Richter Scale^® Articles

(First published in the CAD++ Newsletter in early 1994)

Or, A Lesson in the Proper Channels

It's often difficult, when first starting your own business venture, to come up with the necessary funds to get the equipment and other materials you frequently need (or just want). This includes magazine subscriptions, new PCs, software utilities, and countless dozens of other things. Now, if you could be assured of getting name brand products at wholesale prices, all for the cost of a few stamps or phone calls, wouldn't that be worthwhile?

At this point, you're probably wondering if I'm trying to sell you one of those Price Guarantee Club deals or something. Nope, nothing that obnoxious. What I'm going to tell you about will be obvious once you think about how manufacturers sell products.

The Product Sales Food Chain

In order to get a product to consumers, manufacturers in the PC industry use several channels:

• Distributors, also known as wholesalers, get large discounts from manufacturers, ranging from 25% to 60% (hardware manufacturers usually offer smaller distributor discounts than software manufacturers). The reason distributors get such large product discounts is because they tend to buy in large volumes and then sell only to dealers and resellers, ranging from the mom-and-pop shop to the big retailers (Egghead, for example).
  
• Resellers/Dealers get smaller discounts from manufacturers because, in theory, their volumes are lower (usually ones and twos for most CAD dealers). If a product is available through distribution, this will frequently be the easiest way for a reseller/dealer to obtain the product, although nowadays manufacturers are offering lots of perks to resellers who buy direct. Figure that a reseller/dealer can usually get products at anywhere from 15% to 45% off.
  
• Mail Order companies. These guys are another form of reseller, but because they don't have to provide much support or offer a store front (or even a visitable office), their overhead is a lot lower, which is why they are able to pass much of their discount on to you.
  
• Direct. Most manufacturers these days offer products direct to consumers these days. All it takes is a phone call. Frequently they are running some type of special that might get a you better deal than you'd get at your local computer store.

Now, why is this important? Because, as a reader of this publication, you probably qualify as a consultant, and many consultants also resell other companies' products. So, this means, as a consultant, you could honestly promote yourself to distributors and manufacturers as a reseller (think of the price benefit you could provide your acquaintances with!), in most cases.

The reason you won't always qualify has to do with the various levels or types of reseller programs manufacturers offer, as follows:

• Authorized Reseller, Type 1. This tends to be the most stringent type of reseller program, requiring certain volume commitments, and certification that you have certain skills. Frequently, a business plan is required. Unless you intend to spend most of your time actually reselling these products. This is the type of program that most large CAD companies use for their mainstream packages.
  
• Authorized Reseller, Type 2. This one is a lot less painful, and easier to deal with, as it requires you to fill out a reseller application, and possibly a credit application, but the likelihood of not being approved is virtually non-existent. Most distributors require you to fill these out. Think of it as a great way to build a credit history for your business.
  
• "Hi, I'm a reseller/consultant/dealer". For many manufacturers, telling them this is good enough to get you dealer pricing, although you may have to buy more than a single product to kick off your reseller status with a given manufacturer. It also frequently gets you access to low-cost, not-for-resale versions of the manufacturers software. Microsoft had a program like this where you could get a not-for-resale copy of any program they offered for only about $50. It may still exist, but I haven't checked it out in the last couple of years.

Note that just about any company you try to buy product from as a consultant/reseller/dealer will also require you to supply a State Sales Tax Reseller's Exemption Certificate (or simply said, a Sales Tax ID), which is something you'll have to apply for in your own state (usually with the Secretary of State or State Department of Revenue). This certificate basically indicates to the companies that you are purchasing goods from that they should not charge you sales tax for the products you purchase from them, because you will be reselling or integrating the products in your offerings and charging your customers sales tax instead. Legally, if you keep the product you purchased for your or your company's personal use, you must pay your state the sales tax for the product, since the distributor or manufacturer didn't charge it. On the other hand, if you got the products via mail order from a different state, there's currently no real way to track the value of such transactions, so your conscience must be your guide. Several bills are floating around Congress to force mail order companies to collect sales taxes for all destinations because states feel cheated in their sales tax revenues. For those of you in Europe, some countries handle VAT (Mehrwertsteuer auf Deutsch) in somewhat the same way as U.S. states handle sales tax.

If you have a Sales Tax ID, most distributors and manufacturers automatically assume you are a reseller. I should point out that if you live in a state with no sales taxes, like my current home of New Hampshire, you may have to argue with the distributor or manufacturer for a while to explain that no Sales Tax IDs can be had in your state.

A couple of the largest distributors you should be aware of: Ingram-Micro at 1-800-456-8000 and Merisel @ 1-800-MERISEL. Call them and ask for reseller applications and sample catalogs. You can also call Computer Reseller News at 516-562-5000 to get a sample issue and a subscription form, now that you're setting yourself up as a consultant who resells. Finally, to get yourself on all the proper lists to get mailings from people who think you're a reseller, attend a COMDEX tradeshow or two. It'll work wonders for getting on mailing lists.

Alternate Channels

I've spent a lot of space here on how to be considered a reseller to get lower pricing, but I wouldn't want you to overlook the obvious: buying generic and buying mail order, and developer programs.

While buying products from distributors is great for name-brand products, you can frequently get a better deal going with generic versions (i.e. a no-name local brand PC vs an AST PC) or by going mail-order (Gateway, for example). This is very likely to be a worthwhile bit of research when looking for systems, peripherals, and other hardware, but not for software, where distribution or the manufacturer are far better options.

Developer Programs

My company is a registered developer with a bunch of CAD software companies. When we started out 6 years ago, at several thousand dollars a package, there was no way we could have possibly afforded to pay for all the CAD packages we use for testing and developing. The CAD companies realized this was a problem, and came up with registered/authorized developer programs. By signing up with these programs, you can get free copies of pretty much any of the software a given CAD company offers, providing you sign an agreement to only use the software for testing and development purposes and not for any real commercial CAD use. If you're developing a CAD add-on, that's not a bad deal.

Registered developer programs are not only limited to CAD software companies. Most large software companies tend to have such programs, where they may offer their product at a discount to developers. Novell, Microsoft, and Lotus, among others, offer these types of programs.

Other Types of Soft-Goods

Before I close out this month's column, I'd like to mention two often overlooked computer related items: Books and magazines.

I've found two ways to save on books. The first is arranging an institutional discount at our local Barnes & Noble, where they whack off an additional 5% off the existing 10% they already provide on all books. They justify this because we buy hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of books per month. It's a good thing to try to do if you have several avid readers in your community - pool your buying power.

The other way, which also involves buying in volume (10 books at a time), is to go direct to the publisher. For example, Random House, which has published my latest collaborative work, AutoCAD Power Tools, offers anyone who order 10 books at a time, a 50% discount. If you whine and wheedle, they may even let you mix and match.

Finally, we get to magazines. At Panacea, we get over 30 different magazines delivered to us a month. We pay for none of them. Some we get because we filled out a little qualification form for a free subscription, but many we get because we are "comp'd". A "comp" subscription is a complimentary one, given to you by the publisher either via a sales manager's request, or via an editorial request.

Getting the advertising manager to comp you on a subscription requires just a call to the magazine you want, asking for the sales department, and explaining to the sales manager why it is you are interested in his or her magazine as a potential venue for your advertising. The magazine should have some relation to what your business does, since it's unlikely that you'll convince a sales manager for a cycling magazine that your CAD product is a good match. If you have a reasonable match, ask to be put on the comp list. More times than not, a sales manager is not going to risk annoying you by refusing your request for a comp subscription in case you really will advertise with the magazine at some point in the future.

Getting an editor to comp you is much more difficult, and can generally only be done in one of two ways. The first is that you write for the magazine occasionally (more on this in a future column). The second way is if the editor in question is a friend or an acquaintance that needs your help every so often (for quotes, for example).

Conclusion

Many people in our industry often pay much more for products than they need to. All it takes is a little entrepreneurial spirit and some know-how, such as what I have provided, to be able to save a little bit of money for the future.

(This column first appeared in the February 15, 1994 issue of PC Graphics Report)

Lately it seems that I've been seeing and hearing more and more threats to the stability of the PC market, all as a result of something called Intellectual Property.

Intellectual property (IP) refers to a wide range of items, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. Most of the news breaking legal actions of the PC industry in the last decade have been based on intellectual property issues, such as Intel's actions against AMD and Cyrix for alleged misuse of technology, patent infringement, etc.; Lotus suing Borland and Apple suing Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for look and feel; the more recent Compton announcement of a universal patent covering accessing data on a CD-ROM; Dell threatening action against companies using VL-Bus designs because of patent infringement; and the list goes on...

So far, the PC graphics industry has been very lucky. Only a few IP disputes have arisen in our industry in the last few years, and fortunately none of them very crippling. But, this should also be seen as a sign of trouble ahead. With the rest of American society being so ridiculously litigious, can the PC graphics industry be far behind?

I don't think so. I think that our industry has avoided litigious behavior because it knows how unreasonable such behavior can be. Anyone remember the CAD Track patent on XOR cursors? This company got a patent on something everyone knew how to use and do, but that no one actually publicly documented to create "prior art" (more on this in the next column). The result is that virtually every graphics hardware company has had to pay a sizable fee to license this patent to avoid being taken to court for patent infringement.

Unfortunately, the lack of IP disputes in our industry has created something of a lackadaisical attitude towards the whole issue of intellectual property. Witness, for example, Diamond's Viper graphics board family, and Tseng's VIPER technology - both share the same name and both are PC graphics products, key components for a legitimate trademark dispute. And, what about the handful of competing graphics boards that all have "Ultra" as part of their name? And, doesn't someone out there have a patent on high-speed, interleaved DRAM access for graphics boards?

While I'm thrilled that the PC graphics industry is currently not even remotely as litigious as the rest of our society, I can't help feeling a little nervous that something will change our state of near-serenity sometime real soon. Things like the Compton patent, and Microsoft's patent acquisitions are just some of the warning flags I see.

Ignorance is NOT Bliss

After discussing the whole topic of IP with a number of people in our industry, it appears that at least one contributing factor to our carefree nature regarding IP is the result of plain old ignorance. However, ignorance of IP matters won't help anyone avoid IP disputes.

It should be noted that lowering the level of IP ignorance in our industry is also fraught with peril. While IP education may raise awareness about how to protect one's own interests, it also provides the tools for companies to go on the offensive once they realize the value of their own IP holdings. Realizing that I may be opening a major can of worms, and even creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, I nevertheless think it's important that everyone understand the basics of intellectual property, benefits and pitfalls alike. Therefore, in my next column (to appear in a week or two) I'll tell you more than you ever thought you'd want to know about copyrights, trademarks, and patents.

In closing, let me present a scenario to further drive home the importance of understanding IP issues, and whet your appetite for my next column.

Scenario 1:

Premise:

Company A invents a new technology/process that it uses in its new FrabbleStam(tm) product, but keeps the technology under tight wrap, not telling anyone how it works and also not patenting it (after all, they say, who needs patents?).

Variants:

Company B sees the FrabbleStam product, figures out what Company A's new technology is, maybe tweaks it a little here and there, and applies for and is subsequently granted a patent on the technology. The patent grant is given because no prior art was ever published or patented by Company A.

Or:

Company B develops a product similar to the FrabbleStam totally independently of Company A or the actual FrabbleStam product, also inventing a technology similar to Company A's technology, but after Company A has done so. Company B applies for and is subsequently granted a patent on the technology because of a lack of prior art.

Climax:

Company B then approaches Company A accusing them of patent infringement, demanding either:

Variants:

Company A immediately cease shipping its FrabbleStam product and any products using Company B's patent, and pay Company B some sum of money to pay for damages Company B has incurred from Company A's pre-existing sales of FrabbleStam.

Or:

Company A may continue to sell its FrabbleStam product providing it pays Company B a royalty on each sale, as well as some sum of money to pay for damages Company B has incurred from Company A's pre-existing sales of FrabbleStam.

Result:

Variants:

Company A may attempt to prove that Company B's patent is invalid, which would cost at least $100,000 in legal fees, and take years.

Or:

Company A may try to get Company B's patent reexamined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). To use this approach Company A must procure sizeable amounts of relevant data to back up the request. This may cost less than invalidating the patent, but is also being less likely to produce results favorable to Company A since no published prior art exists.

Or:

Company A may just throw in the towel and agree to Company B's demands, since it can't afford to fight the patent.

So, which company would you rather own or be part of?

Until next week (or the week after that)...

(This column first appeared in the November 16 & 30, 1993 issues of PC Graphics Report)

For many months now, we've been reading and hearing about "convergence" - a generic term used to describe the coming together of several technologies. In particular, it refers to a combination of cable, television, multimedia, PCs, network programming, and perhaps a few other things mixed in. Add to that the on-going acquisition efforts of Paramount by Viacom and QVC (currently at over $10 billion and rising!), and Microsoft's commitment to invest $100 million a year in developing this market, and you have a situation with lots of potential, providing you can understand it.

I had the opportunity to attend a conference on this topic a short while ago, entitled Convergence '93 Interactive Television, and I must say the whole experience was rather fascinating. I'll try to provide a broad overview of the convergence/interactive television (IT) market in this week's column.

500 Channels, And There's Still Nothing To Watch...

Convergence is supposed to bring us to a whole new plateau of information access from the home. In the process, the carrot dangled in front of us is that such information will be distributed through a 500-channel medium - imagine what new metaphysical experiences today's couch potatoes will be able to experience with a 10-fold increase in channels!

The first question that always gets asked is: Seeing how difficult it is to get decent content on todays 50-60 channels, how can anyone fill 500 channels? There are several answers to this, as well as more problems raised by this concept.

First, we could probably fill at least 30-50 more stations with popular topics and ideas: the cooking channel (with cooking shows), the scenery channel (with soothing music and images), a 24-hour a day infomercial channel (scary thought), the computer channel (non-stop computer talk shows, how-to's, etc.), the instructional channel series (home repair and improvement, auto mechanics, etc.), the golf channel, the games channel (for when some level of interactivity is available, or for downloading games into your game machine), the SEGA channel, and the list could go on.

Second, if you care for more international programming, you'd probably be able to access a large number of existing satellite channels, currently not supplied by your cable operator.

Next, even more channels could be filled with local access - the cost of production in such a situation, thanks to many of your companies, is almost negligible. You get a Video Toaster, Matrox's Studio package, or similar hardware and software combinations for as little as a few thousand dollars, combine it with Animator Pro or one of dozens of other animation packages (for titling, graphical segues, or even full presentations), add a camcorder with video-out capability, and you can have your own channel too. Being a little creative would help as well.

So, that still doesn't get us even half way to the 500 channels the new cable systems are purporting of supporting. Enter Near Video-On-Demand (NVOD). Many of you probably already have the ability to get pay per view (PPV) events on your cable systems. The problem is that you're beholden to the cable operator's show schedule. By taking those movies and offering them at 15-minute start intervals (i.e. each with its own channel), the average movie would consume six to eight channels. With twenty movies available, for example, somewhere between 120 and 160 channels would be consumed.

Based on all this, it certainly does look possible to use all 500 channels, but how will these become available via existing cable systems? The answer is compression, digital compression to be exact. If you can achieve a 10:1 compression ratio, you can supply 10 times as much actual information. With normal coax cable being limited to about 50 channels or so, digital compression could produce the explosion to 500 channels. It's a rather simplistic explanation, but I think it brings the point across that digital compression is being counted on as the Rosetta Stone which will unlock the next major step in cable television.

While it became rapidly apparent during the conference that none of the companies could agree with any of the others on industry standards - the gist was "Our company believes in a single, industry-wide standard... providing it's ours" - all the companies did agree that MPEG was the only real solution for digital compression and real-time decompression. An added benefit of using MPEG (or any other CoDec, for that matter) is that when or if we make a transition to HDTV displays, then a digital transport medium can be easily made to work on HDTV. The target device characteristics for digital television are a lot less critical than with NTSC, PAL, or SECAM broadcasts.

So, Which Channel Was That On?

One major problem surfaces, however, when looking at the plethora of possible channels, and that is channel navigation. With 300+ channels, in addition to PPV movies, how do you find which out which channel has what on it?

A number of companies at the conference presented their views of how things should work. One solution was to show four channels at once, one in each quadrant of the screen, with sound enabled for one at a time - certainly the ultimate in high-speed channel surfing! This has the same drawbacks that single-channel surfing has, including not knowing what's on during a commercial. This latter item, could be resolved by having program information available with a given channel, but that require standards for encoding such information.

TV Guide demonstrated an interactive, on-screen TV Guide for navigating, which included an interface for handling parental restrictions, NVOD, PPV, and even program descriptions. A few other companies had similar user interface concepts but with different implementations. One company (my notes don't indicate which one), even went as far as to propose a radical change via use of their user interface - pay per each viewing. For example, if you missed the regular free network broadcast of Seinfeld last Thursday night, you could ask to see it again at any time for a small charge (sub-dollar). Same would apply to any movie, talk show, sitcom, news reports, etc. While the logistics of both making the content available on demand and processing the billing for such a mechanism are overwhelming, it's a really interesting concept - paying for content that you select, because you select it when it's convenient for you.

The problem with the channel navigation schemes currently being evaluated here is a more innocuous one, however. Based on recent studies, a startling number of Americans are functionally illiterate (I believe the number was between 30-50% - not a misprint). Being functionally illiterate means that while you might, with moderate difficulty, be able to read text from the newspaper or book, you could probably not balance check books, order from a restaurant menu in a timely manner, read bus schedules, interpret assembly instructions for a toy, set the timer on a VCR, etc. Now imagine placing a complex remote control in the hands of a functionally illiterate person, and having them use a text oriented (or even partially graphically oriented) user interface on their television. That's a sure way to create animosity towards the concept of future television, and thereby raise the level of technophobia undoubtedly already being experienced by many people. Perhaps the so-called Generation X, who have grown up with Nintendos and MTV, will be able to cope, but there are a whole lot of people that will shun such new technology, if it's not intuitively easy to use for a wide range of differently skilled people. The convergence industry has a lot of work ahead of it to design truly intuitive interfaces that won't alienate a significant number of consumers.

The Missing Link: The Set-Top Box

Now, I've described some of the possible worlds of wonder in the multi-hundred channel environment, but how do we get from today to then? Obviously, existing cable converter boxes, known as set-top boxes, can't handle digital decompression, nor can they cope with intelligent user interface software. But, expect new breeds of set-top boxes to be just around the corner. Jerrold and Scientific-Atlanta both described their plans for set-top box evolution at the conference I was at, and SGI, Amiga, and 3DO indicated they would like their technology to be considered as well. Jerrold plans on incorporating 386 or 486 technology into their set-tops, running Modular Windows as the base OS. Scientific-Atlanta, on the other hand, is targeting the PowerPC as its CPU of choice, and would not (or could not) disclose its operating system choice. There was also some talk at the conference about being able to remotely upgrade set-top boxes via automated microcode downloads.

In any case, the set-top boxes would need a fast CPU, MPEG hardware, enough memory to run some pretty complex programs, and store at least one frame of decompressed video (and maybe more), as well as some well-integrated graphics display technology. Want to sell several million graphics chips? Here's a market just waiting to happen.

Set-top boxes won't just be for channel navigation and viewing, either. Expect the ability to have games and simulations downloaded into the set-top for additional entertainment value and functionality (and cost, of course). There will probably also be a PC option in some cable systems, so you can use your home computer as a primary or auxiliary set-top box.

While the 500-channel systems are still a few years away for most cable markets, at best, early next yea anyone who wants to will be able to experience 150-channel digital TV with the purchase of an $800 or so investment. The investment would include a set-top box and an 18-inch portable satellite dish from a company called DirecTV. Funded in large part by Hughes, DirecTV has a satellite distribution mechanism, and even offers PPV via a small smart-card you have to order from them. The smart card gets inserted into their custom set-top box.

For ground-based cable systems, expect the transition from full analog to full digital to occur in several steps over next 5 years or so. Numerous technology trials are being conducted in key cable markets around the country, and the results of these tests will determine exactly how everyone proceeds into the future.

Where's the Data and What About Interactivity?

With the exception of the pay-per-content concept, everything I've described so far can be achieved with a near-mono-directional cable system, just like the ones most of us are using today: cable programming comes in, and your box can be enabled for PPV events or movie channels from the cable operators central location. One major issue, though, relates back to standards - there are only two ways data can currently be broadcast on existing cable systems: 1) during the vertical blanking interval (VBI); or 2) on a totally separate channel. Since cable systems are not point to point, information for a single box has to be broadcast back to all set-top boxes in the system. The dedicated separate channel for data concept is proven and works, but it is bandwidth limited (you can only have so much information about so many channels, for so many set-tops, before there's no space left). VBI is better for specific channel content, but because its use is unregulated, the VBI is already being used for vast numbers of things by the channel content providers. FNN, for example, passes stock-market information in the VBI. Close-captioning sucks up additional VBI space. Some channel providers, such as C-Span, rent their VBI space out to companies who want to broadcast messages to remote sites over the airwaves. In Germany, and now in Endland, the VBI is filled with TeleText (the best use of the VBI I've seen so far).

For those of you who are not familiar with it, TeleText is a continuous information stream measured in pages (001 through 999). The low number pages usually contain menu listings, referring you to another page number. When you enter a page number you want to see, the TV (many new German TVs have TeleText support built in) waits for the selected page to be sent in the VBI, captures it, and displays it. Each station has its own TeleText data, including the latest news, sports information, weather information, and program listings. TeleText compatible VCRs allow you to use a primitive cursor on the program listing pages to select a program to record, and some VCRs will periodically rescan that page to see if the program time has changed, and adjust their programming if so. This is technology that you can purchase in Germany, as a consumer, today! And here in the U.S., we have to resort to VCRPlus...

Anyhow, what this all boils down to is that the emerging convergence industry needs non-proprietary information-broadcast standards that they can all agree on and use. However, even the lack of standards won't prevent Interactive Television from becoming a couch potato staple item.

The whole issue of interactivity with your television is being attacked in a number of ways currently. The long term plan is that you select something from a menu/interface on your TV, and your set-top box sends your request back to the signal distribution point for immediate processing. Getting to this point, however, will require that networking standards be set to handle networks with tens of thousands of subscribers, and may require some serious topology changes as well, including point-to-point mechanisms, such as what the telephone companies already offer today (i.e. your normal phone line), albeit with limited bandwidth. It'll be interesting to see what happens now that the FCC has given the green flag to phone companies to enter the cable supplier game.

In the meantime, several companies are using a range of ways to manage interactive television. Zing has a remote control sized device (with a small LCD screen), and a box that is placed in-line with the set-top, to track data passed in the VBI. With the Zing device, you can play interactive football (guess the play being made by a team you've selected as it's happening live on TV), or play along in game shows. To manage feedback to the central Zing location, you need to plug a phone line into the set-top addition, and a local TYMNET number or 800 number are called. Cost is planned for under $100 for the initial investment, and a $25/yr subscription fee. This should be available soon. The VBI encoding for several game shows and sports events is also in progress.

NTN, the developers of QB1 (the interactive football game described above) use a different approach, which focuses mainly on bars and other places people gather in large quantities. Multiple users of the NTN device compete against one another for points (and even prizes) on a local and nationwide basis during live football broadcasts. Using some infra red or FM transmissions, data is passed both ways in the bar - to and from the handheld units and the collector. The collector will then also send information to the NTN HQ for national tallies, again, via phone line. This system has been in operation for about a year already, and plans are underway to expand coverage.

Finally, Interactive Network (which may be familiar to those of you in the Bay Area because of their infomercial advertising there) has a handheld unit to play QB1 and Jeopardy (other interactive items are on their way). In addition to providing a set-top add-on to read VBI, and possibly return information, IN also uses a local FM signal broadcast to send information to the hand held units. Again, after the game is over, you can plug a phone line in to have your scores sent in for national tallying. Each quarter, point leaders will meet for a play-off to win prizes of some sort. Pricing is a little higher ($149) than Zing's, but the handheld (held in two hands, really) is more capable, partly as a result of its larger LCD display, and partly because of the retracting QWERTY keyboard incorporated into the unit. The IN device is available in some geographic markets now, and plans are in place to cover most major metropolitan areas in 1994.

Conclusion

In any event, as you can hopefully see, all this is starting to come together now, and the business opportunities are still there, but partnering is a definite requirement for market entry, because of all the big players involved. The partnerships that can also provide quality content programming, both for viewing and interactive participation will be much better off.

For PCGR readers, the areas I can see for targeting are: graphics chips for set-tops, LCD controllers for hand-held interactive devices, MPEG decompression silicon (should be silicon for 30 fps full screen), real-time MPEG compression systems, ergonomic user interface designs (both visual and handheld), infra-red and other local transmission technologies, sound and video clip libraries, NTSC/PAL/SECAM overlay/capture/output, HDTV hardware, digital video storage and retrieval subsystems, low-cost modem silicon, and phone privacy switches (not a graphics task, but necessary nonetheless to prevent the interactive devices from interrupting a voice call and vice versa). I could probably go on and on, but those are the most obvious to me. The market size is phenomenal, easily equal to the entire PC market today (i.e. 100+ million), so this market is something that shouldn't be taken lightly. As for me, I'll be playing Jeopardy interactively, while trying to pin down some markets for my company.