by Willms Buhse November 08, 2006 at 10:34 AM

There is some buzz around our recent announcement about our partnership with Discretix to collaborate on the Interoperability of DRM. Louise Wells mentions the difficulties of standardized and interoperable DRM.

I would like to add to that though, that in my opinion two aspects are crucial if it comes to interoperability:

1. Ensure IOP among implementations of open standards like OMA DRM
2. Find ways to make different DRM schemes to work among each other - including the trust model

When it comes to the first, the OMA selected Coremedia DRM as the reference implementation some months ago. About 30 companies already rely on CoreMedia for DRM interoperability including the top handset providers, leading operators and many componment manufacturers

The second aspect is more complicated to achieve. From a technical point of view, OMA DRM allows the import and export of content to and from other DRM schemes.How to combine different trust models is much longer discussion I will not go into now... that said, several baby step activities are happening behind closed doors...

So, how many baby steps sum up to a big bang?

by Willms Buhse November 01, 2006 at 01:41 PM

Last week I was invited to give a keynote at the mobile content day in Munich. Here's a quick summary of my thoughts (slides here):

More and more content becomes available for mobile phone users. But how can all this be found? Are searches on Google or shopping lists on Amazon really engaging? Technology changes fast, social behaviour takes its time.
By looking back to social behaviour - how did people discover content a decade ago? In two engaging ways:

• either by spontaneous buy by discovering the offering in record stores (maybe triggered by radio or MTV before)
• or by recommendation: a friend tells you about his favourites - and you want them too.

So how can content technology support this social behaviour? I believe strongly in mobile TV and - yes - superdistribution will play a major role in discovery of mobile content. And in both cases DRM interoperability is mandatory to ensure that different content types can be consumed across a multitude of devices in a trusted environment.

by Sören Stamer September 18, 2006 at 02:10 PM

Recently, Janus Boye at CMSWatch asked an interesting question: Is German CoreMedia still a CMS company?

The true answer is: Yes, absolutely! And no, CoreMedia has never been.

Yes, CoreMedia is a superior and highly innovative CMS company. Here is why:

1. The CoreMedia CMS product offers outstanding performance for high-traffic portals, multi-channel applications, highly-innovative services and complex integration scenarios. Trials over trials against our competition from the US performed by some of our clients proved this point again and again

2. The CoreMedia CMS product is the preferred Content Management platform for most of Central Europe's high-traffic portals. CoreMedia is the clear market leader with a high level of customer satisfaction.

3. The CoreMedia CMS product is a star in our portfolio. Our revenues generated with the CoreMedia CMS product are growing. And we see a very attractive global market and plenty of use cases for our CMS product.

4. The CoreMedia CMS product has a superior architecture. With its unique object-oriented content modeling it is designed for multi-channel and multi-touchpoint applications, for billions of transactions per month or even per day, for linear scalability, for carrier-grade performance, for seamless integration of content and transactions, for 24/7 operations and for innovations.

5. The CoreMedia CMS product can be used and is already used for various services like Enterprise Content Management, Internet Portals, Intranets, Online Shops, Mobile Services, Knowledge Management Interactive TV, Mobile TV, Electronic Service Guides, Media Asset Management, Cross-Media Publishing etc.

6. The CoreMedia CMS technology provides the powerful basis for the CoreMedia DRM product as well.

7. And CoreMedia CMS and CoreMedia DRM belong together. Content Management and Digital Rights Management follow pretty much the same idea. Enterprises want to control their content. They buy a CMS to manage and control all of their content and to deliver it only to authorized users. A DRM system does pretty much the same. But the DRM system handles rights objects instead of content objects. Put simply, rights objects are used to control the use of content objects after delivery. I am convinced that any next-generation Content Management Environment has to provide solid DRM features soon. Therefore, CoreMedia is one of the world's most innovative CMS companies.

And no, CoreMedia has never been just a CMS company. Here is why:

1. Content Management means a lot of different things to different people. Our CMS competitors were happy to store and manage various types of files, especially HTML pages. CoreMedia was not. For us content has to be handled smarter than as files or documents. Therefore, CoreMedia invented an object-oriented content object modeling to define the semantics of the stored information. HTML-pages and documents are the results of some business-logic dynamically selecting and transforming various pieces of content. We tried to highlight this, when we called it CoreMedia Smart Content Technology a few years ago. This it not classical Content Management like Vignette, Documentum, Interwoven or RedDot define it. So, CoreMedia has never been only a CMS company.

2. Static content is of little value. To generate real value content and transactions have to be tightly interconnected. Content may be used to sell products, to enable business processes, to create entertainment services, to answer questions in a call center or to build interactive services. The CoreMedia CMS product is designed to enable the seamless integration of content and transactions. Nearly every CoreMedia CMS customer uses this capability to create highly innovative new services. So, CoreMedia CMS is not only a CMS, it is more. CoreMedia Content Application Platform described it very well five years ago.

3. Classical CMS is not enough anymore. What Enterprises really need is a powerful, flexible and highly-scaleable platform to create, maintain and deliver attractive digital services to their customers, employees, partners, shareholders, and to the public. Enterprises need something we might call a Service Delivery Platform, like the Telecommunication industry already does. CoreMedia has worked hard to implement this bold vision for years now. CoreMedia's Services Delivery Platform integrates CMS, Multi-Channel Content Delivery, Multi-DRM, Transaction Control, various specialized services, Web 2.0 building blocks and a powerful development environment. The Next Generation CMS will be known as SDP and CoreMedia is again one of the leading innovators.

To keep a long story short: If you want to be able to innovate, to create attractive new interactive service all the time, CoreMedia is the right partner for you. The CoreMedia Service Delivery Platform (SDP) offers superior CMS, DRM, and more. Is CoreMedia still a CMS company? Yes and no. CoreMedia is a future-of-CMS company.

by Sören Stamer September 16, 2006 at 07:17 PM

Being digital feels great. Finally, Web 2.0 puts the Internet's amazing power into our hands, into everyone's hands. It is free speech at its best. Web 2.0 and digital information will unlock great potential of our human society. I strongly believe that this is truly a revolution and I am amazed.

But there is one thing that makes me thinking: Will we be able to enjoy living in a world where digital information is totally free?

In other words: Will our society accept to live without privacy and trust as core concepts? And can we handle it?

Privacy means maintaining partial control over (digital) information. Sharing information with good friends without disclosing them to the rest of our global society is desirable and needs a concept we could call trust.

If we share some kind of private information with a friend, we have to trust her or him, to securely protect our privacy. Trusting her or him might be a difficult task for us and keeping all the 'non disclosure agreements' might be difficult for her or him as well. Ideally, this task is successfully performed by the underlying distributed IT infrastructure. So we have to trust the IT infrastructure.

How can this happen? Can we effectively trust any IT infrastructure?

Think of the latest proposals for the GNU Public License (GPLv3). The new rules with regard to keys and signatures make it hard or impossible to create a secure DRM mechanism. There is a very heated discussion about GPLv3 and DRM already. Here is more.

However, the most important point comes here: GPLv3 makes it hard to create trust in those systems. And without means of trust in distributed environments there is no privacy in those distributed systems as well.

Personally, I guess that human society will demand some means of trust to provide different levels of privacy. If Web 3.0 cannot meet these expectations, we might feel like Winston Smith in "1984" some day.

by Sören Stamer September 16, 2006 at 07:07 PM

This might upset a lot of people: Microsoft's PlaysForSure is a worthless promise for those who do already own MS DRM protected music and want to buy a brand new Zune player from Microsoft. Zune says there is no choice.

by Willms Buhse September 15, 2006 at 10:31 AM

I am just coming back from the Mecca and CTIA show in Los Angeles. While thinking about the big news - well there was actually none (it except for Arnold and Paris showing up).
During a panel on strategies and trends for mobile music, interoperability became a big topic. I almost fell of my chair, when a major manager said: "interoperability is the technology companies responsibility - we can't do anything!?".
Well, it's music products we're talking about, right? I really wish the copyright holders would step up and take stronger responsibility for making sure consumers can enjoy their music wherever they like.
Especially when it comes to mobile content, the issues consumers are facing when changing their phone, or worse changing their provider, haven't been thought through carefully in the US-market. This might lie in the fact that content owners and operators alike look at DRM on an application level (specifically designed for a music application, a video service, etc.). In Europe the leading operators have realized that it is more an infrastructure component that can be used across different applications. This makes it much easier to integrate the same DRM across all applications rather than having isolated solutions. We have seen many migration projects which caused major customer care issues after consumers were locked into proprietry DRM solutions.

by Willms Buhse September 08, 2006 at 03:04 PM

Last week I participated at a press conference with T-Mobile and Musicload, Europe’s No. 2 music service after iTunes. Together, we presented the world's first fully-fledged OMA v 2.0 solution, developed as a prototype in close collaboration between three Deutsche Telekom's business units - T-Online for fixed line, T-Mobile for the mobile world and T-Systems as technical integrator.
To me, OMA DRM seems to enter a new phase!
The main topic of the presentation was the vision of music without frontiers - sharing of content within family members, and sharing between friends (including rewards - the almost famous “Digital Tupperware” case)
Joachim Franz from musicload was commenting on their anywhere strategy - music on devices from any vendor (except ipods) using the so-called domain concept. The mobile phones used in the prototype were from Nokia... at that moment I was wondering why we all are waiting for a music phone from Apple. Frankly, I am waiting for a Nokia mp3-player without a sim-card. Would make a wonderful bundle with a cheap mass market phone. Or is there already one I don't know of?
Matthias Schröter from T-Mobile (we know each other from various OMA meetings across the world) was sharing his vision on Superdistribution, where users recommend their favorites by sending them via Bluetooth "P2P" to other hand sets.
The interest was bigger than expected - the room was packed with over 60 international journalists, which appeared to be very interested in the idea of open standards for DRM.