February 2006

Sony VAIO VA1 Series Wireless Home Entertainment PC
Sony has announced the new VAIO VA1 Series, a wireless home entertainment desktop computer.
Looking like it was knocked out by designers in a hurry to get home, the chunky machine seems to lack Sony’s usual flair for design, but underneath the less-than-glamorous exterior lurks a novel hybrid machine, boasting analogue and digital TV tuners, a DVD rewriter and capacious hard drive.
The display is a big Sony 20″ screen with true 16:9 aspect ratio, X-black technology and double lamp illumination, with a nippy 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 processor powering the PC.
Graphics are taken care of courtesy of an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 with 128MB RAM, with the integrated TV tuner offering both analogue and digital channels, with built in Freeview.
Running on Microsoft Windows XP Media Centre Edition, there’s a high capacity 250GB hard drive inside and a dual layer DVD DVD±RW rewriter, capable of recording up to four hours of DVD-quality TV in one go.
High definition audio is provided by Sony’s Direct Stream Digital (DSD), a technology developed by Sony in conjunction with Philips.
Despite its all-in construction, some expandability options are provided with space for a second hard disk and slots for more RAM.
In line with its home entertainment pretensions, the machine includes a wireless keyboard with built in touchpad, a wireless mouse and remote control.And to keep things neat and tidy, the whole caboodle uses a single plug. Nice.
Full details, comprehensive specs and product photos are (as you can see) somewhat thin on the ground as we went to press, but we’ve heard that the Sony VA1 should be available from February, priced at around £1,500 ($2,620, €2.185).
8 February, 2006
BSkyB Moves Execs, To Enter ‘Adjacent Areas Of Business’
Sky has announced three of its top Exec will be altering roles, we suspect, as they prepare to become more than just a satellite TV company.
Using its best management speak, the UK Satellite-overlord is “aligning its organisational structure to support sustained growth towards its target of 10 million direct-to-home customers in 2010.”
The favoured three will be stepping it up a gear, and far beyond having the key for the executive toilet, we suspect they’ll be getting a whole suite of bathroom facilities.
- Dawn Airey, who has been Managing Director of Sky Networks since 2003, becomes Managing Director, Channels and Services with overall responsibility for Sky’s multi-platform content strategy. The existing Sky Networks structure will be joined in the Channels and Services group by an enlarged interactive team that brings together all of Sky’s new media content on interactive TV, online and mobile platforms. She’ll assume additional responsibility for Sky’s joint ventures, wholesale distribution arrangements with cable companies and commercial relationships with third-party channels on the satellite platform.
- Mike Darcey, who joined Sky in 1998 and is currently Group Strategy Director, becomes Group Commercial and Strategy Director with extended responsibility for a new group that combines Sky’s Strategy, Future Technology, R&D and Business Development teams. In addition, he’ll take on a further responsibility to manage and develop Sky’s major commercial relationships in support of the company’s strategic goals
- Jon Florsheim, who joined Sky in 1994, becomes Managing Director, Customer Group in addition to his existing title of Chief Marketing Officer. The Customer Group brings together all of Sky’s expertise in sales, marketing and customer operations to create a seamless brand, product and service experience for customers. This team will lead the continued development and implementation of Sky’s multi-product strategy, including the launch of the company’s broadband offering in the second half of calendar 2006.
We think Mike Darcey sounds like he’s going to have the most fun, and certainly the most toys to play with.
James Murdoch, Sky’s Chief Executive, touches on where BSkyB is planning on going, as they “exploit content on multiple platforms and expand into adjacent areas of business.”
With the strength of BSkyB’s relationships with their customers, fear will be struck into the heart of many execs in many industries by the words “adjacent areas of business.”
8 February, 2006
UK Ad Authority Slaps T-Mobile Web’n’Walk Advertising
T-Mobile was told to see the headmaster and returned with a derrier rouge after making exaggerated claims about its “web’n’walk” mobile Internet service.In a wave of PR-driven hyperbole last October, T-Mobile claimed that their Service – which let customers access the web from their mobiles – would “redefine the mobile Internet market” letting people access the net “Internet wherever you are”. (You may also remember that at the time Guy Kewney wondered if Google were behind the service).
Arch-rivals Orange clearly didn’t like the look of this new service and lobbed a sizeable spanner in the works, lodging an objection with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) on the grounds that T-Mobile had overstated the availability of the service.
Orange gleefully pointed out to ASA that with T-Mobile only managing 86 per cent coverage in the UK, the advert was giving a false impression about the availability of the service.
T-Mobile had a valiant stab at a defence, arguing that their advert was all about making the distinction between Ye Olde Crappe WAP and their new, full Internet-access, web’n’walk service, adding that they had included the line, “subject to coverage”.
The ASA was having none of it, despatching T-Mobile’s team with a plague of fleas in their ears, firmly pointing out “the unconditional and geographical nature of the phrase, ‘the Internet wherever you are’.”
As heads lowered amongst the T-Mobile team, the ASA statement continued: “We considered the use of such unconditional language to be contradictory to the qualification stated in the coverage disclaimer.”
To the sound of a salvo of slapped wrists, the statement concluded that the ad, “was misleading because readers were likely to interpret the claim to refer to geographical network coverage. We told T-Mobile to avoid making such unconditional claims in future advertising.”
(PS. Don’t tell Orange, but T-Mobile’s website is still making the claim, “Stay one step ahead with web’n’walk and access the Internet wherever you are.”)
Elsewhere, big-boy ISP Wanadoo also felt the harsh crack of ASA leather as it was criticised for ads promoting its “up to 8Mb” service which were seen to fall far short of its claims.
T-Mobile Web’n’Walk
8 February, 2006
Get Free Entry to iTunes Music Store Billion Songs Countdown
Apple have announced a competition to become the downloader of the 1 Billion th music track on iTMS.
Just over a year ago we put out a brief piece expressing our frustration at Apple making a PR splash every time it sold another 100m tracks. Our plea … don’t worry about telling us until the next figure was significant.
Well it looks like that day is fast approaching.
At the time of writing, we see on the live track count that they’ve sold just short of 950,981,000 tracks.
The prize for the 1Bn th track is well worth winning
1 x 20-inch G5 iMac
10 x 60GB iPods (5 white/5 black)
1 x U.S. $10,000 iTunes Music Card (good for any media type)
On the back of the billionth hoopla, is the plan to reward track purchasers every time a 100,000 song is hit, which provides
1 x 4GB black iPods nano
1 x US $100 iTunes Music Card
which is also not to be sneezed at.
You know we like to save you money when we can and for those with sharp eyes, you’ll see near at the bottom of the page in light grey (thanks Apple), “*No purchase necessary to win. Click here to submit a free entry form.” Following the link takes you to the form telling that you can indeed make up to 25 free entries a day. We’re not sure on the US rules for competitions, but we know in the UK that free entry is essential when there’s no skill involved with entering the competition.
Best of luck – and let us know if you win!
iTunes Billion Songs Countdown
Free entry form – iTunes Billion Songs Countdown
7 February, 2006
M600 Handset Announced by Sony
Sony Ericsson have announced their new M600 handset, a tri-band (900/1800/1900 plus UMTS 2100 for 3G data outside the US) jobbie, with Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3.0 operating systems.
Measuring a pocket unruffling 15 mm thick, the 3G-capable communicator sports a Blackberry 7100x style dual function QWERTY keyboard and a large, touch-sensitive, 2.6-inch 240×320 262K colour display.
The dual function thumb-board offers continuous spell checking and word completion, with input aided by a 3-way jog dial and handwriting recognition.
Touted as a “fully-specified email tool and mobile phone”, the handset offers true multitasking, so a user can, for example, browse the Internet while chatting away on the phone.
The onboard push email applications and remote synchronisation options should please the swivel-action office crowd, with support for AlteXia, Ericsson Mobile Office (EMO), iAnywhere OneBridge, Intellisync, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, RIM – BlackBerry Connect , Seven, Visto and standard email.
For road warriors and shuffling suits, there’s the facility to read and edit PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents and Adobe PDF files on the move, with the popular Opera 8 browser provided for surfing the Internet.
For storing email attachments and multimedia content, there’s 80MB of internal memory, with Sony bundling in an additional 64MB Memory Stick in their new, teensy-weensy, bound-to-lose-it-in-seconds Micro M2 card format.
The built in media player offers support for MP3, AAC, ACC+, E-AAC+ and m4a, streaming audio and video playback 30 fps with Stereo Bluetooth support.
In line with its business focus, there’s no built in camera, and Wi-Fi is an unfortunate omission too.
For some reason we kept thinking of a Spectrum ZX-80 when we looked at the phone, but I guess that’s no bad thing.
Sony Ericsson will be making the new phone available in Granite Black and Crystal White from Q2 2006.
Sony Ericsson’s M600i, A First Look [All About Symbian]
7 February, 2006
Sony Micro M2 Memory Stick For March Launch
If you’ve owned a few digital cameras or PDAs and switched brands a couple of times over the years, you’ll probably already have a formidable collection of non-compatible memory cards wasting away in your drawer.
Looking around our office, we’ve acquired a mighty pile of chunky compact flash memory cards, Sony memory sticks in various flavours, SD cards and the fairly obscure XD format that was forced on us when we fell in love with the Fuji F11 camera.
Lord knows how much that lot costs us, but it looks like we might have to be dipping into our pockets yet again after Sony have released yet another version of their Memory Stick.
Designed for use in cellphones, the new Memory Stick Micro M2 measures in at just 15 x 12.5 x 1.2mm (about 1/4 the size of the Memory Stick Duo) and is set to compete against similarly Lilliputian formats like the MicroSD, MiniSD and TransFlash memory cards (an ‘M2’ adaptor will let users fit the new cards into Memory Stick PRO slots).
Developed by Sony and SanDisk the new card will ship in March and initially come in storage capacities of 256MB, 512MB and 1GB. In theory, the new Micro M2 cards will eventually be able to offer up to 32GB capacity.
Much as we hate to give any kudos to yet another memory card format, that’s a mighty impressive capacity and offers enough storage space to turn mobile phones into fully fledged, iPod-worrying MP3 players.
As is often Sony’s way, we expect consumers are unlikely to be given much choice whether they want to use the format or not with forthcoming Sony Ericsson handsets already using the format.
With the exception of occasional appearances on third party cameras and laptops, none of the various Memory Stick formats have found much favour with other manufacturers, so anyone tempted by the Sony Ericsson’s new range will have to fork out for yet another memory card format.
Thanks Sony.
Sony
7 February, 2006
Blogs Replicating Like Tribbles On Heat
It looks like the world is going blog crazy as the number of blogs online doubles every five and a half months, with a brand new blog being created every second.
That’s the claim made by blog trackers Technorati, whose online service indexes and searches blog postings across the globe.
The company is currently tracking more than 27 million separate blogs around the world – around 60 times more than what was online three years ago.
According to Technorati, around 2.7 million of those blogs are updated at least weekly, with something like 1.2 million total posts appearing every single day. New blogs are appearing at a rate of over 75,000 every day with an average of fifty thousand blog posts being recorded every hour.
The figures were released by Technorati founder David Sifry in his “State of the Blogosphere” post on Monday.
“At (this) rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject,” Sifry noted, adding that the sheer amount of information presented a new challenge to readers trying to find the most interesting and authoritative data available.
Although the vast majority of blogs take the form of personal diaries, navel gazing monologues and raging outlets for hormonal teenage angst, some bloggers have taken on a growing role in accelerating news cycles, challenging mainstream media reports, questioning political figures and subversive activities like undermining advertising campaigns.
It’s not all good news though, with Sifry revealing that “about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud.”
We’ve certainly suffered from spammers scooping up our content and reproducing it on their own, unrelated blogs in an attempt to drive traffic elsewhere, and these fake blogs are making Google blog searches a frustrating affair.
Sifry announced that Technorati along with tech companies including all the major search engines will be working together in another “Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit” this spring to form strategies to combat this growing problem.
Technorati
7 February, 2006
Camera Phones Disappoint
Although cameras are considered to be an essential part of modern mobile phones, a new study has revealed that only a tiny percentage of camera phone snaps are actually being stored or sent.
A survey undertaken by market research firm In-Stat found that less than a third of camera phone owners shared picture messages with friends.
“People who haven’t yet purchased camera phones are very enthusiastic about all the uses for their images,” says David Chamberlain, In-Stat analyst.
“However, once they start using their new phones, they are turned off by perceived poor picture quality, slow network speeds, and the difficulty of creating and sending pictures. Our survey found that very few pictures actually make their way out of the handset to be shared with others,” he commented.
The stats bear out the disappointment, with only 28% of camera phone users sending and sharing their photos against the 60% that initially purchased a camera phone for that purpose – and only one in 20 camera phone users are bothering to print their snaps or store them on carrier-provided websites.
After seeing the dire quality of the pictures taken with our i-mate JAM smartphone we can see his point, although the study didn’t ask what phones they were using (we’d imagine people would be making a lot more use of photos taken with capable camera phones like Sony Ericsson’s 2 megapixel K750i).
The survey also found that owners of ‘proper’ cameras – suitably un-wooed by the blurry pics from their camera phones – are less likely to replace their phones in the near future than other users.
Consumers wanting to be able to take and send decent quality photos are hit by a double whammy: camera phones capable of taking high quality phones aren’t cheap, and the higher resolution files they create end up costing a bomb in network carrier costs. Best solution? Take along a ‘real’ camera and email it when you get home.
The report estimates (rather wildly) that by 2010 there will be from 300-850 million mobile users sending at least one image per month across the carrier network.
A recent report by IDC forecasted that global camera phone shipments will climb from 270 million units in 2004 to nearly 766 million in 2009.
Tutorial: Fixing photos taken on camera phones [Adobe]
7 February, 2006
FON Global WiFi Venture Gets Google And Skype Investment
Internet big boys Google and Skype have teamed up with two venture capital firms, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, to invest a mighty wedge into Fon Technology, a Spanish startup looking to build a global network of Wi-Fi hotspots.
A total of €18 million ($21.6 million) has been invested in the Madrid-based company, with the cash being set aside to increase the number of Fon users and to support the growth of Wi-Fi worldwide, “particularly in countries where broadband is currently unaffordable to most people.”
Fon’s service allows subscribers to connect and/or share their WiFi connections with others and has notched up 3,000 registered members since launching a beta version of its service in November 2005.
The company hopes to establish a global network of 1 million Wi-Fi hotspots by 2010, allowing FON users, or “foneros,” to connect to the Internet via FON WiFi hotspots provided by other foneros (we’re already getting fed up saying ‘fon’ ).
For Google and Skype, a deal with FON makes their web-based services more ubiquitously available, with developers gaining access to a new platform for creating and delivering services on a global scale.
FON intends to scoop up revenue from a subscription model, where ‘foneros’ sign up as Linus members (sharing their home WiFi hotspot with the FON network and able to use any FON hotspot for free), Bill members (sharing WiFi hotspots with Alien members for a fee but unable to roam the FON network for free) and Alien members who pay to use the FON network on an as-needed basis.
According to FON, fifty-percent of revenue generated from ‘Aliens’ will be shared with ‘Bills’, with alien memberships currently available on a free-trial basis.
We’re not sure how he kept a straight face, but FON founder, Martin Varsavsky is quoting as saying, “Aliens are at the heart of our business model.”
“As we continue to grow, we will attract consumers for all three foneros categories and achieve our goal of creating a global WiFi nation. This is a great opportunity for ISP’s, bloggers, developers, early adopters, consumer electronics manufacturers and the ‘average Joe or Jane’ with a WiFi connection to make money by letting other foneros connect to the Net safely and simply,” he continued.
Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom was also enthusiastic: “There is perhaps no more important goal for the industry than helping to make broadband Internet access available around the world.”
“FON has a great idea to help people share WiFi with one another to build a global unified broadband network, and we’re happy to lend support. Enabling more communities to tap into the power of the Web benefits us all,” he added.
FON
6 February, 2006
PDA Sales Plummet Again
It’s been spluttering and wheezing in its sick bed for what seems like an eternity, but the latest figures from research firm IDC confirm that the prognosis isn’t good for the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
The figures show the worldwide market for handheld PDAs continuing to plummet, with sales dropping for the fourth consecutive year in 2005.
IDC’s research reveals that just 2.2 million devices were shipped during the last three months of the year, with annual sales falling 16.7 percent to 7.5 million units – substantially down on 2004’s figure of 9.1 million.
Although a bright Christmas period saw sales grow 37.6% over Q3, the trend remains resolutely downward, with the declining market segment driving PDAs into a market niche.
Industry pundits put the slow but steady decline of PDAs down to the exponential growth of smartphones, with the convenience and features of converged handhelds proving more alluring to punters.
According to Gartner’s figures, a massive 72 million smartphones will be shifted this year, compared to just 6.6 million units in 2003.
But don’t go ordering flowers for the PDA funeral quite yet, as IDC research analyst Ramon Llamas insists that it’s not all over for the PDA market, with plenty of smaller vendors remaining committed to a more niche PDA market.
“The departure of other worldwide vendors has opened the door for smaller vendors to improve their position within the market. During the course of the year, several smaller vendors remained within striking distance of beating each other for the number four or five position, and even posed a challenge to some of the worldwide vendors,” commented Llamas.
Palm – whose market leading Treo 650 smartphone has just been ported to Windows in the shape of the Treo 700w – remains the most popular PDA brand, securing 43 per cent of the market last year, with HP in second place at 25 per cent.
Elsewhere, Mark Nelson, the founder of Ovid Technologies who owns 8 percent of Palm’s stock, has urged Palm to consider selling its business to big boys like Research in Motion, Dell or Hewlett-Packard while its stock is high.
With Palm winding down its PDA business and concentrating on its Treo smartphone range, Nelson argues that Palm will have difficulty competing against deep-pocketed rivals like Dell and HP who are currently ploughing big R&D budgets into similar products.
Palm declined to comment, but Todd Kort, an analyst at Gartner, reckons that Palm’s independence is a positive advantage, making them, “faster on their feet” with the ability to “turn on a dime a little faster than Nokia can.”
In Europe, Nokia still rule the smartphone roost, but as we reported last year, the Treo remains hugely popular in the States.
Kort suggested that Palm’s lean’n’mean size gives it the edge to adapt to quickly changing market trends and target high-end customers.
6 February, 2006