科技新聞

2003/04/01

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. government said Friday it will begin testing a system using handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, to deliver urgent messages to doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in the event of a biological attack.

The three-month test will evaluate how often health-care workers download the information to their handheld devices and whether they find the system useful, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

The project will be tested with health-care workers who use a system created by ePocrates, a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, that sends alerts to more than 700,000 health-care workers, including more than 250,000 doctors, an HHS statement said.

A test messages will contain a memo about particular biological agents and Web links to information about diagnosing and treating related conditions, the health agency said. Health-care workers will be able to save the information to their PDAs for future reference.

2003/04/02

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) -- Sweden has overtaken the United States as the Web-savviest nation on the planet, a survey showed on Tuesday.

One other European country, Denmark, was also more aggressive in taking advantage of the Internet than the United States, according to research carried out by IBM and the intelligence unit of British magazine The Economist.

Of the 60 countries surveyed, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were at the bottom of the list with 2.37 and 2.52 points respectively out of a possible 10.

Sweden scored 8.67, up from 8.32 a year ago. The United States was little changed at number three with 8.43 points, on par with the Netherlands and Britain.

The differences were small between the top 14, all scoring more than eight points as a result of plentiful cheap Internet connections, software and technical support, legal and government frameworks and populations which think it is cool to spend time on the Net.

"Northwest Europe, North America and Australia are at virtually similar levels," said Peter Korsten, European executive director at IBM's Institute for Business Value.

Absent from the top 15 were France and Italy, which were clearly second league in "connectivity" and "consumer and business adoption." "They're laggards and that's a bit scary," he said.

South Korea jumped from 21nd to 16th place, overtaking France, Italy, Taiwan, New Zealand and Belgium, as it boasts the world's highest percentage of high-speed Web households.

2003/04/10

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- After seven decades, reality is catching up to Dick Tracy's wristwatch phone -- Japan's cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo will soon start selling a mobile phone that's worn around the wrist and snaps off to become a regular handset.

"We are targeting young businessmen in their 20s and 30s as the device looks a bit rugged," DoCoMo spokesman Takuya Kono said.

Dubbed the "Wristomo," the watch opens up to become a phone, and users can talk while wearing it like Dick Tracy, the comic-book hero who debuted in the 1930's.

The Wristomo, manufactured by Seiko Instruments, weighs 4 ounces including batteries. It also hooks up to DoCoMo's hit "i-mode" Web-surfing service.

The company plans to sell 5,000 Wristomo phones for between $250 and $330 each, Kono said. The new phone will only be usable in Japan.

A competitor, Samsung Electronics of South Korea, plans to launch its wristwatch phone late this year.

2003/04/30

A vast preponderance of the world's problems today can be traced to the fundamental economic disparity of having a very small layer of rich people (that's us in the developed countries) living on the same planet as a vastly larger group of desperately poor people. What those people, many of them so alienated and angry, need most is the ability to raise their standard of living quickly to something more closely resembling ours. Despite all the suffering, war, distress, chaos, and fear in our world, the ongoing unstoppable trajectory of progress, particularly technological progress, continues to give me confidence that change will come.

War or no war, technology is increasingly the way the world's problems will be addressed. The Internet makes the world a smaller place. And it is growing up in its capabilities. We are on the cusp of a new era of cheap and effective technology, an era in which many capabilities of networked software and hardware begin to come together in new ways. Much of the progress has been hard to discern in the face of the dotcom and Wall Street crashes, and September 11 and its aftermath. But this coming together will benefit companies, and it will benefit the world.

Look at the biggest tech trends:

Standardization

An ever-widening array of technology tools are available in inexpensive, standardized form. The price of computers, storage, and bandwidth, among other things, continues to drop per unit of performance. Dell Computer is the ultimate apostle of this trend, but Dell only succeeds because of the work of Intel, Microsoft, the Linux community, and others.

Open source

Software that costs essentially nothing can do more and more tasks. I wrote the other day about the mySQL database. Meanwhile, Linux continues to astound. It makes available to anyone, inexpensively, the kind of robust software provided by the traditional proprietary Unix vendors. Linux also allows Wal-Mart to sell a $200 PC.

Wireless

The cost of deploying a broadband network is plunging because it can now be done wirelessly. This suits our public spaces, workplaces, schools, and homes. We can thank not the telecommunications industry but those in the computer industry who developed the standards-based unregulated Wi-Fi technology.

'Data Comes Alive'

This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: Web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic Web," a richer version of the Web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes.

Selling software as a service

I've written in this column about the phenomenal growth of Salesforce.com's per-user-per-month sales automation software. Salesforce is just one of several new companies that allow anyone to automate parts of their operations without buying hardware, networks, and expensive enterprise software. All you need is a browser and you can get work done. If you apply this concept to your entire computing and software infrastructure, you have what IBM calls "on demand" computing, or Hewlett-Packard refers to as "adaptive infrastructure." It's all about getting more efficient use of technology resources, whether you own them or not.

Take these trends together and it is clear that a dramatic new set of inexpensive but powerful capabilities is emerging. With the growth of the Internet, we're starting to see a much more supple technology fabric available to any enterprise, organization, or indeed, country. These new tools will be as usable in Peru as they are in Peoria.

The Internet will be the great leveler. The new interconnected network and today's technologies give the little guy access to tools of unprecedented power -- whether that little guy is a small competitor to a big corporation or a small poor country struggling to compete with the U.S. and Europe. Cheap machines, inexpensive bandwidth, easy-to-deploy networks, and rapidly improving yet affordable software all add up to a gift to the world. Let's make the most of this gift in the hope that things from here on get better, not worse.

2003/05/05

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- For frustrated shoppers who spend hours searching for an elusive item, help is on the way -- in the form of a satellite-guided shopping cart.

Product designer Murray Laidlaw has fitted a shopping cart with a global positioning system, or GPS, to guide shoppers to their products, the Daily Mail newspaper reported Wednesday.

GPS, initially designed for the U.S. military, will guide shoppers by showing arrows on a screen that shows them the correct shelf.

The device, which will sit on the cart's handle, will also suggest recipes, alert customers to special offers and work out the quickest route around the store.

"Lots of people just don't shop in a methodical manner," Laidlaw told the paper. "This device will make shopping trips less confusing and time-consuming."

2003/05/19

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- The U.S. Army has found a powerful new weapon in training soldiers for the dirty and dangerous business of urban warfare: video games.

For the past year, the Army has been handing out free games as part of its recruiting efforts, but in the coming months it will also turn to a video game to train squad leaders in real-life combat tactics.

"If you enroll in the army of the future, you'll get your helmet, your gun and one of these discs," said Wil Stahl, a game designer at Pandemic Studios who led the three-year project to develop the game based on the Army's requirements.

"You have an Xbox -- they assume -- at home," he said.

Game simulates firefight

The combat simulator, which Santa Monica, California-based Pandemic showed off for reporters at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, puts players at the head of two light-infantry teams locked in a running firefight in a vaguely Middle Eastern city.

The "bad guys" pop out from behind walls and pull up in pickup trucks with automatic-weapons mounted on the beds. When shot, they fall with a burst of blood from the head.

In developing the game, which is now being spun off as a mass-market release titled "Full Spectrum Warrior, Pandemic said it was careful to fictionalize details of the game's setting and to make sure that the U.S. soldiers acted with discipline and professionalism.

As for the digital battleground, the look shifted from Bosnia-like terrain to a more Arab-looking street during the course of development, he said.

"We can't ignore the fact that we are in Afghanistan. We are in Iraq," said Stahl.

Commercial version expected

The commercial version of "Full Spectrum Warrior" will be published by Calabasas, California-based THQ Inc. in early 2004 for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox game console.

The project is not without its critics, especially among experts who question the relationship between video games and violence among children.

"It seems to me that they're using the Army's involvement to legitimize the violence," said Joanne Cantor, a professor who researches issues concerning violent games at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Separately, the U.S. Army said that more than 1.1 million people have gone through "basic training" in its "America's Army" personal computer game, which debuted at the Expo in Los Angeles last year.

2003/05/20

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours.

That is the warning The Walt Disney Co. will issue this August when it begins to "rent" DVDs that after two days become unplayable and do not have to be returned.

Disney home video unit Buena Vista Home Entertainment will launch a pilot movie "rental" program in August that uses the self-destruction technology, the company said on Friday.

How it works

The discs stop working after a change in color renders them unreadable. They start off red, but when they are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.

Buena Vista hopes the technology will let it crack a wider rental market, since it can sell the DVDs in stores or almost anywhere without setting up a system to get the discs back.

The discs work perfectly for the two-day viewing window, said Flexplay Technologies, Inc., the private company which developed the technology using material from General Electric Co.

In talks with other companies

Chief Executive Alan Blaustein said he was also in conversations with other companies to use the self-destructing discs.

The technology cannot be hacked by programmers who would want to view the disc longer because the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology.

However, the disc can be copied within 48 hours, since it works like any other DVD during that window.

Buena Vista did not disclose pricing plans but said the discs, dubbed EZ-D, would be available in August in select markets with recent releases including "The Recruit," "The Hot Chick," and "Signs."

2003/05/26

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- File-sharing Internet junkies, the scourge of media companies everywhere, have become a headache for Internet service providers (ISPs) too.

The proliferation of high-speed broadband Internet access has created an explosion in file-trading, an activity that hogs bandwidth and racks up big network costs for access providers.

Major music labels and Hollywood blame the emergence of file-sharing networks such as Grokster, Kazaa and eDonkey for opening up a black market trade of copyrighted materials that's eating into their business.

Now ISPs say that as much as 60 percent of data traffic zipping around their networks is in the form of large music, movies and software files. For a large ISP, the bandwidth costs needed to accommodate the traffic could run into the millions, if not tens of millions of dollars per year, experts say.

British technology start-up CacheLogic estimates the global cost of file-sharing to ISPs will top 828 million pounds ($1.3 billion) in 2003, an expense that will nearly triple next year.

"What the ISPs are spending on bandwidth is one of their greatest capital expenditures," said Andrew Parker, a co-founder of CacheLogic.

The escalating bandwidth costs associated with file-sharing are not sending the ISPs' broadband services into the red, but the firms are anxious to bring it under control.

"It is a potential problem. It's something that we need to manage quite sensitively," said Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, a division of Britain's largest telecoms operator, BT Group.

Double-edged sword

And yet it's the popularity of sharing music, film and game files with other computer users that is drawing many customers to high-speed broadband Internet services in the first place.

A variety of ISPs including Europe's third largest, Tiscali , even promote their broadband services on peer-to-peer networks to woo users with slower connections.

But many industry watchers say the "all-you-can-eat" formula for selling broadband is coming to an end. According to Jupiter Research, nearly 60 percent of European ISPs either have instituted or are considering instituting bandwidth limits on data-hogging customers.

Holding some of them back is a concern among some firms that a cap on user's data allotment would anger customers who pay monthly fees for broadband access.

A tech band-aid?

A few start-ups including CacheLogic and Canada's Sandvine Inc. have developed technological stop-gaps aimed at cutting down on costs without imposing drastic usage measures.

CacheLogic's Parker said many European ISPs are trying a new computer server that it has developed, which places limits on file-sharing traffic flow.

The server, which operates on Linux software, largely confines file-sharing activities to customers of the same ISP, resulting in big potential cost savings.

ISPs tend to rack up high bandwidth costs when a customer trades files with a customer at an outside ISP. The costs escalate further when a user in the UK trades a file with somebody in, say, Asia.

"That's probably where the bulk of the cost is," said Fergal Butler, Internet technical consultant for UK cable company/ISP Telewest, referring to the longer-distance connections. "That's what you have to keep under control."

2003/06/03

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- David Najjab is an educator with an unusual problem: He's trying to lure students who are serious about making a career out of fun and games.

As director of the new school of video game making at Southern Methodist University, Najjab plans to attract students by using some of the area's game luminaries -- including members of id Software Inc., maker of the famed "Doom" and "Quake" games -- as teachers and speakers.

But he has plenty of competition from schools around the country.

Formal game education remains a relatively untapped area, but the emergence of video game schools makes sense in the 30-year-old industry, said Jason Della Roca, director of the International Game Developers Association.

Gaming's traditional training ground, a mentoring system where the self-taught pass on knowledge to like-minded tech-savvy gamers, is no longer enough given the myriad of skills needed to create a modern game, Roca said.

Many talents required

Jay Horwitz, industry analyst with Jupiter Research in New York, said making games requires many talents, from art and music to math, computer science and physics. Pulling these disciplines together is increasingly common as the industry matures into a mainstream form of entertainment, Horwitz said.

"It's still a pretty immature media, but a discipline for actual game development is starting to make sense," he said. "Today you have a very rich environment."

Southern Methodist University's new Guildhall school of video game making is an 18-month, $37,000 program that will offer specializations in art creation, level design and software development. Classes begin in July.

Nationally, there are several well-established programs, including the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington, and Full Sail in Orlando, Florida.

Even traditional schools such as MIT and the University of Michigan have incorporated game-specific classes and programs into existing curriculum.

Where the jobs are

The games industry employs about 30,000 in the United States, and demand is expected to grow by about 15 percent, or 5,000 jobs, a year, Najjab said. Salaries vary from $49,000 for designers with a few years' experience to $300,000 for veterans.

Several companies are in the Dallas area, including Ensemble Studios, Monkeystone Games, Ritual Entertainment and Terminal Reality.

Richard Gray, a level designer at Ritual who is known in gaming circles as Levelord, will be teaching at Guildhall.

"Game designing is indeed a dream-job-come-true for me and my contemporaries, but that is because we all share the passion," Gray said. "We come into work in T-shirts and jeans. We work long and weird hours but rarely use an alarm clock. ... And most of all, we get to make games for a living."

2003/06/05

NEW YORK (AP) -- Dennis Birch compares the U.S. soldier to a Christmas tree: Whenever improvements in technology help lighten a soldier's load, someone else wants to hang on a new piece of gear like an ornament.

The result is "100 pounds of great ideas hanging off him in all different directions," Birch said.

So in its prototype for a high-tech uniform of the future, researchers at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts, have shaken all gear from the soldier and started from scratch.

In the researchers' designs, soldiers of 2011 will step into wired uniforms that incorporate all the equipment they need. The uniforms will monitor vital signs and plug them into a massive network of satellites, unmanned planes and robotic vehicles the military has planned.

"The idea is to make it an integrated system of systems, so there aren't decisions that need to be made on what lifesaving equipment you have with you or not," said Birch, who is with the Army center's Objective Force Warrior technical program.

When dressing for battle in the so-called "Scorpion ensemble," soldiers will don no more than 50 pounds (22.5 kilograms), making them much more mobile than today's troops, who carry up to 120 pounds (54 kilograms) of gear, Birch said.

Plugged in

The ensemble will plug the soldier into the military's planned Future Combat System, for which the Pentagon recently earmarked $15 billion to develop.

That system envisions lighter tanks, powerful computer networks and larger fleets of remote-controlled airplanes and robotic ground vehicles. The first battalion could field the system by late 2010 -- about when the Scorpion ensemble would be ready to plug human soldiers into the network.

As currently envisioned, soldiers will first wear an undershirt netted with sensors that monitor heart rate, body temperature and respiration.

Then comes a uniform with built-in tourniquets that one day might be tightened and loosened remotely. Body armor is built into a load carriage that holds water, ammunition, batteries and circuits to keep the soldier plugged into the network.

The most high-tech component will be the helmet, with tiny, built-in cameras to spot enemies lurking in the dark or concealed by bushes. The cameras' images will appear on semitransparent screens attached to their helmets.

Finding their way

These cameras "provide much less resolution (than standard night vision), but much better target contrast," said A. Fenner Milton, director of the night vision lab at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

"So if you're looking for a soldier behind a tree, or trying to avoid an ambush, or going into an environment where there is no ambient light, like inside a building or a cave, the infrared is preferred," Milton said.

Soldiers who get lost -- a problem in Iraq and other wars -- will view maps, global-positioning coordinates and other data on their location. The same sort of data could be used to call in air strikes. Images from drones, robotic vehicles or other members of the unit also may appear on screen.

The headgear will contain a laser-engagement system to identify friends and foes -- and serve as a "laser tag" training device, Birch said.

The way the soldier will interact with the system is still under development. Voice activation is a goal, but difficult because of varying accents. A control panel built into the sleeve is also being considered, Birch said.

The goal is to give soldiers important information without overloading them. "They have enough distractions already when they're in the middle of a battle," Birch said.

The Scorpion ensemble will have an open architecture so new devices can be swapped as technology advances, Birch said. Concepts on the drawing board include chameleon-like camouflage that mimics surroundings to make a soldier almost invisible.

New guns expected

Even the gun is undergoing a makeover.

Within five years, the XM29 should be ready for combat. The weapon will fire the same bullets as today's M16s and M4s, but will also launch programmable "air bursting" grenades that explode in the air to rain shrapnel on an enemy's head, or pierce upper-floor windows.

The same gun could fire non-lethal projectiles -- perhaps nets -- to incapacitate enemies, said Frank Misurelli, a spokesman for the Army's Picatinny Arsenal.

For soldiers who need heavier firepower, several corporate, military and university labs are developing robotic vehicles that could launch mortars or other weapons, serve as remote eyes and ears or simply haul gear.

Smart land mines would protect troops' flanks under one project at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The mines, connected wirelessly, could hop from the ground to fill voids if the minefield is breached.

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a government-sponsored lab that opened on May 22, research could lead to external skeletons carrying artificial muscles that would make soldiers faster and stronger, said Paula Hammond, a research team leader.

Blocking out chemicals

Other research could lead to lightweight uniforms that close pores between fibers to block out chemical weapons, or fibers that stiffen to form a cast or splint on a broken bone.

"You can hobble away rather than just lay with your broken leg until someone finds you and finishes you off," Hammond said.

Another project at MIT envisions thin films that would monitor a soldier's breath for exposure to toxins, then signal the system to release the appropriate medicine, according to Hammond.

Sensors one day could show exactly where wounds are, said Dr. Richard Satava, a DARPA program manager. In a project Satava is developing, doctors could pull up the file of a wounded soldier and rehearse surgery on a hologram rendered from computed tomography images -- also known as CAT scans -- of the soldier's body.

2003/06/09

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Hip-hop star Nelly did it. Madonna is doing it. And British rock group Radiohead plans to do it -- boost music sales by reaching out to fans through mobile phones.

With sales of CDs on a three-year slide, the music industry sees mobile phones as powerful outlets for promoting artists and distributing music for profit -- something it failed to do in the early days of Internet music-swapping.

In recent months, recording labels have entered deals with wireless carriers and other companies. The music companies are selling rights to their musicians' recordings and images for use in screen savers, digital images and song snippets that are then sold to mobile phone users.

Using text messages

Madonna and other artists already send text messages to cell phones on new albums or tour dates. Nelly sent similar ones to fans who had submitted their numbers at concerts.

In June, members of Radiohead plan to reach fans on their mobile phones -- exactly how has yet to be disclosed -- on the same day the band releases its new record, said Vijay Chattha, spokesman for San Francisco-based IPSH!net, which developed the promotions.

The recording industry hopes to drive CD sales and, eventually, direct sales of songs over mobile phones.

That vision remains far from becoming reality, however. The U.S. wireless market is about two years behind Europe and Asia, and it's not clear how interested Americans will be in using their phones to buy or listen to music.

"The phone is really still a communications device. It's not a substitute for an MP3 player or any of those other things," said Jupiter Research analyst Lee Black.

Mobile marketing

Despite such obstacles, the industry is pushing ahead. Music companies "are really embracing mobile in a way that has not been seen before," said Ralph Simon, director of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, a trade association. "They see it as an important part of the marketing rainbow."

Music industry officials also are optimistic that mobile phone networks will be less susceptible to rampant pirating seen on the Internet, which the industry blames for sagging sales.

But while recording companies may be eager to get a foothold in a new medium, they're also cautious about how much music to free up.

"Until everyone is fully convinced they're not going to be Napsterized in this space ... (the) attitude is 'Make me some fire and I'll bring you more wood,"' said Shawn Conahan, president of Los Angeles-based Moviso LLC, which develops ring tones and other features for wireless devices.

Demand growing

This year's U.S. mobile music market for all content will reach $51 million, according to Ovum, a London-based consulting firm. It could reach $400 million to $500 million by 2007, according to Seamus McAteer at the Zelos Group, an advisory firm in San Francisco.

Analysts and recording executives believe demand for mobile entertainment will grow as Internet-connected and text messaging-capable handsets become more common. Now, only 10 percent to 15 percent of the handsets in the United States are capable of receiving such messages, Simon said.

The top revenue producers for mobile music are downloadable ring tones. Music fans can buy electronic snippets of popular songs by artists such as Carl Perkins and Iggy Pop to replace their phones' generic ringer sounds.

Moviso had $15 million in U.S. sales last year and hopes to generate between $40 million and $50 million this year, Conahan said.

But some would-be customers are turned off by the rising costs of mobile products. Lynn Fernandez, a 22-year-old psychology major at California State University, Los Angeles, stopped downloading ring tones.

"It used to be 10 cents and they would bill to your cell phone," Fernandez said. "Now, it's like $1."

Launching experiments

Still, the labels see potential.

"At a time when other parts of the music business have been contracting, there's a high premium on finding new ways to" generate sales, said Paul Vidich, executive vice president for business development for Warner Music Group.

Warner, part of CNN's parent company AOL Time Warner, has entered trial agreements with wireless carriers and sold "tens of thousands" of ring tones in a three- to four-week period, Vidich said.

The draw of ring tones and other content is driven by mobile phone users' desire to personalize their handsets, said Thomas Gewecke, Sony Music senior vice president of business development.

Sony has launched a site for AT&T Wireless customers to browse information about recording artists' tour dates and song releases. Sony is working on providing clips by phone of original recordings of songs, images and animations.

"Ring tones are today's business," Vidich said, "and the downloads are tomorrow's business."

2003/06/18

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Scared of losing your pooch?

Japan's largest home and office security provider Secom thinks it can offer the paranoid pet owner a little peace of mind.

Secom said Monday it plans to unleash a new service later this month to track missing dogs, using satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks.

Owners can place a sensor -- which Secom said is the world's smallest and lightest mobile GPS terminal at 48 grams (1.7 ounces) -- around the dog's neck in a small pouch or on its back using a full-body harness.

Similar to kid gadget

The company said the sensor might be too heavy for small dogs and cats.

Dog owners can locate their missing pet within 50 meters (164 feet) on a Web site by typing in a username and password or by placing a call to the Secom phone center.

The technology used by Secom is an extension of a similar service offered since April 2001 for tracking young children, the elderly and missing automobiles.

How much does it cost?

Tokyo-based toymaker Takara has sold about 300,000 dog "translation" devices called the "Bowlingual" in Japan and plans to launch an English-language product in the U.S. market during the summer for about $120.

Secom's service will carry a 5,000 yen ($43) registration fee and a monthly fee of 800 yen ($7). Each call to the Secom center will cost the dog owner 200 yen ($2).

Secom said it aims to register about 10,000 canines by the end of the business year in March at a pace of about 1,000 dogs a month.

2003/06/25

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Apple Computer introduced on Monday its new "G5" computer chip, a breakthrough design by International Business Machines which can handle twice as much data at once as traditional PC microchips.

The maker of Macintosh computers also said that its new online iTunes music store had sold 5 million song downloads since its inception eight weeks ago.

Cupertino-California-based Apple introduced a new desktop computer based on the G5 chip, which can manage 64 bits of data at once, compared with 32 bits for traditional computers.

"The PowerPC G5 changes all the rules. This 64-bit race car is the heart of our new Power Mac G5, now the world's fastest desktop computer," Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, told the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.

Refining the OS

Jobs also previewed the next version of OS X, code-named Panther, which is expected to be shipped by the end of the year. The system upgrades Apple's user interface and also better integrates the company's iChat instant messaging service.

As for a refreshed Macintosh microprocessor, a faster chip made by International Business Machines could help close what has been called the "gigahertz gap" between Apple's PowerPC chips and those from Intel.

It has been a big year for Apple, which launched its iTunes music store -- backed by record labels -- in April. The service lets users download songs for 99 cents apiece with no subscription fee, unlike other online music services.

Market share at a low

Apple has seen its market share of the personal computer market dwindle to 2 percent worldwide, and while credited for sleek, well-designed and easy-to-use computers, has not had much success in increasing sales of its Macintosh computers, particularly desktops, Kay said.

"That's a historical low," Kay said of Apple's market share.

But some analysts see the new IBM 970 processor, referred to by some as the G5, as helping to change that.

"Sales of Apple's high-end PowerMac family, which have fallen for two years, could rebound beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2004 because of an alignment of three key PowerMac sales drivers," wrote Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf in a note to clients.

Demand expected to increase

He pointed to new PowerMacs using the faster chip; Quark Express, one of the most popular desktop publishing software programs, has been released for Mac OS X; and the advertising market for the fall television season has shown "surprising strength."

This last factor, Wolf said, could augur for increased demand for the PowerMac among graphics professionals.

Wolf also cited continuing momentum for Apple's online music store, which is incorporated into its iTunes digital music software.

"Apple could have a winner on its hands, especially when it introduces a Windows version later this year," Wolf wrote.