Coincidently Monday the trail against Lernout & Hauspie begins. I don't know if they are known outside of Belgium, but in the late nineties they gave Flanders (Dutch speaking North of Belgium) the dream it could have a leading role in peach technology. L&H even formed the centre of a "Flanders Language Valley".
Unfortunately L&H made some wrong investments and became the centre of a major financial scandal after Robert Smithson of the Wall Street Journal discovered fictitious transactions in Korea and shady accounting techniques. As a result L&H went bankrupt in 2001. It's around this scandal that a court case starts this Monday. It's big news here in Belgium, as a lot of people invested money in L&H and are hoping to get some of it back.
I was wondering if L&H where actually on the right track, Jo Lernout today still believes in the technology. I was thinking he was wrong, but this news item might prove him right.
It was actually L&H that bought the then faltering in Dragon Systems in 2000. L&H was after their bankruptcy bought by ScanSoft (for very little money). ScanSoft bought Nuance Communications and changed it's name to Nuance. And now they seem to be getting successful with the NaturallySpeaking software, so it probably was a good acquisition by L&H back then. And ScanSoft (now Nuance) was in turn smart in buying them up.
It's not from listening to loud music that you stop hearing higher frequencies, it's a natural phenomenon: your hearing of high-pitched sound degrades as you grow older.
This has been used to repell teenagers using an annoying high-pitched sound adults can't hear:
"The device, called the Mosquito, emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30." An other application is using it as a ringtone adults can't hear.
But these sounds are still below 20 kHz, even children can't hear sounds above 18 kHz or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Coincidently Monday the trail against Lernout & Hauspie begins. I don't know if they are known outside of Belgium, but in the late nineties they gave Flanders (Dutch speaking North of Belgium) the dream it could have a leading role in peach technology. L&H even formed the centre of a "Flanders Language Valley".
Unfortunately L&H made some wrong investments and became the centre of a major financial scandal after Robert Smithson of the Wall Street Journal discovered fictitious transactions in Korea and shady accounting techniques. As a result L&H went bankrupt in 2001. It's around this scandal that a court case starts this Monday. It's big news here in Belgium, as a lot of people invested money in L&H and are hoping to get some of it back.
I was wondering if L&H where actually on the right track, Jo Lernout today still believes in the technology. I was thinking he was wrong, but this news item might prove him right.
It was actually L&H that bought the then faltering in Dragon Systems in 2000. L&H was after their bankruptcy bought by ScanSoft (for very little money). ScanSoft bought Nuance Communications and changed it's name to Nuance. And now they seem to be getting successful with the NaturallySpeaking software, so it probably was a good acquisition by L&H back then. And ScanSoft (now Nuance) was in turn smart in buying them up.