Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

New Version of iTunes Released

Well, this one caught us on the hop – normally I just select “Check for iTunes Updates” out of habit and expect nothing, but today brought the 4.5 update.

What’s new? The most obvious addition is Party Shuffle – a little application for keeping your soirées rocking. By selecting tracks from your playlists and presenting them in a slightly simpler (presumably so even drunk people can operate it), slightly prettier interface (it’s for parties after all), you’ll never make a musical gaff at a party again. It even shows the last five tunes played and what’s coming up, so people can still bicker over the music choice – and you can even set it so that it plays high-rated songs more often.

Artists featured in the iTunes music store now have handy arrows next them – clicking on the arrows will take you to a handy area in the store with the option of buying more music.

Another new feature allows users to share playlists – you can share your favourite list with friends and people you’ve never met, accompanied with some spiffy artwork made up of a mosaic of sleeves from the tracks in your mix. This is done simply by choosing “Publish playlist to music store” from the file menu. iTunes users can rate each other’s mixes (be prepared to be insulted by people you’ve never met in ways you’d never dreamed of) and top lists are displayed in the iTunes store.

Cheekily, iTunes will now convert your Windows Media files to AAC, if you require – so now you can have music bought from other websites on your iPod.

The Windows version of 4.5 seems to make it a better behaved Windows application, which is welcomed after the first release ignored all the user interface guidelines.

So, not major update but adds a few interesting features for the youngsters – it’s still the best jukebox software out there, and that’s even without a music store in Europe to back it up.

iTunes

European Anti-spam Laws Useless

European anti-spam legislation won’t do a thing to quench the flood of junk email across the region, says a report from the University of Amsterdam.

Why? Because Europe isn’t sending the bulk of it. As the study say “The simple fact that most spam originates from outside the EU restricts the European Union’s Directive’s effectiveness considerably.”

The study was conducted over nine months by Dr Lodewijk Asscher and a team at the Institute for Information Law at the university.

Europe’s guidelines for direct marketing are contained in the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communication. The directive was passed in July 2002 and the compliance deadline was six months ago. So of course, you’ve been seeing less spam since then. Yes, we thought the real outcome was different too.

The legislation requires that users only receive bulk emails that they have opted-in to. Nice idea but since opting-in is a key way that spammers harvest addresses in the first place, and the legislation is yet to make a single prosecution against a spammer, the model is somewhat flawed.

In fact, the directive is so duff that Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal haven’t even bothered implementing it yet and have been threatened with legal action.

In order for anti-spam legislation to work, all countries have to have compatible directives in place. Since there is a lot of money in spam for some regions, this is going to be difficult.

The study – available from 1 May

Elonex’s Wall-mounted Media Centre PC

Elonex have produced an all-in-one media centre that is so simple to install you just need to drill some holes in the wall and provide an aerial and power.

The eXtentia (UK£2114, €3162) is essentially a slim wall-mounted PC with a TFT display – the display is bright and clear and has a 17” diagonal viewing area, running at 1280 x 768 pixels.

The media centre will connect to your home network through its integrated 802.11g interface, or even plain old Ethernet. Interestingly, there’s a dial up modem on the motherboard, though this probably won’t see much action: if you’re going to hang something this expensive on the wall to watch your DVDs, no doubt your internet access will be broadband.

Also inside the eXtentia is a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor with 512mb of RAM. Both memory slots are full, so if you ever want to upgrade you’ll have to throw the original sticks out. The graphics card is a Radeon 9600 – which isn’t bad for a media centre, though it might struggle in a couple of years when playing new games.

Sound is stereo with the integrated speakers and sub-woofer – but since there’s a full set of 5.1 outputs, including optical, presented at the back you can plug it into your existing set-up. Other connections for getting media into and out of the PC include five USB ports, Firewire and a variety of AV ports for camcorders.

Control of the eXtentia is through a wireless keyboard and mouse, and more traditional infra-red remote control. There’s a handy 8-format memory card reader so that you can display photographs and transfer files form all your other devices – and let’s face it, you probably use at least four different card types.

The unit runs Microsoft’s Windows Media Centre, and this provides the user interface for recording TV programmes onto the 250gb hard disk.

We can look forward to seeing a lot more of these devices in the future – Sony have already had success with their Vaio lifstyle PC, whilst Dell and Gateway are offering more products that are aimed at domestic media use.

What’s not known though is if public are ready yet for a TV that needs service packs, a firewall and anti-virus software – perhaps media centres will come to use an embedded OS and be more like the TiVo.

Elonex

Band, Super Smart, Release Ringtone Album

Apparently, they're called Super SmartPanda Babies is the new album from Super Smart, a German four-piece band – and it’s only available as a series of mobile phone ringtones.

There are many aspects of this story that make me want to leave my office and go and live in a cave but I can’t deny that it’s innovative and turns the entire music publishing and purchasing model (which is already in disarray anyway) on its head.

The album is, apparently, a sort of disco-pop/electro-punk affair and is published by Go Fresh Mobile Music.

Antonio Vince Staybl, GMM founder, describes the thinking behind Panda Babies: “Music has to be re-thought. 20 Euro for an inflexible album, lowest margins for artists as well as the loss of image of CDs, which are nowadays distributed everywhere free of cost as give-aways, necessitate an immediate change in thinking.” Toni Werner Montana, boss of the label, adds: “We release songs within a few hours Europe-wide without interfaces to the classical music industry. Our prices for a ring tone album or a compilation of ten to twelve tracks including a mobile phone video will settle down at four to five Euro and the price for a single ringtone at 1.49 Euro in the medium-term”.

As part of the project, the band wear panda heads to protect their identity – though from whom, I’m not quite sure. Me, possibly.

If anyone would like to send us a review of the album for publication here – please feel free to contact us. The best one wins something terrible out of my record collection, chosen at random.

GoFresh

Lego Billund Introduces WiFi Child Tracking

Legoland Billund have just successfully deployed a “Kidspotter” WiFi tracking system for children at the park in Denmark. The service is provided by Opus IT, specialists in “themepark intelligence”.

Parents rent a kit from the information desk that contains a WiFi transceiver for their child to wear and a special map for the parents. If they somehow manage to lose sight of their offspring they send a SMS message to the Kidspotter number – the service then automatically sends back the name of the park area and map coordinate that their child is located in. Relieved parents can immediately whiz round to the location and remonstrate with wayward offspring until they cry.

This is a splendid idea for parents who are careless enough not to keep an eye on their children, but Opus’s technology is not just for tracking kids – they are promoting it for use with all visitors:

“IMAGINE Knowing exactly where all your visitors and assets are at any given point in time: Right now – or in the past! KidSpotter® will enable you to increase earning per visitor through comprehensive park traffic analysis and real-time optimization of traffic.”

We can’t imagine living in a world where visitors may routinely and voluntarily electronically tag themselves so that theme parks can sell them more things, but then people will do strange things for discounts. For use with all attendees voluntarily, the service may fail – fingerprint ID systems for banking have traditionally met resistance because of associations with criminal activity, and Kidspotter is clearly similar to convict tagging.

However, theme parks could make the service compulsory – after all, if you’re a good citizen, why would you object? Especially if you get a discount on rides for providing all that movement information.

WiFi transceivers in ID cards, anyone?

Legoland’s WiFi tracking service

Kidspotter

BT Abandons Broadband Pre-Registration Scheme, Promises Coverage to Rural Britain

BT’s preregistration scheme for broadband has been dropped, because of high demand for the service throughout the country. Instead, the telco has promised to make an additional 1128 exchanges broadband-enabled by 2005 – providing coverage to 99.6% of the UK. Coverage is at about 85% today.

Alison Ritchie, BT chief broadband officer, said in a release from the company: “BT has continued to innovate in order to drive broadband as an enabler for tomorrow’s society and to deliver a truly Broadband Britain.

“The broadband registration scheme has been a powerful tool for us to match investment to demand and its fantastic success, with the support of local campaigners, has set the way for other countries to follow. Now, as we move into more and more rural areas and we have a clearer picture of growing demand, there are real benefits to be gained through a planned roll out. This means we can deliver broadband to far more people in a shorter timeframe.

“This approach also means we can use the best engineering solution for the whole network to efficiently manage costs and future growth. Together with our plans to extend the reach of broadband from a local exchange, this takes us significantly closer to universal availability.”

The previous initiative, where an exchange was only converted if there were enough preregistered customers to make it worthwhile, prompted BT to upgrade over 2000 exchanges.

The company will now be undertaking a systematic roll-out to all but the very smallest exchanges. As for the remaining 100,000 UK premises that won’t be covered by the new exchange upgrades, BT has promised to continue to find other ways to deliver broadband internet access to remote locations.

BT’s press release

PalmOne’s New PDAs

PalmOne has released two new handhelds in their Zire range – the Zire 32 and 72.

The Zire 31, US$149 (€125) has a faster CPU than its predecessor and runs Palm OS 5.2. The PDA has a new-style controller on the front panel – allowing better navigation through documents, but also better for control whilst playing the growing range of Java games available. This controller, coupled with the new headphone jack and the mandatory expansion slot will ensure that buyers use the machine for playing media on the move.

Palm have included Bluetooth in their new Zire 72, US$299 (€251), allowing users to use an appropriate mobile phone to send messages on the move. The 72 is a somewhat striking Yves Klein blue colour – we can’t help but get the feeling that other colours might be in the pipeline.

The 64mb 72 also features a better digital camera than its 71 predecessor, sporting 1.2m pixels, backing that up with 2x digital zoom and 320 x 240 video capture. The camera has better integration with Palm applications than has been seen before – photographs can be attached to contacts and used as backdrops within programs.

But what about an update to the T3? Surely the Tungsten T4 (and Palm OS6) can’t be that far off?

The Palm 72

The Palm 31

Windows Media 9 Now On Linux

Turbolinux have become the first major distributor to provide a Linux-based OS with Windows Media and DVD playback built in.

Version 10F of their distribution comes with both CyberLink’s PowerDVD for Linux and Xine. Xine is the most popular Linux video playback engine and this distro comes with licensed Windows Media 9 codecs.

PowerDVD supports CSS (the Content Scramble System), allowing Linux users to watch DVDs legally, they’re no longer bypassing a copy protection algorithm to decode content off disks.

As Linux distributions go, Turbolinux 10F is not cheap – it’ll set you back US$149 (€125), but then it does contain proprietary commercial software and codecs. However, Windows XP Home, which has the same functionality (with free WM9 codecs) is only US$30 (€25) more expensive than Turbolinux.

Although getting WM9 into a Linux distribution is a step forward, it’s not really all that surprising: Microsoft’s new expanded licensing programme means that the company is very willing to get their media technology onto as many platforms by “allowing the components to be deployed on all platforms—even non-Windows desktops” (from the WM licensing page).

Turbolinux’s announcement

Microsoft’s Windows Media Pricing and Licensing

The Text-Message Enabled Chandelier

The beautiful Swarovski SMS-enabled chandelierSwarovksi, an Austrian crystal group famed for their chandeliers (where else do you get yours anyway?) have demonstrated a chandelier that displays text messages sent to it from mobile phones.

The chandelier, called “Lolita” (oh no – that’s going to do strange things to the search engines) uses strings of LEDs hung in crystal cylinders. The rows of LEDs are then switched on and off in sequence to create a scrolling dot-matrix effect – rather like an extraordinarily posh and expensive version of those displays you get in cab office windows.

Swarovski

Netflix Switching to Web Delivery

Netflix, the online DVD rental firm has plans to deliver films via the internet by 2005: “Our strategy is to get huge in DVDs and then expand into downloads,” Reed Hastings, Netflix Chief Executive, said to Reuters.

Netflix’s business model currently operates around the postal service – users browse the Netflix site, selecting titles they wish to view. DVD’s are then delivered to the company’s 1.9 million subscribers by post. Cutting out the postal service will pay for online delivery and allow Netflix to invest in more content. Hastings estimates that a download service will have 5 million subscribers by 2006.

Netflix currently charge US$20 (€17) a month for their postal-delivery service, and are proposing a US$22 (€18.50) per month charge for their download offering.

Netflix don’t want to download to computers, instead using a broadband connection direct to the TV set-top box – rather like Blockbuster’s unique VOD service in the UK.

Competition is going to be fierce – more movie download services are in the pipeline and Netflix will have to go up against strongly-backed groups like Movielink and CinemaNow. Movielink was formed by five major studios: MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. CinemaNow counts Microsoft and Blockbuster amongst their investors.

Netflix

CinemaNow

MovieLink