LATEST ADDITIONS

Widescreen pictures and 5.1-channel audio will soon be accompanied by stenches, scents, fragrances, and aromas. Parfum Recherche SA, a Paris-based olfactory research firm, has announced a partnership with Snout & Proboscis Development Corp. of Santa Clara, California, to license its scent-encoding and -decoding technology to film studios and home-theater hardware makers worldwide. S&P's new chip division will be known as Scentronics.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.hewlett-packard.com">Hewlett-Packard</A>, <A HREF="http://www.mitsubishi.com">Mitsubishi</A>, <A HREF="http://www.philips.com">Philips</A>, <A HREF="http://www.ricoh.com">Ricoh</A>, <A HREF="http://www.sony.com">Sony</A>, and <A HREF="http://www.yamaha.com">Yamaha</A> demonstrated the read and write capabilities of a prototype DVD-ReWritable (DVD+RW) drive at CeBIT '98. This was the first public demonstration of the write capabilities of the DVD+RW format, which has sparked controversy in recordable DVD circles. Product prototypes based on the DVD+RW specification are expected to reach US markets by this fall.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.dolby.com">Dolby Laboratories</A> won a bidding war for a four-storey office building near its Potrero Hill headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Dolby president Bill Jasper plunked down $18.25 million in cashier's checks for the glass-block building, which had fallen into bankruptcy after it had been used as a diamond-cutting and distribution center linked to both the De Beers cartel and the Russian government.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.cablelabs.com">Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.</A> specified an existing high-speed serial protocol called IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire) as the link between OpenCable digital set-top boxes and devices such as television sets and DVD players. <A HREF="http://www.opencable.com">OpenCable</A> is a CableLabs-sponsored initiative aimed at developing key interface specifications in order to foster interoperability among digital set-top boxes built by multiple vendors and used in broadband, two-way cable networks.