PARIS: Now even Internet plumbing companies want to catch the wave of the home and social networking phenomena that have millions of people wiring their households and then using Web sites like MySpace and Friendster to share their lives.

Cisco, long known inside technology circles for the hardware that connects computers to one another on the Internet, wants to move beyond its usual clientele of big businesses and network providers and become a household name among consumers.

The company has a long row to hoe; it will be years before the ordinary consumer - let alone a teenager chatting on Friendster - thinks of the name Cisco in the same way as, say, Sony or Apple.

But Cisco has taken several small steps in that direction already, dropping the “Systems” from the end of its name and making a grab for publicity based on its prescience to trademark the name “iPhone.”

It has also snapped up some start-up companies that are far from its original mission, including Utah Street Networks, a software developer for online social networks, and Five Across, a collaboration software maker. And the company is investing billions of dollars in a video-conferencing business.

Recently, Cisco has taken its brand to the mass market in a European television advertising campaign, which is certainly a novel approach for an infrastructure company.

Chris Dedicoat, who heads Cisco's operations in Europe, said it was already getting “respectable shelf space” in large electronics retailers like Dixons and Media Markt with its Linksys brand, whose products help technology-minded consumers create home networks linking their digital devices.

It is those devices - no longer just personal computers, but television set-top boxes, printers, phones, stereos and even refrigerators - that are the objects of Cisco's affection.

“The appliance world is going to change so much; the average life span is getting shorter and shorter,” Dedicoat said. “We want to make sure we are seen as the company that can integrate the consumer's choice of appliance.”

That means, Dedicoat said, being perceived as an “open” company, willing and able to be the link between things as disparate as a Hitachi television, an LG refrigerator, an Apple iPod and a Canon digital camera.

That is why Cisco is letting Apple use its iPhone trademark when the iPod maker comes out with a combination mobile phone and music player next month, Dedicoat said.

Cisco agreed to license the name in exchange for being able to make its products work with those of Apple, a company known for being “closed” to other systems.

“What we demonstrated in our talks on the iPhone is a commitment to collaboration,” Dedicoat maintained.

Dedicoat said he believed Cisco's investment in consumer awareness was merely following the transition of the Internet into an everywhere-everyone channel for communications.

Social networking is just today's rest stop on the way to micropersonalization of information and entertainment, and that means every consumer is a mass market of one.

The Internet has replaced knowledge-sharing in such a permanent and dramatic way, he said, that the next generation of invention and innovation will come from “the network,” not from individuals, whether it be in the fields of biology, information technology or rocket science.

At the same time that it is introducing itself to the average end-user, Cisco aims not to neglect its bread-and-butter business: Internet service providers and corporate customers.

“Businesses also need to reach consumers in new and different ways,” he said, “and we want to be seen as an enabler of that.”

As for becoming a name as well-known to the average home do-it-yourselfer as something like Krazy Glue, Dedicoat acknowledges there are limits.

“We know that it's ambitious and that it's a long-term goal,” he said.

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GADGET OF THE WEEK

Two decades ago, Polar popularized the use of heart-rate measurements as a training tool for athletes, both professional and amateur.

More recently, high-level cyclists have added another indicator: their actual power output, usually measured in watts. Cyclists generally capture that information with special hubs or cranks that contain tiny, if sensitive, strain gauges.

Polar is now reintroducing its alternative approach. The Polar CS 600 With Power relies on sensors that capture slight differences in chain vibration as well as chain speed to calculate power output.

The CS 600 appears to have overcome the technical problems that plagued a power measurement system that Polar briefly offered several years ago. While the Polar system does not require replacing any part of the bicycle, it does add several pieces of somewhat unsightly equipment. At $700, the CS 600 is exceptionally expensive for a bicycle computer. But that price is well below the cost of strain gauge-based alternatives, even excluding the wheel building or installation costs, potentially making it attractive to amateur racers or even some recreational riders. And, yes, the CS 600 still measures heart rate.

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When Eric Petit wants to watch a movie on his PlayStation Portable, he pops a DVD into his computer and fires up Handbrake, a program he wrote for converting the digital video files to fit onto his pocket-sized game player. In a few minutes, the movie is resized to fit on the smaller screen where it can be watched without the plastic disc.

Handbrake is just one of a number of popular tools that convert video files into a different format. Format conversions are becoming more common for people who want to watch movies someplace other than the television anchored in the living room.

Anyone who wants to watch a show on a cellphone, a game machine or portable media players like the Archos must become familiar with the alphabet soup of different formats and the software that manage them.

Petit works with a team of volunteers from around the world who help him add new features to the program that he gives away for free (handbrake.m0k.org), but a number of commercial software companies are selling programs that do the same thing. A quick Web search for “video conversion” can lead to dozens of versions from different companies.

Techspansion, for instance, sells VisualHub, a tool for converting videos from sites like YouTube. There are dozens of similar tools, many sharing the same open source core written by some of the same volunteers that helped Petit write Handbrake.

The conversion software is relatively easy to use, converting films with a click or two. But they force video fans to fake their way through acronyms like Divx or MPEG, abbreviations like FLV and odd names like Ogg Vorbis.

Users must learn to make decisions about technical matters like size of files, the aspect ratio and a dozen other options obscured by a cloud of mathematics.

If the technical questions are complicated, the legal environment is even more confusing and uncertain because some feel that making copies of your own DVD files might run afoul of some laws designed to stop pirating. In 2000, a Hollywood studio successfully sued Eric Corley, the editor of 2600 magazine, for distributing DeCSS, a tool that would strip away CSS, the encryption layer that protects video on DVDs.

Some say that decision makes tools like Handbrake illegal if they are used to convert video from protected DVDs.

The software makers say there is a tradition of consumers being allowed to make personal copies of media they own as a backup or to work on new kinds of machines. For instance, there was a day when people made tapes of music on their LP records.

The technological issues are nearly as knotty. But there is some vocabulary that needs to be learned by the growing number of people who choose to “rip” a movie for personal enjoyment: bitrate, codec, dimensions and frame rate.

The prime consideration, at least for anyone who does not have several terabyte storage devices in their home, is to store a movie in as little space as possible. The bitrate offers the user the rough ability to choose the final quality of the movie by controlling how big the file grows per minute of video converted.

Choosing the right bitrate can be a limbo game: The user tries to go lower and lower to save file space until the image quality is unbearable. Higher bit rates mean better quality images with smoother transitions and fewer glitches around the edges of objects.

The effects of the bitrate setting depend on the choice of the codec, the algorithm responsible for converting the data. Some of the most common codecs implement standards with names like Divx, MPEG2, or its later cousin, MPEG4. The newer algorithms tend to do a better job over all with lower bitrates, producing smaller files with fewer pixelated edges.

The simplest way to shrink files is to reduce the resolution of the video to the player's size. The size of the file depends upon the number of pixels in an image and this is calculated by multiplying the length by the width. Reducing the frame rate from a standard 30 frames a second to 15 frames a second can also slice a file, but it will make the image more jumpy.

There are many other opportunities for confusion. Separate codecs convert the audio signal. MP3, for instance, refers to the audio part of the MPEG3 algorithm. The audio portion is very popular for converting music, but the video part is largely supplanted by the newer MPEG4.

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Felipe Galindo

BERLIN: In 1989, 13 countries in Europe agreed to use the same technology for the first digital mobile phone networks. The pact averted costly competition among standards and propelled GSM to global dominance, with the standard now powering 2.3 billion, or 81 percent, of handsets worldwide.

So far, the European Commission has failed to achieve the same end with the technology for sending video directly to cellphone handsets. On Wednesday, the commission is expected to take action to put pressure on industry to come up with a single standard that all 27 countries in the European Union would use.

If mobile video is successful - and that's still a big if, experts say - the technology could open vast new markets for equipment makers, help cellphone operators finally justify expensive third-generation networks and let broadcasters reconnect with on-the-go viewers who no longer spend hours before conventional televisions.

In Europe alone, the research firm Datamonitor estimates, the number of mobile video viewers, now fewer than 1 million and mostly in Italy and Finland, could rise by 2012 to 43 million. Most are looking for Europe and the United States, where mobile TV is still in its infancy, to replicate the medium's success in Asia.

In Japan, 7.3 million handsets, about 6 percent of cellphone users, can receive free digital broadcasts sent with the mobile video standard called ISDB, developed by the public broadcaster NHK, according to JEITA, an industry association. Mobile TV broadcasts started about a year ago there, as they did in South Korea.

But the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, is having difficulty getting industry to back a single standard.

Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld, or DVB-H, is supported by Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Philips and Motorola, but there are a handful of competing standards. The biggest of the rivals is Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or DMB, developed in South Korea and backed by Samsung, Panasonic, LG Electronics and others.

DMB was originally developed for digital radio broadcasts and DVB-H is a product of the DVB digital video standard used by terrestrial TV broadcasters, but experts say the technical differences are not apparent to consumers.

After a year of prodding DVB-H and DMB backers to compromise by combining their technology into a single new standard that uses the best of both, Viviane Reding, the EU telecommunications commissioner, threatened to simply choose DVB-H. Reding made the threat after an industry advisory group created by the commission, the European Mobile Broadcasting Council, failed in a year to produce a compromise.

“Members agreed the standard should be an open standard,” said Arthur Weyns, a vice president for global affairs at Philips Consumer Electronics, who is following the debate within the European Information & Communications Technology Industry Association, which is based in Brussels and is the main European industry group. “But they couldn't agree what the standard should be.”

So on Wednesday, the commission is expected to ratchet up pressure on industrial competitors. According to a person close to the deliberations, the commission will vote to publish the DVB-H standard in the European Commission's official register. That move would have the effect of strongly encouraging EU member countries to choose DVB-H. Should this not elicit a compromise, Reding and the commission are poised over the next year to pass a directive that would bind countries to use DVB-H.

Michael Kornfeld, one of the researchers who developed DVB-H, said he thought that the markets, not regulators, would decide whether DVB-H or DMB prevailed. Both technologies are being used commercially or being tested in EU countries, and attempts to force a single standard by Brussels would encounter stiff industry opposition, said Kornfeld.

As is often the case, Germany, the EU's largest country, will play a significant role. In Germany, the 13 states, not the federal government, claim to possess the sole legal authority to set which digital video standards are used in their territories. Already there is disagreement, with Bavaria backing DMB, and Berlin, Brandenburg and North Rhine Westphalia backing DVB-H.

If that persists, mobile viewers traveling a few hundred kilometers from Munich to Frankfurt, for example, would have to switch phones or obtain a handset with both standards - which don't exist yet - to continue watching the same TV show. That's a far cry from the useful ubiquity of GSM.

DVB-H competitors, who have invested millions in their technologies, want the commission to take a neutral stance on standards, allowing consumers and markets to decide.

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(Elvis doll that snarls)

If there is a rash of Elvis sightings later this month, it may be because of the arrival in stores of the WowWee Alive Elvis, an animatronic Elvis bust with infrared eyes and lips that sync to music.

This Elvis can look you square in the eye, tilt his head and croon “Love Me Tender” through the speakers in his shoulders.

This is WowWee's second robotic bust, the descendant of a chimp released last year. Both were created by George York, an inventor who used forensic reconstruction techniques and guidance from Graceland to conjure up Elvis in his prime. Beneath the rubbery skin are nine motors for head movements and facial gestures, including four levers dedicated to the upper lip for that signature sneer. A microphone-shaped remote lets you adjust volume, choose tunes or toggle between modes like talking and singing.

Alive Elvis, which will initially be available at Sharper Image stores and at Graceland for about $300, includes one plug-in cartridge with eight songs and 37 phrases voiced by an Elvis impersonator. There are three audio jacks, either for playing music through the speakers, or to patch in a microphone just in case you want to sing along and work on your own sneer.

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HONG KONG: Shares in the Lenovo Group, now just starting to turn around a unit acquired from IBM, jumped more than 2 percent on Wednesday after the company revealed it hoped to buy a rival PC maker, Packard Bell, to strengthen its European operation.

Lenovo said on Tuesday that it was in exclusive talks to buy Packard Bell, based in the Netherlands, from its principal owner, John Hui, who bought Packard Bell from NEC Corporation in October 2006. Hui, also known as Lap Shun Hui, is the former owner of eMachines, another computer maker.

If successful, the deal would help Lenovo quickly capture market share in a region where it is ranked sixth and is barely profitable, while it continues to digest and revive the former IBM business, analysts say.

But it would also expose the firm to an intense battle for consumers with companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and the aggressive Acer Inc.

Deutsche Bank estimated that Packard Bell had as much as 2 billion euros ($2.8 billion) of annual revenue in 2006.

Lenovo, one of a handful of Chinese companies trying to forge a global brand by investing abroad, dropped to fourth globally in the first three months of 2007, but reclaimed the No. 3 spot from Acer a quarter later by riding an upswell of corporate demand.

It commanded 8.3 percent of the global market, according to the research firm IDC, ahead of Acer's 7.2 percent but just slightly more than half of second-place Dell's 16.1 percent.

“We believe the deal should help Lenovo to maintain its global No. 3 PC vendor position in the near term and strengthen Lenovo's European operation, which is relatively weaker than its other regions,” Goldman Sachs wrote on Wednesday.

Lenovo's shares soared 61 percent in the second quarter, versus the Hong Kong benchmark index's 10 percent rise, as investors cheered improvement in its international business.

Lenovo says it plans to introduce a range of notebooks in January and desktops in March or April, rounding out its product range. Lenovo's PCs are tailored primarily for corporations and governments.

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