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?

BT Doubles Bandwidth for Business Customers; Blair Promises Broadband UK 2008

BT has announced today that it will be doubling the speed of its customers’ Business Broadband Network connections, at no extra cost. Customers on the 512k and 1 meg pipes will be upgraded to Network 1000 and 2000 automatically.

Customers on the 2 meg service won’t be getting ablistering 4 meg however – instead they’ll see a UK£30 (€44) reduction in their monthly line rental.

Duncan Ingram, BT Retail’s managing director of Broadband and Internet Services commented: “High bandwidth is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for businesses. Companies now need to have more than one computer attached to a network connection and that’s exactly what our Network products are designed for. Doubling bandwidth, whilst not increasing price, is part of our continuing drive to give our business customers the tools they need to really harness broadband, giving them a clear advantage over competitors and enabling them to punch well above their weight. Not only does it make communication easier, but also enables small businesses to have access to the same applications and services that have traditionally only been open to much larger enterprises.”

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, the UK PM Tony Blair promised a broadband Britain by 2008, if the country voted Labour: “Our country and its people prospering in the knowledge economy. Increasing by £1bn the investment in science, boosting support to small businesses and ending the digital divide by bringing broadband technology to every home in Britain that wants it by 2008.”

Broadband is part of a package of ten items that Blair promises as part of a Labour third term. Included amongst them are ID cards and the electronic registration of everyone who passes the UK’s borders.

Given that it’s not actually the UK government who will be doing the connecting, it’s a bit of a cheeky promise.

Since BT have already estimated that 99.6% of households will be broadband accessible by July 2005, is Tony saying that voting Labour will delay the whole process by three years?

BT double bandwidth

Toshiba Announce First 60GB Music Players

Toshiba have added some new models to their gigabeat series, including the world’s first 60GB digital music player. All players in the gigabeat F series have 2.2 inch QVGA high resolution colour displays and feature storage capacities from 10GB to 60GB. Based on Toshiba’s 1.8” hard-drive technology, the music players will début in Japan in November 2004.

The 60GB model will store 15,000 4 minute tracks encoded at 128kbps in either WMA or MP3 formats – that’s nearly 42 days of continuous music.

Interaction with the gigabeat F players is done through Plus Touch, a plus sign-shaped sensor that allows users to navigate quickly through music libraries and tracks. The players attach to PCs through a USB cradle, and users can rip any CD in their optical drive by pressing the RipRec button on the cradle. Toshiba’s gigabeat Room software manages music on the PC and player, synchronises tracks within designated folders and allows artwork and notes to be attached to music. Supporting Windows DRM, the players are fully compatible with either Windows Media or MP3 files, but no AAC as yet.

So what next? Who will be the first to break the 100GB music player barrier, and when?

The Toshiba players

Duke Nukem Forever Crawls Slightly Closer; New Development Tools for the PSP

Think Half Life 2 is taking a long time? Well, spare a thought for those poor souls waiting for Duke Nukem Forever – the whole affair reminds me of the “Apocalypse When?” headlines when Coppola was working on his Vietnam film. Rabid fans of the first person shooter series will be pleased to hear that a physics engine provider has been chosen, and so hopefully the new game will have the same detail and level of interactivity as its 3D predecessors.

Physics for the world inhabited by the Snake Plisskin-inspired eponymous hero will be supplied by Meqon, a new company in the physics middleware market.

George Broussard, CEO of 3D Realms commented on the choice: “We evaluated several physics SDK’s and Meqon was really fast, had the cleanest interface and integrated into our game very quickly.”

The original Duke Nukem shot to fame in 1991, but it wasn’t until 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D that players discovered the joys of shooting fire extinguishers and laying traps that the series reached legendary status. Since then 3D realms have had a number of hits, including May Payne and of course Wolfenstein 3D.

3D Realms

Meqon

In other gaming news, SN Systems have released a development kit for Sony’s PSP handheld. Their ProDG tools are available to registered developers on the PSP hardware, and include a compiler, assembler, linker and debugger – with full integration with .NET.

Andy Beveridge Co-Founder and Director of SN Systems said in a statement: “It’s been a very exciting time for us, getting hold of the new hardware and seeing what it can do is always fascinating. We’ve put a lot of hours into this latest line of ProDG and we’re really pleased with the results. It doesn’t stop there though; developers choosing ProDG for PSPTM are going to have a few more toys to play with in the near future, I just can’t mention them all right now.”

The development tools are backed by Sega’s Yuji Naka, R&D Creative Officer: “ProDG for PSP has rich functions and is very stable while keeping up with fast changes of development environments. SEGA is very satisfied especially with the fact that important functions such as .NET integration, fast compile speed, and good GUI of debugger are equipped from the early version.”

SN Systems

Roobarb and Custard in the 21st Century

Roobarb & Custard30-something nostalgics, rejoice: a new series of Roobarb and Custard is in production. IP owners and new series Executive Producers, A+B Productions have started work at Monster Animation Studios in Dublin. To be distributed by Celador, Roobarb and Custard Too uses hand-drawn and hand-animated cells coupled with modern production processes to produce a cartoon that is faithful to the original series.

Hardcore R&C fans will be relieved to hear that there is no dodgy computer graphics work in the new version, and that the classic look has not been messed around with. Having done a side-by-side comparison with an early animation sample, I was very impressed by the R&C Too, and was keen to find out how they managed to recreate the distinctive look of the original. Adam Sharp, co-founder of A+B Productions told us “We’re using innovative ways to bring back the classic feel the original hand drawn series had.”

I spoke to Gerard O’Rourke at Monster Animation Studios about the painstaking process that A+B and Monster went through to get the correct look and feel: “Everything is hand-drawn. It’s then traditionally scanned into a computer and digitised. It’s then animated by hand, using a graphics tablet and is then rendered using a combination of Photoshop and Painter to achieve that marker pen feel. From there it’s composited together in After Effects – and then it’s over to post production to do the sound.”

And how did they reproduce the wobbly lines? “They recreate the drawing a number of times – when it’s played back if gives you the wobbly lines. Because you have to replicate the drawing a number of times, you have to do extra and copy them and offset them,” Gerard told us.

“The old version was done in the 70s, and you’ve probably heard the stories of them getting unemployed brickies and everyone they could find to work on Roobarb and Custard – and the reason they had that look that the markers had run out was because the markers had run out! They didn’t use animators all the time, but it did create its own feel and look – and we’ve been trying to increase the production values but not lose the charm of the programme.”

What about people who may be worried that it’s just a Flash update?

“We don’t want people to think that it’s a Flash project, because Flash can tend to be very flat and internet-based, but it is a great animating tool. But it really is only a tool like Word and Excel. It’s how you use it afterwards – take the different functions out of it and then use them with your own techniques and methods. We’ve taken all our software to its limits and used all the libraries and tools that we could get.”

Gerard seems very pleased with amount of care that A+B have been putting in to the new series: “Richard Bryers is narrating the series again, he’s doing all the voices. Grange Caveley, creator and writer has written all the new scripts.”

“It’s very much Roobarb and Custard 1974.”

Monster Animation

If you just can’t wait for the new version of Roobarb and Custard, here’s a selection of can-buy products from Amazon
DVD: Roobarb And Custard – The Complete Roobarb And Custard [1974]
VHS: Roobarb And Custard

Yahoo’s New Homepage

Yahoo’s homepage has become rather busy of late – in fact the number of sections, links and buttons to click has made it almost as impenetrable as Jacob Neilsen’s own Useit page. The search engine trend, even since Google appeared, has been to make user interfaces simpler – after all, what chance do you have of finding something on the internet if you can’t even find something on the search engine’s home page?

MSN Search has recently had a make over, Google still gets praise for the simplicity of their default home page, so it was time for Yahoo to do something. Visitors to Yahoo get swamped in a choice links and paths – the old-style Yahoo home page currently harbours more than 210 links, making locating tools and information frustrating for the novice user.

Enter the new, simplified Yahoo home page. Whilst not quite the radical culling of links that was needed, the page is much more organised. Links and other things to click are kept at a modest 150 or so (still 100 too many in my opinion), but categorisation is much better.

The new page has been tightened up, with better use of space and font sizes, also separate sections are finally delineated by lines and coloured boxes. The new design makes prominent use of MyYahoo – a personalisation function designed to let visitors further tailor the home page to their needs with localised weather and even, for those of a gullible nature, horoscopes.

Surprise – there’s a music button! Though this just takes the user through to launch.yahoo.com, offering videos and music news. No music store as yet, though you can buy CDs and ringtones. Since Yahoo just forked out US$160 million (€130 million) for MusicMatch, expect this to change soon.

Try the new Yahoo

AT&T Release Ogo

AT&T have finally released their Ogo handset. The US$130 (€106) device is designed to do one thing well – messaging. The Ogo allows subscribers to send emails, instant messages and text messages, and that’s about it – but there’s plenty of demand in the market for a simple messaging product that performs well. Are we seeing the opposite of convergence?

The Ogo will attract comparisons with its nearest competitor, the Blackberry, though with its brightly coloured display screens and clamshell design it is clearly aimed at a much younger, less business-based market. The 115mm x 75 mm x 25 mm unit opens up to present a 4000-colour screen and keyboard, and provides 2.5 hours of usage time with 120 hours standby. 2.5 hours doesn’t seem like a lot to us, and we’re sure many avid text and email users will have to charge their Ogo at the end of every day.

For a monthly subscription starting at US$17.99 (€14.62), users get unlimited ingoing and outgoing email and instant messages one of Yahoo, MSN or AOL, extra accounts cost an additional US$3 (€2.43) a month.

Andre Dahan, president of AT&T Wireless Mobile Multimedia Services, said in a statement: “With Ogo, we are creating an entirely new category and the next ‘must have’ device in the consumer electronics space. Unlike many of today’s disappointing multi-purpose wireless devices, we created Ogo to do one thing – mobile messaging – extraordinarily well. Ogo doesn’t pretend to be ‘all things to all people,’ and is not bogged down by hardly-used features or an out-of-reach price tag. Instead, Ogo offers the most desirable mobile applications, on a smartly-designed device that most people can afford.”

Ogo

Rajar Propose Move to Electronic Measurement

Rajar, Joint Radio Audience Research Ltd, has published its roadmap for updating the way that it measures radio audiences in the UK.

The schedule includes a tendering process to begin in April 2005, with the new contract to be awarded in September 2005, or later. After that, new versions of the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) and the GfK Radiocontrol systems will be vaildated and tested, alongside a new meter from Eurisko.

Sally de la Bedoyere, managing director of RAJAR, said in a statement: “The RAJAR roadmap to enhanced radio audience measurement is ambitious, but certainly achievable. It is the final stage of a journey RAJAR began in 2001 and it leads to a seismic change in radio audience measurement, namely the possible move to electronic measurement. We are optimistic that, by 2007, we will be heralding the introduction of an audio-meter based methodology, which measures analogue, digital, digital TV and Internet listening and we shall continue to work vigorously in the pursuit of this goal.”

Kelvin Mackenzie has already announced that the tests are “twaddle”, and indeed his Wireless Group is suing Rajar, as they are claiming lost revenue due to the lack of an electronic measurement system.

Rajar

Pentium Reaches 6GHz

It’s not stable by any means, but a group of Finnish overclockers have got a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 up to 6009.73Ghz. The chip needs liquid nitrogen to keep it running, so don’t try this at home – it’s not available as a home system, and doesn’t even fit in a case. Though non-toxic and non-flammable, liquid nitrogen does present a frost-burn and asphyxiation hazard to geeks who have to calculate PI just that bit faster.

For safety, he overclocked system has low memory and a cheap graphics card, so has a couple of key performance bottlenecks (after all, you wouldn’t want to risk destroying a nice new Radeon X800 if you fried your system board), but is an interesting proof of concept. In this instance, only program that run entirely on the processor and do not make memory, disk and graphics calls with show the most benefits from this level of overclocking.

Overclocking to 6GHz and showing off

Chrysalis Launch Music2Mobile

Chrysalis Mobile have launched a new range of licensed products for mobile phones under the name Music2Mobile. The product range will include ringtones, images and, eventually, downloads of full tracks. The label also intend to licence content to other major providers in the UK and abroad.

Music2Mobile has already been picked up by Carphone Warehouse, and they will soon be offering products through their UK stores. That’s right – although the product is available download from internet and WAP sites, the range is principally intended to comprise of branded, physical products. They’ll be popping up in point-of-sale displays in a shop near you soon.

Content is selected on a weekly basis by a team at Chrysalis Mobile to keep up to date with consumer tastes, and will initially feature these three offerings (information supplied by Chrysalis Mobile):

Playlist – full physical catalogue of tunes across seven genres. Content can be requested directly by texting to short-codes, accessing via a music2mobileTM-powered WAP portal or over-the-counter instore using pin-code activation.

Genre Cards – seven individual cards updated monthly, containing ten leading songs within a specific music category; these cards are paid for over-the-counter and the consumer can then select multiple content items from the card list.

Monthly Theme Cards – individual cards promoting official content (including real tones and wallpapers) from a specific artist and negotiated directly with labels; the consumer purchases the card over-the-counter and selects their favourite content for download.

Monthly Tone Chart – a Top 20, instore ring tone chart updated fortnightly. Content can be requested directly by texting to short-codes, accessing via a music2mobileTM -powered WAP portal.

Chrysalis Mobile are not offering full song downloads immediately, preferring instead to wait until network bandwidth and phone technology are capable of delivering the user-experience the company wants.

But why concentrate on retail? Nick Gregg, Strategy Director of Chrysalis Mobile, said “Retail is a logical extension for Chrysalis Mobile given our focus on leading brands that have significant audience reach. Under the music2mobileTM brand we have coupled the development of high quality content optimised specifically for mobile phones with our experience working directly with record labels to provide a real differentiated service for major retail players.”

Chrysalis Mobile

Adobe Propose Digital Negative Standard Format for Cameras

Adobe have proposed a public, archival format for raw digital camera data to deal with the archival problems of detail loss and accessibility. For most camera users, images are stored as JPEGs, which is a lossy format even with the gentlest of compression. Some cameras make use of a raw format, storing the image exactly as it is captured without compression – but of course not all manufacturers use the same format and the specifications for many of them are not publicly available. This lack of an open standard also creates the risk that software to read a particular camera’s raw image data may not be available in the future, making archiving problematic.

To combat these concerns, Adobe are suggesting the adoption of DNG, or Digital Negative Format and have made its specifications freely available. DNG is based on the TIFF-EP format, and supports metadata so that images can be described and differentiated.

To encourage adoption, they have released a free converter which will take the raw image format from a variety of cameras and convert them to DNG. Adobe hope that a single processing solution will improve workflow for photographers if they have to use raw files from multiple cameras and manufacturers.

Adobe on DNG