June 2006

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard: World Cup Scores Live To Desktop
If watching the World Cup on TV, online or down the pub wasn’t enough, Microsoft can help you stay up to date with goal-by-goal action.
They’re providing a little app (3.5Mb) for Windows users called Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. We’ll forget that to the rest of the world outside the US, the game is called Football, and focus on what it can do.
When you’ve downloaded it (after proving that you have ‘Genuine Windows’), the setup is minimal – choose your team; set how transparent you want the app to be; decide if you want automatic or manual data updates and specify an option RSS feed.
It’s a looker
It’s an attractive looking piece of software, which is slightly more that a one trick pony. The next match in your teams group will be shown, as is the current top four positions of the Group with the cumulative totals. Both of these have the option to view full details, which refreshes the screen in a scrollable window.
Scores of other matches scroll across the bottom of the window in a CNN stock price style.
Not missing a trick, they offer you the ‘opportunity’ of clicking on a link, taking you to MSN for further details.
If you specify an RSS feed (Digital-Lifestyles, natch), the headlines from these are intermittently scrolled along the bottom too.
There’s also a compact mode that only displays the particular match that’s being played.
Use-by date
This software does have a use-by date. Clearly you’re not going to get any information updated after the World Cup ends on 9th July, because …. there’s no more matches being played.
Following this you’re going to have 7 days to obsessively click around the historic match information imagining ‘what if?”
Most refreshingly, on 31 July, the software will prompt you to uninstall the software.
Microsoft Live
Microsoft Live is something that Microsoft pushing really hard. They see it as a way to try and claw back some the gain that Google has had. This is being lead by 13 June, 2006
Sony Alpha A100 dSLR: Brief Look
We had our hands on the Sony Alpha A100 last week, Sony’s first step into the Digital SLR (dSLR) market.
We’ve known for a while that Sony and Konika/Minolta would be producing a dSLR, following Sony’s purchase of the traditional SLR company. The A100 is the first product of the deal.
Sony tell us that they see the market for dSLR’s growing by 30% over the next year, which is lucky as the compact digital market appears to be stagnating. They’ve got grand plans for this market, with their stated ambition to be ‘challenging for the top position’ by 2008.
The key message from Sony with the whole of the Alpha range is “We want to make you a better photographer.” Highly appealing to those who may be scared off by crossing over from a compact camera to the SLR world.
What’s Hot
Sony have brought their own CCD technology to the party, giving a 10Mpx image, but it’s not full-frame (the sensor isn’t the size of a full 35mm film frame). They’ve combined this new CCD with anti-shake features seen on the Konica Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 5D, which stabilises the sensor instead of the lens element. Sony have labeled this Super SteadyShot.
The new Bionz image processor also adds a lot like the Dynamic Range Optimiser, which balances light levels between subject and background when taking photos into the light from a dark place.
A feature brought over from the Konika/Minolta includes EyeStart. Two sensors just below the viewfinder detects when the camera is brought to the eye and prepare the camera to start shooting.
As with previous cameras, Sony are working with Carl ZeissThe SLR lenses from Konika/Minolta will fit the A100, so the brave might be able to pick up a bargain or two buying them second-hand, quite likely when there have been 16 million of them sold worldwide.
First impressions
These are all based on the brief time we had with it. We plan to do a more in-depth review in a few weeks time.
First impressions are that of a quality camera. The battery grip is solid and comfortable, giving the impression that handling it over an extended period wouldn’t be tiresome.
The materials used vary over the body depending on the function and need. It’s with interest that we saw that the material around the shutter button was highly reflective providing a good feel, and we assume, reducing the risk of the area wearing excessively.

Sony Alpha A100 test shot – See the whole set at original resolution
When taking photos, small things like the solid sound that the shutter makes after you press the shutter button, as it raises out of the way to expose the CCD, also reassures you that it’s quality.
On the back of the body is a 2.5″ Clear Photo LCD which provides a very wide viewing angle, useful for showing off your recently taken shots. We can also confirm that Sony’s efforts to make the screen viewable in sunlight have been successful.
Sony claim that all of the commonly used functions are placed on dials, close to hand on the body, rather than burying it within on-screen menus.
Showing that the camera is a transition between Konika/Minolta and Sony, the storage on the camera is the size of compact flash. Not wanting to appear lacking in their support for their own format, Sony provide a converter to support Memory Stick.

Sony Alpha A100 test shot – See the whole set at original resolution
The lenses that come with it, especially when the two pack is considered, give good value, but as is so often the case with bundled lenses, we wonder if these will be cast aside after a short time. Although appearing to be competent, small differences from after-market lenses like the mountings being plastic, not metal, give pointers to the build quality.
Our only reservation is over the quality of the photos taken. Initially they looked great, but when zoomed to full screen we were alarmed to see the pixilation of the image. We’re not sure if this was down to the camera we used being on some strange settings or if the camera has a problem. We’ll know more when we get our hands on it for a longer period.

Sony Alpha A100 test shot – See the whole set at original resolution
Pricing and availability
The Alpha A100 is keenly priced
£599.99 – Body only
£699.99 – Body and 18-70 Lens
£849.99 – Body,18-70 and 75-300 Lenses
Sony are quoting that the whole kit and caboodle will be available in July 2006.
12 June, 2006
NSA To Harvest Social Networks?
Think carefully the next time you edit your Flickr or Myspace profile. New Scientist reported last week that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” For many the move is hardly surprising given the ongoing erosion of personal privacy as a result of 9/11 and makes George Orwell and Philip K Dick’s dark imaginings about the workings of big government (they gave us the concepts of thought-crime and pre-crime respectively) a depressing reality.
Many are saying that it bears all the hallmarks of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program or the “blueprint for the total surveillance society” as it was dubbed by Lee Tien of the EFF. The program aimed to gather digital information from a variety of sources to aid in the tracking and capture of terrorists but was suspended in 2002 after a public outcry over privacy.
The New Scientist report speculates that the NSA plans to use semantic-web tools to plot connections between individuals. A paper promoting just such a process was delivered at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh last month. The paper, titled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, described how conflict of interest in the scientific peer review process could be avoided by plotting the relationships between individuals, by analyzing the RDF tags of data from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social software service and the computer science bibliography website DBLP. New Scientist noted that the research was part-funded by Advanced Research Development Activity who spend the NSA’s research cash.
This news follows the report by USA Today on June 1st that the FBI had asked companies including Google, Microsoft and AOL (amongst others) to store Web usage histories for up to two years to assist with the investigations into child pornography and terrorism. Lee Tien observed that the Justice Department was “asking ISP’s to really become an arm of the government”.
In Europe, the adoption of similar approaches has been attempted with less success. In 2003 the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that the government abandon plans to get ISP’s to store usage data for six years but should still ask the companies to keep data as and when law enforcers required.
The APIG report (PDF), which was delivered ahead of the consultation process for the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) Part 2, made the specific recommendation that
“a specific prohibition should be put into RIPA to prevent access to communications traffic data for ‘predictive use’. If particular patterns of behaviour were highly correlated to criminal behaviour then it might become possible for ‘fishing expeditions’ to detect these patterns to be seen a proportionate action. We agree that this type of access to traffic data raises considerable concern and do not believe it should be permitted under an ‘internal authorisation’ regime.
In September 2005 the European Commission adopted a proposal that would see telecommunications data held for one year and Internet data for six months and, last month, the European Court annulled the agreement which compelled airlines to submit private data on passengers flying to the US.
It’s not just us that thinks that the Global War on Terror has been used by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to infringe personal liberty with precious little evidence of positive results. Privacy groups have warned about the dangers of “automated intelligence profiling” citing the potential for inaccuracies, misuse and abuse.
Governments have hardly proven themselves capable custodians so far. In the UK recent blunders at the Home Office have seen thousands of individuals wrongly branded as criminals due to inefficient manual administration systems. Add government fecklessness to the huge quantity of incomplete, exaggerated and plain wrong data entered by ourselves about ourselves on social software sites and you could have the ingredients for a totalitarian, bureaucratic hell, worthy of Kafka.
12 June, 2006
Anti-DRM FlashMobs Hit Apple Stores
Saturday saw anti-DRM protests at eight Apple stores across the USA organised by DefectiveByDesign, who are running an on-going ‘Campaign to Eliminate DRM.’
The protests took place between 10am and noon, where those involved got dressed up in brightly coloured HazMat (hazardous material) suits, stood outside the shops carrying placards and handing out leaflets.
They argue that it is unreasonable, among other things, that purchasers of music tracks on iTunes are not able to resell their music once they have finished with it – a right they previously had when they used to buy physical media.
Where as to most people DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, Defective By Design label it ‘Digital Restrictions Management.’ Their particular beef with Apple is that, because of the use of DRM, Apple are locking-in people who buy music tracks at the iTunes store.
It’s the first time we’ve heard to a flashmob being used for anything approaching useful.
Being online-types there’s loads of media to look at whether is be photos and a number of videos from Chicago and San Francisco.

List of Apple stores affected
Apple Store – 1 Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Apple Store – 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
Apple Store – 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105
Apple Store – 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141
Apple Store – 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153
Apple Store – 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h
Apple Store – 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093
Apple Store – 189 The Grove Drive Los Angeles, CA 90036
DefectiveByDesign call to arms
12 June, 2006
Skype-me in eBay Auctions?
Word is spreading that the long-antcipated integration of Skype into eBay’s auction site is close at hand.
eBay are holding their annual developers conference, eBay Live, this week in Las Vegas. There are an amazing 10,000 people going along to the sell-out event.
John Donahoe, president of eBay’s Marketplace unit told the assembled eBay-fans and software developers that there would be a significant announcement about it on Tuesday during Bill Cobb’s keynote speech.
The inclusion of a SkpyeMe, click-to-call button is a no-brainer. Anything that makes the potential purchaser more relaxed about spending their money is good for all concerned – the seller, purchaser and of course, eBay.
Beyond actually physically meeting the seller (you know, like people used to do in shops), voice gets closer to the norm, and the video conference feature currently in Beta with Skype gets as close as you can. The added advantages of video is the ability of the purchaser to ask the seller to turn around the object for sale and ask what the ding in the back of it is.
Skype recently introduced Skypecasting, the ability to broadcast to up to 100 Skype users. While it’s being used for a wide variety of innovative application such as learning of languages and small music concerts, we see the eBay-centric usage being live auctions.
Other things that have come up at eBay Live include eBay Blogs and Wiki’s.
Wall Street hasn’t been that keen on eBay of late with their stock dropping over 20% since they bought Skype.
12 June, 2006
Wikia: Wikipedia In Disguise?
What’s the difference between a Wikia and a Wikipedia? Trivia, mostly – but also, Gil Penchina (pictured below). Penchina has spent eight years running eBay as a general manager and told me it was “like a whole career with any ordinary company, and I want to stop.”
So Gil has started his own gang. He’s the new CEO of Wikia, which is (at first sight, anyway) exactly like Wikipedia, right down to being founded by the same guy – Jimmy Wales – but it’s designed to relieve the pressure on the main site to cover trivia like soap TV shows.
The company announced itself in a Wiki entry on its own site saying: “Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia.”
But it’s not all Star Trek, as you might deduce from that. Try “Archaeology” for example: “The archaeology Wikia is for any archaeology related content, and for the archaeological community to share ideas on this topic.” Why isn’t that on Wikipedia? or “Astronomy”? – “The astronomy Wikia is for all astronomy topics.”
But a little roaming around exposes the difference: it’s a “community thing.” According to the Astronomy Wikia, “The wiki was started with a focus specifically on topics related to the Mid Atlantic Star Party and will include reports from MASP attendees.”
Is there a real need for this? Gil thinks yes, definitely – but the way he talks, it’s not altogether clear who exactly is needing it. For example, try the “Buffyverse” Wikia which was founded on 15 October last year.
That’s got to be a goodie, right? Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the spinoff, Angel, are two of the most cult-like of cult-media TV shows. It’s not only got meaningless violence by cute, tight-busted teens, but also supernatural demons and Powers That Be – and any true Buffy fan will also assure you, a line in wry comedy that rivals anything the best of British TV comedy could offer.
And despite all that, there’s nothing there. Hit the button “article” for and all you get is: “You have followed a link to a page that does not exist yet. If you are here by mistake, just click your browser’s back button.” And off you go, kid; you’re effectively going to found the Buffy Wikia.
Why would you do that? In Gil’s view of the future, of course, it would be to prevent the more serious Wikipedia from being cluttered with Buffy trivia. Too late, surely? – but even if it isn’t, is “good for Wikipedia” the same as “good for Wikia?”
Out in the real world, of course, people run fan sites without feeling any need to use a Wikipedia entry. If they think a Wiki is a good way to do a fan site, the software for running a Wiki is available – many are free. All you need is a nice URL like (say) BuffyGuide or BuffyWorld and in that case, the “community” can create advertising and subscription and screensaver revenue – and you get to keep the money, not give it all to Gill and Jimmy.
Gil accepts that the financial success of Wikia isn’t yet assured. He’s not pouring cash into it. It’s not flooded with expensive staff; it’s going to grow as it grows, he says.
On the other hand, lots of people have made lots of money out of supporting groups and communities. And a lot of people have been pouring scorn on the trivial content of the Wikipedia – and saying “it’s not a Real Encyclopaedia, is it?” in mocking tones – a criticism that deeply offends Jimmy Wales.
If the Wikia concept does catch on, it looks like it may be slow. As one disappointed visitor to the “Doom” Wikia complained: “wow, I just came to the main page of this wiki and got excited to read about Doom, it’s got coverage of the games, the mods, everything I’d want to know. Then I got to the end of the paragraph on the main page, and had no idea how to access any of this cool content. how about a link or two on the main page to get people started? a table of contents or something perhaps? there’s just nothing there.”
Doom isn’t the only empty cupboard. There are some obviously promising Wikias, but far more that are not yet.
Gil just nodded and smiled. “I’m not looking for instant frenzy,” he conceded. “I was really thinking of retiring, but Jimmy said this needed doing, and it may suit me after the stress of eBay for the last eight years…”
9 June, 2006
Nokia N80: Screen and Browser Set To Stun
The dream of effortless – and easy to see – mobile Web surfing has taken a step forward with the release of Nokia’s N80 smartphone. The new device is rapidly garnering praise for its stunning screen which takes the stress out of Web browsing and picture viewing.
With a resolution of 352 x 416 pixels and the capacity to display 262,144 colours, the N80 leaves behind some of its N-series brothers and outdoes most QVGA (that’s Quarter VGA or 240×320 resolution, to you) devices.
The holy grail of mobile screens is full VGA – a massive 480 x 640 pixel resolution. The first full VGA device, Sharp’s 904SH, has already been launched in Japan and though there’s no release date as yet for the technology over here, it’s just a matter of time. Until then the N80 is causing industry commentators like 3G.co.uk to proclaim it the best display they’ve seen on this class of phone.
The increased density of the display makes the interface more crisp and easier to read and Nokia have taken advantage of this by utilizing vector graphics to sharpen up icons and fonts, reducing the blockiness associated with lower resolution devices.
The browsing experience is enhanced by Nokia’s new Mini Map feature. Mini Map allows full HTML Web pages to be navigated by clever use of multiple, semi-transparent windows, offering different views of the page. The phone also utilizes the impressive S60 browser recently covered which now sports a visual history feature and RSS support.
The N80 is pretty sharp on taking pictures too. With a 3.2 megapixel camera built-in, the N80 can deliver stills at 2048 x 1536 pixels, substantial enough to challenge regular digi cameras. Video recording is good at 352 x 288, the same resolution as the N70 and N90, and a VGA camera is mounted on the front for video calls.
The N80 is bursting at the seams with impressive features including connectivity in just about every standard going (UPnP, Bluetooth 2.0, 3G,Wi-Fi), playback of music files (WMA,MP3, AAC, AAC+) and integrated video-sharing and blogging tools. With all that and the eye popping display, the N80 might be the phone of the moment.
9 June, 2006
Billy Bragg vs MySpace
There’s mutterings of some discontent around MySpace, the insanely popular social site.
Billy Bragg, well known in the UK for his rebel-rousing tunes, has taken a stance against MySpace by removing his music in protest of MySpace’s Terms and Conditions.
Bragg and ‘his people’ posted a comment on their MySpace blog (we do love it when a companies tools are used against them), decrying what they say are completely unreasonable terms.
TERMS: (as of 17th March 2006)
By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully- paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the Content posted by you may remain on the MySpace.com servers after you have removed the Content from the Services, and MySpace.com retains the rights to those copies.
The summary? MySpace can exploit the music/content that is put on the site, worldwide, without payment – and sub-license it infinitely.
The original Bragg posting was made back in mid-may, but was highlighted when it was picked up by the New York Daily News this week.
Since then, there have been many announcing the impending death of MySpace with thoughts that all musicians would follow suit and MySpace would implode. As yet we haven’t seen any signs of this.
It appears that MySpace didn’t intend to own everything and are putting it down to sloppy lawyering and say they intend to straighten things out. MySpace spokesman Jeff Berman, told the New York Daily News, “Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist’s work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends,” adding the all important. “Obviously, we don’t own their music or do anything with it that they don’t want.”
There’s a difficult balance to be had here. Clearly MySpace is putting out millions of musicians tracks daily and needs to be able to do this, without having a separate contract with each artist. Running alongside this need is the equally important need not to terrify the musicians into thinking that all of their music are belong to us (MySpace).
Billy Bragg’s MySpace
9 June, 2006
Freeview TV Homes Exceed Analogue For First Time
We wouldn’t normally bore you with tales of how many more percent of the UK population have joined the Digital TV-owning army, but this one is a significant one.
For the first time, the number of households having the BBC-backed Free-to-Air service, Freeview, has exceeded their analogue cousins. Nearly 7.1m have Freeview and 6.4m are still analogue only.
Freeview will also be pretty pleased that for the third successive quarter their sales have exceeded the 1 million mark, achieving 1.2m between January and March, up 40% over the same period last year.
Digital satellite is still the Digital Daddy, with 7.7m homes subscribing to Sky and the remaining 645,000 receiving free-to-view satellite.
There would have been relief at the recently-merged UK cable companies when they saw that there’d been an increase in the number of subscribers. The gain for NTL is only 5,000 subscribers in real terms as the additional new now-digital 70,000 digital cable subscribers were laid off against the 65,000 analogue subscribers who switched. These figures relate to the pre-merged companies.
Interestingly there still around 500,000 analogue subscribers out of the 3.3m total cable subscriber-base. Changing these has got to be a priority if NTL want to start making the returns they need from subscribers.
TV over ADSL First
For the first time Ofcom has reported separate figures for TV over ADSL services. Currently this is only London-focused HomeChoice, but they will be joined in short order by other IPTV companies like BT Vision. HomeChoice gained at a rate of 21.4% over the same period in 2005, ending with 48,545 subscribers.
Breaking down Sky’s figures
There’s some interest to be had comparing Sky’s Q4, 2005 figures with Q1 2006 – a couple of surprises lie in there.
Churn (number of subscribers leaving the service) is up to 11.4% over 10.6% and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is down £5 to £392 from £397. This doesn’t sound like a lot until you look at it in terms of income loss – over £38m.
On the positive front there was a gain of 87,000 households, with multi-room households gain 84,000 and Sky+ users up 149,000, now hitting 1,430,000.
Additional TV Sets – Ongoing problems
Ofcom are estimating that 38% of Freeview sales are intended to secondary TV sets which will start to allay a lot of fears.
The big hurdle for the UK digital switch-over gang is the replacement of the non-primary TV set, the bedroom TV & video, little Johnny’s TV and the spare that the babysitter uses. When the analogue-broadcast lights go off is when these people start to yell.
Ofcom UK Digital TV Q1 2006 report (PDF)
8 June, 2006
Samsung Announce True VGA Mobile Display
Mobile phone companies have been striving to develop high resolution displays to capitalise on the potential of multi-media content. This week, Samsung joined the growing list of manufacturers who have created a true VGA display suitable for mobile phones.
The 1.98″ LCD panel was debuted on Tuesday at the 2006 Society for Information Display International Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco. The screen uses the company’s proprietary amorphous silicon (a-Si) technology to achieve the same resolution as most desktop PC’s. It can display up to 16 million colours and supports extremely fast data transfer rates making it ideal for viewing video content.
According to Samsung, the screen has 10 times as many pixels per square inch as a typical 40″ HD TV meaning that your Big Brother clips will be rendered in super high definition.
VGA has been available on handheld devices for a while now. Toshiba debuted the first PDA with VGA display (the e805) back in December 2003 and the first VGA mobile, Sharp’s 904SH, launched in Japan in April this year. The latter has four times the resolution of the average QVGA (Quarter VGA) display and face recognition functions that authenticates users by their facial features.
All of this pixel-mania may be pleasing to electronics CEO’s and geek tech-heads but there are questions about the value of such high definition in such a small device. Higher resolution means greater pixel density which means smaller graphics. This doesn’t, necessarily, equate with ease of use. As one industry insider commented, “The fundamental issue is interface design not resolution. High resolution is primarily useful for viewing pictures – still or moving. Putting a Windows style UI (user interface) on a screen with a resolution greater than the human eye can detect doesn’t deliver a better product.”
Nokia has already had a stab at addressing this issue with their S60 browser Mini Map function which allows the user navigate around full HTML pages by zooming in and out. A feature which may point the way for future developments in interface design.
8 June, 2006