April 2005

‘Great For Music’ Handsets And ‘Find Music’ Programme Launched By Orange UK
Orange, the UK’s most popular mobile network, has wheeled out the initial line-up for its Great for Music handsets; the Nokia 6680 3G handset, Nokia 3230 and Sony Ericsson K300i handsets.
All the phones utilise the full range of music services available from Orange World, making it easy to download tracks, news and gossip, follow the hit40uk chart and buy videos, True Tones, wallpapers and tickets.
If all that proves too technologically challenging for confused customers, Orange are kindly staffing their stores with “phone trainers” to explain what button does what (we can’t help imagining a store full of lycra-clad sales assistants dancing to bad disco).
Music downloads from Orange World are to be included in the Official UK Download Chart, paving the way for tracks downloaded to Orange mobiles to be included in the Official UK Singles Chart for the first time.
“The Official UK Chart’s decision to include music downloads from Orange World in its Chart demonstrates that the music industry has recognised the rising importance of mobile music downloads within the digital music sphere,” said Mark Ashford, head of music, Orange UK. “The advent of digital music downloads on mobile means that up-to-date phones also act as music players, making digital music accessible for one in three people in the UK.”
A backslap of sponsorship deals will make it possible to book gig tickets through Orange handsets and download exclusive artist material and downloads.
“Enjoying music on your mobile handset is the going to explode in 2005. Therefore it is no surprise that Orange is committed to providing customers with the richest and most rewarding music experience possible. With Find music we are working with the best in both the music and mobile industry to help people buy, receive, listen and even interact with music in much more spontaneous and exciting ways.” enthused Julian Diment, head of brand and commercial partnerships, Orange UK.
Music downloads from Orange World cost £1.50 (US$2.8/€2.20) per track (£3.50/US$6.55/€5.10 for Fireplayer tracks), with users able to browse through the latest releases or search for the artist of their choice on Music Player.
Orange will also be trying to look hip and radical while promoting their corporate brand at the forthcoming Glastonbury and T in the Park events.
Orange UK
Nokia 6680 3G handset
Fireplayer
4 April, 2005
Napster Live, Music TV Series To Broadcast On UK’s Channel 4
Napster UK has teamed up with Channel 4 to broadcast a short series of live TV music shows, creating the first national terrestrial television programme to be run by a digital music service.
Napster UK has announced the deal to broadcast the predictably titled “Napster Live”, which will take the form of six 11 minute programmes featuring “established and emerging acts”.
Each episode will serve up an exclusive performance of two songs by a featured artist, along with an interview, biography and the all-important competition spot.
The programmes are being put together by independent television production company Blaze TV (who also knock out the weekly music show CD:UK).
Included in Channel 4’s ‘T4 Youth and Music’ programming, the first show will be screened at midnight on Saturday April 16 and feature rock band Garbage.
Other acts so far confirmed for Napster Live on Channel 4 include MOBO-winning UK R&B artist Estelle and UK rockers The Subways.
Napster Live already exists on the Napster digital music service as audio-only recordings, but the TV show will showcase a new format produced exclusively for Napster and Channel 4 by Blaze TV. Music from the TV show will be made available online at a later date on the Napster UK service.
“We’re incredibly excited to be teaming up with Napster on what feels like a truly unique and exciting proposition for 4Music,” frothed Neil McCallum, Commissioning Editor, T4, Youth & Music. “The bands booked are exactly the sorts of artists we’ve been supporting and this allows us to capitalise on bringing even more live music to a wider, up-for-it audience.”
“To extend the Napster experience to television is the logical next step in the UK roll out of the biggest brand in digital music,” purred Leanne Sharman, Napster vice-president and UK general manager.
Building up to a crescendo of mutual backslapping, Sharman added: “Channel 4 has a deserved reputation for groundbreaking and forward-looking programming as well as championing live music, so we’re delighted to make our TV debut on their platform. Napster is also extremely fortunate to have a partner like Blaze TV whose production skills, expertise and contact book have proven invaluable in creating this series.”
Not one to miss out on the quote frenzy, Conor McAnally, Blaze TV director of programmes, offered this insight: “In a world where the production and consumption of music are changing so drastically and so rapidly we are delighted to be involved with the market leader in music digital downloading and to have been given the opportunity to create exciting new programming for Channel 4 whose commitment to music, and especially new music, is unparalleled in the UK”.
Although eleven minute pop music programmes are hardly going to change the face of modern TV, Napster’s move reflects the inevitable convergence between online and terrestrial TV, with download charts already hitting the mainstream.
The series will be broadcast every Saturday night on Channel 4 from April 16, 2005 for six weeks.
Napster UK
Channel 4
4 April, 2005
R.E.M. On-Demand Music Channel Launched By HomeChoice
Video Networks, providers of the HomeChoice entertainment and communications service, has announced the addition of a brand new R.E.M. video-on-demand (VoD) channel to its platform.
HomeChoice customers keen to keep on losing their religion will gain exclusive access to the channel – which has been entirely designed and built in-house – from 31st March 2005.
Earlier this year also saw the re-release of nine of R.E.M.’s most successful albums including Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People. The launch of the R.E.M. channel ties in with the band’s UK tour.
The V:MX R.E.M. channel is being trumpeted as the first artist specific video-on-demand package in the world and will sit within HomeChoice’s suite of V:MX music channels, which feature a library of over 3,000 music videos.
The R.E.M. channel will offer a R.E.M. videography (a what?!), featuring the nine re-released R.E.M. albums.
Sofa reclining HomeChoice customers will be able to access music videos – and associated live and documentary footage – by selecting the appropriate album cover using their remote control.
The functionality of the HomeChoice service will let customers create their own R.E.M. play list from the music videos on the channel and optionally purchase downloadable tracks by SMS.
While useful, this isn’t quite as slick as it sounds: if a viewer hears a track they want to buy, they have to click on the onscreen information button which will provide a number to text. A code is then sent back to them which they can enter when they log onto the Internet to download the music track. When we spoke to HomeChoice, they told us they were working on a more integrated way of getting pay-for content to their customers.
Naturally, there’s the usual ring tone guff provided for those who like to display their ‘individuality’ with irritating phone noises, with the channel offering 10 R.E.M. true tones of their most popular tracks, purchasable via SMS for £3 (US$5.60 /€4.40) each.
The R.E.M. channel will also include four competitions throughout the life of the channel, with prizes including an MP3 player pre-loaded with R.E.M. tracks, a pair of VIP tickets to R.E.M.’s concert in Hyde Park in July plus several R.E.M. goody bags.
The deal is what ghastly corporate types would call a “synergetic win win situation”, with Video Networks telling us that “no money has changed hands as both parties have brought certain elements to the channel and will then be sharing the revenue from the downloads and ring tones.” This would make sense, Warners/R.E.M. are providing a lot of content, and HomeChoice/Video Networks are providing a lot of design, programming and, of course, bandwidth. Video Networks have 34 people working in their in-house design studio and within the TV product team.
Roger Lynch, Chairman and Chief Executive, Video Networks Ltd said: “The addition of this on-demand channel is not only a true coup for R.E.M. fans but also ensures Video Networks continues to offer the most innovative music content on TV in the world today.”
The R.E.M. music channel will be automatically available to all shiny, happy customers who currently subscribe to the HomeChoice music package.
The negotiations for the deal with Warner Music have been underway since the beginning of 2005, brokered by a Video Networks BizDev person, who joined them from the music business. The service launches on 31st March 2005 and is available for a total of 16 weeks.
Home Choice
Video Networks
R.E.M. official site
4 April, 2005
Pope’s Death Told Via SMS Text Message
News of the Pope’s death was broadcast to the media from the Vatican using text messages and email enabling the 2,000-year-old Church to meet the increasing demands of real-time news.
Just a quarter of an hour after the Pope was pronounced dead on Saturday at 8:37pm (GMT), officials at the Vatican got out their texting fingers and sent journalists an SMS message alerting them to a pending statement.
With most of the world’s media hungry for news, an email communiqué was beamed to a sea of state-of-the-art handheld computers a minute later, purchased by journalists at the suggestion of the Vatican.
The email contained a simple, short Word document saying: “The Holy father died this evening at 21:37 in his private apartment.”
The technology ensured that TV viewers across the globe learned of the Pope’s death before the faithful thousands gathered in prayer below the Pope’s window in St. Peter’s Square.
Minutes later, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri informed the crowds, who greeted the news with a long round of applause – an Italian tradition – with the spectacle being captured on television in real time.
The Vatican’s embracing of the mass media is a relatively new phenomenon – as recently as the 1960s news of Pope John XXIII’s inoperable stomach cancer was kept secret until just a few days before his death in June 1963.
Pope John Paul proved to be far more open to the media, writing in February that the Church should not be shy of using the media, including the Internet, to spread its message, saying the “mass media can and must promote justice and solidarity”.
With real time news networks and Internet bulletins documenting every minute of the Pope’s demise, he certainly got his wish.
Vatican
4 April, 2005
2GB Gmail Inbox From Google
A year after its launch, Google has doubled the capacity of its Gmail service and added new features.
Those lucky souls invited to have an account now get a whopping great 2GB of storage, with the ability to send up to 10MB of attachments in a single message with free POP access – with Google promising further increases in the pipeline.
“Since we introduced Gmail, people have had a lot of places to store e-mail, but some of our heavier users have been approaching their limits, and have been wondering what is going to happen,” says Georges Harik, Gmail’s product management director. “So, starting today, we are going to give people more and more space continuously and indefinitely.”
“Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GB by giving more space as we are able to do so. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs.”
The move comes hot on the heels of last week’s decision by Yahoo to increase the size of its free account to 1GB. Both Yahoo and Hotmail can offer up to 2GB of storage as well, but users must fork out for the privilege.
The company has announced no immediate plans to increase Gmail’s 10MB limit on attachment sizes, and there’s no prospect of subscribers being able to turn their in-box storage into a full-featured virtual external hard disk.
Google is, however, aware that some crafty Gmail subscribers are using the service for this purpose, mailing files to themselves as a way of storing them online.
Google seems cool about it too, with Harik saying, “We want our users to understand that we have a plan and that we are anticipating their needs, and that nothing strange is going to happen with Gmail down the line.”
Google is also testing phishing protection on the accounts, serving up a warning when it detects a dodgy looking email.
Gmail’s arrival on the scene a year ago sent up a rocket up the backsides of the Web mail market, whose main players had been providing minimal inbox storage for their free services.
At the time, Yahoo only offered a paltry 4MB of in-box with Microsoft providing even less at 2MB.
Since then, most major Web mail providers have reacted to Gmail’s generous inbox quotas with Microsoft and Yahoo both now offering 250MB for their free services. Yahoo plans to begin offering 1GB starting in late April.
Curiously, Gmail is still technically in a beta phase, and is not generally available – the only way users can obtain a Gmail account is by invitation from an existing user (each current user has 50 invitations to give).
Google also randomly offers Gmail accounts via its main Google.com Web page.
Google have yet to clarify whether Gmail accounts would ever be totally open, with Harik cryptically commenting, “We keep looking for ways to make it more broadly available to people who want to use it”.
While Gmail is totally free to use, it’s financed by text ads that are served up to users with each message they open. The fact that the ads are based on each message’s text caused an outcry, but Google insist that text scanning is automated and without nosey human intervention.
Google Gmail
Gmail new features list
1 April, 2005
EuroSport, RTL Nieuws Launch TV on Vodafone Netherlands UMTS
Vodafone Netherlands have added two further ‘channels’ to their current 20 plus channel UMTS (3G) service.
The first provides live access to the Eurosport channel where subscribers can listen to Dutch commentary. The version running on the Vodafone UMTS handsets is exactly the same as what is shown on TV, with a slight delay to allow for the encoding of the video.
Vodafone are a significant sponsor of sport around the world, covering F1 motor racing, a number of football teams, cricket, rally championships, Sking, even hurling and football in Ireland.
The second additional service is RTL Nieuws, RTL’s news channel. Rather than take a live stream, the news is packaged in to a 20 minute show, comprised of items of between 30-seconds and 2 minutes. The on-demand service is refreshed six times a day.
This joins the news service NOS-journaal, the public service news channel that has been running on Vodafone Live! for some time.
To date, Vodafone has EuroSport and RTL Nieuws exclusively and their addition brings the total number of TV channels available to 23, joining CNN, Playboy Channel, 2GOTV and MTV.
The charging for TV service over UMTS is worth spending a short while looking at. For data transfer 3G/UMTS services have been charged on a price per kilobit transferred basis.
Seeing the confusion this would cause with the consumer watching TV (how would they have the faintest idea how much they had spent watching a TV show), Vodafone took the decision to charge TV viewing by the minute.
In Holland, Vodafone customers pay 2.5 Eurocents for each minute they watch, so a 10 minutes session costs 25 Eurocents (US$0.32/£0.17). Time for another acronym? What You Watch Is What You Pay, WYWIWYP? No, we can’t see it catching on either.
As yet there are no bundles available, but we would imaging this is just a matter of time and competition. As yet, there’s no competition for this service. Vodafone were the first provider in Holland to launch UMTS with their Connect Card in Feb 2004 and followed this up with the first launch of the consumer service.
TV over UMTS works on all eight of the 3G handsets available on Vodafone Netherlands.
Vodafone Netherlands
NOS-Journaal
1 April, 2005
Viacom Outdoor, Tube Trial For Digital Advertising Screens
The London Underground is to show digital advertising on its escalators for the first time, as part of a trial being handled by Viacom Outdoor.
Viacom, the current holder of London Underground’s outdoor advertising contract, will be trialing the display screens, (snappily entitled Digital Escalator Panels (D-EPs), on the side of the busiest escalators on the network at Tottenham Court Road station.
We spoke to the staff at London Underground and understand that tests will be carried out over the next five days. The screens will intially be mounted at the top of the escalator, but they are very concerned that the screen could initially attract too much attention from the public, causing a blockage at this very busy station.
The 66 video panels will blast out moving images and text, although LU has stated that they will not display TV or film advertising on safety grounds “for fear of distracting travellers”. Seeing as some adverts are better than TV shows, we’re not quite sure how they work that one out.
The screens also have the ability to link up, making the transfer of images from screen to screen possible. What is displayed and when will be controlled centrally at Viacom’s North London office.
Advertisers will be offered the option of time-specific advertising (such as theatres using evening slots, or fast-food at lunchtimes) although there is no prospect of retina scanning being used to provide personally targeted advertising, a la Minority Report.
Viacom is flogging five- and 10-second slots and has already scooped up seven clients for the service.
The trial is due to start within months, and if successful will be rolled out at other locations across the network.
Jon Lewen, Viacom Outdoor’s digital account director, was on hand to provide the required buzzword-peppered statement: “We are committed to exploring new and innovative ways to capture and captivate London Underground users. DE-Ps will both enhance the consumer’s experience of advertising on the Tube and offer revolutionary new creative opportunities for our clients to connect with this audience in a more creative and tactical fashion.”
With London Underground’s recent statement about introducing mobile phone coverage at tube stations, we wonder how long it will be before some bright spark suggests bombarding long-suffering tube passengers (sorry, ‘customers’) with interactive videoscreen/Bluetooth advertising.
Viacom
London Underground
1 April, 2005
Space Invaders Revolution Coming To Nintendo DS
Everyone’s heard of Space Invaders haven’t they? Those who haven’t, will surely have been sitting in a very dark room with their fingers in their ears, singing “La, la, la, la” very loudly to themselves since 1978.
It’s a game with fantastical legends surrounding it, like the one about the Bank of Japan having to increase the circulation of 100-yen coins to cope with them sitting in Invader machines.
Since the original release, it’s been remade a quite a few times with varying success. Until now, the most recent release was the 25th Anniversary edition in 2003, where they went hell-for-leather releasing all sorts of branded goods as diverse as watches, bags, shoes and even cushions.
Not wanting to let a good thing go by, Nintendo has announced the latest version of Invaders – Space Invaders Revolution for the Nintendo DS.
The games original creator, Mr Tomohiro Nishikado, oversaw the development of the DS version at his development company, Dreams – how times have changed, he was originally responsible for creating the whole of the game.
It’s not just a copy of the original, Nishikado describes it accordingly, “With Space Invaders Revolution, I wanted the team to take the game back to its roots – whilst at the same time adding features which would appeal to modern gamers.”
The new version sounds like it has some of those interesting features, such as rules that change as you pass between levels.
Of course, for fans of the original, there’s an exact duplicate, rewritten for the DS, not a version running the original code in an emulator as we assumed.
We’re pleased to report that some of the scoring strategies from the first version, work in Classic mode. The Nagoya-uchi (the “Nagoya attack”), or “death row” technique works perfectly (this is when the invaders have reached the very last row, just before the ground, the player’s base is immune to bullets from the bottom row of invaders). We can’t report the same for the 22 shots = 300 points from the UFO technique, as each attempt to date has lead to a loss of counting.
In normal play, the DS version doesn’t make a great use of the dual screens. You can use the lower, touch screen as a controller, tapping the on-screen buttons, in some of the games and sometimes graphics do pass between the two.
New Era Mode has plenty of challenges in it, as you fight your way through 60 levels, bringing in puzzle elements to the tried and tested formula.
It’s published by Rising Star Games with a license from Taito (the original developers) and will be available in the shops during Q2 this year.
Nintendo DS
Taito
Space Invaders, 25th Anniversary edition
1 April, 2005