Sony news from COMDEX

Two Sony developments of note from COMDEX:

1. Sony is now pushing an "i-Link" bus as the standard interface between all their equipment (including PCs). When I asked about how this related to s-link, I was told that they were two entirely different protocols, and that i-Link was intended to be a cross-vendor standard vs s-Link which was always a Sony proprietary standard. The guy I talked to claimed this was not an indication that Sony was dropping support for s-Link, but I'm not sure I believe that. In any case, if i-Link ends up being a bigger, more open, and more supported standard than s-Link, all the better for us.

2. One of the workstations at the Sony booth was showing some software called "Digital Media Park" which controls CD Jukeboxes, MD players, video-CD players, audio files, etc and gives you one big library of all of that that you can organize by artist, format, etc. You can create playlists, search for tracks etc. Apparently you can also do home control (via IR? X-10?). It was a pretty slick interface but I'm not sure how much functionality was really under the hood - in particular, I didn't see anything about CDDB lookups. And, of course, it doesn't have Colby Boles behind it. 8-)

I actually saw a preview of this software last year at CES but was told at that time that Sony had no immediate intentions to market it.

I'm still not sure how they will be marketing it now. There was no printed info about it at the show and the booth boys were pretty clueless about it.

You can catch a glimpse of it on some of the Japanese Sony pages, ie http://www.sony.co.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/COMPO330/cdmd.html.