Category: Current and Future Trends

Article – From the horse’s mouth

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming laptop – the process of selecting which graphics processor  an app or game should use in this Optimus-equipped laptop will soon be managed by Windows 10

Microsoft

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17093 for PC (Windows Experience Blog)

Previous Coverage

What is a GPU all about?

My Comments

Over the last few years, an increasing number of laptop-computer manufacturers worked with graphics-card vendors to implement dual-graphics-processor setups in their portable computing products.

This offered a function that works in a similar manner to the “performance / economy” or “sports mode” switch present in an increasing number of cars. Here, the transmission can be set to give the car sports-like performance or to allow it work more efficiently, typically by determining when the transmission changes gear in relation to the engine’s RPM. NVIDIA markets this function as Optimus while AMD markets it as Dynamic Switchable Graphics.

Sony VAIO S Series – equipped with dual graphics with an easy-to-use operating-mode switch

Initially Sony implemented a hardware switch to select the graphics processor on their VAIO S Series that I previously reviewed but you manage this function through a control app offered by NVIDIA or AMD depending on the discrete graphics chipset installed. From my experience, these programs can be very confusing to operating especially if you want to allow particular software to run in high-performance or economy mode, or simply override these settings.

This Intel CPU+GPU chipset will be the reason Microsoft will be providing operating-system management of multiple graphics processors

Microsoft have now integrated in to a preview build of the next iteration of Windows 10 the ability to manage these settings using the operating system’s interface. This setup also applies to desktop systems equipped with two discrete GPUs such as a baseline graphics card and a performance-focused graphics card; or systems connected to an external graphics module. It can cater towards a situation where a computer is equipped with two built-in graphics processors and an external graphics module, a situation that can be made real with Intel’s new CPU+discrete GPU system-on-chip or a gaming laptop with a regular games-grade GPU, when computers with this kind of hardware also have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

.. as will external graphics modules like this Akitio Node Thunderbolt 3 “card cage” external graphics module

The user experience requires you to select a program, be it a Classic (traditional Windows desktop) app or a Universal (Windows Store) app, then choose whether to let the system choose the GPU to use, or to use the GPU offering the highest performance, or the GPU that is the most economical. Here, it could cater for the external graphics modules or systems with three graphics processors by choosing the one with the most horsepower, typically the graphics processor in an external graphics module.

There is the ability for an application or game to choose the graphics processor to work with and this management ability won’t override that choice.  The ability to choose the graphics processor for a program to work with on the basis of whether it is power-saving or higher-performance makes it feasible to work with setups where you may connect or disconnect GPUs on a whim such as when you use external graphics modules.

What users may eventually want is to allow Windows to select the graphics processor for an application based on the kind of power source the host computer is using. Here, such an option could allow an app to use high-performance graphics like a discrete graphics chipset while the computer is running from AC power, but use a power-conserving graphics setup while running on batteries.

Other goals that may be seen would include the ability for Windows to manipulate multiple graphics processors to optimise for higher graphics and system performance for particular situations. This could range from using an integrated graphics processor in a setup using a discrete or external graphics processor for its graphics needs to improve performance for supplementary tasks to allocating GPUs to particular display clusters.

At least Microsoft has started on the idea of “baking in” multiple-graphics-processor management into Windows 10 rather than relying on software supplied by graphics-processor vendors to do the job.

How is online delivery going to be handled securely when no-one’s at home?

Most of us who buy goods on the Internet are likely to run in to situations where they miss a parcel delivery due to, for example, no-one being at home. This includes situations with families that have teenagers that arrive home earlier than the parents and it is desirable that adults sign for packages that have been delivered.

This can also extend to situations where you need to have a courier collect goods from your place, something I have had to do every time I have finished with review-sample products where I return them to the distributor or PR agency. But it would also apply when you have to return unwanted merchandise to an online retailer or send faulty equipment to a workshop to be repaired, or simply to use a messenger service to run printed documents from your home office to a business partner. Here, you have to make sure someone you trust is at home looking after the consignment until the courier arrives to collect it.

These systems may need to be modified to support secure unattended parcel delivery

There has been recent Internet discussion about the Amazon Key product which is a smart-lock ecosystem that allows Amazon couriers to drop off your orders inside your home after you confirm with them that they have your order. The constant issue that was raised was the fact that courier could wander around your home unsupervised after they drop off the order, thus being a threat to your privacy and home security.

But this may raise certain architectural requirements and possibilities to cater for the rise of online deliveries. These requirements and possibilities are about creating secure on-premises storage for these consignments that have been delivered or are to be collected by a courier while you are absent. It is also about making sure that the courier cannot enter your home unsupervised under the guise of dropping off or picking up a consignment.

They will affect how homes are designed whether as a new-build development or as a renovation effort and will affect how apartment blocks and similar developments are designed. It is very similar to the use of specially-installed lock-boxes to keep front-gate or meter-box keys that are only opened by the utility’s meter reader with a special master key when they read your utility-service meter.

Architectural requirements

One of these could be a cabinet or small storeroom located towards the front of your home and used primarily for storage of delivered goods. Of course, you may use these spaces to store items like clean-up tools or solid fuel. Some householders may see a garage or a shed also serve this same purpose.

An alternative would be to implement a small vestibule or porch enclosure with an inner front door and outer front door, Here, these spaces would be secured with a smart lock or access-control system that ties in with secure consignment-drop-off arrangements like what Amazon proposes.

In the case of a vestibule, the inner entry door that leads to the rest of the house would be secured under the control of the household and not be part of these arrangements. This also applies to arrangements where the vestibule opens to other rooms like a home office.

Multi-dwelling units like apartment blocks may have to have luggage-locker storage facilities for unattended parcels

For multi-dwelling developments, this could be achieved through the use of a storage facility similar to a cluster of luggage lockers. Here, one or more lockers are shared amongst different apartments on an as-needed basis. In these buildings, they would be located close to or within the mail-room or as a separate storeroom. For those buildings that have multiple entry vestibules for different apartment clusters, it may be plausible to have a group of parcel-delivery lockers in each vestibule.

If your property has a front gate that is normally locked, you may have to use a smart lock or access-control system compliant with the abovementioned secure consignment drop-off arrangements on that gate.

Security requirements for these spaces

All these arrangements would be dependent on a smart lock or access-control system that ties in with the couriers’ or online-delivery platforms’ ecosystems and would be used when you aren’t at home. Such systems would be dependent on consignment numbers that are part of consignment notes or delivery dockets, along with the recipient being notified by the courier of the pending delivery.

But you would be able to have access to these spaces using your own code, card or access token held on your smartphone as expected for all smart-lock setups.

Integration with the courier’s workflow

Such setups would require the household to register them with an online-shopping platform or a courier / messenger platform operated by the incumbent post-office or an industry association. Here, the household would notify whereabouts the secure storage space is on their property

Product delivery

Typically, when you receive a delivery, the courier would ring the doorbell and find that no-one is at home. Or the door is answered by a child and the standing arrangement regarding the chain of custody for deliveries is for the parcel to be received and signed for by a responsible adult.

In this situation, the courier would have to enter details on their handheld terminal about no-one being home. You would then be contacted by email, text messaging or a similar platform regarding the pending delivery and then you use the platform’s companion mobile app or Website to authorise the drop-off of your consignment in the safe storage space.

Then the courier would receive a one-shot authority code which they use to unlock the storage space so they can lodge your parcel there. Once they have delivered the parcel, you would be notified that the parcel is waiting for collection. You would then use your keycode to open up that space to collect your goods when you arrive.

Product collection

There are also times where we require a courier to collect goods from us. This can be situations ranging from returned merchandise, through equipment being collected for repairs, to sending goods out as gifts. In these situations, a responsible adult may not be home to hand over the item and you don’t want to wait around at home or co-ordinate a pickup time for the consignment.

Here, you would organise the consignment paperwork with the courier or the recipient organisation if they are organising the pickup. As part of this, you would receive a consignment number as part of the consignment note, returned-merchandise authorisation or similar document.

Then you would place the goods in the storage space and make sure this is locked. Subsequently you would enter the consignment number in to the smart lock or platform app on your phone or computer. This consignment number works as a one-shot authority code for the courier to open the secure storage space.

When the courier arrives to collect the consignment, they would enter the consignment number in the smart lock to open the storage space in order to collect the goods. Once they have collected the goods, they then lock up the storage space before heading onwards with the consignment. You would then be notified that they have collected the consignment, with the ability to track that parcel as it is on its way.

Issues that need to be raised

Access to a competitive online-retail or parcel-delivery marketplace

It can be easy to bind an unattended-delivery secure-storage platform to an incumbent postal service (including a courier service owned by or a partner with one of these services), or a dominant online retailer like Amazon.

This ends up as a way for the incumbent postal service or dominant online retailer to effectively “own” the online-retail or parcel-delivery marketplace by providing more infrastructure exclusive to their platform. It can also expose antitrust / competitive-access issues where other courier firms or online retailers can’t gain access to self-service unattended-delivery arrangements.

This issue can be answered either through an app-based approach that works with the smart-home / Internet-of-Things ecosystem to interlink with IT systems associated with the goods-delivery industry; or a common platform adopted by the courier / messenger and online-retail industry that integrates unattended-delivery storage as part of the workflow.

Similarly, these systems need to have a level of flexibility such as being able to work with multiple smart locks on the one property. This would be to facilitate a locked gate and / or two or more storage spaces such as a trunk-style cabinet for small items and a larger storeroom for larger consignments; or to provide a private storage space for each dwelling on that property such as a house converted to apartments.

Conclusion

The online retail marketplace has brought about a discussion regarding management and secure storage of consignments that are delivered to unattended addresses.

Traditional radio and TV broadcasters could augment their newscasts by having them on-demand

A question that can be raised in the online era is whether radio and TV broadcasters need to place their latest newscasts “on demand” alongside running them at the appointed times.

This is to encourage us to find relevance for traditional broadcast media in an age where the preferred source for information and entertainment is from online media services including social media. It is also about finding ways where traditional public-service and commercial broadcast media can maintain their influence in an age where Silicon Valley is obtaining more clout.

The typical newscast situation as it stands

What typically happens with radio is that most stations will ordinarily run a short-form newscast of up to five minutes long on the hour. Some of them even run an additional newscast on the half-hour during the breakfast programme as people are getting ready for work. It doesn’t matter whether the radio station serves as an informer like the talk-based stations or as an entertainer like music-based stations. Some stations who don’t have their own news-gathering team usually syndicate another station’s short-form newscasts to keep their listeners up to date with the news.

For TV, the traditional broadcasters, especially free-to-air broadcasters, frequently run regular short-form news updates, commonly known as “newsbreaks”, inserted between programmes or during commercial breaks. They are typically used to announce breaking news or updated news items or provide a succinct overview of what’s going on. This is in addition to the main long-form half-hour news bulletins run during breakfast, midday, early afternoon, early evening (which is TV’s prime time) and late evening.

Some of these stations may run dedicated newsbreaks focused on particular themes like local weather or financial / business news. The TV stations who advertise on local radio during the afternoon drive-time programme are more likely to run an audio equivalent of a newsbreak as their commercial for that daypart in order to create public interest for their main evening news bulletin.

Let’s not forget that all these broadcasters will run newsflashes, even interrupting regular programming, when there is significant breaking news.

The current way we consume media

But we are living in an environment where we rely on on-demand entertainment like Spotify, podcasts, Netflix and catch-up TV services. We even end up in an environment where sports is the only reason for watching or listening to linear real-time broadcast content. Similarly, some of us use PVRs to record TV shows and may find ourselves with “banked up” TV-show collections on these devices especially if we travel or not watch any TV for a while.

But most radio and TV stations’ Websites provide news clips for each of the news items that occur through the day, more as a way to allow people to learn more about particular events or share them on blogs or the Social Web. This is based on the “portal” idea that was started when the Web cam in to the mainstream and these broadcasters wanted to augment their daily broadcasts with a Web-based newspaper.

How can radio and TV news fit in with today’s media habits?

Amazon Echo, Google Home or similar platforms could be used to summon the latest news

But having the latest radio and TV news available in an on-demand context can earn its keep with a significant number of use cases.

For example, a short-form newscast like a radio news bulletin or TV “newsbreak” could earn its keep with a voice-driven home assistant where you could ask for the latest news. In this case, you could say “Hi Alexa, what is the latest news from the ABC?” and you would hear the latest local ABC Radio newscast together with the ABC’s newscast signature tune we have loved. If you are dealing with a voice-driven home-assistant device equipped with a screen like Amazon Echo Home, you could ask the voice assistant for the latest news from a TV station like the Seven Network whereupon you would see the latest newsbreak. In those situations where you have separate short-form newscasts for finance, sport, weather and other topics, it could be feasible to ask the voice assistant for one of these newscasts.

Even a device like Amazon Echo Show could run the latest TV “newsbreak”

Similarly, a podcast or music player app could support the insertion of short-form news bulletins between podcasts or between tracks after a certain time has passed. A TV network having the latest newsbreaks online through their catch-up TV services or through YouTube can allow users to “pull up” short-form news content as required.

There could be the ability to draw down that long-form prime-time TV news bulletin via a “catch-up” TV service so one can catch up with the day’s news at a time they see fit. Even offering an audio-only version of one of these bulletins could earn its keep with a range of users like vision-impaired people or drivers.

What can broadcasters do?

Most broadcasters and networks don’t have to do anything with the news content that they make available through their channels. They simply have to keep the recordings of short-form and long-form news bulletins available and indexed according to time of publication.

Radio stations can even record the bulletins that are not normally recorded like traffic bulletins to provide an experience similar to what Blaupunkt achieved with their Traffic Information Memo feature on some of their 1990s-era car radios. This was where the car radio would operate in a standby mode for three hours when the car is parked and record traffic bulletins as they come through from the last-tuned radio source. It relied upon established standards commonplace in Europe for providing machine-to-machine signalling for these broadcasts, namely the RDS system. Then the driver would be able to press a blue “TIM” button to hear the last four traffic bulletins that were recorded.

This can be facilitated in a manner similar to what happens with podcasts where the latest content is available through an RSS Webfeed. Most talk stations would be familiar with this practice when they make their shows available as podcasts or for syndication to other stations. But they also need to keep their “branding” alive with these newscasts like maintaining the use of their news signature tunes at the start of each bulletin so people know they are dealing with their favourite broadcasters. Let’s not forget that a single URL should then be used to provide a Weblink to the latest news bulletin for the various voice-driven-home-assistant skills, mobile apps and the like to locate that resource.

The idea could be augmented by having a standard metadata flag for RSS Webfeeds containing audio or video content like podcasts that represents the fact that the feeds are news bulletins. Here, it could allow “podcatcher” and similar software to treat them as a news bulletin then retain and play just the latest newscast. As well, if the software has always-live Internet access, it could make sure it’s always up to date with the latest news bulletins that the user wants.

As well, broadcasters and allied organisations can create “skills” for voice-driven home assistants along with “channels” for on-demand video services. It can extend to linking them to standard application-programming interfaces to facilitate “news-on-demand” apps and services.

There has been some investigation by online media providers, especially those who have advertising in their business model to permit free or freemium access like Spotify or YouTube to allow the insertion of newscasts in online-advertising spaces. Similarly, providing it as an optional service or “channel” on a streaming service is being seen as a way to add value to these services.

But this kind of application especially where newscasts are inserted in to a playlist could be seen as heretical by the Millennial generation who want to break away from traditional broadcast media and the methods they use. This is although having the latest radio and TV newscasts on demand through various mechanisms is really about mass customisation.

Conclusion

What will be required of traditional radio and TV broadcasters who maintain a strong profile with their newscasts is to “think outside the box” with how they are used. This means being able to take them further and integrate them with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant & co; or effectively have them as part of “custom-content” strategies.