Month: October 2004

Google Launches Google Print

Researching things on the web is an essential part of everyday business – but too often books and other printed sources get left behind.

Google’s aim is possibly one of the the most daring and challenging I’ve seen announced by any company: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To bring them another step forward, Larry Sage and Sergey Brin announced Google Print, at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Designed to help people discover books , Google Print allows users to search across the full text of entire books. Sadly, as with Amazon’s own book search facility, users cannot read or download the entire book, but there are links to buy a copy. Printing and image copying is blocked on book pages returned from searches. So you don’t read an entire book for free by doing multiple searches on the same title, Google keeps a watch on the number of pages you’ve viewed from a particular book – though this is not associated with user information, so no one can tell what books you’re looking at online.

Google is encouraging publishers to send copies of their books to Google for scanning and indexing, free of charge – the company hopes that it will make revenue from advertising on the search pages, and from the links to online book sellers. Currently, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic and Penguin are amongst the first publishers to submit titles for inclusion in Google’s new venture.

Handy if you’re looking for something that might be contained in a book that’s in print, but what about the many thousands of books that are out of print? There’s no incentive for publishers to put books they don’t intend to reprint online, as there’s no physical book to sell through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Making out of print titles available electronically for a fee really would be a step towards making the world’s information universally accessible as they account for millions of pages of text that is currently hidden from any search engine.

Try Google Print

StreamCast Announce Morpheus 4.5

StreamCast Networks chose the Web 2.0 conference to announce a major update to their Morpheus peer-to-peer client. Employing a new hash table technology from NEOnet (you know, I’m getting really bored with all these five-year-old Matrix references), Morpheus 4.5 claims more efficient searching and downloads across the major P2P networks.

If you listen really carefully, you can almost hear the RIAA’s lawyers phoning in yet another order for more champaign and Porches.

“This is not just another updated application from a technology developer. Morpheus 4.5 is a genuine leap forward in advancing peer-to-peer file-sharing and searching, thanks to the horizonless search capabilities of the NEOnet technology,” StreamCast Networks CEO Michael Weiss said in a statement. “For the first time ever, decentralized P2P technology delivers central server reliability in a completely decentralized architecture to provide a quality of service unparalleled by existing applications.”

So, what’s a “horizonless” search? It means that the new client will search across all P2P networks at once, all seven million simultaneous users, rather than just clusters of computers – reducing the number of hops that a peer-to-peer client takes before it locates a specific file.

Ben Wilken, Architect of the underlying technology to NEOnet, explains the benefit: “Morpheus with NEOnet allows users to find that file within three hops or less, significantly reducing the network congestion caused by peer-to-peer usage by up to 600 percent.”

Since Morpheus does not keep a central database of all files available, it doesn’t break any laws – indeed StreamCast claim it is the only P2P file sharing software ruled legal by US Federal courts. However, if users upload and then share content they don’t hold the copyright to, then they will have committed a crime.

Other enhancements to Morpheus include integration with users’ antivirus software, anti-spoofing technology (useful for detecting Overpeer’s handy work), parental controls and an integrated media player.

Morpheus

RealArcade Celebrates 150 Million Downloads

RealNetworks are celebrating the 150 millionth game download through their RealArcade service. Founded in 2001, RealArcade now serves about 1.8 million downloads every week, from a catalogue of over 250 titles. With RealNetworks claiming 45 million downloads of the Arcvade client itself, that means that the average user has downloaded just over three games each.

RealArcade’s games are aimed at casual, pick up and play gaming – you won’t find any Final Fantasy VIIs there as the company wants to cater to customers who just fancy a quick blast of something. Popular titles on RealArcade include Jewel Quest, Shape Shifter, and the favourite in August, Feeding Frenzy. I might download Insaniquarium Deluxe just for the title alone.

“Millions of everyday people are experiencing games for grownups because they find casual games to be simple, accessible, friendly entertainment for the whole family to play,” said Andrew Wright, vice president of games for RealNetworks Inc in a statement: “We’ve been able to capture a lot of that growth at RealArcade by offering a product that consumers consistently rank as one of the best on the Web.”

An internal survey from Real indicates that two thirds of Arcade’s customers are women, and two-thirds of those have children. Almost half of RealArcade’s users say they visit every day, showing that the site is definitely “sticky”.

RealNetworks quite research from IDC: “Against common expectations, this market isn’t comprised of the ‘typical’ gamer, but rather a diverse spectrum of players who would never consider themselves to be gamers. As a result, this market has grown explosively by successfully tapping into new markets,” said Schelley Olhava, of IDC. “Double digit growth rates in the paid downloadable games space alone will result in U.S. revenues of $760 million (€619 million) by 2007.”

The RealArcade platform is DirectX-based, making development of new games, and porting existing titles simpler, but limits the platform to Windows PCs only.

Real Arcade

Netflix’s Subscriber Growth

Netflix have released their latest subscriber numbers, and whilst the company’s user base has certainly grown, the future is certainly in online movie delivery.

Netflix had 2.23 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2004 – up 73% from 1.29 million on its books at the end of Q3 2003. Only 4% of its current subscriber base are on free trials, and those 96% of paying subs brought in a projected US$21 million in Q3 2004.

Netflix’s current business model is to rent up to three DVDs at a time to customers via the postal service. With the growth of home broadband, sending films out in the mail evidently has a limited lifespan, and so the company recently partnered with TiVo in a venture to designed to switch the delivery mechanism to online – finally putting the “Net” in “Netflix”.

However, the company believes that their 25,000 title DVD library still has some legs on it – CFO Barry McCarthy commented in a statement: “Three years ago we shortened the estimated useful life for our DVD rental library from three years to one year. For a young company with limited operating experience, that accounting estimate was management’s best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content at that time. However, with several years of operating history behind us and based on analysis of this historical data, management’s current best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content is three years.”

SG Cowen and Co. report that things won’t be so simple for Netflix, and that they will face stiff competition from Blockbuster when they go online – Blockbuster’s brand and market share will impact Netflix’s subscriber base, both in its DVD by post and online rental business, over the next few quarters.

Netflix

Yahoo’s Personalised Search

Yahoo have been fine-tuning their portal and search offering of late, as part of an effort to fend off new rivals and reduce the gap with Google. Their new wheeze is personalised searching – allowing users to save results that they find most useful, attach notes to saved searches and share results with other users via email. Yahoo promise not to harvest submitted email addresses for marketing purposes.

Saving search results is quite handy, but then if I’m impressed by a page I generally bookmark it anyway, making the save feature less useful. Being able to attach notes to results makes the feature more relevant, but then again being able to export the notes and results to a word processor would make it even better.

Saved pages go to a MyWeb section in Yahoo, with details on how pages were found in the first place. Users can categorise results to make navigation easier, but as it stands this is just like a slightly more useful version of bookmarking pages. Pages and results that you don’t want can be blocked from future searches, making whittling down answers much easier.

Links and notes can be shared from MyWeb, though I feel that Yahoo have missed a trick – I would like to see what searches and pages other Yahoo users have stored, and would like to share my information with them – almost like Apple’s iMix feature in their music store. As it stands, I can only email links to people I know and can’t publish my search for other people to use. How much time would you save if you could consult someone else’s tailored search, complete with notes?

Yahoo’s MySearch

BT Bars Scam Diallers… For Now

BT has responded to the growing problem of rogue telephone diallers by blocking 1,000 premium rate numbers used by the downloaded applets.

Diallers are generally installed without a computer users knowledge, often through a website or as part of an application or virus. The dialler then replaces the users’ ISP details and instead access the internet using an expensive premium rate number. BT admit that they have dealt with 45,000 complaints from subscribers who have fallen victim to this scam, with another 9,000 cases pending.

With the offending numbers blocked, diallers will not be able to get through – for the time being. This is only a temporary fix – new diallers are released almost daily and I’m sure it might take somewhere in the region of about a week for someone to come up with a dialler that can check a regularly updated table of numbers that haven’t been blocked yet. Putting BT and its subscribers back where they started.

Realistically, the only way round this is for concerned subscribers to block access to all premium-rate numbers – which can be inconvenient. BT report that some 1.5 million customers currently use this approach, and the company provides premium-rate number blocking as a free service.

Gavin Patterson, BT’s group managing director for consumer and venture business said in a statement: “We have taken the decision to block numbers suspected of being associated with diallers as soon as we are alerted to a problem. We have offered free premium rate barring to all customers, and a removable bar for premium rate and international calls for UK£1.75 (€2.54)a month. We have made it clear that we are not the ones profiteering from people’s misfortune. In fact, we will continue to forego our share of the call revenue generated by these disputed calls.

“We will be emailing all of our dial-up customers again to give them advice on how to avoid falling victim to a dialler, because customers need to take action as well to protect themselves, as we believe many cases aren’t fraud but are due to a lack of awareness from customers. In fact, we are seeing that many cases are cleared up when we explain where these charges have come from, which underlines our view that there needs to be greater awareness of how these services operate.”

BT comment on diallers

Sony’s Vaio Type X Media Centre

Sony have launched their latest convergent device onto the Japanese market – a digital media centre for the home with huge storage and potential. The Vaio Type X is essentially a PC with four 250Gb hard drives and seven television tuners in it, though “only” 500Gb is available for PVR functions. This means that lucky Japanese owners can record everything that’s broadcast on the country’s seven network stations all week, and then just delete the shows they’re not interested in. This brings timeshifting television into an entirely different phase with consumers selecting what they don’t want to watch, rather than what they do want.

Recorded programmes are presented in a thumbnail view, so that users can visually select what they want to watch – Sony call this the Time Machine View, and content can be sorted in a number for ways, chronologically or by genre for example.

The Vaio Type X has two tuner cards with three analogue tuners each – plus an integrated tuner on the main board itself. A digital tuner is an optional extra.

The other 500Gb is for the PC part of the Vaio X, based around a 3.6Ghz P4 with 1 gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon X600XT video card.

Sadly, Sony have no plans to market the Vaio X outside Japan, so we will have to wait to see what they have planned for the international market.

The Vaio Type X

BPI to Sue UK Filesharers

The British Phonographic Industry is about to begin action against illegal filesharers in the UK. The BPI has observed that similar programmes, notably the RIAA’s own action in the US, have worked in other countries and intends to crack down on Britain’s music pirates as early as this month. The rapid rise in broadband adoption in the UK has also spurred them into action before the problem gets out of control.

The BPI will be following a 15/75 rule in which individuals they sue – they believe that 75% of all infringing files on the internet are being shared by just 15% of the file sharing population.

A BPI spokesman, told NME.com: “There are a small percentage of hardcore internet users who are uploading material regardless of its illegality. It would appear that litigation is the only way to deter them. It’s becoming pretty obvious that litigation needs to be there as a deterrent.”

We have a call in with the BPI and will bring you more information from them as soon as we have it.

The BPI

NME

FCC Begins Digital Television Push

The USA’s Federal Bureau of Communications has started their big consumer campaign to switch the country over to digital television by December 2006, or January 2009 depending on who you ask. Starting with an interview with chairman Michael Powell at half time during Monday Night Football, the campaign is based around a website designed to help consumers learn about digital television and assist them in their decisions when moving from analogue.

I’m trying to imagine Tessa Jowell appearing at half time during ITV News Football Extra and it’s not really working for me.

Powell said during a press conference to mark the campaign: “Although for the vast majority of American households, digital television may be uncharted territory, we will not let them go it alone. If you have questions about digital television, the FCC is ready to serve as a primary resource for quick answers. Then we hope they will get DTV — get the set, get the connection, get the content.”

The FCC certainly have a huge task in front of them if they are to be stuck with the initial 2006 date: there are only 11 million digital TV sets in the US – that’s just 10% of households, with only two years to go. The deadline may well be put back to January 2009, a date that Powell intends have the commission vote on later this year.

The FCC’s DTV site

GameTrak: Dark Wind Bundle Due for Release

Beat-em-ups have always been a bit of an odd genre for me: the highly kinetic action on the screen – punching, kicking, disembowelment – has always been strangely at odds with the frantic button mashing dictated by the controls. Well, those first two techniques anyway.

Now being beaten by your opponent simply because he saw a button sequence on the internet that you didn’t know about, or thrashed by your girlfriend because she can press the triangle button faster than you can is a thing of the past – now you can throw real punches at your on-screen opponents.

GameTrak have developed a new PS2 beat-em-up, Dark Wind, that will be bundled with their eponymous controller. The game makes full use of the GameTrak hardware to allow players to punch and block with great accuracy.

The GameTrak controller itself consists of two sensors which can be attached to limbs or a prop (like that Samurai sword you’ve always wanted) and can measure with an accuracy of up to 1mm in a 3m cube. The controller can be used with many different genres of games – GameTrak themselves suggest golfing and lightgun games. I just can’t wait to see if it’s compatible with Freak Out. A USB peripheral, the controller may end up being used on XBox and PC games, as well as the PS2. The Dark Wind bundle will cost UK£69.99 or €99.

The controller won the Most Innovative Product award at the Leipzig Games Convention and has certainly stirred a lot of interest in a market that is starting to take notice of different types of games controllers, particularly in the wake of the success Sony has enjoyed with EyeToy.

Exotic controllers have become popular in arcades of late – indeed, when consoles can reproduce arcade cabinets exactly, cabinets are turning to controllers to make them stand out. Modern arcade cabinets now have swords, revolving seats, footballs and denim-clad buttocks as controllers to give an experience that console games don’t provide. Since the first light gun came in to the home, consoles are always quick to adopt what’s going on in the arcade – and the GameTrak will be able to emulate many current controller and game styles. Though I don’t expect to be wandering home with that buttock thing under my arm any time soon.

But I will soon have some bongos, and that’s even better.

GameTrak