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?

Tactile Text Messages

Researchers at Bonn University have come up with a way of feeling text messages using a matrix of pins. Rather like the Braille readers used by blind and partially-sighted PC users, pins are raised and lowered, in patterns – but the system isn’t Braille for mobile phones yet.

Users program which patterns the phone makes to which keywords – examples given are a wave towards the user to indicate “I” and you a wave away from the user to indicate “you”.

It’s currently cumbersome, and of limited use (why not just look at your phone?), but the team feel it will have uses in art-installations or other more traditional feedback systems – such as steering wheels. There’s also no reason why the system can’t be refined so that blind users can read text messages.

If the array can be made small enough to work with mobile phones of 3g dimensions, this feedback system might be a great idea for giving access to PDAs for the blind.

Prof Eckmiller of Bonn University told the BBC: “Our major intention with this invention and development is to open up the sense of touch as a new channel for human communication, the sense of touch will in the future be added as the third communication channel to human communication technologies.”

Department of Neuroinformatics at Bonn

Napster Hits Problems as European iTunes Launch Confirmed

Napster has run into licensing problems as it prepares its UK launch – with only four months to go. It would appear that the fragmented nature of Europe’s music labels, licensing bodies and royalty collection services are causing headaches for the new music services.

Negotiations are apparently heading back on track in the UK, but are only in preliminary stages in Europe.

Former Napster investors Bertelsmann AG will be in court in San Francisco next week where music labels are accusing the media giant of keeping the download service operational because of its investment in 2000.

Bertelsmann invested US$90 million (€76 million) in Napster in 2000, hoping to turn the service into the legal music site it is now. Now Universal Music and the EMI Group are claiming the $90 million investment cost them approximately $17 billion (€14.3 billion) in lost revenue because of illegal downloads.

Not a bad return on an investment, really.

Reuters

Napster – still Coming Soon

Send Spam, Get Paid, Get Banned

Sendmails Corp are a marketing firm that know that people will do anything for money – and that includes allowing their PCs to be used to send spam. The New Hampshire-based company is offering US$5 (€4.22) to internet users who download and install their VirtualMDA (Mail Delivery Agent) client, followed by US$1 for every hour of CPU time the agent uses sending out bulk emails to “customers”.

Despite fact that most net users complain bitterly about the unstoppable rise in unsolicited emails, anti-spam groups fear that plain old human greed will prompt people to sign up for the service, and spam will just get worse.

There is, of course another problem here. Sending spam isn’t SETI@home – it doesn’t take massive amounts of CPU cycles to even huge amounts of mail. Sendmail don’t really want your processor time – what they’re really after is your IP (internet protocol) address.

Companies who make a habit of making huge bulk mailings tend to get their IP address blocked by ISP’s mail servers. Internet service providers know who the key culprits are and block or at least heavily filter all mail coming from their domains. Users of VirtualMDA will be sending spam from their own IP address – and that’s not going to make your DSL provider very happy. They’ll ban you, and your email address may well get blocked by several mail providers.

Of course, Sendmail and their customers don’t care about this as plenty more people will sign up and take the US$1.

Wired on the service

Computer not as busy as it could be? Sign up for SETI and get us all killed

CyWorld – A Virtual World with 6 Million Inhabitants

Six million virtual inhabitants? No, it’s not Everquest, it’s not Star Wars Galaxies and sadly it’s not EVE – Cyworld is a Korean virtual community, and the fastest growing site in the country.The site has proven so popular that Park Geun-hee, the daughter of former president Park Chung-hee caused a stir last month by creating her own Cyworld site with pictures of her hobbies and video of her playing the piano. “I wanted to find a way to show young people, especially young girls, who I really am”, she later explained to the press.

Cyworld was founded in 2001 and toodled along for a few years with a number of keen fans, but its popularity exploded when SK Telecom bought it. SKT put marketing Won behind it and it now has 13% of Korea’s 47.6 million inhabitants as members. Korea has long been a key part of the connected world – nearly 80% of Koreans subscribe to broadband internet services, spending an average of 13.5 hours per week.

Subscribers to Cyworld, meet, decorate their homes, wander about a bit, listen to music, accessorise and invite friends over for parties – just what young trendy avatars like to do. Graphics are stylish, but simple and colourful isometric drawings – none of the 3D polygon look that has blighted many attempts at virtual worlds in the past. Think eBoy meets meets MacPaint.

So, apart from subscription costs, what’s the revenue stream? Cyworld’s currency is the Acorn – Acorns are used to buy music for your virtual gatherings, furniture and accessories to keep you at the height of avatar fashion. Here’s another incredible fact: about 100 million Won worth (€72,000, US$85,000) are sold to subscribers every day. That’s about €26.3 million (USD$31 million) worth of play money sold every year.

With 30,000 new members signing up every day, there’s obviously a lot of money to be made in virtual worlds. Could a site like Cyworld be this popular in the West? And who would design it?

One hundred million Won worth of Acorns sold every day.

Cyworld’s home page (Korean)

NAB: New 5.1 Extension Means Better Compression

Dolby Laboratories have announced an extension to their Dolby 5.1 codec, called Dolby Digital Plus. The codec extension is of particular interest to television broadcasters because of the efficiency of its compression: if audio tracks take up less room, then it leaves more bandwidth for more channels.

Broadcasters are keen to deliver more channels to customers – particularly when they’re charging them – but need to keep picture quality up to, or even better than, current standards.The existing DD codec supports but rates from 320Kbps to 640Kbps for 5.1 audio – yet this new extension will reproduce 5.1-channel sound down to 192Kbps. Dolby Digital Plus has a new top end to – up to 6Mbps, which will no doubt be handy in the future.

Importantly, Digital Plus is backwardly-compatible with previous versions of the 5.1 codec.

Dolby have already come up with an interesting application for the new codec – a DVD could access a studio’s website and stream a live director’s commentary, or other interactive content, through the viewer’s TV.

Dolby Digital on Digital Plus

RIAA Drops “Clean Slate”

The Recording Industry of America has dropped their Clean Slate programme, it emerged after a California man challenged the initiative in court.

“As public awareness about the illegality of unauthorized copying and distribution of music files over peer-to-peer computing has dramatically increased since the inception of the program, the RIAA has concluded that the programme is no longer necessary or appropriate, and has voluntarily withdrawn it,” stated the RIAA attorney.

Clean Slate was an initiative which encouraged people who had uploaded and shared music files to sign up and acknowledge in writing that they had broken the law. Individuals then promised that they had removed all illegal music files from their computers, and in exchange the RIAA pledged not to sue them when it started taking legal action against file swappers.

Only 1,108 people have signed up for the programme since in was launched in September 2003, most of them in the first few weeks.

Eric Parke challenged the Clean Slate programme in court, and accused the RIAA of fraudulent business practices. Clean Slate was criticised from its début as offering limited protection: it never promised any sort of guarantee if a body other than the RIAA, say for example a record label, decided to prosecute someone on its handy list of offenders.

When Parke took the RIAA to court over the programme, they requested that the case be dismissed, as Clean Slate had been quietly dropped. Nice of them to tell everyone.

The terms of Clean Slate

Nintendo: Cartoons for the GBA

For US$20 (€) you’ll soon be able to buy a GBA cartridge containing up to 45 minutes of high-quality (well, for a 240 x160 pixel screen anyway) video and animation. Nintendo are addressing an issue that they’ve long had with their games consoles: kids keep switching them off and watching television. Admittedly, they tend to watch Nintendo cartoons, but then that might expose them to adverts for other companies’ products.

So, Nintendo have brought the cartoons to their GameBoy Advance in the form of cartridges containing between two and four episodes of popular cartoons. First up will be a selection of episodes from the Pokémon franchise, followed by other titles from other series: SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly Oddparents, Dora the Explorer and Codename: Kids Next Door, and Sonic X.

“Even by the remarkable standards of product evolution that have characterized the Game Boy franchise, this is a landmark event,” says George Harrison, Nintendo of America’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, said in a statement. “Pokémon is part of the first step in revolutionizing the nature of portable video entertainment, with eventual reach targeting all demographics.”

This is a remarkably similar idea to the ZVue player we talked about a few months ago – though since Nintendo has sold more than 20 million GBA players in the USA alone, the Zvue’s prospects look somewhat diminished.

Nintendo

The Self-Censoring DVD Player

RCA, a Thomson brand, have launched a DVD player that can be programmed to skip content that viewers find unsuitable. The US$80 (€68) player contains software from ClearPlay that checks the inserted DVD against a database of titles and skips sections that may offend, based on a selection of filters. Because of this the player can only “protect” viewers from films it already knows about.

The player comes preinstalled with 100 filters for films such as Daredevil and Pirates of the Caribbean. Owners of the player can pay US$5 (€4.22) per month to receive internet updates, which they simply burn to a CD from their computer and then feed to the DVD player. So it looks like protecting the peoples’ moral sensibilities is a revenue stream in itself.

ClearPlay’s database currently contains filters for 500 popular films. ClearPlay, based in Salt Lake City, allow viewers to filter on four categories: violence, sex and nudity, language and (the intriguingly named) “other”. That’ll be drugs then. When a scene comes up that hits one of the filters, bad language is muted or the scene itself is skipped.

Studios don’t like the idea of a player that edits their films: “ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay’s vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned,” The Directors Guild of America said in a statement. “Ultimately, it is a violation of law and just wrong to profit from selling software that changes the intent of movies you didn’t create and don’t own.”

Apart from impending action because of this latest product, ClearPlay are currently being prosecuted in association with a video rental outfit in Colorado, “Clean Flicks” for editing films and then burning them back to DVD.

The censoring DVD player is an interesting and scary idea – and since it’s optional, then it only allows viewer’s to do what they’ve always done when watching films, skip the bits they find uncomforatble or inappropriate. In fact, I covered my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears several times during Moulin Rouge, as it was so offensive.

The ClearPlay user-managed filter is a far better option than allowing regulators and broadcasters to censor films for viewers without consultation.

…though Channel 4’s “melon farmer” edit of Robocop should go down as a modern classic.

ClearPlay

“Fun you – melonfarmer!”

Print Your Own Games

Nintendo’s eReader, an optical card reader developed by Olympus using their “Dot Code” technology, is a small add-on for GBA users. Players can scan (hideously overpriced) trading cards into their GBA to play games and unlock extras. Each card has a dot code printed on it that stores a couple of kilobytes of code – that code can be an emulation of an early Game and Watch title, or it can even be a smart new umbrella for your Animal Crossing character.

Cards are the same shape and size as standard playing cards (though without the naked ladies on the back) and are available in packs of five or so based on popular Nintendo franchises: Animal Crossing and Pokémon unlock or upload new aspects to the games, or you can even upload the classic Donkey Kong 3 to your GameBoy Advance.

The dot codes use Reed Solomon error correction and now that the scheme has been worked out, homebrew coders can finally write their own games for easy distribution to GBA owners. Tim Schuerewegen cracked the code and is hosting an original game – BombSweeper. Coders interested in writing for the GBA can even use GNU GCC to compile code – plus the API for the GameBoy Advance is very well documented.

The eReader has been modestly successful, but never set the world alight. In fact, support for it seems to have been quietly dropped. Try plugging one into your GBA SP and you’ll see what I mean – it no longer fits. The link port on a SP is now on the opposite side of the console, so the eReader can’t slide fully into the cartridge slot.

Tim Schuerewegen’s page on the GBA

The eReader file format

Official eReader home page

NAB: Want to interact? Dial #YES

YES Communications have a new interactive mobile phone service for radio listeners in the US. Dialling #YES (#937) on a mobile phone connects listeners to a sophisticated voice service that allows them to identify, rate, share and (importantly, no doubt) buy any song that’s been played on participating stations in the last 24 hours. Listeners can also participate in live polls and promotions.

The service goes live in the autumn – and will provide access to play lists from MTV, MTV2, VH1 and 2,500 radio stations. The service will therefore need to keep track of 600,000 songs in a 24 hour period.

The YES service is free to radio stations and costs the user US$0.79 (€0.66) per call, plus US$0.20 (€0.17) per minute. Radio stations then get a cut of the revenue for promoting the service.
“YES turns more than 600,000 songs per day into advertisements for themselves. The 2,500 stations we offer have about 75 million listeners at any given moment, so we provide a response platform for 45 trillion impressions every day,” said Daniel Goldscheider, CEO of YES Networks, Inc. “It will be a great tool for radio to turn listeners into active participants, to get deeper insight and to open a new and recurring revenue stream.”

The service reminded us vaguely of Visual Radio, but seems somewhat backward by comparison with Nokia’s project.

As previously reported, Nokia are rolling out Visual Radio to stations in Helsinki, allowing users to view video, take part in polls, quizzes and games, and download songs, ringtones and graphics. Whilst the number of tracks that YES deals with is certainly impressive, the service itself trails way behind Visual Radio in terms of scope and interactivity – we believe it’s another strong indicator that the mobile phone market is far less well-developed in the USA.

We don’t think the Finns will be losing any sleep over this one.

Yes Communications

A demo of Visual Radio