Digital-Lifestyles

March 2004

  • Pay As You Go Broadband

    In answer to BT’s new UK£19.99 broadband product, capped at 1gb but “burstable”, Tiscali have launched a competing product aimed at customers wanting to dip their toes in broadband internet access.

    Bandwidth is set at 512Kb/s and has an option of either 1Gb of data per month, or 50 hours online. Customers who go over their basic allowance either pay 2p per minute or 2p per Mb extra, depending whether they are on the 1Gb or 50 hour package.

    The new packages that are appearing from suppliers look like good value at first, but we thought we’d check what you’re really getting. We dug out our HP48G+ and calculated that you could get nearly 10Gb down the pipe on the 50 hour package, but then it does limit you to less than two hours a day online. Further frightening calculations revealed that certain DigLif staff spend at least 120 hours a month online, and so for “heavy” users uncapped products currently retailing at UK£29.99 are best.

    Tiscali’s Broadband Offerings

  • Gracenote CD Database Raises US$13 Million in Venture Capital Funding

    A few years ago, it was just a convenient tool to show what tracks you were playing on your CD – but now Gracenote is an important tool for people who listen to music on their PC or iPod, whether they know it or not.

    We can think of few tools which have gone from a nice feature to being absolutely essential – the rise of personal digital music players has made online CD databases absolutely essential if you want to rip your 1000+ collection of disks and still stay sane.

    Many users of Gracenote don’t even know they’re accessing the service – most applicatons just nip off and download the data without them realising. More recent changes to Gracenote have meant that applications must be licensed to use the database, and must display the Gracenote logo when they access the service.

    The company estimate that 150 million units of Gracenote-capable software were shipped in 2003, and that this will rise to 200 million in 2004.

    Gracenote

    FreeDB – an open source CD database

  • Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo Gang Up on Poor Defenseless Spammers

    Only two months after the US can-spam act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing), Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink and Yahoo have taken legal action against at least a hundred of the individuals that have been clogging up your inbox with all those offers of loans, cheap medicines and naked men, women and livestock.

    The can-spam act made many of the spammers techniques illegal – such as sending bulk email by the misuse of open proxies (basically a relay for sending mail), using false email addresses and false unsubscribe options.

    The plaintiffs aren’t entirely sure who they are prosecuting – many of the defendants are as yet unnamed, but they’re confident they’ll know who they are by the time the cases get to court.

    This is a tiny, tiny step in the progress towards reducing the amount of spam that is sent worldwide every day. This legal action from MS et al will do little to stop the vast tidal wave of spam from around the world – only when changes are made to email software and mail transmission can we look forward to seeing any reduction.

    Microsoft’s Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative (CSRI)

    BBC Q&A on Spam

    Spam filters on ZDNet

  • London Innovation Conference 2004

    The business world is fast moving. News ideas and creative thinking are always needed if you want your business to stay ahead of the game. Having bright new ideas is not the only problem. You need innovation to transform those ideas and make them happen in the real world. This one day Conference will help you do just that. With expert speakers, practical support, sector and themed sessions and invaluable first-hand experience, it will give you the knowledge, inspiration and confidence to turn your good ideas into successful business ventures.
    The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London http://www.london-innovation.org.uk/conference.htm

  • Starbucks Offering Customised CDs

    Always keen to develop the Starbucks experience, the Seattle-based coffee house has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to give customers an innovative music product – personalised CDs burned to order.

    We’ve all seen services offering tailor-made CDs before, where this service is different is in the customer interface. This one uses HP tablet PCs (and thankfully, headphones) so that punters can chose can choose from 250,000 licensed tracks and have a CD or two made up for them from their selection.

    This could finally be a success for custom CDs – many initiatives in the past have failed because customers don’t really like standing in front of a kiosk for half an hour choosing tracks from a limited selection. Lounging around in a well-worn sofa drinking coffee and picking favourites from a library of a quarter of a million tunes is much more appealing.

    A further benefit will be that customers to Starbucks will get more exposure to legal downloads and may be tempted to try similar services such as iTunes when they get home.

    The service will be available in selected US branches from 16th March – if any DigLif readers get a chance to try it out, please drop us an email and let us know how you found it.

    Business Week

    What Starbucks did next

  • Hand-held Digital Video Broadcasting – a summary of progress at DVB World 2004

    The fourth Digital Video Broadcasting World conference was held in Dublin last week – and one of the key topics discussed was the developing standard for broadcasting digital video to hand-held and other mobile devices.

    The new standard was only conceived two years ago, and after a couple of name changes (it has previously been known as DVB-M and DVB-X), has been named DVB-H. The standard was accepted by the DVB Technical Module in January and is expected to be submitted to the European Television Standards Institute this year.

    As the standard is still so new, there are still some problems to be ironed out, mainly power consumption and some network issues.

    DVB-H’s core function is the delivery of digital media to small and portable devices such as mobile phones, but without using mobile phone networks. It has been designed to deliver MPEG-2 streams, but can broadcast any type of data.

    The proposed standard addresses five issues with mobile devices: they tend to move about, they have smaller screens, they have smaller antennas, they require indoor coverage and they run on battery power.

    DVB-T (the terrestrial standard for digital broadcasting) was not really considered for mobile video as it was designed for use with rooftop antennas and does not have the building penetration required, nor is it very power efficient. In theory it could be used to broadcast to mobile devices but a separate dedicated standard would allow many optimisations, rather than just bolting on functionality to a standard that was never actually designed for mobile use.

    DAB was designed for devices with similar location and power demands, but simply does not have the spectrum width to carry the data required.

    Another interesting aspect of DVB-H is that it can coexist with DVB-T without disturbing devices using the other stream, such as set-top boxes.

    DVB-H uses time-slicing between streams to reduce power consumption, but this saving is more or less lost when the total bit rate for a service is low. It’s designed to carry only IP (Internet Protocol) services, so is obviously constrained by the capabilities of the carrier protocol – but since IP is well understood and supported, and has a rich set of features such as strong encryption, this should not present many problems.

    As we said at the beginning, the standard doesn’t use existing mobile networks to deliver content, but we should add that it also needs more masts than conventional broadcasting (though less than cellular coverage, and the masts need not be as large as conventional broadcast masts). It is expected that existing cellular masts will be upgraded to transmit DVB-H signals. However, the cellular network will provide the return path, allowing users to pay for content and receive licenses for their purchases.

    Presented at DVB2004 was the Nokia’s 7700 is the first device to support DVB-H through the addition of their Streamer SU-6 accessory. The SU-6 is attached to the 7700 like a battery pack and is just the beginning for devices that will provide new forms of multimedia and entertainment for consumers.

    DVB Home

    The Nokia 7700

    The European Television Standards Institute

  • .mobile domain on the way?

    There has not been a new Top Level Domains (TLD) since .name came out a couple of years ago. Even that ended up as a bit of a damp squib. But now a collection of nine corporations, have applied to ICANN (Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers) to form a new domain. Their proposal, .mobile is to be used for mobile applications/devices and will be filed by 15 March 2004.

    Nokia is leading some pretty heavyweight companies from the worlds of computing, software, tech manufacturers, mobile phone makers and cellular service providers. The list; Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Vodafone, 3, GSM Association, HP, Orange, Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd. and Sun Microsystems is not only from a diverse range of areas, but are feature companies that normally do not really like each other, like, Nokia, Microsoft and Sun.

    If the current application is successful, the current estimate is to have the first names available during the second half of 2005. An independent, separate organisation would run the registry.

    This is not the first time Nokia has tried to get some new TLD’s introduced, back in October 2000 they requested, the following form ICANN:-

    .mas
    .max
    .mid
    .mis
    .mobile
    .mobi
    .now
    .own

    At the time they came out with a press release, which sadly they have removed from their site, but thanks to archive.org (nee Way Back Machine), we can find the original release. (Interesting to see their projections for mobile handset, overtaking computers for IP access by 2003). The 2000 applications, clearly was not a success.

    UMTS forum has been a big supporter for a Mobile TLD, or M-TLD, as they prefer to call it, and two years ago (March, 2002) they published the findings of ‘Benefits and Drawbacks of Introducing a Dedicated Top Level Domain Within the UMTS Environment’ prepared by Theron business consulting. The Executive Summary –  is available to the public, the detail (TOC) is not without registration. The estimated cost of applying for and running the was estimated at less than 3m Euro.

    The purpose of the .mobile domain, beyond opening up the domain market to another potential name grab, is not immediately clear. So after reading between various lines and carrying out further research we’ve concluded the following.

    It appears that the idea is to limit the people who can get a .mobile name, and by doing this, they hope to ensure that, at the very least, the content is formatted for mobile devices and the service has a level of QoS (Quality of Service). If this will turn out to be a mobile walled garden, a mini-internet, only for mobile devices is not clear. Will .mobile domain only be available for use BY mobile devices, or are people to put their mobile-friendly content on .mobile domains?

    Some quotes by the founding partner companies appear to support the walled garden theory.

    “We expect that by leveraging the technologies of the Internet, appropriately scaled for mobile scenarios, this initiative will provide the ease of use and efficiency that will significantly fuel mobile Internet usage.”
    Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of the MSN Communications Platform at Microsoft

    “Creating a unique, standard platform for a mobile Internet environment is a natural next step to enabling new and compelling services for businesses and consumers,”
    Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives and business development, HP

    Forcing publishers to create a whole separate sites to operate under a .mobile domain appears a very expensive route. We would imagine that it would be a much better to define a standard that can be used with any currently existing domain. ie just serve it from the same domain as before but define Digital-Lifestyles.info/mobile or mobile.Digital-Lifestyles.info as the convention.

    If the mobile phone owners would get a choice between .mobile-internet or Internet is also not clear.

    One things that the mobile industry understand is if each handsets has its own domain name, there are significant issues in maintaining DNS records and monitoring their connection to the Internet – as the phone connect and disconnect so regularly. This lead us to think that they are talking about maintaining a separate DNS system for mobile devices. If they do end up running a separate DNS, Nokia (or their JV company/partners) would become the gatekeeper to and from the mobile world – a very powerful position.

    More details of this are bound to popup over the next few weeks, if anything relevant turns up, we will let you know.

    The mobile Top Level Domain initiative

    Nokia October 2000 application to ICANN

    Theon business consulting

  • Coming to a PVR Near You: Hitachi’s 400gb hard Drive

    Snappily titled the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is currently under test by equipment manufacturers hoping to use it in their products, and could be incorporated into PVRs late in the year. The 400gb drive is available with a PATA or newer SATA interface and spins at 7200 rpm, pretty much the standard these days. The drive uses 3.5” platters, so won’t be suitable for mobile devices. Currently, the highest capacity 3.5” drive is around 250gb.

    Hitachi hopes the drive will give it a bigger role in the consumer electronics market due to the rapid growth of PVRs, hard disk recorders and media hubs in the home. Last year Apple bought 730,000 units of hard disks from Hitachi’s competitor Toshiba, so obviously they’re keen to see some of that business in future.

    400gb translates to about 400 hours of broadcast television, or about 45 hours of HDTV. Or nearly a year’s worth of MP3s.

    Apple’s hard drive future

  • EU Passes the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive

    The European Parliament has passed the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, an anti-piracy law covering media and other copyrighted goods across the entire EU.

    The new law has had an early amendment to restrict civil lawsuits to commercial counterfeiters and pirates such as those selling copied football shirts, CDs and videos. In it’s original form publishers could pursue individuals through the courts for downloading music and other media in good faith, rather like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

    Civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) still argue that the amendment is not enough and that individuals could still be prosecuted as under the new law. Companies are allowed to raid homes, freeze bank accounts and seize property though proposals for custodial sentences were dropped. In the US, organisations such as the RIAA used the DMCA to prosecute file sharers, and resulted in a number of unfortunate legal cases against children.

    Interestingly, the new law was guided through the courts by Janelly Fourtou. By sheer coincidence, her husband is Jean-Rene Fourtou, chief executive of Vivendi Universal.

    The EFF on the new law

  • Sky Launch Virtual Horse Racing Channel

    With CGI horses and a live studio commentary, Sky have launched a virtual racing channel for subscribers. Broadcasting from 6pm to 2am on Sky Digital channel 295, the channel will also allow punters to bet on the Super Keno draw, with a jackpot of £1 million.

    Pete Ward, Executive Producer of Sky Vegas Live, said: “Sky Vegas Live gives viewers everything to play for – a slick and attractive channel with high pay-outs. The virtual TV studio will be the first of its kind and will give viewers the Vegas buzz in their living room and attract viewers who will enjoy a new betting experience.”

    Presenting the channel will be National Lottery Live’s Gigi Morley and former Blue Peter host Stuart Miles.

    Sky Vegas Live