May 2005

Yahoo Video Search Leaves Beta, Adds Content
Yahoo has pulled a fast one on its rivals by unexpectedly taking it’s five month long ‘Beta’ video search service to a full release, and adding some new media partners to provide searchable material.
The service enables Web users to find and view a wide variety of video content including news footage, movie trailers, TV clips and music videos.
The announcement comes just days after Google had proudly paraded new partners for its beta video search service, which lets users search closed captioning content and view still shots of video clips.
Google has also been seeking original material by inviting users to submit their own video to the service.
Finding video content on Yahoo’s new search facility is easy enough: type in the relevant keywords and you’ll be taken to a results page showing thumbnails of the video files. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the hosting page with an option to directly view the video.
Sources for Yahoo’s new search feature have been expanded to include CBS News, Reuters, MTV, VH1.com, IFILM.com, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, as well as an assortment of independent producers and content pulled by spidering the Web for video content.
In the interests of research, we rummaged around for naughty porn, but couldn’t find anything too racy – until we spotted the ‘turn safe search off’ option. Clicking on this released a veritable cascade of filth that would send Mary Whitehouse’s graveyard residence spinning in turbo mode.
This latest development adds more fuel to the almighty bun fight currently being battled out between Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves and less well-known names like Blinkx, as companies compete to grab a juicy slice of the lucrative video search advertising business.
These companies clearly understand that in the future of a near infinite number of sources for content, the consumer is going to become very confused and possibly overwhelmed by choice, unless someone, or a service guides then through it. Having identified this, they’re all chasing it.
Yahoo Video Search
5 May, 2005
3 Get Granada’s Celebrity Wrestling TV Footage To Mobiles
UK third-generation mobile phone network 3, have teamed up with TV production and distribution company Granada to bring the popular ITV show, Celebrity Wrestling, to video mobiles for the first time.
(Note to readers unacquainted with this particular TV show: it’s a series of dreadful wrestling matches featuring barrel-scraping Z-List ‘celebrities’ desperately seeking tabloid fame).
The new agreement will give 3 network users access to the show’s ‘highlights’ with the added ‘bonus’ of backstage outtakes.
Gareth Jones, COO of 3 thinks the idea is a whoop-de-do winner: “TV shows like this are ideal for our ‘Today on 3’ service, we’re tapping into programmes that we know our customers really enjoy and we’re providing it to them in bite-size chunks on 3.”
Building up to a crescendo of celebrity-fuelled excitement, Jonesy went on: “Our customers are watching Celebrity Wrestling at home on TV, reading about it in the newspapers and through this new agreement with Granada, they can now watch the highlights on 3.”
Katrina Moran, Granada Interactive lined up for a synergistic snog: “We’re excited to be working with 3 and delighted to see Celebrity Wrestling proving so popular on 3’s video mobile network. We know Celebrity Wrestling fans won’t want to miss any of the action, with 3 they can watch their favourite moments on the move and even get the backstage uncut action too.”
Lord knows who would want to fork out for this dreadful tack, but Granada will be supplying around sixty video clips to 3 customers over the course of the eight week series, with the clips charged at 50p each (or included within add-on packages).
Why anyone would want to fork out to view the cray-zeeee backstage antics of a load of stretching-the-definition-of-the-word ‘celebrities’ on a mobile screen sure beats us, but it provide ample proof of the old adage; ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’.
Celebrity Wrestling
Granada TV
5 May, 2005
T-Mobile Trials 2Mb WiFi On Southern Trains
T-Mobile is offering a free WiFi pilot service on Southern Rail’s busy London-to-Brighton train service in readiness for a full launch in June.
The service, part of a £1 billion improvement project for Southern Rail, will be rolled out on 14 trains supplied by 60 Wi-Fi base stations along the route.
T-Mobile have been trialing the service for several months, with a limited amount of base stations offering 256K upload speeds and download speeds at 2Mbit. T-Mobile has said these speeds will be upgraded on launch.
Despite limited publicity, freeloading passengers have been using the service, with T-Mobile logging seventy-five users over a ten day period from 1st April.
Most of the users were morning commuters, alerted to the service by stickers in the carriage windows.
From June onwards, passengers will have to fork out for the service as T-Mobile introduces its national HotSpot prices.
T-Mobile manager for WiFi Jay Saw was in full corporate PR spin mode as he enthused: “We are the only operator that has placed GPRS, 3G and WiFi at the centre of its strategy. That differentiates us from the competition. We’re the world’s largest network – by our own definition.”
“The Brighton Express has four million regular commuters. We’re the first to install broadband on a train,” beamed Saw, adding that, “Southern, along with our own research and feedback, tells us that there’s a lot of demand. And the feedback from the early users so far has been very positive. We are trying to maximise the value of dead time for commuters.”
Nomad Digital executive chairman Nigel Wallbridge, whose company is responsible for the build and operation of the WiFi network, sounded positively loved up as he set his backslap motors to full: “In my business life, I have rarely had a better experience than working with T-Mobile and Southern, and the railways rarely get good press in Britain.”
We hope to have a hands-on test of the service shortly.
Southern Railway
T-Mobile UK
5 May, 2005
iPod shuffle Scoops Up 58% Of US Flash Player Market
Purring like a cat recumbing in cream, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple’s iPod shuffle has snaffled a 58 per cent share of the flash-based digital media market in the US.
The iPods shuffle’s market share rose from 43% in February to 58% in March, with Oppenheimer positive that the flash-player market share will continue to grow.
He told Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich that Apple was “supply-constrained in March” suggesting that the figures for April will be more sales-tastic.
According to Apple’s own figures, the company now boasts a 90 per cent share of the hard disk-based MP3 player market and 70 per cent of the digital music download market.
Apple’s CFO asserted that “Apple isn’t feeling the competitive heat yet” from other digital media device manufacturers like Creative, Sony, iRiver and others, insisting that Apple “doesn’t appear concerned” about the threat from music-playing mobile phones.
Positively glowing with confidence, Oppenheimer claimed that MP3 capability in handsets will be more complementary than a replacement, with handsets suffering from “a worse user interface and limited battery life,”
Despite the much-publicised non-appearance of the iTunes-capable Motorola handset, Oppenheimer was equally upbeat about working with mobile phone operators.
Milunovich expects Apple to reveal iPods with wireless and video capacity before Christmas, guessing that new Ipods will be able to play short video clips.
Apple Exec: Shuffle Grabs 58% of Flash Player Market; What Cell Phone Threat?
5 May, 2005
Webroot: Spyware Makes $2bn a Year Claim
Anti-spyware firm Webroot have produced a survey which claims that spyware – invasive programs that generate pop-ups, hijack home pages and redirect searches – generate an estimated US$2bn (~£1.05bn~€1.54bn) in revenue a year.
The report suggests that a huge number of consumer computers are infested by some form of spyware, with their SpyAudit software revealing that 88 per cent of scans found some form of unwanted program (Trojan, system monitor, cookie or adware) on consumer computers.
Based on their scans from the first quarter of 2005, the vast majority of corporate PCs (87 per cent) were also found to have undesirable programs or cookies lurking within.
Excluding cookies, more than 55 per cent of corporate PCs contained unwanted programs, with infested consumer PCs crawling with an average of 7.2 non-cookie infections.
Dastardly system monitor programs (key loggers) were found in seven per cent of consumer and enterprise PCs scanned using Webroot’s software, down from 19 per cent in Q4 2004.
Lallygagging trojan horse programs were found on 19 per cent of consumer PCs and seven per cent of enterprise PCs, a figure unchanged from Q4 2004.
“To combat spyware effectively, the anti-spyware industry must be fully informed about the origins of spyware, its growth path and the impact it has on consumers and businesses,” warned David Moll, CEO at Webroot.
“Our previous Quarterly SpyAudit Reports have provided a numerical analysis of spyware’s growth, but our industry has been lacking a comprehensive resource that fully documents the spyware threat. The State of Spyware Report fills that void and delivers the most in-depth, expansive review and analysis of spyware to date.”
Webroot’s data comes from an analysis of stats from Webroot’s consumer and corporate SpyAudit tools and from online research conducted by Webroot’s automated spyware research system, Phileas.
Although most spyware is associated with flesh-tastic porno sites and deeply dodgy warez sites, Phileas recognised 4,294 sites (with almost 90,000 pages) containing some form of steeenkin’ spyware.
Here’s the science: Webroot reached their figure for the value of the spyware market by multiplying the average number of pieces of adware per machines (4.38, they say) by the number of active users on the net (290m – according to Nielsen Netratings) times the value of each adware installation per year – US$2.25 (~£1.18~€1.73), a figure derived Claria’s filing that it made US$90m (~£47.3m~€69.5m) a year from 40m “users”.
Although these figures seem disturbing, many industry eyebrows have arced skywards at Webroot’s figures, with an article in Techdirt suggesting that the company might be trying to pump up its own value by exaggerating the threat.
The scathing piece points out that Webroot is using a highly controversial method of including “mostly harmless tracking cookies” and lumping them in with spyware to boost the apparent size of the market.
Webroot Justifies Its Own Over-Valued Existence
Webroot
4 May, 2005
Sober.P Virus Targets World Cup Fans. Now 77% Of All Viruses
According to a survey carried out over the Easter period by network management company, Ipswitch, a thumping 93% of all e-mail received was unwanted spam.
A new beast of a virus is on the loose, with anti virus firm Sophos claiming that the Sober.P worm has “broken records in terms of the number of infected messages sent out and speed of propagation throughout Western European segments of the Internet.”
The UK security company reported that the Sober.P virus, first detected on Monday, now accounts for 77 percent of all viruses detected by their threat-monitoring stations worldwide.
“This is a pretty significant virus. We usually don’t see it spread to 77 percent of all inbound viruses,” warned Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at Sophos.
“Usually, it spreads much slower, and users have time to update their computers,” he added.
Variants of Sober have been around since 2003, with the mass-mailing worm continuing to spread as crazy mad fools still open attachments in infected email.
The latest version, variously tagged Sober.N, Sober.O or Sober.S, uses email written in both English and German with one variant luring victims with a message saying the recipient has won free tickets to the 2006 World Cup in Germany.
Once the infected attachment is opened, the virus copies itself onto the host computer, scoops up email addresses from the user’s machine and then blasts out similar infected emails to the harvested addresses.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, thinks the World Cup message is aiding the rapid spread of the virus: “Many people will be eager to attend one of the biggest sporting events in the world next year, and may think it’s worth the risk of opening the email attachment just in case the prize is for real.”
Showing a Tommy Cooper-esque flair for comedy, Cluley added, “Computer users who don’t practice safe computing will feel as sick as a parrot, and will only be passing this worm onto other unsuspecting victims.”
Sober.P may end 2005 as one of the worst viruses, replacing last year’s bad boy, Netsky.P, which accounted for 22.6 percent of all virus incidents, according to Sophos.
Sophos
4 May, 2005
IPSwitch Survey Reveals 93% Of Global e-mail Is Spam
According to a survey carried out over the Easter period by network management company, Ipswitch, a thumping 93% of all e-mail received was unwanted spam.
According to the company’s research, 44% of the spam surveyed was offering mortgage and loan ‘deals’, 18% of spam e-mails were offering various types of medication with 9% of pesky spam offering pirated software.
The survey also highlighted a new trend of e-mails attempting to ‘phish’ recipients’ banking details in lottery scams, with 7% of spam e-mails recorded being of this type, and a further 7% of the spam was made up of various pornographic offerings.
Naturally, the company had a shiny new product on hand to sort out the problem they’d just highlighted, the anti-spam Ipswitch Collaboration Suite 2.0.
Elsewhere, AOL’s anti-spam software backfired spectacularly in the hurricane-hit state of Florida, where emergency managers in Indian River County discovered that their email weather alerts were being tagged as spam.
After an unusually busy hurricane season, around 4,200 people signed up for the county’s e-mail alert service, offering quick alerts on hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather emergencies.
But not everyone was receiving the alerts, as AOL’s filters were trapping the emergency emails as spam.
Basil Dancy, a county computer software engineer, explained, “Because we send out mail in large numbers, it becomes a pattern for spam senders.”
The county is now working with AOL to fix the problem
Ipswitch
4 May, 2005
Google News Looks To Improve Quality Of Search Results
Google is busily hatching plans to dramatically improve the results of internet news searches by introducing a system that ranks articles by quality rather than just their date and relevance to search terms.
Currently, typing something like ‘Iraq’ into Google, will generate zillions of “hits”, ranked in order of relevance or by date, so that the most recent or most focused appear at the top of a monster list.
The problem with this approach is that news stories from more authoritative sources – say the CNN or the BBC – can be knocked off the first page of results because they are not as recent or as relevant to the keywords typed into the search box.
Google hopes to address this problem by building a smartypants database that will compare the track record and credibility of global news sources and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.
The database will do its thang by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources while making a note of average story length, number with bylines, the number of the news agencies cited, along with how long they have been in business.
And there’s more! Google’s database will also record the number of staff a news source employs, monitor the volume of internet traffic to its website and check its international appeal by counting the number of countries accessing the site.
A big box stuffed full of levers and blinking lights will then absorb all these parameters, weigh them according to a clever-clogs formulae it is constructing, and then distil them down to create a single value.
We like to think that this number – then used to rank the results of any news search – is noisily outputted on a long string of ticker tape, but we might be getting a bit carried away.
Google’s ambitious system was unveiled by patents filed in the US and around the world in 2003 which revealed that the same methodology could be employed to rank other search results, such as sales and services.
Campaigners and activists may not welcome this news though, as Google’s proposed system suggests that it will be harder for independent, non-mainstream news sites to appear in the top rankings.
One of the beauties of the web is that of you type in the name of the uber-corporates Nestle into Google, the Nestlé boycott campaign appears on the first page of results.
I wouldn’t like that to change.
Google
4 May, 2005
Nokia Set To Become World’s Biggest Camera And MP3 Manufacturer
Nokia continues to be the Big Cheese of the worldwide mobile handset market, shipping nearly twice as many phones as its nearest competitor, Motorola.
According to a report by IDC, Nokia shipped 53.8 million handsets in the first quarter of 2005, representing a chunky 30.9% share of the market.
Motorola lagged a fair way behind with 28.7 million shipments (16.5% of the market), followed by fast-rising Samsung, who had 24.5 million shipments and 14.1% of the market.
Nokia anticipates continued success and expects to shift 25 million smartphones in 2005 – twice as many as the 12 million it sold in 2004.
According to data from Canalys, it’s already off to a flying start, shipping almost 5.4 million smartphones in the traditionally slow first quarter, a triple fold increase from last year.
Overall, global shipments of smart mobile devices were up 82% year on year in Q1 2005, with Nokia grabbing half the market, followed by palmOne, RIM (Blackberry) and Fujitsu.
Phenomenal camera phone sales are also predicted by Nokia, which looks to ship 100 million camera phones and 40 million phones offering MP3 playback.
This would make Nokia the biggest camera and MP3 player sellers in the world, toppling Canon and Apple respectively off their thrones.
As we reported last week, Nokia has announced a range of high quality two-megapixel camera phones, making the phones an attractive alternative to a dedicated digital camera.
Similarly, their spanking new N91 phone has both a camera and an MP3 player built in, with a 4 gig hard drive rivalling standalone digital music players like the iPod mini.
The new phone is expected to come with a wallet draining price sting of around $800-$900 (~$422-£475 ~ €623-€700), although telecom carrier deals are expected to bring the price down to around $500 (~£264 ~€390) in the US.
Things are heating up in the handset industry, with the big players trying to out do each other on the feature lists.
Sony are about to release the W800, their first walkman phone, while Samsung is already offering camera phones offering higher resolution images than Nokia.
It’s not all going Nokia’s way though. In the US, Motorola remain the top dogs with a mobile market share of 31.7%, while Samsung overtook Nokia, grabbing 18.2% of the market compared with Nokia’s 14.6%. In fourth place was LG Electronics with a market share of 12.6%, with Kyocera in fifth at 5.2%.
Nokia
Canalys
IDC
3 May, 2005
Yahoo 360 To Import Content From Non-Yahoo Services
Yahoo has announced plans to ramp up the feature set of its Yahoo 360 social networking and blogging service, currently in beta.
According to Paul Brody, director of community products at Yahoo, the company intends to let users import content, such as photos and music, from non-Yahoo applications.
“Some of the things that people very much want to do is to share content from other sources outside of Yahoo,” observed Brody, “[Yahoo] 360 right now does a great job of allowing you to share the content you might have already on Yahoo.”
The Yahoo 360 service entered an invite-only limited beta period in late March allowing participating users to publish blogs, share content and post pictures with control over who they shared their content with.
The service currently only allows users to include content from other Yahoo services such as Yahoo Photos and Yahoo Music, but now Yahoo are to offer the inclusion of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from other sources.
Brody stated that he wanted the Yahoo 360 service to be an “open” product, adding, “If you have content anywhere on the Internet, you should be able to share it with friends and family through Yahoo 360.”
The beta period has given Yahoo some useful feedback about their users’ needs – with the company now working with bloggers to give them greater flexibility in customising their blogs and adding features such “trackback.” Trackbacks create a links between related information on different blogs, further explained in a link below.
“Yahoo 360 should be made available to the public in the next few weeks, by which time the capability to share non-Yahoo content will also be included.” Brody commented.
Localised versions of Yahoo 360 will be launched soon in some countries in Asia and Europe, according to Brody. The Yahoo blog service is already available in some countries like Japan and Korea.
Yahoo’s My Web Upgrades Personal Search Tools
Google Introduces Local Search To UK
Yahoo 360 Service Blends Blogging And Social Networking Tools
TrackBack description from sixapart
3 May, 2005