May 2004 – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

IDC: Mobile Applications for Consumers is Where the Money Is

IDC’s new study “Western European Consumer Mobile Data Applications” analyses opportunities for consumer mobile data applications in the market – and I can’t say that we were very surprised by any of the findings. IDC believe that the current state of the market is a good reflection of what to expect in the future: mobile operators will be making cash out of selling small applications, ringtones and other widgets to phone owners, in a market worth an estimated €6.67 billion (US$8 billion).

“This underlines that the wireless industry will not see the one killer application that many are still seeking and talking about,” said Paolo Pescatore, senior analyst for IDC’s European Wireless and Mobile Communications Service. “It is very much a cocktail and these applications will drive usage over GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA. All these applications – ring tones, gaming, video, and music – will eventually find their place on a mobile.”

IDC rightly report that demand for video is not very high, currently – and is certainly dwarfed by consumer interest in games, ringtones and SMS “texting”. As video is not very satisfying on phones at the moment, the industry must be careful not to over-hype the service or mislead consumers into thinking that they will be watching TV quality visuals on their mobile any time soon.

Operators will need to offer engaging content, the report says, and that means that they’re going to have to spend considerable amounts of money and resources securing the rights for that material, whilst partnering up with content houses.

IDC express surprise at the lack of music services for mobile users, and believe that people’s interest in music, coupled with mobility, presents a compelling reason to offer music services. IDC believe it will just take a bit longer, with operators rolling out services towards the end of the year.

The IDC study

Gates Says Blogs Are Good For Business

Blogging is entering the mainstream – Bill Gates thinks they’re a useful business tool, so expect one of your directors to pop up with the idea of corporate blogs at your next board meeting.

Blogs are online diaries, usually collections of links, thoughts and illustrations kept by one person who wants to share information about themselves or their enthusiasms. They can be purely personal, or a day-to-day update on a business project.

Gates says that blogs are a good way to share information, both inside and outside of organisations and have considerable advantages over older forms of communication such as email (email is old now?). Emails can miss out the right people or be too imposing, and websites are too passive. People forget to visit websites, and get frustrated when they make the effort to go there and the site hasn’t been updated.

The solution? A blog with an RSS feed. Real Simple Syndication is a feed that allows stories to be pushed to other sources like news readers and even other websites. This way, changes and new information come to the reader, not the other way round.

Over 700 MS employees keep project blogs, to share information and keep others up to date on projects they are working on.

Microsoft doesn’t have a blogging tool yet – but it can’t be long before one appears, tied in with MSN, Messenger and quite possibly FrontPage and MS Project.

Blogging Platforms

Blogs

BT and Microsoft Team Up to Offer Broadband in Scotland

BT and Microsoft are trialling a new service in Scotland that offering software and broadband to small and medium-sized businesses. Connected And Complete is a package consisting of broadband installation, Microsoft Office Small Business Edition, twice yearly health checks, a help desk and tools for making a website.

Jerry Thompson, BT’s head of business broadband, said: “There are well developed IT and financial services sectors in Scotland and we think they will be early adopters.”

If successful, the service will be offered to businesses throughout the UK.

BT are doing quite well out of broadband at the moment – year end results show a 30% jump in turnover for their new services, bringing in UK£3.4 billion (€5 billion) in revenue.

Nice to see something nice being tried out in Scotland for a change, since other trial runs in the past have included nuclear waste, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the poll tax and Malcolm Rifkin.

Microsoft on Connected And Complete

Sony’s LocationFree Wireless Broadband TVs

We got very excited about this when we first wrote about it in January. Sony have introduced two new LCD TVs that allow you to enjoy media wherever you like at home without running wires. You don’t even need mains as they can run for a couple of hours on their internal batteries.

The LF-X1 display has a 12.1” screen with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, whilst its smaller sibling, the LF-X5 has a 7” display with a 800 x 480 resolution. Prices are US$1500 (€1247) and US$1000 (€831) respectively.

The two screens come with a base station which you connect to your video source, and then the station transmits to the screen using any one of the three main WiFi protocols. The TV itself can chose which WiFi variant is most appropriate for the quality of video you wish to watch or amount of interference in your immediate environment.

You don’t even need to be at home – if your content is on a network you can stream it over the internet to the TV using 802.11b, as long as your upstream transfer rate is greater than 300kbits/s.

The TVs are very well catered for with other connections – each features a built-in tuners, ethernet port, two video inputs, USB port and IR port for remote control. For viewing photographs, the LF-X1 has a Compact Flash socket, the LF-X5 has a Memory Stick port.

AkibaLive

Pirated CDs Earning Tourists a Jail Sentence

First it was plane spotting, then it was playing with a GameBoy on the beach – now there’s something else unwary tourists can get thrown into jail for in Greece: buying pirated CDs.

A tourist was arrested last week as he bought two counterfeit CDs from a vendor in Athens, and to give everyone a reminder that such activities are illegal, he earned himself a three month sentence. It’s not recorded what happened to the guy who sold him the CDs, though Greek courts have prosecuted about 1000 illegal sellers in the past.

IFPI spokesman Ion Stamboulis said in a statement: “This is not a symbolic measure. We are determined to prosecute the buyers and we have the support of the authorities.”

Clamping down on the vendors has proven problematic in the past as they have fairly hefty underworld connections, so perhaps the authorities are looking for an easier way to tackle the issue.

The surge in prosecutions is no doubt aimed that trying to fix Greece’s terrible piracy record (the worst in Western Europe) before the start of the 2004 Olympics.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries

Napster Launches in the UK

Napster 2.0 UK is live at last, just beating Apple to first over the line, though Apple might well have the last laugh. Napster finally has deals in place with all five major record labels, plus the Association of Independent Music and high street retailer Dixons.

Dixons will be selling Napster-branded CD-Rs in their stores. Could someone please send a pack of those back through time to the RIAA and take a photograph of their faces? Thank you.

Napster is currently offering 500,000 tracks to customers, but promises this will rise to 700,000 next month.

The big surprise with Napster is the price: a track from Napster UK costs twice the price of the equivalent from the US iTunes Music Store. At a time when most music services are charging US$0.99 (€0.82, UK£0.55) for a track, Napster are charging non-subscribers a staggering UK£1.09 (€1.62) per track – the equivalent of charging US$1.94.

Buying a subscription for UK£9.95 (€14.80) a month allows users to download tracks for UK£0.88, but this is still 62% more than the iTunes cost – without taking the subscription price into account. It looks like OD2’s sale was a good idea after all.

A 7-day free trial of the Napster service is available from the link below.

Napster UK

World’s First Combined Digital TV and Radio Chip

Frontier Silicon, fabless manufacturer of semiconductors for digital TV/radio consumer products have started shipping its Logie integrated circuit. The Logie chip is the world’s first single chip DVB-T/DAB integrated circuit, and will be first used in an as yet unnamed Goodmans set-top box.

Other than the Goodmans product, there aren’t any combined digital TV/radio units out there, and a chip like this will allow manufacturers to produce them easily and cheaply. If power consumption issues can be worked out, portable DVB-H/DAB devices in the near future could be a real possibility.

Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, commented in a statement, “Our Logie device enables set top box manufacturers to produce low cost boxes with considerable consumer appeal, including the reception of 24 digital TV channels and 50 or more digital radio (DAB) channels that are all free. There is no other combination DVB-T/DAB chip currently available in the market that can do this.”

Frontier recently won the PricewaterhouseCoopers Hottest Technology Company of 2004 Award, and produce chips used in products from, amongst others, Grundig, Philips, Roberts and Sharp.

Frontier Silicon

Goodmans Digital

New Office for Macintosh

Things have come a long way since the disaster that was Word for Macintosh 6.0 (hey, Mac users have long memories, what can I say?), and now Microsoft’s new iteration of its Office suite boasts plenty of features and optimisations for OS X .

New features include a Project Centre for keeping track of documents, contacts, notes and emails relating to individual projects and a rather useful Compatibility Report feature for checking if your document is going to appear anything like you intended on a colleagues PC.

Handy features like these are collected together in the new Toolbox, allowing users to access them from inside any Office application.

The version of Internet Explorer is still the somewhat elderly 5.0, but then it’s highly unlikely that MS would ever be able compete with Apple’s own legendary Safari browser.

Office 2004 for Macintosh costs US$399 (€331).

Microsoft Office for Macintosh

Or there’s always OpenOffice for Mac – it’s free

Pioneer Announce Fifth-generation Plasma HDTVs

They’re Japan-only products for the time being, but Pioneer have have announced a range of new PureVision high definition (HD) plasma televisions.

The models are: PDP-435HDL (43”, long speakers), PDP-435HDS (43”, short speakers), PDP-435SX (single body), PDP-505HDL (50”, long speakers) and the PDP-505HDS (50”, short speakers).

Plasma TVs are very popular in Japan, with an estimated market of about 450,000 units in 2004. HD broadcasting is well ahead of other countries, and is expected to grow still further as digital terrestrial broadcasting takes off.

The new TVs are capable of displaying 5.75 billion colours. This means, apart from I should keep my HP48 nearer my desk, that each of the 3.2 million RGB colours has a further 1,792 grayscale shades each. Pioneer call this, with no hint of hyperbole, the Advanced Super CLEAR Drive System C.

The TVs also incorporate the world’s first Direct Colour Filter, eliminating the need for a pane of glass across the front of the screen, resulting in improved contrast and focus. If you’ve ever had to lift a 50” plasma screen, you appreciate this the lack of glass panel also makes them considerably lighter – by about 5kg.

How long will they last? Plasma TVs generally are past their best after five years (bet they didn’t tell you that in the shop), but these screens are rated for 60,000 hours – so if you watch TV for five hours a day 365 days a year, expect them to last for 32 years.

Pioneer’s new displays

BT’s 90% Broadband Coverage

BT made a further 22 exchanges broadband-enabled yesterday, taking coverage in the UK to 90% of the population.

BT Wholesale chief executive Paul Reynolds said: “This is a stunning achievement. Nine out of 10 people are now connected up to a broadband exchange and we’ve announced plans to get us to near universal coverage by next summer – well ahead of earlier predictions.

“Our pioneering approach to broadband rollout has been widely recognised, most recently with the OECD rural broadband report putting Britain ahead of the pack for broadband availability compared to the other G7 nations.

“BT has put the UK at 90 per cent ADSL coverage today with our closest competitor countries in the G7 aiming for this level by the end of 2004. By that stage we’ll be past 95 percent and well on the way to topping 99 per cent by summer 2005.”

You can bet that the last 10% will be the hardest – some of of the remaining units are the oldest, remotest exchanges, not nice easy ones in the middle of cities. However, BT is aiming for 99.6% coverage by summer 2005. This represents an enormous amount of work still to be carried out, however: 2,652 exchanges are broadband-enabled, with 2,366 in the programme for next year.

BT’s Press Release