By November 20, 2011, analogue television in the whole of France must be replaced with TNT (Terrestrial Numeric Television i.e. digital television). This change over will make it possible to release the frequencies used for analogue transmissions of which a part will allowed to enrich the number of TNT channels available to the great despair by the traditional television channels who already see their market share at risk.
But it is the remainder of the released channels which will not be used for television could play an important role. They are officially reserved for the installation of high debit Internet in France.
It should be said that they have an excellent penetration in the buildings. One is unaware of who will exploit them, but it is extremely probable that just like in the United States, they make an auction with public bidding among all the operators already in place.
To remain on the American example: even though Google hoped to buy a part of it, the bidding took off and the historical operators were pushed out and thus did not to make a big thing of these allocated frequencies.
Confirming the
tendency started in the United States, a new study carried out at world level by iSuppli confirms that for the first time in history more laptops were sold than office machines in the third quarters 2008.
This new tendency is not really surprising since the time when the portables have the role of the supplement machines has passed. It is certainly necessary to merit Intel with much of this change due to the Core series of processors that really improved the performances of the portables, even though in a certain manner we have already tasted this in the Mac world with G4 a few years before.
Today, the portables have sufficient power to satisfy most of the consumers, additionally they always have it at hand whether in its role of toy or work tool.
The role of second machine may now pass to the mobile phones, iPhone in the lead, that also acquired a lot of power, however at most it can be a supplement machine given the difficulties of typing more than some tens of words within a reasonable time.
Since the exclusiveness of Orange (France) has fallen, and that the festivals of Christmas have passed, the Apple Approved Retailers start to receive iPhones. It should be said, they have awaited them now since months and months.
To our knowledge, they will only be able to sell them accompanied with an orange subscriptions, the only operator that has signed contracts with them.
This last point can explain the fact that they have received some.
It seems that Intel wants to put sticks into the spokes of NVidia and its chip 9400M intended for Atom.
The foundry indeed indicated that it has no intention for a partnership and that it did not hope to validate the 9400M on its ultra mobile platform.
Moreover, today it is still impossible to buy Atom processors without acquiring the in-house controller at the same time, which would force mother board manufacturers to circumvent this "interdiction" by having to keep them without the hope of using them later on.
This is a bad blow for NVidia which had here an important card to play.
It should be said that the relations between the two companies have been stressed since the beginning of the year:
- While specializing on the GPGPU, NVidia has encroached on the prerogatives of the Intel processors.
- The project Larrabee of Intel (obviously late) is supposed to supplant the traditional video cards. However it is this project that is now almost forgotten.
- Nvidia did not want to share with Intel the SLI function making it possible to cumulate the power of the video cards.
- Intel does not want to lay off technologies of the new Core i7 mother cards.
- While launching Geforce 9400M largely more powerful than the equivalent solutions of Intel (GMA XX00), Nvidia showed its superiority in this field and counts to monopolize 30% of this short-term market, however this is a very remunerative market for Intel.
In short, the two companies are now in direct competition and each one will want to complicate the life of the other. Alas Nvidia is still downstream of Intel and its future depends closely on them.
The famous analysts of Gartner have moved to a new topic. It relates to the sale of CD and even if their predictions are not achieved, it has what it takes to shake the Majors producers of music and the traditional channels of distribution.
The analysis considers indeed that the era of CD has ended and that Christmas 2008 will be the last of of materialized music.
Already, the retailers decreased spaces reserved for CD; the physical sales of the media accounted for 91% of business in 2005; it was already no more than of 77% in 2007.
Always according to this analysis, the Major producers should agree to disregard traditional launching of albums, to calm their fights against the hacking and to concentrate on the new channels of distribution by focusing their energy there.
Of course, it is hard to imagine the Majors producers will accept this easily; to give up their practices and especially to accept the idea of having more and more interaction with iTunes that is now the top seller of music in the United States in front of Wal-Mart.
