Dumb devices to act smart

A German electrical engineer who helped make MP3 players a reality has turned his attention to making "dumb devices" act smart.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, now a professor at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany, is backing Perfect Stream technology that lets computing power in the internet "cloud" do the thinking for simple gadgets.

"When I first met these guys it sounded crazy to me," he said while courting partners for Perfect Stream at the Consumer Electronics Show that ended on Sunday in Las Vegas.

"But I have a fondness for crazy ideas because when we started MP3 it seemed crazy to everyone as well."

The idea with Perfect Stream is to have digital video and audio tailored to individual tastes and delivered as a service to essentially any gizmo that can talk to the internet.

"This technology works and we are trying to internationalise it," said Nikolas Samios of Perfect Stream.

Services can be programmed with a person's preferred shows, news sources, music and internet content, and the data can be routed to digital picture frames, in-car navigation systems, feature phones, game consoles and more, said Brandenburg.

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