April 2007

Ikodot Sports Finder For Cameras
Photographers looking for a simple and effective way to quickly frame shots might like to swivel their snapping eyes in the direction of the Ikodot.
An unusual and rather innovative thing, the Ikodot is best described as a ‘sports finder’ and is used for framing pictures without the need to look through a LCD display or peer through a small optical viewfinder.
A bit like a gun sight in use, the finder slots into a regular camera hotshoe and takes the form of a rectangular metal outline with two small raised metal balls in the middle.
The user lines up the two balls to frame a photograph, with the lens coverage dictated by how close the finder is to your face.
So for 21mm wideangle coverage, the user must hold the camera so that it ‘touches their cheek,’ while holding the camera so it’s touching the ‘average’ hooter will give 35mm coverage. For 50mm coverage, the camera must be held a thumbs-width from your nose.
Of course, this process is going to need some fine tuning and practice before it gets anywhere near as close as using a LCD screen, but it does have the advantage of being fast and discrete: photographers trying to sneak some snaps at a theatre, for example, will appreciate not having to illuminate the hall with each shot.
The Ikodot also offers advantages for four-eyed photographers who perhaps find it hard to focus on a LCD screen or get close up to an optical viewfinder. It’s a shame that the finder can’t fold flat when not in use though.
The Ikodot is available in graphite and chrome finishes from www.ikodot.com for $99.
Read some photographers discussing the Ikodot here: DPReview
4 April, 2007
Joost v0.9 Out: Grab Your Name Quick
There’s a new version of Joost just out today – v0.9 – and amongst the changes, is the switch from using an email address to login to using a username.
Any of those who were slow getting on the Skype-train and ended up with a crummy username take note, you need to act fast to get your name of choice.
To add to the pressure of this, Joost are also giving an extra five invites away to each Joost Member, so the names are disappearing fast.
What else is different with the new version?
The first thing you’ll notice when it starts up is that it now opens in full screen.
The ident has been moved from its previous dominant central position to the bottom right hand corner. The upcoming programme name has now taken its place now middle centre.
There’s been a little fiddling with the icons. Of particular note is the design and function of the one to the right of the channel name. It still brings up the programmes that are available on the channel, but it now has a back button that takes you to a menu of channels – logical really.
Content rating also appears to have been added – or perhaps I haven’t previously looked at any content that needed rating.
Picking The Prodigy, Smack My Bitch Up (Live), I was met with a screen asking me to confirm that I was indeed over 18 (quite why it was needed to see this is anyone’s guess). Interestingly the muted video appeared to run in the background, while I was working out exactly just how old I was.
Those of you who have been watching the development of Joost, will notice that the adverts are getting just a little bit longer and more corporate. The latest addition appears to be an advert for IBM notebooks, while it is visually interesting (for the first viewing), it’s hardly cutting edge funk-ville.
The only downside we’ve found so far is that it crashes – not something that we had a problem with in Joost or The Venice Project before.
Ooo … and we’ve seen there’s a promo video up on the Joost site too (new to us). It’s here below for your delectation.
[QUICKTIME http://static.joost.com/videos/joostvideo.mov 320 240 false true]
Joost
3 April, 2007
Google Moves Into The TV Ad Business
With Internet advertising now thoroughly pwned by Google, the company is now looking to break into TV advertising.
The company is set to unveil deals today with satellite TV service EchoStar Communications and Astound Cable in the US to broker commercials in a similar way to how it offers online advertising.
Advertisers will be able to upload adverts to the company’s website and plug in to an automated system to select channel, time and geographical preferences.
Just like the current AdWords system, an auction then determines whether the ads get placed and for what price.
Keval Desai, product management director for Google TV ads, described the new TV scheme as being, “very similar to what we are doing on the Web. TV is becoming like the Web.”
During the television pilot, Google will serve commercials to EchoStar’s Dish Network satellite channels, a US service which enjoys around 13.1 million subscribers. The adverts won’t look any different to regular ones, carrying no Google branding and appearing in the usual time slots.
Google say that advances in set-top-box technologies have made it possible for them to report aggregate statistics on how many times an ad was viewed and whether folks watched it through to the end.
“Advertisers can use this data to understand the effectiveness of their TV ad campaigns and use this information to provide more relevant ads to viewers,” the company added.
Source
3 April, 2007
Apple And Record Companies Charged In EU iTunes Row
The European Commission has dished out formal charges to Apple and ‘unnamed major record companies’, accusing them of restricting music sales in Europe.
The EU alleges that agreements between Apple and the record companies are guilty of breaking European Union rules that prohibit restrictive business practices. It’s far from the first time that the EU and other Northern European Countries has got wound up about Apple and iTunes.
“Consumers can only buy music from the iTunes online stores in their country of residence and are therefore restricted in their choice of where to buy music, and consequently what music is available and at what price,” said Jonathan Todd, European Commission spokesman.
“The statement of objections alleges that distribution agreements between Apple and major record companies contain territorial sales restrictions,” he added.
Promptly shifting the blame on to the record companies, Apple insisted that they’d tried to operate a single pan-European iTunes store accessible to peeps from any member state but were foiled by music labels and publishers imposing legal limits on the download rights.
The Commission first got involved back in 2005 after the UK consumer group Which? pointed out that iTunes purchasers in France and Germany were paying far less than us poor chumps in the UK (67 pence against 79 pence).
Apple and the record companies now have two months to defend themselves in writing or take part in an oral hearing which usually happens around a month after a written reply has been received.
This latest development is unrelated to yesterday’s deal between Apple and EMI.
Source
3 April, 2007
Over Half Of UK Adults Have Home Broadband
Industry body Ofcom has published its Digital Progress Report, the result of taking a long goosey gander at current trends in the UK broadband industry up until the end of last year.
The report found that half of all UK adults live in broadband-connected households, up 11% from 12 months ago and a hefty seven times increase from 2002.
Folks connected to broadband lines are getting good use of it too, with 63% of adults using it daily, while 30% went online at least once a week.
Video content was viewed by 51% of adults with broadband at home, with 26% watching video clips every week.
Over two thirds (70%) of broadband-connected adults bought products or services online, and over half had carried out banking transactions.
Broadband users were found to spend on average 9.1 hours online per week, over double the amount of people still connecting via screechy modems in dial-up.
Although just under half of users had no idea how fast they were connecting to the Internet, the report put the average headline connection speed at 3.8Mbps (up from 1.6Mbps in 2005).
Voice over IP (VoIP) services like Skype have seen an increased take up, with one in ten adults making calls over the Internet, double the amount compared to the end of 2005. Of those using VoIP, 14% said they were making calls daily with a further 30% making calls several times per week.
Bundling
Bundling was found to be an important factor for consumers choosing their ISP, with 40% of all adults with broadband at home using other communications services from the same provider.
Wi-Fi
Ofcom found that just over a fifth (21%) of of all UK adults owned a Wi-Fi enabled laptop in February 2007, with a third of that total using public hotspots to access the internet. The amount of available public hotspots was counted at around 12,000 in September 2006, up 32% from the previous year.
Mobile Internet
The report found that despite one in three UK adults saying that they owned an Internet-enabled mobile phone in February 2007; only half had ever actually used the thing to go online.
It seems that a ‘lack of need or interest’ put off the majority of users (43%), with cost the second reason (31%).
Ofcom
3 April, 2007
Apple And EMI Cut High Quality DRM-Free Music Deal
It wasn’t the bonanza of Beatles songs that some had hoped for, but Apple has just announced that all of EMI Music’s vast catalogue of digital music will be available for purchase without digital rights management from the iTunes Store from next month.
The DRM-free tracks from EMI will be encoded at a high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding – making them “virtually indistinguishable” in audio quality from the original – but at a higher price of $1.29 per song (compared to 99c for 128bps downloads).
Users wanting to ‘upgrade’ their library of previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions can do so if they’re prepared to fork out 30 cents a song.
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice — the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
“We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year,” he added.
Keen not to miss out on the quote-fest, Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, piped up: “EMI and iTunes are once again teaming up to move the digital music industry forward by giving music fans higher quality audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings, with no usage restrictions on the music they love from their favourite artists.”
Using the new DRM-free EMI downloads, users can enjoy the tracks without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on – something that was celebrated by a guy called Eric Chiu posting on the Engadget site who gleefully commented, “My BitTorrent Engine is ready to fire on full cylinder… Demonoid and Piratebay, be ready for the new era of EMI Music.”
Apple
EMI Music
2 April, 2007
Avoid Corporate Coffee Chains With The Delocator
If you travel around the UK a lot and find the homogenisation of High Streets into identical rows of bland coffeeshop multinationals a deeply depressing experience, you may find delocator.org.uk the perfect site for your needs.
Bearing a passing resemblance to the ‘store locator’ seen on the Starbuck’s site, the delocator lets you type in a UK post code and find the nearest ‘non corporate cafe’ near you, with a drop-down menu for selecting the distance range to search, from 1km to 15km.
The site’s still in early days and because it relies on users to input recommended cafes, the coverage isn’t as complete as it might be, but the author told Digital Lifestyles that he intends to add more functionality ‘in the Spring’ (he’s also asked for help in running this site – contact him here.)
Despite this, we still managed to find two non-corporate cafes within a 1km of us, with the results displayed in a text box containing a description of the cafe and address details, accompanied by a zoomable Google map.
Delocating the world
The first Delocator website started up in America, tasked with “assisting the public in finding and supporting independently owned cafes” and proved a great success, with over 5000 independent cafes across the States being inputted by users.
The site encouraged other activists to create their own delocator site using a downloadable toolkit, with a second site being set up for Canadian users, delocator.ca, with the UK site now being the third of what may turn out to be a multinational anti corporate franchise (now there’s a concept!).
With Starbucks promising to open a new branch every fortnight for the next decade in the UK, we reckon local, independent coffee shops need al the help they can get.
Free Rosey Lee in the East End
Elsewhere, Starbuck’s shiny new store in Whitechapel in the East End of London found itself the subject of an unusual protest last week by those cheeky scamps, the Space Hijackers.
Setting up a stall and dishing out free fair trade teas, tasty home made sandwiches and delicious cakes to passers by, the protesters hoped to illustrate “what the area will be missing if Starbucks and their ilk are allowed to settle in.”
Naturally, the urban75 website went along to lend their support (and scoff some tasty banana cakes) – see their photo report here
2 April, 2007
VBox: Virgin Free TV DTT Launched By Virgin Media For Non Cable Customers
Virgin Media has ramped up the availability of its quadplay (broadband, phone, mobile and TV) services beyond its cable franchise network with today’s announcement of a new digital TV service.
Using the digital terrestrial television platform (DTT), Virgin will be offering a new set-top box to lure customers with the promise of over 40 free-to-air TV channels and over 25 digital radio stations, an eight-day, Virgin branded, on-screen TV guide, interactive content (via the trusty red button) and plug ‘n’ play installation.
Perhaps cocking a snoot to Sky’s energy-scoffing box, Virgin say that their set top box will offer low power consumption and use just 1/15th of the energy of a standard 60W light bulb (we could work that out as a percentage for you, but it’s still Monday morning).
The box is a wee little puppy too, measuring up around the same size as Ye Olde VHS tape (19cms by 9cms) and comes with a remote control and a nifty remote control extender so you can still use the remote if the box is hidden away somewhere.
Virgin will be dishing the boxes out for free to any non-cable customers subscribed to their twenty quid 8 Meg broadband and Talk Anytime phone bundle, or there’ll be a £40 charge to non-cable customers taking a broadband service on it’s own.
Philip Snalune, managing director of non-cable (bit a duff job title that, no?) at Virgin Media, said:
“Launching a basic TV service into non-cable areas enables us to expand availability of our quadplay of broadband, phone, mobile and TV. This is just the first step and our aim is to offer more advanced TV services in all areas throughout 2008.”
Virgin Media
2 April, 2007
Beatles Songs For iTunes?
After years of throwing squadrons of lawyers at each other, the big Apples – Apple Inc and Apple Corps – kissed and made up a few months ago and now it looks like they can’t stop the love.
Yesterday, record company giants EMI Group PLC announced that it planned to unveil “an exciting new digital offering” with Steve Jobs and the gang at Apple, leading pundits to conclude that The Beatles’ music catalogue is finally about to be made available through Apple’s iTunes online music store.
Spinning the expectation-o-meter right up to eleven, EMI revealed that their chief executive, Eric Nicoli, and Apple head honcho Jobs will be holding a news conference today, which will be supplemented by a “special live performance.”
The Beatles have famously refused to sign up to iTunes and other online music services for years, and many expect the download charts to be instantly filled up with the Fab Four’s songs as soon as their catalogue becomes available.
Of course, the fact that the story broke on April Fool’s Day has led some to think it might be a bit of a jolly wind-up wheeze, so I guess we’ll have to wait to see if the scheduled 1pm conference happens or not.
Mind you, if it is an April Fool’s it’s a pretty crummy one compared to Google’s TiSP Toilet wireless network one.
2 April, 2007