Audio pioneer Sidney Harman dies of complication from leukemia at the age of almost 93, just a month after his being diagnosed of the disease.

Of course Harman is best known for inventing the "hi-fi"-- high fidelity sound-- as well as for co-founding high-end audio component maker Harman International Industries, whose brands include Harman-Kardon and JBL. Harman was company CEO until 2008, when he stepped down following an aborted sale to KKR and Goldman Sachs.

He was known for being a polymath, lecturing in more than a dozen academic departments at USC, where he founded the Academy for Polymathic Study.

Most recently he bought the magazine Newsweek.

Go RIP Sidney Harman

The “father” of the MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione now aims to create a specification based on open source software and standards that will accelerate the rise of Web-ready televisions.

The OCTV is an effort under his Digital Media Project, an industry group founded by Chiariglione in 2003.

The OCTV project wants to accelerate the development of a market of products, content, services and applications designed to enrich one-way TV services with interoperable multichannel 2-way content access and delivery.

But OCTV won’t develop a complete product…instead only the spec and an industry-grade software platform that implements that spec for commercial products and services.

Of course, the big multinational companies in connected TVs each prefer their own proprietary solution, in the hopes they can lock up a market in iTunes-style.

The DMP will work with ITU-T to review proposals.

Go Open Connected TV (OCTV)

Microsoft releases Windows Home Server's second version, with an evaluation version to be available early this month.

WHS machines are known for being easy to set up and manage-- but the news of the company's dropping the Drive Extender feature did raise some eyebrows.

Microsoft's reasoning goes that as HDD capacities grow, customers won't need to "extend" volume capacity-- hoping machines coming with up to 3TB of storage will be enough.

OEMs are said to be already working on WHS 2011 machines, which should start hitting the market by May.

Go Windows Home Server 2011 Ready for Release

Jungo launches Panorama, its next generation of DSL, cable and fiber remote management for service providers.

Panorama handles the connected home as a whole-- manageing both home Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) and broadband and home video services. This way service providers can provide management and support from service down to single device level.

A Service View feature also enables customer support representatives to filter their view by service (telephony, DVR, internet) in order to monitor and control a specific service-- reducing customer support and customer interation.

Panorama ties with CPE side software and extends standard TR-069 paramenters to allow for performance, security and connectivity issue identification (including present and future problems) for remote fixing via predefined processes.

The company says Panorama will also offer connectivity to devices beyond residential gateways and STBs (including cameras, mobile phones and tablets) while being fully scaleable for future devices on the market.

Go Jungo Panorama