The Economist

But survey work done by Parks Associates, a market-research company based in Dallas, Texas, suggests that only 15-20% of consumers are willing to sign up for such “time-of-use” or “demand response” programmes. And 35% of customers say they would not allow the utility to - ...read more

In this area Apple's reputation for making things easy to use gives it an advantage. Moving digital content—photographs, music, videos—from computers to television sets is “the crux of it all”, says Kurt Scherf of Parks Associates, a - ...read more

The problem is obvious. The television room may be empty. Its owners may have gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea or to the toilet. They may have switched channels during the commercial break, be napping or talking on the telephone. The viewer may be a teenage girl, even though - ...read more

Believers in this future point to encouraging statistics. Parks Associates, a research firm in Texas that specialises in the digital home (and which organised the conference at which Mr Burke gave his keynote address) surveyed a group of internet users and found that 84% of them use - ...read more

Companies are fighting to turn your home into an entertainment multiplex. On June 21st, Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, launched two new lines of chips, code-named Grantsdale and Alderwood, which it says are the “most compelling” changes to the way personal computers (PCs) - ...read more