The next generation home digital experience is about one essential idea: to deliver more and diverse media-rich content to the consumer by giving consumers access to their digital life when they want it, how they want it and where they want it. This experience revolves around a new generation of television sets, mobile devices, HD and games appliances, wirelessly connected homes as well as a host of set-top box options.

As communications, broadcast media and broadband entertainment are continuing to converge, a major shift has begun in the connected home environment. The integration of the television experience with the complete power of the new end user technologies, from broadband to mobile, opens the door to not only an exclusive world of entertainment and information, it brings a next generation idea of full consumer interactivity within diverse mobile experiences. Personalized television and mobile will forever change the consumer entertainment landscape and will open the door to a consumer with more and greater control over his or her environment.

As a mobile Internet pioneer, ACCESS has helped to develop and deliver technologies that have brought the Internet to a new generation of mobile devices and consumers. In this presentation, David “Lefty” Schlesinger will discuss the future of the mobile and beyond-PC markets, the next generation home digital experience and how this will affect the consumer in the era of convergence.

XML applications for publishers have largely failed to realize the full potential inherent in the technology. While larger publishers could make the investment necessary to realize significant return on the use of XML technology, smaller enterprises simply could not, for a number of reasons, but fundamentally because the startup costs and ongoing costs of ownership were simply too high. The DITA standard fundamentally changes the equation, bringing several unique features that, together, serve to lower both the startup cost and ongoing costs, making the use of XML for publishers much more affordable than it ever has before. At the same time, advances in supporting technologies important to Publishers, such as improved support for XML in Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, powerful new XML search and retrieval systems such as MarkLogic, and a new generation of lower-cost XML editors, as serve to make the use of XML for Publishing applications more attractive than it ever has been before.

Jeff Deck will speak on his adventures traveling around the country as the founder of the Typo Eradication Advancement League. He will share insights from the trip as well as photos of some egregious typos and their downfall at the hands of the League.

From early March to late May, Deck and three other sworn members of TEAL took a road trip around America to stamp out as many typos as they could find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. They did not blame, nor chastise, the authors of those typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time had come for the crisis to be addressed. The League believes that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.

Deck and his traveling companions came to some startling conclusions over the course of their trip, as they discovered a wide assortment of mistakes and met with varying degrees of success in persuading people to let them fix typos. They realized that fear and apathy reign over much of the American retail sector, both of which prevented many corrections from taking place.  Many employees were afraid to authorize typo fixes due to expected retribution from their bosses; others just didn’t care enough to see justice done. The Leaguers also became aware of larger communication issues afflicting society today. People are not talking to each other even enough to point out small errors in signs. This does not bode well for problems of greater urgency. 

As far as root misunderstandings behind the more common typos, TEAL thinks that a better educational philosophy for teaching spelling and grammar is needed from the start, grounded in phonics. Erroneous orthographic notions propagate like a virus—lucid education is what will keep the body of the language out of malady.