strictly for fortunehunters...with a global thinking

...most people today are wondering, where is the best place to live, throwing several parameters or considering different priorities in each case. It happened to be as anxious as well on the topic and I managed to find a good source that compares different cities globally. The metrics are not bad, subway ticket, burger meal, cup of coffee etc.

Surprisingly many changes were made in the ranking between cities living cost from 2006 to 2007, light twists to the big cities, with Europe leading the global list and Moscow being the #1 far above NYC that is the base city. NYC went down from #10 to #15, London up to #2, Dubai went down from #25 to #34, but the biggest outsider was Athens that moved from #59 to #29, 30 positions!! Is that the Euro strength? Living cost is coming along with luxurious and prestigious lifestyle and definitely Athens is performing well with a tremendous improvement the last years. If you walk downtown in Athens, you will get the vibe. Based on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Greece is ranked #19 globally, based on the GDP/capita or the average annual income.

Berlin was also the second outsider that moved up 27 positions, from #72 to #45. Its your conclusions where you want to live based on the rankings, but the two latter outsiders definitely stand out.

Keep on you research, if interested, the suggested source/survey has tremendous amount of info

-E

Its IPTV time!

As the broadband technology started to mature, it seems that its time for the killer application or service that will differentiate the operators in a win-win strategy. Verizon is still promoting HD TV on the other hand offering a free TV set, as I was watching in a commercial the other days, trying to challenge the subscribers and offer the media for the ultimate experience.

Currently, we are shifting from phase 1 - IPTV deployment into phase 2 - Content and Marketing. A One-Plus differentiation strategy is applied in Phase 2 from AT&T and Verizon promoting as much as they can the high speed broadband and the IPTV smart services. Similar is the landscape in Europe, with Telefonica, France Telecom and Telecom Italia, counting subscribers and adaptation rates. The last one, also holds a subsidiary in France competing indirectly against FT.

I have been assigned to discuss Phase 1 and the shift into Phase 2 in April during the next UltraBB IV event, in Paris. The Phase 3 follows, when IPTV matures as a product and we focus on Applications and Advanced Advertising. That would be part of my lecture as well.

Stay tuned..

E

The New Media world

Last Friday, have been at Columbia University to an event on the Digital TV revolution. Literally, was amazed from the technological progress in that field, discussing the 4K and 8K TV with an amazing resolution that sometimes feels like your eyes cannot handle all these details, and it feels like everything is so real or crystal clear and you cant see any pixels any more.

The Internet TV and the IPTV and the content generation have definitely changed the landscape. Now we are discussing 1 Terrabit/sec to broadcast 4K TV quality and replicate that into different countries simultaneously. The future was right there during the event, but all these new things need about 10-20 years till they get adapted from the market. The guys from CineGrid were really amazing, introducing new platforms and architectures, proving that anything can happen in the media transfer eliminating the distances. The only "struggle" they faced was the TCP/IP transfer that was replaced from the UDP protocol and variations as more appropriate for their applications.

-E