BT Wholesale will be offering itemised bills to its customers from 28th May. Subscribers will be able to view each user’s time spent online and the amount of bandwidth used.
“Previously, BT wholesale gave service providers the start and stop time for each user. With the improved functionality, we are able to record a breakdown of the bytes used both upstream and downstream,” said a spokesperson for BT Wholesale.
With over a 100 online stores and more to come, the music download business is certainly booming. It seems that everyone has one – from Oxfam to Coca Cola.
To celebrate it’s first birthday, pro-music.org has published a directory of the legal music download sites and stores on the web today, and it demonstrates just how the industry has grown in just a year.
Twelve months ago, when pro-music.org launched, there were 20 sites, with an catalogue of about 200,000 tracks. Now that number is over a hundred, and the major sites have catalogues of more than 500,000 tracks – as more and more distribution deals are made, that particular number will rise dramatically.
pro-music.org has launched sister sites in Germany, France and Italy to reach internet users around the world.
Jay Berman, Chairman and CEO of the IFPI said in a statement: “Pro-music has achieved over twelve months what its founding alliance partners intended it to be – a successful international educational campaign about online music. Pro-music is supported across the music sector, has attracted tens of thousands of visitors and rolled out in national versions in French, German and Italian. The site spells out in clear and simple terms the legal and copyright concerns around online music. It explains the fight against internet piracy. And, above all, it has tracked the surge of new legitimate services that have come on stream in the last year. Pro-music has a vital role to play in improving awareness in this area, and there seems no doubt that the second year of the campaign will be even more important than the first.”
The California state senate has approved Liz Figueroa’s email privacy bill, with some revision. “My legislation guarantees that our most private communications will remain just that – private,” said Senator Figueroa.
The bill was revised at the last minute – it originally required ISPs to seek permission before scanning emails. As it stands, e-mail and instant messaging providers can scan emails to build a profile for delivering adverts, but must abide by strict limits on how the data is used. The data cannot be shared, kept or shown to a “natural person”. We take this to mean that humans are not allowed to peek at your mail, but bots can. GMail now has to permanently delete any email at the request of a subscriber.
Anti-spam and virus filtering are covered in the bill, and as this is done automatically by software agents, it has never really been a privacy issue.
Racing out music stores globally to get in ahead of iTunes, Napster have launched their Canadian service. It’s exactly the same as the others – with the small exception that it’s much cheaper than the UK store. Yet again.
Tracks start at CAN$1.19 (€0.72) and the subscription is CAN$9.95 (€5.98), compared to the UK costs of UK£1.09 (€1.64) per track and UK£9.95 (€14.90) for a subscription.
Confident pricing, eh? Yes, they have sales tax in Canada, it runs at about 14%, dependent on where you live – so VAT is not to blame.
Since we can be fairly certain that Napster UK realise that their customers have access to the internet and can check prices and do conversions, I wonder what their thinking is with making the UK store twice as expensive as all the others?
If anyone at Napster would care to email with an explanation, I’d be delighted to give them a voice here.
Nokia has announced that the N-Gage QD mobile gaming phone has started shipping in Europe. The QD is a extensive revision of the original N-Gage console, and contains a number of new features and improvements, including better multiplayer features, rethought controls and a display that may not actually blind you after prolonged use.
The price begins at a startlingly cheap €49.99 (US$60.77) with a contract, in some markets.
The QD is backwardly compatible with older N-Gage titles, and Nokia are promising another 50 new games by the end of the year.
With competition from Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP imminent, the QD will have to rely on its multiplayer online functions to survive. Nokia are putting a lot of faith in their N-Gage Arena service to connect gamers and build a fan community. Quality, high exposure titles like Sims Online (which is essentially like handing people crack, isn’t it?) and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 will no doubt help to achieve this.
We will have the definitive review of the console here shortly, once we’ve given the console a thorough going over.
Microprocessors are old news – they’re now so mainstream that it’s no longer a surprise to see them advertised on television or on billboards, as it was ten or fifteen years ago. Intel know that it’s just them and AMD in the consumer processor market – and now that you can’t win on clock speed, cache size or bus width any more, they need to make their products appear different and sexy to make those billboards interesting again. Let’s face it all those claims about clock speed were dubious anyway – there are too many factors involved and now that AMD don’t even bother publicising processor speeds, it makes a nonsense out of comparisons (that’s right – your Athlon 2800 doesn’t run at anything like 2.8gHz. That’s just a marketing number to make you think it does).
Cue a new shift in Intel’s product emphasis – it’s not the processor, it’s the chip set. Intel now want you to see the benefits of having a motherboard built round their platform. Now that chip sets are working harder for their money, being the gateway to your PC’s multimedia and communications features, Intel want you to know about it.
Grantsdale is heading your way in June, and is pitched to lead a new generation of entertainment PCs. Just the sort of thing that Intel want to see sitting in your living room.
Marketing a processor just wouldn’t give Intel the clout they need to displace other pieces of consumer electronics in the living room – they need to show the full range of functions that a chip set can perform to show that you’re going to be getting the DVD playback, encoding, games and internet performance that will merit a space under your television.
Grantsdale integrates a lot of features that would previously require more electronics to pull off – including Dolby audio and 3D graphics, allowing PC manufacturers to build smaller, cheaper, quieter boxes.
Intel will be spending a huge amount of money to make sure you know why chipsets are important and why you would want one of theirs. As AMD have no visibility in this area, they’re going to have to come up with something fast.
Oh, and apparently, Intel are making a special effort to train retail salespeople in Grantsdale’s benefits. I look forward to some amusing conversations with the staff in Dixons in the summer then.
More news on Grantsdale as it appears.
Just why are ringtones so expensive? Don’t get me wrong here: I hate them, but there is a huge discrepancy between the cost of downloading a music track and downloading a new ringtone for that phone that’s you’ll probably only own for a month. Often the ringtone will cost more than the entire original song it is based upon.
Consultancy firm Informa have published a report on the state of the ringtone market, and it looks like it’s all the music companies’ fault.
A ringtone based on a sample from a track can set you back up to four times the cost of downloading the whole song from iTunes – the cost is inflated because record labels require royalties of between 25 and 55% of the cost of the ringtone.
For example a track off iTunes will cost you about €1.50 (US$1.82 – nearly twice as much as the US store. I’m sure that’s justified) when the site appears suddenly next month, yet downloading a ringtone can cost a staggering €6 (US$7.30). And thank you T-Mobile UK, for that confident pricing. How much pocket money do kids get paid these days anyway?
“The reseller is really between a rock and a hard place,” said Simon Dyson, a co-author of the report. “They are torn between raising the price or keeping it steady in the hopes of establishing a market. Demanding such high percentage rates by the record companies could certainly lead to the market being depressed.”
Depressed? That’s nothing compared to what will happen when phones are released that can just play an MP3 file as the ringtone – then commuter-bothering phone owners won’t have to buy anything at all. Then the US$3 billion (€3.6 billion) market will vanish over night – instead of growing to the US$5 billion (€8.5 billion) monster it’s expected to be by 2007.
Incidentally, I know some pandas who have a really good ringtone album out.
Japanese television viewers have begun complaining to broadcasters over the sudden removal of editing and copying freedoms they’re experiencing now that the country’s version of the broadcast flag has been rolled out on digital terrestrial and cable channels.
NHK and and the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters launched the broadcast flag on 5 April, limiting viewers to a single copy of programmes carrying the signal. As programmes can only be copied once, no editing can be performed either. Within a week NHK and other broadcasters had received 15,000 complaints and enquiries.
This move also means that Japanese consumers will not be able to remove adverts from programmes they have recorded for archiving, or make a backup in case an offline recording is destroyed.
Furthermore, viewers have to insert a user identification card, B-CAS (from the company who manufactures them, BS Conditional Access Systems), into their digital televisions in order to watch broadcasts.
It’ll be interesting to see the scale of protest when America’s broadcast flag system rolls out in just over a year and a month – whilst not requiring an ID card to access broadcasts, the flag will tell all new television sets what can and can’t be done to a signal – right down to preventing any copying whatsoever.
Storage specialists SanDisk will release a new addition to their product range next month – and we think that PocketPC users will get quite excited about it. It’s an SD memory card with a 802.11b transceiver built in.
The low-power card is compatible with devices running the PocketPC 2002, PocketPC 2003 and Windows Mobile 2003 operating systems and will provide a theoretical 11Mbps bandwidth over a range of about 800 feet.
SanDisk’s marketing manager Dave Smurthwaite made a bold statement with the card’s unveiling: “We think we’re about a year ahead of competitors.” So expect the market to be flooded with competitors’ versions in about four months’ time.
The card won’t be available for another month, but when it does appear it’ll be about US$130 (€107). Not only does that work out at about US$20 (€16.50) cheaper than buying a memory card and a WiFi adapter, users get the added convenience of only using one slot on their PDA.
Head to the escape pods, the end is near, friends.
The Iliad, the epic poem that for 2700 years has been our best dramatisation of the Trojan War, has been translated into Windows Messenger.
The poem’s 15,693 lines of achingly beautiful hexameter are now condensed in to 363 words and some smileys. All this for the 21st century “instant messaging generation”, and as part of a promotion for Microsoft’s chat application.
However, I imagine there were a few people like me in the 15th century who declared the the end of civilisation when the first printed edition appeared in 1488.
“The new ‘TrIM Troy’, a Messenger translation of the first five books of the 24 book classic tome, has been designed to give MSN Messenger’s eight million users a whistle stop tour of Homer’s world, the motives behind Menelaus’ rage, the bravery of the Greek army, the tragic death of Hector and the fall of Troy in their online lingo”, says the press release.
The upshot of this shallow and purely marketing-led butchery is best seen in its effect on the chilling opening verse:
Rage —
Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving towards its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of mean and brilliant Achilles.Somehow, this now becomes:
“Ur right to still be ngry, Anchilles has m’ssed things up 4 da Grks wiv his rage”
I would class this as a lossy compression scheme, without any doubt.
Robert Fagel’s astonishing 1996 translation, available from Penguin