Dec 2005
Last December 15, the HP Media Center PC was launched in Cielo Restaurant here in Cebu. Helen Tan, the business development manager of HP MCPC ( as it is known) for SouthEast Asia was here. What was timely is that this was launched ahead of Manila!
I have written about the great cool things this computer ( running a special windows version called Media Center Edition, and equipped with special remote control) can do, which is to become a radio, a tv set, a video player, a DVD player and recorder, and also a photo album. However, the various demos that I have seen before missed out one thing ( since most demos during the Microsoft conference did not set up the TV antennae).
This time, one cool thing I noted is that when you are watching TV through the PC, it instantly records it for you in the hard disk, automatically! What is significant about that? Simply that if you hear the phone ringing, or need to go to the bathroom, and missed a small portion, you can just pause the live TV, and play it when you come back! Or if there was a segment in TV that you missed, you can instantly rewind and play it back!
It is certainly a big thing, and I wonder why TV sets ( even those not computer enabled) don’t think about putting this feature. I certainly have had dozens of times where I wish I could just rewind a little bit to see what I missed because I was temporarily distracted.
I certainly marvel at the things we can do now. Obviously there is inflation, and things become more expensive all the time. I am not yet that old, but I remembered in my grade 2 days when soft drinks were about 20 centavos each, and now they cost over 30 times as much.
And yet, when it comes to information and communications technology, the reverse has happened. I remember that overseas call 20 years ago was about 2 dollars per minute. Now, they can cost as low as 4 or 5 cents a minute, or even free if you use voice over internet.
22 years ago, I bought my first personal computer. The dollar was about 14 pesos to a dollar ( now it is almost 4 times as much). Yet, in peso terms, the computer that I bought then, ( a PC XT with 256k memory, no hard disk ,a monochrome monitor) cost almost 20,000 pesos. For that amount of money now, ( if you take into account the dollar, it should be 4 times cheaper), you can buy a Celeron machine which is a thousand times faster, with five thousand times more memory, and a hundred thousand times more disk space, with a million times more color. Can you imagine that if the dollar had stayed at P7 pesos per $1 dollar, we could have bought this computer now for a little over 2,500 pesos?
Moving to another topic, you might be interested in this application, and maybe a local provider can provide also this service? If you remember in the TV and movie series, Mission Impossible, there was the concept of the self-destructing message. After the agent receives his instructions, the message will just delete itself. This was supposed to be for ‘ security’ purposes.
A company in the UK , Staellium is launching this option. What they will do is to provide you a place where you can register, and then when you send a text to a wap enabled cell phone, what the reader will receive will just be the senders name and a link. After the sender clicks on the link, he will be able to view the message. After one view, the message will disappear. So the next time, the user clicks on the link, it will just be an empty page.
I don’t know if this is a viable concept. If you want to know more, click on www.stealthtext.com, and read their features.
Wilson Ng keeps a blog of his articles at www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife