學費幾乎跟史丹佛一樣貴的大學，我那工人階級的父母所有積蓄都花在我的學費上。六個月後，我看不出唸這個書的價值何在。那時候，我不知道這輩子要幹什麼，也不知道唸大學能對我有什麼幫助，而且我為了唸這個書，花光了我父母這輩子的所有積蓄，所以我決定休學，相信船到橋頭自然直。
當時這個決定看來相當可怕，可是現在看來，那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。當我休學之後，我再也不用上我沒興趣的必修課，把時間拿去聽那些我有興趣的課。
這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在友人家裡的地板上，靠著回收可樂空罐的五先令退費買吃的，每個星期天晚上得走七哩的路繞過大半個鎮去印度教的HareKrishna神廟吃頓好料。我喜歡HareKrishna神廟的好料。追尋我的好奇與直覺，我所駐足的大部分事物，後來看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說：
當時里德學院有著大概是全國最好的書法指導。在整個校園內的每一張海報上，每個抽屜的標籤上，都是美麗的手寫字。因為我休學了，可以不照正常選課程序來，所以我跑去學書法。我學了serif與sanserif字體，學到在不同字母組合間變更字間距，學到活版印刷偉大的地方。書法的美好、歷史感與藝術感是科學所無法捕捉的，我覺得那很迷人。
我沒預期過學的這些東西能在我生活中起些什麼實際作用，不過十年後，當我在設計第一台麥金塔時，我想起了當時所學的東西，所以把這些東西都設計進了麥金塔裡，這是第一台能印刷出漂亮東西的電腦。如果我沒沉溺於那樣一門課裡，麥金塔可能就不會有 多重字體跟變間距字體了。又因為Windows抄襲了麥金塔的使用方式，如果當年我沒
這樣做，大概世界上所有的個人電腦都不會有這些東西，印不出現在我們看到的漂亮的字來了。當然，當我還在大學裡時，不可能把這些點點滴滴預先串在一起，但是這在十年後回顧，就顯得非常清楚。
我再說一次，你不能預先把點點滴滴串在一起；唯有未來回顧時，你才會明白那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起的。所以你得相信，你現在所體會的東西，將來多少會連接在一塊。你得信任某個東西，直覺也好，命運也好，生命也好，或者業力。這種作法從來沒讓我失望，也讓我的人生整個不同起來。
我的第二個故事，有關愛與失去。
我好運－年輕時就發現自己愛做什麼事。我二十歲時，跟SteveWozniak在我爸媽的車庫裡開始了蘋果電腦的事業。我們拼命工作，蘋果電腦在十年間從一間車庫裡的兩個小夥子擴展成了一家員工超過四千人、市價二十億美金的公司，在那之前一年推出了我們最棒的作品－麥金塔，而我才剛邁入人生的第三十個年頭，然後被炒魷魚。要怎麼讓自己創辦的公司炒自己魷魚？好吧，當蘋果電腦成長後，我請了一個我以為他在經營公司上很有才幹的傢伙來，他在頭幾年也確實幹得不錯。可是我們對未來的願景不同，最後只好分道揚鑣，董事會站在他那邊，炒了我魷魚，公開把我請了出去。曾經是我整個成年生活重心的東西不見了，令我不知所措。
有幾個月，我實在不知道要幹什麼好。我覺得我令企業界的前輩們失望－我把他們交給我的接力棒弄丟了。我見了創辦HP的David Packard跟創辦Intel的BobNoyce，跟他們說我很抱歉把事情搞砸得
很厲害了。我成了公眾的非常負面示範，我甚至想要離開矽谷。但是漸漸的，我發現，我還是喜愛著我做過的事情，在蘋果的日子經歷的事件沒有絲毫改變我愛做的事。我被否定了，可是我還是愛做那些事情，所以我決定從頭來過。
當時我沒發現，但是現在看來，被蘋果電腦開除，是我所經歷過最好的事情。成功的沉重被從頭來過的輕鬆所取代，每件事情都不那麼確定，讓我自由進入這輩子最有創意的年代。
接下來五年，我開了一家叫做NeXT的公司，又開一家叫做Pixar的
公司，也跟後來的老婆談起了戀愛。Pixar接著製作了世界上第一部全
電腦動畫電影，玩具總動員，現在是世界上最成功的動畫製作公司。
然後，蘋果電腦買下了NeXT，我回到了蘋果，我們在NeXT發展的技術
成了蘋果電腦後來復興的核心。我也有了個美妙的家庭。
我很確定，如果當年蘋果電腦沒開除我，就不會發生這些事情。這帖藥很苦口，可是我想蘋果電腦這個病人需要這帖藥。有時候，人生會用磚頭打你的頭。不要喪失信心。
我確信，我愛我所做的事情，這就是這些年來讓我繼續走下去的唯一理由。你得找出你愛的，工作上是如此，對情人也是如此。你的工作將填滿你的一大塊人生，唯一獲得真正滿足的方法就是做你相信是偉大的工作，而唯一做偉大工作的方法是愛你所做的事。如果你還沒找到這些事，繼續找，別停頓。盡你全心全力，你知道你一定會找到。而且，如同任何偉大的關係，事情只會隨著時間愈來愈好。所以，在你找到之前，繼續找，別停頓。
我的第三個故事，關於死亡。
當我十七歲時，我讀到一則格言，好像是「把每一天都當成生命中的最後一天，你就會輕鬆自在。」這對我影響深遠，在過去33年裡，我每天早上都會照鏡子，自問：「如果今天是此生最後一日，我今天要幹些什麼？」每當我連續太多天都得到一個「沒事做」的答案時，我就知道我必須有所變革了。提醒自己快死了，是我在人生中下重大決定時，所用過最重要的工具。因為幾乎每件事－所有外界期望、所有名譽、所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼－在面對死亡時，都消失了，
只有最重要的東西才會留下。提醒自己快死了，是我所知避免掉入自己有東西要失去了的陷阱裡最好的方法。人生不帶來，死不帶去，沒什麼道理不順心而為。
一年前，我被診斷出癌症。我在早上七點半作斷層掃描，在胰臟清楚出現一個腫瘤，我連胰臟是什麼都不知道。醫生告訴我，那幾乎可以確定是一種不治之症，我大概活不到三到六個月了。醫生建議我回家，好好跟親人們聚一聚，這是醫生對臨終病人的標準建議。那代表你得試著在幾個月內把你將來十年想跟小孩講的話講完。那代表你得把每件事情搞定，家人才會盡量輕鬆。那代表你得跟人說再見了。
我整天想著那個診斷結果，那天晚上做了一次切片，從喉嚨伸入一個內視鏡，從胃進腸子，插了根針進胰臟，取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮靜劑，不醒人事，但是我老婆在場。她後來跟我說，當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後，他們都哭了，因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌，可以用手術治好。所以我接受了手術，康復了。
這是我最接近死亡的時候，我希望那會繼續是未來幾十年內最接近
的一次。經歷此事後，我可以比之前死亡只是抽象概念時要更肯定告訴你們下面這
些：
沒有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，也想活著上天堂。但是死亡是我們共有的目的地，沒有人逃得過。這是註定的，因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明，是生命變化的媒介，送走老人們，給新生代留下空間。現在你們是新生代，但是不久的將來，你們也會逐漸變老，被送出人生的舞台。抱歉講得這麼戲劇化，但是這是真的。
你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裡。不要被信條所惑－盲從信條就是活在別人思考結果裡。不要讓別人的意見淹沒了你內在的心聲。最重要的，擁有跟隨內心與直覺的勇氣，你的內心與直覺多少已經知道你真正想要成為什麼樣的人。任何其他事物都是次要的。
在我年輕時，有本神奇的雜誌叫做 Whole EarthCatalog，當年我們很迷這本雜誌。那是一位住在離這不遠的Menlo Park的StewartBrand發行的，他把雜誌辦得很有詩意。那是1960年代末
期，個人電腦跟桌上出版還沒發明，所有內容都是打字機、剪刀跟拍立 得相機做出來的。雜誌內容有點像印在紙上的Google，在Google出現之前35年就有了：理想化，充滿新奇工具與神奇的註記。
Stewart跟他的出版團隊出了好幾期Whole EarthCatalog，然後出了停刊號。當時是1970年代中期，我正是你們現在這個年齡的時候。在停刊號的封底，有張早晨鄉間小路 的照片，那種你去爬山時會經過的鄉間小
路。在照片下有行小字：
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
那是他們親筆寫下的告別訊息，我總是以此自許。當你們畢業，展
開新生活，我也以此期許你們。
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
非常謝謝大家。
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'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
以下是蘋果電腦公司與Pixar動畫製作室執行長SteveJobs在2005年
六月12日對全體史丹佛大學畢業生的演講內容。
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
今天，有榮幸來到各位從世界上最好的學校之一畢業的畢業典禮上。我從來沒從大學畢業。說實話，這是我離大學畢業最近的一刻。今天，我只說三個故事，不談大道理，
三個故事就好。
第一個故事，是關於人生中的點點滴滴怎麼串連在一起。
我在里德學院（Reedcollege）待了六個月就辦休學了。到我退學
前，一共休學了十八個月。那麼，我為什麼休學？
這得從我出生前講起。我的親生母親當時是個研究生，年輕未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我。她強烈覺得應該讓有大學畢業的人收養我，所以我出生時，她就準備讓我被一對律師夫婦收養。但是這對夫妻到了最後一刻反悔了，他們想收養女孩。所以在等待收養名單上的一對夫妻，我的養父母，在一天半夜裡接到一通電話，問他們「有一名意外出生的男孩，你們要認養他嗎？」而他們的回答是「當然要」。後來，我的生母發現，我現在的媽媽從來沒有大學畢業，我現在的爸爸則連高中畢業也沒有。她拒絕在認養文件上做最後簽字。直到幾個月後，我的養父母同意將來一定會讓我上大學，她才軟化態度。
十七年後，我上大學了。但是當時我無知選了一所學費幾乎跟史丹佛一樣貴的大學，我那工人階級的父母所有積蓄都花在我的學費上。六個月後，我看不出唸這個書的價值何在。那時候，我不知道這輩子要幹什麼，也不知道唸大學能對我有什麼幫助，而且我為了唸這個書，花光了我父母這輩子的所有積蓄，所以我決定休學，相信船到橋頭自然直。
當時這個決定看來相當可怕，可是現在看來，那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。當我休學之後，我再也不用上我沒興趣的必修課，把時間拿去聽那些我有興趣的課。
這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在友人家裡的地板上，靠著回收可樂空罐的五先令退費買吃的，每個星期天晚上得走七哩的路繞過大半個鎮去印度教的HareKrishna神廟吃頓好料。我喜歡HareKrishna神廟的好料。追尋我的好奇與直覺，我所駐足的大部分事物，後來看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說：
當時里德學院有著大概是全國最好的書法指導。在整個校園內的每一張海報上，每個抽屜的標籤上，都是美麗的手寫字。因為我休學了，可以不照正常選課程序來，所以我跑去學書法。我學了serif與sanserif字體，學到在不同字母組合間變更字間距，學到活版印刷偉大的地方。書法的美好、歷史感與藝術感是科學所無法捕捉的，我覺得那很迷人。
我沒預期過學的這些東西能在我生活中起些什麼實際作用，不過十年後，當我在設計第一台麥金塔時，我想起了當時所學的東西，所以把這些東西都設計進了麥金塔裡，這是第一台能印刷出漂亮東西的電腦。如果我沒沉溺於那樣一門課裡，麥金塔可能就不會有 多重字體跟變間距字體了。又因為Windows抄襲了麥金塔的使用方式，如果當年我沒
這樣做，大概世界上所有的個人電腦都不會有這些東西，印不出現在我們看到的漂亮的字來了。當然，當我還在大學裡時，不可能把這些點點滴滴預先串在一起，但是這在十年後回顧，就顯得非常清楚。
我再說一次，你不能預先把點點滴滴串在一起；唯有未來回顧時，你才會明白那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起的。所以你得相信，你現在所體會的東西，將來多少會連接在一塊。你得信任某個東西，直覺也好，命運也好，生命也好，或者業力。這種作法從來沒讓我失望，也讓我的人生整個不同起來。
我的第二個故事，有關愛與失去。
我好運－年輕時就發現自己愛做什麼事。我二十歲時，跟SteveWozniak在我爸媽的車庫裡開始了蘋果電腦的事業。我們拼命工作，蘋果電腦在十年間從一間車庫裡的兩個小夥子擴展成了一家員工超過四千人、市價二十億美金的公司，在那之前一年推出了我們最棒的作品－麥金塔，而我才剛邁入人生的第三十個年頭，然後被炒魷魚。要怎麼讓自己創辦的公司炒自己魷魚？好吧，當蘋果電腦成長後，我請了一個我以為他在經營公司上很有才幹的傢伙來，他在頭幾年也確實幹得不錯。可是我們對未來的願景不同，最後只好分道揚鑣，董事會站在他那邊，炒了我魷魚，公開把我請了出去。曾經是我整個成年生活重心的東西不見了，令我不知所措。
有幾個月，我實在不知道要幹什麼好。我覺得我令企業界的前輩們失望－我把他們交給我的接力棒弄丟了。我見了創辦HP的David Packard跟創辦Intel的BobNoyce，跟他們說我很抱歉把事情搞砸得
很厲害了。我成了公眾的非常負面示範，我甚至想要離開矽谷。但是漸漸的，我發現，我還是喜愛著我做過的事情，在蘋果的日子經歷的事件沒有絲毫改變我愛做的事。我被否定了，可是我還是愛做那些事情，所以我決定從頭來過。
當時我沒發現，但是現在看來，被蘋果電腦開除，是我所經歷過最好的事情。成功的沉重被從頭來過的輕鬆所取代，每件事情都不那麼確定，讓我自由進入這輩子最有創意的年代。
接下來五年，我開了一家叫做NeXT的公司，又開一家叫做Pixar的
公司，也跟後來的老婆談起了戀愛。Pixar接著製作了世界上第一部全
電腦動畫電影，玩具總動員，現在是世界上最成功的動畫製作公司。
然後，蘋果電腦買下了NeXT，我回到了蘋果，我們在NeXT發展的技術
成了蘋果電腦後來復興的核心。我也有了個美妙的家庭。
我很確定，如果當年蘋果電腦沒開除我，就不會發生這些事情。這帖藥很苦口，可是我想蘋果電腦這個病人需要這帖藥。有時候，人生會用磚頭打你的頭。不要喪失信心。
我確信，我愛我所做的事情，這就是這些年來讓我繼續走下去的唯一理由。你得找出你愛的，工作上是如此，對情人也是如此。你的工作將填滿你的一大塊人生，唯一獲得真正滿足的方法就是做你相信是偉大的工作，而唯一做偉大工作的方法是愛你所做的事。如果你還沒找到這些事，繼續找，別停頓。盡你全心全力，你知道你一定會找到。而且，如同任何偉大的關係，事情只會隨著時間愈來愈好。所以，在你找到之前，繼續找，別停頓。
我的第三個故事，關於死亡。
當我十七歲時，我讀到一則格言，好像是「把每一天都當成生命中的最後一天，你就會輕鬆自在。」這對我影響深遠，在過去33年裡，我每天早上都會照鏡子，自問：「如果今天是此生最後一日，我今天要幹些什麼？」每當我連續太多天都得到一個「沒事做」的答案時，我就知道我必須有所變革了。提醒自己快死了，是我在人生中下重大決定時，所用過最重要的工具。因為幾乎每件事－所有外界期望、所有名譽、所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼－在面對死亡時，都消失了，
只有最重要的東西才會留下。提醒自己快死了，是我所知避免掉入自己有東西要失去了的陷阱裡最好的方法。人生不帶來，死不帶去，沒什麼道理不順心而為。
一年前，我被診斷出癌症。我在早上七點半作斷層掃描，在胰臟清楚出現一個腫瘤，我連胰臟是什麼都不知道。醫生告訴我，那幾乎可以確定是一種不治之症，我大概活不到三到六個月了。醫生建議我回家，好好跟親人們聚一聚，這是醫生對臨終病人的標準建議。那代表你得試著在幾個月內把你將來十年想跟小孩講的話講完。那代表你得把每件事情搞定，家人才會盡量輕鬆。那代表你得跟人說再見了。
我整天想著那個診斷結果，那天晚上做了一次切片，從喉嚨伸入一個內視鏡，從胃進腸子，插了根針進胰臟，取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮靜劑，不醒人事，但是我老婆在場。她後來跟我說，當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後，他們都哭了，因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌，可以用手術治好。所以我接受了手術，康復了。
這是我最接近死亡的時候，我希望那會繼續是未來幾十年內最接近
的一次。經歷此事後，我可以比之前死亡只是抽象概念時要更肯定告訴你們下面這
些：
沒有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，也想活著上天堂。但是死亡是我們共有的目的地，沒有人逃得過。這是註定的，因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明，是生命變化的媒介，送走老人們，給新生代留下空間。現在你們是新生代，但是不久的將來，你們也會逐漸變老，被送出人生的舞台。抱歉講得這麼戲劇化，但是這是真的。
你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裡。不要被信條所惑－盲從信條就是活在別人思考結果裡。不要讓別人的意見淹沒了你內在的心聲。最重要的，擁有跟隨內心與直覺的勇氣，你的內心與直覺多少已經知道你真正想要成為什麼樣的人。任何其他事物都是次要的。
在我年輕時，有本神奇的雜誌叫做 Whole EarthCatalog，當年我們很迷這本雜誌。那是一位住在離這不遠的Menlo Park的StewartBrand發行的，他把雜誌辦得很有詩意。那是1960年代末
期，個人電腦跟桌上出版還沒發明，所有內容都是打字機、剪刀跟拍立 得相機做出來的。雜誌內容有點像印在紙上的Google，在Google出現之前35年就有了：理想化，充滿新奇工具與神奇的註記。
Stewart跟他的出版團隊出了好幾期Whole EarthCatalog，然後出了停刊號。當時是1970年代中期，我正是你們現在這個年齡的時候。在停刊號的封底，有張早晨鄉間小路 的照片，那種你去爬山時會經過的鄉間小
路。在照片下有行小字：
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
那是他們親筆寫下的告別訊息，我總是以此自許。當你們畢業，展
開新生活，我也以此期許你們。
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
非常謝謝大家。
==========================================================
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
認識Web下一波革命性的技術
認識Web下一波革命性的技術－－IT書訊
現在網站雖然已經如此普遍，但並不表示Web的發展已經到了極限，「Semantic Web」（語意網路）開始起步，Web的下一波革命才正要開始呢！
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
十年前，如果哪家公司有Web網站，是一件很騷包的事。現在，網站變得如此稀鬆平常，不提供網站的公司恐怕還會惹來「跟不上時代潮流」之譏。網站雖然已經如此普遍，但並不表示Web的發展已經到了極限，「Semantic Web」（語意網路）開始起步，Web的下一波革命才正要開始呢！
Semantic Web主導下一波Web革命
想要瞭解Semantic Web，這本由麻省理工學院出版社（MIP Press）所出版的《A Semantic Web Primer》會是一個不錯的導引。關於Semantic Web，許多資訊網路上都有，但是資料太多，入門者很難過濾，甚至常常見到老舊、訛誤的資訊。這本書的作者，將Semantic Web最新的發展作了完整的整理，讓讀者在兩百多頁的篇幅中，很快地學會Semantic Web最新的技術和標準。
本書很薄，所以並無法太深入每個細節，但足以讓讀者瞭解Semantic Web的概況。至於更進一步的資訊，本書的每個章節最後都會附上一堆『建議閱讀』，可以按圖索驥，找到更深入的細節。
目前的Web內容還是以呈現資料讓人瀏覽為主，而不是「電腦能處理的」（Machine-Processable）資料。Semantic Web的目的是，網頁不只供人瀏覽，也能供程式分析與處理。如此一來，我們就可以利用程式來幫我們進行許多Web相關的工作，解決許多目前的問題。
XML+RDF+OWL，讓Semantic Web成為可能
事實上，Semantic Web的技術已經有了，現在的問題在於採用的人不多。目前，Semantic Web相關的技術與標準包括了XML、XML Schema、RDF、RDF Schema、OWL、規則與邏輯。這些技術，在本書的內容中都有涵蓋。
●XML：定義Well-Formed的文件。
●XML Schema：用來定義Validated的文件。
●RDF：簡單的資源模型，以及資源之間關係描述。RDF能用來描述簡單的語意。
●RDF Schema：這是一種語彙描述語言，用來描述RDF資源的屬性和類別，以及類別階層。
●OWL：Web Ontology Language故意縮寫成OWL（貓頭鷹），而不縮寫成WOL。這是一種更豐富的語彙描述語言，用來描述類別和屬性，包括類別之間的關係、關係數、相等性、更多的屬性、屬性的特徵（例如對稱性）、以及列舉類別。OWL是W3C制訂的標準。
●邏輯與規則的描述，目前是用XML，以後會用RDF和OWL。
第一章介紹Semantic Web的概念，先從今天的Web所遭遇到的問題開始，然後提到Semantic Web如何解決這些問題，接著說明Semantic的相關技術，最後介紹了一個多層次的Semantic Web實踐方式。這一章寫得相當清晰易懂，讀完這一章就可以對Semantic Web有最基本的概念了。
第二章到第五章是相關技術的詳細說明。第二章說明XML以及XML相關的技術。利用XML可以讓文件具備良好的架構，可以幫助語法的組織。利用XML Schema和DTD，文件可以被機器存取（Machine-Accessible）。本章也介紹了XPath、XSLT、XML Namepsace。第三章說明RDF和RDF Schema。第四章介紹OWL。第五章介紹邏輯以及規則。
第六、七、八章則是Semantic的實務。第六章介紹Semantic Web的一些應用（共有九個例子），這些應用範例相當有趣，也可以讓你更加清楚Semantic Web所帶來的好處。第七章描述一個Semantic Web系統的開發過程。最後，第八章則是一些問題的探討。
期待Semantic Web的美麗新世界
Semantic Web描繪一個很好的願景，而且技術也已經逐漸成熟，但是由於知道相關技術的人不多，所以我認為三五年之內並不會成為一股潮流。隨著Semantic Web相關標準逐漸定案，且相關出版逐漸增加，我期待大家開始漸漸導入Semantic Web技術，讓美麗新世界快點到來。
《作者簡介》
蔡學鏞，清華大學資訊工程碩士、元智大學資訊系兼任講師、美商 O'Reilly 出版社技術編輯、臺灣微軟特約專欄作家、寰震科技技術顧問、研討會講師。蔡學鏞先生著譯有多本 Java 書籍，並在台灣和大陸的多本 IT 雜誌開闢技術專欄，專長的語言為 C/C++、C#、Java、REBOL。他的聯繫方式：xy.cai@msa.hinet.net。
現在網站雖然已經如此普遍，但並不表示Web的發展已經到了極限，「Semantic Web」（語意網路）開始起步，Web的下一波革命才正要開始呢！
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
十年前，如果哪家公司有Web網站，是一件很騷包的事。現在，網站變得如此稀鬆平常，不提供網站的公司恐怕還會惹來「跟不上時代潮流」之譏。網站雖然已經如此普遍，但並不表示Web的發展已經到了極限，「Semantic Web」（語意網路）開始起步，Web的下一波革命才正要開始呢！
Semantic Web主導下一波Web革命
想要瞭解Semantic Web，這本由麻省理工學院出版社（MIP Press）所出版的《A Semantic Web Primer》會是一個不錯的導引。關於Semantic Web，許多資訊網路上都有，但是資料太多，入門者很難過濾，甚至常常見到老舊、訛誤的資訊。這本書的作者，將Semantic Web最新的發展作了完整的整理，讓讀者在兩百多頁的篇幅中，很快地學會Semantic Web最新的技術和標準。
本書很薄，所以並無法太深入每個細節，但足以讓讀者瞭解Semantic Web的概況。至於更進一步的資訊，本書的每個章節最後都會附上一堆『建議閱讀』，可以按圖索驥，找到更深入的細節。
目前的Web內容還是以呈現資料讓人瀏覽為主，而不是「電腦能處理的」（Machine-Processable）資料。Semantic Web的目的是，網頁不只供人瀏覽，也能供程式分析與處理。如此一來，我們就可以利用程式來幫我們進行許多Web相關的工作，解決許多目前的問題。
XML+RDF+OWL，讓Semantic Web成為可能
事實上，Semantic Web的技術已經有了，現在的問題在於採用的人不多。目前，Semantic Web相關的技術與標準包括了XML、XML Schema、RDF、RDF Schema、OWL、規則與邏輯。這些技術，在本書的內容中都有涵蓋。
●XML：定義Well-Formed的文件。
●XML Schema：用來定義Validated的文件。
●RDF：簡單的資源模型，以及資源之間關係描述。RDF能用來描述簡單的語意。
●RDF Schema：這是一種語彙描述語言，用來描述RDF資源的屬性和類別，以及類別階層。
●OWL：Web Ontology Language故意縮寫成OWL（貓頭鷹），而不縮寫成WOL。這是一種更豐富的語彙描述語言，用來描述類別和屬性，包括類別之間的關係、關係數、相等性、更多的屬性、屬性的特徵（例如對稱性）、以及列舉類別。OWL是W3C制訂的標準。
●邏輯與規則的描述，目前是用XML，以後會用RDF和OWL。
第一章介紹Semantic Web的概念，先從今天的Web所遭遇到的問題開始，然後提到Semantic Web如何解決這些問題，接著說明Semantic的相關技術，最後介紹了一個多層次的Semantic Web實踐方式。這一章寫得相當清晰易懂，讀完這一章就可以對Semantic Web有最基本的概念了。
第二章到第五章是相關技術的詳細說明。第二章說明XML以及XML相關的技術。利用XML可以讓文件具備良好的架構，可以幫助語法的組織。利用XML Schema和DTD，文件可以被機器存取（Machine-Accessible）。本章也介紹了XPath、XSLT、XML Namepsace。第三章說明RDF和RDF Schema。第四章介紹OWL。第五章介紹邏輯以及規則。
第六、七、八章則是Semantic的實務。第六章介紹Semantic Web的一些應用（共有九個例子），這些應用範例相當有趣，也可以讓你更加清楚Semantic Web所帶來的好處。第七章描述一個Semantic Web系統的開發過程。最後，第八章則是一些問題的探討。
期待Semantic Web的美麗新世界
Semantic Web描繪一個很好的願景，而且技術也已經逐漸成熟，但是由於知道相關技術的人不多，所以我認為三五年之內並不會成為一股潮流。隨著Semantic Web相關標準逐漸定案，且相關出版逐漸增加，我期待大家開始漸漸導入Semantic Web技術，讓美麗新世界快點到來。
《作者簡介》
蔡學鏞，清華大學資訊工程碩士、元智大學資訊系兼任講師、美商 O'Reilly 出版社技術編輯、臺灣微軟特約專欄作家、寰震科技技術顧問、研討會講師。蔡學鏞先生著譯有多本 Java 書籍，並在台灣和大陸的多本 IT 雜誌開闢技術專欄，專長的語言為 C/C++、C#、Java、REBOL。他的聯繫方式：xy.cai@msa.hinet.net。
Sunday, June 05, 2005
紡品添加電子元素 安全加分
服飾紡品添加電子元素 安全加分
■ 劉嘉麟
新的科技與技術為紡織這個被認為是成熟的傳統產業注入了一些新的概念，也給高科技紡織材料與服飾發展帶來無限的活力。像歐、美、日等先進國家正在積極投入的「電子化服飾」就是是運用電子、電機、通訊等技術結合紡織品最好的例子。
電子化服飾 生活添便利
電子化服飾發展現況據市場調查公司VDC公司表示，目前全球許多消費性電子產品和電腦晶片的生產廠商都在設法將具有音樂播放、電話、電腦或上網功能的產品置入耳環或服飾內。在美國的手機製造商已在研發一種像珠寶一般大小穿戴在脖子上的電話。另外，美國的某家電腦公司也已開發出可放在衣袖裏的電話和護腕型答錄機，並且以申請專利；而德國晶片生產製造商英飛凌（Infineon）公司，在2004年發表了織在毛衣內不怕水洗的MP3播放服飾。
另外，這家公司也在2004年3月發表可洗式滑雪電子衣、電子地毯、無線識別晶片（RFID）等概念性產品，估計最快在2004年8月底將滑雪電子衣將以499歐元上市銷售。並將在三至四年內完成MP3播放器的毛衣的開發並在市場上販售，價格則訂在每件60歐元。
Schoenrock也引用VDC研究預估表示，2007年的電子化服飾材料銷售額將超過10億歐元。英飛凌也與約200家紡織公司討論合作開發的事宜，並已與德國哈米爾（Haneln）地毯工廠合作，預計開發出「智慧型電子化地毯」的原型。此產品可藉由滿佈在地毯上的感應控制器與終端連結的電腦，智慧型電子化地毯除在緊急狀況下藉由隱藏的LED指引逃生路線之外，也可在鞋子上搭配RFID晶片，衍生作為保全的用途。
另外，Schoenrock認為，此種概念的延伸在未來還可應用到建築結構之中，只要在建築結構中滿佈此特殊感應裝置，在地震等意外事故發生時，可立即警示出此建築物結構的安全狀況，不需動用目前的X光儀器進行掃描，可見其廣闊地市場潛力。
醫療保健領域 潛力十足
總體來說，電子化服飾在2004年達到2.38億美元的需求，到了2006年則增加到5.56億美元，將會成長132.9%。而行業上的差異對電子化服飾的需求、功能與接受度也都不盡相同。
以倉儲業來說，業者的需求在2004年達到1.04億美元的需求值，到了2006年則增加至1.58億美元，有51.7%的成長。至於運輸業，需求預測在2004年將達到2,570萬美元，2006年則增加至6,240萬美元左右，成長幅度為142.8%。
以電信服務業來看，業者的需求在2004年達到2,810萬美元，到了2006年則增加到6,900萬美元，成長了145.6%。另外，政府、軍隊和公眾安全業領域中，此業者的需求在2004年達到2,570萬美元，到了2006年則增加至8,470萬美元，成長幅度為229.6%，這種應用領域的產品有一定程度的寡佔性。
工業、生產業方面，業者的需求在2004年達到1,680萬美元，到了2006年則增加至4,180萬美元，成長148.8%。從服務業的需求來看，在 2004年達到1,050萬美元的需求，到2006年則增加至2,890萬美元，成長了175.2%。另外，由消費者的需求看來，需求在2004年會達到 1,080萬美元，到了2006年則增加至4,870萬美元，此兩年間預計會大幅成長350.9%，是預估消費成長最高的應用族群。
另外由醫療保健的領域來看，此業者的需求在2004年達540萬美元，2006年則將增加至2,320萬美元，大幅成長了329.6%，成長幅度僅次於一般的消費大眾，是成長第二高的消費族群。而由銷售或教育的專業族群看來，此業者的需求在2004年達到420萬美元，到了2006年則增加至1,650萬美元，預計會成長292.9%左右。隨著已開發國家的醫療與衛生系統越來越進步，嬰幼兒死亡率降低；再加上生育率也因婦女的就業而逐漸降低，這些國家的人口結構逐漸老化，故預估在醫療領域的應用會大幅成長。
目前全世界都面臨到人口老化的問題，歐洲地區在1980年時人口中僅22%超過60歲，但是預計到了2040年，超過60歲的老年人口將占歐洲總人口的 40%。這一群老年人口的行動沒有年輕人方便，倘若他們又有慢性疾病纏身，必須請醫生定期出診或將病患定期送醫，以監視病患的狀況下，這樣不僅耗費人力、物力，對公共醫療系統也是個沉重的負擔，故此類具醫療功能的電子化服飾必將快速地發展。
（作者是紡織所／ITIS計畫分析師）
■ 劉嘉麟
新的科技與技術為紡織這個被認為是成熟的傳統產業注入了一些新的概念，也給高科技紡織材料與服飾發展帶來無限的活力。像歐、美、日等先進國家正在積極投入的「電子化服飾」就是是運用電子、電機、通訊等技術結合紡織品最好的例子。
電子化服飾 生活添便利
電子化服飾發展現況據市場調查公司VDC公司表示，目前全球許多消費性電子產品和電腦晶片的生產廠商都在設法將具有音樂播放、電話、電腦或上網功能的產品置入耳環或服飾內。在美國的手機製造商已在研發一種像珠寶一般大小穿戴在脖子上的電話。另外，美國的某家電腦公司也已開發出可放在衣袖裏的電話和護腕型答錄機，並且以申請專利；而德國晶片生產製造商英飛凌（Infineon）公司，在2004年發表了織在毛衣內不怕水洗的MP3播放服飾。
另外，這家公司也在2004年3月發表可洗式滑雪電子衣、電子地毯、無線識別晶片（RFID）等概念性產品，估計最快在2004年8月底將滑雪電子衣將以499歐元上市銷售。並將在三至四年內完成MP3播放器的毛衣的開發並在市場上販售，價格則訂在每件60歐元。
Schoenrock也引用VDC研究預估表示，2007年的電子化服飾材料銷售額將超過10億歐元。英飛凌也與約200家紡織公司討論合作開發的事宜，並已與德國哈米爾（Haneln）地毯工廠合作，預計開發出「智慧型電子化地毯」的原型。此產品可藉由滿佈在地毯上的感應控制器與終端連結的電腦，智慧型電子化地毯除在緊急狀況下藉由隱藏的LED指引逃生路線之外，也可在鞋子上搭配RFID晶片，衍生作為保全的用途。
另外，Schoenrock認為，此種概念的延伸在未來還可應用到建築結構之中，只要在建築結構中滿佈此特殊感應裝置，在地震等意外事故發生時，可立即警示出此建築物結構的安全狀況，不需動用目前的X光儀器進行掃描，可見其廣闊地市場潛力。
醫療保健領域 潛力十足
總體來說，電子化服飾在2004年達到2.38億美元的需求，到了2006年則增加到5.56億美元，將會成長132.9%。而行業上的差異對電子化服飾的需求、功能與接受度也都不盡相同。
以倉儲業來說，業者的需求在2004年達到1.04億美元的需求值，到了2006年則增加至1.58億美元，有51.7%的成長。至於運輸業，需求預測在2004年將達到2,570萬美元，2006年則增加至6,240萬美元左右，成長幅度為142.8%。
以電信服務業來看，業者的需求在2004年達到2,810萬美元，到了2006年則增加到6,900萬美元，成長了145.6%。另外，政府、軍隊和公眾安全業領域中，此業者的需求在2004年達到2,570萬美元，到了2006年則增加至8,470萬美元，成長幅度為229.6%，這種應用領域的產品有一定程度的寡佔性。
工業、生產業方面，業者的需求在2004年達到1,680萬美元，到了2006年則增加至4,180萬美元，成長148.8%。從服務業的需求來看，在 2004年達到1,050萬美元的需求，到2006年則增加至2,890萬美元，成長了175.2%。另外，由消費者的需求看來，需求在2004年會達到 1,080萬美元，到了2006年則增加至4,870萬美元，此兩年間預計會大幅成長350.9%，是預估消費成長最高的應用族群。
另外由醫療保健的領域來看，此業者的需求在2004年達540萬美元，2006年則將增加至2,320萬美元，大幅成長了329.6%，成長幅度僅次於一般的消費大眾，是成長第二高的消費族群。而由銷售或教育的專業族群看來，此業者的需求在2004年達到420萬美元，到了2006年則增加至1,650萬美元，預計會成長292.9%左右。隨著已開發國家的醫療與衛生系統越來越進步，嬰幼兒死亡率降低；再加上生育率也因婦女的就業而逐漸降低，這些國家的人口結構逐漸老化，故預估在醫療領域的應用會大幅成長。
目前全世界都面臨到人口老化的問題，歐洲地區在1980年時人口中僅22%超過60歲，但是預計到了2040年，超過60歲的老年人口將占歐洲總人口的 40%。這一群老年人口的行動沒有年輕人方便，倘若他們又有慢性疾病纏身，必須請醫生定期出診或將病患定期送醫，以監視病患的狀況下，這樣不僅耗費人力、物力，對公共醫療系統也是個沉重的負擔，故此類具醫療功能的電子化服飾必將快速地發展。
（作者是紡織所／ITIS計畫分析師）
Thursday, June 02, 2005
逢甲發表泳電科技 領先美日
逢甲發表泳電科技 領先美日
記者宋健生／台中報導
你能想像只需要加水，電能就能源源不絕嗎？逢甲大學昨（1）日發表未來新能源「泳電」科技，這種新研發的泳電發電電池是利用水作為燃料，就可產生直流電，已引起自行車、汽車等相關產業高度興趣。
目前，贊助這項研究計畫的廠商包括：勤美、恆電能源開發、聖恆科技、健元工業社、金嶽實業、太平洋自行車及日新電機等。逢甲計劃再爭取與巨大、美利達、裕隆等國內自行車或汽車大廠合作的機會。
泳電科技研究計畫由逢甲大學奈米科技研究中心顧問吳溢隆主導，主任蔡宜壽、研究員廖本逸協同主持。吳溢隆昨天向贊助廠商展示新研發的泳電發電電池，只滴了幾滴水或直接丟入水中，電池立刻產生電能，讓燈泡發光，相當神奇。
逢甲大學表示，隨著泳電技術不斷成熟，未來與奈米科技結合後，還計劃發表泳電自行車、泳電電熱設備、泳電汽車、微泳電發電電池等研發，對民生應用上，將可發揮重大變革。
吳溢隆指出，地球可用資源逐漸短缺，可重複使用、對環境無污染、能源轉換效率佳的新能源技術，已是各國工業及學術界追求的重要目標。
泳電被解釋為「永久之水來電」，主要整合量子學觀念、奈米材料特性、燃料電池技術及電化學手法等，以水作為燃料，在鋁美合金板中透過自行研發的吳氏膜，造成電位差而產生直流電，這項技術目前領先美、日等先進國家。
吳溢隆表示，當初他以吳氏膜代替一般燃料電池使用的杜邦Nafion膜作實驗，發現在未供給氫氣、氧氣前就有電流產生；經過多年來研究改進，從原發現的0.1伏特到目前已增至1.5伏特，漸趨於成熟。
吳溢隆強調，泳電發電電池完全符合ISO 14000認證標準，無論在材料、生產過程、可回收等特性，均符合環保規定。因為以水為燃料，只要添加水即可發電，甚至電池依照選擇材料的特性，還可作彎曲變形等應用。
目前，泳電發電電池第一階段的應用為手工樣品、電子產品等，第二階段將朝新奈米材料的開發與模組化方向發展，陸續增加電機、電熱產品；第三階段將使產品微小化，再增加醫學、軍用等產品，市場商機無窮。
吳溢隆以心律調整器為例，未來如使用泳電電池作為電源，將不必再煩惱充電問題；因為泳電電池利用水發電，只要人體內的濕度超過80%以上，自然就有源源不絕的電能產生，讓心律調整器永遠運作下去。
【2005/06/02 經濟日報】
記者宋健生／台中報導
你能想像只需要加水，電能就能源源不絕嗎？逢甲大學昨（1）日發表未來新能源「泳電」科技，這種新研發的泳電發電電池是利用水作為燃料，就可產生直流電，已引起自行車、汽車等相關產業高度興趣。
目前，贊助這項研究計畫的廠商包括：勤美、恆電能源開發、聖恆科技、健元工業社、金嶽實業、太平洋自行車及日新電機等。逢甲計劃再爭取與巨大、美利達、裕隆等國內自行車或汽車大廠合作的機會。
泳電科技研究計畫由逢甲大學奈米科技研究中心顧問吳溢隆主導，主任蔡宜壽、研究員廖本逸協同主持。吳溢隆昨天向贊助廠商展示新研發的泳電發電電池，只滴了幾滴水或直接丟入水中，電池立刻產生電能，讓燈泡發光，相當神奇。
逢甲大學表示，隨著泳電技術不斷成熟，未來與奈米科技結合後，還計劃發表泳電自行車、泳電電熱設備、泳電汽車、微泳電發電電池等研發，對民生應用上，將可發揮重大變革。
吳溢隆指出，地球可用資源逐漸短缺，可重複使用、對環境無污染、能源轉換效率佳的新能源技術，已是各國工業及學術界追求的重要目標。
泳電被解釋為「永久之水來電」，主要整合量子學觀念、奈米材料特性、燃料電池技術及電化學手法等，以水作為燃料，在鋁美合金板中透過自行研發的吳氏膜，造成電位差而產生直流電，這項技術目前領先美、日等先進國家。
吳溢隆表示，當初他以吳氏膜代替一般燃料電池使用的杜邦Nafion膜作實驗，發現在未供給氫氣、氧氣前就有電流產生；經過多年來研究改進，從原發現的0.1伏特到目前已增至1.5伏特，漸趨於成熟。
吳溢隆強調，泳電發電電池完全符合ISO 14000認證標準，無論在材料、生產過程、可回收等特性，均符合環保規定。因為以水為燃料，只要添加水即可發電，甚至電池依照選擇材料的特性，還可作彎曲變形等應用。
目前，泳電發電電池第一階段的應用為手工樣品、電子產品等，第二階段將朝新奈米材料的開發與模組化方向發展，陸續增加電機、電熱產品；第三階段將使產品微小化，再增加醫學、軍用等產品，市場商機無窮。
吳溢隆以心律調整器為例，未來如使用泳電電池作為電源，將不必再煩惱充電問題；因為泳電電池利用水發電，只要人體內的濕度超過80%以上，自然就有源源不絕的電能產生，讓心律調整器永遠運作下去。
【2005/06/02 經濟日報】
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
碳奈米管技術面板可取代現行科技
Moto研發碳奈米管技術面板 號稱可取代現行科技
（國際新聞中心梁燕蕙／綜合外電） 2005/05/10
據網站Cnet報導，美國手機大廠摩托羅拉（Motorola）日前宣佈已發展出採用碳奈米管（carbon nanotubes）所打造的最新彩色顯示器原型機（prototype），號稱可取代現行平面科技，不過，摩托羅拉自己並不打算涉足顯示器或面板市場，打算將該技術提供授權專利。
摩托羅拉嵌入式系統研發中心主管Vida Ilderem指出，應用碳奈米管打造奈米發射顯示器（nano-emissive displays），可說是第一項里程碑，該公司早已投入數年發展場發射顯示器（field emission displays）科技，而奈米管（nanotubes）則是近來取自奈米科技發展的產物。
報導指出，摩托羅拉的原型機對角線長4.7吋，解析度為128 x 96畫素，生產過程中較複雜的部分，便是將奈米管貼上玻璃基板（glass substrate）上，預計2年內可望導入量產，Ilderem估計，若從液晶面板（LCD）轉為生產奈米發射顯示器（NED），約需更換一半左右的機器設備，若從電漿顯示器轉為生產NED，仍需更換四分之一的生產設備。
（國際新聞中心梁燕蕙／綜合外電） 2005/05/10
據網站Cnet報導，美國手機大廠摩托羅拉（Motorola）日前宣佈已發展出採用碳奈米管（carbon nanotubes）所打造的最新彩色顯示器原型機（prototype），號稱可取代現行平面科技，不過，摩托羅拉自己並不打算涉足顯示器或面板市場，打算將該技術提供授權專利。
摩托羅拉嵌入式系統研發中心主管Vida Ilderem指出，應用碳奈米管打造奈米發射顯示器（nano-emissive displays），可說是第一項里程碑，該公司早已投入數年發展場發射顯示器（field emission displays）科技，而奈米管（nanotubes）則是近來取自奈米科技發展的產物。
報導指出，摩托羅拉的原型機對角線長4.7吋，解析度為128 x 96畫素，生產過程中較複雜的部分，便是將奈米管貼上玻璃基板（glass substrate）上，預計2年內可望導入量產，Ilderem估計，若從液晶面板（LCD）轉為生產奈米發射顯示器（NED），約需更換一半左右的機器設備，若從電漿顯示器轉為生產NED，仍需更換四分之一的生產設備。
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Moore's Law還可適用10至20年
2005.04.27 工商時報
摩爾：Moore's Law還可適用10至20年
王玫文/台北─夏威夷電訪
摩爾定律於十九日風光慶祝四十周年，定律提出人、也是英特爾榮譽董事長的高登摩爾昨（廿六）日接受亞洲媒體電話訪問。摩爾堅持未來十至廿年內此定律仍將適用，也不需修改。他並表示，未來數位家庭與可清晰分辨語音的智慧型電腦，將是摩爾定律很好的應用領域。
英特爾為慶祝摩爾定律四十周年，年初以來舉辦一連串的活動。不過目前在夏威夷享受退休生活的摩爾本人倒是相當謙虛，表示此定律就算不是他發現，也可能由其他人歸納得知。而摩爾定律如此精確地預測半導體技術的發展，也是他始料未及的結果。摩爾一九六五年曾提出晶片中的電晶體每幾年就會倍增，一九七五年修正為每約十八至廿個月倍增。昨天摩爾堅稱，此定律在未來十至廿年間仍將適用，也沒有提出更新版本的打算。
至於摩爾定律未來的應用，摩爾表示，數位家庭趨勢的演進，將使消費者對電腦需求更多的記憶體容量、更好的中央處理器與繪圖處理器效能。另外，他也提到，希望電腦運算能力能藉由摩爾定律持續增加。例如電腦辨識語音資訊的能力仍須大幅加強，直到能夠立即分辨英文中two與too的差異，讓使用者能與電腦進行智慧性的對談。不過他表示這不知要何時才能落實。
至於外界持續以生產成本持續提高等議題挑戰摩爾定律，摩爾表示，本質來說，十至廿年後可能會出現根本上的限制，但在那之前，半導體業界仍可持續開發出密度更高、體積更大的晶片，持續延展晶片設計與系統使用者的能力。即使是在摩爾定律之後，他認為半導體業界仍可製造出更小、更高效能的晶片，人們也可以期待單一晶片中內含數十億個電晶體的時代來臨。
摩爾昨天也給年輕的半導體工程師建言。他表示，半導體已成為規模龐大的全球性產業，新的領域如生物科技等即使目前規模還不大，未來發展可期。一個工程師在一生中可能經歷三至四個重大的趨勢轉折，但基礎科學理論架構就是他面對這些轉折時候最好的依靠。
摩爾對今日英特爾的成功秘訣則表示，英特爾在創立初期便建立良好的基礎制度，在電腦中央處理器也取得相當優勢的產業地位，最後則是持續性地投資在研發與技術上，確保維持競爭優勢。對所有半導體公司而言，摩爾認為技術就是一切的根本。
至於摩爾的退休生活，他表示，雖已從英特爾退休，但仍參與董事會與一些組織活動，使得退休生活仍忙碌。他正考慮從相關活動中，完全引退。
摩爾：Moore's Law還可適用10至20年
王玫文/台北─夏威夷電訪
摩爾定律於十九日風光慶祝四十周年，定律提出人、也是英特爾榮譽董事長的高登摩爾昨（廿六）日接受亞洲媒體電話訪問。摩爾堅持未來十至廿年內此定律仍將適用，也不需修改。他並表示，未來數位家庭與可清晰分辨語音的智慧型電腦，將是摩爾定律很好的應用領域。
英特爾為慶祝摩爾定律四十周年，年初以來舉辦一連串的活動。不過目前在夏威夷享受退休生活的摩爾本人倒是相當謙虛，表示此定律就算不是他發現，也可能由其他人歸納得知。而摩爾定律如此精確地預測半導體技術的發展，也是他始料未及的結果。摩爾一九六五年曾提出晶片中的電晶體每幾年就會倍增，一九七五年修正為每約十八至廿個月倍增。昨天摩爾堅稱，此定律在未來十至廿年間仍將適用，也沒有提出更新版本的打算。
至於摩爾定律未來的應用，摩爾表示，數位家庭趨勢的演進，將使消費者對電腦需求更多的記憶體容量、更好的中央處理器與繪圖處理器效能。另外，他也提到，希望電腦運算能力能藉由摩爾定律持續增加。例如電腦辨識語音資訊的能力仍須大幅加強，直到能夠立即分辨英文中two與too的差異，讓使用者能與電腦進行智慧性的對談。不過他表示這不知要何時才能落實。
至於外界持續以生產成本持續提高等議題挑戰摩爾定律，摩爾表示，本質來說，十至廿年後可能會出現根本上的限制，但在那之前，半導體業界仍可持續開發出密度更高、體積更大的晶片，持續延展晶片設計與系統使用者的能力。即使是在摩爾定律之後，他認為半導體業界仍可製造出更小、更高效能的晶片，人們也可以期待單一晶片中內含數十億個電晶體的時代來臨。
摩爾昨天也給年輕的半導體工程師建言。他表示，半導體已成為規模龐大的全球性產業，新的領域如生物科技等即使目前規模還不大，未來發展可期。一個工程師在一生中可能經歷三至四個重大的趨勢轉折，但基礎科學理論架構就是他面對這些轉折時候最好的依靠。
摩爾對今日英特爾的成功秘訣則表示，英特爾在創立初期便建立良好的基礎制度，在電腦中央處理器也取得相當優勢的產業地位，最後則是持續性地投資在研發與技術上，確保維持競爭優勢。對所有半導體公司而言，摩爾認為技術就是一切的根本。
至於摩爾的退休生活，他表示，雖已從英特爾退休，但仍參與董事會與一些組織活動，使得退休生活仍忙碌。他正考慮從相關活動中，完全引退。
Saturday, April 16, 2005
前瞻技術專家巴特：ＲＦＩＤ讀取機 台灣切入有優勢
2005.04.16 工商時報
前瞻技術專家巴特：ＲＦＩＤ讀取機 台灣切入有優勢
陳碧芬/台北報導
美國麻省理工學院前瞻技術專家巴特昨天表示，RFID被列為二十一世紀十大重要技術之一，必將廣泛應用在配送通路、庫存管理、消費商品等，台灣科技業切入最有優勢的項目，應該是在RFID讀取機(Reader)，尤其是攜帶型、口袋型，易於發揮製造與成本控制的傳統能力，並結合後段應用系統整合，可望跟上全球的技術進步。
巴特（Piyush A. Patel）為美商 Kyra Infotech執行長，長期參與美國麻省理工學院實驗室的前瞻研究，與該公司技術長Praveen Limbachiya均為RFID專家。他們此行是應外貿協會暨台灣區體育用品工業同業公會的特別邀請，陪同世界體育用品聯合會（WFSGI）首席法律顧問謝衡（Jochen Schaefer）一起來台，於「2005年台北國際體育用品展」期間，以「如何將RFID(無線設頻辨識系統)技術有效運用於產品認證及供應鏈管理」為題發表演講。
謝衡指出，在WALMART等跨國型大賣場的帶領下，RFID的應用加速發酵，極可能大幅取代目前使用的條碼（Bar-code）資訊辨識系統，相關的整合應用更可運用在各行業的供應鏈及物流管理。他認為，最具潛力的RFID傳輸載具將會是手機和汽車，前者是一般消費者採買、逛街的好幫手，後者則可以大幅降低交通事故、提高運輸的品質。
巴特提出四項理由，說明RFID的未來潛力，其中以MIT研究團隊參與全球推動組織，最是讓他信心十足，「具公信力的單位，以開放碼的作法，也不收取智財授權，必定可以為RFID推波助瀾。」
全球RFID產業的發展現況，從供應鏈角度分析，主要可區分為RFID晶片、RFID設備與RFID系統三大領域。Praveen指出，無論政府部門或民間企業，都對RFID應用產品有所需求，而且也沒有任何國家會壟斷關鍵技術，主要還是靠各廠商的系統整合，因此台灣科技業者加快腳步切入，針目前價格仍偏高的讀取機部份，產品設計上以攜帶型為較佳，但在應用系統上應與大廠結合。
前瞻技術專家巴特：ＲＦＩＤ讀取機 台灣切入有優勢
陳碧芬/台北報導
美國麻省理工學院前瞻技術專家巴特昨天表示，RFID被列為二十一世紀十大重要技術之一，必將廣泛應用在配送通路、庫存管理、消費商品等，台灣科技業切入最有優勢的項目，應該是在RFID讀取機(Reader)，尤其是攜帶型、口袋型，易於發揮製造與成本控制的傳統能力，並結合後段應用系統整合，可望跟上全球的技術進步。
巴特（Piyush A. Patel）為美商 Kyra Infotech執行長，長期參與美國麻省理工學院實驗室的前瞻研究，與該公司技術長Praveen Limbachiya均為RFID專家。他們此行是應外貿協會暨台灣區體育用品工業同業公會的特別邀請，陪同世界體育用品聯合會（WFSGI）首席法律顧問謝衡（Jochen Schaefer）一起來台，於「2005年台北國際體育用品展」期間，以「如何將RFID(無線設頻辨識系統)技術有效運用於產品認證及供應鏈管理」為題發表演講。
謝衡指出，在WALMART等跨國型大賣場的帶領下，RFID的應用加速發酵，極可能大幅取代目前使用的條碼（Bar-code）資訊辨識系統，相關的整合應用更可運用在各行業的供應鏈及物流管理。他認為，最具潛力的RFID傳輸載具將會是手機和汽車，前者是一般消費者採買、逛街的好幫手，後者則可以大幅降低交通事故、提高運輸的品質。
巴特提出四項理由，說明RFID的未來潛力，其中以MIT研究團隊參與全球推動組織，最是讓他信心十足，「具公信力的單位，以開放碼的作法，也不收取智財授權，必定可以為RFID推波助瀾。」
全球RFID產業的發展現況，從供應鏈角度分析，主要可區分為RFID晶片、RFID設備與RFID系統三大領域。Praveen指出，無論政府部門或民間企業，都對RFID應用產品有所需求，而且也沒有任何國家會壟斷關鍵技術，主要還是靠各廠商的系統整合，因此台灣科技業者加快腳步切入，針目前價格仍偏高的讀取機部份，產品設計上以攜帶型為較佳，但在應用系統上應與大廠結合。
Sunday, April 10, 2005
南韓Ubiquitous Dream Hall 打造「無所不在」的生活
"南韓Ubiquitous Dream Hall 打造「無所不在」的生活
http://mag.udn.com/mag/dc/printpage.jsp?f_ART_ID=9242
‧資策會FIND 2005/03/29
韓國政府為推動「無所不在(Ubiquitous)」的實現，與韓國當地的資通訊業者合作，在漢城推出了Ubiquitous Dream Hall，讓韓國民眾可以一窺無所不在的夢想生活。
作者：張玉霜(FIND研究員)
在 歷經過去數年上網人口提升以及寬頻產業、技術與服務等層次的競爭後，資訊先進各國著眼於無線設備與技術的發展，紛紛提出如「無所不在 （ubiquitous）」這樣的二十一世紀資訊時代新口號。最早提出這項概念政策的，是日本政府於2004年3月所提、8月確認政策核心的「u- Japan（ubiquitous Japan）政策，希望以資訊技術創造安全、安心的無所不在社會；而同樣在資訊通訊發展方面居領先地位的韓國，在2004年的「IT 839 計畫」中，也提出將以八大服務、三項基礎建設、九項成長動力創造無所不在社會的政策。
韓國政府在其一系列的e化過程中，一直以成為全球電 信及IT建設產業的龍頭而努力，無論是政府與企業、企業與企業間的合作關係皆有相當多的成功案例；而當無所不在的IT技術被視為是成功站穩全球市場關鍵因 素的此時，政府與業者（如KT、三星電子、LG電子、SK Telecom、KTF、LG Telecom等企業）立即緊密合作，共同運用無所不在的資訊通訊應用技術，建置了一個示範應用環境：「Ubiquitous Dream Hall（無所不在的夢想會館）」。
Ubiquitous Dream Hall簡介
所謂的無所不在環境包含五個A，分 別是「任何時間（Any time）」、「任何地點（Any where）」、「任何設備（Any device）」、「任何服務（Any service）」以及「安全性（All Security）」。未來，透過有線與無線所建構而成的網絡，不管使用者是在任何一個工作環境中，都可以即時獲取所需的資訊與服務；同時，無所不在的電 腦與網路通訊環境也將讓奈米科技（Nanotechnology, NT）與生物科技（Biotechnology, BT）跟IT技術產生強大的連結。
圖：無所不在的構想
(資料來源：韓國MIC 資料整理：ACI-FIND)
韓 國的Ubiquitous Dream Hall是以生活中各項可能的資訊通訊應用建置成一個生活環境，內有數位家庭中心（Village Hall-Digital Home）、社區中心（Village Hall-Neighborhood Facilities）、娛樂中心（Entertainment Hall）以及技術展示中心（Technical Show-room）。參觀者可在數位家庭中心以及社區中心裡，體驗在家庭、醫院的高速網絡以及學校、咖啡館和其他社區中心活動的數位生活；在技術展示館 裡，則可透過跨世代的產品讓參觀者體驗下一世代IT技術的發展；而娛樂中心中則是一個由虛擬的競賽遊戲、電腦遊戲、線上遊戲以及家庭戲院所共同組成的快樂 會館。
「無所不在」社會產業策略
針對「無所不在」的新世代，在Ubiquitous Dream Hall中提供了幾項未來可能發展的產品：
電子產業 （Electrical Industry）
隨 著個人電子資訊終端設備、網路流動性以及相關的需求不斷增加，未來勢必會發展出相關電子設備來取代現有電腦的強大功能，例如：目前智慧電子儀器 （Intelligent Electronic Device, IED）已經被廣泛運用於監控、防範及診斷上，這就是一種無所不在環境的實現。另外，無線設頻識別技術（RFID）由於具備家庭應用及電腦通訊等多重應用 功能，也逐漸成為建構無所不在環境的重要關鍵技術。
定位服務 （Location Based Service, LBS）
定 位服務主要是透過鑲嵌在行動電話中的晶片來掌握使用者所在的位置，以提供使用者所需的相關服務。這項服務傳遞方式區分為兩大類，主要是使用行動通訊站台， 或者是使用衛星的GPRS系統；服務內容則包括了定點追蹤服務、公共安全服務、定位資訊提供服務等。近來，韓國的行動通訊公司（SK Telecom、KTF以及 LG Telecom）試圖擴展其相關服務至汽車旅行、訂位內容以及行動黃頁等領域。
無所不在的健康照護（U Healthcare）
無 所不在的健康照護主要是透過一個置入在身體上的測量儀器來自動偵測生物的狀況與變化，並將變化資料傳輸至所在地的資料收集站中，之後再進一步將資訊傳遞至 研究中心的中央伺服器上，以便觀測數據。未來，倘若這項醫學實驗能夠成功，將會改變現在人們的就醫習慣，病人未來可以不用到定點的醫院，而是在家就醫；醫 療體系至此得以邁入無所不在的健康照護世代。
智慧輪胎 （Smart Tire）
智慧輪胎是透過安裝在輪胎橡膠中的感應 器來提醒駕駛人輪胎的安全性，而當中的核心技術其實就是胎壓監測系統（Tire Pressure Monitoring System, TPMS）。透過鑲嵌在四個輪胎內的無線傳輸器及壓力與溫度感應器來紀錄輪胎行駛中的狀態，藉由偵測胎壓的變化來提醒駕駛人，輪胎可能出現破裂的情形，或 者根據路況來自動調整胎型，並在可能發生意外時對駕駛人發出警訊。
智慧展示器 （Smart Display）
所謂智慧 展示器就是一個內建無線網路的觸控式螢幕，透過無線網路來接收或傳遞伺服器上的相關資訊，讓使用者可以選擇在任何時間任何地點來獲取訊息。例如，以家裡的 電腦螢幕監控家中其他電器的狀況，形成一個完善的家庭電器監控網路。同樣地，也可以將這項技術應用在辦公環境中，讓員工可以透過無線上網方式來進行工作或 列印動作。
實體特徵識別計畫 （UFID Project）
實體特徵識別（Unique Feature Identifier, UFID）是將如建築物、文化資產、道路、橋樑、河流、港岸以及其他人工或自然的結構等各種社會資源進行認證的機制。以社會資源建構專屬ID收集相關建築 資料，建置一個社會資源資料庫，發展出整合管理社會資源的機制；此外，更進一步，希望能夠透過相關資訊的資料庫建立，減少未來在類似建設上重複成本的付 出。
FM無線電基礎的資料傳送 （FM Radio-based data broadcast）
過去，FM調頻被普遍 應用於收音機的廣播上，不過為了避免各個調頻間的相互干擾，常常導致過多頻帶被浪費，因此微軟利用這些多餘的頻帶進行 12Kbps資料的轉換，此稱做智慧型隨身物件技術（Smart Personal Object Technology, SPOT）。 SPOT可提供如新聞、氣象、交通、股票以及其他個人資訊等即時的資訊傳輸。
公車管理系統計畫 （BMS Project）
公 車管理系統（Bus Management System, BMS）是在無所不在的環境下透過GPRS或者是無線的收發器來追蹤公車的即時資訊，如現在位置、狀況、車子派遣狀況以及抵達時間等。透過公車管理系統以 及相關的系統式管理系統，來掌握公車調度的實況，可改善交通問題。目前，韓國的漢城已經開始實施相關應用。
家庭網路 （Home Networking）
電腦晶片越來越小，可加以應用的功能性就越強，此加快了數位聚合家庭網路的發展以及加速數位家庭生活的實現。當家庭、交通、社會以及電子商務的相關資訊都將可以在家庭聚合網路中呈現時，即可以創造出一個應用連結人性化智慧與科技介面的高優質生活。
新世代網絡計畫 （Next Generation Network Project）
韓 國政府在新世代網路（Next Generation Network, NGN）計畫中提到，希望創造一個結合PSTN、internet、ATM、FR、專用網路、無線網路等溝通網絡的新生活，以語音與資料組合來提供各式各 樣、多元化的多媒體服務；同時，其他國內外的企業也都預計在2010年建立一個NGN環境，讓使用者可以使用任何終端設備來連結高速網路，實現真正的數位 夢想生活。
智慧服飾 （Smart Wear）
智慧服飾是另一個資訊新時代的創新應用，例如可以穿在身上的電腦、智慧纖 維以及智慧時尚等，智慧型的服飾讓使用者藉著身上的服飾即可連結到網路上，並不受限於時間、地點以及特定的電腦設備。因此韓國認為，21世紀科技時尚將會 是IT、NT、BT以及ET等產業再創高峰的重要領域，並預計將會為紡織及時尚產業帶來新的轉變。
結論
從韓國的 Ubiquitous Dream Hall中可以發現，韓國政府對於未來的環境規劃構想已成雛形，並且追求不斷的創新；此外，韓國政府同時也大力推動相關的產業與基礎建設，清清楚楚地展現 將韓國帶上全球資訊通訊發展領先國家的雄心，而Ubiquitous Dream Hall的呈現，更是表現出政府企圖將無所不在生活推入國民生活環境的細膩之處。
【本文轉載自：資策會FIND網站「趨勢導航」單元】
http://mag.udn.com/mag/dc/printpage.jsp?f_ART_ID=9242
‧資策會FIND 2005/03/29
韓國政府為推動「無所不在(Ubiquitous)」的實現，與韓國當地的資通訊業者合作，在漢城推出了Ubiquitous Dream Hall，讓韓國民眾可以一窺無所不在的夢想生活。
作者：張玉霜(FIND研究員)
在 歷經過去數年上網人口提升以及寬頻產業、技術與服務等層次的競爭後，資訊先進各國著眼於無線設備與技術的發展，紛紛提出如「無所不在 （ubiquitous）」這樣的二十一世紀資訊時代新口號。最早提出這項概念政策的，是日本政府於2004年3月所提、8月確認政策核心的「u- Japan（ubiquitous Japan）政策，希望以資訊技術創造安全、安心的無所不在社會；而同樣在資訊通訊發展方面居領先地位的韓國，在2004年的「IT 839 計畫」中，也提出將以八大服務、三項基礎建設、九項成長動力創造無所不在社會的政策。
韓國政府在其一系列的e化過程中，一直以成為全球電 信及IT建設產業的龍頭而努力，無論是政府與企業、企業與企業間的合作關係皆有相當多的成功案例；而當無所不在的IT技術被視為是成功站穩全球市場關鍵因 素的此時，政府與業者（如KT、三星電子、LG電子、SK Telecom、KTF、LG Telecom等企業）立即緊密合作，共同運用無所不在的資訊通訊應用技術，建置了一個示範應用環境：「Ubiquitous Dream Hall（無所不在的夢想會館）」。
Ubiquitous Dream Hall簡介
所謂的無所不在環境包含五個A，分 別是「任何時間（Any time）」、「任何地點（Any where）」、「任何設備（Any device）」、「任何服務（Any service）」以及「安全性（All Security）」。未來，透過有線與無線所建構而成的網絡，不管使用者是在任何一個工作環境中，都可以即時獲取所需的資訊與服務；同時，無所不在的電 腦與網路通訊環境也將讓奈米科技（Nanotechnology, NT）與生物科技（Biotechnology, BT）跟IT技術產生強大的連結。
圖：無所不在的構想
(資料來源：韓國MIC 資料整理：ACI-FIND)
韓 國的Ubiquitous Dream Hall是以生活中各項可能的資訊通訊應用建置成一個生活環境，內有數位家庭中心（Village Hall-Digital Home）、社區中心（Village Hall-Neighborhood Facilities）、娛樂中心（Entertainment Hall）以及技術展示中心（Technical Show-room）。參觀者可在數位家庭中心以及社區中心裡，體驗在家庭、醫院的高速網絡以及學校、咖啡館和其他社區中心活動的數位生活；在技術展示館 裡，則可透過跨世代的產品讓參觀者體驗下一世代IT技術的發展；而娛樂中心中則是一個由虛擬的競賽遊戲、電腦遊戲、線上遊戲以及家庭戲院所共同組成的快樂 會館。
「無所不在」社會產業策略
針對「無所不在」的新世代，在Ubiquitous Dream Hall中提供了幾項未來可能發展的產品：
電子產業 （Electrical Industry）
隨 著個人電子資訊終端設備、網路流動性以及相關的需求不斷增加，未來勢必會發展出相關電子設備來取代現有電腦的強大功能，例如：目前智慧電子儀器 （Intelligent Electronic Device, IED）已經被廣泛運用於監控、防範及診斷上，這就是一種無所不在環境的實現。另外，無線設頻識別技術（RFID）由於具備家庭應用及電腦通訊等多重應用 功能，也逐漸成為建構無所不在環境的重要關鍵技術。
定位服務 （Location Based Service, LBS）
定 位服務主要是透過鑲嵌在行動電話中的晶片來掌握使用者所在的位置，以提供使用者所需的相關服務。這項服務傳遞方式區分為兩大類，主要是使用行動通訊站台， 或者是使用衛星的GPRS系統；服務內容則包括了定點追蹤服務、公共安全服務、定位資訊提供服務等。近來，韓國的行動通訊公司（SK Telecom、KTF以及 LG Telecom）試圖擴展其相關服務至汽車旅行、訂位內容以及行動黃頁等領域。
無所不在的健康照護（U Healthcare）
無 所不在的健康照護主要是透過一個置入在身體上的測量儀器來自動偵測生物的狀況與變化，並將變化資料傳輸至所在地的資料收集站中，之後再進一步將資訊傳遞至 研究中心的中央伺服器上，以便觀測數據。未來，倘若這項醫學實驗能夠成功，將會改變現在人們的就醫習慣，病人未來可以不用到定點的醫院，而是在家就醫；醫 療體系至此得以邁入無所不在的健康照護世代。
智慧輪胎 （Smart Tire）
智慧輪胎是透過安裝在輪胎橡膠中的感應 器來提醒駕駛人輪胎的安全性，而當中的核心技術其實就是胎壓監測系統（Tire Pressure Monitoring System, TPMS）。透過鑲嵌在四個輪胎內的無線傳輸器及壓力與溫度感應器來紀錄輪胎行駛中的狀態，藉由偵測胎壓的變化來提醒駕駛人，輪胎可能出現破裂的情形，或 者根據路況來自動調整胎型，並在可能發生意外時對駕駛人發出警訊。
智慧展示器 （Smart Display）
所謂智慧 展示器就是一個內建無線網路的觸控式螢幕，透過無線網路來接收或傳遞伺服器上的相關資訊，讓使用者可以選擇在任何時間任何地點來獲取訊息。例如，以家裡的 電腦螢幕監控家中其他電器的狀況，形成一個完善的家庭電器監控網路。同樣地，也可以將這項技術應用在辦公環境中，讓員工可以透過無線上網方式來進行工作或 列印動作。
實體特徵識別計畫 （UFID Project）
實體特徵識別（Unique Feature Identifier, UFID）是將如建築物、文化資產、道路、橋樑、河流、港岸以及其他人工或自然的結構等各種社會資源進行認證的機制。以社會資源建構專屬ID收集相關建築 資料，建置一個社會資源資料庫，發展出整合管理社會資源的機制；此外，更進一步，希望能夠透過相關資訊的資料庫建立，減少未來在類似建設上重複成本的付 出。
FM無線電基礎的資料傳送 （FM Radio-based data broadcast）
過去，FM調頻被普遍 應用於收音機的廣播上，不過為了避免各個調頻間的相互干擾，常常導致過多頻帶被浪費，因此微軟利用這些多餘的頻帶進行 12Kbps資料的轉換，此稱做智慧型隨身物件技術（Smart Personal Object Technology, SPOT）。 SPOT可提供如新聞、氣象、交通、股票以及其他個人資訊等即時的資訊傳輸。
公車管理系統計畫 （BMS Project）
公 車管理系統（Bus Management System, BMS）是在無所不在的環境下透過GPRS或者是無線的收發器來追蹤公車的即時資訊，如現在位置、狀況、車子派遣狀況以及抵達時間等。透過公車管理系統以 及相關的系統式管理系統，來掌握公車調度的實況，可改善交通問題。目前，韓國的漢城已經開始實施相關應用。
家庭網路 （Home Networking）
電腦晶片越來越小，可加以應用的功能性就越強，此加快了數位聚合家庭網路的發展以及加速數位家庭生活的實現。當家庭、交通、社會以及電子商務的相關資訊都將可以在家庭聚合網路中呈現時，即可以創造出一個應用連結人性化智慧與科技介面的高優質生活。
新世代網絡計畫 （Next Generation Network Project）
韓 國政府在新世代網路（Next Generation Network, NGN）計畫中提到，希望創造一個結合PSTN、internet、ATM、FR、專用網路、無線網路等溝通網絡的新生活，以語音與資料組合來提供各式各 樣、多元化的多媒體服務；同時，其他國內外的企業也都預計在2010年建立一個NGN環境，讓使用者可以使用任何終端設備來連結高速網路，實現真正的數位 夢想生活。
智慧服飾 （Smart Wear）
智慧服飾是另一個資訊新時代的創新應用，例如可以穿在身上的電腦、智慧纖 維以及智慧時尚等，智慧型的服飾讓使用者藉著身上的服飾即可連結到網路上，並不受限於時間、地點以及特定的電腦設備。因此韓國認為，21世紀科技時尚將會 是IT、NT、BT以及ET等產業再創高峰的重要領域，並預計將會為紡織及時尚產業帶來新的轉變。
結論
從韓國的 Ubiquitous Dream Hall中可以發現，韓國政府對於未來的環境規劃構想已成雛形，並且追求不斷的創新；此外，韓國政府同時也大力推動相關的產業與基礎建設，清清楚楚地展現 將韓國帶上全球資訊通訊發展領先國家的雄心，而Ubiquitous Dream Hall的呈現，更是表現出政府企圖將無所不在生活推入國民生活環境的細膩之處。
【本文轉載自：資策會FIND網站「趨勢導航」單元】
未來科技大勢：極簡的科技與消失的電腦
未來科技大勢：極簡的科技與消失的電腦
‧數位時代雙週 2005/03/15
電腦是二十世紀最具特色的科技，而未來的科技將會是如何？這問號不僅全世界科技公司全力研究，也是著名的美國麻省理工學院媒體實驗室（Media Lab）金頭腦們探究的中心議題。
作者：鄧兆旻
一個月前，跟一個念博士班的朋友一起吃飯，他花了近四十分鐘跟我炫耀他最新買的PDA （個人數位助理），功能多到講不完。我對於許多他所展現的功能確實是相當驚奇，不過他最後提到的一個問題，卻更有意義：「蘋果電腦的iPod一台要三百美元，只能聽音樂。我這台最新型的PDA只要二五○美元，什麼都能做，真不知道為什麼有人要去買iPod？」
朋友所說的確實沒錯。「聽音樂」這個功能，在那本厚達兩百頁的PDA使用說明書裡面，大概只佔了四頁篇幅；從最簡單的「幫媽媽算這個月還剩下多少銀兩可以買保養品」，到「編輯家裡的拉布拉多跟波斯貓調情的影片」，到「做跟大老闆們簡報的投影片」，功能目不暇給。所以究竟為什麼單一功能的 iPod隨身聽能夠如此大賣，而新力（Sony）卻決定停下它那著名的Cleo PDA生產線呢？
從一個「互動設計」（Interaction Design）研究者的角度來看，整件事情的關鍵，其實在於：「簡約」（Simplicity），已經成為當代人們面對資訊科技的基本態度與思考。
科技極簡主義－－現在的個人電腦就像一把瑞士刀，如此複雜，也如此讓人感到難以親近
願意讀厚厚說明手冊的電子產品愛好者，畢竟只是人口中的少數。數位隨身聽沒有其它功能，你只能用它來聽音樂，但是也正因為其簡單，所以接受度大大提高。使用者對這項產品的期待，只會停留在「聽音樂」的功能上；使用者對產品的感知能力（cognitive perception），也是侷限在「這是一台聽音樂的機器」上，因此不會被過多的功能給淹沒，而造成購買上的疑慮。
資訊科技的「極簡主義」，無論從產業界或是學界的角度來看，都已經正式成為主流。「When less is more（當少，變成多）」，應該是資訊電子相關產業與學界的工作者，都應該反覆思考咀嚼的一句箴言。
使用新定義：找出瑞士刀與菜刀之間的差異
從使用者的角度來看，這樣的現象我們可以用一組對比來解釋：一台PDA，可以比喻成一隻瑞士刀；而一台MP3隨身聽，則可以比喻成一隻廚房裡的切菜刀。雖然瑞士刀的功能百百種，可是如果你要廚師用瑞士刀來切菜，恐怕只會換來一對白眼。我們現在的個人電腦就是被設計成瑞士刀，要一台電腦可以做所有的事情，從「打報告」到「看電視」，從「查天氣」到「上網交友」，從「算成績」到「畫海報」……，正是這樣的設計模式，造成電腦如此複雜，也如此讓人感到難以親近。
當今的個人電腦互動模式，並不適合所有的人來「無痛苦」操作，就好像瑞士刀上的刀，不可能適合所有跟「刀」有關係的工作是一樣的。無論軟體的「使用者介面」如何設計，都很難讓用家可以輕鬆的完成「他想要完成的任務」。如果我們回到PDA跟iPod的例子上來看，PDA在播放音樂上的功能，可能跟iPod沒有兩樣，可是在使用者介面上的設計，就必須利用既有的按鈕和手寫筆，來複雜地完成播放音樂的功能，而不能像iPod那樣可以有一個特製好用的轉輪，或是專門設計給選擇音樂的按鍵來讓使用者使用－－這時你不難感受：「Simplicity」，才是人機介面互動的真諦。
除了介面設計上簡單易懂之外，功能不在多，在精。在設計未來消費電子產品的路線上，「菜刀模式」比「瑞士刀模式」，更能夠讓產品深入到跨客層的市場。如果以為提供超多功能在同一台電腦或是PDA，能夠增加產品對多種客層的吸引力，其實是無視使用者對「過多功能」所產生的本能抗拒。
如果把時間軸拉長至十年以上，我認為：能否將「資訊科技的極簡主義」深化在思考之中，會成為產品是否能真正觸動人心的最重點之一。
應用新趨勢：當電腦無所不在會帶來災難？
隨著軟、硬體技術的發展以及科技大廠半利誘、半強迫的推銷，我們未來的生活環境裡，將會充斥著不輸給現在桌上型電腦能力的「嵌入式系統」的電腦。以後大家手上的馬克杯，腳上穿的鞋子，檯燈，原子筆，大門，冰箱等等都會有電腦在其中－－我們現在必須開始思考如何讓這樣的趨勢，不會變成另一個複雜的災難！
如果說現在連要透過無線網路，把家裡兩台電腦連結到網際網路，都已不是一個簡單的工作了，讓我們想像一下許多科技大公司所提倡的所謂「未來智慧家庭」的畫面：你家的電視、冰箱、微波爐、餐桌、檯燈、衣櫃、盤子、咖啡機、床……通通都透過無線網路連在一起，當床感應到你起床了，就通知咖啡機煮咖啡，冰箱裡面牛奶沒了，就顯示一個畫面在電視上提醒你－－這些美好遠景，真的是我們想要的，真的是能讓我們的未來生活，更加輕鬆寫意的資訊科技嗎？如果你冰箱裡的電腦當機，結果忘記通知你上禮拜買的豬肉壞掉了，或是你馬克杯上的電腦「提醒你這杯咖啡很燙」的這個功能壞掉了，那會是什麼樣的情形？現在我們對付一台電腦就已經動不動搥鍵盤、摔滑鼠了，將來我們要對付上百個遍佈家中的電腦，我們會不會被這些東西搞的想燒掉我們的未來冰箱，或是踹爛你家的夢幻衣櫥呢?
如果資訊電腦產業仍然不能認知到把使用者對於科技的極簡要求，放在設計思考的最上端，我們可以想像類似BMW新7系列的iDrive 「設計災難」，恐怕會一再地發生，直到使用者受夠了為止。
消失的電腦－－所謂「消失」，其實是因為工具的絕佳設計，而讓使用者在互動的過程中，不會感覺到它的存在。
在全球互動設計跟人機介面領域裡，最重要的一個研究機構，就是美國矽谷的全錄帕克（Xerox PARC）實驗室。這個實驗室做出了世界上第一台個人電腦（Personal Computer）雛形，發明且設計出所謂的「桌面」（desktop）的使用「隱喻」（metaphor）。三十年來，已經有數以億計的電腦以這樣的使用比喻，呈現在我們的生活周遭。但是就在一九九一年九月，全錄帕克實驗室的科學家懷瑟（Mark Weiser）在《科學美國人》雜誌上提出一篇重要的文章「二十一世紀的電腦」（The Computer for 21th Century）。
在這篇文章中，懷瑟直接了當地說明：持續三十多年的個人電腦的互動模式將會成為過去，而他所提倡的「遍及式運算」（Ubiquitous Computing）會將之取代。通篇文章最重要的觀念，就是開頭的那兩句話：
「影響最深刻的科技，是那些最終以『消失』的型態存在的科技。這些科技慢慢的深化在我們的生活中，一直到變成生活的一部份，進而消失。」
設計新思維：使用時完全感受不到工具存在
懷瑟的願景，基本上是認為將來所謂的「電腦」，會出現在各式各樣的實體物件當中，以一種「消失」的存在方式，與人類的生活緊密結合在一起。但是我們上段提到的所謂「未來智慧型家庭」的畫面：電腦嵌入在實體物件中，而且通通透過無線網路連在一起，並不是他所想要強調的重點。
懷瑟「遍及式運算」內涵的真正精神，是他揭示了一個全新的科技互動設計上的觀念。他認為資訊科技以及電腦的存在，應該以使用者角度來出發，深入分析每一項使用者進行的活動（諸如插花，畫畫，查字典，打電話，掃地等等），並且研究、設計相對應的「特製化」的實體工具（physical tools），來幫助使用者達成他的任務。
這樣的工具，無論是軟體或是硬體，必須設計到讓使用者可以在使用的過程中，完全沒有意識到這些工具的存在，從而使用者能真正專心在需要注意力的活動上。要達到這樣的目的，像個人電腦或是PDA這樣的「統包」式（generalized）的工具，是無法提供的。就好像PDA雖也可以播音樂，但是在播音樂這件工作上，不可能設計到讓整個使用者的「互動經驗」，得以跟專門播放音樂的iPod一樣的順暢。
這樣的設計理念，代表了所有跟使用者要進行之工作「無關的」功能，都應該全部剔除。「互動介面」設計師應該要專注在該項設計所要支援的任務上（例如，杯子能偵測並顯示液體的溫度），而不應該去設計跟任務不相關的功能（例如，杯子能顯示一週天氣等等），進而簡化系統架構，而達到真正的「簡約」設計目的。
從研究的角度來看，要怎麼讓這些工具真正能夠深入到人的生活之中，而且讓人在互動的過程中忘記電腦的存在，是最具有挑戰性的地方。
互動新模式：盡可能做到簡單又好用
所謂「消失」，其實是因為工具的絕佳設計，而讓工具本身完全地整合（fit in）到工作執行的動作裡，讓使用者在互動的過程中，不會感覺到工具的存在。就好像我們用筆寫字，除非筆斷掉或是沒有墨水了，我們才會將我們互動的注意力轉移到筆本身。在寫字的過程中，我們不會去意識到筆的存在，而是一直專心於寫出好文章以及深刻意義上。這便是德國哲學家海德格（Martin Heidegger）所謂的「ready-to-hand」，也就是我們中文裡所說的「就手」。
雖然說我們都知道要把互動介面設計得愈簡單愈好，但同時又要能達到支援某項工作的目的，也是種兩難；因此，如何找到最佳的簡約模式，成了身為「互動設計/工業設計」者的最大挑戰。愛因斯坦所說的：「把所有東西，盡可能的做到最簡單，但是不能過於簡單，」將成為未來資訊科技極簡主義所追求的聖杯（holy grail）。
無論是資訊電子產業公司的高階主管們，或是工業設計、平面設計、互動設計師們，現在應該是－－重新由使用者角度出發，再思考究竟應該提供給使用者何種產品與功能的時候了。能夠從「Simplicity」出發，設計出來的產品不止對使用者會是真正好用、就手；對公司來說，也會馬上簡化相關的開發流程與執行細節，可以說是雙贏的方向。
對於任何一個對思考未來科技的面貌有興趣的人，當思考在接下來五十年資訊電子科技該是怎麼樣發展的時候，除了天天接受各大廠的願景廣告裡轟炸外，我們應該有另一條思考的方向，就是如何把「極簡主義」帶到人與機器的互動上，讓機器與電腦能夠真正的「消失」在我們的生活之中，就好像我們用電只要插插頭，不用去扭開發電機，要用吸塵器只要開開關，不用去轉馬達一樣，「電」跟「馬達」已經成功的消失在我們生活中了，而電腦消失在我們的生活之中的日子，什麼時候會到來呢？讓我們一起創造與期待吧……。
★案例：
忘了極簡的設計災難——BMW的iDrive
BMW二○○三年推出的「新7」系列的車系中，重新設計了一套稱之為「iDrive」的電腦輔助駕車系統，從排檔桿到儀表板等等整套重新設計，提供的功能大概有七、八百種，連BMW公司自己的主管，都說不清楚到底有多少功能，BMW有著頂尖的工程師與設計師，似乎他們把「新7」當成「太空戰艦」來設計。
美國《Car and Driver》（人車誌）稱這台「新7」為，「一個瘋狂的嘗試，過份使用電腦晶片想取代直覺式的駕駛……，我們的資深編輯花了十分鐘，才把車子成功發動！」BMW這個例子是最近所發生的相當標準的「未來災難」的代表。工程師與設計師竭盡所能把數不盡的功能作進去，還為了控制這些功能，設計了一個所謂的 iDrive 控制系統，卻忘記了開車的駕駛不想玩電動，不想當艦長，只想上車的時候，可以讓四個輪子轉啊轉地，把自己送到目的地就好。很明顯的，「Simplicity」在這BMW企業裡，並沒有被放在最頂層來思考。
「音樂瓶」－－讓科技消失的產品
麻省理工學院媒體實驗室教授石井裕，為他遠在日本的母親設計了一款「氣象報測」器，但－－為什麼，會是一個瓶子呢？
全錄帕克實驗室科學家懷瑟雖然已在一九九九年七月過世，但是他的理念已經在美國「人機介面」研究圈內，拓展並傳承了下來。在麻省理工學院的媒體實驗室，由石井裕（Hiroshi Ishii）教授所帶領的「Tangible Media」（可觸摸的媒體）研究小組所做的許多研究專案，便是受到懷瑟的啟發。
在一九九九年計算機協會（ACM） 舉辦的世界最頂級電腦圖學會議（SIGGRAPH）上，「Tangible Media」小組發表的「音樂瓶」（Music Bottle）便是其中一個非常漂亮的例子。圖中的瓶子是設計給石井教授在日本的母親使用。當她把瓶子的瓶蓋打開的時候，瓶子會根據在美國波士頓當地的天氣的不同，而播放不同的音樂，進而藉由音樂就可得知波士頓當時的天氣。同樣地，石井教授也可以在美國透過打開瓶蓋，而得知他的母親在日本的天氣如何。
我們可以從很多層面，來看這個設計的獨到之處：
首先，這是一個非常漂亮、化繁為簡的使用者介面設計。讓我們想像一下現在使用電腦查詢天氣的方式：打開電腦，開啟作業系統，輸入密碼，找到瀏覽器並且執行程式，輸入可以查詢天氣的網站，再想辦法選到美國波士頓劍橋地區，進而得知當地天氣。這樣的互動經驗，與打開瓶蓋「聽到鳥叫聲就是天氣晴，聽到下雨聲就是下雨」，兩者比較起來，哪一個對石井教授母親，會是比較好用易學呢？而對要教會他母親使用的石井教授而言，那一個比較容易教會？也是很明顯的了。
如果我們深入一點去探究，這個介面之所以好用，是因為它利用了人類對「瓶子」這樣的物品，已經有了既定的人物互動模式：「打開瓶蓋à得到內容」（如果是香水瓶的話，那內容就是香味跟香水）。因此對使用者來說，「看到瓶子à打開蓋子à得到內容」（在這個例子下，是天氣的資訊），是完全符合人類使用這個工具的預期和習慣的。也因此使用者可以輕易學習與瞭解，因為這個介面所利用的比喻「瓶子」，是我們所熟知的。使用者不需要為了得到天氣資訊，而特別去學習「如何開瓶蓋」這件事情。但是如果是要透過現在的網頁得到資訊，就必須學會「開機」、「瀏覽器」、「漫遊」等等的「不尋常」工具了。
此外，因為只要設計給使用者來得到天氣資訊，所以才有出簡單的介面讓使用者使用（打開瓶蓋à聽聲音）。如果這個瓶子又要能算試算表還要能播電影，那瓶子的介面將會變的非常複雜、難用，而瓶子內部為了支援這些無用功能的軟硬體，也會使整個架構變得十分複雜。
最後，我們從「音樂瓶」的例子中可以想像，這樣的工具可以很輕易地「消失」在我們的意識當中，達到懷瑟所謂「以『消失』的狀態，存在於生活當中」的科技。如果你想要得到天氣的資訊，只要簡單的把瓶蓋打開，而不需要把所有的精神都放在把電腦打開，開啟瀏覽器、瀏覽網頁這些事上面。這個「天氣香水瓶」可以深入地整合在我們的日常生活之中，而不是像桌上的那台電腦一樣，很突兀地入侵到我們所熟習的世界裡。
‧數位時代雙週 2005/03/15
電腦是二十世紀最具特色的科技，而未來的科技將會是如何？這問號不僅全世界科技公司全力研究，也是著名的美國麻省理工學院媒體實驗室（Media Lab）金頭腦們探究的中心議題。
作者：鄧兆旻
一個月前，跟一個念博士班的朋友一起吃飯，他花了近四十分鐘跟我炫耀他最新買的PDA （個人數位助理），功能多到講不完。我對於許多他所展現的功能確實是相當驚奇，不過他最後提到的一個問題，卻更有意義：「蘋果電腦的iPod一台要三百美元，只能聽音樂。我這台最新型的PDA只要二五○美元，什麼都能做，真不知道為什麼有人要去買iPod？」
朋友所說的確實沒錯。「聽音樂」這個功能，在那本厚達兩百頁的PDA使用說明書裡面，大概只佔了四頁篇幅；從最簡單的「幫媽媽算這個月還剩下多少銀兩可以買保養品」，到「編輯家裡的拉布拉多跟波斯貓調情的影片」，到「做跟大老闆們簡報的投影片」，功能目不暇給。所以究竟為什麼單一功能的 iPod隨身聽能夠如此大賣，而新力（Sony）卻決定停下它那著名的Cleo PDA生產線呢？
從一個「互動設計」（Interaction Design）研究者的角度來看，整件事情的關鍵，其實在於：「簡約」（Simplicity），已經成為當代人們面對資訊科技的基本態度與思考。
科技極簡主義－－現在的個人電腦就像一把瑞士刀，如此複雜，也如此讓人感到難以親近
願意讀厚厚說明手冊的電子產品愛好者，畢竟只是人口中的少數。數位隨身聽沒有其它功能，你只能用它來聽音樂，但是也正因為其簡單，所以接受度大大提高。使用者對這項產品的期待，只會停留在「聽音樂」的功能上；使用者對產品的感知能力（cognitive perception），也是侷限在「這是一台聽音樂的機器」上，因此不會被過多的功能給淹沒，而造成購買上的疑慮。
資訊科技的「極簡主義」，無論從產業界或是學界的角度來看，都已經正式成為主流。「When less is more（當少，變成多）」，應該是資訊電子相關產業與學界的工作者，都應該反覆思考咀嚼的一句箴言。
使用新定義：找出瑞士刀與菜刀之間的差異
從使用者的角度來看，這樣的現象我們可以用一組對比來解釋：一台PDA，可以比喻成一隻瑞士刀；而一台MP3隨身聽，則可以比喻成一隻廚房裡的切菜刀。雖然瑞士刀的功能百百種，可是如果你要廚師用瑞士刀來切菜，恐怕只會換來一對白眼。我們現在的個人電腦就是被設計成瑞士刀，要一台電腦可以做所有的事情，從「打報告」到「看電視」，從「查天氣」到「上網交友」，從「算成績」到「畫海報」……，正是這樣的設計模式，造成電腦如此複雜，也如此讓人感到難以親近。
當今的個人電腦互動模式，並不適合所有的人來「無痛苦」操作，就好像瑞士刀上的刀，不可能適合所有跟「刀」有關係的工作是一樣的。無論軟體的「使用者介面」如何設計，都很難讓用家可以輕鬆的完成「他想要完成的任務」。如果我們回到PDA跟iPod的例子上來看，PDA在播放音樂上的功能，可能跟iPod沒有兩樣，可是在使用者介面上的設計，就必須利用既有的按鈕和手寫筆，來複雜地完成播放音樂的功能，而不能像iPod那樣可以有一個特製好用的轉輪，或是專門設計給選擇音樂的按鍵來讓使用者使用－－這時你不難感受：「Simplicity」，才是人機介面互動的真諦。
除了介面設計上簡單易懂之外，功能不在多，在精。在設計未來消費電子產品的路線上，「菜刀模式」比「瑞士刀模式」，更能夠讓產品深入到跨客層的市場。如果以為提供超多功能在同一台電腦或是PDA，能夠增加產品對多種客層的吸引力，其實是無視使用者對「過多功能」所產生的本能抗拒。
如果把時間軸拉長至十年以上，我認為：能否將「資訊科技的極簡主義」深化在思考之中，會成為產品是否能真正觸動人心的最重點之一。
應用新趨勢：當電腦無所不在會帶來災難？
隨著軟、硬體技術的發展以及科技大廠半利誘、半強迫的推銷，我們未來的生活環境裡，將會充斥著不輸給現在桌上型電腦能力的「嵌入式系統」的電腦。以後大家手上的馬克杯，腳上穿的鞋子，檯燈，原子筆，大門，冰箱等等都會有電腦在其中－－我們現在必須開始思考如何讓這樣的趨勢，不會變成另一個複雜的災難！
如果說現在連要透過無線網路，把家裡兩台電腦連結到網際網路，都已不是一個簡單的工作了，讓我們想像一下許多科技大公司所提倡的所謂「未來智慧家庭」的畫面：你家的電視、冰箱、微波爐、餐桌、檯燈、衣櫃、盤子、咖啡機、床……通通都透過無線網路連在一起，當床感應到你起床了，就通知咖啡機煮咖啡，冰箱裡面牛奶沒了，就顯示一個畫面在電視上提醒你－－這些美好遠景，真的是我們想要的，真的是能讓我們的未來生活，更加輕鬆寫意的資訊科技嗎？如果你冰箱裡的電腦當機，結果忘記通知你上禮拜買的豬肉壞掉了，或是你馬克杯上的電腦「提醒你這杯咖啡很燙」的這個功能壞掉了，那會是什麼樣的情形？現在我們對付一台電腦就已經動不動搥鍵盤、摔滑鼠了，將來我們要對付上百個遍佈家中的電腦，我們會不會被這些東西搞的想燒掉我們的未來冰箱，或是踹爛你家的夢幻衣櫥呢?
如果資訊電腦產業仍然不能認知到把使用者對於科技的極簡要求，放在設計思考的最上端，我們可以想像類似BMW新7系列的iDrive 「設計災難」，恐怕會一再地發生，直到使用者受夠了為止。
消失的電腦－－所謂「消失」，其實是因為工具的絕佳設計，而讓使用者在互動的過程中，不會感覺到它的存在。
在全球互動設計跟人機介面領域裡，最重要的一個研究機構，就是美國矽谷的全錄帕克（Xerox PARC）實驗室。這個實驗室做出了世界上第一台個人電腦（Personal Computer）雛形，發明且設計出所謂的「桌面」（desktop）的使用「隱喻」（metaphor）。三十年來，已經有數以億計的電腦以這樣的使用比喻，呈現在我們的生活周遭。但是就在一九九一年九月，全錄帕克實驗室的科學家懷瑟（Mark Weiser）在《科學美國人》雜誌上提出一篇重要的文章「二十一世紀的電腦」（The Computer for 21th Century）。
在這篇文章中，懷瑟直接了當地說明：持續三十多年的個人電腦的互動模式將會成為過去，而他所提倡的「遍及式運算」（Ubiquitous Computing）會將之取代。通篇文章最重要的觀念，就是開頭的那兩句話：
「影響最深刻的科技，是那些最終以『消失』的型態存在的科技。這些科技慢慢的深化在我們的生活中，一直到變成生活的一部份，進而消失。」
設計新思維：使用時完全感受不到工具存在
懷瑟的願景，基本上是認為將來所謂的「電腦」，會出現在各式各樣的實體物件當中，以一種「消失」的存在方式，與人類的生活緊密結合在一起。但是我們上段提到的所謂「未來智慧型家庭」的畫面：電腦嵌入在實體物件中，而且通通透過無線網路連在一起，並不是他所想要強調的重點。
懷瑟「遍及式運算」內涵的真正精神，是他揭示了一個全新的科技互動設計上的觀念。他認為資訊科技以及電腦的存在，應該以使用者角度來出發，深入分析每一項使用者進行的活動（諸如插花，畫畫，查字典，打電話，掃地等等），並且研究、設計相對應的「特製化」的實體工具（physical tools），來幫助使用者達成他的任務。
這樣的工具，無論是軟體或是硬體，必須設計到讓使用者可以在使用的過程中，完全沒有意識到這些工具的存在，從而使用者能真正專心在需要注意力的活動上。要達到這樣的目的，像個人電腦或是PDA這樣的「統包」式（generalized）的工具，是無法提供的。就好像PDA雖也可以播音樂，但是在播音樂這件工作上，不可能設計到讓整個使用者的「互動經驗」，得以跟專門播放音樂的iPod一樣的順暢。
這樣的設計理念，代表了所有跟使用者要進行之工作「無關的」功能，都應該全部剔除。「互動介面」設計師應該要專注在該項設計所要支援的任務上（例如，杯子能偵測並顯示液體的溫度），而不應該去設計跟任務不相關的功能（例如，杯子能顯示一週天氣等等），進而簡化系統架構，而達到真正的「簡約」設計目的。
從研究的角度來看，要怎麼讓這些工具真正能夠深入到人的生活之中，而且讓人在互動的過程中忘記電腦的存在，是最具有挑戰性的地方。
互動新模式：盡可能做到簡單又好用
所謂「消失」，其實是因為工具的絕佳設計，而讓工具本身完全地整合（fit in）到工作執行的動作裡，讓使用者在互動的過程中，不會感覺到工具的存在。就好像我們用筆寫字，除非筆斷掉或是沒有墨水了，我們才會將我們互動的注意力轉移到筆本身。在寫字的過程中，我們不會去意識到筆的存在，而是一直專心於寫出好文章以及深刻意義上。這便是德國哲學家海德格（Martin Heidegger）所謂的「ready-to-hand」，也就是我們中文裡所說的「就手」。
雖然說我們都知道要把互動介面設計得愈簡單愈好，但同時又要能達到支援某項工作的目的，也是種兩難；因此，如何找到最佳的簡約模式，成了身為「互動設計/工業設計」者的最大挑戰。愛因斯坦所說的：「把所有東西，盡可能的做到最簡單，但是不能過於簡單，」將成為未來資訊科技極簡主義所追求的聖杯（holy grail）。
無論是資訊電子產業公司的高階主管們，或是工業設計、平面設計、互動設計師們，現在應該是－－重新由使用者角度出發，再思考究竟應該提供給使用者何種產品與功能的時候了。能夠從「Simplicity」出發，設計出來的產品不止對使用者會是真正好用、就手；對公司來說，也會馬上簡化相關的開發流程與執行細節，可以說是雙贏的方向。
對於任何一個對思考未來科技的面貌有興趣的人，當思考在接下來五十年資訊電子科技該是怎麼樣發展的時候，除了天天接受各大廠的願景廣告裡轟炸外，我們應該有另一條思考的方向，就是如何把「極簡主義」帶到人與機器的互動上，讓機器與電腦能夠真正的「消失」在我們的生活之中，就好像我們用電只要插插頭，不用去扭開發電機，要用吸塵器只要開開關，不用去轉馬達一樣，「電」跟「馬達」已經成功的消失在我們生活中了，而電腦消失在我們的生活之中的日子，什麼時候會到來呢？讓我們一起創造與期待吧……。
★案例：
忘了極簡的設計災難——BMW的iDrive
BMW二○○三年推出的「新7」系列的車系中，重新設計了一套稱之為「iDrive」的電腦輔助駕車系統，從排檔桿到儀表板等等整套重新設計，提供的功能大概有七、八百種，連BMW公司自己的主管，都說不清楚到底有多少功能，BMW有著頂尖的工程師與設計師，似乎他們把「新7」當成「太空戰艦」來設計。
美國《Car and Driver》（人車誌）稱這台「新7」為，「一個瘋狂的嘗試，過份使用電腦晶片想取代直覺式的駕駛……，我們的資深編輯花了十分鐘，才把車子成功發動！」BMW這個例子是最近所發生的相當標準的「未來災難」的代表。工程師與設計師竭盡所能把數不盡的功能作進去，還為了控制這些功能，設計了一個所謂的 iDrive 控制系統，卻忘記了開車的駕駛不想玩電動，不想當艦長，只想上車的時候，可以讓四個輪子轉啊轉地，把自己送到目的地就好。很明顯的，「Simplicity」在這BMW企業裡，並沒有被放在最頂層來思考。
「音樂瓶」－－讓科技消失的產品
麻省理工學院媒體實驗室教授石井裕，為他遠在日本的母親設計了一款「氣象報測」器，但－－為什麼，會是一個瓶子呢？
全錄帕克實驗室科學家懷瑟雖然已在一九九九年七月過世，但是他的理念已經在美國「人機介面」研究圈內，拓展並傳承了下來。在麻省理工學院的媒體實驗室，由石井裕（Hiroshi Ishii）教授所帶領的「Tangible Media」（可觸摸的媒體）研究小組所做的許多研究專案，便是受到懷瑟的啟發。
在一九九九年計算機協會（ACM） 舉辦的世界最頂級電腦圖學會議（SIGGRAPH）上，「Tangible Media」小組發表的「音樂瓶」（Music Bottle）便是其中一個非常漂亮的例子。圖中的瓶子是設計給石井教授在日本的母親使用。當她把瓶子的瓶蓋打開的時候，瓶子會根據在美國波士頓當地的天氣的不同，而播放不同的音樂，進而藉由音樂就可得知波士頓當時的天氣。同樣地，石井教授也可以在美國透過打開瓶蓋，而得知他的母親在日本的天氣如何。
我們可以從很多層面，來看這個設計的獨到之處：
首先，這是一個非常漂亮、化繁為簡的使用者介面設計。讓我們想像一下現在使用電腦查詢天氣的方式：打開電腦，開啟作業系統，輸入密碼，找到瀏覽器並且執行程式，輸入可以查詢天氣的網站，再想辦法選到美國波士頓劍橋地區，進而得知當地天氣。這樣的互動經驗，與打開瓶蓋「聽到鳥叫聲就是天氣晴，聽到下雨聲就是下雨」，兩者比較起來，哪一個對石井教授母親，會是比較好用易學呢？而對要教會他母親使用的石井教授而言，那一個比較容易教會？也是很明顯的了。
如果我們深入一點去探究，這個介面之所以好用，是因為它利用了人類對「瓶子」這樣的物品，已經有了既定的人物互動模式：「打開瓶蓋à得到內容」（如果是香水瓶的話，那內容就是香味跟香水）。因此對使用者來說，「看到瓶子à打開蓋子à得到內容」（在這個例子下，是天氣的資訊），是完全符合人類使用這個工具的預期和習慣的。也因此使用者可以輕易學習與瞭解，因為這個介面所利用的比喻「瓶子」，是我們所熟知的。使用者不需要為了得到天氣資訊，而特別去學習「如何開瓶蓋」這件事情。但是如果是要透過現在的網頁得到資訊，就必須學會「開機」、「瀏覽器」、「漫遊」等等的「不尋常」工具了。
此外，因為只要設計給使用者來得到天氣資訊，所以才有出簡單的介面讓使用者使用（打開瓶蓋à聽聲音）。如果這個瓶子又要能算試算表還要能播電影，那瓶子的介面將會變的非常複雜、難用，而瓶子內部為了支援這些無用功能的軟硬體，也會使整個架構變得十分複雜。
最後，我們從「音樂瓶」的例子中可以想像，這樣的工具可以很輕易地「消失」在我們的意識當中，達到懷瑟所謂「以『消失』的狀態，存在於生活當中」的科技。如果你想要得到天氣的資訊，只要簡單的把瓶蓋打開，而不需要把所有的精神都放在把電腦打開，開啟瀏覽器、瀏覽網頁這些事上面。這個「天氣香水瓶」可以深入地整合在我們的日常生活之中，而不是像桌上的那台電腦一樣，很突兀地入侵到我們所熟習的世界裡。
Monday, April 04, 2005
Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Printable Version - What's Next for Apple?
What's Next for Apple?
Steve Jobs won't ever tell you -- but we will. Here's what a trail of intriguing evidence reveals about where the world's hottest company is going.
By Paul Sloan, Paul Kaihla, April 2005 Issue
Steve Jobs was rocking back and forth in his chair at the head of his conference room table -- and venting. It was January 2002, and the target of his ire was the music business. The industry was reeling from Internet piracy and, as Jobs saw it, doing nothing about it. Even Jobs himself, a man accustomed to commanding people's attention, had been largely ignored by music execs. Jobs railed to his audience, a few Apple (AAPL) lieutenants and Paul Vidich, then a senior exec at Warner Music, about the industry's total lack of imagination. "Until now," Jobs said, "I've never had a living, breathing music executive come to Apple."
Vidich sat quietly.
"Why is it," Jobs continued, "that the people who run the music industry just don't get it?"
Vidich could have taken this the way Jobs certainly meant it -- as an insult. But as Vidich listened, he couldn't help thinking that he agreed. Finally, he spoke up.
"Steve," he said, "that's why we're here. We need some help."
Photoessay: Apple Gear We Hope to See
It's amazing to consider what has happened since that encounter at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In three years Apple has utterly changed the way people listen to music, and Jobs has become the hero of the very people he was lambasting. Top acts are eager to sell their music via the iTunes music store. The iPod music player has become totemic; it's selling at a rate of about 40 per minute. White buds sprout from so many ears that a sudden human evolutionary adaptation seems to have taken place.
Apple's lead in digital music is growing even as an army of corporate powerhouses -- Dell (DELL), Microsoft (MSFT), Samsung, and Sony (SNE) among them -- spends hundreds of millions of dollars to grab a slice of the business. And the financial transformation driven by Apple's storming of the music stage has been profound: On its knees when Jobs retook control in 1997, Apple is coming off a year in which revenue rose 33 percent and profits quadrupled. Its stock, not surprisingly, has been on a tear, up more than sixfold in the past two years and now hovering around $42 a share.
Moving to the Beat
Apple dominates the market for digital-music players, which is set to grow another 44 percent this year. The iPod should generate as much revenue as the Mac by 2006.
Note: Market share as of January 2005 for hard-drive-based players. Apple share includes iPods sold by HP. Source: NPD Group
*Projected. Note: For all portable MP3 players. Source: IDC
*Projected. Note: Fiscal year ends in September. Mac and iPod revenues include related accessories, software, and downloads. Sources: Apple; Needham & Co.
So, Mr. Jobs, what do you do for an encore?
It has become a parlor game in some quarters to try to divine where Apple is going and how it intends to get there -- and not just at the dozens of blogs that traffic in Apple rumors. Recently, Microsoft quietly hired a former Apple design executive whose mission is to help Bill Gates's baby behave more like Steve Jobs's. Apple doesn't make the game easy; Jobs is famously secretive and detests leaks -- just ask the kid from Harvard whom Apple recently sued after he posted details of the Mac Mini before the stripped-down computer was unveiled at Macworld (see "The Secrecy of Success"). But there are ways to draw a bead on what's brewing in Jobs's fantasy factory. And we're here to tell you, it goes way beyond what he has discussed at Macworld.
Jobs wouldn't talk to Business 2.0, but in various public forums, he has stressed how the $499 Mac Mini, the low-cost iPod Shuffle, and an advanced operating system called Tiger, due out this spring, are meant to build on the digital-music momentum. In truth, they are but the tip of a very long spear. Discussions with past and present company officials, Apple partners, and longtime acquaintances of Jobs, as well as clues in patent applications and other evidence, point to a gargantuan effort to leverage the iPod's success by creating an entire line of breakout consumer electronics devices. Dozens of gadgets -- from an iPod phone to wireless iPods that talk to one another to the ultimate all-in-one home-cum-car media hub -- appear to be on the drawing board or, in some cases, already in prototype.
Most of what Apple's engineers are fiddling with won't make it out of the lab, of course. Jobs himself will determine what does. Though he has ceded some control to trusted aides as he has matured as a manager, he still makes the final call on products. And how he chooses in coming months will have an immense impact on technology, on entertainment, on the culture, and, of course, on Apple. For the first time in more than a decade, Apple has a chance to become a commercially powerful company -- not just a very cool place with a superstar CEO and brilliant designers, but a leader in new markets that are exponentially bigger than the very computer industry it pioneered.
It's not a done deal by any means. Apple has a history of blowing huge leads, starting in the personal computer market, where its market share is down to 2 percent. But should Jobs pull it off, he'll add glittering new layers to an already rich legacy. "If Steve plays this right," says Mike Homer, who was a top Apple exec in the late '80s and is now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, "this could be the greatest turnaround in corporate history."
Everybody knows that the iPod is a sensation, but it takes a close look at the numbers to fully grasp the dimensions of its success. The iPod ranks as one of the greatest consumer electronics scores of all time -- and may stand as the ultimate champ before all is said and done. Apple has sold 10 million iPods; Sony's Walkman sold roughly 3 million units in its comparable first three years. There's anecdotal evidence, at least, that the iPod's momentum hasn't ebbed since its record Christmas sales; in New York, San Francisco, and other cities, demand is so intense that it's been difficult to find the iPod Shuffle, even at Apple's retail stores. And iTunes, the company's online music warehouse, is rocking: Some 300 million songs have been downloaded from it. Both iPod and the iTunes store command more than 65 percent of their respective markets.
Some of the ways in which Jobs will leverage the iPod's success are not particularly sexy, but they're potentially lucrative. For instance, Apple will continue to chase the money in fairly basic iPods -- and there are big bucks still to be made in that market. The portable digital-music player is in its infancy. Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co., projects that by 2010 there'll be 500 million portable players in circulation, about one for every 15 people on the planet. Apple's share will almost inevitably slip as competition mounts, but the vastness of the market will mean many more billions of dollars in sales for the company.
Nor should the iTunes store be counted out as a moneymaker. Jobs has said the store is mainly a way to drive sales of the far more profitable iPod. But Wolf says iTunes generated almost $200 million in sales last year, and Apple, without breaking out numbers, said the store recently turned a profit. The margins are small -- but the potential for growth is huge.
iTunes is selling roughly 9.6 million songs a week, and Apple is rapidly expanding its reach. The company recently launched iTunes stores in Europe and Canada, adding 190 million potential customers. It plans to roll out iTunes in Japan this year. Wolf calculates that iTunes could bring in annual revenue of $2 billion within the next few years. "This will be a big boost to Apple," Wolf says.
The sizzle is in what Apple comes up with to turbocharge the iPod -- or to create entirely new devices so irresistible that, iPod-like, they'll blast open vast new markets. Analyzing that requires some speculation, of course. But here's what a raft of evidence -- both concrete and circumstantial -- suggests is coming down the Apple pipeline, and how likely it is to survive Jobs's brutal product-winnowing process.
Wireless iPod
Likelihood: Virtually certain
If there's anything close to a dead-bang sure bet on what Apple will do next, it's a wireless iPod. The company has been hiring wireless engineers to work on the iPod, according to job postings on its website. And an Apple patent application published in November covers a "hand-held media player" with a wide range of wireless capabilities. Tony Fadell, the original iPod team leader, is listed as one of the inventors, and a person familiar with Apple's patent process says that, in this case, the phrase "media player" mainly refers to the iPod.
A wireless iPod would offer several sweet advantages. It could use Bluetooth to sync with your computer without a docking station. With Wi-Fi, you could tap into the iTunes store from a public network -- at a Starbucks (SBUX), for instance, or in a hotel lobby.
"Apple still has huge opportunities to broaden the capabilities of the iPod," says Roger McNamee, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and longtime Apple watcher. "Wi-Fi is a huge secret weapon."
A wireless iPod also could provide rich new opportunities for Apple to sell music. By teaming with local radio stations, for instance, iTunes could sell you a group of songs you heard on the drive to work and wanted to hear again. The songs would be beamed directly to your iPod before you even made it to your cubicle. Bandwidth is still an issue, as is the strain that wireless capability would put on the battery. Moreover, you'd need to be able to enter a password on the iPod, and right now the only way to enter information on your iPod is through a computer.
The patent filing also suggests capabilities beyond tapping into a network. For example, it covers a method for one handheld player to send content "wirelessly to the selected remote recipients." In other words, one iPod could play music from another. Even more intriguing is that the device could extend well beyond music, even browsing and receiving content from videocameras or game players. Several Apple watchers say a wireless iPod is likely no more than a year away.
vPod
Likelihood: 75 percent
Since the iPod debuted, Jobs has been fending off questions about when he'll come out with an iPod that plays video. Some iPods already can display photos, and Apple just announced one that, using a cable, retrieves pictures directly from a camera. But Jobs has repeatedly argued that video doesn't make sense on a portable device.
Still, there's powerful, almost inevitable logic to adding some sort of video capability to the iPod, or an iPod-like portable device. It wouldn't be Hollywood movies, at least not initially. Far more likely would be the ability to carry home movies -- made with your iMovie software, of course -- on your iPod, so you could plug it into a screen and show your flicks to friends. Commercial content is also possible, perhaps in the form of sports clips or music videos. The iTunes store now offers some music videos for free viewing on a computer, and Apple has left the video possibility open. In April 2004 it applied for a patent that covers a graphical user interface for iTunes, pointing out that it could use the system to sell "audio, video, or image data." One former Apple executive says, "This is a direction Jobs has to pursue."
Jobs has made fun of the Portable Media Center, a handheld device made by Creative Technology and other companies that runs on Microsoft software, arguing that it is cumbersome and short on content. He drew laughs in October when he projected a picture of a PMC on a San Jose movie theater screen and then superimposed a photo of the far-smaller iPod. But bulkiness was the same complaint he had with music players in the pre-iPod era. Sony's new PlayStation Portable is sleek and beautifully handles video, not to mention songs, and Apple insiders say Jobs is closely watching how that device fares. "Eventually," longtime Apple analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group predicts, "Apple will add video, even TiVo-like capability, to the iPod." Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who remains a Jobs confidant and sounding board, believes that the only reason Apple hasn't done video is "they haven't found the right product yet -- and Jobs isn't willing to make a mediocre product."
Eventually, though, such a device could lead to a natural marriage with Hollywood, which is desperately trying to figure out how to cope with Internet piracy. One top movie studio executive sees Jobs's public dismissal of portable video devices as a "disinformation campaign" to buy time until Apple has a product Jobs loves. That could be years away. Still, Apple's QuickTime website is already Hollywood's favorite for putting trailers online. Movie executives also have urged Jobs to come up with encryption software for video. Most telling, the studio exec says, is that Apple headhunters have been trying to raid his employees for Apple's nascent digital-video team. And let's not forget that while Jobs had few contacts with top music execs when he started putting together the iTunes store, his other day job is as CEO of Pixar.
iHome
Likelihood: 70 percent
The race is on to create the one magical device that powers all your digital home entertainment. Microsoft has been promoting its Media Center PC, which functions as a hub to a TV screen -- playing and recording TV, letting users manage music and photos, and working as a regular computer controlled by either a remote or a wireless keyboard. Other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), are pushing Microsoft-powered devices that look like large stereo-rack components. Yet, in the roughly two years these machines have been on the market, only 1.4 million have sold.
One concern among consumers is that these gadgets, in the end, are still just computers, which raises fears that endless reboots will replace constant reruns as the bane of TV watchers. Apple's angle of attack on the living room is measured but shrewd. And its aim isn't to put a computer there so people can, say, browse the Web. With its AirPort Express, a tiny device that plugs into an electrical outlet and wirelessly connects computers, Apple users can beam music from their computers to their stereos -- and this appears to be the first step in an Apple campaign to make household devices seamlessly speak to one another. "What's clearly emerging from Jobs is a vision of the home network that is an entertainment network," says former Apple exec Homer, who has also worked at Netscape and his own startups. "And the next place that's going to go is into the stereo rack -- a sort of stereo-rack version of an iPod."
Homer expects Apple to come out with a device (Apple certainly wouldn't call it a computer) that sits in the living room and works wirelessly not only with your music but also with your photos, movies, and TV. This product would let you tap into your music collection from anywhere in the house -- not just at your computer -- and play your tunes on remote speakers. The computer would still be the hub for all your entertainment, but the user would barely realize that -- and it would work with Windows or Mac. Plenty of companies are trying to do this with home networks, but it's an area ripe for Apple's trademark plug-and-play simplicity. "The ideal product would be an appliance that Apple positions as a digital hub," Enderle says.
Rumors have surfaced that Apple is interested in acquiring TiVo, but analysts give them little credence. Apple is more likely to make its own device, they say, than to buy a company saddled with fierce competition and falling prices. Moreover, Jobs has complained about the TV business because cable companies have so much power. Perhaps just as important, Jobs himself has said commercial television is a wasteland. Nonetheless, Enderle believes that by 2007 Apple will unveil a digital hub. "If they execute in this area as well as they have with the iPod," he says, "they could own this segment as well."
iPod on Wheels
Likelihood: 60 percent
The digital hub vision isn't restricted to the home. The car has become a key battleground for Apple to spread its digital content format, potentially locking in millions of customers. A number of automakers -- Mercedes-Benz, Nissan (NSANY), and Volvo among them -- are rolling out models that have adapters for iPods. A driver controls the iPod using the buttons on the steering wheel, and the content is displayed on the car stereo panel. Microsoft also is working aggressively to capture the car market, but for now Apple is clearly ahead. "Every car company customer we have -- Honda (HMC), Chrysler, Dodge, Ford (F) -- has asked us when we can integrate the iPod for them," says Stephen Witt, head of marketing for car stereo maker Alpine USA, an Apple partner. "The other car companies are knocking on our doors."
Some have a far grander digital vision for the car. Eventually, the thinking goes, the iPod will morph into what George Peterson, president of research firm AutoPacific, calls a super PDA, or a super iPod. It would wirelessly communicate with the car, providing an iPod-like interface on the dashboard that handles not only music but also addresses, calendar information, and even a navigational system. The device would never have to leave your shoulder bag. "This is the holy grail," Peterson says. Other companies are working on such devices, he says, but the auto industry is eager to tap into consumers' love affair with the iPod. He expects the Apple-enabled holy grail to be on the road by the middle of 2006.
iPhone
Likelihood: 50 percent
Apple fans -- and a fair number of nonfans -- lust for some sort of Apple phone. The infuriating design and general clunkiness of most mobile phones today cry out for the Apple touch. Jobs has teamed up with Motorola (MOT) to make a phone that will let users play a handful of songs downloaded from iTunes. But this could be just a prelude to Apple's entrance into the phone market. With Motorola, Apple has already helped build a prototype of a combination phone/iPod that resembles the iPod in look and feel, according to someone familiar with it.
An Apple phone's functions could be accessed hassle-free with the iPod's scroll wheel, and the numbers could work with a slide-out keyboard or a simple touchpad system on the screen. It seems certain that Apple could vastly improve on current phones' finger-snarling methods of retrieving contacts, calendars, and music. "Cell phones make you jump through so many layers," says Robert Brunner, Apple's lead designer from 1989 to 1996 and now a partner at design firm Pentagram, whose team came up with the product images that accompany this story. "The whole scroll wheel and menu system works really well on a phone."
Like iPods, cell phones have become fashion accessories, with high-end units such as Motorola's $450 Razr selling well. An Apple-designed phone/iPod would almost certainly take the high-style crown. Wozniak suspects that Apple's phone/iPod prototypes so far just aren't good enough for Jobs. "Other companies would flood the market with iPod spinoff devices," he says, "but Steve is actually very patient and cautious."
As appealing as the idea is, there's a big barrier to Apple's making a cell phone or phone/iPod combination without a partner. Jobs would need to collaborate with the wireless carriers. Carriers often place demands on phone makers, even insisting on certain functions, and Jobs, ever the control freak, would never put up with that. Yet as beefier phones hit the market -- Samsung is set this year to roll out the first cell phone with an internal hard drive, making it far better than current phones for storing music -- Apple could feel pressure to strike back.
No matter what bursts forth from Apple's labs, Jobs already has achieved something that many observers thought would never happen: He has freed Apple from the PC ghetto in which it had been ensnared for more than two decades. At 50, and despite a recent battle with pancreatic cancer, Jobs is at the top of his game. Throughout the life of the iPod, he has made one canny move after another.
For instance, there's the story of how Jobs managed to corner the global market on the tiny, 1.8-inch hard drives made by Toshiba that enabled the iPod to hold thousands of songs. While it's been widely noted that the deal bought Apple months of open-field running in the portable player market, the full impact on competitors still isn't well understood. Creative, an early maker of MP3 players, had been working on a hard-drive-based player for about a year and was on the verge of a deal with Toshiba for the same drives -- until Jobs swooped in and struck his exclusive pact. Creative founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo still seethes. "We had a very sexy player," he says, waving his hands in frustration, "but we couldn't ship it." Creative scrapped the model and later developed its Zen line, which debuted in November. It has sold reasonably well, and Creative is aggressively chasing the iPod with a big-bucks marketing campaign. But Zen sales remain a very distant second to the iPod's.
If Jobs can pull off similarly inspired gambits with his coming rounds of product decisions, many experts believe that Apple's influence in the new world of digital entertainment could rival Microsoft's in PCs. But above all, some argue, Jobs must avoid repeating the mistake that cost Apple its massive early lead in the computer market.
That happened largely because Jobs would not open up the Mac. He kept its operating system proprietary, and Microsoft and its ally Intel (INTC) clobbered him. Jobs is also keeping the technical standards underpinning the iPod and iTunes proprietary. Skeptics argue that if he insists on keeping his digital-music system closed, sooner or later someone will do the same thing to the iPod that Microsoft did to the Mac. Microsoft itself, with its legions of partners making portable players, wants to be that someone.
Many people who know Jobs say he will never put another major format on the iPod or let rival players work with iTunes. Mark Anderson, who has been writing about Apple for 20 years as publisher of the Strategic News Service, argues half-jokingly that Jobs's zeal for control is so overwhelming that Apple should create a licensing division independent of the CEO. Jobs and his design crew could focus on creating blockbuster products. Then, when the competition begins to catch up, the licensing division would take over. Otherwise, Anderson says, "he risks blowing his lead again."
But Jobs may surprise the skeptics. One company insider has said Apple would consider opening up its system if its digital-music market share started to crumble. Wozniak also says Jobs is so determined to make Apple a huge, commercially powerful company that he'd strike partnerships if necessary. Jobs reached out to Vidich, the former Warner executive, who is now at AOL, for help breaking into the music business; today he has productive partnerships with every big-time recording label. He struck a deal allowing HP to sell iPods, and he made the shrewd decision to allow iTunes and the iPod to work with Windows machines.
This is, after all, a new era. If Microsoft can go to the once unthinkable lengths of hiring a former Apple exec for lessons on how Jobs does it, maybe it's time for Jobs himself to take a page out of Bill Gates's playbook.
Photoessay: Apple Gear We Hope to See
Paul Sloan (psloan@business2.com) is a senior writer at Business 2.0.
Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1037197,00.html.
Steve Jobs won't ever tell you -- but we will. Here's what a trail of intriguing evidence reveals about where the world's hottest company is going.
By Paul Sloan, Paul Kaihla, April 2005 Issue
Steve Jobs was rocking back and forth in his chair at the head of his conference room table -- and venting. It was January 2002, and the target of his ire was the music business. The industry was reeling from Internet piracy and, as Jobs saw it, doing nothing about it. Even Jobs himself, a man accustomed to commanding people's attention, had been largely ignored by music execs. Jobs railed to his audience, a few Apple (AAPL) lieutenants and Paul Vidich, then a senior exec at Warner Music, about the industry's total lack of imagination. "Until now," Jobs said, "I've never had a living, breathing music executive come to Apple."
Vidich sat quietly.
"Why is it," Jobs continued, "that the people who run the music industry just don't get it?"
Vidich could have taken this the way Jobs certainly meant it -- as an insult. But as Vidich listened, he couldn't help thinking that he agreed. Finally, he spoke up.
"Steve," he said, "that's why we're here. We need some help."
Photoessay: Apple Gear We Hope to See
It's amazing to consider what has happened since that encounter at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In three years Apple has utterly changed the way people listen to music, and Jobs has become the hero of the very people he was lambasting. Top acts are eager to sell their music via the iTunes music store. The iPod music player has become totemic; it's selling at a rate of about 40 per minute. White buds sprout from so many ears that a sudden human evolutionary adaptation seems to have taken place.
Apple's lead in digital music is growing even as an army of corporate powerhouses -- Dell (DELL), Microsoft (MSFT), Samsung, and Sony (SNE) among them -- spends hundreds of millions of dollars to grab a slice of the business. And the financial transformation driven by Apple's storming of the music stage has been profound: On its knees when Jobs retook control in 1997, Apple is coming off a year in which revenue rose 33 percent and profits quadrupled. Its stock, not surprisingly, has been on a tear, up more than sixfold in the past two years and now hovering around $42 a share.
Moving to the Beat
Apple dominates the market for digital-music players, which is set to grow another 44 percent this year. The iPod should generate as much revenue as the Mac by 2006.
Note: Market share as of January 2005 for hard-drive-based players. Apple share includes iPods sold by HP. Source: NPD Group
*Projected. Note: For all portable MP3 players. Source: IDC
*Projected. Note: Fiscal year ends in September. Mac and iPod revenues include related accessories, software, and downloads. Sources: Apple; Needham & Co.
So, Mr. Jobs, what do you do for an encore?
It has become a parlor game in some quarters to try to divine where Apple is going and how it intends to get there -- and not just at the dozens of blogs that traffic in Apple rumors. Recently, Microsoft quietly hired a former Apple design executive whose mission is to help Bill Gates's baby behave more like Steve Jobs's. Apple doesn't make the game easy; Jobs is famously secretive and detests leaks -- just ask the kid from Harvard whom Apple recently sued after he posted details of the Mac Mini before the stripped-down computer was unveiled at Macworld (see "The Secrecy of Success"). But there are ways to draw a bead on what's brewing in Jobs's fantasy factory. And we're here to tell you, it goes way beyond what he has discussed at Macworld.
Jobs wouldn't talk to Business 2.0, but in various public forums, he has stressed how the $499 Mac Mini, the low-cost iPod Shuffle, and an advanced operating system called Tiger, due out this spring, are meant to build on the digital-music momentum. In truth, they are but the tip of a very long spear. Discussions with past and present company officials, Apple partners, and longtime acquaintances of Jobs, as well as clues in patent applications and other evidence, point to a gargantuan effort to leverage the iPod's success by creating an entire line of breakout consumer electronics devices. Dozens of gadgets -- from an iPod phone to wireless iPods that talk to one another to the ultimate all-in-one home-cum-car media hub -- appear to be on the drawing board or, in some cases, already in prototype.
Most of what Apple's engineers are fiddling with won't make it out of the lab, of course. Jobs himself will determine what does. Though he has ceded some control to trusted aides as he has matured as a manager, he still makes the final call on products. And how he chooses in coming months will have an immense impact on technology, on entertainment, on the culture, and, of course, on Apple. For the first time in more than a decade, Apple has a chance to become a commercially powerful company -- not just a very cool place with a superstar CEO and brilliant designers, but a leader in new markets that are exponentially bigger than the very computer industry it pioneered.
It's not a done deal by any means. Apple has a history of blowing huge leads, starting in the personal computer market, where its market share is down to 2 percent. But should Jobs pull it off, he'll add glittering new layers to an already rich legacy. "If Steve plays this right," says Mike Homer, who was a top Apple exec in the late '80s and is now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, "this could be the greatest turnaround in corporate history."
Everybody knows that the iPod is a sensation, but it takes a close look at the numbers to fully grasp the dimensions of its success. The iPod ranks as one of the greatest consumer electronics scores of all time -- and may stand as the ultimate champ before all is said and done. Apple has sold 10 million iPods; Sony's Walkman sold roughly 3 million units in its comparable first three years. There's anecdotal evidence, at least, that the iPod's momentum hasn't ebbed since its record Christmas sales; in New York, San Francisco, and other cities, demand is so intense that it's been difficult to find the iPod Shuffle, even at Apple's retail stores. And iTunes, the company's online music warehouse, is rocking: Some 300 million songs have been downloaded from it. Both iPod and the iTunes store command more than 65 percent of their respective markets.
Some of the ways in which Jobs will leverage the iPod's success are not particularly sexy, but they're potentially lucrative. For instance, Apple will continue to chase the money in fairly basic iPods -- and there are big bucks still to be made in that market. The portable digital-music player is in its infancy. Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co., projects that by 2010 there'll be 500 million portable players in circulation, about one for every 15 people on the planet. Apple's share will almost inevitably slip as competition mounts, but the vastness of the market will mean many more billions of dollars in sales for the company.
Nor should the iTunes store be counted out as a moneymaker. Jobs has said the store is mainly a way to drive sales of the far more profitable iPod. But Wolf says iTunes generated almost $200 million in sales last year, and Apple, without breaking out numbers, said the store recently turned a profit. The margins are small -- but the potential for growth is huge.
iTunes is selling roughly 9.6 million songs a week, and Apple is rapidly expanding its reach. The company recently launched iTunes stores in Europe and Canada, adding 190 million potential customers. It plans to roll out iTunes in Japan this year. Wolf calculates that iTunes could bring in annual revenue of $2 billion within the next few years. "This will be a big boost to Apple," Wolf says.
The sizzle is in what Apple comes up with to turbocharge the iPod -- or to create entirely new devices so irresistible that, iPod-like, they'll blast open vast new markets. Analyzing that requires some speculation, of course. But here's what a raft of evidence -- both concrete and circumstantial -- suggests is coming down the Apple pipeline, and how likely it is to survive Jobs's brutal product-winnowing process.
Wireless iPod
Likelihood: Virtually certain
If there's anything close to a dead-bang sure bet on what Apple will do next, it's a wireless iPod. The company has been hiring wireless engineers to work on the iPod, according to job postings on its website. And an Apple patent application published in November covers a "hand-held media player" with a wide range of wireless capabilities. Tony Fadell, the original iPod team leader, is listed as one of the inventors, and a person familiar with Apple's patent process says that, in this case, the phrase "media player" mainly refers to the iPod.
A wireless iPod would offer several sweet advantages. It could use Bluetooth to sync with your computer without a docking station. With Wi-Fi, you could tap into the iTunes store from a public network -- at a Starbucks (SBUX), for instance, or in a hotel lobby.
"Apple still has huge opportunities to broaden the capabilities of the iPod," says Roger McNamee, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and longtime Apple watcher. "Wi-Fi is a huge secret weapon."
A wireless iPod also could provide rich new opportunities for Apple to sell music. By teaming with local radio stations, for instance, iTunes could sell you a group of songs you heard on the drive to work and wanted to hear again. The songs would be beamed directly to your iPod before you even made it to your cubicle. Bandwidth is still an issue, as is the strain that wireless capability would put on the battery. Moreover, you'd need to be able to enter a password on the iPod, and right now the only way to enter information on your iPod is through a computer.
The patent filing also suggests capabilities beyond tapping into a network. For example, it covers a method for one handheld player to send content "wirelessly to the selected remote recipients." In other words, one iPod could play music from another. Even more intriguing is that the device could extend well beyond music, even browsing and receiving content from videocameras or game players. Several Apple watchers say a wireless iPod is likely no more than a year away.
vPod
Likelihood: 75 percent
Since the iPod debuted, Jobs has been fending off questions about when he'll come out with an iPod that plays video. Some iPods already can display photos, and Apple just announced one that, using a cable, retrieves pictures directly from a camera. But Jobs has repeatedly argued that video doesn't make sense on a portable device.
Still, there's powerful, almost inevitable logic to adding some sort of video capability to the iPod, or an iPod-like portable device. It wouldn't be Hollywood movies, at least not initially. Far more likely would be the ability to carry home movies -- made with your iMovie software, of course -- on your iPod, so you could plug it into a screen and show your flicks to friends. Commercial content is also possible, perhaps in the form of sports clips or music videos. The iTunes store now offers some music videos for free viewing on a computer, and Apple has left the video possibility open. In April 2004 it applied for a patent that covers a graphical user interface for iTunes, pointing out that it could use the system to sell "audio, video, or image data." One former Apple executive says, "This is a direction Jobs has to pursue."
Jobs has made fun of the Portable Media Center, a handheld device made by Creative Technology and other companies that runs on Microsoft software, arguing that it is cumbersome and short on content. He drew laughs in October when he projected a picture of a PMC on a San Jose movie theater screen and then superimposed a photo of the far-smaller iPod. But bulkiness was the same complaint he had with music players in the pre-iPod era. Sony's new PlayStation Portable is sleek and beautifully handles video, not to mention songs, and Apple insiders say Jobs is closely watching how that device fares. "Eventually," longtime Apple analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group predicts, "Apple will add video, even TiVo-like capability, to the iPod." Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who remains a Jobs confidant and sounding board, believes that the only reason Apple hasn't done video is "they haven't found the right product yet -- and Jobs isn't willing to make a mediocre product."
Eventually, though, such a device could lead to a natural marriage with Hollywood, which is desperately trying to figure out how to cope with Internet piracy. One top movie studio executive sees Jobs's public dismissal of portable video devices as a "disinformation campaign" to buy time until Apple has a product Jobs loves. That could be years away. Still, Apple's QuickTime website is already Hollywood's favorite for putting trailers online. Movie executives also have urged Jobs to come up with encryption software for video. Most telling, the studio exec says, is that Apple headhunters have been trying to raid his employees for Apple's nascent digital-video team. And let's not forget that while Jobs had few contacts with top music execs when he started putting together the iTunes store, his other day job is as CEO of Pixar.
iHome
Likelihood: 70 percent
The race is on to create the one magical device that powers all your digital home entertainment. Microsoft has been promoting its Media Center PC, which functions as a hub to a TV screen -- playing and recording TV, letting users manage music and photos, and working as a regular computer controlled by either a remote or a wireless keyboard. Other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), are pushing Microsoft-powered devices that look like large stereo-rack components. Yet, in the roughly two years these machines have been on the market, only 1.4 million have sold.
One concern among consumers is that these gadgets, in the end, are still just computers, which raises fears that endless reboots will replace constant reruns as the bane of TV watchers. Apple's angle of attack on the living room is measured but shrewd. And its aim isn't to put a computer there so people can, say, browse the Web. With its AirPort Express, a tiny device that plugs into an electrical outlet and wirelessly connects computers, Apple users can beam music from their computers to their stereos -- and this appears to be the first step in an Apple campaign to make household devices seamlessly speak to one another. "What's clearly emerging from Jobs is a vision of the home network that is an entertainment network," says former Apple exec Homer, who has also worked at Netscape and his own startups. "And the next place that's going to go is into the stereo rack -- a sort of stereo-rack version of an iPod."
Homer expects Apple to come out with a device (Apple certainly wouldn't call it a computer) that sits in the living room and works wirelessly not only with your music but also with your photos, movies, and TV. This product would let you tap into your music collection from anywhere in the house -- not just at your computer -- and play your tunes on remote speakers. The computer would still be the hub for all your entertainment, but the user would barely realize that -- and it would work with Windows or Mac. Plenty of companies are trying to do this with home networks, but it's an area ripe for Apple's trademark plug-and-play simplicity. "The ideal product would be an appliance that Apple positions as a digital hub," Enderle says.
Rumors have surfaced that Apple is interested in acquiring TiVo, but analysts give them little credence. Apple is more likely to make its own device, they say, than to buy a company saddled with fierce competition and falling prices. Moreover, Jobs has complained about the TV business because cable companies have so much power. Perhaps just as important, Jobs himself has said commercial television is a wasteland. Nonetheless, Enderle believes that by 2007 Apple will unveil a digital hub. "If they execute in this area as well as they have with the iPod," he says, "they could own this segment as well."
iPod on Wheels
Likelihood: 60 percent
The digital hub vision isn't restricted to the home. The car has become a key battleground for Apple to spread its digital content format, potentially locking in millions of customers. A number of automakers -- Mercedes-Benz, Nissan (NSANY), and Volvo among them -- are rolling out models that have adapters for iPods. A driver controls the iPod using the buttons on the steering wheel, and the content is displayed on the car stereo panel. Microsoft also is working aggressively to capture the car market, but for now Apple is clearly ahead. "Every car company customer we have -- Honda (HMC), Chrysler, Dodge, Ford (F) -- has asked us when we can integrate the iPod for them," says Stephen Witt, head of marketing for car stereo maker Alpine USA, an Apple partner. "The other car companies are knocking on our doors."
Some have a far grander digital vision for the car. Eventually, the thinking goes, the iPod will morph into what George Peterson, president of research firm AutoPacific, calls a super PDA, or a super iPod. It would wirelessly communicate with the car, providing an iPod-like interface on the dashboard that handles not only music but also addresses, calendar information, and even a navigational system. The device would never have to leave your shoulder bag. "This is the holy grail," Peterson says. Other companies are working on such devices, he says, but the auto industry is eager to tap into consumers' love affair with the iPod. He expects the Apple-enabled holy grail to be on the road by the middle of 2006.
iPhone
Likelihood: 50 percent
Apple fans -- and a fair number of nonfans -- lust for some sort of Apple phone. The infuriating design and general clunkiness of most mobile phones today cry out for the Apple touch. Jobs has teamed up with Motorola (MOT) to make a phone that will let users play a handful of songs downloaded from iTunes. But this could be just a prelude to Apple's entrance into the phone market. With Motorola, Apple has already helped build a prototype of a combination phone/iPod that resembles the iPod in look and feel, according to someone familiar with it.
An Apple phone's functions could be accessed hassle-free with the iPod's scroll wheel, and the numbers could work with a slide-out keyboard or a simple touchpad system on the screen. It seems certain that Apple could vastly improve on current phones' finger-snarling methods of retrieving contacts, calendars, and music. "Cell phones make you jump through so many layers," says Robert Brunner, Apple's lead designer from 1989 to 1996 and now a partner at design firm Pentagram, whose team came up with the product images that accompany this story. "The whole scroll wheel and menu system works really well on a phone."
Like iPods, cell phones have become fashion accessories, with high-end units such as Motorola's $450 Razr selling well. An Apple-designed phone/iPod would almost certainly take the high-style crown. Wozniak suspects that Apple's phone/iPod prototypes so far just aren't good enough for Jobs. "Other companies would flood the market with iPod spinoff devices," he says, "but Steve is actually very patient and cautious."
As appealing as the idea is, there's a big barrier to Apple's making a cell phone or phone/iPod combination without a partner. Jobs would need to collaborate with the wireless carriers. Carriers often place demands on phone makers, even insisting on certain functions, and Jobs, ever the control freak, would never put up with that. Yet as beefier phones hit the market -- Samsung is set this year to roll out the first cell phone with an internal hard drive, making it far better than current phones for storing music -- Apple could feel pressure to strike back.
No matter what bursts forth from Apple's labs, Jobs already has achieved something that many observers thought would never happen: He has freed Apple from the PC ghetto in which it had been ensnared for more than two decades. At 50, and despite a recent battle with pancreatic cancer, Jobs is at the top of his game. Throughout the life of the iPod, he has made one canny move after another.
For instance, there's the story of how Jobs managed to corner the global market on the tiny, 1.8-inch hard drives made by Toshiba that enabled the iPod to hold thousands of songs. While it's been widely noted that the deal bought Apple months of open-field running in the portable player market, the full impact on competitors still isn't well understood. Creative, an early maker of MP3 players, had been working on a hard-drive-based player for about a year and was on the verge of a deal with Toshiba for the same drives -- until Jobs swooped in and struck his exclusive pact. Creative founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo still seethes. "We had a very sexy player," he says, waving his hands in frustration, "but we couldn't ship it." Creative scrapped the model and later developed its Zen line, which debuted in November. It has sold reasonably well, and Creative is aggressively chasing the iPod with a big-bucks marketing campaign. But Zen sales remain a very distant second to the iPod's.
If Jobs can pull off similarly inspired gambits with his coming rounds of product decisions, many experts believe that Apple's influence in the new world of digital entertainment could rival Microsoft's in PCs. But above all, some argue, Jobs must avoid repeating the mistake that cost Apple its massive early lead in the computer market.
That happened largely because Jobs would not open up the Mac. He kept its operating system proprietary, and Microsoft and its ally Intel (INTC) clobbered him. Jobs is also keeping the technical standards underpinning the iPod and iTunes proprietary. Skeptics argue that if he insists on keeping his digital-music system closed, sooner or later someone will do the same thing to the iPod that Microsoft did to the Mac. Microsoft itself, with its legions of partners making portable players, wants to be that someone.
Many people who know Jobs say he will never put another major format on the iPod or let rival players work with iTunes. Mark Anderson, who has been writing about Apple for 20 years as publisher of the Strategic News Service, argues half-jokingly that Jobs's zeal for control is so overwhelming that Apple should create a licensing division independent of the CEO. Jobs and his design crew could focus on creating blockbuster products. Then, when the competition begins to catch up, the licensing division would take over. Otherwise, Anderson says, "he risks blowing his lead again."
But Jobs may surprise the skeptics. One company insider has said Apple would consider opening up its system if its digital-music market share started to crumble. Wozniak also says Jobs is so determined to make Apple a huge, commercially powerful company that he'd strike partnerships if necessary. Jobs reached out to Vidich, the former Warner executive, who is now at AOL, for help breaking into the music business; today he has productive partnerships with every big-time recording label. He struck a deal allowing HP to sell iPods, and he made the shrewd decision to allow iTunes and the iPod to work with Windows machines.
This is, after all, a new era. If Microsoft can go to the once unthinkable lengths of hiring a former Apple exec for lessons on how Jobs does it, maybe it's time for Jobs himself to take a page out of Bill Gates's playbook.
Photoessay: Apple Gear We Hope to See
Paul Sloan (psloan@business2.com) is a senior writer at Business 2.0.
Find this article at http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1037197,00.html.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
一線遊戲公司的今是昨非(一)
一線遊戲公司的今是昨非(一)
‧崔逸鴻 2005/01/28
進入二十一世紀，數位內容成為顯學，遊戲產業新公司如雨後春筍般成立，遊戲市場重新洗牌；面對競爭激烈的遊戲產業現況，台灣的遊戲公司有什麼樣不同的發展方向，又有哪些公司在這幾個不同方向中各擅勝場呢？
資深的遊戲玩家注意啦！如果您手邊還保留著多年前台灣廠商自行發行或自行改版的國外知名遊戲軟體(也就是”原版的盜版”啦 >-<')，請不要因為現在原廠復刻板或模擬器普及，您用不到這些軟體了就輕易把它丟棄，因為它大有可能身價不凡，能在拍賣網站為您賺到新台幣好幾千元唷！筆者認識的一位業界大老，日前將手邊塵封已久的的台灣海盜版 ”創世紀(Ultima)”一代在E-bay上賣到超過美金兩百元的好價錢，由於創世紀系列是素負盛名的經典角色扮演遊戲，忠實玩家蒐羅版本的熱誠，甚至於到連原廠沒有授權的海盜版都如數家珍的程度，而台灣版雖然也是非法侵的盜版產品，但製作之精美，卻是揚名海外，讓海外的收藏家願意高價收購這些台製的盜版產品，實在是令人哭笑不得，不知該說些什麼是好。
老實說，台灣的老字號遊戲業者，在早年尊重智慧財產權的觀念不如今天普及的狀況下，多半都是靠侵權盜版的行為起家的，雖然不光采，但在那個年代，這樣的錯誤也令人不忍深責，更何況隨著時代進步，大家紛紛改邪歸正，規規矩矩地向原廠爭取授權；甚至開始自行研發屬於華人自己的遊戲產品；所以今天我們回顧過去台灣廠商的盜版行為，除了應該譴責之外，從另一方面來看，卻也標示了台灣在整個亞太地區的遊戲產業當中起步極早的事實。
早在二十多年前，台灣的遊戲產業就已成形，雖然當時的社會對遊戲產業頗有歧視，但是遊戲廠商卻自立自強，走出自己的路。揚棄盜版侵權行為後，不同的廠商在遊戲代理、改版、代工、自行研發等等領域默默耕耘，逐漸嶄露頭角，也有些廠商採取多角化經營路線，大家懷抱美好願景各自奮鬥；幾經波折後，有些公司走入歷史，也有些公司不但存活至今甚至更加壯大。進入二十一世紀，數位內容成為顯學，遊戲產業新公司如雨後春筍般成立，遊戲市場重新洗牌；面對競爭激烈的遊戲產業現況，台灣的一線遊戲公司有什麼樣不同的發展方向，靠什麼各擅勝場呢？
智冠科技
多年以來，遊戲業界一直有"南智冠、北大宇"的說法，指的就是兩家老字號重量級遊戲廠商，而這兩家也碰巧代表業界兩種不同的優勢類型。總公司在高雄的智冠科技(股)是通路王者，台北的大宇資訊(股)則是研發公司的知名品牌。
其實智冠的優勢不只一端，公司本身路線靈活，媒體關係良好，行銷精準強勢，橫跨單機及網路遊戲市場的自製、代理、發行各項領域，同時也朝向集團化發展、進行專業分工；所以自1983年成立至今，經營績效一直十分亮麗，但凌駕這些優點之上的，在於智冠是遊戲通路第一把交椅，過去第三波、華彩資訊、協和國際等公司都曾浹豐沛資金及集團資源企圖挑戰智冠的通路地位，結果無一成功。智冠通路綿密的程度令人咋舌，既涵蓋實體通路的傳統資訊產品小賣店、 3C資訊家電連鎖店、便利商店、書局、漫畫店、網咖、租書店、影音租售店、郵局；又包含虛擬通路如手機付費、寬頻用戶小額付費等等；在開拓新通路方面更是積極；因此智冠擁有超高物流、金流效率，為單機及網路遊戲銷售打下有利基礎，也使得公司在其他方面的優勢如虎添翼，發揮得淋漓盡致。像是路線靈活這一點，我們可以看到在盜版時代，智冠產品眾多，物美價廉；在代理階段，智冠爭取國外授權攻勢凌厲，使盡檯面上檯面下的手段；自製遊戲抬頭後，智冠以簽約綁住眾多小工作室方式，確保智冠自製產品的低成本、高產能，同時也靠通路優勢成功代理其他國內自製遊戲；網路遊戲時代智冠更是合縱連橫，子公司中華網龍專攻自製遊戲，遊戲新幹線則是專業代理公司，另外還投資以炎龍騎士團及天地劫系列成名的的老牌子漢堂資訊和擁有超時空英雄傳說系列、三國群英傳系列及新絕代雙驕系列知名產品的宇峻奧汀科技；不論那一個時期，您走進台灣任何一家販售遊戲產品的商店，都一定可以找到智冠產品；正因為是通路第一，所以智冠可以在一路走來始終如一的低評價中屢創高峰。
智冠的低評價同時來自於消費者及合作廠商。合作廠商方面，智冠殺價凶，票期長，壓低成本的功夫極佳，但是只要產品今天交給智冠，明天玩家就通通買得到，其他廠商沒有一個辦得到；所以大家只好捏著鼻子忍受；不過成本過低造成的產品品質低落，則是消費者怨聲載道的主要因素。在單機時代，智冠產品的臭蟲(bug)過多、完成度不夠，引起各遊戲留言板上一片罵聲，消費者抱怨之多，讓智冠不得不關閉本身公司網站上的玩家留言板，在當時的遊戲界，一樣是前所未見的創舉。網路遊戲時代，攻佔王座的”仙境傳說”(RO)則維持智冠傳統，讓玩家流傳”RO有三寶，斷線、Lag、修不好”的順口溜。話雖如此，筆者認為智冠是遊戲界的絕佳投資標的，絕對能確保公司及股東利益，這項成就一直是其它遊戲公司所難以企及的。
簡而言之，智冠是靈活的，在不同時代裡，採用了不同的策略，身段柔地塑造了今日的成功，所有遊戲公司裡，被罵得最慘的最兇的都是智冠，但智冠無疑也是站的最穩，最迎合大眾市場的公司，這個事實所代表的意義，值得我們深思。
大宇資訊
1988成立的大宇資訊可以說是典型的研發型公司，也是國人自製遊戲的先趨者，國產遊戲能在當年全部是國外代理遊戲的狀況下拿下一片立足之地，大宇絕對居於首功。大宇集結了一流的遊戲研發人員，創意豐沛，品質良好，在單機遊戲方面，享有良好銷售和口碑，知名遊戲如”大富翁”系列、”仙劍奇俠傳”系列、”軒轅劍”系列在海峽兩岸都叫好叫座，在只要中文化就能賣座的時代，大宇推出的產品品質遠遠超過同時代的其它公司，為公司奠定極佳品牌形象。
大宇的單機遊戲”仙劍奇俠傳”系列，在海峽兩岸叫好叫座。(畫面擷取自「仙劍奇俠傳2官方網站」)
此外，大宇在中國大陸佈局很早，也開始展現成果，大陸地區的營收已經不遜於台灣，北京和上海的研發基地都交出漂亮成績單。但大宇光鮮亮麗的外表下也有重重隱憂，首先，以單機產品來說，雖然大宇出品，必屬佳作；但是望穿秋水才見得到一款，雖說慢工出細活，可是同樣是銷售排行榜第一名產品，別人家可以兩年出三款遊戲，大宇要兩三年才能出一款，進度管控真的不理想。其次，大宇只有單機遊戲可圈可點，其他方面不論是通路行銷、遊戲代理、網路遊戲、手機遊戲、遊樂器平台遊戲，大宇的表現都不出色。行銷及通路方面不夠優秀突出似乎是所有研發型公司的宿命，大宇也沒能破除此一魔咒，但是筆者常常納悶，大宇為什麼堅持要自己做通路？從前是歷史必然，最早期的遊戲公司由於當時產業不成熟，沒有專業分工，只好樣樣自己來，別說通路行銷了，連生產包裝都無法假手他人。時至今日，大宇實在沒有自己做的本錢，自製遊戲產能不高，沒有辦法達到經濟規模，但是業務行銷的薪水是個沉重的負擔，所以只好代理其他遊戲來分攤成本，但是以結果論來看，大宇選擇遊戲代理的眼光並不夠好，代理的單機遊戲品質有降低大宇水準的嫌疑，自然市場反應平平，對營收貢獻有限。好在代理自日本 SquareEnix 的網路遊戲”魔力寶貝”成果斐然，不但是獲利金雞母，也讓大宇建立網路遊戲營運平台，培訓出營運客服團隊，為大宇自製網路遊戲的前途增添勝算。可是傷感情的部分又出現了，大宇自製網路遊戲有技術瓶頸，開發不順，迄今只有 ”軒轅劍網路版”上市，而且成績不如預期。
手機遊戲和遊樂器遊戲方面，大宇也一樣是先驅，不像其他同業只是口頭說說，而是真正有實力也有產品上市，遺憾的是---不賺錢！！這是大宇最嚴重的問題。最令筆者擔心的一點，則是人才流失問題。軟體公司的最大資產是人才，遊戲業也不例外；大宇知名的幾個遊戲製作人當中，狂徒的姚壯憲現任北京軟星總經理，DOMO的蔡明宏則擔任台灣大宇協理，都轉任行政工作；其他則幾乎被挖角殆盡:軒轅劍系列的郭炳宏轉任遊戲橘子，仙劍和霹靂奇俠傳的謝崇輝任職雷爵資訊，天使帝國的廖莊敬在遊戲橘子轉投資的飛魚工作室...其他整團整團離開的人才更是不勝枚舉。
筆者認為，大宇這幾年來已經在吃老本，大宇的品牌之所以建立，是基於連續推出幾款品質極為優異的產品而打下的，讓玩家們認定了大宇出品等於品質保證這樣的信心，不幸的是同樣評價的產品，已經有很多年沒有出現在大宇的產品名單中了。時代在改變，玩家也在改變，能不能拿出現在的玩家願意花錢購買的產品，是老牌大宇的成敗關鍵。
遊戲橘子
再來就是業內首席的行銷型公司遊戲橘子，相信很多人對遊戲業的第一印象都來自遊戲橘子的廣告，遊戲橘子的行銷在業界創造了許多個第一，不但成功促銷該公司遊戲，也增進一般民眾對遊戲業的認知，使得整個遊戲產業知名度大開。比較令人矚目的幾個標竿，包含第一個高價聘請知名影藝明星為遊戲代言、第一個以電視廣告做大規模宣傳、第一個大量免費贈送遊戲主程式光碟、第一個赴東京電玩展正式參展、第一個在網路遊戲中做異業結盟、第一個遊戲公司總經理成為廣告明星；除了這些創舉之外，還有大量創意十足的遊戲內外活動、精心設計的電子報、充分媒體曝光率，徹底改變遊戲業的遊戲規則，讓天堂這款遊戲在台灣網路遊戲市場穩坐冠軍長達兩年，也拉高其他同業的行銷預算，促進台灣經濟繁榮，難怪遊戲橘子在台北世貿參展時，陳水扁總統親自蒞臨展覽攤位。
其實遊戲橘子的前身富峰群在業界耕耘多年，最早還是從遊戲研發起步的呢，但是一直到引進專業行銷人才，轉型成為遊戲橘子之後才出現爆發性成長，這也是筆者僅見，唯一從研發公司轉型為行銷公司的成功案例。奇怪的是，既然是研發公司出身，代理遊戲時選擇產品的眼光怎麼會這麼糟呢？除了韓國原廠收了簽約金卻中途夭折，沒有做出來(也不退錢！！)的”Forestia”和”Athanasia”兩款遊戲之外，”戰場”、”混亂冒險”、"巨商"這幾款品質不夠好的遊戲雖然也靠強勢行銷讓大家都知道上市消息，可惜行銷只能引起消費者興趣，無法讓消費者為不夠好玩的遊戲掏錢付費。更可怕的是代理遊戲部分營運得好，真正的甜頭多半歸韓國原廠；營運不佳，韓國原廠仍然可以坐收簽約金和保證權利金，倒楣的還是台灣代理商。因為2004的的財報還沒有真正出爐，我們以2003年來看，遊戲橘子的營收高達新台幣19億，其中單單付給天堂開發商NCSoft的權利金(不含認列在更早年度的簽約金和權利金)就有新台幣 7.4億；其他廠商還不計算在內，而所有遊戲的營運成本(包含伺服器、頻寬、GM、客服、行銷、通路、倉儲等等)都是遊戲橘子支付，更別提遊戲橘子本身的公司管銷了，所以2003年遊戲橘子在收入19億的狀況下還是虧損；看來遊戲橘子對韓國經濟發展更是貢獻良多，下次參展時，真正應該到場致意的是韓國總統才對。相信遊戲橘子也意識到了代理遊戲是為人作嫁的事實，所以兩三年前就開始想要自製網路遊戲，本身喊出招募開發人才的"百人計劃"(如果成功會變成國內第一大研發團隊)，此外還投資好幾家研發工作室；但是和大宇一樣在網路遊戲開發方面遇到困難，遲遲沒有看到有份量的產品，不但2002 大張旗鼓到東京電玩展參展的”諾亞方舟”難產，還在2003年大量裁撤轉投資的研發工作室，遊戲橘子的成敗難料，一如這家公司給人的感覺。
遊戲橘子從富峰群時代開始，就遭遇過幾次重大危機，每次都在孤注一擲下渡過危機，公司規模也越來越大，也因此養成了遊戲橘子異於業界，敢衝敢賭的獨特作風。遊戲橘子引進了許多業內所沒有的新模式，往往新招一出就立即佔了上風，但這些新招式並不是其它公司學不會的，隨著各公司逐步改變觀念，遊戲橘子和各家公司的差別已經越來越小了。遊戲橘子帶領業界到了一個新的境界，但是如果沒有一套別人學不會的獨門功夫，那時代的巨輪很快就會趕上的。
台灣遊戲業界中值得介紹的公司還有很多，本文先就擁有自己獨特競爭優勢的這三家公司加以介紹，接下來筆者還會另文剖析其他遊戲公司，歡迎大家跟筆者分享您的看法。
遊戲界的今是昨非(二)：「第三波」的策略運用
‧崔逸鴻 2005/01/28
進入二十一世紀，數位內容成為顯學，遊戲產業新公司如雨後春筍般成立，遊戲市場重新洗牌；面對競爭激烈的遊戲產業現況，台灣的遊戲公司有什麼樣不同的發展方向，又有哪些公司在這幾個不同方向中各擅勝場呢？
資深的遊戲玩家注意啦！如果您手邊還保留著多年前台灣廠商自行發行或自行改版的國外知名遊戲軟體(也就是”原版的盜版”啦 >-<')，請不要因為現在原廠復刻板或模擬器普及，您用不到這些軟體了就輕易把它丟棄，因為它大有可能身價不凡，能在拍賣網站為您賺到新台幣好幾千元唷！筆者認識的一位業界大老，日前將手邊塵封已久的的台灣海盜版 ”創世紀(Ultima)”一代在E-bay上賣到超過美金兩百元的好價錢，由於創世紀系列是素負盛名的經典角色扮演遊戲，忠實玩家蒐羅版本的熱誠，甚至於到連原廠沒有授權的海盜版都如數家珍的程度，而台灣版雖然也是非法侵的盜版產品，但製作之精美，卻是揚名海外，讓海外的收藏家願意高價收購這些台製的盜版產品，實在是令人哭笑不得，不知該說些什麼是好。
老實說，台灣的老字號遊戲業者，在早年尊重智慧財產權的觀念不如今天普及的狀況下，多半都是靠侵權盜版的行為起家的，雖然不光采，但在那個年代，這樣的錯誤也令人不忍深責，更何況隨著時代進步，大家紛紛改邪歸正，規規矩矩地向原廠爭取授權；甚至開始自行研發屬於華人自己的遊戲產品；所以今天我們回顧過去台灣廠商的盜版行為，除了應該譴責之外，從另一方面來看，卻也標示了台灣在整個亞太地區的遊戲產業當中起步極早的事實。
早在二十多年前，台灣的遊戲產業就已成形，雖然當時的社會對遊戲產業頗有歧視，但是遊戲廠商卻自立自強，走出自己的路。揚棄盜版侵權行為後，不同的廠商在遊戲代理、改版、代工、自行研發等等領域默默耕耘，逐漸嶄露頭角，也有些廠商採取多角化經營路線，大家懷抱美好願景各自奮鬥；幾經波折後，有些公司走入歷史，也有些公司不但存活至今甚至更加壯大。進入二十一世紀，數位內容成為顯學，遊戲產業新公司如雨後春筍般成立，遊戲市場重新洗牌；面對競爭激烈的遊戲產業現況，台灣的一線遊戲公司有什麼樣不同的發展方向，靠什麼各擅勝場呢？
智冠科技
多年以來，遊戲業界一直有"南智冠、北大宇"的說法，指的就是兩家老字號重量級遊戲廠商，而這兩家也碰巧代表業界兩種不同的優勢類型。總公司在高雄的智冠科技(股)是通路王者，台北的大宇資訊(股)則是研發公司的知名品牌。
其實智冠的優勢不只一端，公司本身路線靈活，媒體關係良好，行銷精準強勢，橫跨單機及網路遊戲市場的自製、代理、發行各項領域，同時也朝向集團化發展、進行專業分工；所以自1983年成立至今，經營績效一直十分亮麗，但凌駕這些優點之上的，在於智冠是遊戲通路第一把交椅，過去第三波、華彩資訊、協和國際等公司都曾浹豐沛資金及集團資源企圖挑戰智冠的通路地位，結果無一成功。智冠通路綿密的程度令人咋舌，既涵蓋實體通路的傳統資訊產品小賣店、 3C資訊家電連鎖店、便利商店、書局、漫畫店、網咖、租書店、影音租售店、郵局；又包含虛擬通路如手機付費、寬頻用戶小額付費等等；在開拓新通路方面更是積極；因此智冠擁有超高物流、金流效率，為單機及網路遊戲銷售打下有利基礎，也使得公司在其他方面的優勢如虎添翼，發揮得淋漓盡致。像是路線靈活這一點，我們可以看到在盜版時代，智冠產品眾多，物美價廉；在代理階段，智冠爭取國外授權攻勢凌厲，使盡檯面上檯面下的手段；自製遊戲抬頭後，智冠以簽約綁住眾多小工作室方式，確保智冠自製產品的低成本、高產能，同時也靠通路優勢成功代理其他國內自製遊戲；網路遊戲時代智冠更是合縱連橫，子公司中華網龍專攻自製遊戲，遊戲新幹線則是專業代理公司，另外還投資以炎龍騎士團及天地劫系列成名的的老牌子漢堂資訊和擁有超時空英雄傳說系列、三國群英傳系列及新絕代雙驕系列知名產品的宇峻奧汀科技；不論那一個時期，您走進台灣任何一家販售遊戲產品的商店，都一定可以找到智冠產品；正因為是通路第一，所以智冠可以在一路走來始終如一的低評價中屢創高峰。
智冠的低評價同時來自於消費者及合作廠商。合作廠商方面，智冠殺價凶，票期長，壓低成本的功夫極佳，但是只要產品今天交給智冠，明天玩家就通通買得到，其他廠商沒有一個辦得到；所以大家只好捏著鼻子忍受；不過成本過低造成的產品品質低落，則是消費者怨聲載道的主要因素。在單機時代，智冠產品的臭蟲(bug)過多、完成度不夠，引起各遊戲留言板上一片罵聲，消費者抱怨之多，讓智冠不得不關閉本身公司網站上的玩家留言板，在當時的遊戲界，一樣是前所未見的創舉。網路遊戲時代，攻佔王座的”仙境傳說”(RO)則維持智冠傳統，讓玩家流傳”RO有三寶，斷線、Lag、修不好”的順口溜。話雖如此，筆者認為智冠是遊戲界的絕佳投資標的，絕對能確保公司及股東利益，這項成就一直是其它遊戲公司所難以企及的。
簡而言之，智冠是靈活的，在不同時代裡，採用了不同的策略，身段柔地塑造了今日的成功，所有遊戲公司裡，被罵得最慘的最兇的都是智冠，但智冠無疑也是站的最穩，最迎合大眾市場的公司，這個事實所代表的意義，值得我們深思。
大宇資訊
1988成立的大宇資訊可以說是典型的研發型公司，也是國人自製遊戲的先趨者，國產遊戲能在當年全部是國外代理遊戲的狀況下拿下一片立足之地，大宇絕對居於首功。大宇集結了一流的遊戲研發人員，創意豐沛，品質良好，在單機遊戲方面，享有良好銷售和口碑，知名遊戲如”大富翁”系列、”仙劍奇俠傳”系列、”軒轅劍”系列在海峽兩岸都叫好叫座，在只要中文化就能賣座的時代，大宇推出的產品品質遠遠超過同時代的其它公司，為公司奠定極佳品牌形象。
大宇的單機遊戲”仙劍奇俠傳”系列，在海峽兩岸叫好叫座。(畫面擷取自「仙劍奇俠傳2官方網站」)
此外，大宇在中國大陸佈局很早，也開始展現成果，大陸地區的營收已經不遜於台灣，北京和上海的研發基地都交出漂亮成績單。但大宇光鮮亮麗的外表下也有重重隱憂，首先，以單機產品來說，雖然大宇出品，必屬佳作；但是望穿秋水才見得到一款，雖說慢工出細活，可是同樣是銷售排行榜第一名產品，別人家可以兩年出三款遊戲，大宇要兩三年才能出一款，進度管控真的不理想。其次，大宇只有單機遊戲可圈可點，其他方面不論是通路行銷、遊戲代理、網路遊戲、手機遊戲、遊樂器平台遊戲，大宇的表現都不出色。行銷及通路方面不夠優秀突出似乎是所有研發型公司的宿命，大宇也沒能破除此一魔咒，但是筆者常常納悶，大宇為什麼堅持要自己做通路？從前是歷史必然，最早期的遊戲公司由於當時產業不成熟，沒有專業分工，只好樣樣自己來，別說通路行銷了，連生產包裝都無法假手他人。時至今日，大宇實在沒有自己做的本錢，自製遊戲產能不高，沒有辦法達到經濟規模，但是業務行銷的薪水是個沉重的負擔，所以只好代理其他遊戲來分攤成本，但是以結果論來看，大宇選擇遊戲代理的眼光並不夠好，代理的單機遊戲品質有降低大宇水準的嫌疑，自然市場反應平平，對營收貢獻有限。好在代理自日本 SquareEnix 的網路遊戲”魔力寶貝”成果斐然，不但是獲利金雞母，也讓大宇建立網路遊戲營運平台，培訓出營運客服團隊，為大宇自製網路遊戲的前途增添勝算。可是傷感情的部分又出現了，大宇自製網路遊戲有技術瓶頸，開發不順，迄今只有 ”軒轅劍網路版”上市，而且成績不如預期。
手機遊戲和遊樂器遊戲方面，大宇也一樣是先驅，不像其他同業只是口頭說說，而是真正有實力也有產品上市，遺憾的是---不賺錢！！這是大宇最嚴重的問題。最令筆者擔心的一點，則是人才流失問題。軟體公司的最大資產是人才，遊戲業也不例外；大宇知名的幾個遊戲製作人當中，狂徒的姚壯憲現任北京軟星總經理，DOMO的蔡明宏則擔任台灣大宇協理，都轉任行政工作；其他則幾乎被挖角殆盡:軒轅劍系列的郭炳宏轉任遊戲橘子，仙劍和霹靂奇俠傳的謝崇輝任職雷爵資訊，天使帝國的廖莊敬在遊戲橘子轉投資的飛魚工作室...其他整團整團離開的人才更是不勝枚舉。
筆者認為，大宇這幾年來已經在吃老本，大宇的品牌之所以建立，是基於連續推出幾款品質極為優異的產品而打下的，讓玩家們認定了大宇出品等於品質保證這樣的信心，不幸的是同樣評價的產品，已經有很多年沒有出現在大宇的產品名單中了。時代在改變，玩家也在改變，能不能拿出現在的玩家願意花錢購買的產品，是老牌大宇的成敗關鍵。
遊戲橘子
再來就是業內首席的行銷型公司遊戲橘子，相信很多人對遊戲業的第一印象都來自遊戲橘子的廣告，遊戲橘子的行銷在業界創造了許多個第一，不但成功促銷該公司遊戲，也增進一般民眾對遊戲業的認知，使得整個遊戲產業知名度大開。比較令人矚目的幾個標竿，包含第一個高價聘請知名影藝明星為遊戲代言、第一個以電視廣告做大規模宣傳、第一個大量免費贈送遊戲主程式光碟、第一個赴東京電玩展正式參展、第一個在網路遊戲中做異業結盟、第一個遊戲公司總經理成為廣告明星；除了這些創舉之外，還有大量創意十足的遊戲內外活動、精心設計的電子報、充分媒體曝光率，徹底改變遊戲業的遊戲規則，讓天堂這款遊戲在台灣網路遊戲市場穩坐冠軍長達兩年，也拉高其他同業的行銷預算，促進台灣經濟繁榮，難怪遊戲橘子在台北世貿參展時，陳水扁總統親自蒞臨展覽攤位。
其實遊戲橘子的前身富峰群在業界耕耘多年，最早還是從遊戲研發起步的呢，但是一直到引進專業行銷人才，轉型成為遊戲橘子之後才出現爆發性成長，這也是筆者僅見，唯一從研發公司轉型為行銷公司的成功案例。奇怪的是，既然是研發公司出身，代理遊戲時選擇產品的眼光怎麼會這麼糟呢？除了韓國原廠收了簽約金卻中途夭折，沒有做出來(也不退錢！！)的”Forestia”和”Athanasia”兩款遊戲之外，”戰場”、”混亂冒險”、"巨商"這幾款品質不夠好的遊戲雖然也靠強勢行銷讓大家都知道上市消息，可惜行銷只能引起消費者興趣，無法讓消費者為不夠好玩的遊戲掏錢付費。更可怕的是代理遊戲部分營運得好，真正的甜頭多半歸韓國原廠；營運不佳，韓國原廠仍然可以坐收簽約金和保證權利金，倒楣的還是台灣代理商。因為2004的的財報還沒有真正出爐，我們以2003年來看，遊戲橘子的營收高達新台幣19億，其中單單付給天堂開發商NCSoft的權利金(不含認列在更早年度的簽約金和權利金)就有新台幣 7.4億；其他廠商還不計算在內，而所有遊戲的營運成本(包含伺服器、頻寬、GM、客服、行銷、通路、倉儲等等)都是遊戲橘子支付，更別提遊戲橘子本身的公司管銷了，所以2003年遊戲橘子在收入19億的狀況下還是虧損；看來遊戲橘子對韓國經濟發展更是貢獻良多，下次參展時，真正應該到場致意的是韓國總統才對。相信遊戲橘子也意識到了代理遊戲是為人作嫁的事實，所以兩三年前就開始想要自製網路遊戲，本身喊出招募開發人才的"百人計劃"(如果成功會變成國內第一大研發團隊)，此外還投資好幾家研發工作室；但是和大宇一樣在網路遊戲開發方面遇到困難，遲遲沒有看到有份量的產品，不但2002 大張旗鼓到東京電玩展參展的”諾亞方舟”難產，還在2003年大量裁撤轉投資的研發工作室，遊戲橘子的成敗難料，一如這家公司給人的感覺。
遊戲橘子從富峰群時代開始，就遭遇過幾次重大危機，每次都在孤注一擲下渡過危機，公司規模也越來越大，也因此養成了遊戲橘子異於業界，敢衝敢賭的獨特作風。遊戲橘子引進了許多業內所沒有的新模式，往往新招一出就立即佔了上風，但這些新招式並不是其它公司學不會的，隨著各公司逐步改變觀念，遊戲橘子和各家公司的差別已經越來越小了。遊戲橘子帶領業界到了一個新的境界，但是如果沒有一套別人學不會的獨門功夫，那時代的巨輪很快就會趕上的。
台灣遊戲業界中值得介紹的公司還有很多，本文先就擁有自己獨特競爭優勢的這三家公司加以介紹，接下來筆者還會另文剖析其他遊戲公司，歡迎大家跟筆者分享您的看法。
遊戲界的今是昨非(二)：「第三波」的策略運用
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