To all those celebrating Halloween tonight, make it a happy one.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM WAVE!

With the heightened awareness of piracy and copyright infringement on the web, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to track use and distribution of their licensed content through Digital Rights Management (DRM).

When online .mp3s and .movs started to replace CDs and DVDs, the public’s awareness of DRM increased. That awareness, combined with a few high-profile follies, like Sony’s “rootkit-DRM” a few years ago, caused consumers to rally against the DRM movement. Now, with high-profile announcements like “DRM-Free mp3s on iTunes,” DRM seems to be struggling once again in the digital music industry.

But what is the current state and future of DRM in the publishing industry? Surely, our content and the content of our customers’ is vital to our business and in some instances a critical revenue stream. It prevents assets from being used inappropriately or without permission. Is DRM within the publishing industry fundamentally different than within the music industry? What impact does DRM have on the usability of assets? What do you think of DRM in general, do you use it in your organization?

Looks like within the next couple of years, the industry will have access to 4 terabyte hard drives. The article below suggests that this could be possible by 2011.

Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011….
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week….
“We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,” said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi’s data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.

Read the rest of the article over at MSNBC.com

Within the foreseeable future, users workstation will be able to house terabytes of data. How will company’s adapt? Will there users even need all this space considering most corporate data resides on remote storage servers? Organizing, searching, finding, rights management, availability, how will workflows be affected with all this data sitting out there? The next few years should be interesting with the storage needs and disk space availability increasing at such a rapid pace. Filtering through all this data will become increasingly dependant on how its organized and managed.

OSX 10.0 was first released in March, 2001 and in the last 5 years it has had 5 major releases and 40+ minor releases. For an Operating System, the frequency of releases is somewhat disturbing when it comes to reliability and consistency. How does this effect you?

Some of you may remember Don Alder as the talented guitarist from the 2007 IMUG, and also as a speaker on behalf of the Rick Hansen Foundation.

Well, all of us at WAVE want to give a big shout out to Don because he just won first place in the 36th Annual Walnut Valley International Fingerstyle Guitar Contest!

From the Press Release:

“Don Alder of Vancouver, BC, Canada placed 1st in this prestigious contest. Don says he is very very young and getting younger each year. In real life he is a Technical Production Manager for the Rick Hansen Foundation. This is his fifth time attending the Festival. He is also a songwriter and has placed three years in a row in the instrumental portion of the Songwriter’s Showcase here at the Festival. At the age of 13 he was given an electric guitar when he got sick and had to miss school for 6 months. In addition to the guitar he also plays the harp guitar.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Congratulations Don!

2007 winners (L to R): Tim Thompson of Hendersonville, TN (2nd), Don Alder of Vancouver, BC Canada (1st), and Dan Bliss of Merriam, KS (3rd)

If anyone else has news they’d like to share with us, feel free to leave a comment, e-mail, or call us! We love to here about all of our customers accomplishments, whether it is winning the NY Marathon or winning $2 on a scratch-off.

WAVE has become a sponsor of the Henry Stewart Conference. We will be exhibiting in and participating in the Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and and New York conferences.

To learn more details about WAVE’s involvement in Henry Stewart please see our Henry Stewart Press Release. And to learn more about the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium please visit www.DAMusers.com.

When you think of having your ECM or DAM system support streaming of multi-media assets. Are you thinking that you want the originals streamed? If so, why? How would you solve the various players, platforms, and media types that are available? Which ones do you like best?