Opening Keynote — The Digital Lifestyle: Under Construction

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Opening Keynote — The Digital Lifestyle: Under Construction
Presented by: Greg Jones, General Manager, DSP Systems Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments

Beyond the four walls of the digital home is a huge opportunity for delivering content anywhere, anytime – the ultimate Digital Lifestyle. Explore how consumers, service providers, and technology enablers will work together to deliver the vision of the emerging digital lifestyle that is being fueled by new advances in digital signal processing.

Texas Instruments’ portfolio of digital signal processing (DSP) and analog technology solutions represents a broad spectrum of digital lifestyle categories, including communications, digital entertainment, networking, and telemetry applications. Greg Jones, who serves as the general manager for DSP Systems Strategic Marketing, highlighted the importance of the DSP in building a wider array of needed consumer solutions, noting that DSP enables many of the services important to the digital lifestyle, including DSL.

Jones sees a larger role for DSPs in the future across a wide array of emerging consumer applications. Digital entertainment is obviously going to be a significant area as digital signal processing will be necessary in managing bandwidth use and encoding and decoding the many different video codecs and formats. Jones said that there may be upwards of 30-40 different codecs to manage.

In addition, Jones brought up examples beyond entertainment where signal processing will play a role in improving learning and communications (instant translations during phone calls) and transportation (the nearly automated automobile). He also mentioned digital healthcare applications as an opportunity for TI to expand its role. Finally, he discussed how DSP technologies will help service providers offer a higher quality of services by measuring and monitoring traffic and applications with PIQUA solutions.

Interesting Technology Developments Throughout History

I had an interesting conversation today with an industry contact who reminded me that he's been waiting for the inflection point for his company's solution to occur for about ten years now! It's a reminder that even the most-promising of technologies can take years - and even decades - to reach their full potential. Look at Wi-Fi as an example. Although it seems that wireless networking came out of nowhere to infiltrate every coffee shop, development of the actual 802.11b standard took years, and not many folks gave it much thought as a consumer-facing solution (it was viewed more as an enterprise or vertical market fit inititially). For even longer developments, look at the home controls industry. We love to bring up the early home controls initiatives, characterized (literally) by basement-sized computers. After 50 years of experimentation, home and lifestyle management looks to be on the rise.

Last night's History Channel program Modern Marvels is another case in point on how technology developments can sometimes take surprising turns as they mature over the years. The "70's Technology" showcase on Modern Marvels featured everything from Mr. Coffee, the Microwave, the Pontiac Trans-Am, and the Concord. In addition, there were a couple of TI people interviewed about the use of DSP technologies in calculators and the “Speak and Spell” toy. They also referred to how the early work in LEDs for calculators eventually found its way into the TI DLP solution for high-definition televisions! I actually had a Speak and Spell as a kid – it was a cool educational toy!

At our recent CONNECTIONS conference, we were reminded that the DSP actually has its roots even further removed from bell-bottom pants and bad disco music! The original implementation was for submarine detection! So, yes, there are always a few surprises in this space.

Greg Jones from TI was a keynote speaker at this year's CONNECTIONS conference. Jones serves as the General Manager for DSP Systems Strategic Marketing, and he highlighted the importance of the DSP in building a wider array of needed consumer solutions, noting that DSL services as completely enabled by DSPs.

Jones sees a larger role for DSPs in the future across a wide array of emerging consumer applications. Digital entertainment, he noted, is obviously going to be a key area, as digital signal processing will be a needed ingredient for managing bandwidth use and encoding and decoding for the many different video codecs and formats that require processing. Jones said that there may be 30-40 different codecs to manage.

Beyond entertainment, Jones brought up interesting examples of where signal processing will play a role in improving learning and communications (instant translations during phone calls) and transportation (the nearly-automated automobile). He also mentioned digital healthcare applications as an opportunity for TI to expand its role. Finally, he discussed how DSP technologies will help service providers offer a higher-quality of services by measuring and monitoring traffic and applications with PIQUA solutions.

Originally posted by Kurt Scherf, Vice President, Parks Associates at http://parksassociates.blogspot.com