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San Diego, California based Qualcomm, Inc. announced the reference design for its Kayak desktop Internet access terminal, music player and 3D games play with 3G wireless broadband access on 13 November last year.
However will it fly, when several earlier attempts at anything less than a fully-fledged PC have enjoyed limited end-user acceptance, especially on the open retail market, and they eventually fizzled out, as we shall see further down.
Kayak is not a fully fledged PC with all its processing and storage capabilities but instead is a more affordable alternative to a PC intended to help bridge the digital divide over widely available 3G wireless broadband networks especially in emerging countries where there is little fixed line or fixed broadband penetration.
As a reference design, Qualcomm will not make or market Kayak PC alternative itself but will provide the tried and tested circuit design and recommended software specifications to device manufacturers who can then design a wide range of devices based on the reference design, which they then supply to end users.
The Kayak reference design uses Qualcomm’s dual-core Mobile Station Modem (MSM) MSM7xxx-series chipsets to provide both computing and connectivity.
Devices based on the Kayak reference design will offer a fully featured Web 2.0-capable browser from Opera Software which can perform at desktop resolutions, access via the browser to Web 2.0 productivity applications, support both external television sets via composite video as well as computer monitors to be used as displays, is compatible with a standard keyboard and mouse for input, and has a music player and/or a 3D gaming console functionality.
Initial Kayak PC alternative units, manufactured by Taiwan-based Inventec Corp, will be used to initiate user trials during the first quarter of 2009 in Southeast Asia on both CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) networks.
“Emerging markets will be a huge growth driver for the telecommunications industry in the coming years,” said Mark Hirsch, vice president of corporate marketing, Inventec Corporation.
Future plans for commercial Kayak-based devices may include support for Snapdragon solutions.
T-a-a-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-n-g!
However, all this rings alarm bells in my head. Sure, all these ideas for more affordable alternatives to PCs are great and perhaps even noble on the part of their designers to enable the less fortunate to benefit from IT.
However, while there’ve been several attempts to provide more affordable alternatives to full-blown PCs in the past, with few exceptions such as the Apple iPhone and perhaps the netbook PC sized PSION Series Seven personal digital assistant still used by Fairfax Media editor Avanti Kumar to write his stories at press conferences, all the other offerings have at best had relatively limited success, and Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child notebook PC alternative isn’t exactly rocking either.
End-users seem to always want otherwise, as we can see from their current enthusiasm for netbook PCs, which while less powerful than the latest among their notebook PC counterparts, they nonetheless are just more affordable and portable full-blown PCs, running older operating systems such as Windows XP.
Videotex
An early attempt at non-PC IT access was Videotex, which basically was a dialup bulletin board service with rudimentary colour graphics, while a major attempt similar to Qualcomm’s Kayak was Oracle’s Network PC reference design which did not take off either.
Videotex’s greatest success story was the Minitel service in France, where France Telecom gave away Minitel terminals for free and stopped publishing telephone directories, while instead letting subscribers access the directory online with their Mintel terminals.
This also created opportunities for a slew of third parties to provider their information and entertainment content and applications through Minitel.
Research into the Videotex concept began at Britain’s General Post Office (GPO) Telecommunications (now British Telecom) in the late 1960s and it was called Viewdata, and the GPO launched the service under the brand name Prestel.
In 1974, Videotex’s display was standardised as CEPT1 (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations), which defined a 40 x 24 grid of colour text with some rather rudimentary blocky mosaic graphics characters for constructing simple graphics. These graphic tiles were encoded in the upper half of the extended ASCII code table within the device’s character ROM.
Computers back then were either expensive mainframe or minicomputers located in computer rooms which were off limits to most except for authorised personnel, so Videotex let users with suitably enabled devices dial in to these host computers, usually via in-built 75/1200 baud modems to access the information on them, effectively bringing the benefits of computing to the man on the street.
Videotex terminals came in various forms, including special TV sets, set-top box like adaptors with keyboards, dedicated Videotex terminals with monitor and keyboard and specially adapted PCs, all of which were fitted with internal Videotex modems for access.
It created opportunities for various third-party information providers to provide different types of content and applications either for free or for a fee.
For example, in 1979, Michael Aldrich of Redifon Computers in the UK (later Rediffusion Computers) used a prototype domestic television fitted with the Prestel chip set to demonstrate real-time transaction processing in 1979 and thus he invented teleshopping or online shopping as it is now known.
Selection and navigation of Videotex pages was achieved either with the TV’s remote control of a special QWERTY keyboard which plugged into the TV.
While the GPO had its public Prestel service, Rediffusion had its own Videotex host based on its own minicomputers which supported up to 16 simultaneous callers. The system was aimed at corporate customers to implement their own in-house Videotex systems.
From 1980 onwards, Rediffusion designed, sold and installed its systems with major UK companies including the world's first travel industry system, the world's first vehicle locator system for one of the world's largest auto manufacturers and the world's first supermarket system.
For example, the vehicle locator let salesman in one car showroom locate a make and model of a car the customer wants in another of their showrooms nearest to them.
Aldrich also wrote a book, Videotex - Key to the Wired City (Quiller Press 1982) about his ideas and systems which among other topics explored a future of teleshopping and teleworking that has proven to be prophetic.
He also invented, manufactured and sold Rediffusion’s Teleputer range of PC which could communicate using its Prestel chip set and the company manufactured and sold two models, the Teleputer 1 and the Teleputer 3.
The Teleputer 1 was a straight Videotex terminal, while the Teleputer 3 was an 8-bit Zilog Z80 based micro computer (PC) which ran either under the CP/M operating system or Redifusion’s proprietary version called CP* (CP Star).
At the time, I was a customer service engineer in Rediffusion Malaya’s Computer Marketing Division in the 1980s and was involved with its Videotex products.
The Teleputer 3 had a pair of external single sided 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives, keyboard, internal Videotex modem, 64 KB of memory, an RS232 printer port and it used a modified Rediffusion 14 inch portable colour TV, with the tuner circuitry removed and was being driven via an analogue RGB display input.
All Teleputer 3s came with a suite of applications, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and database applications written in the BASIC programming language and which ran in a BASIC interpreter, though Rediffusion regarded the Teleputer 3 as a Videotex terminal with microcomputing capabilities, rather than a microcomputer with Videotex access capabilities.
Meanwhile, IBM produced a Videotex card with software which let its IBM PC to be used to access Videotex services.
Telita
In 1982, the Telecommunications Department Malaysia (now Telekom Malaysia) bought a GEC 4000 Videotex minicomputer as a host for its Videotex service which it called Telita – an acronym for Telekom, Lihat dan Tahu – which means Telecom, see and know in the Malay language.
The system occupied half of the fourth floor of its telephone exchange at the end of Jalan Gasing in Petaling Jaya and Telekom provided a four-number short code for subscribers nationwide to dial in at local rates.
One of the information providers on Telita was the Malaysian Medical Association which used it to provide doctors with access to information on the side effects of different medicines.
However, Rediffusion’s Teleputer 3 and IBM’s PCs were priced at RM12,000 and RM14,000 respectively back then, so both were basically unaffordable for most to use for Videotex access.
So Rediffusion did not seriously see the Teleputer 3 as a viable platform for Videotex access, while IBM refused to provide its Videotex card for use in much cheaper clone PCs.
Meanwhile, several other manufacturers provided more affordable desktop Videotex adaptors. For example, Tandata in the UK produced a range of adaptors with integrated keyboard, modem, video and audio ports, and Rediffusion Malaya supplied several hundreds of them to Telekom Malaysia for its Telita service.
However, Telita had a limited end-user uptake and Telekom Malaysia terminated the service in the mid 1990s, by which time the Internet and the World Wide Web had begun to gain traction among end-users and the rest is history.
Videotex in Australia perhaps had wider uptake, thanks perhaps to there being more applications, such as stock trading online and information services.
Meanwhile, while Prestel's two-way features (including e-mail) were interesting, like proverbial horses taken to water, end-users were apparently unwilling to pay much for such a service, so in the late 1980s the system was re-focused to provide financial data, and was eventually bought out by the Financial Times in 1994.
A closed access videotex system based on the Prestel model was developed by the travel industry, and continues to be almost universally used by travel agents throughout the UK, even as late as 1999.
In the late 1990s when Internet was taking off rather healthily in Malaysia, to make it easier for the less PC savvy to access the Internet, Philips Malaysia came out with an Internet adaptor which connected to a home TV set as monitor so people could surf the Web with it using a remote control but it had relatively little uptake, even though it cost less than a PC.
The Network Computer
At the ITU Telecom exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995, Oracle Corp’s chairman and chief executive officer, Larry Ellison announced the concept for a Network Computer (NC) reference design based on Oracle technology.
IBM’s Lou Gerstner also announced IBMs commitment to the idea.
Like Qualcomm’s Kayak, the NC was to be a dedicated Internet access device rather than a full-blown PC which dialled up to the Internet to access information and applications.
In November, 1996 Ellison launched the NC amidst much fanfare at the Oracle Open World event at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and he also announced a subsidiary in charge of managing the licensing of its NC reference design to various manufacturers.
At the same time, he also announced Oracle HatTrick, a suite of Java-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics applets for the NC.
HatTrick was to run within the messaging interface of Oracle InterOffice 4.0, its Web-based collaboration software, which would save users from having to open multiple applications to run its different applications.
Written completely in Java, HatTrick also published natively in HTML enabling graphically-enhanced documents created with HatTrick to be viewed with any browser. HatTrick was to have shipped with InterOffice 4.1 in the first quarter of 1997.
By then, several manufacturers had produced their own variants of the NC in a variety of forms, including desktop terminals, TV set-top boxes, TVs incorporating an NC, NCs built into telephones and even a Wireless NC.
They cost between US$300 and US$500. Available immediately then were the Acorn NC and the IDEA Internet Client Station (ICS), which were desktop NCs costing US$400 and US$500 respectively, with the rest to be rolled out beginning December 1996 and through 1997.
Ellison expected the NC to enable the development of the information society by allowing most households, in the United States and the rest of the world, to enjoy the benefits of computer and information technology (IT).
With his palms outstretched and faced downward, and with the stage lighting bathing him in a beam of golden light, Ellison said rather prophetically in his trademark flamboyant and charismatic manner, “With 70% of US and over 90% of non-US households not having a computer, the information society will not happen.”
The rate of adoption of PCs among US households without PCs has slowed from four per cent in 1994 to a projected two per cent in 1996, so with the advent of the NC, Ellison expected 90% of US households to have computers by the year 2000.
He expected that by that time NC technology would cost less than US$100 and would be integrated into a variety of appliances including TV sets, telephones, handphones, calculators and many others.
Being made in many different forms by many competing manufacturers, Ellison saw the NC challenging Microsoft’s dominance over the computers and IT industry.
“The idea that one company can control the most important technology and industry in the world is totally unacceptable,” said Ellison.
To dispel claims by certain quarters that the lack of bandwidth over plain old telephone lines would hamper the adoption of the NC among home users, Ellison demonstrated full-motion streaming video on an NC which he claimed was connected via a 28.8 Kbps dialup modem.
However, Oracle targeted the NC mainly at corporations where it hoped to gain from the PC and terminal replacement market. It also focussed the NC at the education market.
“The NC will save schools on having to hire network administration staff,” Ellison said.
Also present at Open World was Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy, who cradled Sun’s own equivalent of a dedicated Internet access device. When asked he did not know its name and said, “Perhaps, The Earthquake,” because of its stylised split design.
Sun was also behind the NC idea, since it was and still is a strong advocate of the concept of the network being the computer, which shows signs of coming to pass today, with the buzz over cloud computing.
Oracle Open World events are occasions for much grandstanding about one’s products and technologies, with much ridiculing of competitors’ products, especially those of Microsoft’s, and the tone of much of the hubris over the NC was partly due to opposition to Microsoft.
However, Hewlett Packard’s Lou Platt was the most level headed when he proclaimed, “We won’t get involved in technology wars and will continue to support different technologies.”
After all, Oracle, Sun and Hewlett Packard are based in California’s Silicon Valley, while Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington State and there certainly is a degree of techno-politics and corporate cultural differences between IT companies based in these two regions.
Come to think of it, there even are cultural differences even between the IT industry in Silicon Valley south of San Francisco and the entertainment industry centred around Hollywood near Los Angeles.
I even suspect there are cultural differences between the artistic and alternative culture of San Francisco which the hippies gravitated to, and the technological/ entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley nearby.
It’s unfortunate that the IT media lets itself get drawn into these techno-tribal wars, thus helping to promote and reinforce the kind of Apple versus PC, Palm OS versus Windows Mobile and so on among IT fans, which is not much different from soccer club fans getting into fights with fans of rival clubs, though with a little more decorum.
In Asia, Oracle at the time was soon to announce NC hardware manufacturers in Japan, Taiwan and Korea, its senior vice president for the Asia Pacific Division, Derek Williams said.
Williams expected the English-language version of the NC to be available in the region in the first quarter of 1997 and a double-byte version by March that year.
I had the chance to try out some of its Asian variants in Kuala Lumpur in early 1997 and one hung when I tried to access the website of Thailand’s newspaper The Nation, perhaps due to some incompatible content.
In the run up to Oracle Open World 96 and at the event itself, Oracle touted the advent of the NC as marking the end of the PC era and the dawn of the NC era.
However, two years later, Ellison conceded that the NC was a failure, while the PC era continued unabated and Microsoft is still king of the hill.
A replay of the NC?
Now will Qualcomm’s Kayak PC alternative reference design be a replay of the NC but with 3G connectivity, though unlike Oracle, Qualcomm did not make any grandiose claims of its epoch shattering effects?
SURF! put that question to Goh Thih Liang (Goh), Qualcomm’s country manager for Malaysia.
SURF!: Your press release of 13 November, 2008 says, "The Kayak PC alternative fills the niche that exists between desktop PCs, which normally require landlines or separate accessories for connectivity, and Internet-capable wireless devices" and further down says, "Manufacturers can then design a wide range of devices based on the Kayak reference design…". So what are these different types of devices which can be based on the Kayak reference design and do they include everything from desktop PCs to notebooks and the increasingly popular netbook PCs such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a special version of which has an integrated SIM card is already being offered by Maxis?
GOH: It is up to the manufacturers to determine the types of devices which will be based on the Kayak reference design. Our focus is on ensuring that the devices are affordable and that there is connectivity. Computing is important, but connectivity is the key. It’s not just the digital divide – now it’s the connectivity divide.
Many millions of people living in remote or underdeveloped areas are still waiting to experience the adventure, opportunity and truly life-changing benefits of the Internet. Cost, geographic and infrastructure challenges make it extremely difficult for them to obtain even basic dial-up Internet access. Thanks to the Kayak PC alternative, wireless technology is poised to help bring affordable Internet connectivity to markets where wired connections have been slow in coming, difficult to install or simply unaffordable.
Kayak is a great example of how Qualcomm and its customers are leveraging 3G networks to help bring developing markets into the global online community for the first time.
SURF!: Does Qualcomm charge manufacturers any fees to use the Kayak reference design?
Goh: Qualcomm is consistent with its typical business model for the Kayak reference design.
SURF!: Qualcomm describes Kayak as a "PC alternative," so is it for some kind of PC or some kind of dedicated Internet access device using 3G cellular broadband?
Goh: Kayak is a thin-client-type device designed primarily to allow people to use Internet-based services and applications, like web browsing, webmail and online productivity applications. It includes a full-featured web browser, Opera, as well as graphic and audio processing to make the most of the applications and content available online. Both television sets and computer monitors can be used as displays with a standard keyboard and mouse for input. Kayak devices can also function as music players and 3D gaming consoles. The main advantages of Kayak are built-in cellular connectivity and an inherently lower-cost platform based on high-volume wireless chipsets.
SURF: If so, is Qualcomm resuscitating Oracle's Larry Ellison's concept of the Network Computer reference design launched at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco in late 1996 and which Ellison admitted was a failure two years later?
Goh: In 2009 it’s hard to argue against the importance of the Internet as a source of information and, increasingly, useful applications. With the rise of WiFi, netbooks and Internet-capable mobile phones, getting online is an increasingly important part of people’s lives. We want to make it possible for more people to take advantage of the information and services that are available online.
SURF!: Going back further to the late 60s, Britian's Post Office Telecommunications conceived Prestel videotex, which was a forerunner to the Internet and many manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon with different types of stand-alone consumer terminals to use to access Prestel and other videotex services but that failed, with the exception of France's Minitel service. While it could be argued that videotex, with its limited, blocky and rather crude alpha-mosaic graphics on a 40 x 24 screen was superceded by the Internet and the World Wide Web and web browsers on full-blow PCs, still could both the failure of videotex, Ellison's Network Computer reference design, Philips' Internet access appliance introduced in the 90s and even Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Chile notebook PC be due to users preference for a full-blown computer, including lower processing-powered netbook PCs, rather than a limited function, dedicated access device?
Goh: Telecommunications networks and technologies are very different today compared with the late 1970s. What is important is to have fully functional Internet access and the ability to take advantage of all of the services and applications that make the Internet useful, and then making all of that available to people who haven’t been able to experience it before. Also, because Kayak is a reference design, local partners can design a final product that meets the needs of local markets.
SURF: Why doesn't Qualcomm just focus on enabling integrated 3G, whether CDMA2000 or WCDMA access in various Intel architecture and Apple Mac PCs?
Goh: Qualcomm does that as well, by providing solutions such as Gobi, our integrated wireless broadband solution for notebook computers, and technology for wireless USB modems and similar products. We see 3G as a broad based platform upon which various devices can communicate. But we also wanted to provide a reference design – Kayak – for markets where some people can’t afford a full-featured PC or get access to the necessary connectivity.
SURF!: Further down, the press release says, “Emerging markets will be a huge growth driver for the telecommunications industry in the coming years,” said Mark Hirsch. Which emerging markets are you targeting and how much cheaper than say a netbook or clone desktop PC will be a device based on the Kayak reference design be?
Goh: Kayak is primarily targeted at emerging markets in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and Latin America. Kayak systems’ cost will vary depending on specific designs and capabilities as chosen by device manufacturers, but are expected to be much more affordable than PCs that are then retrofitted with solutions for 3G connectivity.
It’s difficult for us to pin down a precise price point, since there are many factors which would affect the final price, but based on other efforts in these markets, we do feel that the final devices must be below $200 in order to be successful. Of course, if network operators decide to subsidize part of the device cost as a bundle deal with data minutes, the cost to the user will be even less.
SURF!: Besides Opera browser, music player and gaming, does the Kayak reference design also include a POP/IMAP e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation graphics and personal information manager for people who want work done on the go?
Goh: The Kayak reference design is not for mobile devices – it is a desktop PC-style format. Kayak is primarily designed to allow people to access hosted applications. Today there are powerful online solutions for e-mail (many of which will also connect to POP3 and IMAP servers), productivity and more. And focusing on hosted applications keeps the complexity and cost of the device low. However, the device has to be sophisticated enough to support the audiovisual features that make for a good experience.
SURF!: How will Qualcomm ensure Internet access appliances based on its Kayak reference design will be a success after such a track record of failures of similar devices based on similar intentions to offer a cheaper alternative to PCs -- which have been gradually falling lower and lower. For example an entry-level notebook PC cost around RM7,000 back in 1996 but today one costs less than RM2,000. So how will devices based on the Kayak reference design beat that?
Goh: We do see Kayak as being a very different effort in the sense that we’re not as focused on low-cost computing as we are on Internet connectivity. We believe that computing may be very important to these markets, but connectivity is key to helping these regions build their productivity.
The global demand for low-cost computing and Internet connectivity has only begun to be addressed, and there is still room for innovation in this emerging market. One limitation of current low-cost PCs is the lack of affordable Internet access options for many users. The wide availability of 3G wireless networks worldwide makes wireless an obvious option for Internet access in much of the world.
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