May 2006

CEO Carter To Leave Ofcom: UPDATED
This just in, Steven Carter, Chief Executive Officer of UK communication uber-regulator Ofcom will be standing down with effect from 15 October 2006.
Luke Gibbs of OfcomWatch covered Carter possible departure this back in January this year.
At the time of writing this article, Ofcom hasn’t given an official explanation of why Carter is leaving, just that he is.
As to the process of him leaving, the official Ofcom line is a little bewildering, “He will continue to lead on all operational and financial matters until that date (15 October 2006), but from 1 August 2006 will not be party to Ofcom’s economic, competition and policy decisions.”
What’s special about 1 Aug 2006? Given Carter’s contract prevents him from securing future employment whilst at Ofcom, is this perhaps someway for him to hasten taking up another role with another organisation? Carter’s contract also contains “appropriate gardening leave restrictions” up to a maximum of 12 months at the discretion of the Chairman.
The next role for Carter has been the matter of some conjecture, nay gossip. Given Ofcom is seen by a lot of the world as a leader in communications regulation, there are many possible roles. Amoung those mentioned so far have been BSkyB, and with James Murdoch rumoured to be shifting upstairs the position may be open. Hey … how about the FCC?
From 1 August, David Currie will act as Executive Chairman and will chair the Policy Executive, until a permanent replacement can be found.
Prior to joining Ofcom in 2003, Carter was at UK cable company NTL during its time of financial troubles.
More details on the story when we have them.
OfcomWatch
Ofcom
26 May, 2006
YSP-1 Yamaha Review (70%) (pt.1)
Yamaha’s YSP-1 is a marvel of technology, it’s about 42 inches long by 4 inches high and about 4 inches deep but can produce 5.1 audio that really does sounds like a conventional set-up with speakers in-front and behind you.
The magic is all done inside the box using clever electronics and the 40 speakers in the front-panel (there are actually 42, but the two at the end just add a bit of mid-range). It works by cleverly combining the channels and then playing various bits out of various speakers which make the channels come out as “beams” which can then be steered to various parts of the room.
The system does lack the punch and heavy bass of a conventional system as the speakers are so small, but there’s a sub-woofer output to drive an active external unit which adds the missing low frequencies.
There are analogue (stereo) and three digital inputs to connect to TV, DVD and AUX systems, two being optical connections and the 3rd digital co-ax. The digital input supports both Dolby Digital and DTS encoding.
Before Yamaha came out with the YSP-1, the only equivalent system was the Pioneer DSP-1 which cost around £25,000 (~$46k, ~e36k). The YSP-1 is much more affordable with a retail price of around £800 (~$1500, ~e1171) .
The system supports stereo, 3.1 and 5.1 output configurations.
A box is a box without careful set-up
Though Yamaha provide some sensible defaults, the system really needs a good tweak in order to get the most out of it. This means taking the video output and plugging it into your TV and going through the set-up screens (video output is via standard definition composite video).
Unfortunately it isn’t easy. You have to put in the room dimensions then listen to where the test sounds are and steer the beams. The YSP-1 is meant to sit just under the TV/Plasma and there isn’t a way to tell it that it’s on the floor while the screen is six feet higher.
Tuning the YSP-1 is very fiddly and complicated, going through several screens of settings. It will take a while to get right.
However once it is set-up (which will probably take a few goes), viewing a DVD with either Dolby or DTS 5.1 multi-channel output does work, sounds really do appear to be coming from behind and sweep through the room.
The YSP-1 really needs to be mounted as close to the TV as possible so that sounds eminate from the picture. It does still work mounting below (i.e. on the floor), but there’s a bit of spatial distortion as sounds come from below the screen and the YSP-1 doesn’t seem to have any compensation for that, it probably could be tuned manually, but that gets more complicated again and you’re really on your own.
It’s likely you can get get a better sound from a system with real speakers mounted behind you, but it’s probably going to cost more than the 800 quid that that YSP-1 costs. There’s also the hassle of what to do with all the wires that have to trail all over the room.
Though the YSP-1 does save on speaker wiring, it does still require cables to it for the digital sources, power and video out – but they can generally be hidden behind the unit if carefully mounted, especially if under a plasma then all the video/audio wires can be concealed together.
Read the second part of review.
25 May, 2006
Pearson To Develop iPod Educational Material
All of those children who have been struggling to get their parents to buy them the playground-must-have, an iPod, now have the ultimate excuse – “But it’s for my edukashon!”
Pearson Education are to develop educational content for teachers and students which will play on an iPod. What a perfect strong-arm tactic, one that I’d imagine parents will find hard to refuse.
Pearson will also be buying Apple’s PowerSchool, their student information systems division for an undisclosed amount. PowerSchool is a Web-based system that reports on the performance, grades, homework and attendance of many US school children.
Deja Vu
John Couch, Apple’s vice president of Education, gave forth, “Apple’s commitment to education has never been stronger, which is why we’re excited to broaden our relationship with Pearson. Our customers will love having Pearson’s education content on their iPods, and we’re confident that PowerSchool will continue to flourish and grow with Pearson.”
What to expect on the iPod
Both students and teachers will have great reason to become iPod owners.
Students will be able to download study guides that work with Pearson’s educational texts and listen to review notes to prepare for exams.
They also hook in the teachers by giving access to podcasts on professional development, helping with lesson preparation and guidance in connecting with students struggling with specific content.
Apple has used this approach previously. Many years ago Apple started selling their computers to school children at a discount, with the logic that if they were hooked early, they’d be in the Apple-way for the rest of their lives.
This latest iPod-driven move is genius – but we can’t help feeling it’s eering on the evil-genius side.
25 May, 2006
PayPal Exclusive Wallet On Yahoo: Wide-ranging Deal
PayPal is to be the exclusive online wallet across Yahoo’s product and services. In a wide-ranging, four component, business arrangement announced today, eBay and Yahoo will be stroking each other commercial departments.
In their words, PayPal will be “deeply integrated on the Yahoo! site and will receive prominent positioning when users purchase Yahoo! services.” Beyond this PayPal will also be offered to Yahoo’s merchants and publishers, including the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other small business services.
Yahoo exclusive graphics ad provider to eBay
Additional details of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” big dollar deal include Yahoo being the exclusive provider of graphical advertising on eBay.
Interestingly Yahoo will also be offering sponsored search for complementary products on some eBay.com search results pages in the U.S.
Click-to-Call Advertising “being explored”
As we’re sure you know, Click-to-Call will let the user click on an icon on an advert and speak directly to the advertiser, without touching the phone.
For us, this part of the announcement is a bit of a strange one. Yahoo has Yahoo Messenger with Voice and eBay has Skype, so who would provide the voice services in which circumstances is pretty unclear, and we would have though, an area for friction.
What they’re saying about it is, “Yahoo and eBay do not expect this relationship to have a material impact on their financial results in 2006. Both companies will incorporate any financial impact for 2007 and beyond when they deliver their business outlook for those periods.” Make of that what you will.
25 May, 2006
USB Turntable Records Vinyl Straight To PC
If you’ve got a big stack of top notch vinyl gathering dust at home, you may want to consider using this natty USB Turntable to record the platters that matter straight on to your desktop or laptop PC.
Simply slam the turntable’s USB plug into any spare port on your computer, load up the easy-peasy Audacity software and you should be away in minutes.
The USB Turntable plays 33 1/3 and 45rpm records (no 78s, so tough luck granddad) and comes with adjustable pitch control (+/- 8 per cent), anti-skating control and a “high-speed vinyl recording function” (whatever that is).
The turntable can also be hooked up to any home stereo with CD or auxiliary inputs so you can rock out to your old punk rock 45s after a night in the pub.
The deck is a belt driven jobbie, so wannabe superstar DJs can forget all about getting scratchy on the thing, and is now available from Firebox for £120 (€176.40 or US$225.00).
Using your existing turntable
We have to say that if you really value your tunes, you’ll get infinitely better quality by using a ‘proper’ turntable like the Pro-ject Debut III turntable, which sells for around the same price as the USB turntable.
Although the turntable can’t be plugged into an USB port – or even your computer for that matter – you can capture the glorious sound of that lovely old vinyl by using a twenty quid phono pre-amp to convert the signal into an output compatible with your sound card instead.
25 May, 2006
Samsung Announces World’s First Solid State Laptops
Samsung has announced the imminent release of the world’s first solid state laptops, in the shape of the Q1,an Ultra Mobile PC and the Q30-SSD, a 12.1-inch screen notebook PC
Instead of the rattling old hard disk drives we’ve grown to love, Samsung’s new models will come with a 32-gigabyte flash memory as their main storage device.
Known as a solid-state drive (SSD), Samsung’s flash memory drive can read data three times faster than conventional hard disks (53MB/s) and write data 150 percent quicker (28MB/s). Scorchio!
Best of all, with no disks to spin up, there’s better protection against shock, 25-50% faster boot-up/sleep recovery times, longer battery life and no noise from whirring fans.
Sounds good? Well, check out the price before reaching for your plastic.
The Q30-SSD looks set to come with a mighty sting of around $3,700 US-equiv when it hits the shelves in Korea (only) from early June onward, and the Ultra Mobile PC will come with the same trouser tightening sting.
“The SSD laptops are targeting a different consumer group from conventional laptop users,” explained Samsung spokesperson Lee Seung-han. “And the price will go down gradually.”
The company also said that it was only selling the SSD laptops in South Korea to reduce the risks from teething problems.
Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD)
With the high price of flash memory proving unattractive to PC manufacturers, Samsung are looking to sweeten the pill by developing a Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), which is being debuted at a Microsoft conference in Seattle this week.
Samsung’s Lee was enthusiastic about the new technlogy, claiming that early tests show the hybrid hard drive outperforming the flash memory-only drive in terms of processing speed.
“The Windows boot-up time is significantly faster in the Hybrid Disk than in the Solid-State Disk, maybe because the SSD is still in its early development state,” he said.
Specs: NT-Q30-SSD/NT-Q1-SSD
Processor Intel Celero M 753 (1.2GHz)/Intel Celero M 353(900 MHz)
Memory 1 SODIMM Socket, DDR2 400 MHz, 512 MB (both)
LCD 12.1″ WXGA (1280 x 768) TFT-LCD/ 7″ WVGA (800 x 480) TFT-LCD
Graphic Intel GMA 900/Intel GMA 900
Video Memory DVMT (both)
Storage 32GB SSD (both)
External ODD Ultra-slim (9.5mmH) Super-multi Drive (Red)/ –
Communications Modem/Lan Combo, WLAN (802.11 b/g)/10/100 Ethernet, Mini card WLAN (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth v2.0
TV / DMB Embedded DMB/Embedded DMB
Keyboard 83-key Korean Keyboard/Keyboard and Organizer Package included
AudioSRS 3D Sound Support, 16-bit Stereo, SB Pro compatible, Internal Stereo Speaker (2W x 2) (both)
Power 60W AC adapter (110-240 free volt) (both)
Battery Li-ion Battery, Standard 3-Cell, Extended 6-Cell (both)
Dimension (without battery) 287.7 x 197.5 x 18.0 ~ 23.8 mm/ 227.5 x 139.5 x 24.5~26.5 mm
Weight1.14 kg (HDD onboard notebook: 1.16kg)/ 751 g (HDD onboard notebook: 777g)
Samsung
24 May, 2006
LG MFJM53 Nano-Like MP3 Player Launches
It may not have the swish designer lines of the iPod and the name may roll off the tongue as smoothly as a mouth full of dry nuts, but LG Electronics new MFJM53 MP3 player looks more than a bit useful.
Boasting a huge 30-hour battery life that smacks the botty of the iPod and sends it home to bed, the 8GB MFJM53 is compatible with the PlaysForSure digital rights management (DRM) technology, offering integration with subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody, which use Microsoft’s DRM.
The player also supports MP3, WMA, WAV, Ogg, MPEG4, and ASF music files, as well as MPEG4 video encoded in AVI files with support for JPEG pictures and text files.
Bringing up the impressive multimedia feature set is an on board microphone, a line-in port for recording, an FM radio and a mysterious new feature described on their website as ‘Music Theraphy’ (sic).
Touchy touchy
The MFJM53 sports a large-ish 1.77-inch, 262K, 60 X 128 pixels OLED screen which gets one over its rivals by being touch-sensitive, boasting ‘Index Finger Navigation’ (great for developing that ‘smudgy screen’ look).
The LG is a pocketable number too, weighing 88g and measuring 10.1 x 4.8 x 1.4cm.
Although we like the look of this fella – the feature set particularly impresses – the lack of a scroll/clickwheel is going to seriously hamper its ability to challenge the dominance of the uber-iPod.
Moreover, the marketing geniuses who dreamt up a name so instantly unmemorable as ‘MFJM53’ needs a thwack in the Oggs for their stupidity.
Why dream up a name that’s near impossible to remember when one of the strengths of your greatest rival is its easy-to-remember product name? The fools!
Anyhow, crap name aside, LGs new – what was it called again? – ah, yes, MFJM53 player will be available in just black and white, with pricing and availability to be announced.
LG product specs
24 May, 2006
Nokia Mobile S60 Browser Code Goes Open Source
At the W3C conference in Edinburgh today, in a move to get the mobile industry (and possibly more) to standardise on a single Web browser, Nokia has released the source code for the mobile Web browser it developed last year.
Using the same open-source frameworks used by Apple’s Safari browser, originally created by the KDE team, Nokia designed a browser for its S60 phone range, adding various enhancements designed to improve mobile browsing.
Under the open source deal, any individual software developer, third party mobile phone makers or operators can get their grubby mitts on the software engine that powers the Nokia-developed browser and customise it for their own needs.
Nokia’s S60 Web Browser for S60 is a fully fledged affair, offering full mobile browsing of complete Web pages straight off the Internet, complete with support for AJAX technologies, dynamic HTML and scripting languages.
Nokia intend to offer “active participation” with the open source community, sharing enhancements, widgets and improvements to the core browser engine in real time.
“We want to reduce the fragmentation currently in place in mobile browsing,” said Lee Epting, VP of Forum Nokia, Nokia’s software development support program.
Although sceptics may suggest the last thing rivals would want to do is to start using a Nokia browser, she insisted that the terms of the ‘liberal license’ would let anyone use the code to develop their own commercial offerings.
The source code will be made available to open source developers through the WebKit Open Source Project.
Further resources can also be found at Nokia Opensourcesite and Nokia S60 browser.
24 May, 2006
Over A Third Of All PC Software Pirated
Over a third of all packaged software installed on PCs worldwide in 2005 was pirated, according to a study released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade group charged with fighting the use of unauthorised software.
Although the percentage of dodgy software in use remained the same as last year, global losses from software piracy rose by US$1.6 billion to $34 billion, according to BSA’s figures.
Exaggerated figures?
Not everyone buys into the hefty figures though, with some economists questioning the estimated losses in the annual study.
The total is based on the price users would have paid for legitimate versions of the pirated software, but, as BSA president and CEO Robert Holleyman recently commented himself, some users would have decided not to use the software if they had to fork out for it.
In fact, some have claimed that BSA’s accounting methods are so inaccurate that it amounts to scaremongering, especially when extrapolating figures from third world countries where just a few programs at full price would cost more than a citizen’s average annual income.
More notably, IDC, the company that produces the reports, has already stated publicly that the BSA is misrepresenting the numbers, pointing out that the US$34 billion claimed “losses” aren’t actually “losses” at all – it’s just the estimated retail value of the pirated software.
Instead, IDC estimates that only one out of every ten pirated programs should be counted as an actual loss, which makes for much less of a headline-grabbing story.
Piracy league tables
Back to the BSA, Holleyman noted the anti-piracy progress being made in some countries, but insisted that, “much more needs to be done.”
Of all the countries studied, the US came out with the lowest piracy rate of all at 21 percent, but the massive size of the software market there meant that it recorded the highest claimed loss of $6.9 billion.
In second place was China with recorded losses of $3.9 billion and a piracy rate so high that anyone actually buying a registered copy of software must be seen as a bit of a weirdo – 86 percent.
In third place was France which notched up losses of $3.2 billion, accompanied by a piracy rate of 47 percent, while in Brit-land, 27 per cent of PC software used in the UK was claimed to be illegal.
In terms of outright piracy, Vietnam and Zimbabwe led the purloining world with piracy rates approaching 90 percent, followed by Indonesia at 87 and China and Pakistan at 86 percent.
Although the amount of global piracy has remained constant, the study found that some traditional piracy hotspots have decreased, with Ukraine registering the biggest drop in piracy rates last year, down 6 percentage points, with China, Russia and Morocco also managing a 4 percentage points decrease.
Next to the US, countries with the lowest piracy rates included New Zealand, Austria and Finland.
Business Software Alliance (BSA)
24 May, 2006
Moto Q Smartphone Finally Launches
Months later than expected, Motorola’s new ‘Blackberry-killer’ smartphone, the Moto Q has finally been launched on the Verizon network in the US.
Dubbed the RAZRberry, the pocket-size Q is slightly thinner than Motorola’s monster-selling RAZR phone, with the company claiming that it’s the smallest device offering a QWERTY keyboard on the market.
Powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, Motorola are describing the Moto Q as a “mini notebook” that will enable customers to leave their bulky laptops at home.
As we reported back in July 2005, the handset comes with EVDO wireless capabilities, a QVGA screen (at 320 x 240, still noticeably smaller than the 320 x 320 resolution of rival Palm Treo 700p), Bluetooth 1.2, 1.3MP camera and handy thumb scrollwheel. But no Wi-Fi.
Denny Strigl, president and CEO of Verizon Wireless, was on hand to whip up a whirlwind of PR froth: “The Moto Q offers power, style and ease-of-use in a cool ultrathin format, giving Verizon Wireless customers an uncompromising experience in one device.”
The Moto Q sure packs in a lot of functionality, offering e-mail, instant messages and short messages, backed up by business features like integration with Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat.
“We think the opportunity extends beyond business users,” enthused Mark Shockley who regales under the fabulously American job title of “vice president of seamless mobility” in Motorola’s Mobile Devices unit.
Shockley insisted that the Q is for people with a “life balance” (a what?) who want to use their phones to listen to music, take photos, record short videos and play games.
Although Motorola seem to be aiming this phone at the mass market, we see it more as a bit of superslim strumpet aiming to woo current BlackBerry/Palm Treo users.
Although both those phones command a fierecly local user base, that wafer-thin form factor might just be enough to tempt them to jump ship.
Moto Q
23 May, 2006