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?

CeBIT: First Look at ExpressCard

PCMCIA, the expansion card format that was hard enough to spell, never mind configure, has a successor and it’s being shown at CeBIT.

PCMCIA was good for a while, but is showing its age – it’s pre USB, pre-Firewire and harks back to the days before even Windows 95. A replacement is on the way: the ExpressCard. It’s smaller, has a faster bus, uses less power and supports plug-and-play auto-configuration. Their bus is based on PCI Express and USB2.0 architecture – hence the hot-swap feature.

The new modules are half the size of their predecessors – they come in 34mm and 54mm formats and are a mere 5mm thick.

Look out for ExpressCards appearing towards the end of 2004 – compliant cards will feature an orange rabbit (obviously representing mobility and speed).The Express Card standard

Saturday CeBIT: Manufacturers Recognise Importance of Consumers’ Digital Lifestyles

Many big exhibitors are pushing devices, components and software designed to enhance consumer’s digital lifestyles, in answer to the rapidly growing demand for smart devices capable of sharing content. Traditionally a business conference, this year has seen a pronounced shift at CeBIT towards the needs of the consumer.

Many consumer mobile phones contain applications and features purely seen as business tools a few years ago, such as scheduling software, email and connectivity with PCs and other devices.

Many exhibitors, such as Sony and Microsoft are displaying devices intended to introduce home users to a world where they can download and share content easily anywhere in the house. Microsoft is promoting this vision through its Windows XP Media Centre PC and has now developed the Windows Media Centre Extender which will allow users to access their Media Centre PC from anywhere in the house. We reported on Microsoft’s “iPod killer”, the Portable Media Centre yesterday, and this new device will be fully compatible with home Media Centre PCs.

Sony’s answer to all this, the hotly-awaited PSX, is on display at CeBIT. The games playing aspect of the PSX is almost secondary to its other functions: PVR, music, electronic programme guide, photograph and home video album … and all compatible with other Sony devices such as cameras, PDAs and even the PSP when it appears. The feature list for the European PSX has yet to be finalised, so we’re afraid that the model on display at CeBIT today is the Japanese box. A shame really, because those people who would be most interested in the PSX will already either seen the Japanese edition, or even had one imported by now.

CeBIT 2004 has shown how important digital lifestyles are to both manufacturers and consumers – there is a huge range of devices available with more coming soon. Sadly, for true interoperability, manufacturers would like to lock their customers into one brand – which is likely to lead to frustration. The Sony music online shop will only work with Sony software on Sony devices, Microsoft won’t let you play Windows Media files on a Linux PVR.

We hope that consumers will campaign for open standards and better interoperability before companies lock down the entire chain, from software to hardware to media.

CeBIT News Site

UK’s Voice Over IP Sector Sets Up Trade Association

Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony is growing rapidly in the UK, but has yet to reach mass market – currently six million people worldwide make VoIP calls, mostly in the USA and Japan. In years to come this could be the number of people making VoIP calls in Britain alone. Ofcom have reports and suggestions on how the sector should be managed – including setting aside a block of non-geographic numbers for VoIP services.

To promote the sector and effectively lobby Parliament, thirteen UK companies have grouped together to form the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA). The thirteen founder members are Call UK, ET Phones, Gossiptel, Gradwell.com, Idesk, Imass Telecom, Intervivo, Magrathea, Mistral Internet, Speak2World, Telappliant, Telco Global and T-Strategy. It is not yet known if BT will be permitted to join the group.

The ITSPA hopes for a self-regulating sector, known for innovation: spokesman Kim Thesiger said “Internet Telephony providers now offer a serious alternative to the existing telephone companies, and we need to look at the levels of regulation and encouragement that this industry needs. This technology will revolutionise the way in which consumers and businesses make voice calls over the next few years ushering in far cheaper prices for phone calls and offering a wealth of new products and services that were only available to the biggest corporations until now.”

E-Consultancy’s Guide to VoIP

The state of VoIP worldwide

Microsoft’s’ iPod Killer – Bigger, More Expensive

It had to happen – although Microsoft have had mixed fortunes in the hardware market, it was inevitable that they would release a competitor to the iPod and other personal media players out there.

This new gadget will have functionality not seen in iPods so far: video playback and picture display, and it will run MS’s Portable Media Centre (PMC) OS. “We think this is going to be one of the hot devices for Christmas 2004,” said James Bernard, product manager for PMC. The hardware itself is basically a Creative player with a 20 or 40 gb hard drive. Sizewise, it’s about three times the thickness of an iPod and twice as long.

The device will play MP3s, so won’t be completely tied to Microsoft’s own Windows Media Format. As previously reported, MS have content deals in place with Napster and EMI.

Pricing in the in relevant markets varies, but is estimated to be US$750, €550 (Denmark, Sweden) and UK£399.

The impeding release can only increase speculation that Apple will retort with a video iPod at some point next year.

Slashdot — “LOTS OF SHOUTING”

Reuters

CeBIT: The Future is in Integration, Not Technology

“There is not going to be one Next Big Thing – it’s going to be many things working together, combined to work seamlessly” said Motorola’s president and COO, Michael Zafirovski in his speech at CeBIT yesterday. This seems to be a common theme emerging from CeBIT, and is reflected in the nature of the mobile devices coming into the market.

It’s almost impossible to buy a mobile phone that is just a phone. Even the most basic phone available has a some sort of PDA functionality, games and a simple WAP browser. Many phones appearing now are in fact more sophisticated than the people you see chatting into them – and the phones at least will continue to get more sophisticated and useful.

Where the challenge for network providers and mobile phone manufacturers lies now is bringing several channels of communication together: many consumers have a fixed line at home (often more than one), a mobile for each person, a mobile in the car, a phone in the office, email on some devices not others … it goes on. Although solutions have been banded around for years (Wildfire, anyone?) the scale of the problem is now far greater than was anticipated before the rapid growth of mobile communications and internet usage began ten years ago.

The current situation does not allow for simplicity and will begin to turn users away unless investment into the seamless integration of devices and services begins to rival the effort put into getting the latest megapixel camera into the smallest form factor.

Opening remarks presented by Simon Perry at the Digital-Lifestyles theme day at IBC September 2003 (PDF).

CeBIT: Sendo Smart Phone Records 30 Minutes of Video

Weighing 129g and with a 176 x 220 pixel TFT display, the new Sendo X is yet another entry into the highly competitive smartphone market.

The phone features all the usual applications and gadgets that have come to define smartphones: digital camera, GPRS, PDA functionality – however, there are a couple of features that set it apart.

Video playback is enhanced though Sendo’s GraphiX engine – a coprocessor that ensures smoother playback of Real and MPEG4 video streams. With 32mb of RAM free to users, the phone can store 30 mins of video, or 1000 photographs from the 4 x zoom camera. Memory expansion is through SD cards.

Another new feature is it’s Voice Signal Technologies (VST) voice-activation function: Sendo claim that their VST advanced speech recognition allows users to access the phone’s functions and address book without having to train the phone to recognize their voice.

The phone runs Symbian’s OS and Nokia Series 60 applications, and is J2ME compatible.

Sendo on the X and its GraphiX engine

EU/Microsoft Talks Collapse

It has not been possible for the European Commission to reach an agreement with Micorsoft over the bundling of Windows Media Player in versions of its desktop operating system.

Commissioner Mario Monti said in his statement a few minutes ago: “I would like to stress the constructive and co-operative spirit displayed by Microsoft in the last few weeks. I also want to acknowledge the high degree of professionalism of the members of the Microsoft team at all levels.”

The Commission is expected to meet next Wednesday to discuss next steps – it looks for certain that there’s a heft fine on the way to Microsoft’s European headquarters.

Commissioner Monti’s statement

Discussion over at Slashdot

CeBIT 2004: 18th – 24th March 2004, Hannover

Digital Lifestyles will be covering CeBIT 2004, and we’ll publish the relevant key stories and news throughout each day.

ICT World Forum 2004

This year the forum will feature 32 speakers from 9 countries, and the theme across the three days is achieving business profitability through technology.

Highlights for us include Brian Kardon (CSO, Forrester Research Inc.), Andy Green (CEO, BT Global Services), Pekka Ala-Pietilä (President, Nokia Corporation) and Justin Lindsey (CTO, US Department of Justice).

With an emphasis on the technology trends of 2004 and CRM, there’s going to be a lot of discussion of the future of the mobile market place – for the consumer, the devices and for the service providers themselves.

Key Events at CeBIT

There will be 260 corporate lectures at CeBIT this year, we like the look of:

  • Mobile processes, services and mobile content – efficient design and security, mobile CRM
  • e-Government with Web Services
  • Mobile applications: navigation, tracking, RFID and mobile payment
  • Digital photography and IP-video security

Exhibitors

Amongst the 6400 companies exhibiting, look out for important announcements from Sony, Nokia, Micorsoft and all the usual suspects.

New Facilities at CeBIT

With over 200 802.11b access points installed all around the venue, delegates will have access to Wireless LAN in every area at the exhibition centre.

For the first time, the fair organisers are providing an SMS guide to the fair. If you get lost (perhaps on the way back from the bar, or you’ve left your fair catalogue under a heavy pile of carrier bags and promotional mouse mats), just text +3777-4-CEBIT with the name of the exhibiting company (your own, for example) and the location and stand number will be sent directly to your phone (so you can stagger back to check what happened whilst you were away, without too much embarrassment).

CeBIT Homepage

CeBIT: Sony’s European Music Launch

Sony have announced at CeBIT that they’re launching a new music service in Europe in June. The initial countries on the list will be UK, Germany and France. The service will comprise of some 300,000 tracks form Sony’s catalogue, and they will be available for the usual €0.99 per track.

Now for the bad news. The tracks won’t be MP3s, they won’t be AAC and they won’t be Windows Media Format. They’ll be ATRAC3 (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding 3) – and customers will have to use Sony’s Sonic Stage 2.0 software.

We’ve used Sonic Stage in the past, and it’s a bit of a pig: getting tracks onto devices is relatively simple, but getting them off again can be a nightmare – we hope that some changes will be made to the platform to make the whole process considerably less painful.

This is also a bold move for Sony – by providing Sonic Stage as the engine and selling ATRAC3 music, the service will only work with Sony devices, considerably narrowing their market reach at the expense of copy protection. With Napster and iTunes launching in Europe later this year, it won’t take long to see if this was a good decision or not. We’ll keep you posted.

US Service “Coming Soon”

CeBIT: Nokia’s Mega Pixel Camera Phone and Image Album

The new Nokia phone announced today at CeBIT takes the camera part of “camera phone” very seriously. The 7610 contains a 4x zoom, 1152 x 864 resolution camera – and its Movie Director application lets users edit video and add music on the move.

The phone comes with Nokia’s new Lifeblog software allowing owners to record their every thought and detail about their life and then upload it to the internet. I know someone here who’ll be very excited about that.

Also unveiled today was the Image Album – a 20gb hard drive that will download images and video from compatible Nokia phones. To show them on a TV screen or other display, Nokia will be launching the Image Viewer SU-5, which handily has a remote control. Juha Putkiranta, president of Nokia’s Imaging Business Unit, said: “Mobile imaging is on an explosive growth path.” It’s obvious from these new devices that Nokia are taking imaging very seriously indeed and don’t just regard it as a gimic.
PC World has a bit more from Putkiranta

Slashdot gets excited

BBC on Lifeblog