Following the surprise resignation of SMG’s Chief executive Andrew Flanagan, the pieces are in place for consolidation of the Scottish and Ulster media outfits that provide the Celts with their ITV services.
SMG’s share price has been underperforming and in this time of ‘challenging market’ conditions in the advertising sector, any opportunity to trim costs will be welcomed by city investors and commentators alike.
SMG, although mainly associated with television, has a diverse media portfolio including the cinema advertising outfit Pearl and Dean along with Virgin Radio. The two look a good fit, the well managed UTV stable owns the Wireless group that includes the successful Talksport station and is becoming active in what they refer to charmingly as New Media. UTV had been named as possible buyers of Irelands’ commercial broadcaster TV3, but this was ultimately unsuccessful, it may now look to expand in Scotland.
With many predicting the imminent departure of Charles Allen, ITV, a shareholder in SMG has troubles enough of it’s own to be ruled out of a takeover.
Although it would have a battle to justify expansion north of the border now, given time the advantages to all concerned mean a single ITV is likely to be the final end-game.
Yahoo! and Motorola have cuddled up in their synergetic beds and fluffed up their co-branding pillows to announce a new deal that will see Yahoo! Go pre-installed on millions of Motorola handsets next year. 
With two of the mobile phone big boys onboard, we reckon there’s been a fair amount of backside-kicking going on at arch-rivals Google, who must be well miffed to see Yahoo grab such a huge chunk of the market. 
With more and more phones offering internet access, punters want to be able to easily access services, search the web and grab their mail on the move. 
If you thought that YouTube was going to rule the roost forever in delivering videos over a Browser, think again. 
Every two or three videos that you watch will trigger the showing of a video advert. They’re currently running at 30-seconds, and I’d imagine that they’ll stay at that or less. Anymore and people will see it too much as a barrier to seeing the content they want. Most of the ads I’ve seen today have been for the Library of Congress 
It wasn’t that long ago that you’d be sure to garner approving nods from your fellow executives if you pulled out a pen that lit up when your mobile phone had a call coming in (yes! we had one too!). 
If this multi-function pen has excited your wavelengths, be advised that it’s only available in limited quantities for a limited time only, so get your order in quick! 
According to figures compiled by mmetrics.com, a research firm who strut around in the exciting world of mobile market measurement, when it comes to mobile phones there’s a hefty transatlantic gulf in smartphone tastes. 
French say “Nous aimons Nokia”
“Ja ist Nokia gut,” say Germans
Americans go ape for Palm
There’s been tons of financial results coming out around now, but we’ve spared you from them – we’re nice like that. Today we felt it was worth an exception. 
As is well known, one way Google does so well is by getting other sites (partners) to carry their clients advertising for them (of which Digital-lifestyles is one). In accounting-ese/jargon, they refer to it as Traffic Acquisition Costs or TAC. These increased to $785 million, up from $723 million in its first quarter. The TAC (see how quickly you can get into the swing of this jargon) remains at 32% of their advertising revenue, giving a rough understanding that Google take 68% of these ad earnings – pretty healthy in their favour. 
One of the reasons I found myself being wooed over to the Windows Mobile dark side last year was after Palm unforgivably failed to deliver on their promise of Wi-Fi drivers for the Treo 650. 
Although the lack of Wi-Fi remains a major disappointment on the Treo (it’s also noticeably absent from the latest Treo 700p, much to the consternation of their loyal user base), T-Mobile’s superb unlimited data Web’n’Walk deal more than makes up for it, offering unlimited GPRS data for just £7 a month. 
Although onboard Wi-Fi appears to remains a distant dream for the Treo there is at least the option to use the Enfora Wi-Fi sled (review coming shortly). 
There is, however, a way to access Skype on a Palm via a service called 
YouTube is being sued by a video news service, Los Angeles News Service for infringing the copyright of their video material, in particular, the footage of the 1992 LA riots, including the horrific attack on a truck driver. 
YouTube has made moves to reduce copyrighted material on their sites, including limiting the length of videos that can be uploaded. 
The terrible day that the mobile phone companies had been hoping wasn’t going to arrive, is here. Skype have today announced four WiFi handsets that let you send and receive calls without switching your computer on while wanding around – err, like a mobile phone. They’ve been expected for a while, but are finally getting closer to the hands of the public, being as they’ll start selling in Q3 this year. 
We got our hand on the NetGear SPH101 recently and were really impressed with the solid build and how easy it was to use. The Skype interface was loyal to the computer-based editions, with the graphics being an exact replica. 
If you enjoyed Hitchcock’s Rear Window movie, you can now play a James Stewart character in your very own home thanks to Brando’s new USB Web Cam With Telescope. 
The manual focus Webcam also offers video with a frame rate of 30fps at 320×240 and 15fps at 640×480. 
Being a Brando product, it’s as cheap as chips – just $26 – and only available via mail order from Hong Kong.