February 2007 – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

Skype Pro: Europe Details Emerge

Sykpe Pro: Europe Details Emerge As you know, Skype Pro was announced in the middle of January. Today the pricing was confirmed.

For €2 + VAT per month, subscribers will be getting

Zero cents per minute calling to domestic landlines in the UK previously 1.7c per minute
Free Skype Voicemail (normally €15 per year)
€30 discount on SkypeIn numbers
€5 Skype Credit included as part of the introductory offer (see below)
A €30 discount on a Philips VoIP 841 cordless phone
A €10 discount on an SMC WiFi phone
Additional discounts on a series of Skype Extras are also available including desktop sharing, avatars, emoticons and ring tones

It’s not all free on the calls to landlines, as each call made will have a 3.9c connection charge made against it.

The lucky dwellers of Europe (specifically Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the UK) will benefit from this first.

Other countries worldwide will follow in 2007.

Skype Pro

Beardy Big Cheese At Google Predicts Internet Growth Driven By Mobiles

One of the big cheeses at Google, vice president and chief ‘Internet evangelist’ (say wah’?!) Vinton G. Cerf has been shining up his crystal ball and coming up with his predictions for the future.

Beardy Big Cheese At Google Predicts Internet Growth Driven By Mobiles Looking deeper, deeper, deeper into his shiny orb (oo-er), the beardy Cerf revealed that it won’t be personal computers fuelling the growth of the internet. Instead he reckons that the expansion of the worldwide web will be powered by mobile phones, with countries like India snapping up zillions of the fellas and getting online en masse.

Talking to Yahoo, Cerf whipped out his Big Book of Internet Facts (BBOIF) and observed that the amount of people accessing the web has expanded quicker than Fatty Arbuckle’s waistband at a pie eating contest, with the numbers soaring from just 50 million in 1997 to nearly 1.1 billion today.

Despite this, the web still only reaches a miserly sixth of the world’s population, prompting Cerf to comment, “You will get those other 5.5 billion people only when affordability increases and the cost of communication goes down.”

Beardy Big Cheese At Google Predicts Internet Growth Driven By Mobiles “The mobile phone has become an important factor in the Internet revolution,” he added.

Flicking further through his BBOIF, Cerf said that there are 2.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide with numbers rocketing in developing countries led by China and India.

India is already adding seven million mobile-phone users a month – enough to tempt British telecom giant Vodafone to shell out over $11 billion dollars for a controlling stake in local mobile outfit Hutch-Essar – with new Internet-enabled features and services likely to reel in more online users.

Naturally, Google wants a slab o’the action, and has been expanding its research and service offices in India, hoping to increase the current meagre total of just 40 million people online – just 3.5 percent of India’s enormous population.

Via

Nikon Coolpix P5000 Announced

Nikon Coolpix P5000 Announced Nikon has announced several additions to its new Coolpix lineup today, but the one that’s caught our eye is its high-end Coolpix P5000 prosumer model.

The specs look enticing: 10 megapixel sensor, stablised 3.5x zoom, high ISO range, 2.5-inch screen, add-on lenses and a neat, all-black compact design (3.9 x 2.5 x 1.6 in.).

Nikon Coolpix P5000 Announced We like proper image stabilisation (rather than the ISO-booting sleight-of-hand touted by some makers) and the P5000 comes with optical lens shift VR (Vibration Reduction) technology borrowed from Nikon’s upmarket SLR camera systems.

With clever-clogs angular velocity sensors (we could have used some of them last night in the pub) measuring camera movement, the camera automatically calculates the amount of compensation required, with the VR lens unit adjusting position to negate offset camera shake.

Nikon claim that their VR system provides sharp images up to three steps slower, which should give the camera an edge over some of its rivals in low light shooting.

Nikon Coolpix P5000 Announced In line with most of its rivals, the P500’s ISO range soars up into the grainy heights of ISO 3200 capability (at a reduced 5M capacity), with an Anti-Shake and High-Sensitivity mode automatically selecting the optimal rating.

Photographers who can’t stop themselves fiddling and tweaking about with any dial they can get their hands on will enjoy the camera’s Program, Shutter Priority,
Aperture Priority Auto and Manual modes, backed by 16 scene-optimised Scene modes and seven different movie modes.

Nikon Coolpix P5000 Announced They’ll also enjoy the optical viewfinder, even if it is a bit of a squinty affair, with the rechargeable Lithium-ion battery EN-EL5 promising around 250 shots on a single charge. There’s a vaguely useful 21meg of internal memory with a SD card slot offering SDHC card compatibility.

Nikon have also announced optional accessories including a 0.67x Wide-angle Converter and a 3.0x Telephoto Converter lenses, with the camera’s built in hotshoe ready and willing to accept flashguns from Nikon’s advanced Speedlight range.

DPreview

UK Punters Are Feeling The MP3 Music Love

A new survey by Q Research discovered that a third of UK consumers aged 11 to 25 were slapping down up to £5 a month on digital tunes, with three per cent shelling out £25 or more a month.

UK Punters Are Feeling The MP3 Music Love Not all the kids are feeling the digital love though, with 45 per cent of respondents spending but ne’er a bean on music.

A hefty 85 per cent of respondents were found to be owners of MP3 players with the ubiquitous Apple iPod being the most popular device by a long chalk.

The survey found that the young ‘uns were the biggest users of free download services – almost half – but 43 per cent of under 16s were still paying up to £10 a month, with a hardcore nine per cent splashing out as much as £10 to £25 a month.

UK Punters Are Feeling The MP3 Music Love When it comes to the real big spenders, the lucrative 20-24 year olds sector were flashing the most cash, with two thirds spending up to £10 a month on downloads, and 16 per cent spend from £10 to £20 a month.

Downloading tunes direct to mobile phones is still a niche interest though, with punters put off by the high cost.

Liz Nelson, chairman of Q Research, commented that the survey showed that, “while there is already a very buoyant market for paying for MP3 files from the internet among young people, they are very aware of the cost of downloading files to their phones.”

“This finding is underlined by other projects we have done, where we have discovered opposition among young people to watching video or receiving video ads to their mobiles because of the cost,” she added

Source

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Released

Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom After a lengthy sojourn in beta, Adobe has finally released version one of its Photoshop Lightroom photographic software

Aimed at pro/enthusiast photographers, the software aims to “simplify photography from shoot to finish” by providing a simple interface for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs.

Boasting support for more than 150 camera raw formats, the program lets users edit, adjust and experiment with photographs while protecting the original data, whether it be in JPEG, TIFF, PNG or RAW formats.

Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom With more and more users shooting digitally and hard drives rapidly filling up with zillions of image files, there’s gold in them thar hills for software companies providing solid image management tools, and Adobe is hoping to nudge ahead of respected rivals like Portfolio, ACDSee and iVew MediaPro (now swallowed up by Microsoft).

Naturally, Lightroom comes with a super-slick interface and a veritable shedload of tools for viewing, organising and managing your precious snaps, including batch processing, file renaming, DVD back-up and keyword searching.

Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom The new Key Metadata Browser comes with an improved ranking and rating system, sporting colour labels and a pick/reject system.

Photos can be fine tuned using tools for globally correcting white balance, exposure, tone curves, lens distortion, and colour casts, with “task-oriented modules” helping users get through typical workflow jobs.

There’s also a new tool for tweaking hue, saturation and luminance, and Clone and Healing brushes for dealing with the pesky bits of dust that seem to head en masse for our Nikon’s sensor the second we change lenses.

Adobe Releases Photoshop Lightroom Photoshop Lightroom runs under Mac OS X 10.4 or Windows XP (and, presumably) Windows Vista, and will be knocking out for an upmarket £125 (excl VAT) before April 30 rising to a hefty £175 (excl VAT) after that date.

Photoshop Lightroom

Vista Launch: Boxed Copy Sales Down, PC Sales Up

Although punters waited an eternity for the chuffing thing to be released, first-week retail sales figures for boxed copies of Windows Vista were almost 60 per cent down on sales registered for the first week for its predecessor, Windows XP.

Vista Launch: Boxed Copy Sales Down, PC Sales Up The figures, from the market research group NPD Group, calculated that the dollar value of Vista retail box copies shifted during the week of 28 January crashed 32 per cent compared to the value of XP box copies sold during its debut in October 2001.

It’s not all bad news for Billy and the gang though, as the sales of new PCs running Vista went through the roof after Vista’s launch, up a massive 67 per cent over the same period last year.

Conceding that direct comparisons are difficult as many stores were clearing out their XP inventory prior to Vista’s launch, Chris Swenson, a software analyst with NPD commented that the figures, “still reflects a fair bit of growth.”

Swenson added that the seemingly contradictory figures are down to consumers twigging that they need a beefier system to be able to run the bells and whistles of Vista, so some are going out and buying a new PC rather than upgrading.

Vista Launch: Boxed Copy Sales Down, PC Sales Up There’s no such confusion with Office 2007 sales however, which recorded very strong retail sales, more than doubling the first week sales for Office 2003.

There’ll also be much hand rubbing at Microsoft with the news that consumers are upgrading to the higher end versions of Vista, with the average selling price recorded at around US$207 – up two thirds on the average selling price of XP.

“So, although total dollars were down compared to XP, I think the preliminary data shows that Microsoft’s gamble on a new high-end Vista SKU will help keep dollar volumes from declining as rapidly as unit volumes in the near term,” observed Swenson.

Via

Wikipedia Goes Top Ten In The US

Wikipedia Goes Top Ten In The US Wikimedia Foundation’s popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia has now become one of the most popular websites in the US.

According to analysts comScore Networks, Wikipedia elbowed itself into a top ten place for the first time in January, with its 42.9 million unique visitors earning it a ninth place ranking.

This puts the site ahead of web big-hitters like The New York Times, Apple and Viacom, who ranked 10th, 11th and 12th in January 2007 by comScore’s figures.

Although Wikipedia has hit the top ten spot in other countries, its rise in the US has been dramatic, with the site only managing a 33rd spot with 18.3 million unique visitors in January last year.

Wikipedia Goes Top Ten In The US By July 2006 it has soared up to the 18th spot with 28.1 million unique visitors and by November it was hovering outside the hallowed top ten slot with 39.1 million unique visitors giving it a 12th place ranking.

ComScore explained that the Wikipedia total also includes other Wikimedia sites, like Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks and Wikinews, but said that the vast majority of the traffic comes from the Wikipedia encyclopedias.

Although it seems like it’s been around for ages, Wikipedia only started in January 2001 but can now boast 1.6 million articles on its English-language site, and over 5 million articles in other language sites.

Wikipedia sites also perform well globally, with comScore ranking them sixth overall in December 2005, ratcheting up a total of almost 165 million unique visitors.

Wikipedia

Blair To Write To Each Road Pricing Petitioner

Blair To Write To Each Road Pricing Petitioner Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of attention drawn to the huge number of votes cast by the British public in an online petition calling for the “Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.”

Over 1.5 million people have signed to show that they reject the idea from the UK government to force UK drivers to have to pay £200 for the privilege of having all of their car journeys monitored, recorded and charged accordingly.

On Saturday, the Guardian newspaper picked up on the idea that, as part of the registering views on the site, users had to enter their names, postal and email addresses, giving the UK government direct contact with each and every person who used the petition to voice their disapproval on the road usage charging scheme. They postulate that this gives them the opportunity of contacting the objectors directly to try and cajole them into changing their minds.

Quite if this is something that the petitioners realised when they placed their votes is unclear.

The site itself isn’t doesn’t really help either “our email will not be published, and is collected only to confirm your account and to keep you informed of response to this petition.”

Closer examination of the Privacy Policy makes it a little clearer- “unless you ask us not to, to write to you a maximum of two times about the issues raised in the petition.”

Blair To Write To Each Road Pricing Petitioner

The straw poll that we’ve taken among some of those who had placed their votes, felt their email addresses were only required to validate the vote. They weren’t aware of the chance to opt-out of being contacted at a later date.

Blair writes about writing
Sunday’s Observer sees Tony Blair publishing a piece explaining what a great idea it is to have over 1.5 million people telling him he’s wrong, and how it has sparked debate … which luckily enough was just what he wanted … he tells us now. (Let’s hope he doesn’t mean like his nuclear power debate).

He goes on to say “What it has given us is the ability, which was simply not there before, to engage with those who have signed the petition,” he then confirms that “Over the next few days, I will be sending out a response to everyone who has signed the petition against road charging, explaining the problems the country faces and why I believe road charging is surely part of the answer here as it is in many other countries.”

So is the whole e-petition idea a ruse just to find out who opposes government policy – then use this information to write to them directly to ‘inform them of why they’re wrong not to be thinking the same way as the government.

If they find out this isn’t successful with all of the voters, they will be taken into detention centers and have it beaten into them (OK, I made this last bit up)

I suspect people will want to have their say, but when they receive government spin in return, will stop using their real email addresses and start taking advantage of temporary email addresses like Temporary inbox.

The Petition

Many people have also questioned whether they should pay yet more money to use their cars as there’s already an effective tax per mile of car usage – the heavily taxed petrol that the UK government already imposes.

GRAW 2 Interview with Christian Allen, Creative Director, Red Storm: Podcast

GRAW 2 Interview with Christian Allen, Creative Director, Red Storm: Podcast Christian Allen, Creative Director at Red Storm, responsible for the online multi-player portion of GRAW 2 (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare 2) and I sat down for 15 minutes at the exclusive First Look in London.

I’ve already reviewed the game, which is highly impressive and took the chance to touch on quite a few different areas with Christian in this chat. These include the new Spawning system that avoids Spawn Camping; the advances in graphics for the new game; what the next stage of video games might be; how their early prototyping works during their current develop process; the new storm shooter weapons in the game (CX4 storm & RX4 storm); how they research the future weapons they’re including in GRAW2, like the Natick Solider Center (catch phrase “We’re the science behind the Soldier”) and their Future Force Warrior (FFW) Program; find out his favourite GRAW 2 weapons; discuss the stuff they’ve had to pull from the game because it’s too futuristic, like solider health monitoring; and how the new health patching media function will really encourage team play.

It’s quite a ride. Click below to listen …

[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/christian-allen-GRAW-2-interview.mp3]

Buy GRAW 2 on Amazon UK or Amazon US