How We See CE

I work at DS2, a company that develops Integrated Circuits for high-speed communications over power lines. During the last 7 years, I have been involved in different areas at DS2; System Architecture Design (where I was involved in the initial design of our 45Mbps and 200Mbps powerline chipsets), Test Engineering, Technical Support, and Technical Marketing (which is my main activity now). I have a Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Valencia, Spain). For the last year and a half, I have lived between California and Europe, which means that:

1. I have a lot of Frequent Flier miles, and
2. I spend a lot of time complaining about things that I like from the USA that I cannot find in Europe, and vice versa.

The funny thing here is that what I miss when I’m in Europe usually involves “electronics”, but what I miss when I’m in USA usually involves “food”!

My job involves spending a lot of time working with companies that are developing Consumer Electronics (CE) products that enable users to share multimedia content (video, music, photos) between different devices around their homes. That work has allowed me to see firsthand the emergence of applications that were almost non-existent two or three years ago.

An example: suddenly, the average user (and by “average user”, most of the time I mean “my wife”) demands functionality that he/she never thought of in 2005. Two years ago, she was happy with her collection of photo books, a DVD player and an FM radio. Now, we “need” two laptops, a NAS box, two 802.11g wireless access points, three powerline adapters, and a Digital Media Adapter, working “invisibly” (most of the time) to allow her to enjoy the huge collection of photos, MP3 files and movies that we have accumulated during the last few years.

In future posts in this blog I’ll try to share with you my thoughts about where I think the “networked CE” industry is going. I look forward to receiving feedback on emerging trends from readers.