Month: September 2004

Yahoo’s New Homepage

Yahoo’s homepage has become rather busy of late – in fact the number of sections, links and buttons to click has made it almost as impenetrable as Jacob Neilsen’s own Useit page. The search engine trend, even since Google appeared, has been to make user interfaces simpler – after all, what chance do you have of finding something on the internet if you can’t even find something on the search engine’s home page?

MSN Search has recently had a make over, Google still gets praise for the simplicity of their default home page, so it was time for Yahoo to do something. Visitors to Yahoo get swamped in a choice links and paths – the old-style Yahoo home page currently harbours more than 210 links, making locating tools and information frustrating for the novice user.

Enter the new, simplified Yahoo home page. Whilst not quite the radical culling of links that was needed, the page is much more organised. Links and other things to click are kept at a modest 150 or so (still 100 too many in my opinion), but categorisation is much better.

The new page has been tightened up, with better use of space and font sizes, also separate sections are finally delineated by lines and coloured boxes. The new design makes prominent use of MyYahoo – a personalisation function designed to let visitors further tailor the home page to their needs with localised weather and even, for those of a gullible nature, horoscopes.

Surprise – there’s a music button! Though this just takes the user through to launch.yahoo.com, offering videos and music news. No music store as yet, though you can buy CDs and ringtones. Since Yahoo just forked out US$160 million (€130 million) for MusicMatch, expect this to change soon.

Try the new Yahoo

AT&T Release Ogo

AT&T have finally released their Ogo handset. The US$130 (€106) device is designed to do one thing well – messaging. The Ogo allows subscribers to send emails, instant messages and text messages, and that’s about it – but there’s plenty of demand in the market for a simple messaging product that performs well. Are we seeing the opposite of convergence?

The Ogo will attract comparisons with its nearest competitor, the Blackberry, though with its brightly coloured display screens and clamshell design it is clearly aimed at a much younger, less business-based market. The 115mm x 75 mm x 25 mm unit opens up to present a 4000-colour screen and keyboard, and provides 2.5 hours of usage time with 120 hours standby. 2.5 hours doesn’t seem like a lot to us, and we’re sure many avid text and email users will have to charge their Ogo at the end of every day.

For a monthly subscription starting at US$17.99 (€14.62), users get unlimited ingoing and outgoing email and instant messages one of Yahoo, MSN or AOL, extra accounts cost an additional US$3 (€2.43) a month.

Andre Dahan, president of AT&T Wireless Mobile Multimedia Services, said in a statement: “With Ogo, we are creating an entirely new category and the next ‘must have’ device in the consumer electronics space. Unlike many of today’s disappointing multi-purpose wireless devices, we created Ogo to do one thing – mobile messaging – extraordinarily well. Ogo doesn’t pretend to be ‘all things to all people,’ and is not bogged down by hardly-used features or an out-of-reach price tag. Instead, Ogo offers the most desirable mobile applications, on a smartly-designed device that most people can afford.”

Ogo

Rajar Propose Move to Electronic Measurement

Rajar, Joint Radio Audience Research Ltd, has published its roadmap for updating the way that it measures radio audiences in the UK.

The schedule includes a tendering process to begin in April 2005, with the new contract to be awarded in September 2005, or later. After that, new versions of the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) and the GfK Radiocontrol systems will be vaildated and tested, alongside a new meter from Eurisko.

Sally de la Bedoyere, managing director of RAJAR, said in a statement: “The RAJAR roadmap to enhanced radio audience measurement is ambitious, but certainly achievable. It is the final stage of a journey RAJAR began in 2001 and it leads to a seismic change in radio audience measurement, namely the possible move to electronic measurement. We are optimistic that, by 2007, we will be heralding the introduction of an audio-meter based methodology, which measures analogue, digital, digital TV and Internet listening and we shall continue to work vigorously in the pursuit of this goal.”

Kelvin Mackenzie has already announced that the tests are “twaddle”, and indeed his Wireless Group is suing Rajar, as they are claiming lost revenue due to the lack of an electronic measurement system.

Rajar

Pentium Reaches 6GHz

It’s not stable by any means, but a group of Finnish overclockers have got a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 up to 6009.73Ghz. The chip needs liquid nitrogen to keep it running, so don’t try this at home – it’s not available as a home system, and doesn’t even fit in a case. Though non-toxic and non-flammable, liquid nitrogen does present a frost-burn and asphyxiation hazard to geeks who have to calculate PI just that bit faster.

For safety, he overclocked system has low memory and a cheap graphics card, so has a couple of key performance bottlenecks (after all, you wouldn’t want to risk destroying a nice new Radeon X800 if you fried your system board), but is an interesting proof of concept. In this instance, only program that run entirely on the processor and do not make memory, disk and graphics calls with show the most benefits from this level of overclocking.

Overclocking to 6GHz and showing off

Virgin Digital launches Yet Another Music Store (YAMS)

As another week starts, Yet Another Music Store (YAMS) gets launched. Virgin Digital today launch their music service in the US.

To raise their head above the other online music stores, Virgin have lined up a number of features that they hope will be differentiators. Their thinking – one million music tracks, an “Ask the Expert” services and “3D browsing”, but more on those later.

They are looking to play on their strengths, taking the approach that they are a music company aiming to sell music, not a technology company trying to sell music and by listening to their customer’s views of online services, they are creating the idea tool for music fans.

Individual tracks are priced at the now-to-be-expected 99c and the subscription service, priced $2 lower than rival service from Napster or Real at $7.99, will offer unlimited streamed access to over 100,000 albums, 60+ radio stations and protected downloads.

The differentiators – “Ask the Expert”, where customers will be able to pose questions about music and technology matters and get an answer without the usual sarcastic grimace from the floppy-haired assistant behind the shop counter. The futuristically named 3D browsing will provide suggestions of other tracks to tempt the music-hungry fan to part with more cash.

MusicNet will be providing the backend and using Windows Media to protect the downloads, while enabling burning to CD and download to over 50 portable music players.

The service will be promoted heavily in their high street stores and in their traditional manner, we imagine that Virgin will be marketing the hell out of this, with their adverts aimed at the ‘yout’, quite possibly featuring a young lad snogging a granny.

Virgin Digital

Chrysalis Launch Music2Mobile

Chrysalis Mobile have launched a new range of licensed products for mobile phones under the name Music2Mobile. The product range will include ringtones, images and, eventually, downloads of full tracks. The label also intend to licence content to other major providers in the UK and abroad.

Music2Mobile has already been picked up by Carphone Warehouse, and they will soon be offering products through their UK stores. That’s right – although the product is available download from internet and WAP sites, the range is principally intended to comprise of branded, physical products. They’ll be popping up in point-of-sale displays in a shop near you soon.

Content is selected on a weekly basis by a team at Chrysalis Mobile to keep up to date with consumer tastes, and will initially feature these three offerings (information supplied by Chrysalis Mobile):

Playlist – full physical catalogue of tunes across seven genres. Content can be requested directly by texting to short-codes, accessing via a music2mobileTM-powered WAP portal or over-the-counter instore using pin-code activation.

Genre Cards – seven individual cards updated monthly, containing ten leading songs within a specific music category; these cards are paid for over-the-counter and the consumer can then select multiple content items from the card list.

Monthly Theme Cards – individual cards promoting official content (including real tones and wallpapers) from a specific artist and negotiated directly with labels; the consumer purchases the card over-the-counter and selects their favourite content for download.

Monthly Tone Chart – a Top 20, instore ring tone chart updated fortnightly. Content can be requested directly by texting to short-codes, accessing via a music2mobileTM -powered WAP portal.

Chrysalis Mobile are not offering full song downloads immediately, preferring instead to wait until network bandwidth and phone technology are capable of delivering the user-experience the company wants.

But why concentrate on retail? Nick Gregg, Strategy Director of Chrysalis Mobile, said “Retail is a logical extension for Chrysalis Mobile given our focus on leading brands that have significant audience reach. Under the music2mobileTM brand we have coupled the development of high quality content optimised specifically for mobile phones with our experience working directly with record labels to provide a real differentiated service for major retail players.”

Chrysalis Mobile

Adobe Propose Digital Negative Standard Format for Cameras

Adobe have proposed a public, archival format for raw digital camera data to deal with the archival problems of detail loss and accessibility. For most camera users, images are stored as JPEGs, which is a lossy format even with the gentlest of compression. Some cameras make use of a raw format, storing the image exactly as it is captured without compression – but of course not all manufacturers use the same format and the specifications for many of them are not publicly available. This lack of an open standard also creates the risk that software to read a particular camera’s raw image data may not be available in the future, making archiving problematic.

To combat these concerns, Adobe are suggesting the adoption of DNG, or Digital Negative Format and have made its specifications freely available. DNG is based on the TIFF-EP format, and supports metadata so that images can be described and differentiated.

To encourage adoption, they have released a free converter which will take the raw image format from a variety of cameras and convert them to DNG. Adobe hope that a single processing solution will improve workflow for photographers if they have to use raw files from multiple cameras and manufacturers.

Adobe on DNG

Report: Vodafone Group Analyst & Investor Day

The Vodafone Group is today hosting an analyst and investors day at their new offices in Newbury. Arun Sarin, Chief Executive of the Vodafone Group, is fronting the day and opened the session by explaining that Vodafone are living their message. The new office building is a wireless office that enabled total flexibility of working and, except for a small number of emergency fixed phone lines, every other phone line is a mobile phone.

Speaking about 3G, he reconfirmed that Vodafone is committed to releasing it to the public by Christmas this year. The details of how, what and when wouldn’t be discussed today, but would be released in November (which we have already covered). The only clues he gave were that it would be a “sensibly rollout over time” and “not a big bang”.

While commenting on the selection of ten 3G handsets that they announced last week, Arun reiterated that it was “very important to control the terminal” (handset) and underlined this importance of this, as in a poll, 37% of UK mobile consumers have no brand preference. They are working with a larger number of handset providers. With some of these, Vodafone are actually specifying features and the design of the handset. We were them assured that they will continue “pressing down harder on suppliers” to ensure better margins.

Bill Morrow, CEO Vodafone UK, took to the stage next and in a non-stop flow of facts  that he didn’t appear to take a single breath for, we learnt among other things that 75% of UK customer pay for Vodafone Live!, the companies content play, with them spending an additional £4.70/month on the service above their basic subscriptions.

Commenting on their web-based content distribution, we learnt that three weeks ago, they launched a ringtone bundle on their site, giving 3 tones a month for £5 per month. With no marketing, the site has already attracted 30,000 subscriptions.

Vodafone were keen to get over that they are “getting ready to change gear” and this brought together under One Vodafone, or VodafOne. They claimed that they would be gaining a £2.5Bn efficiencies by uniting their service platform and IT platforms across all of their subsidiary companies worldwide for all providers. They are reducing their number of data centre from 33 to 27 and are moving to an all IP backbone.

During the Q&A, we felt the most interesting questions was concerning their attitude to UK spectrum trading, which Ofcom wants to start by 2007. Sadly, the answers that came back were completely unenlightening, giving the excuse that it was “too early to tell”, but that they had a very good relationship with the government bodies.

Vodafone

TiVo hits 2m subscribers

TiVo has announced to Reuters that it has doubled its number of subscribers in the past year to 2 million. The majority of their income comes from subscriptions, now they sell significantly less PVR’s (Personal Video Recorders) direct to the public as they did originally.

Many people have questioning TiVo’s long term viability with their apparent business model, especially as they are expected to lose their current exclusive deal to supply DirecTV with PVR’s.

We understand that they have set aside $50m to market hard to the in the build up to christmas, when they hope to gain another million subscribers – aiming for 3 million subscribers by January 2005.

TiVo

Schwarzenegger signs P2P Bill for California

In what some view as payback time to the industry, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Californian legislation on Tuesday forewarning those engaged in online piracy. The bill, which is the latest attempt by film and music trade associations to combat the use of elusive file-sharing software, requires anyone disseminating movies or music on the Internet to disclose their e-mail address.

The opposing camps could not be more different.  The bill’s sponsor – surprise, surprise – the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the signing, its president Dan Glickman saying that Schwarzenegger had “a unique understanding of the powerful impact of piracy. ” Does this mean he appreciates that if lots of people with very questionable taste in cinema had not pirated copies of Schwarzenegger movies, he would be even richer than he already is? He also remains a member of the (not exactly indigent) Screen Actors Guild, which supported the bill.

On the opposing side you have the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation who say that ‘suing fans doesn’t pay artists’, and the American Civil Liberties Union.  Both the EFF and the ACLU say the measure infringes on the privacy rights of computer users and could turn casual file-sharers into criminals.

This Internet piracy bill will work like a sniffer dog tracking down people who download copyrighted material. Henceforth in California, file sharers who trade songs or films on the Internet without providing a valid e- mail address will be guilty of a misdemeanour.

Schwarzenegger already signed an executive order last week prohibiting state employees from using software designed for file sharing.  He did not comment on the signing, but if he did it might go something like, Play da movia ya, but give me you’re email address first.

Legislation

Electronic Frontier Foundation