As reported here at the beginning of the week there seems to be a real danger of the BBC’s non-subscription card free alternative to Sky’s Freesat offering falling at the first fence.
While the BBC cosies up to Sky to help make everyone covet a shiny new High Definition display and the services that go with it, it’s reported in Broadcast that the companies who will manufacture the receivers have no specification to work too.
If a specification isn’t nailed down in the next few months, it’ll be 2007 before the boxes hit the shops. By then there could be considerable consumer resistance, with buyers prefering to wait to see what happens with any new high-quality domestic standard, and the makers of the boxes moving to newer higher tech, bigger margin products.
In short, there’s a danger that the boat may be missed.
A raft of HD services across Europe is likely to eat up scarce capacity on the high-power satellites that beam the programmes down to earth, making any system that duplicates services across platforms more expensive.
Add to all of the above the challenge of creating a clear marketing and installation message, and I can see that there could well be people in the BBC who would rather that their careers didn’t get blighted by a potential fiasco.
The BBC could be minded too by OFCOM’s view that the burdens of switching to digital delivery should not fall disproportionately on the dear old ‘beeb’. Unless priorities change, James Murdoch can relax on the BSkyb extra terrestrial UK monopoly for a bit longer.
But will the public gain too?
For those who have better thing to do with their lives than fanatically watch every twist and turn of online technology, or if you’re living outside the US of A, you may well not have been using Google’s recently launched Google Local For Mobile (GLM)- or even have heard of it.
Yesterday we revealed how GLM has 
More detail than the browser version
Intertrust must have though that all of the xmases came at once on the day Vodafone confirmed their licensing deal. It’s not every day that the World’s largest mobile operator signs a deal like that with you.
The Vodafone deal goes well beyond these basics and licenses all of the technologies and patent that Intertrust have available.
Both Vodafone and Intertrust declined to reveal the value of the transaction, but given the need for separate deals with the handset companies, it may be here that Intertrust make most of their money. This will not be optional if the handset manufacturers want to be on the Vodafone service and offer content.
Following the BBC confirmation of High Definition Television (HD) trials for 2006, all of a sudden it feels like there’s a plethora of High Definition services and trials in the UK next year.
Speaking at the same event, Richard Freudenstein, CEO, BSkyB, was careful not to mention what the monthly subscription will be for HD on Sky when it launches. He spent his time talking up the platforms’ HD bouquet that will include Sky One, sports and movies with an HD Sky Plus box and plenty of storage capacity.
Confusion still reigns
Despite their emphatic denial, Google appear to be planning to bring GPS to the recently announced Google Local For Mobile.
Currently the users of the service have to key in or select the desired starting and destination points, and press a key to mimic their progress in the real world. Using GPS eradicates the need to tell the system where you are, or update the system to your progress.
The GPS feature could well be waiting for a second release of the service, or waiting for next-gen handsets with aGPS built into them, to become more widely used.
Ofcom, the UK uber-regulator, has today announced that they have removed the licensing restrictions on the frequency that radio frequency identification(RFID) tags use.
Perhaps the revealing section in Ofcom’s announcement is that they “seek to deregulate in order to increase the amount of licence-exempt spectrum used by businesses to bring new technologies and services to the market.” (Our stress).
Accton Technology has unveiled a Skype-enabled Wi-Fi phone, the SkyFone WM1185-T in Tokyo.
This is exactly the type of deal that we thought that Skype would be doing and fits perfectly into our thought of 
It has taken the Bluetooth headset industry a remarkably long time to twig that we don’t want to use one headset for listening to music, and then frantically rip it off to use another Bluetooth headset for answering the phone. Anycom has the one… at a price.
And the icing on the cake: a Bluetooth audio gateway. Without further details (actual hands-on reviews!) this is probably going to seem more wonderful than it can in reality be: but what we’re hoping it will do, is allow you to plug several audio inputs into it, and switch between them – from landline phone to Skype, from Skype to iPod, from iPod to mobile phone.
The commercial rivalry between two UK online retailers has spilt over into the world of advertising, or more precisely the heady world of UK advertising adjudication, run by the Advertising Standards Authority.
The ASA batted the first complaint aside, but felt the second held water despite Tesco putting up the follow argument. Their long winded thinking can be cut down to … As no single CD or DVD was priced over £19 (thank goodness – our addition), to qualify for the Amazon free delivery, it entailed ordering more than one item.
But this jiggery pokery didn’t get them off the hook and the ASA found against them.
Netgear have released a new wireless access points with claimed speeds of up to 240Mb/s, beating that of wired networks of 100Mb/s (though modern Ethernet wired networks can now go up to 1000Mb/s or 1Gb/s and faster).
Speed gains using clever encoding
The IEEE (the body that sets the 802.11 standards) are working on the next phase of standards which will incorporate MIMO and other techniques, but they are not due for a while and it will take manufacturers a while longer to then make systems that conform to those new specs. There are no guarantees that any kit now will be upgradeable to those new standards.