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?

Channel 4 Planning New Digital Services

Channel 4 is planning some new digital services in the UK to retain and grow its share of viewers. It has not been confirmed by Rob Woodward, commercial director of the company, if the new channels will be free to air or subscription only, but they are expected to cover music, factual and comedy. They’ll be carried on Freeview, that much is certain.

The new channels may be aimed at an older ABC1 audience (i.e. a bit more BBC2) than C4’s current younger mainstream audience.

More details when we have them.

Channel 4

Amazon’s A9 Search Engine Goes Live

Amazon’s A9 search engine – complete with browser tool bar and diary function, has gone live. The new service is unique in two respects: you can search through the full text of many books on Amazon, and there’s an innovative diary function enabling users to make notes on any web page, and retrieve them on any computer you use.

The full text book search is welcome, based on Amazon’s Search Inside the Book service, and allows you to see the actual page of the book queried. However, the book search is limited in functionality and is essentially a mechanism to allow Amazon to sell more books.

The search engine is based on good old Google, and requires users to create an account and log in to view their saved searches and notes. Oh, wait a minute … even more data for Google to mine! Plus Amazon will have access to your searches and promote relevant books to you.

It’s a strange hybrid – not quite Google, but not Amazon either. We’ll be keeping an eye out to see who absorbs who.

A9

John Battelle’s Searchblog on the launch

Gateway’s Wireless, XP Media Centre-aware, DVD Player

Gateway have released an upgrade to their wireless DVD player – and it seems to be a world first. The ADC-320 Wireless Connected DVD Player will take a wide range of content from your PC and show it on your TV. Ideal for watching all those TV programs you recorded with the Windows Media Centre PVR.

The 802.11g enabled player will connect to a PC up to 300 feet away, and is compatible with Windows Media Centre as well as ordinary Windows boxes. Interestingly, multiple ADC-320s on the same wireless network can “listen in” on a media stream and display the same content in multiple locations – handy for events and large parties. Consequently, the DVD player incorporates security features to enable it to comply with secured networks, supporting WEP and WPA encryption.

The player also supports a large range of formats: MP3, MPEG1, 2 and 4, Windows Media , Microsoft PVR and AVI files.

This new hardware is essentially the previous ADC-220 with a firmware upgrade and a 802.11g card in the back – in fact, Gateway are already offering an upgrade path to the 320 through their website.

An ADC-320 will set you back US$199 (€166), and is available now.

More about the ADC-320

N-GAGE 1.5: Back for a Beating

Nokia has announced the next iteration of their mobile gaming platform in the form of the N-GAGE QD. It’s backwardly compatible with the existing N-GAGE games, but there have been a few refinements and changes, all based on what Nokia have been learned since the first model was released.

Nokia’s Senior Vice President of Games (now there’s a crrrrrrazy job title), Ilkka Raiskinen said “After six months on the market with the N-Gage platform, we wanted to expand our device portfolio based on the feedback we’ve received. With improved gaming ergonomics, gamers can now start to play games at the push of a button and enjoy the increased responsiveness of the game keys. We also added support for hot-swap MMC and extended the battery life.”

N-GAGE Arena is pushed to the fore this time, and it’s a smart move too, as it was the multiplayer functions that made the console stand out from other hand-held gaming platforms out there. The QD now has a Arena Launcher allowing gamers to communicate, view score rankings and download content via a GPRS connection.

The N-GAGE QD has also incorporated some of the features that the (admittedly few) purchasers of the first system requested – particularly the improvements to gaming controls. As Nokia insisted that the first N-GAGE was a gaming platform first, phone second many saw the awkward placement and size of the controls as a bit of a howler.

Another welcome change is the positioning of the microphone and speaker – Raiskinen added: “For phone calls, we reoriented the speaker and microphone to support ‘classic talking’.” Previously, if you wanted to make a phone call, you had to hold the handset at a right angle sticking out from your head. At the very least, this would make you look somewhat foolish. However, we can’t imagine anyone getting mugged for an N-GAGE.

With greater emphasis on multiplayer gaming and improved ergonomics, it could be that they’ve got it right this time, especially since Nintendo and Sony’s next hand-held gaming platforms will almost certainly not support GPRS gaming.

Nokia on the new N-GAGE QD

Yahoo on the story

Microsoft Still Kissing, Still Making Up

Microsoft have settled an long-running dispute with InterTrust over patents relating to content protection – namely, setting permissions on content for buying, copying and downloading digital content. InterTrust sued MS in 2001 after talks to license their technology failed.

MS have agreed to pay $440 million (€369 million) to put this one to rest.

An anonymous source at the BBC said to Digital Lifestyles: “Interesting … particularly where a MS spokesperson says that ‘patent issues were the responsibility of MS not their customers’ …that one will come back to haunt them.”

It appears that Microsoft are tying up loose ends so they can concentrate on new business – also, Digital Lifestyles see an interesting synergy with the Linux/SCO case.

We believe Microsoft will contrast their recent intellectual property settlements against the currently unresolved SCO source code dispute. Demonstrating that Windows is litigation-free compared to the potentially dangerous disputes surrounding Linux and potential additional licensing fees might entice businesses away from the open source operating system towards a (law-wise at least) “safer” Windows.

You heard it here first.

InterTrust on the settlement

Nokia Picks Visual Radio Partner

Remember we reported on Visual Radio? Nokia have just chosen Hewlett-Packard as a technology partner to help get the service into the market. They intend to develop Visual Radio further, with the aim of making it available to other handset manufacturers through HP.

Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives for HP said “As you drive to this ‘digital lifestyle’ where it’s fundamentally mobile and digital and virtual, and content becomes much more meaningful, how do you have business models in that world?”

Their answer is to employ HP to sell Visual Radio to phone makers and radio stations, providing installation and support.

Research from Nokia indicates that phone owners with FM receivers in their handsets only listen to radio once a week – but the company is hoping that their new service will encourage users to take more interest in radio and use Visual Radio to buy ringtones and other music-related content.

Forbes on the announcement

TellTale Weekly: A Project Gutenberg for Audio Books

Telltale Weekly are building an audio library – on a cheap now, free later model. They are looking to add at least fifty titles to their library every year, releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The professionally recorded, DRM-free, texts are available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio files and can be transferred and listened to however the user wishes, for personal use. The site currently has 23 titles, but are looking to expand as quickly as they can acquire content, and they’re looking for contributions from authors, performers and producers.

TellTale Weekly hope that by charging a small sum for new titles now, they will be able to offer them free later, after five years or 100,000 downloads. “Paying to hear the text now (and for the next five years),” they say, “helps to cover the costs for the production, recording, and bandwidth of the performance you purchase, and supports future releases so that we’ll still be producing new audiobooks by the time our first one hits the public domain.”

TellTale Weekly

Creative Commons

Slashdot on TellTale

Apple’s Faster, Cheaper eMacs

Apple has revised its eMac computer line with two new models. At US$799 and US$999 the two additions are faster, a bit cheaper and have a lot more features than previous versions.

Both of the new models have 1.25GHz G4 processors and 128mb of memory, and incorporate beautiful 17” displays. The more expensive of the two models has an 80gb hard drive (the cheaper only has 40gb) and has Apple’s SuperDrive built in. Both computers have Radeon 9200 graphics with 32mb of its own video memory. It might be because I’m sitting here with a 256mb 9800 that 32mb seems a bit mean, graphics memory wise. But then, I’m sure my card doesn’t even need to wake up to render my typing in OpenOffice.

The new Macs come with iLife ’04, Apple’s digital lifestyle application – see our previous write up on features like GarageBand.

Apple is heavily promoting their AirPort extreme technology for wireless networking with the new eMacs, though it is not included as standard.

Apple Store on the new eMacs

Google’s GMail May Be Blocked

Google’s plans to incorporate targeted advertising in emails sent to its GMail subscribers have hit another setback – Liz Figeuroa, a Democratic Senator in California is drawing up legislation declaring that the adverts are intrusive and the service is an invasion of privacy.

This puts a rather large dent in Google’s business model for the site: the storage for all those one gig accounts, even compressed, won’t be cheap and targeted advertising was really their only revenue stream for the service.

Figeuroa wrote a strongly worded letter to Google urging them to forget the whole thing: “I cannot urge you strongly enough to abandon this misbegotten idea. I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself and for all of your customers.”

European privacy groups are already sniffing around GMail potential privacy infringements, specifically Google’s lack of a promise that anything deleted on GMail is deleted forever.

We’re a little baffled that this concern is levelled only at an email service – there are plenty of other areas where people are giving their privacy away. People don’t have to sign up for the free email service, and there are plenty of others around, admittedly with less storage. Many people already choose to give away personal information, purchasing habits and other private data in exchange for something “free”, and there seems to be no shortage of willing punters: look at those store loyalty cards in your wallet for example. If you have a Nectar, Boots, Game or other reward card, you’re already presenting marketing companies with a rich, moment-by-moment picture of what you buy, when and what with.

Kron4 report the story

BBC News on GMail

US CD Sales Up 10%

With sales of CDs up 10.6% for far in 2004, figures in a new report from Neilsen represent the best year the American music industry has seen for some time.

All music sales (including legal downloads, music on DVDs and CDs) were up 9.2% in the first quarter of 2004.

The data for the survey was collected by Nielsen’s Soundscan system which collects data from 14,000 point of sale registers across the US and Canada.

Record companies, fresh from a three year slump, were claiming an ongoing decline blamed on piracy. Some industry observers still blame the slump on the labels and artists themselves, with a dearth of quality product in the market to drive sales.

Record labels are still cautious about the upswing, and are taking nothing for granted, and is citing surveys that indicate piracy has decreased since the RIAA started taking people to court.

Neilsen Soundscan

Silicon Valley