Finally, e-mail for people who hate typing. Shaw Cablesystems has launched a new free service for its high-speed Internet customers that allows them to send a video e-mail of up to two minutes in length to multiple recipients.

It’s sure to be a hit with those hunt-and-peck types — as long as they make sure they’re dressed when they boot up the computer and start answering e-mail in the morning.

Peter Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications Inc., said the service is available to any of Shaw’s 1.2 million high-speed Internet customers, the majority of which are high-speed or high-speed-lite subscribers.

“It’s going to be great for people who don’t like to type,” said Bissonnette.

“The user is all over the map. I know my mother would like to receive something like that and kids, of course, love it.”

Widely used video e-mail was forecast since the 1970s, but inadequate PC power and network speeds have kept it in the corporate realm until the last couple of years. Many web cams allow for the creation and sending of video e-mail.

Bissonnette e-mailed a brief video message to The Province. The video was short of commercial broadcast quality, but quite watchable, while the audio was excellent.

The Shaw Video Mail interface allows the inclusion of full audio as well as photos in a slide-show format. Shaw’s technicians wrote their own software for the product.

The recipient of a video e-mail clicks on an enclosed link and is taken to the Shaw server where the video messages are stored — which saves the user from using up his own disk drive space. Prospective senders need to have a computer equipped with a web cam.

Dialup users can receive but not send the video e-mail.

Bissonnette said Shaw is the first Internet service provider in Canada to offer the service. Comcast rolled out video e-mail service in the U.S. last August.

A spokesman for Telus Corp., Shaw’s main Internet-service rival in Western Canada, said the company doesn’t offer anything like video e-mail, but added its HomeSitter home-monitoring system allows users to save and e-mail video clips.

On a related topic, Bissonnette said Shaw’s Internet telephone service, launched earlier this year in Alberta, will be available in Vancouver before the end of the year.

“We’ve been working on upgrading the last four months,” he said. “We have to build a separate network for this in preparation for launch.”

© The Vancouver Province 2005

NEW YORK — Intel Corp., the world’s largest maker of computer chips, on Monday said it established a $200-million US venture capital fund to invest in Chinese technology companies that develop hardware, software and services.

The Intel Capital China Technology Fund will target upstart companies that work with the semiconductor company’s products. The technology heavyweight said examples of areas it plans to focus on are cellular communications, broadband applications for consumers, and chip design.

Creation of the fund marks the latest company looking to expand into China as that nation continues to loosen restrictions on outside investments. Intel Capital said its investment managers based in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing have made strategic investments in China since 1998.

Already, almost 50 Chinese companies have received investments from Intel — with 11 going public or being acquired. Intel has held investments in telecom software supplied AsiaInfo Holdings Inc. and Internet portal Sohu.com.

“The pace of IT innovation is accelerating,” Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani said in a statement.

“Companies around the world should look beyond China‘s purchasing power and view the country’s innovators as potential suppliers. We look forward to working together with the country’s leading technology companies to grow China‘s IT industry together.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Burnaby-based Extreme CCTV’s night-vision cameras already keep watch at the pyramids of Egypt.

And the state-of-the-art EX82DXLs are on order for use at Abu Ghraib, the infamous U.S. military prison in Iraq.

But now they have been selected to guard a giant oil refinery in Indonesia and the Presidential Palace in Singapore, wedging open a new market for the company in Southeast Asia.

As well, Extreme is chipping at China and supplies Hong Kong/China border authorities with its REG Licence Plate Readers.

Over 90 per cent of the company’s $25 million plus in sales is split between the U.K, Europe and North America, but, in the last year, it has been planting seeds in Asia.

Extreme designs and builds equipment that uses near-infrared light to illuminate dark and low-light conditions. This kind of light is just beyond the range of the human eye.

“We can see things other people can’t,” Jack Gin, president and CEO of Extreme CCTV, said in an interview. “We can capture [movement] and licence plates in the dark at high speeds.”

It sells its night vision cameras and licence plate readers to international companies like Johnson Controls and SAIC, which include them in full-package security projects around the world. “Security is a complex solution and involves layers of things that have to be integrated,” Gin said.

In Southeast Asia, Extreme sells via O’Connors Singapore Pte Ltd. Its strategy in Asia is to pitch the “highest-tech products to high-end projects where it would be tough for competitors to show up and copy or emulate.”

Instead of, say, shopping malls, Extreme targets governments and Fortune 500 companies that want surveillance for their palaces, border crossings, oil tanks and prominent landmarks. To reach this clientele, Gin will attend an upcoming security conference and trade expo in Singapore where security companies from around the world will be showcasing their goods.

While Extreme has broken into Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China [and has actually stationed an executive responsible for Asia in Zhuhai, southern China], sales are currently showing particular traction in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. “There is money for security there. There is concern and fear of terrorism. And there have been events. Let’s not forget that there have been horrible acts of terrorism in Indonesia more recently than Sept. 11,” Gin said. “The J.W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta was bombed [in 2003. Since then,] we have licence-plate reading cameras going into international hotels with an American name.”

Gin also hopes to expand elsewhere in Asia — the main target being China. Like the U.S., Beijing has earmarked official funds to stock up on the latest in tech equipment for every aspect

of state security, from sophisticated nationwide databases linked to smart cards that can be scanned by remote sensors to CCTV for monitoring public spaces, to web cameras and Internet firewalls. The massive multi-year program is known as the “Golden Shield.”

But while Asian governments are keen to spend on security, they sometimes have fewer of the checks and balances taken for granted in most Western, democratic states, human rights groups warn.

Those groups argue that while people in China are communicating more freely and have better access to information than ever before, thanks to technology, it’s wishful to think that the same technology works only to protect public safety and erode authoritarian rule. In fact, it is also helping to strengthen Beijing‘s ability to monitor and suppress groups it doesn’t like.

Greg Walton, a freelance researcher who wrote on behalf of Montreal-based Rights & Democracy, particularly targeted Nortel Networks for its sale of research and equipment that automates the surveillance of telephone conversations and the channelling of video surveillance data to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

More prominent international NGOs such as Amnesty International have also pointed fingers at Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Websense, Sun Microsystems and other major software companies for selling Beijing technology it uses to monitor and censor Chinese citizens.

Indeed, the struggle to balance civil liberties with security is an issue that the most disparate regimes have in common.

Gin says that he isn’t “into politics,” but emphasizes that “the greater population wants safety first. We live in a society here where thankfully we can trust our police force to do the right thing. If you can’t trust your police, you are living in the wrong part of the world.”

To that end, while Extreme sells its cameras to many prisons across North America, Gin says that “our strategy in Asia is to sell certain products. And the prison market in China is not something we are chasing. I might have a problem with the moral ethics of that.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

CREDIT: The Associated Press Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs (right) seals the deal with Intel Corp.’s Paul Otellini onstage in San Francisco yesterday.

In an announcement that has the potential to shake its user base to the core, Apple confirmed yesterday it’s going to switch its Macintosh computers to Intel Corp. chips for the first time.

It’s a major shift that some analysts say means Apple will be able to produce its computers more cheaply, while others say the move is risky and will cripple sales for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company over the next year as product lines begin the changeover.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off a prototype computer using an Intel chip at an Apple developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, saying Intel chips will debut in Apple’s Macintosh computers by June 2006 and that all Macs will use Intel by the end of 2007.

The move is welcome news for Mac laptop users, who would like to get better performance on the go. Intel chips cost less, run faster and generate less heat than the products built by Motorola and IBM that Apple has relied upon for 21 years.

That means higher performance machines with a smaller footprint.

“The main motivation is more and better processor choices,” said Jean-Louis Gassee, who oversaw Apple’s products and research-and-development efforts from 1981 to 1990 and is now a venture capitalist in Palo Alto, Calif.

Clearly, Apple is even more closely targeting the laptop market, analysts say, because it’s a market that’s growing more than three times faster than desktop PCs. Shipments of Apple PCs surged 45 per cent in the U.S. in the first quarter, spurring the biggest market-share gain in five years, as the success of its iPod music players drove new Mac purchases, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

“More and more people are using laptops for everything,” said Richard Smith, professor of communication at Simon Fraser University. “They are becoming power users’ machines. This is all about building faster computers with better battery life. And Intel is ahead there.”

While the upside is large for Apple, there may be short-term pain as new users are attracted by the Intel brand and current Mac owners who are considering upgrading wait on the sidelines for the new, Intel-based Macs.

“It’s a bit of a gamble,” said Richard Rosenberg, professor emeritus at University of B.C.‘s computer science faculty. “Are people going to wait to see if the Intel Mac is a faster machine?”

Another potential revenue problem for Apple is its iconic iPod music player — which has carried the firm’s financial performance in the past several quarters.

There was extra iPod inventory for the first time in April, according to Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster.

For the past five years, the current Mac OS X operating system software has been built to work with Intel chips, Jobs said.

Apple is developing software called “Rosetta” that will allow PowerPC-based Mac programs to run on Intel-based Macs, Jobs said.

Rosetta will let users run the current Mac programs until software developers rewrite their products for the Intel chip.

It was unclear whether Windows-based software — or even Windows itself — would run on an Intel-Mac.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

CREDIT: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun Roger Couldrey is president and chief executive officer of Canada Post’s highly successful epost electronic mail delivery service, now serving nearly 300,000 Canadians.

Nearly 300,000 Canadians signed up for Canada Post’s electronic postal payment service in the first three months of this year, epost president and CEO Roger Couldrey says.

He credits surging interest to epost’s emergence as the dominant player since it acquired webdox, its primary competitor, last year.

And he’s hoping interest will snowball this summer as the last of the major financial institutions integrate their online banking systems with epost and word spreads that the number of companies using the service for billing has reached critical mass.

So far the free service is used by about two million of Canada‘s 11 million Internet banking households.

Research suggests it takes at least five electronic bills to interest individuals in subscribing to a service that allows them to receive and pay bills from any location where they have online access.

Epost has signed up more than 100 companies, many of them major names, and Couldrey says that translates into seven to 10 pieces of mail that the average consumer can receive electronically each month.

In addition to the big banks, B.C. mailers using epost include Canadian Tire, Chevron, Citifinancial, City of Burnaby, City of Richmond, City of Nanaimo, Future Shop, HBC, Home Hardware, Rogers, Telus, Terasen Gas, The Brick, United Furniture Warehouse, Visions Electronics and Zellers. BC Hydro and the City of Vancouver are coming soon.

The advantage for billers is that they save money, paying about 40 cents apiece for an electronic bill versus 70 cents to $2 for snail mail, depending on what’s counted in the cost, Couldrey said in an interview in Vancouver.

Apart from saving on stamps, convenience is the primary advantage for consumers. They can pay bills when they want and from where they want, a significant advantage for snowbirds and summer vacationers.

Many of epost’s two million subscribers also access epost through their bank’s website, allowing them to centralize their financial management. Now the two major payroll companies, Ceridian and ADP, are getting involved, allowing for electronic delivery of pay stubs.

Intuit has also signed up, allowing users of Quicken and QuickTax to synchronize data and pre-populate their online tax returns, reducing the likelihood of input errors.

“It is all coming together,” Couldrey said. “It has been a slow birth but our volumes have been going up 10 per cent per month since the integration of webdox and epost.”

Visit www.epost.ca for more information.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

CREDIT: Jason Payne, The Province Spy Zone’s night-vision binoculars offer a SWAT-team level of performance.

Spy gear has come a long way from periscopes and pen cameras. The latest espionage accessories are high-style and high-tech.

Today’s sophisticated spy cameras are no longer limited to buttonholes and duffle bags. Virtually any office or household item can be outfitted with electronic eyes.

Among the most practical are cameras masquerading as working alarm clocks (Spy Zone’s wireless, coloured camera model is $260), pencil sharpeners, TV antennas, smoke detectors, baby monitors, cigarette packs, exit signs, VCRs, plants, cellphones, table lamps, teddy bears and books.

Think you could spot one of these covert appliances? Don’t forget to look up: a replica ceiling sprinkler ($495 US; www.spystuff.com) serves as an aerial Big Brother.

Outdoor monitoring requires heavy-duty hardware such as night-vision goggles. Spy Zone’s Starlight infrared night-vision binoculars offer SWAT-team style performance, amplifying nighttime ambient light to create an image field ($999; www.spyzoneonline.com).

For outdoor, after-dark recording, Purely Security’s Dual Wide Angle Night Vision Wireless Cameras let you switch channels for two different infrared camera views ($215 US). Or create your own after-dark recorder using a night-vision wireless unit the size of a sugar cube ($50 US; both available at www.purelysecurity.com).

No modern-day Mata Hari should embark on a mission without stocking her purse with portable spy goodies: a lipstick-sized camera for powder-room photos ($180 US; www.cctvwholesalers.com), a peephole reverser to see into hotel rooms ($150) and sunglasses with mirrors to check for tails ($15; both www.spycityonline.com).

Don’t forget spy pens and paper: The latest pens write upside down and under water, detect counterfeit bills with special ink or use disappearing ink. Spy paper dissolves when wet (pens $12-$20, paper $10; www.spycityonline.com).

Need to give an anonymous tip? Placed over any phone receiver, the Micro Voice Disguiser ($69.95 US; www.spyworld.com) can even make a woman’s voice sound like a man’s.

Meanwhile, cyber sneaks and computer hackers are having a field day with spyware.

Keystroke loggers allow users to capture and record keystrokes: everything from e-mail and bank passwords to website addresses. This gizmo can wreak havoc on a user at a public internet terminal ($159; www.thespystore.com). Phone jammers can circumvent call display by faking numbers using software such as CIDMAGE ($59.95 US; www.artofhacking.com).

For every spy there’s a counter-spy, and counter-surveillance gear is key to stopping security threats.

Bug detectors will unearth listening devices, wireless cameras, cellphones and taps ($240; www.spyworld.com).

To foil bugs you can’t find, room sound barriers such as the AJ-34 Audio Jammer will generate a masking hiss that desensitizes microphones or recorders ($129 US; www.thespysource.com).

If you want to scramble spy cameras, video detectors will identify oscillation field emissions and sound an alert.

To clear your phone line, telephone tap detectors can pick up line taps and radio-frequency signals from body wires and automatically mute conversations ($350 each; www.spycityonline.com).

MISSION CLASSIFIED

Not every mission is possible. Nor every spy gadget practical.

No one knows this better than the CIA. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its Directorate of Science and Technology in 2003, it curated an exhibition of its silliest surveillance inventions.

Absurd espionage experiments include a 1970s project to fly a minibug into a room using an actual mechanical insect.

Luckily, scientists realized that a bumblebee robot would fly too erratically before they got too far.

Then they tried a dragonfly spy prototype before researchers discovered the “insectothopter” could be brought down by wind.

They weren’t all failures. The agency successfully used listening devices disguised as tiger droppings in Vietnam and flew pigeons with tiny cameras strapped to their chests above enemy targets.

It also tested a rubber robot catfish named Charlie that was designed to swim undetected in rivers.

His mission is still classified.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

A male model shows off LifeDrive, the first of palmOne’s new Mobile Manager line, in Toronto’s subway.

Call it a PDA on steroids.

And PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) leader palmOne is banking it will help add some muscle to its dipping sales.

palmOne took the first step in a major directional foray today, launching a brand-new PDA line it calls Mobile Manager with a mega-featured device called the LifeDrive.

The LifeDrive merges business productivity tools and entertainment applications and features a four gigabyte hard drive, a large 320×480-pixel, high-resolution colour screen, a 416 megahertz processor and wireless access through built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies.

It is palmOne’s first product with hard-drive storage. The company said the Hitachi-made one-inch microdrive is smaller than a matchbook and transfers data 30-per-cent faster than previous-generation models.

With the addition of the new microdrive, palmOne said the device can carry 1,200 office documents, 6,000

e-mails, 1,000 photos, 300 songs, 2.5 hours of video, 50 voicemails, 10,000 contacts and 10,000 appointments.

“Your personal and professional lives are becoming ambiguous,” said Michael Moskowitz, president of palmOne Canada, in an interview. “It crosses that boundary daily –whether it’s your kid’s photos or your personal videos or your business documents, it’s all intertwined.

“That’s a big part of what’s driving this new category.”

Battery life is dependent on the application, but the device can play two to three DVD movies on a charge, said Moskowitz. The suggested retail for the LifeDrive is $699.

PalmOne, which already has Zire and Tungsten lines of PDAs for consumers and professionals, respectively, as well as its Treo smart phone, is clearly looking to invigorate sales with the new line.

According to a recent analyst report by Gartner Inc., PalmOne suffered a 26-per-cent drop in PDA shipments worldwide, compared to the first quarter of 2004, in the first three months of this year.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

NEW YORK — Microsoft Corp. this week unveiled a new version of its Windows operating system for mobile devices that unifies the platform for cellphones and Pocket PC handheld computers while adding such features as PowerPoint viewing and internal hard-drive support.

Windows Mobile 5.0, introduced by chairman Bill Gates at the company’s annual conference for mobile software developers, also adds support for the miniature typewriter keyboards that are increasingly common on mobile phones and organizers.

Other enhancements include updates to the mobile versions of Microsoft Word and Excel that better maintain the formatting of documents created on a computer and allow the creation of charts from a spreadsheet.

The elimination of distinct phone and PDA versions of the operating system puts Windows Mobile on the same page as rival mobile device platforms such as Symbian, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, and Palm.

It also marks another change of course in Microsoft’s long-evolving strategy to extend the dominance of its Windows computer platform to mobile devices.

Those efforts began with a single platform based on Windows CE, short for consumer electronics, but then fragmented into three custom-made flavours: Pocket PC organizers, “smart” cellphones, and then Pocket PCs equipped with phones.

Now they’re all being brought back under one roof, a move that may motivate developers to write more software applications for Windows Mobile since they won’t need to create three different variations. Users with specific needs and interests can be drawn to a particular operating system if there are more customized applications, ranging from mobile business tools to video games.

The reunification also means certain capabilities previously available for only one of the two versions of Windows Mobile are now available for both phones and handhelds.

One of these is integrated support for Wi-Fi short-range wireless connections, now available for smart phones rather than just Pocket PCs. Another is so-called “persistent” memory storage, which preserves basic user information when a device’s battery runs out of power. This capability was previously available for smart phones, but not Pocket PCs.

The updated version of Mobile Windows also serves as another example of Microsoft seeking to barge its way into a hot new sector where it’s late to the party — much as it responded to the Netscape Navigator web browser with Internet Explorer and to the Palm Pilot with Pocket PC.

This time, by adding support for internal hard drives, Microsoft is enabling device makers to design phones and organizers with enough storage capacity to compete in the portable music player market dominated by the IPod, from Apple Computer Inc.

Windows Mobile accounts for a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s business. Combined, software revenue from mobile devices and consumer electronics totaled $80 million in the first three months of 2005.

That was up 31 per cent from a year earlier but amounted to less than a 10th of Microsoft’s overall revenue for the quarter.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Mobile phones are about to undergo a major evolution, thanks to a new thumb-nail sized hard drive that will allow audiophiles to store up to 3,000 digital tunes on their handset.

Dominant mobile-phone manufacturer Nokia has launched a new line of products, which will contain a 22-millimetre hard drive that has a four gigabyte capacity. The first of the line, the N91, will deliver about 12 hours of music. Some are even saying it could doom music players such as the iPod.

“We think this will be the year that the mobile phones start to be perceived as capable music players,” said Nokia vice president Jonas Geust.

Geust said that Nokia will deliver more than 40 million phones this year that have music-playing capability — up from 10 million in 2004.

Analysts say the mobile-phone industry moving further into the multi-media realm is just a natural progression, as storage becomes cheaper and consumer demand for richer content increases.

“Everybody is trying to capitalize on the success of the iPod and launch these all-in-one devices,” said Eddie Chan, an IDC Canada research analyst.

“It really boils down to the richness of the experience. It’s about the convergence of our professional and personal lives. You want to have your digital content with you whenever.”

Geust said the N91 features substantially upgraded audio performance and allows users to share playlists by multimedia message, e-mail or Bluetooth. Digital songs can also be bought and downloaded directly to the device without the use of a computer. The usual smorgasbord of PDA functions are also on board, in addition to a two megapixel camera for snapshots and video.

Nokia plans to launch the phone worldwide this fall — although it’s clearly aimed at the well-heeled and tech-savvy. The expected price (before airtime-plan discount) is expected to be about $1,000.

Although it is the first hard drive phone for Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola are also in the fledgling market. South Korean tech giant Samsung was first to market last fall with a 1.5 GB hard-drive phone.

Apple Computer has owned the portable music market, selling 15 million iPods so far, but Microsoft honcho Bill Gates said yesterday in Frankfurt, Germany that Apple shouldn’t get too comfortable.

“I don’t think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term,” said Gates.

Motorola, however, is also working directly with Apple to produce an iTunes capable phone.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

A virulent worm is spreading across the Internet, showing up Wednesday in one of every 22 e-mails being sent.

The latest epidemic, the largest this year, is the latest variant of the Sober virus and it is accounting for almost 80 per cent of all the viruses online.

Thought to originate in Europe, it is spreading in both German and English, tricking e-mail users into triggering it with such promises as free World Cup soccer tickets or purporting to contain registration and other information that appears to be legitimate.

Once opened, the virus spreads by sending itself by all the e-mail addresses contained on the infected computer.

“It’s an epidemic,” said Ryan Purita, a senior security consultant with Vancouver‘s Totally Connected Security Ltd. “It’s a big problem.

“It is definitely the one that is making the most waves. I haven’t seen anything remotely close to it this year.”

Purita said the virus, which has its own e-mail engine, doesn’t rely on a user’s address book to propagate itself, but simply scours the hard drive for any e-mail addresses

It also targets certain files for deletion, including the live update function on Symantec’s anti-virus software.

Despite its prevalence, Vincent Weafer, senior director of development at Symantec Security Response, said the virus is already being locked out of corporate mail systems.

“It’s in the e-mail traffic but we are not seeing it go through to the end point,” he said. “It’s out there, it is spreading, but we’re not seeing the end point infections that we would see with other infections.”

Experts at Sophos, the Internet security company, said the worm has spread to more than 40 countries, and shows no signs of slowing. By Wednesday, it was accounting for 4.5 per cent of all e-mail traffic on the Internet.

“Sober doesn’t do anything new, with the exception that it is a bilingual virus,” said Chris Kraft, senior security analyst with Sophos in Vancouver. “It will try and tailor a specific message to the German-speaking countries and the non-German-speaking countries.”

That means while a subject line offering free World Cup tickets is most prevalent in Europe, here infected e-mails are containing such lines as “registration information,” and pretending to be from an e-mail service, or “your e-mail was blocked,” a line that convinces many people to open the attachment.

“Once people open that attachment they are infected,” said Kraft.

Kraft said the sheer volume of the virus-infected e-mails could cause problems. “It raises the mail volume and it may take a mail server down if the volumes are too high,” he said.

This worm is particularly adept at disguising itself as a legitimate e-mail, prompting many users to inadvertently trigger it by opening the attachment it is carried in. Security experts say the best defence against this attack is anti-virus software that is kept up to date.

SOBER THOUGHTS:

Sober, an Internet worm virus, by Wednesday had spread to 40 countries, accounting for 4.5% of all e-mail traffic.

– Sober spreads by scouring hard drives for e-mail addresses.

– Infected messages can arrive in both English and German, feature a wide array of subject lines, including “your password,” “registration confirmation,” “your e-mail was blocked” and “mailing error.”

– It can also appear as an e-mail from FIFA — the international football association –saying the recipient has won free tickets for the 2006 football World Cup in Germany.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005