September 2005

SMS: It’s Time To Get Pregnant
A new text-messaging service called EggAlert wants to help women to keep better track of their menstrual period. The service calculates a woman’s next ovulation time and sends a tet message (SMS) to her cell phone altering/warning her she at the hight of her fertility. While the Website of EggAlert focuses on women who want to become pregnant, we’re thinking the service could also be used as a form of contraception.
According to EggAlert.com the service can also be used both as a Notifier for the upcoming premenstrual symptom, to schedule certain events around the time of menstruation and as a reminder for women who want to do self breast examinations.
Some Questions are left open: According to the Website, the service is available worldwide, but seems only be on-hand for customers with a billing address in the US and Canada. That’s why we could not get through to the signing-up process to check if more than one cellphone number could be handled. As it would be nice to send a message to the partners cellphone too.
While claiming that the service “increases your ability to naturally select a boy or a girl.” PDA Healthware, Inc. does not provide any statistics about happy customers, nor any testimonials. We would love to hear about the first Text Message enabled pregnancy.
We can see a long term merging of with company will be a quick dating service when it’s linked with location-based data.
EggAlert
19 September, 2005
Nokia 6630 Music Edition Announced
Acting like they’re fearful of not appearing hip to the mobile music revolution, Nokia have added their own rival to the Apple/Motorola ROKR and Sony Walkman phones, a special edition of the highly rated Nokia 6630 – despite having had music-playing on their phones for yonks.
Shipping later this month, the Nokia 6630 Music Edition offers a new music player and a bundled memory card to offer “enhanced music functionality.”
The updated music player bundles in a 256mb RS-MMC (with memory card support up to 1 gig), which Nokia claims will hold up to 15CDs of music, giving it an edge over the 100 iTunes song limit on the Motorola ROKR.
Music can be transferred to the phone using the included Nokia PC Suite software or with the bundled Nokia USB MMC/SD reader, with the Nokia Audio Adapter letting users plug in their favourite headphones (or “cans” if you’re a DJ) into the standard 3.5 mm stereo jack.
“The Nokia 6630 Music Edition is a fantastic combination of music, smartphone and 3G,” frothed Tuula Rytilä-Uotila, Director, Imaging EMEA, Nokia.”
“You can carry a good portion of your music collection with you wherever you go and with the Nokia Audio Adapter, you can quickly connect your favourite set of music headphones,” Tuula added.
The phone comes in two colours – Aluminum Grey for hip, fast living, city slickers and Rustic Red for cow-bothering, straw chewing, country types.
Being based on the well-rated Nokia 6630, the phone also includes a 1.3 megapixel camera, mobile broadband access with WCDMA networks, mobile email and streaming video.
Nokia have also launched the Nokia Music Pack, a bundled package of enhancements for mobile music, which includes the Nokia Audio Adapter, the Nokia 256 MB MMC Card, the Nokia USB MMC/SD reader and Nokia Stereo Audio Cable.
The only question we’ve got – is where’s the Nokia N91 we got excited about last month?
Nokia
19 September, 2005
Vodafone Targets Mass Market With New 3G Phones
Vodafone plans to unleash a swarm of new 3G mobile handsets in the run-up to Christmas as the company tries to turbo charge mass market adoption of its third-generation (3G) mobile service.
The world’s biggest mobile operator will adding a total of 15 phones to their portfolio.
Ten of the new phones will be exclusive to Vodafone, with six targeted at entry-level customers in an attempt to encourage the mass market take-up of its 3G services.
“We are confident that this is going to be a 3G Christmas,” ho-ho’d Chief Marketing Officer Peter Bamford.
This rings (festive?) bells with us, giving us a very strong feeling of Deja Vu as we heard ‘Vodafone’s betting heavily on 3G this Christmas‘ in November 2004. Perhaps Vodafone thing that saying it two months earlier this year (Sept vs Nov) will ‘make it happen’.
The period before Christmas is traditionally a bumper trading period for mobile phone operators, and Vodafone is confident that its festive offering of MP3 playin’, video and audio streamin’, video call-makin’ 3G phones will send sales soaring.
The new phones
The entry-level phones will include two handsets each from Sharp and Samsung and one each from Motorola and Sony Ericsson – all exclusive to Motorola.
The non-exclusive handsets will include the hugely popular Motorola RAZR V3x phone, the Nokia N70 and 6280, and Samsung’s SGH-Z500V and SGH-Z140V phones.
Four of the new handsets – two each by Sharp and Toshiba – will be targeted at the well heeled, with the Limited edition Sharp 902 Ferrari serving up exclusive Ferrari content for those folks impressed with that kind of thing.
All of Vodafone new 3G phones will offer new services, with the company hoping to tempt users to regularly dip into their catalogue of 500,000 full-track music downloads and mobile TV services and content.
Vodafone launched their 3G service in November 2004, and was reporting 3.3 million 3G customers by June this year.
The company expects big things from their 3G service, forecasting 10 million customers across its businesses to be using 3G mobile video and picture phones and high-speed laptop cards by the end of this financial year in March 2006.
Vodafone
16 September, 2005
‘Lost’ clips to debut over mobile on 3 – News Release
3 is to bring the smash TV hit Lost to the small screen. Following a deal between the UK’s largest video mobile network, Buena Vista International Television (BVITV) and Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG), divisions of The Walt Disney Company Ltd, a mobile audience of over 3.2 million will be able to watch show recaps and previews of the action from Channel 4’s top-rated series. This is The Walt Disney Company’s first mobile video content agreement in Europe.
Lost is a gripping series which follows the survivors of a plane crash, stranded together on a remote, hostile island. As the group of strangers work together to create order in their makeshift community, and to stay alive, there appear to be darker forces at work around them. The show makes its debut over mobile this week.
3’s service includes 2-3 minute recaps of every episode, available for the length of the series, so fans can catch up on the plot at any stage, plus behind the scenes interview and previews of the next episode. Each clip will cost 50p.
Lost is the latest prime time series to be made available on 3, following Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity and the X factor.
Already, millions of viewers hooked on Lost are debating conspiracy theories, scrutinising the characters and speculating on the plot’s twists and turns.
Graeme Oxby. 3’s Marketing Director, said: It’s compulsive, addictive television that gets people talking – it’s exactly the sort of TV our customers will watch.
“Every one of our 3.2million customers has a TV in their pocket. This new service means our customers will never be behind the plot and can keep on top of the action, wherever they are.”
Tom Toumazis, executive vice president & managing director, BVITV EMEA said: “Lost is BVITV’s fastest-ever selling, most successful TV series, having been licensed by us to 183 territories worldwide on TV – now being licensed for the first time on to mobile.
“We are sure that its ever-growing UK fanbase will ensure its success on mobile – the addictive, action-packed nature of the show lends itself particularly well to this format, as fans need to watch carefully to unravel the many mysteries within the show.”
“Mobile is rapidly emerging as a new entertainment platform and already has tremendous reach,” said Attila Gazdag, vice president and managing director of Walt Disney Internet Group, Europe. “Our strong brands have translated extremely well to this new platform and we’re pleased to be offering video, especially of such a great show, to broaden our mobile offerings.”
3 UK
16 September, 2005
AP asap Says “Word Up!” To The Kids
Yo! Yo! Yo! Word! The Associated Press are getting hip and launching a news service for da yoot. Wicked, innit?!
On Monday, the near-ancient (well, 157 years old) newswire is launching its “younger audience service,” offering articles and “experiences” in multimedia formats, with audio, video, blogs and audience-participation features aimed at capturing the easily-distracted attention spans of a younger audience.
The hope is that all these interactive baubles will help entice the 70 million 18-to-34-year-olds in the US into becoming the next generation of news consumers by drawing them to AP’s member sites.
Naturally, farms of flapping flipcharts and masses of mood boards were employed as creative types toiled over their double mochas to come up with a suitably street name for the service, eventually christening it “asap”.
Apparently, the deal is that you pronounce the name letter by letter to “evoke the wire service’s legendary speed”. So don’t go upsetting those delicate designers by calling it “A Sap”
AP are claiming that the service will be “provocative, smart, relevant and immediate”, delivering the latest in news, entertainment, lifestyles, money and gadgets, and sports on a daily basis.
So far, more than 100 newspapers have signed up for asap, with the option to use the content for their online editions, print editions or both.
According to Ruth Gersh, project development manager for asap, none of the papers would be charging readers for asap’s content.
Although no specific charges have been publicly released, pricing for the service will depend on the circulation of the newspaper buying it.
Ted Anthony, the comparatively ancient 37-year-old editor of asap, said that original material will be included in the service, penned by a new staff of twenty mainly New York based journalists.
Giving an example of the sort of content that might be used, Anthony said that an AP reporter in Kazakhstan might file a news article for the wire but recount his journey in an audio clip for asap.
“We want to bring people closer to the news and closer to their world, and we do that by recognising that there are real people who are gathering the news; they aren’t simply automatic fact-gatherers,” commented Mr Anthony.
Learning from focus groups and prototypes that their target audience demands a sophisticated view of the world with a need to be engaged, the answer is, apparently, to use the word “you” more in their articles.
“We’re doing things the AP has never done, and we’re using the incredible global scope of this organisation to bring the most interesting stories in the world to people in entirely new ways,” said Anthony, spectacularly failing to fit in a single engaging “you” in his comment.
Associated Press
16 September, 2005
Barmy Ballmer; Cracking Mobile Theft; Flogging A Dead Horse On eBay – Teenage Tech News Review
It’s funny, laugh!
Couldn’t believe this one when I read it. Well, almost couldn’t believe it. Following on from the earlier story, Steve Ballmer is now apparently denying ever having thrown a chair across a room in anger and claiming he would “f—ing bury” the executive, Mark Lukovsky, who told Ballmer he was leaving Microsoft for greener pastures offered to him by Google.
Ballmer told the Telegraph: “I’ve never thrown a chair in my life,” which The Register says might raise the idea that he got someone else to do it for him. I probably would if I was as rich as he is!
Lastly, am I the only one who thinks that Steve Ballmer has a certain resemblance with Shrek?
Ew… That’s not nice!
According to The Register, a Romanian woman has tried to evade being caught thieving a mobile phone by sticking it where, well, the sun doesn’t shine.
Police when they caught her were puzzled by their inability to find the phone, but quickly solved this problem by ringing the phone, which, well, pin-pointed the phone’s position and the woman was escorted to the police station to have the device removed. The phone was then given back to its rightful owner after being sprayed down with detergent.
Flogging a dead horse… Literally
Apparently, there was someone selling a dead horse on eBay not so long ago. I do have my suspicions about the sincerety of the auction, seeing as the only details present in the auction were:
Dead horse for sale
Please email me with any questions.
Sadly, the original listing has now been removed from the site
These ridiculous auctions remind me of a lovely list of auctionable tid-bits including:
- 24 Children
- A Linux Geek
- And last but not least Nine used toothbrushes
16 September, 2005
BSkyB Get Into Mobile TV and VOD later
The Times have covered Richard Freudenstein, COO of BSkyB, speech at the RTS Cambridge Convention
Sky will be delivering video to mobile phones, as we’d predicted when we reported that NDS had signed a deal with Frontier Silicon.
We understand that it will include Sky Movies, Sky News and Sky Sports (which is bound to get some excited).
They also plan to let their Sky+ subscribers programme their PVR using their mobile phones.
The other biggy in Freudenstein talk was him confirming that that Sky will be offering VOD (Video On Demand) which will run over Ethernet – ie delivered over broadband. They’re not confirming dates.
Sky has been muttering about this behind closed doors to those who would listen for at least 18 months, but it’s the first time they’ve said it publicly.
Expected Sky and BT to strengthen their current cuddling relation, to a full on snog, as BT’s 21CN comes more into reality. this will provide additional bandwidth and an Ethernet port into every home in the UK, as they’re trailing in Cardiff, Wales.
The poor things at The Times have got a little bit confused between memory and storage of Sky’s PVR, Sky+, ‘newest Sky+ boxes have extra memory that is currently not used.’ Ah, isn’t it sweet. You’d have thought that two companies within the News International group would be able to understand each other business.
BSkyB
16 September, 2005
UK Analog Switch-Off For Digital TV By 2012: Confirmed
In her speech to the Royal Television Society in Cambridge this evening, Rt. Hon. Tessa Jowell confirmed digital switchover and outlined the timetable for switching by region.
Digital switchover will happen between 2008 and 2012 by ITV region in the following order:
2008 – Border
2009 – West Country, HTV Wales, Granada
2010 – HTV West, Grampian, Scottish Television
2011 – Yorkshire, Anglia, Central
2012 – Meridian, Carlton/LWT (London), Tyne Tees, Ulster
This regional order has been determined by a technical criteria determined by the broadcasters and Ofcom. The regional order will follow ITV regions. This ensures that the impact on ITV regional advertising markets is minimised.
Jowell also reiterated the Government’s pledge that digital switchover will be platform neutral. As reported earlier on OW, SwitchCo, which will be renamed ‘DigitalUK’ will launch tomorrow, and will oversee the switchover process, marketing and neutrality.
Jowell also outlined a programme to help vulnerable consumers. Households with one person over 75 and those with one person receiving disability allowances will be eligible for help and subsidy. The assistance scheme will be funded by the BBC through the licence fee (which is therefore obviously secure despite not Bill yet being in place).
It remains to be seen whether the BBC will be limited in how it promotes technologies in which it has a vested interest like DTT (Freeview) to these households.
Comment – It is interesting that London will be switched in 2012. Same year as we host the Olympics.
It is also worth noting the name change of SwitchCo to DigitalUK. This suggests a role beyond digital television, with the organisation being ambitious in its aims and looking to embed the most sophisicated digital technologies at the core of the home. Only by taking this approach will switchover be genuinely enabling for citizens, narrowing rather than extending the digital divide.
Tessa Jowell
15 September, 2005
Reuters launches 3G Video News Service On Vodafone
News agency Reuters has teamed up with Vodafone Live to offer a 3G streaming news video service for Vodafone customers in the UK.
The subscription service will be Reuters’ first direct-to-consumer mobile video news service and will be available to Joe Public for £3 ($5.45, €4.50) a month.
For their hard earned cash, mobile subscribers will be treated to regular updates from key financial markets around the world, as well as clips from the big news stories of the day.
The service, accessible by selecting “Business News” from the “News & Weather” menu on the handset, will become Vodafone’s first business and financial video to be made available over their network.
Suitably equipped 3G subscribers can choose from more than 20 different videos a day including market reports from London, New York, Singapore, Tokyo and Frankfurt.
Those lucky people can also watch riveting interviews with CEOs and industry leaders, and view stories on people and companies making headlines.
Vodafone subscribers will also get technology, world, sports and entertainment news and be able to set up SMS breaking news alerts.
Alisa Bowen, head of Reuters.co.uk, said: “The growth in downloads of video from our Websites, where over one million clips are viewed each month, made it clear just how popular video news has become.
It was an obvious next step to make this available on mobile devices, combining it with the existing financial data and text services to offer a truly multimedia experience.”
The 3G service is one a series of new mobile video services that Reuters will be rolling out as part of its meisterplan to make more of its news and information directly available to consumers.
Vodafone
Reuters
15 September, 2005
Truveo Claims Best Video Search
They may be a start up that no one’s heard of, but Truveo are making a big noise about their beta video search engine, claiming that it’s more up-to-date than either Yahoo or Google and produces higher quality results.
The company says that it has cooked up a unique technology which lets its crawlers reach video content that other search engines can’t reach.
Like most video search engines, Truveo locates and indexes video content by mining closed-caption transcripts and importing RSS feeds, but the vast majority of video clips on the web don’t provide any closed-caption or RSS metadata.
Their boffins have got around this restriction by employing visual crawlers which can “visually” examine the context of the surrounding web application, a process which apparently reveals “a bounty of rich and detailed metadata related to every video.”
Truveo claims that this technology lets them access material that cannot be found through other search engines.
“For search to reach the next level and become truly ubiquitous, a fundamentally new approach is required to rapidly find and organize the vast amounts of television, movie and video content created every minute.” said the fabulously named Tim Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Truveo.
Despite the growth in video search engines and the recent involvement of big boys like Google and Yahoo, widespread consumer adoption of video search still seems a bit of a way off – we’ve certainly never found the need to regularly use one yet.
Bandwidth issues would have put off a lot of punters, although the growth of broadband connectivity should see more people downloading video off the web.
The real problem may be providing content that’s actually worth watching, with complicated legal tangles over copyright and digital rights management issues keeping a lot of the good stuff in the domain of the file-swappers.
And if any further proof of the problem were needed, Truveo’s entertainment homepage tells its own story, when we looked it was featuring a “Farting Preacher” clip in its top five links.
Quality!
Truveo
15 September, 2005