The loss of Internet access in Myanmar has slowed the tide of photos and videos shared with the rest of the world but people outside of the troubled country continue to use new media sites and other technologies to protest military activity in the Southeast Asia country. ADVERTISEMENT

Cablecom. (Bloomberg News)

LONDON: In the film “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey plays a cable television installer who goes to great lengths to befriend a customer, giving him a free, unauthorized service upgrade. In the real world, American cable companies may be less eager to please, but nonetheless they dominate the pay-TV and broadband businesses.

In Europe, by contrast, “in most countries we are still the little guy,” said Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global, which owns cable networks in a number of European countries, as well as Asia, Australia and Latin America. But now the European cable business wants to raise its profile, with Liberty Global and other investors trying to persuade consumers, content providers, competitors and regulators alike that the cable guys are on their side.

“Usually the cable company is the one that's providing the innovation in the market,” Fries said. “But as an industry, we are probably under-represented and underappreciated in Europe.”

Actually, the size of the cable business, as well as the level of innovation, varies widely from market to market across Europe. More European households - about 63 million - get their pay-TV from cable than from any other source.

But in countries like Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where cable is nearly ubiquitous, it is largely in the form of old-fashioned analogue connections. Less than one-quarter of European cable TV connections are digital, compared with about half of those in the United States, according to Forrester Research.

Even in markets where cable is predominantly digital, like Britain, cable has been left behind by satellite and free, over-the-air digital TV systems. Meanwhile, telecommunications companies have been more successful than cable companies at selling European customers bundled services like broadband, telephone calls and digital television.

“While cable is the dominant television technology throughout the region, there has been a lot of difficulty upgrading it to digital,” said Ted Hall, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, a research company.

After a round of consolidation fueled by private equity deal makers, analysts have said that European cable companies may be in a better position to make the investments in networks, content and marketing that could help them compete with telecommunications and satellite companies.

Last year alone, the three leading cable operators in France merged into one nationwide provider, Numericable, and the two biggest cable companies in Britain got together to form a company now called Virgin Media. Another operator with national scale was formed a year earlier when a Spanish cable company, Ono, acquired the cable operations of a telecommunications company, Auna.

Private equity has taken an active role in the consolidation, with several of these companies helping to finance the deal in Spain. Private equity firms also control Numericable and the leading cable company in Germany, Kabel Deutschland, along with smaller operators in a number of other countries.

Liberty Global, a spinoff from the media empire of the American cable entrepreneur John Malone, has also been busy. It recently pulled out of France, Sweden and Norway, markets where analysts said it had little hope of building a dominant position, but it acquired market leaders in Switzerland and Ireland, among other acquisitions.

There has been speculation that Liberty Global, the largest international cable business, might be interested in building up its European presence by acquiring Virgin Media, which put itself up for sale in July but put the process on hold in August amid the turbulence in financial markets.

“We'll see if that asset becomes available again and then look at it if it does,” Fries said. “It has some interesting attributes.

“We're also examining opportunities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And in certain markets in Western Europe, we'll take a look at things that come available.”

Analysts have identified Germany as potentially attractive to Liberty Global, since recent developments have suggested that a long-awaited consolidation of this most fragmented of European cable markets is under way.

While the number of cable operators has been whittled down to one in several European markets, an estimated 4,000 companies are involved in the business in Germany, according to Cable Europe, a trade group. Three of them, known as Level 3 operators, own much of the network infrastructure and some connections to consumers; most of the rest, called Level 4 providers, operate only the final link from, say, an apartment building to a customer's home.

Regulators created this separation in an effort to limit the power of Deutsche Telekom, which originally built the cable network but was not allowed direct access to customers. Deutsche Telekom was later required to sell the network, which is now in the hands of Kabel Deutschland, Unity Media and Kabel Baden-Württemberg.

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LONDON: Trusting ads - relatively

Among U.S. consumers, the word most closely associated with advertising is “false.”

That disquieting finding - for marketers, at least - comes from a trawl of blogs, social-networking services and other online discussion forums by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which measures consumers' brand perceptions on the Internet.

The word association project was carried out in conjunction with a broader survey by Nielsen of consumer attitudes toward advertising in 47 countries. That study showed that consumers typically place more trust in recommendations from other consumers than in other advertising.

“The advertising industry has to do better work, and it has to do a better job at communicating the value it brings to consumers,” said Jonathan Carson, co-founder of BuzzMetrics, which is part of the market research company Nielsen.

The picture is not all doom and gloom for marketers or for media owners reliant on advertising, however. The study showed, for instance, that consumers in developing markets still have relatively high levels of trust in advertising, even if their counterparts in developed countries are more cynical. In the Philippines and Brazil, for instance, 67 percent of consumers said they generally trusted advertising.

The Danes, by contrast, appear to be a skeptical bunch, with only 28 percent saying they trusted advertising. Many other European nationalities were also at, or near, the bottom of the list, though Americans still appeared relatively trusting, at 55 percent.

That is good news for the advertising economy, because much of the growth in ad spending is expected to come from developing markets in coming years. While marketers in developed countries worry that consumers are recoiling from advertising, such concerns do not appear to be an issue yet in places like Brazil.

“Advertising is newer in those markets, so the cynicism hasn't built up yet,” said Carson, of Buzzmetrics. “In developing markets, advertising is seen more as a conveyor of useful information. In more developed markets, people don't need it to play that role. They have too much information already.”

Even in developed markets, some media still appear to benefit from relatively high levels of trust. Newspaper advertising, for instance, is trusted by 63 percent of consumers, according to the survey, with North Americans and Latin Americans particularly showing faith in it. Only half of the respondents in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa said they trusted newspaper ads.

Television also did relatively well, with 56 percent of respondents worldwide saying they trusted it. Consumers in Latin America, where television shows featuring the best ads are a staple of prime-time schedules, were particularly well disposed toward television spots; Europeans less so.

Consumers appear to be wary about some new kinds of advertising, despite - or, perhaps, because of - the rampant growth in online advertising and other digital marketing. The format that fared worst, with only 18 percent of respondents saying they trusted it, was advertising in cellphone text messages, which in many countries can be done only if a marketer has obtained consumer permission.

Online banner ads and ads sold by search engines also fared poorly.

“The positive thing about these new digital channels is that they are extremely scalable,” Carson said. “You can get a very high reach at a low cost, compared with traditional media. But it's tempting to abuse it.”

If consumers are turned off by some kinds of digital advertising, like text messages, pop-ups or banners, that may explain digital marketers' eagerness to work indirectly, through blogs, social networks and other kinds of online forums. Of all survey respondents, for instance, 61 percent said they trusted consumer opinions posted online.

But even more consumers, 78 percent, said they trusted direct recommendations from other consumers: what marketers call word of mouth. And unlike some of the media, consumer recommendations scored highly across all markets. Everywhere, it seems, people still trust their friends.

Eric Pfanner can be reached at adcol@iht.com

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NEW YORK: The laser printers used in homes and small businesses may be compact, reliable performers, but when it comes to looks, they tend to be drab. The appearance of printers has always taken a back seat to their ability to turn out steady streams of text.

Now Samsung has introduced a sleek, low-standing laser printer meant to include good looks along with performance: its case has a dazzling, high-gloss ebony finish reminiscent of a Steinway grand piano. The printer is unusually slim, too. Its components have been miniaturized so that it is only about 5 inches, or 13 centimeters, high.

The printer (model ML-1630, $199) uses black ink only. Introduced last month, it is on sale exclusively at Apple retail stores for three months, and will be widely available afterward. A slightly taller all-in-one version scans and copies as well as prints (SCX-4500, $299). The machines work with both Macintosh and Windows-based computers.

Samsung's innovative design might be a good way for the manufacturer to distinguish itself in a crowded field, said Ken Weilerstein, an analyst at Gartner, the market research firm.

“There's a lot of competition in personal printers as more vendors have entered the business, most notably Kodak,” Weilerstein said. Eastman Kodak introduced a line of consumer printers earlier this year, joining Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Brother and other brands on the market.

So far in 2007, more than six million printers meant for homes have been shipped to market, Weilerstein said. But in general, the printers are designed more for performance, price and compatibility than looks. Appearance is basically an afterthought, he said.

The Samsung printer comes with a heavy piece of protective plastic over its lid. Peel it off, and there is a black surface that is shiny enough to have come from an Art Deco interior of the 1930s.

The printer is easy to install. The toner cartridge slides directly into its slot in the machine, clicking into place immediately. The input paper tray, which opens with the press of a small button, holds 100 sheets.

I tried the printer with a Mac. The computer recognized the printer immediately after installing it. The quiet printer produced about 17 pages a minute.

If aesthetics are of no concern, for the same $200 you might consider another brand of laser printer, like the Brother HL-5240. It is far bulkier than the Samsung, but the standard input tray holds 250 pages, and it prints 30 pages a minute. The toner (TN-550) costs about $50 online and yields about 3,500 pages, for a cost of 1.4 cents a page; the Samsung costs about 3.5 cents a page.

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At first blush, the iPhone from Apple, the new microprocessor family from Intel and the ubiquitous Google search engine have nothing in common. One is a gadget, one is an electronic part and one is a service.

Yet all of these products - much acclaimed for their creativity - depend on obscure process innovations that, while highly complex and lacking glamour, are an essential part of establishing a winning edge in commercial electronics. The success of Apple, Intel, Google and scores of other technology companies has as much or more to do with their process innovations as the products that inspire loyalty among fans and admiration from foes.

Processes are the stuff in the proverbial “black box,” the alchemy unseen by consumers or the inelegantly termed “end users” who buy computers, cellphones, cameras and all manner of digital devices and services.

Snazzy products are the stuff of legends, romanticized by “early adopters” and skewered by neo-Luddites. Yet while these products bring glory to companies, novel processes are often more important in keeping the cash registers ringing.

The proof of this proposition is that while companies often spend millions to advertise and market new product designs and innovations, they guard intensely the details of their process innovations.

Consider the question of Google's greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won't disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google's “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”

Process innovations like Google's computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining an advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components.

Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of where they might go.

Intel treats its process innovations as a competitive weapon, striving to create a “new generation” every two years. That enables the company's chips, even if there were no changes in their design, to perform better and cost less to make.

Consumers are usually blind to the importance of novel processes. Even when they learn about these innovations, they think mostly of the product.

“The average consumer doesn't care what processes are used,” said Mark Bohr, an Intel physicist who oversaw what is arguably the most important advance in decades in the technology for making microprocessors.

Faced with ever-faster chips that threatened to explode into flames, Intel searched desperately for new processes to make microprocessors. Enter hafnium, a rare metal. Designers led by Bohr in Hillsboro, Oregon, chose it to replace silicon oxide, the venerable insulator in chips and a material used in making glass. Bohr also helped to identify new materials, whose identity Intel is keeping secret, for the crucial transistor “gates” that sit atop a chip's insulators.

On Nov. 12, Intel will begin shipping its first chips using the new processes. Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, recently declared that the hafnium-and-gate process innovations should allow his so-called Moore's Law, whereby chips grow ever faster and less expensive, to hold true for some time.

Despite the immensity of the achievement, Bohr is relatively anonymous, even within Intel. “The work of process development comes second to creating new designs for chips,” he said.

If process innovations are unheralded, consumers may misunderstand how technological change works.

“Process innovation tends to receive less attention from the informed public for the same reason that incremental innovation tends to receive too little attention: It is more difficult to encapsulate in a press release or photo opportunity,” said David Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of technological change.

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This article was written by Mark Clayton.

Also, loan guarantees don’t affect taxpayers unless those loans are defaulted on, he points out.

Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the industry already is getting an estimated $12 billion in tax breaks and other largess. The Price-Anderson Act, a law dating from the 1950s, caps the industry’s liability at about $10 billion in the event of an accident, even though studies show that a major nuclear meltdown could easily run 50 times that.

Now, the Senate version of a new energy bill includes a provision that could provide tens of billions of dollars more in federal-loan guarantees. Last Tuesday, the Energy Department announced it would provide up to $2 billion in federal risk insurance for the first six new nuclear-plant projects, protecting them against losses from regulatory or legal delays.

“In my view, these kinds of taxpayer subsidies are vital to the industry, and they wouldn’t be building any of these new nuclear plants without them,” says Doug Koplow, president of Earth Track, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm that analyzes subsidies for all forms of energy, including biofuels.

The nuclear industry gets about $9 billion a year in federal subsidies, he calculates, trailing only oil and coal in federal energy aid. That amount could go far higher if companies were to begin defaulting on guaranteed loans, he adds.

The nuclear industry has already put Congress on notice that it could require loan guarantees of at least $20 billion for planned projects - and more later, NEI officials told The New York Times in July.

The reason is that nuclear power plants are far more expensive to build than coal- or gas-fired facilities. For example: On Monday, New Jersey-based NRG Energy Corp. filed its application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two reactors in Texas at a cost between $5.4 and $6.7 billion.

That huge startup cost might make financial sense, given a reactor’s low operating expenses, especially if government begins to charge utilities for the greenhouse gases they produce. Nuclear power is virtually emission-free.

But the last time that the nuclear industry was on a building spree - in the 1980s - roughly half of the power plants proposed were never finished, in part because of fears caused by the accident at Three Mile Island. Those that were finished were delayed for years and cost far more than estimated. A number of power companies went bankrupt. In late 2003, NRG - the company that filed Monday’s permit application - emerged from bankruptcy caused by overexpansion in the 1990s.

If defaults occur in the new round, critics worry federal costs will be huge.

“This is the second or third ‘nuclear renaissance’ I’ve seen,” says Tyson Slocum, director of energy program at Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s consumer-protection group. “When you look at the cost of these plants and the massive financial subsidies by U.S. taxpayers, I think that money would be better invested in cheaper sources of emissions-free power that don’t have the fatal flaws nuclear power does.”

In 2003, a Congressional Budget Office analysis warned of potential default rates of 50 percent or more on new plants.

Wall Street is also skeptical. In a July letter to the Department of Energy, six investment banks, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, made it clear that federal guarantees were required. “We believe many new nuclear construction projects will have difficulty accessing the capital markets during construction and initial operation without the support of a federal government loan guarantee,” they wrote.

The risks might be worth the cost if nuclear power can have a substantial impact in slowing global warming. But even some industry experts doubt that’s possible. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1 billion tons annually, the level set by some scientists as a goal for nuclear power, the world would need to build 21 new 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants per year - about five of those annually in the U.S. - for the next 50 years, says a Keystone Center report endorsed by the NEI. The U.S. industry reached that level in the 1980s. But even under its most optimistic assessment, the Energy Information Administration recently projected that only about 53 nuclear power plants would be built by 2056. At that rate, this would not even replace the existing nuclear capacity expected to be retired during that time, the Keystone report said.

While such a conclusion would seem to blunt nuclear power’s appeal, industry experts predict that climate legislation is likely to boost the cost of carbon-dioxide emissions. When it does, nuclear power construction will be suddenly very competitive with coal power - and that will accelerate growth faster and farther than predicted, they add.

Nuclear power “clearly can’t do it all, but will do its share” to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions, says Genoa.

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SAN MIGUEL, Philippines - It’s Thursday, so 18-year-old Dennis Tiangco is off to a bank to collect his weekly allowance, zapped by his mother — who’s working in Hong Kong — to his electronic wallet: his cell phone. ADVERTISEMENT

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The wind farm is visible from miles away, a forest of looming turbines churning in the afternoon breeze, rising incongruously above fields of barley, corn and sunflowers.

“This is the only future for the long-term,” says Tulsi Tanti, 49, a one-time yarn manufacturer who turned a small wind energy sideline into the sprawling corporation Suzlon, and turned himself into a billionaire in the process.

If wind power has a reputation of being on the fringes - an expensive technology that has more to do with environmentalist dreams than electricity production - India is also proving it to be a viable energy source, even in the developing world. India has the fourth-highest installed capacity for wind power in the world, lagging only Germany, Spain and the United States, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

Wind, like solar and other renewable energy sources, still faces major hurdles. In India, it costs a wind farm about 7 U.S. cents to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity - approximately 50 percent more than coal, according to the New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute. As in most countries, wind energy is supported by tax breaks and subsidies that make it competitive.

Even Tanti acknowledges wind isn’t going to replace coal - which today supplies about 65 percent of India’s electricity - anytime soon.

But the cost of wind has dropped dramatically in the past decade, in some cases by more than half, and is expected to drop further as the technology advances. And coal could become more expensive if global warming forces countries to adopt costly methods to reduce the pollution it generates.

About 2 percent of India’s power comes from wind but, as costs drop, that could reach 12 percent, experts say. “It’s a serious energy source, as far as India is concerned,” says Mahesh Vipradas, a fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute.

One thing is certain: India needs more energy. With 1.1 billion people and an economy growing at close to 9 percent per year, the country is fast becoming one of the world’s largest energy consumers.

Experts estimate the country has 10 percent to 12 percent less power than it needs. Blackouts are common, even in the largest cities, and hot summer nights can find millions of people sleeping on rooftops, praying for a breeze because their fans and air conditioning won’t go on.

“The whole world needs more and more energy, that is the topmost priority for any economic growth,” Tulsi says during an interview in the Suzlon office in Pune, a western Indian city. “Any one source - or any two, three sources - cannot satisfy this demand.”

That’s where wind comes in.

Three years ago, India had about 2,500 megawatts of wind capacity installed. Today, that has reached more than 7,000 megawatts - enough to power some 30 million homes.

The Indian government has pushed the wind business with tax breaks on windmills, which can cost upwards of $1.2 million apiece, and mandates that states get a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.

All this has been a big boost to Suzlon, by far the biggest wind player in the country.

Tanti and his brothers founded the company in 1995, stumbling into the business after the local power grid couldn’t keep their textile factory going. They purchased a couple windmills and soon left textiles behind.

In recent years, the business has grown about 100 percent annually, swallowing up other companies and raking in profits. The company recently moved its global marketing headquarters to Denmark, but the India operations are still run from Pune.

Suzlon, with a market capitalization of more than $9 billion, has become the world’s fifth-largest wind turbine manufacturer, with operations in Germany, China and Pipestone, Minn., where it makes turbine blades and other parts.

Here, in the hills of eastern India, it operates one of the largest wind farms in the world: more than 500 windmills on 1,300 acres, sprawling across hills, villages and roads and generating more than 600 megawatts of electricity. The blades of the soaring white machines - the tallest ones are 81 yards high - cast shadows that slash across the fields.

Suzlon operates, in many ways, as an energy “developer,” building windmills that are sold to investors or to companies that want to generate their own electricity. At this wind farm, the investors keep the earnings from electricity production while benefiting from generous tax-depreciation rules. Suzlon charges a fee to manage the operation.

Even in the shadow of this vast wind farm, built here to take advantage of regular winds, reliable electricity service remains rare.

India’s tortuously complicated energy laws restrict how electricity can be distributed. Nothing produced here can go directly to locals - it must be funneled through a state utility. Even at the wind farm’s offices, a generator is on standby.

“We get a few hours (of electricity) every day,” said villager Gokul Bhagwan Mali, sitting near the town center, no more than a tea stand with a small wooden bench. “But not enough to do very much.”

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BEIJING (AFP) - An eastern China court has ordered a French electrical company to pay 330 million yuan (44 million dollars) for infringing the copyright of a Chinese enterprise, a company official and state press said Sunday. ADVERTISEMENT