搜尋成為主流(CNET, 12/29/05)

2005年度回顧：搜尋成為主流CNET新聞專區：Stefanie Olsen29/12/2005原文網址 : http://taiwan.cnet.com/news/software/0,2000064574,20103505,00.htm
在Google 2005年毀譽參半的新聞頭條背後，也顯示出另一個訊息：搜尋產業逐漸成熟。
主流美國搜尋市場現在如日中天。所有父母親已能放心上網「孤狗」(google)，反倒是線上新聞媒體今年才首度以些微差距緊隨在後。
對網路公司來說，搜尋業務今年依舊發揮撈錢本領、並為主要廠商帶來豐厚的收入。
「今年搜尋戰火延燒到產業之外，」Ask Jeeves搜尋產品執行副總裁Jim Lanzone表示，該公司今年被收購加入InterActive Corp集團。
2005年Web搜尋產值估計高達50億美元，業界整併以及專精化搜尋能力的進一步發展顯示該產業走向成熟。所有廠商全都同時發展本地搜尋、桌面以及個人化搜尋工具。
搜尋也成了不同服務相互配對以及播放像是電視短片、電影等多媒體內容的主要平台。而隨著寬頻愈來愈普及，因應消費者需求，Blinkx、Brighcove等公司開始發展出線上搜尋電影短片及原始影片的技術。
今年搜尋業也興起整併風。例如媒體集團InterActive Corp以18.5億美元買下Ask Jeeves。eBay也以6.2億收購搜尋引擎Shopping.com。此外，Scripps以5.25億美元買下Shopzilla。
同時，大型搜尋業者則透過併購新興公司以便提供多元化服務。雅虎買下相片社群網站Flickr與Del.ic.ious。Google則收購行動新創公司Android，投資有線寬頻業者Current Communications，並將網際網路先驅Vint Cerf延攬到該公司。
而雖然搜尋市場已由Google、雅虎、微軟及Ask Jeeves幾乎四分天下而且也趨近成熟（最後出現的搜尋引擎是1998年的Google），然而還是有許多後起之秀不斷冒出挑戰現任老大哥。延續2004年的熱潮，許多新創公司希望鎖定特定領域成為一方之霸。
履歷搜尋專門公司Trvovix、待辦事項管理公司Zvents及行動搜尋公司Neven Vision是眾多想找出利基市場的業者之一，而大學院校與非營利團體也忙著發展新工具因應數位圖書館時代的來臨。
而在大吹特擂之中微軟也推出了自己的搜尋引擎，不過即使砸下五千萬美元行銷預算，微軟的搜尋引擎在知名度上仍然落於雅虎及Google之後。
而搜尋的概念今年也有所拓展。Google之流的搜尋索引變成所謂混搭(mashup)或把不同資料於線上整合技術的基礎。這也使得個人與社群變得格外重要。最好的例子是線上百科全書Wikipedia集結眾人產生的內容提供眾多使用者搜尋答案。而Google、雅虎、MSN等業者也汲汲充實搜尋服務的內容，使搜尋結果更加豐富。(鍾翠玲)

Intel Plans to Shift Focus to Consumer Products (NYTimes, 12/30/05)

December 30, 2005
Intel Plans to Shift Focus to Consumer Products
By JOHN MARKOFF
Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, is breaking away from its longstanding love affair with pure computing power to remake itself as a consumer-friendly brand that will seek to dominate the digital home.
Intel's strategy, based on a new generation of multimedia platforms and chips, will be unveiled next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. For consumers, the technology shift will mean laptop computers with longer battery life and computers that will become digital entertainment hubs in the living room.
When Paul S. Otellini, Intel's chief executive, takes the stage at the show Thursday, he is expected to present a new Intel focused on selling a digital lifestyle rather than hardware.
Instead of bits and bytes, Mr. Otellini, the first nonengineer to run Intel, is expected to spend much of his time talking about cool new music and video features that will be made possible by the new home entertainment platform, called Viiv, and Core, a low-powered chip that will eclipse the Pentium M chip for portable computers.
The transformation of Intel will, in part, be defined by its new alliance with Apple Computer, which has come to dominate the digital music business and is entering the nascent digital video market with its iPod players.
Under the guidance of Eric B. Kim, Intel's senior vice president and a former marketing executive for Samsung Electronics, the company is poised to recast itself as a warm and fuzzy consumer company.
Mr. Kim, who was responsible in part for Samsung's transformation into a global consumer brand before joining Intel in September, is leading the company's rebranding effort, which will change the "Intel Inside" logo and introduce the new slogan "Leap Ahead" to tie together the company's many different platforms.
Yet despite the softer image, which will be presented in a wave of advertising next year, industry analysts said Intel's fortunes will still hinge on the ability of its chip designers to recapture some of the company's once unchallenged lead in the microprocessor business.
In fact, the development of the new Core microprocessor, which will be announced at the electronics show, was the work of a team of Israeli chip designers, who are more emblematic of the old Intel than the new one.
Core, code-named Yonah, is a 32-bit microprocessor chip with two separate processing cores and the ability to conserve power and run cooler than previous Intel chips. The development of Core chips is the first in a series of bet-the-company moves that Mr. Otellini is making to stave off the challenge posed by Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices.
If Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., succeeds in its new strategy, it will largely be because it shifted away from its obsession with processing speed, a move that was dictated by the Israeli engineers who put the company on a path to building low-power chips beginning in 2000.
Core chips will make possible portable computers with longer battery life. Even more important, Core will be the microprocessor inside the Viiv multimedia platform for the living room, which Intel executives say will be the key to the company's future.
"With Yonah you will see super- small consumer machines," said Sean Maloney, Intel's executive vice president and general manager of its mobile computer business. "This will be one of the defining Intel strategies next year. We needed a technology like Yonah for the PC to succeed in the living room."
Indeed the entire consumer electronics and computing industry is waiting to see if Apple will be the first company to use the Core chip for its devices.
Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, will take the stage at Apple's annual MacWorld exhibition in San Francisco a week after the Consumer Electronics Show.
It is possible that Mr. Jobs will extend the company's iTunes video strategy from the current portable iPod video player into a Yonah-based set-top box that would permit Apple to define the next generation of home video as completely as it has dominated the market for digital audio.
While an Apple-Intel living room alliance might not emerge as early as January, most industry observers say they believe that Intel's alliance with Apple was shaped in part by Microsoft's decision to pick the I.B.M. PowerPC chip for its Xbox 360 game machine.
"Intel has begun tuning up Yonah for an orchestra we haven't heard yet," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry analyst and president of Envisioneering Inc. in Seaford, N.Y.
Yonah will clearly blunt some of the resurgence of Advanced Micro Devices. A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has long been a distant second to Intel. It began making serious inroads into Intel's markets in the last two years when Intel's strategy of trying to divide the 64-bit and 32-bit computing markets failed.
While Intel created a new 64-bit microprocessor, Itanium, A.M.D. redesigned its existing 32-bit processor by adding 64-bit capability, allowing it to take market share from Intel in both the server and in the desktop computing markets.
But the laptop market and possibly the new market for living room computers based on PC designs is where future growth may lie. With Yonah, Intel stands a good chance of staying ahead of A.M.D. in 2006. Intel is expected to announce next week that several hundred computer companies will build systems based on Core chips.

Those Born to Shop Can Now Use Cellphones (NYTimes,01/02/06)

January 2, 2006
E-Commerce Report
Those Born to Shop Can Now Use Cellphones
By BOB TEDESCHI
Calling all retailers: 2006 may finally be the year that consumers start buying goods with their cellphones.
With people already spending billions on ring tones, wallpaper and games for their phones, analysts and retail executives say they believe it will not be much of a leap to get them to use their phones to buy shoes, books and laptops.
"This will start to show up on the radar screen in 2006," said Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum, a technology consulting firm in London. "The more different pieces we add to these Swiss Army phones, the easier it is to get user acceptance for the next application. And especially around next Christmas, the convenience of shopping on a computer or a cellphone will beat the mall hands down."
Back in 1999, electronic retailers like Amazon.com created miniature Web sites that could be browsed on cellphone handsets, but these companies overlooked something critical: few consumers owned phones that could render images similar to those displayed on a personal computer. Now, Mr. Entner said, 190 million people in the United States have a cellphone, and at least 150 million of those have a color screen.
Back then, consumers cared little about using their cellphones for anything other than chatting. Now they are quickly accepting phones as multipurpose devices. This year, consumers will spend more than $3 billion on ring tones, video clips, games and other services - to say nothing of the money they are paying phone companies for the extra air time required to use those services.
EBay, which like Amazon.com offered users years ago a way to shop its site on cellphones, plans to introduce to Verizon users this month a new version of mobile phone technology that will allow subscribers, for $4 a month, to browse the site, bid on items and receive alerts whenever they have been outbid. The service, which is already available to users of Cingular and Sprint, is a premium version of a stripped-down program that is available free on any phone with a Web browser. EBay introduced the free version in June.
"These kinds of services are still pretty new in the U.S.," said Chris Donlay, an eBay spokesman, "so I think it'll take a while to get some critical mass, but people are using our service, and they seem to like it."
The initiative costs eBay little. The company commissioned Bonfire Media, a technology company based in Los Altos, Calif., to build the free site, and Bonfire built the premium application on its own. EBay, Bonfire and the cellphone companies share the revenue for the premium version, which has attracted tens of thousands of users, according to Bonfire. The company said hundreds of thousands of people had used the free version.
One of eBay's challengers, Overstock.com, which sells travel services and products for fixed prices and at auction, also recently forayed deeper into the wireless realm. In November it started Mobile O, where cellphone users can use their phones to browse and buy anything on Overstock's Web site.
The service was initially intended for customers of Verizon Wireless, who pay $5 to activate it. Jeanne De Sanctis, chief executive of mRocket, which developed the Mobile O application for Overstock and markets similar services to other companies, said Mobile O would be available on Sprint this week .
Patrick M. Byrne, Overstock's chief executive, has personally helped develop the company's mobile efforts, investing more than $200,000 of his own money in mRocket, and lending Overstock engineers to the project. Should mRocket's service gain widespread commercial success, Mr. Byrne's stake in the company would transfer to Overstock. "We do see the number of orders on Mobile O gradually picking up, but it's still a tiny percentage of our business," Mr. Byrne said. "My hunch is that this is going to start really happening more in '07."
Overstock has begun mentioning the service in its advertising campaigns and featuring it more prominently on its Web site. "I view this as a lottery ticket we're paying maybe $300,000 a year to buy," including staff costs, Mr. Byrne said. "Maybe that's all lost money, but if American consumers ever adopt this, we're first in the game."
Security has been a concern for both retailers and cellphone companies; neither wants to be held responsible by consumers if their credit card information is pilfered as it is entered into their handsets.
EBay avoids that problem by not giving users the option of paying by phone. They can win auctions or even secure most "Buy It Now" purchases using their cellphones, but they must pay for the purchases through their PC's. Overstock allows users to tap in credit card or login information securely, using data encryption methods.
Mr. Byrne said he expected many early Mobile O subscribers to use it to compare prices while they were shopping. Alex Poon, chief executive of Bonfire Media, said he had witnessed such behavior from many users of eBay's mobile service.
Consumer Reports magazine added to the cellphone shopping trend with last month's introduction of ShopSmart. For $4 a month, Verizon Wireless and Sprint customers can use their phones to check prices and read product reviews, among other things, on thousands of items.
Of course, the biggest beneficiaries of these services could be cellphone companies. Chris Matherly, associate director of entertainment products and services for Verizon Wireless, said the company had "seen this migration coming for quite some time."
"Data products and services are growing, and as that happens these early adopters from three years ago want to do more than just download videos and games," Mr. Matherly said.
But even though big names like Consumer Reports, eBay and Overstock have recently given the mobile commerce trend some momentum, Mr. Matherly said Verizon was not ready to put its full marketing muscle behind the idea.
"We're not to the point where you'll see a national campaign for Overstock.com that's Verizon-sponsored," Mr. Matherly said. "We're not quite there yet."

Data, Music, Video: Raising a Curtain on Future Gadgetry(NYTimes, 01/02/06)

January 2, 2006
Data, Music, Video: Raising a Curtain on Future Gadgetry
By DAMON DARLIN
The flat-panel televisions will be getting bigger, the MP3 players and cellphones will be getting smaller. And almost everything will be getting cheaper.
But the biggest trend expected at the International Consumer Electronics Show, which begins this week in Las Vegas, is that these machines will be communicating with one another. The theme of this year's show might best be described as Convergence: This Time We Mean It.
For more than a decade, manufacturers of consumer electronics like televisions and audio gear have talked about blending their products with personal computers, so that consumers can enjoy a seamless stream of data, video and music anywhere. It has not happened, because the two industries do not have compatible technology standards and the requisite high-speed Internet connections have not been widespread enough.
This year all that changes, say executives who will be introducing new products at the show. They say that consumers will finally be able to sling images and sound wirelessly around a room or an entire house. The major electronics makers will be showing TV's with computer capabilities and phones that will play video and music, as well as the next generation of digital recording and storage devices.
While technological convergence may now be possible, some fear the industries have not yet made connecting all those devices simple enough for the average user.
"There is still a lot of confusion around the connected home," said Van L. Baker, a market analyst with Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm. "Reducing it will be the challenge to keeping the momentum going."
Getting consumers past the confusion of how to link, say, a PC to a TV will be the next big hurdle.
The show comes after a very good year for consumer electronics. Plasma and liquid-crystal display televisions, MP3 players and digital cameras with five or more megapixels of resolution have been big sellers.
"We don't see any reason that this will slow down anytime soon," Mr. Baker said. "The transition of entertainment from analog to digital, of time-shifting and place-shifting, is just getting under way."
Attendees of the electronics show, the biggest trade show in the country, will be scrambling to get a first glimpse at some of the products that will fuel the growth of the industry, which represents $126 billion in annual sales. The annual exhibition is off limits to the general public, but it is expected to attract 130,000 executives, dealers, journalists and investors.
More than 2,500 exhibitors, a record, spread across 1.6 million square feet, another record, will try to grab their attention. This year, 6 percent of the exhibitors will be from China, illustrating that nation's significance as a major player in the industry. Among foreign attendees, China will rank third, behind Canada and Taiwan.
The show is more than just a display of new technological toys. It is also a forum for industry executives to forge alliances and present new business strategies.
Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, will give his vision of the future in a speech Wednesday evening. Sir Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony, will take his turn Thursday morning. On Friday morning Terry Semel, the chairman and chief executive of Yahoo, will speak, followed later that day by Larry Page, a co-founder of Google.
Intel plans a major announcement about its new Viiv (rhymes with drive) multimedia platform, which will power PC's built to deliver digital entertainment. Intel hopes that Viiv will transform the home computer in the same way that its Centrino platform transformed the laptop into a mobile communications device. Paul S. Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, will give a speech Thursday evening outlining Intel's road map.
Manufacturers are expecting another record year in 2006, but with continuing declines in prices. Across a broad swath of categories like cameras and audio and DVD players, consumers will pay less and get more features. Even in the flat-panel TV industry, prices dropped as much as 40 percent in 2005. This trend will translate into slower revenue growth in 2006.
As for new areas of growth, analysts are predicting big sales of game consoles in 2006 as Sony introduces its PlayStation 3 and Nintendo brings out its Revolution console. Both devices, like the new Microsoft Xbox 360, can be used as the central node for a wirelessly networked home.
Electronics companies will also be introducing new home media servers and TV's that can receive digital content wirelessly from a PC or via an HDMI cable (for high-definition multimedia interface). Another hot topic at the show will be IPTV, or Internet protocol television, which sends programming over the Internet through a broadband connection.
Then there are the companies, like Elan Home Systems, that want to get right in the middle and sell devices to control all the networked appliances. Elan will be at the show introducing a control pad for everything in your house, from electronic devices to the drapes.
While major players in the electronics industry continue to squabble over the format of the next generation of DVD's - Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD - both factions will be showing products that consumers can buy this year. The new players will be expensive, some costing more than $1,000. Still, the industry expects to sell about a half-million of the new players in 2006, mostly as components in PC's rather than as stand-alone devices.
In the audio sector, companies are seeking ways to take advantage of the popularity and dominance of the Apple iPod. Several manufacturers are planning to announce products that will work with the iPod to move music to devices around the house.
Another big trend, said Steve Tirado, chief executive of Silicon Image, a semiconductor maker, is bigger storage devices. "People want a place to consolidate their digital media."
Ross Rubin, the director for industry analysis at NPD, a market research firm, said that apart from home networking systems, some new technologies would make their way to consumer markets this year.
Canon and Toshiba will both present televisions with surface-conduction electron-emitter displays. The technology produces crisper pictures than can be offered by existing flat-panel televisions, the manufacturers say. The sets will go on sale later this year.
Other Asian TV manufacturers will also demonstrate sets built with new organic light-emitting diodes that use less energy and could one day be cheaper to produce than liquid-crystal display panels.
Another notable product development to be seen at the show is the miniaturization of cathode-ray tube technology to fit into flat-panel televisions, allowing what could be the best-quality picture yet. "They will be very high end, very expensive," said Mr. Rubin. But like that of so many products at the show, the price will eventually go down.

Taiwan Chief Seeks More Arms, Not Better Ties to China (NYTimes, 01/02/06)

January 2, 2006
Taiwan Chief Seeks More Arms, Not Better Ties to China
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG, Jan. 1 - President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan called Sunday for increased arms purchases and warned against greater economic ties to mainland China, in a televised speech that silenced months of speculation that he might soon seek to improve relations across the Taiwan Strait.
The speech was Mr. Chen's first major policy address since his Democratic Progressive Party fared badly in islandwide municipal elections on Dec. 3. His party favors greater political independence from the mainland.
The Nationalist Party, which favors closer relations with Beijing, did much better in those elections. The Nationalists have been riding a surge in popularity since the departing chairman, Lien Chan, visited the mainland in late April. He retired last summer.
But Mr. Chen made clear on Sunday in his annual New Year's Day address that Taiwanese policy had not changed fundamentally. He used several politically charged phrases that appeal to independence advocates in Taiwan but are likely to offend mainland China. He also urged the legislature to approve his long-stalled plans to buy more weapons from the United States and raised again the possibility of a referendum to rewrite the Constitution, two steps strongly opposed by mainland China.
He was particularly emphatic in warning of the risk posed by the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army on the mainland, especially its heavy investments in missiles that can reach Taiwan. "In the face of such imminent and obvious threat, Taiwan must not rest its faith on chance or harbor any illusions," he said.
Beijing had no immediate reaction. Wang Daohan, China's chief negotiator on Taiwan issues for many years, died Dec. 24 at 90, and political analysts have said that his death may make the mainland less likely to change policies toward the island soon.
Philip Yang, the director of the Taiwan Security Research Center at National Taiwan University, said Mr. Chen's speech seemed to emphasize shoring up support from hard-line supporters of independence. The Constitution bars the president from seeking a third term when his current term expires in 2008, and there have been growing signs of challenges to what used to be the president's nearly absolute control over the Democratic Progressive Party.
"He tried to prove he is still in control," Mr. Yang said.
The president referred as many as 70 times to the island as Taiwan instead of its legal name, the Republic of China, even though Jan. 1 has long been a public holiday in Taiwan to commemorate the founding of the Republic of China on Jan. 1, 1912. The Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, defeated on the mainland, retreated to Taiwan in 1949.
The island's Constitution still states that the Republic of China has jurisdiction over all of China, including the mainland, but President Chen has shifted away from this in his own comments for years. He also said in his speech on Sunday that his country had an area of just about 14,000 square miles, which is only the area of the island itself.
Mainland China considers Taiwan a breakaway province.
Lai I-chung, the international affairs director at the Taiwan Thinktank, a research group in Taipei that is independent of the Democratic Progressive Party but politically aligned with it, said President Chen's hard line showed that he had concluded that his party's internal divisions contributed more to its defeat in the municipal elections than the Nationalist Party's overtures to Beijing.
One common worry in Taiwan involves growing economic dependence on the mainland and the extent to which the mainland economy now dwarfs Taiwan's. China's economy is expanding more than twice as fast as Taiwan's and is now six times the size of Taiwan's.
On Dec. 20, statisticians in Beijing raised their estimate of the size of the Chinese economy by an amount equal to the entire annual output of Taiwan, after an economic census found that small private businesses in service industries, like restaurants, had previously been undercounted.
Mr. Chen said Sunday that more than two-fifths of all orders placed with Taiwanese companies for manufactured goods were filled by factories elsewhere. The mainland accounts for 90 percent of these shipments from factories outside Taiwan, he said.
"Although we cannot turn a blind eye to China's market, we should not view the China market as the only or the last market," Mr. Chen said. "Globalization is not tantamount to China-ization. While Taiwan would never close itself off to the world, we also shall not lock in our economic lifeline and all our bargaining chips in China."