What's in the box?

The Thomson story gets more interesting, and is one which I return to from time to time. Here is a toaster maker which looks to be assembling the ideal all-singing, all-dancing home gateway, while also trying to position itself in the DRM and transaction layers of IP-based content, presumably so as to avoid being marginalized as yet another CPE maker. This week brings two more interesting acquisitions along this dual-theme. Tuesday the company acquired Inventel, which looks like just the sort of company a Skype or Popular Telephony would do well to get to know. Today Thomson has acquired German content watermarking specialist MediaSec, whose management team have highly credible backgrounds in security. I'm not sure I understand fully how all the pieces will come together, but it's interesting to watch as it takes shape.