The Information Superhighway and Private Households

Traditional business informatics and information management deals with information processing in business contexts. In the last decade information technology focused on electronic data processing in service, industry companies and administrative authorities.

The “Dresden and the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady)” citizen’s information system informs residents and visitors about the 800 year history of the city, offers an overview of the most significant secular and religious architectural masterpieces and provides users with a detailed insight into the history of the Frauenkirche, built in 1726–43 by George Bähr. It is comprised of three chapters of equal length, each chapter equally important from a topical point of view. Some 350 pages of pictures and text shown on the screen are enhanced by historical and current documentary film sequences of about 40 minutes in length, 20 minutes of musical extracts from Dresden composers and singers, and quotations and poetry from leading literary figures and contemporary witnesses in Dresden. The multimedia application, that is provided in the form of a Point-of-Information (PoI) solution, is available on a daily basis and free of charge to those people visiting the pavilion on the Frauenkirche construction site. Furthermore, it is also available for purchase on a CD-ROM, whereby approximately 65% of the sales proceeds go towards the restoration. The technical equipment of the Pol system consists of an IBM pentium computer, a laser disc player and an IBM touch screen XT 21. It was decided not to compress the moving picture sequences in order to ensure maximum quality. The contents of the system have been transferred almost 1:1 to the CD-ROM, although the moving picture sequences have been compressed in MPEG standard.

Today reading has successfully made the transition from paper to the dynamic medium of the computer screen and is becoming a common experience in the world of electronic media. And while the computer industry does everything to convince us that multimedia, will be the glorious future of electronic communication we convey most of our concepts by writing and reading, be it on the computer, be it on paper. The electronic book as a platform to read on a dynamic medium is still in a very early stage both in software and hardware and may look dramatically different from what we expect it to be at this stage. Still the book is the primary source for text and thus a container of memory.

We witness the merging of the telecommunication, information processing and entertainment industries. Communication needs in this complex world can only be met by a more integrated approach in the design of communication devices, network and services.

The ‘home of the future’ has been envisaged by many people over the years. Early writers saw an ideal society, with work minimised through the use of labour-saving machines, and the people able to use their increased leisure to pursue creative and enjoyable lifestyles. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ was written into the American Constitution as the principal benefit of a free society.

Currently companies present their goods and services using a wide range of different media. The aim is always the same: To raise the customers’ desire. At last, one wants to sell.

In future, computer aided purchasing for households might turn the following scenario into reality (see fig. 1): In the privacy of her home, Andrea decides to buy a new shirt. Now she has several options to choose from: she can surf the World Wide Web (WWW) and look through the offers of national and international suppliers or she can hunt for bargains in her regional home shopping network. Another possibility is the use of CD-ROM catalogues of big mail order companies. For home shopping she employs a standard TV and a set-top box. An alternative would be a Multimedia PC. She chooses regional home shopping and can now select one of the electronic product catalogues (EPC) of various multistores. Some of these EPCs are already supported by an advisor system to simplify the selection of a suitable shirt. Electronic shopping centers (malls) represent an alternative way of searching for bargains without being limited to individual stores. Later, Andrea places her order via telephone or data connection. Home Shopping needs electronic sales assistants. Key features of successful salespeople include the ability to adapt to the customer’s problem fast on the basis of having only limited information, to cope with fuzzy hints and to present a problem solution satisfying the customers’ information needs.

Electronic Superhighway and multimedia have become the buzz-words that can be read about in almost every magazine, newspaper or trade-journal. A giant hype has been created, suggesting the upcoming of an equally giant new industry. How bitter is the truth: no multimedia platform has yet received a wide market acceptance, many new product launches remain just announcements, many proclaimed mergers are cancelled and even more start-ups never grow profitable. Big money is invested in what prove to be even bigger disappointments.

The spread of computers into the private household brings new opportunities for many enterprises. Within a brief period a new, rapidly growing market has emerged in which market shares are not yet firmly established. Given this, the Beate Uhse Group has responded relatively quickly to secure market potential.

At the end of the 1970s, only visionaries recognized that the first video game machines and home devices represented the birth of a new medium, namely that of video and computer games. By 1994, they had grown into a US$ 10 billion market, combining the characteristics of older media (sound, vision and animation) with interaction and thus opening up a whole new world of entertainment for consumers.

It was a hot day in August 1969 and I — like probably many others — can recall it quite well: For the first time a man, Neil Armstrong, set foot on the moon and billions of “earthlings” left on their homeplanet witnessed those spectacular pictures from outer space via TV. Since we did not have one at home in those days everybody gathered at my aunt and uncle’s who had recently bought one for the occasion. What it looked like? It was a ghastly monster in a very sixty — ish design, big and ugly. But it was highly effective: it filled one corner of the living room and everybody squeezed into seats and sofas in front of it in order not to miss those sensational black and white pictures and the crackling sound of Armstrongs legendary line: “It’s a small step for man, but a big step for mankind...”

The Information Highway is the basic term for a wide range of services in different areas of telecommunications, computing and entertainment. These services include high-speed data transfer over ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks or other data services, such as Switched Multimegabit Data Services (SMDS) via Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB)-networks. Presently booming online-services are further examples for services attracting public interest now. The success of the Internet — especially since introduction of convenient user interfaces like the World Wide Web — shifts online-services also in the discussion of the Information Highway. Wide introduction of ISDN offers digital connections not only for business users and fiber in the loop as well as cable TV (CATV) networks enable private users to use broadband services. The PC offers multimedia today and a complete generation has been grown up with this technology.

With continually improving health standards, elderly people tend to live longer and lead much longer active lives. The future elderly also tend to live more independently and are generally economically better off than previous generations so constituting an important group of (new) users of assistive devices.

The driving force behind the Information Society is the desire of governments worldwide to improve the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) products and to make the best use of the opportunities they create. This will lead to an increase in competitiveness, create new jobs and improve the overall quality of life for all citizens. Example applications which are already available as pilot systems in many countries can be found in areas as diverse as health care and tele-medicine (Wall Street Journal 1994), on-line access to public information services provided by local and national governments, new leisure and entertainment opportunities (direct broadcast satellite digital TV, virtual reality games played over the Internet on powerful 64-bit games consoles, interactive TV, direct access to travel agents for viewing and booking holiday options are just a very few of the possibilities which already exist today), tele-working, and tele-shopping from home via a normal telephone line.

Let us start with a short presentation of the research-project the research is associated with. In 1987, an interdisciplinary research group was founded at Frankfurt University. Within that group researchers from the departments of economics, political sciences and sociology started to investigate the process of the emergence of new technologies. At the moment, the group works in four different fields (Fleischmann 1993). One project concentrates on the genesis of telecommunication technology. A second project is concerned with the genesis of production technology. A third project is engaged in the field of the genesis of traffic technologies. Last but not least there is the project which is concerned with the genesis of Intelligent Home Technology. This project has started to make an international comparison of the Intelligent Home approaches in Europe, Japan and the USA.

Progress in the field of semi-conductors and LSIs has made the size of computers smaller and smaller and brought us very powerful workstations (WSs) and personal computers (PCs). Digital switching and transmission technologies have realized an ISDN that provides various attractive telecommunication services. These computers and communication networks have become one of the most important social infrastructures for the 21st century. Computer systems were initially limited to character-based information, but recent WSs and PCs can easily manipulate multimedia information such as characters, figures, sound and image data. B-ISDN, which will be realized by ATM switching and optical transmission technologies, can effectively transmit multimedia data include audio and video.

Sixty years after Philo T. Farnsworth first demonstrated a television system, his amazing invention remains in some respects exactly as he left it. Though television has received wide spread distribution around the world and the quality of the picture has steadily improved, it remains for the most part a passive display system for broadcasting images into the home. Even telephone technology has experienced more evolutionary development than television, with individualized, interactive services such as voice mail, call waiting, conference calling and others. Television is about to undergo a revolutionary transformation, with the introduction of the Time Warner Cable’s Full Service Network (FSN), the world’s first digital, interactive television network.

In December 1993, when we set up the independent business area, Burda New Media within our Munich publishing company, you could say we set off in a VW Polo on the communication highway. Very soon, however, this proved to be a country lane full of potholes, an adventure, the realisation of a new idea, like the construction of the railroad between the east and west coast of America in the previous century. It is very easy to get lost in the fog on the communication highway, and to misjudge the bends.

The need for mobile communication grows with the increasing mobility of our society. A good example of this is the wide acceptance of mobile phones since the introduction of GSM-services. For road users mobile access to static and dynamic information gets more and more important with growing traffic. Mobile gets an advanced meaning — similar to mobile phone calls this implies not only within the means of transportation but everywhere. Complex data communication replaces voice communication for instance in trip planning or navigation applications.