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?

The Nokia 9300 – the New Communicator, Only Smaller

No doubt you’ll remember the Nokia Communicator – you’ve probably sat opposite some bloke in a meeting who had one, and I bet he had an air of desperation tinged with coolness about him. Cool, because he thought he had a nifty gadget, desperation because it was enormous and the battery was about to go any moment.

The Communicator, apart from the Trekker name, was a good idea and the various updates and iterations since the first model have improved many of its features and attributes. However (there’s always a however, isn’t there?), other more useful (and certainly smaller) smartphones have appeared, and people failed to see the point of the Communicator after a while.

Nokia are back with another attempt though, and a valiant effort it is too. The new 9300 is 50 grams lighter and several centimetres smaller around the waist – Nokia are touting it as “a new high-end smartphone with both beauty and brains.” The company is hoping to see it in a lot more shirt pockets, and tellingly, handbags.

The tri-band 9300 retains the original hinged format, opening up to reveal a full keyboard and a 65,536 colour screen. Navigation has been improved with a joystick for getting around menus, and eight function keys. Users can expand the 80mb built-in memory to up to 2 gig with an optional MMC card.

The new phone runs the Series 80 OS, and includes software for connecting to various email servers, browsing the internet and a built in office suite, including a PDF reader.

“The Nokia 9300 will appeal to a wide range of professionals who want powerful functionality from a data-enabled device without compromising the look, comfort, simplicity and usability of a standard mobile phone,” said Niklas Savander, senior vice president of Nokia’s business device unit. “We believe the Nokia 9300 strikes that balance in one stylish smartphone, without sacrificing the combined functionality that many people require but until now could only get from carrying multiple products.”

Where’s the camera then?

The 9300 will be available in the first quarter of 2005, though no pricing details have yet been publicised.

The 9300

Atari’s Flashback

The Atari FlashbackIt’s been some time since Atari last brought out a game that was actually worthy of the brand. The Atari logo you see on games now is just that – a logo. Infogrames bought the name a few years ago to add credibility to their business, and the Atari of the 00s has nothing to do with the proud days of the 80s with Nolan Bushnell and (sniff) Crystal Castles.

Atari are to release a new console – well, it’s actually an old one, a 2600/7800 hybrid with two dozen games from the the platforms’ heyday. Called Atari Flashback, the console plugs directly into your television and has two two-button, joystick controllers.

The Atari 2600 games are Adventure, Air Sea Battle, Battlezone, Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Crystal Castles, Gravitar, Haunted House, Millipede, Sky Diver, Solaris, Sprintmaster, Warlords, Yar’s Revenge, and a previously unreleased title, Saboteur. The Atari 7800 games are Asteroids, Centipede, Desert Falcon, Food Fight, and Planet Smashers.

The company will also be releasing Atari Anthology, yet another collection of back catalogue titles for PS2 and XBox, featuring 85 games from the company’s history, with some superflous gameplay modes such as “Trippy” and “Double speed” . There have been a few Atari collections released lately, this seems to be a super-set of them with Gravitar and Battlezone being amongst the previously tricky to find titles.

Now that the company has fully leveraged their old IP, how about some shiny new games that are worthy of the Atari name?

Atari

BitPass Secure More Funding as Content Spurs Micropayment Growth

Good news for micorpayment companies – now that there are actually things worth buying, the forcast for the industry is very healthy indeed. Recent research by TowerGroup estimates that the market for internet and mobile payments will reach US$11.5 billion (€9.52) by 2009, in the US alone. Mobile payment companies like SimPay in Europe must be popping the champagne corks as mobile phone adoption in Europe is traditionally ahead of the US.

To capitalise on the expected growth, BitPass has secured an additional US$11.75 million (€9.72 million) in funding from a group of investors including Worldview Technology Partners, Steamboat Ventures (the venture capital arm of The Walt Disney Company), RRE Ventures and others. Existing investors Garage Technology Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital and Amicus Capital also participated in the round.

The money will be used on the company’s sales and marketing efforts, plus enhancing the company’s product and customer service support.

BitPass’ payment system is geared towards a wide range of online content, such as music and games, and offers secure anonymous payment. No software is required either – just a recent browser.

BitPass is backed by Guy Kawasaki, who said of the company: “BitPass is the most exciting opportunity I’ve seen since the Macintosh. Since my days at Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), I have loved technology that empowers the little guy. BitPass does exactly that. This could create a business model for companies and individuals where there was none before.”

BitPass

Zappware Launch Interactive Television Browser

Zappware, a solution provider for interactive television, have produced a browser platform for set-top boxes. The browser uses an XML-based page description language allowing broadcasters and content providers to re-purpose existing material or develop new content without having to use or learn proprietary system. Since XML is well adopted and understood throughout the industry, production houses can start using the icTV Gateway platform immediately.

The platform will be officially announced during IBC2004 and consists of a client mini-browser in the set-top-box and a scalable server infrastructure at the distribution point.

The server infrastructure translates high-level application data into code for the set-top box, whilst the mini-browser allows users to navigate and view content whilst using a minimal amount of the receiver’s resources. The system employs some clever caching technology to make the best of the limited bandwidth available for iTV applications of this type.

Zappware’s iTV solutions are currently employed on the MHP, liberate and MSTV platforms, in markets throughout the world.

Zappware

Netflix and TiVo to Team Up

Newsweek is reporting that Netflix and TiVo are soon to team up to offer a film on demand service. Netflix currently operate a DVD-by-post delivery mode, but clearly that doesn’t cater for the people at home who don’t really fancy waiting three days for their chosen film to show up.

In many ways, the two companies were made for each other – Netflix has a huge library of films, there are TiVo boxes sitting under thousands of television in the US.

The proposed service will allow subscribers to download DVDs directly to their TiVo box via their broadband link home, and then watch them on their television. No popping out to the video shop, no waiting for the post, no crowding around a PC to watch downloaded films.

TiVo’s first step in this direction was its acquisition of Strangeberry earlier this year – the company produced a technology that allowed TiVo owners to plug a broadband modem into the back of their PVR and download media from the internet. Since then, TiVo have made hardware and software upgrades to their platform, and improved security and other copy protection features.

If Netflix can get distribution rights to their entire library, then many people may never go out again – and the Netflix name will finally make sense.

Tivo

Netflix

Samsung’s Hard Drive Phone

Samsung have launched their SPH V5400 mobile phone, a US$800 (€661) handset with a 1.5 gig hard drive in it. Manufacturers have been adding more and more features to handsets for years now, but they have been hampered by the relatively tiny amount of memory available to them.

The recent commercial breakthrough of micro-sized hard disk drives now means that phones can finally start to live up to all those convergence promises by taking advantage of a decent amount of storage. Most mobile phones have under 16 meg of memory – and that doesn’t go very far when you start throwing photographs, Java games, MP3s, ringtones and your address book at it.

The V5400 certainly needs a 1.5 gig drive in it – the phone features a megapixel camera and MP3 player, so users will be able to store about 350 tracks or a few hundred photographs.

Why a hard drive rather than a slightly more drop-friendly Flash memory? Disk drive capacities increase exponentially compared to their cost as the technology matures, the increases enjoyed by Flash memories are much more modest.

The new phone also has two screens – the main screen is an 320 x 240 OLED, and the secondary screen is a 128 x 128 TFT.

A built in FM transmitter will even send music to a near-by radio, just like the Belkin iTrip (unless legislation changes, this feature will not be legal in the UK) – and if you want to view video or photographs on your TV, well there’s an output for that too.

The phone will be available in Korea by the end of September, with no schedule yet for other markets.

Samsung

Ericsson Ends Bluetooth Design and Manufacturing

Ericsson have halted their Bluetooth design and manufacturing work. Some are heralding this as the end of the short-range communications standard, but it is simply an indicator that the standard has matured – the standard does not require more development work and the chipsets are commodity items. Ericsson, the inventor of standard, will continue to offer Bluetooth features in their new phones, but will leave the manufacturing of the chipsets to high-volume chip manufacturers – and there are are already many making the sets.

Ericsson, with transfer the 125 staff working on Bluetooth to other divisions of the company, though will remain a member of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.

Bluetooth has always been more popular in Europe than in America – only 10% of Bluetooth shipments are in the US, opposed to 65% in Europe (source: Wireless Watch).

Bluetooth is now so widely adopted that it can be left in the hands of other companies to thrive, but it is clear that Ericsson do not believe there will be a next iteration of the technology. There are new technologies on the way – particularly ZigBee, a low-power, low-data rate radio frequency communications standard, designed with a much wider remit than Bluetooth in mind. ZigBee is intended to operate in consumer electronics, PC peripherals, home automation and industrial control applications.

Although Bluetooth has failed in many of the areas it intended to tackle such as automotive communications, the standard still has plenty of life left. Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2 has radically improved support for Bluetooth and with no immediate replacement, it’ll be with us for a while yet.

Bluetooth.com

Zach Leonard Joins The Cloud

Zach Leonard, former Managing Director, UK and EMEA, of the Financial Times has joined The Cloud as Chief Operating Officer. Zach will lead the commercial arm of the business, taking overall responsibility for marketing, sales and business development at the company. Whilst at the FT, Zach launched and managed FT YourMoney and FT MarketWatch.

The Cloud have also recently acquired Peter Elliot, formerly heat of international IT at Orange and Gerard Small, ex-Group Finance Director at Colt Telecom.

The Cloud is Europe’s largest public access WiFI network, with more than hotspots in more than 4,300 location – and growing by at least a 100 more every week.

On the news, Zach Leonard said: “I am very excited about my new role and the challenge of developing new business opportunities for The Cloud. My main focus will be to articulate and implement new customer propositions, to acquire new site estates, to build awareness of The Cloud, and, ultimately, to manage The Cloud’s drive to build wireless broadband access in the enterprise market. The wireless broadband sector has enormous potential, and I am looking forward to being part of a team that is focused on making wireless broadband a success.”

George Polk, CEO of The Cloud, said: “We are delighted to welcome Zach to the team. His appointment, combined with our recent hires in technology and finance, provides The Cloud with a very strong and seasoned senior management team. The company will benefit greatly from this combination of individual expertise and broad experience, which will ensure The Cloud is perfectly placed to meet the challenges inherent in its continued growth and development.”

The Cloud

Alienware’s 4GHz Pentium

I love overclockers – I don’t know if it’s the nerves of steel needed to run components so far beyond their factory specifications that they need to be refrigerated, or the glowing water cooling pipes they use, or it might even be the UV lamps and dodgy stickers. And this is coming from someone who underclocks his graphics card – OpenOffice doesn’t really need much acceleration.

Overclocking basically involves running a processor at speeds beyond factory specification, and is generally performed by home enthusiasts who then have to solve the puzzle of extracting all that extra heat out of their PC case in colourful and complex ways. Some manufacturers have noticed this fashion and have taken to selling systems that have already been overclocked, and the professional build and cooling systems make them more reliable and less messy.

So, for those of you who want power at any expense, Alienware have released a pre-overclocked gaming system, featuring a Pentium 4 that runs at a (probably literally) red hot 4Ghz.

The Area-51 ALX is based around a Extreme Edition Pentium 4, with 1 gig of Corsair RAM, and a 6800 Ultra for a graphics card. Keeping this lot cool requires gold plated, pure copper coolers, and a specially formulated liquid solution to conduct heat away from components. Oh, and two pumps and a few fans. A custom power control board monitors liquid temperature and features an emergency alarm and automatic shut-down features, just in case things get too frantic during those FPS death matches.

At a wallet-alarming US$5,458 (€4,525) for a typical set up, it’s for devoted, power hungry gamers only – but I certainly can’t think of a better way to Half-Life 2’s launch.

Alienware ALX Series

Atzio’s Peer-to-Peer Television

Atzio, a content delivery software company, have developed a form of peer-to-peer distribution for television networks. They predict that P2P will revolutionise the legitimate delivery of TV and video content via the web, whilst broadcasters like the BBC are looking at using the peer to peer technologies to make content distribution cheaper.

Atzio have combined time-shifted media with a “data swarming” mechanism to lower distribution costs – as in the P2P model, a piece of media is divided into small blocks and downloaded from multiple hosts using bandwidth from each machine’s internet connection. Using this technology, a broadcaster does not have to buy huge amounts of bandwidth as its audience effectively becomes the distribution method. A welcome side effect of this model is that, the higher the demand is for a piece of content, the easier it is to get as it will be stored in more places.

The BBC have looked at P2P, amongst other options, for the distribution of their Creative Archive and other content. P2P systems like this are ideal for distributing large files to many users, such as entire films, TV programmes or games – and can be extremely cheap as customers do the distribution for the content publisher.

Atzio’s Peer to Peer Television uses a custom client to secure content against unauthorised copying and distribution, with an integrated playback interface. The network is closed and controlled by the content provider, so unauthorised or infringing materials cannot be distributed and quality of product is assured. Users can browse a content provider’s catalogue for titles and then download them immediately (like video on demand), to a schedule (like a PVR), or add them to their wishlist for viewing much later. A system of this type could replace a DVD-by-post business model quite easily.

The network is compatible with the major DRM systems out there, including Windows, DivX and Real Networks.

How Peer to Peer Television works