New or Emerging Technological Developments

¶ … David Pogue's column, entitled, "Fisher's Tiny New Camcorder," introduces a new product brand that markets video recorders sans the conventional video tapes. This new technology, called the "tapeless camcorders," functions both as a video recorder and as digital camera. Tapeless camcorders, in order to record images and videos, use memory cards that are capable of storing data for a few minutes (Panasonic brands can record up to 10 minutes of video). Pogue addresses both the advantages and disadvantages of tapeless camcorders.

Indeed, tapeless camcorders are revolutionary in that it provides camcorder users and consumers with lightweight and easy-to-handle video recording devices. Furthermore, it is easier to manipulate than video recorders that uses tapes, primarily because takes a while to rewind or forward certain images in the video, unlike memory cards, which enables users to select among the images available in the video footage. Pitfalls that Pogue mentions about the product, however, include the expensiveness, poor video quality, inefficiency of memory cards in recording long, even, extended video footage.

Thus, even if these new tapeless camcorders join the hype of new technologies, subsisting to the credo that "smaller is better," tapeless camcorders do not provide the convenience, cheap cost, and high quality of taped video recordings. Nevertheless, further developments of this new product in the market can yield to better solutions to some of its problems. Greater memory capacities for memory cards, improved quality of video images, and lesser commercial cost of tapeless camcorders can make the product salable to the home entertainment and technology business.

Furthermore, lightweight and digital video recording technology can possibly improve and be linked to developments of mobile phone, computer, and Internet technologies, where video recording features are fast becoming popular among these media.# Newsweek's article "Soon, a (Nearly) Free Way to Phone Home," written by N'gai Croal and Jonathan Adams, introduces to their readers the new technology called "telephony." Telephony technology is defined by the authors as "a way.. To make free or inexpensive phone calls over their..

dial-up Web connections." This new technology integrates together mobile phone/telephone, video, and Internet technologies to achieve one primary objective: to communicate via this multi-media technology. Using an Internet connection, users can enjoy communicating with people from any part of the world (who utilizes the same technology) and be able to talk and see them, that is, converse with them, in real time.

Telephony technology is revolutionized in this article as a new, cheap way to communicate, since "residential IP (Internet Protocol) telephony is generally cheaper than traditional phone services." Indeed, for individuals who value constant communication with other people, telephony technology provides wider avenues for people to be socially in contact with other while on the Internet.

Thus, this new innovation deviates from the popular notion that Internet technology isolates the individual from the society; with telephony, people can create their social networks in 'cyberspace,' establishing new social ties and re-establishing old ones. Telephony technology's implication in the business of technology is that it aims towards a market that values not the product (telephony), but the service it provides (communication and interaction).

As for its prospects in the industry, telephony technology is a flexible innovation that can be utilized both in the categories of business communications and home entertainment industry.

Business communications are better improved by using telephony during meetings and conferences among businesspeople from all over the globe, while home-based consumers can communicate easily with their loved-ones by using telephony technology.# The latest craze in home entertainment technology, the plasma flat screen TV, is the main topic of David Pogue's article entitled, "Prestige or Pixels?" In the January 29, 2004 edition of the New York Times (online edition).

In this article, Pogue enumerates the pros and cons of buying big plasma TVs, which negates the popular 'infotech' credo that "smaller is better." Indeed, among the products in the home entertainment technology industry, television continues to evolve not only in its functions and internal features, but in its physical features as well. A bigger and flatter TV screen, which became the 'ideal TV' of most consumers nowadays, has resulted to the production of bigger plasma TVs sold commercially.

Pogue especially centers his attention on popular brand companies that manufacture these plasma TVs, questioning whether the latest plasma screen TV fad is indeed a race for.