Vanity URLs: Facebook Username Gives In

"What's in a name?" is a tired question that has been asked for years. And with the modern era's predilection for branding, a name is almost as important as the product in terms of perception and cognizance. In response to this, Facebook has finally made available the feature of customizing profile usernames. Customize your Facebook username now.Also called vanity URLs for the conscious, being

Save local TV, not CTV's profit margins

Major Canadian broadcast television networks such as CTV and Global have of late been running a 'Save Local Television' campaign.

The networks allege that they are losing money because cable companies won't pay them extra money to carry their digital signals, the way they do for specialty channels. If this doesn't change, CTV argues, they will be forced to cut back on local content to the point where local television in this country (save for a bit of CBC programming and Rogers-type community access channels) will become extinct.

Before I start explaining all the ways in which this is a horrible argument and CTV is far more at fault for any death of local television than Rogers or the CRTC or anyone else, I should include a disclaimer. So here it is:

I like local media. A lot. I'm convinced that the best way for newspapers to remain relevant in the Internet age is to put a greater focus on local content. I listen to local radio because they'll tell me if something important is going on while Internet/satellite radio often won't. I think brantford.com is an excellent concept and am frustrated at the essential monopoly status held by three media companies in Kitchener-Waterloo. So this is not some sort of free-marketist "if local television fails it's because local television was meant to fail and that's too bad" point of view.

So let's get into this. Basically, CTV saying "give us more money or we might not be able to afford local television" is like the fifth-grade bully beating you up for the first half of recess and then telling you he'll stop if you give him money.

There used to be such a thing as local television. In Kitchener, CKCO. In Montreal, CFCF. In other cities, other call letters. But these stations have all been rebranded and gutted to the point where they have no local identity anymore.

Take CKCO, for example. Now known as "CTV Southwestern Ontario", and the last time I heard anyone call it CKCO on-air was veteran reporter Art Baumunk, by mistake, over two years ago. Their entire schedule of local programming consists of the hour-long newscasts at 12 and 6 during the work week, 30-minute newscasts at 6 on weekends and 11:30 all week long, pseudo-news shows What's Your Point? and Provincewide, and a Sunday morning church service. Combined, that's 16.5 hours of local programming each week. There are 168 hours in a week, so we're looking at just under 10% of CTVSWO's programming as local.

Every few years, the station will celebrate some sort of anniversary and trot out clips from the past. Even from these brief clips, it's obvious that the then-CKCO was producing far more local content - possibly even the majority of its programming was local.

Now, there's no local content, and people of a certain age don't even recognize the CKCO initials (I hesitate to use them around anybody my age). This is entirely because of decisions made by CTV in the past to slash local content - and now they're the ones supposedly looking to *save* it? "Give us money and we'll stop destroying local television". How is that not extortion?

But let's look at this from a different angle. CTV claims they are being put out of business because specialty channels are taking away too much of their audience. Specialty channels like TSN, MuchMusic, the Comedy Network, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Bravo, Space, and Fashion Television - all of which (and many more) are owned by CTV. This stage of their argument is "we started new channels and it never occurred to us that people might actually watch them rather than our existing channels at times".

How about the amount of money (often millions of dollars) CTV pays out to acquire American programming? For the cost of the CSI series alone, I bet they could afford a whole lot more local content.

Best of all, the people who most rely on local television - those in remote, rural communities - are inching closer and closer to being completely without it, as a result of the CRTC's mandate for all stations to be broadcasting digitally by September 2011. Once the switchover happens, it is expected that analog signals could be removed in a few years.

The ironic part of all this? I'm in favour of fee-for-carriage. I think all stations/networks should be competing on an even field, at least when it comes to what they're getting from cable companies. I'm just not in favour of conglomerates cutting local television content for decades and then claiming to be the only ones fighting in its interest.

Oh, and Toronto Sun TV critic Bill Brioux has a list of 25 causes more worthy than Save Local TV. So there's that.

--Ryan

A series of unrelated thoughts

Here's a bunch of small thoughts that have burrowed through my mind over the last few weeks. Tonight or tomorrow, I'll put up something that's actually deserving of being at the top of this page until either Dan gets inspiration or I get off my butt.

The WHO just declared a level six pandemic for the swine flu (also that they won't get fooled again). Funny how the media's paying so much less attention now, when a few weeks ago they were acting like level six would be certain doom for all humankind. As I've been saying since the beginning, when the real threat comes, the WHO won't even know about it until it's too late. (On a groan-tastic note, they said a black man would be President of the United States when pigs fly. Barack Obama was only in office a few months and swine flu.)

Game seven of the Stanley Cup goes tomorrow night. I've been a bad hockey fan. Even though I watched quite a bit of the early rounds (Vancouver/Chicago, Boston/Montreal, Pittsburgh/Washington are the first series to come to mind), I've seen maybe two periods of the final. It's good hockey, it's just very hard to cheer for Sidney Crosby and impossible for me to cheer for Detroit. But I'll be watching tomorrow night for sure.

The City of Brantford is considering changing Dalhousie and Colborne to two-way streets. While it would make it easier for me on the rare occasions I drive to Grand River Hall or the library, I'm not so sure it's an avenue worth pursuing. If you find yourself needing to go in the other direction, you're almost always only a block away from being able to do so (the only real problem is between Clarence and Queen), and it's easier for pedestrians to only have to pay attention to traffic in one direction. Can you imagine the intersection of Dalhousie and Market with dozens of students trying to cross AND traffic flowing both ways? Leave them one-way.

Ever found yourself getting annoyed when your earbuds got all tangled up? Not in knots, just winding around each other to the point where they wouldn't rest in your ears? Somebody has invented a solution, and it's really one of the most ingenious things I've ever seen.

Not sure if I've ever mentioned Soccer Manager here before, but the gist is that it's a multiplayer online simulation where you run a soccer team. After a less than impressive season, my Charlton Athletic squad have racked up five straight victories and look like they'll comfortably make the playoffs, with a chance at promotion. Henrik Larsson and Sebastian Viera were great investments.

That reminds me, I should really blog about Toronto FC one of these days.

Things I don't like about my new job: paper cuts.

Things I do like about my new job: discovering the existence of Carpworld magazine.

That's it for now, I'll be back here in the next day or so.

--Ryan

Sandbox Mobile Media Launch a Sandblast

After officially launching Sandbox.com site a month ago as a web portal through a number of print, online, and television commercials, Sandbox is now launched as a mobile platform as well. The media event was held earlier this evening at the Bureau in A.Venue along Makati Ave, Makati City.The party was filled with celebrity guests and personalities like Chris Tiu, Ramon Bautista, Borgy Manotoc,

No Monday-blues next week…

Samsung Mobile Innovator is sponsoring demo night at MoMoLondon on Monday 15 June 2009. If you are keen to speak to us about anything, particularly the i8910 HD, this is your chance. We'll also be presenting briefly on a great initiative we are launching soon in partnership with the Symbian Foundation.

The event is being held at IPC Media's headquarters which is located near Waterloo.

The Blue Fin Building
110 Southwark Street
London
SE1 0SU

Door opens at 6pm with free food and drink and plenty of opportunity for networking with fellow mobile professionals.

Attendance is free, but you need to register. See the link below for more information.

http://momolo.org

Soft Solder Process for HB LED manufacturing

There is numerous ways to mount a die onto the substrates either made of Copper, ceramic, Leadframe, PCB, and Alumina, or a Pre-mould PLCC leadframe material has to go through a series of consideration. Refer to the attached tables. It is self-explanatory!
We can see that we have to first decide what kind of package we want to build, and for what application. Say if that is made for out door illumination, or For AFL (automobile Front lamp) that will be very harsh for the LED package as we require to pass a stringent Stress cycle requirement. The way how we can cool down the chip is the prime consideration.

Of course, the temperature can be made by force air cooling in an automobile, but in the case of a car running in dessert high way, the LED will be very hot. The junction temperature may go up to 125 Deg C. if the heat sink is not ale to carry out the heat, their performance of the chip will deteriorate and or soon burn out.

Seoul Semi new SMD LED package
12th May, there is a novel design of LED from Seoul Semiconductor to launch of its 120lm/W
high-efficiency and SMD type LED (Part No: LCW100Z1) for general purpose lighting.

As an ultra-thin LED with dimensions of 3.5mm x 2.8mm x 1.6mm, the LCW100Z1 is a high efficiency product that delivers up to 7.8lm (@0.06W) at the low current of 20mA and 14.3lm at the current of 40mA, and its viewing angle is 120 degrees.
This is a silver epoxy on Copper substrates. The heat dissipation should be more superior than the other type on ceramic and PCB. However, they can not achieve a very high BLT more than 1.5 mil, so there is still room for certain performance improvement.

Die Bonding Process
Direct Eutectic process is expensive for the 80/20 AuSn layer which has to be thicker than the surface roughness of base material.

Flux Eutectic process has it drawback as the flux will be the trouble they give up in the years to come for Lens Contamination and Delimination.

High Silver Content Epoxy Bonding
Having limitation in void control and not perfect for CTE matching as it is not easy to product a high enough BLT without any epoxy tailing issues with zero void.

Soft Solder Process
On the other hand Soft solder has been widely used for automobile and power device for more than 40 years. Soft solder has excellent heat-dissipation properties, of typically 35W/mK. high ductility, exhibited outstanding robustness against declamation. During thermal stress condition the solder can withstand a great thermal stress caused by asymmetrical thermal expansion of LED material SIC and Copper (SiC CTE is 3.1~4.7W/k-m and copper is 16.5ppm/K). These extraordinary characterizers lead us to consider an ultimate process for LED.

The remain four challenges are to maintain an Solder coverage, zero void, good die bonding placement and die tilting.

There is some challenge on the solder coverage as the LED chip is thin as 6 mil for EZ1000, and that will be some challenge to have both 100% Void free and good wetting for four edges. However that is research that one company has the solution, and they have actually can achieve +/-20 micron die placement with practical Zero void!

Soft Solder LED process
Basically this is a novel bonding process that requires precision, good temperature profile set-up and hest tunnel design with consideration of the formic gas flow, with CAE and proper het insulation material a standard solder dispensing system with accurate amount of solder to be place on the substrates. A high speed bonding head which can sustain a high temperature with minimum controllable thermal expansion or active alignment on every start of bonds using patent optical alignment method. Also there is a Reflow concern, if after two to three time reflow the solder will be softened and cause the die to be lift up, That will kill the process, If using solder haveing lead, that might not be good for the Product. So this is a kind of delimma, yet to be solved!

Solder Void
Since the die tilting and void will create uneven distribution of solder underneath the die, this void will reduce thermal and electrical conductivity and hence heat dissipation will be reduced These will create a higher electronics resistance. Moreover, larger void are often the beginning of an elimination of the die from the solder, which mean life time reduction. The Void has to be close to zero of more than 2% of the total area under the die.

BLT and Die tilting issue
A consistent BLT requires the Centre of the solder dispense dot to be properly aligned with each other. That is to have the vision of other mechanical way to properly align their two centres to be on point. As the Solder will be flowed back a few milliseconds after the collet has placed the die onto the solder, the solder will be squeezed out and once after the collet is move up, the capillary effect would work from four sides of the die bottom to pull in the solder. The smaller the die , the smaller the capillary force and more critical to properly align the die by the molten solder as there will be having insufficient or no flow back of solder material.

If the die is not placed at the centre of the solder lump, one the edge having minimum solder will not be having the same amount if pulling force as their other three edges and hence a tilted die will occur.

Vacuum Delay and timing
The proper control of the vacuum release is critical for controlling the BLT and Tilting of the Die.
The wrong timing for vacuum release will create die tilting issues, either too early or too late of the timing , especially for smaller dies. If the delay is too early the die will lose control as die falls onto the solder without control. I the vacuum release is too late, the collect will suck back the die.

Mechanical alignment
There is perfect coplanarity for the Collet to be level with the bonding pad, as well between the solder wire dispensing head with the bonding pad.

Purge Air
On the other hand there is used to have certain Purge air at the collet such as to break the vacuum aster. That amount of purge air can cause die tilting as well, in any sense, can not set too much, and that purge air should be so adjusted by software to be controller in proportional to the die size.

Conclusion
Soft solder process has been running in the power device for more than 40 years. That is a mature process. However High Power LED using lead free Solder is a novel process, there is a lot of challenge such as reflow issue for major reliability concern. How to control the amount of Solder is the key point. The advantage is cost and zero Void, and highly reliable LED product could be made! Another step jumping into the Replacement light bulb application.

Who can manage to use the low cost process for best final product reliability will be the one who can win the market.

When will LEDs be truly able to replace Screw in Light bulb?

This was one of the hottest topics some 14 years ago when we met some of senior marketing staff of one European incandescent lamp company saying that the LED screw in light bulbs would be come a commercial product 10 years later, waited until 2004, well, still could not see that to be materialized!

There was great promise and a prominent wish, but the path won’t be easy. Key persons of the major LED players such as Osram, Lumileds and Cree had numerous discussions about this over the years in many consortium and LED shows.

The answer turned out to be less than simple. For one thing, a typical 5mm LED produces about 6 lumens. A commercial lighting fixture would require hundred thousands of such LEDs, bring more technical concerns for driver designers, and in the end consuming more or less the same power as a florescent lighting fixture of the same output.

The pros of for LEDs in lighting fixture comes when you design the LEDs for that purpose, and LED can achieve higher output efficiency, directability of the beam, and reliability that you can’t get any from the best CCFL.

Recently there are a lot of replacement LED light bulb made in large quantity using standard 5mm LED, and sooner we see more and more failed and or burnt out. That was because they are overdriven to the limit that it can designed to withstand, over driven a LED will degrade the epoxy encapsulant. Then the epoxy becoming yellowish, and gradually it starts to crack, once it cracks, the LED will likely to fail.

On the way I returned from Malaysia a couple of days ago, I went to inspect most of the LED lamps that was made with 20 over vertical Lamp in the Airport Express Train at HK Airport.

Obviously that I could see at a low of failed LED in each light fixture. And No one is found to be full lighting up. The train has been running for over ten years and that is the life time for the LED, well I could see that they may not using the bets of his kind and I could remember that the light intensity drops as time goes by!

The lure of the huge compact incandescent-bulb replacement market would seduce the supplying food chain for low cost replacement light bulb using LED by Asian Suppliers, coupled with the entry of low-cost white box producers from China, quickly drove vendors to trade away the long life in exchange for lower cost.

This led to an unfavourable situation in which general consumers often don’t understand the quality of the LED lamp they are buying. In fact in many applications, inexpensive LED light fixture aren’t really direct replacements for ordinary light bulbs or CFL lamp at all.

The consumers buy the wrong bulb for their purpose and get frustrated when it doesn’t work. In China, now we can buy from the market of some bundle of 20 5mm LED light bulb at a price if merely RMB18.00. (USD2.0) This is a incredible low price for the number of LED they have, the chip and associated circuitry. But who know how long these LED can last. Do not forget a typical good quality LED can last 50,000 to 60,000 hours.

All LED designer is doing the best to use different material, manufacturing process to build a LED with good conductive cooling. The incandescent lamps are designed to survive with only radiation cooling. And today, the cost per Lumen of LEDs is still 10X-20X more expensive to replace CFLs and incandescent lamps respectively.

This price different was 20-40X two years ago, the ASP of these good LED is dropping at a mush faster rate that 5 years ago. In order that the LED bulb to be made successful, it has to be reliable, the fixtures must exploit the long life of properly-designed LED lighting to have a competitive position.

On the other hand , the EnergyStar standards will be critical to the development of this market. The beauty of LED lighting is not its cost, or even its efficiency, but the features that it can offer beyond just illumination. Today a typical screw-in light bulb is not expected as cheap as the energy lamp nor the incandescent lamp.

Most of us is using low-cost manufacturing in Asia today. The difference in cost of LED lighting is in the choice of materials and or type of the die bonding process. For instance, you can choose to use inexpensive epoxy that will fail, or you can choose to replace it with a thin film flip chip process which does not contain any epoxy and with excellent gold to gold heat dissipation to keep the LED cool, and there is resistant to light degradation but are more expensive as at price of few times higher.

The substrate, the type of bonding process either epoxy, direct Eutectic, flux eutectic or flip chip, the phosphor that goes over the LED and adds a yellow component to the LED’s blue emission to product white light *1 and the die itself are the key components in a lamp. There are lots of trade secrets and IP in this business, and most of the LED manufacturing or suppliers are quite vertically integrated.

There’s only a core set of companies that have the IP for white LEDs. That could limit competition from low-cost producers copy cats who don’t know how to do it well.
Many consumers have had access to long-life light bulbs, and have steadfastly unwilling to pay a premium for them. Of course there are certain pioneers who has been using LED light bulb at home, hotel as street lamps.

Nowadays there are 70 percent of the lighting-fixture market in the US is commercial, only less then 2% of the user are residential. Incandescent lamp sales are declining as people switch to more energy-efficient lamps such as energy saving lamp as the majority. US and other advance country in Asia are obviously to be lagging in that trend.

If you explore homes in Europe, you will find very small number of incandescent bulbs, and quite common that lamp will be on a dimmer. “In Western countries of Europe, consumers are more eager to pay additional money to enhance a green lifestyle. They are keen on looking for LED light bulbs than any other country in the world.

Friend of mine who is the senior engineer for LED manufacturer asked me what about the maximum light output that we can obtain form the LED. And If that LED lamp can last that long without breakdown as it was listed as one of the sales slogan of 50,000 hours?

In general, higher junction temperature and higher current will mean lower life. There are several failure modes on LEDs, but which one is most likely depends on the architecture of the particular lamp.

“In theory, physics says you could get about 230 Lumens/Watt at perfect efficiency. Most products today are in the neighborhood of 80-90 Lumens/W, and we have cool white lamps [emitting light with a higher color temperature] in the laboratory producing about 130-160 Lumens/W.

Certain users prefer slightly warmer light, and the theoretical perfect efficiency would produce only about 200 Lumens/W at the lower color temperature. The major players had something in the neighborhood of 150 Lumens/W in the lab. But these are hand-built devices. Commercial available device are in the neighbouring of 70-80 lumens/W.

As there is still a need for certain technology breakthrough for higher efficiency say commercial available 200 lumen/W LED. LED should be made at a cost of say 30% of the current LED., Then with these added feature of lumen light intensity per dollar is least 5X better than the current available LED lamp solution.

Then that will be the time for public to accept the LED light bulb to be a standard for domestic application, at that time I think your Incandescent Lamp will be come kind of collectible item and we can only seeing these at Museum!

When that day will be? I think that is 2012.


*1
There are three ways of producing high intensity white-light using LEDs. One way is using RGB LEDs. One is to use individual LEDs that emit three primary colors– red, green, and blue, and then mix all the colors to produce white light. The other is to use a phosphor material to convert monochromatic light from a blue or UV LED to broad-spectrum white light, much in the same way a fluorescent light bulb works.