Where are they now? By Victoria Shannon International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/15/business/ptend16.php PARIS What ever happened to ... the Simputer? The Minitel? Or other hot technology ideas and products that once grabbed all the headlines? Today, The End User looks back at an assortment of techie one-hit wonders - or what would appear to be - and finds out how they died, took on new lives or found a niche in which they have lived happily ever after. The Simputer was all the rage around 2001 as the solution to the digital divide. Born in India from a nonprofit trust, the gadget was to be a cheap, hand-held miniature computer for the have-nots, running on open-source software and using a card insert that could allow the machine to be used by many different people in a community. Although the Simputer was actually built and is still being sold today, the reality has fallen far short of the dream. Rather than a mass-market device, the Simputer (the "Sim" stands for simple, inexpensive and multilingual) ended up in a variety of specialized uses. Bangalore police officers, for instance, use Simputers to manage traffic and issue parking tickets. The stripped-down machine costs 12,000 rupees, or about $270. That price is steeper than the newest headline-grabbing plan to get computers to the poor, Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop project, which is close to production. Check with us in another five years to see how that one fared. When last we left the issue of Internet governance - who should run the diffuse network and how? - a United Nations summit in Tunisia had agreed, in November, to let the U.S. agency Icann keep the reins on the technical addressing mechanisms. But European, some Asian and many developing countries who generally opposed U.S. control at least walked away from Tunis with an agreement to create the Internet Governance Forum, which would continue the dialogue. Last month in Geneva, organizers decided the first meeting of that group would be from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 in Athens. The UN will be represented by Markus Kummer, a Swiss diplomat specializing in information technology policy coordination who had been intimately involved with the Tunis summit. The site www.intgovforum.org has been set up to coordinate planning. Meanwhile, Icann, perhaps a tad humbled by the threat to its role last year, has established its own independent monitor to take a look at how the group is run. The Minitel is alive and well and conducting business - on the Internet. Dating from 1982, the French Minitel was the most successful of the e-commerce ancestors of the Internet, with more than six million terminals in use around 1997. But it was a government-run, closed system - you need a Minitel machine at home to get your recipes, directions, reservations and purchases - and the global tsunami of the Internet eventually overran it. Today, Minitel devices are still in use, but most of the system's commercial activity is done over the Internet, from the www.minitel.fr site. Some Minitel services also are available via mobile phone. For France Telecom, which stills run the system through its PagesJaunes subsidiary, revenue from the Minitel fell 33 percent last year, while Internet activity through all of PagesJaunes rose 34 percent. Still, the Minitel generated 45 million, or $54 million, in sales through the first nine months of 2005. Introduced in 2002, Froogle was supposed to be the biggest threat to shopping sites on the Internet. After all, the price-comparison site was started by Google, which therefore means dominance, right? Not in this case. According to statistics and professional reviews of the site, Froogle is a distant contender in price comparison, behind Shopping.com, Shopzilla and Yahoo Shopping. To some, Froogle just gives you the same kinds of endless results a search on Google does, without narrowing it down for you. Wondering about another "whatever happened to ..." product? Add it to our conversation on Digital Dialogue, the IHT's global exchange about personal technology, at www.iht.com/tech, and I'll track it down. PARIS What ever happened to ... the Simputer? The Minitel? Or other hot technology ideas and products that once grabbed all the headlines? Today, The End User looks back at an assortment of techie one-hit wonders - or what would appear to be - and finds out how they died, took on new lives or found a niche in which they have lived happily ever after. The Simputer was all the rage around 2001 as the solution to the digital divide. Born in India from a nonprofit trust, the gadget was to be a cheap, hand-held miniature computer for the have-nots, running on open-source software and using a card insert that could allow the machine to be used by many different people in a community. Although the Simputer was actually built and is still being sold today, the reality has fallen far short of the dream. Rather than a mass-market device, the Simputer (the "Sim" stands for simple, inexpensive and multilingual) ended up in a variety of specialized uses. Bangalore police officers, for instance, use Simputers to manage traffic and issue parking tickets. The stripped-down machine costs 12,000 rupees, or about $270. That price is steeper than the newest headline-grabbing plan to get computers to the poor, Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop project, which is close to production. Check with us in another five years to see how that one fared. When last we left the issue of Internet governance - who should run the diffuse network and how? - a United Nations summit in Tunisia had agreed, in November, to let the U.S. agency Icann keep the reins on the technical addressing mechanisms. But European, some Asian and many developing countries who generally opposed U.S. control at least walked away from Tunis with an agreement to create the Internet Governance Forum, which would continue the dialogue. Last month in Geneva, organizers decided the first meeting of that group would be from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 in Athens. The UN will be represented by Markus Kummer, a Swiss diplomat specializing in information technology policy coordination who had been intimately involved with the Tunis summit. The site www.intgovforum.org has been set up to coordinate planning. Meanwhile, Icann, perhaps a tad humbled by the threat to its role last year, has established its own independent monitor to take a look at how the group is run. The Minitel is alive and well and conducting business - on the Internet. Dating from 1982, the French Minitel was the most successful of the e-commerce ancestors of the Internet, with more than six million terminals in use around 1997. But it was a government-run, closed system - you need a Minitel machine at home to get your recipes, directions, reservations and purchases - and the global tsunami of the Internet eventually overran it. Today, Minitel devices are still in use, but most of the system's commercial activity is done over the Internet, from the www.minitel.fr site. Some Minitel services also are available via mobile phone. For France Telecom, which stills run the system through its PagesJaunes subsidiary, revenue from the Minitel fell 33 percent last year, while Internet activity through all of PagesJaunes rose 34 percent. Still, the Minitel generated 45 million, or $54 million, in sales through the first nine months of 2005. Introduced in 2002, Froogle was supposed to be the biggest threat to shopping sites on the Internet. After all, the price-comparison site was started by Google, which therefore means dominance, right? Not in this case. According to statistics and professional reviews of the site, Froogle is a distant contender in price comparison, behind Shopping.com, Shopzilla and Yahoo Shopping. To some, Froogle just gives you the same kinds of endless results a search on Google does, without narrowing it down for you. Wondering about another "whatever happened to ..." product? Add it to our conversation on Digital Dialogue, the IHT's global exchange about personal technology, at www.iht.com/tech, and I'll track it down. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
