Mike Slocombe

Fisher-Price Launch Digital Toys For Three Year Olds
Back in our day, we were lucky if we got a lump of mud as a toy (Luxury! – editor), but kids today are spoilt rotten with an endless succession of frivolous gadgets demanding an unwelcome draining of parents’ wallets.
Latest in a long line of toys for the tiny tot that must have everything is the new ‘Kid Tough’ range from Fisher-Price.
Aimed at preschoolers as young as three years old, the brightly coloured digital camera and digital music player look set to distract kids from boring tasks like, you know, playing with other children, reading books and talking to their parents.
Camera
The durable camera looks like it might survive several tantrums and buggy-lobbing fits, and offers a two-eye viewfinder, sturdy hand grips and a small colour LCD preview screen.
Fisher Price’s website doesn’t offer any details about camera resolution, but we figure it’s going to be pretty crappy.
There’s no memory card slots for kids to dribble into, with the camera offering built in storage for 60 pictures, backed up USB connectivity for transferring photos to a desktop PC.
Music player
Styled in a similarly chunky design, the Kid-Tough FP3 player comes pre-loaded with six songs (which will no doubt be repeated for infinity) as well as a less-than-generous two stories in what appears to be Fisher-Price’s proprietary FP3 format.
The circular player features big buttons and an LCD screen with icons to let kids pick their own choons and be a junior DJ Selectaaaaaa!
Naturally, there’s an option to buy some silence from your kid by buying and downloading songs and stories from the Fisher-Price Song and Story Online Store.
The FP3 player can store over 30 songs and 15 stories with the option to add a memory card and rip banging techno tunes for your kids from your own CDs.
With safety in mind, the child-sized headphones are restricted to kid-friendly volume levels and the neck strap is designed to snap if the local bully tries to swing your child around by his/her FP3 player.
The camera and FP3 player are predictably available in pink or blue, and are described as ‘coming soon’ on Fisher-Price’s website. No details of pricing have emerged yet.
Fisher-Price
18 May, 2006
MTV and Microsoft Take On iTunes With ‘Urge’
Apple’s hugely popular iTunes music download service looks set to face some mighty competition in the coming months.
Although many contenders have tried to take on Apple’s market leading music download business, all of have left with a bloody nose – but the arrival of a new service by a powerful pair of rivals could be Apple’s biggest battle yet.
The new ‘Urge’ service sees industry titans Microsoft and music video monsters MTV Networks teaming up to offer a heavyweight contender to iTunes.
Unlimited downloads
Like Apple’s service, buyers will be charged 99-cents per song download, but there’s an added twist: users subscribing $9.95 a month will be able to download unlimited songs from Urge’s 2-million-song catalogue to their personal PCs.
Users wanting to transfer songs onto portable music players can subscribe to the $14.95 service, with tunes protected by anticopying software from Microsoft.
Hoping to succeed where Napster, Yahoo, RealNetworks’s Rhapsody and even Microsoft’s own MSN service have failed, the partnership of the world’s biggest software company and the marketing might and ‘cool’ of MTV could prove a formidable challenge to iTunes.
“They are probably the strongest contender to come into the market for some time,” commented Phil Leigh, a senior analyst for Inside Digital Media, in Florida.
Geoff Harris, product unit manager for Windows Media Player at Microsoft, pointed out that although that other music subscription services have millions of songs on tap, that didn’t help listeners discover new tunes that they might like.
Noting that consumers have embraced satellite radio because it features dozens of channels with music chosen by experts, Harris reckoned that this could prove a real advantage to the Urge service.”You’ve got the experts in music here from MTV doing programming across a whole bunch of genres,” he commented.
As well as music files, subscribers to Urge will be able to download video streams of MTV Network programs, including shows from MTV, VH1, and CMT, a country music video channel. Yee-hi!
Sod the iPod
But there is a serious fly in the MP3 ointment for the new Urge service: crazily, its music downloads won’t be playable on the Apple iPod, despite the player hogging around 70 percent of the market for portable music players. Instead, users will have to invest in rival players like those from Creative Technology.
Although Harris admitted that the iPod incompatibility issue was “a hurdle that we have to get over” (an understatement, we reckon!), he added that, “there’s a long way to go in this market,” pointing out that the zillions of iPods sold still represent a fraction of the potential audience for music downloads.
Jason Hirschhorn, MTV Networks’ chief digital officer, insisted that Urge wasn’t interested in taking on Apple.’It’s not about beating Apple, it’s not about beating Rhapsody,” he said, pointing out that MTV has already teamed up with Apple elsewhere to flog some of its TV shows as downloads on the iTunes site.
We believe you, Jason.
Windows Media Player 11 beta
Although Urge is wholly owned by MTV Networks, Microsoft has committed ample resources to the service, embedding the software in its new Windows Media Player 11 beta, a spruced up upgrade to its media software offering iTunes-like integration.
The new player adds browsing by album cover and a search box to find media as well as offering improved content management, with less clicks needed to burn a CD, for example.
Urge will only be available initially in the United States, with the beta player linked to US-only music stores until the final version of Windows Media Player 11 is released.
Jonathan Arber, a research analyst with Ovum in London has high hopes for the service, “I think there’s a real chance we will see them become the top of the second tier below Apple.”
Assuming the thing is stable and doesn’t come with a zoo-full of bugs, of course.
Urge
Windows Media Player 11
17 May, 2006
Sony Launch AR-Series Blu-ray Laptops And VGN-UX50 Ultra Mobile PC
Sony has whipped out its first laptop equipped with a next-generation Blu-ray optical disk drive, saying that it will be available in Japan next month.
The electronics and entertainment giant also said that it would be unveiling a handheld PC that uses NAND flash memory instead of a hard disk drive during the same month.
VAIO AR-Series
The Blu-ray equipped Vaio notebook is expected to retail for about 400,000 yen ($3,600) – matching the price tag for Toshiba’s new notebooks equipped with the rival HD DVD drive.
Flagship of the new VAIO AR-Series is the AR11S laptop which will feature a hefty 17-inch WideUltraXGA2 screen with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 for watching full HD resolution video.
The AR-Series will also come with a HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) output for hooking up the lappie to a HD-ready TV or Full HD desktop display.
Lurking inside the shiny beast is an Intel Core Duo processor (up to and including the 2GHz T2500) and a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics card with 256MB of dedicated video memory.
There’s also a built in digital camera and microphone onboard, a hybrid Digital TV-Ready (DVB-T) Tuner and a veritable ton of storage space available, up to 200GB.
Full pricing details for the UK are yet to be announced, but the words ‘Sony’ and ‘Blu-ray’ invariably mean, “wallet draining,” with the AR Premium Blu-ray enabled model looking set to be banged out around the $3,500 mark, while the AR Standard model be around $1,800,
Sony’s VGN-UX50 takes on Origami
Sony has also announced a palm-top computer set to compete with Microsoft’s much trumpeted Origami project.
Smaller than a paperback book, Sony’s new handheld computer runs on Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and comes with a touch screen and small built-in keyboard.
Powered by Intel Core Solo U1400 (1.2 Ghz)/U1300 (1.06 Ghz) the pint-sized PC will sport an Intel 945GMS Express chipset, 512MB RAM, 20/30 GB hard drive and 69 key QWERTY keyboard.
Sony’s engineers have managed to wedge in a slide-out 4.5 inch WSVGA (1024×600) touchscreen display which can be used in portrait and landscape modes.
Other features include a 1.3 Megapixel Motion eye camera, Wi-Fi a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, Fingerprint sensor, Memory stick / Compact Flash card slot and a dock offering 3 x USB ports, 1 x Firewire port, Ethernet jack, 1 x VGA out and Felica reader (wireless payment service in Japan).
Sony will also be releasing a NAND Flash memory version of the Ultra Mobile PC, providing ‘instant on’ capability.
Sony plans to start selling the handheld PC in Japan from the end of May (for around 170,000 yen ~£820), with US deliveries following some time after.
Sony
17 May, 2006
Spammers 1 Internet 0 As Blue Security Surrender
A promising anti-spam service by Israeli company Blue Security has been brought to its knees by a renegade spammer hell-bent on protecting his spamming industry
Created by Eran Reshef, Blue Security came up with what looked like a cunningly simple plan to mash up the mass mailers: fight spam with spam.
The company set up a ‘Do Not Intrude Registry’ (similar to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing) and invited members to download a small application called Blue Frog, which automatically sent out requests to spammers to stop sending junk e-mail.
Of course, spammers aren’t renowned for paying attention to opt-out requests, so Blue Frog came with a rather nasty bite to make sure they paid attention: the software bombarded spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
It seemed to work too – Blue Security claimed that “six out of the top ten spammers” had complied with their opt-out requests and after signing up to the free service, we found our spam dropping dramatically. But not for long.
Spammers fight back
Not surprisingly, spammers don’t like it up ’em and soon started fighting back with a counter attack, launching a campaign of extortion e-mail messages threatening to flood users with nonsensical spam and viruses unless they removed their name from the Do Not Intrude registry.
This was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack using tens of thousands of hijacked computers which managed to knock Blue Security’s Website off the Web.
According to Reshef, a shady Russian-speaking spammer known as PharmaMaster then managed to bribe a staff member at a top-tier ISP into ‘black holing’ Blue Security’s former IP address (194.90.8.20) at Internet backbone routers – effectively rendering Blue’s main Website invisible to anyone outside of Israel.
Rather sinisterly, PharmaMaster told Blue Security in an ICQ conversation, that if he can’t send spam, there will be “no Internet.”
With Blue Security reduced to communicating through their secondary TypePad-hosted Weblog at bluesecurity.blogs.com, the spammer moved in for the kill, launching a ferocious denial of service attack that closed down the TypePad and Live Journal servers owned by Six Apart.
This resulted in thousands of blogs disappearing off the Web for a few hours, with the net operations of five top-tier hosting providers in the US and Canada also being disrupted.
The attack also shut down operations for around 12 hours at Tucows Inc., a Canadian Internet services company who helped manage Blue Security’s site.
Surrender
Faced with this endless aggro, Reshef has pulled the plug on his anti-spam operations, commenting, “It’s clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don’t have the authority to start.”
“Our users never signed up for this kind of thing,” he wearily added, admitting that in retrospect he’d made the mistake of not anticipating that PharmaMaster would go “beserk.”
Commenting on the DoS attack on his server, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss declared it to be “by far the largest the company had ever seen,” adding that very few companies currently have the infrastructure in place to withstand similar full-on assaults.
“This attack really was like trying to take out a mosquito with an atomic bomb,” Noss added.
According to Six Apart, the FBI is investigating the attacks, but we won’t be holding our breath on seeing anyone behind bars.
Told You So
Speaking to the Washington Post, Todd Underwood, chief of operations and security for Renesys Corp, tried hard to stop himself from saying, “I told you so”:
“When the company’s founders first approached the broader anti-spam community and asked them what they thought of the idea, everyone said this was a terrible idea and that they would eventually cause a lot of collateral damage,” Underwood commented.
“But it’s also extremely unfortunate, because it shows how much the spammers are winning this battle,” he added.
Where this leaves the venture capitalists who invested more than $4 million in Blue Security in 2004 is anyone’s guess, but we’re saddened to see the outcome.
The fate of Blue Security’s initiative proves that steeenkin’ spammers still rule the Internet and until governments take a unified and global approach to prosecuting junk mailers, they’re free to do whatever they like.
17 May, 2006
BT To Create 12 Wireless Cities In UK
BT has today announced its plans to set up wide-area Wi-Fi networks in 12 cities, giving perambulating folks access to high-speed Internet and telecoms services.
The first phase will see BT installing Wi-Fi hotspots covering large areas in Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Liverpool and London’s Westminster area, with services scheduled to be running in all 12 metropolitan areas by February next year.
“We have been thrilled with the overwhelming response of local authorities and businesses wanting to be part of this wireless revolution,” enthused BT’s chief of converged services, Steve Andrews.
“This first phase of 12 cities is just the start. We are already negotiating with many other cities,” he continued.
Lovely, lovely Cardiff was the city chosen for the first roll out of the Wireless City scheme, with BT Openzone hotspots being installed in many locations in the city centre.
Meanwhile, the bustling heart of Westminster has already seen a dedicated high-bandwidth wireless network being installed, now in the process of being extended.
Sadly, the Wi-Fi service won’t be free to Joe Public, but BT says it intends to develop a range of information and public services for the local authorities and split costs and revenues for such services.
BT is also looking to use the service to promote a Wi-Fi version of its BT Fusion mobile phone services which will be launched later this year.
The Fusion phone currently uses Bluetooth but the updated version will allow consumers to switch from a mobile network to a cheaper Internet network when the phone comes within range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.
BT Fusion
17 May, 2006
Nokia 770 Adds VoIP and IM
Nordic mobile goliaths Nokia have unveiled an upgrade for their Nokia 770 Internet Tablet which gives the chunky device VoIP and instant messaging capabilities through Google Talk.
The announcement, made at the VON Europe conference in Stockholm, marks Nokia’s first foray into Voice over Internet Protocol, with Ari Virtanen, vice president of Nokia’s Convergence Products commenting, “VoIP has really been the No.1 request for us.”
Despite the enthusiasm from Ari at the launch for the upgraded Nokia 770, he insisted that the technology wasn’t expected to cut into the market of traditional mobile telephones.
“I would not say this kind of technology competes with traditional mobile telephony. There will always be stand-alone devices where telephony is the main function,” he said.
Originally unveiled in May 2005, the Linux-powered Nokia 770 was the company’s first non-phone mobile device, designed for users to access the Internet around the home over a wireless broadband connection.
Sales weren’t too hot though, but Nokia reckon that by bolting on VoIP phone capabilities they can turbo charge unit-shifting, with Virtanen insisting that internet telephony is “the key for us to reach higher sales volumes.”
Customers who already have bought the 770 can upgrade their device to use the new Google Talk features for free over the Internet.
Updated OS
The newly introduced OS 2006 edition with Google Talk pre-installed gives users access to Google’s free instant messaging service so they can chat and make calls through the Internet on the 770.
The updated OS also boasts enhanced text typing with full-screen finger keyboard, improved memory performance and a ‘refreshed’ look (did they throw a bucket of water at it, or something?).
The upgraded device is expected to knock out for about €370 (US$470), Nokia said.
Nokia 770
16 May, 2006
Palm OS Treo 700p US Launch
Palm have announced the successor to their hugely successful Palm OS-powered Treo 650 smartphone, the Treo 700p.
Although more of a refinement that a full-on product upgrade, the 700p retains the same winning form factor that convinced many people that the Treo 650 was the best smartphone around.
After Palm released its Windows Mobile-powered Treo 700w in January this year, some Palm OS aficionados feared it might mark the end of their favourite operating system, but the 700p sees the company sticking with the highly capable – if rather elderly – Palm OS 5.4.9 OS.
With a feature set marrying up with the Windows version, the 700p comes with EV-DO, a 312MHz Xscale CPU processor, beefed-up 128MB flash memory (60MB usable), streaming audio/video, an upgraded 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth and a SDIO slot.
Unlike the smaller-screened Windows version, the 700p serves up a bright, crisp 320 x 320 pixel, 65,536-colour display, with the chunky antennae (much loved by Americans, apparently) remaining in situ.
Bundled with the phone is DataViz’ Documents To Go for reading and editing Microsoft Office files, a PDF viewer and an email client that works with Exchange Server 2003 via ActiveSync, plus POP and IMAP accounts.
Yahoo!, AOL and Gmail accounts are also supported.
Wherefore art thou Wi-Fi?
Way back in the midst of time, a Palm executive faithfully promised us that the Treo 650 would support SDIO wi-fi cards, but the long, long wait for the (non-existent) Palm Wi Fi card to materialise saw us shift over to the Windows mobile platform.
Our experience with the i-mate JAM phone wasn’t entirely pleasurable, and after getting fed up with its ‘undocumented features’ we recently took the unheard of step of buying technology over a year old(!), in the shape of a Treo 650 scooped off eBay for £185.
After a year fumbling about with fiddly Windows interface and the stylus-reliant functionality of the JAM, we soon found the ease-of-use, one-handed ergonomics and all-round design features of the Treo to be an absolute revelation.
So much so that we’re even prepared to forgive the omission of Wi-Fi in the latest Treo (Palm in the US insist that EV-DO should be enough.)
Many will disagree, but since we moved over to T-Mobile’s unlimited data usage miserable time battling with Skype for Pocket PC.
The Treo 650 still floats our boat
With the new Palm 700p offering few real benefits over the 650 – and the very real possibility that the phone may not appear in the UK for some considerable time – we’d still recommend picking up a Treo 650, especially if the prices start to drop.
In fact, it’s still our number one all-round smartphone choice – an opinion shared by PC World, who recently put the Treo 650 at the top of the pile in a comparison against smartphone big hitters like the T-Mobile MDA, Nokia 9200 and Blackberry 8700c.
Specifications:
Operating System: Palm OS® 5.4.9
Memory: 128MB (60MB user accessible) non-volatile
Processor: Intel® XScale™ 312MHz processor
Screen: 320 x 320 color TFT touchscreen display 16-bit color displays displays up to 65,536 colors
Wireless:
CDMA 800/1900MHz digital dual-band
CDMA2000 EvDO network-backwards compatible with 1xRTT and IS95 networks
Bluetooth® 1.2 wireless support
Phone Features:
Personal speakerphone
Hands-free headset jack
Microphone mute option
TTY/TDD compatibility
3-way calling
Digital Camera:
1.3 megapixels with 1280×1024 resolution
Automatic light balance
2x digital zoom
Integrated self-portrait mirror
Video capture with 352 x 288 resolution
Audio:
2.5mm headset jack is stereo headset compatible-requires a stereo headset adapter
Speaker
Polyphonic MIDI, MP3, WAV & video ringtones
External ringer on/off switch w/ vibrate mode
Keyboard:
Full QWERTY key layout with backlighting
Integrated number dial pad
Keyguard feature
Other:
Support for MultiMediaCard, SD & SDIO cards
Expansion Slot
Removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery
Talk time: up to 4.5 hours
Standby time: up to 300 hours
Battery
Multi-connector on device
USB sync cable
AC adapter (108-132 VAC/60Hz)
Power/Sync
Size
2.28″ W x 5.08″ H (excluding antenna) x 0.89″ D
58mm W x 129mm H x 58mm D
6.4 ounces / 180 grams
Palm Treo 700p
Treo 700p/700w/650 comparison
16 May, 2006
Pantech PG-3600v Phone Adds Video Editing
Straight out of the school of Advanced Homage to iPods comes this new music phone from South Korean phone maker Pantech.
Featuring a (ahem) “revolutionary touch-wheel sensor,” the phone is aimed at “digital generation” music fans, with 512 Mb internal memory capacity supported by an external card slot for maximum onboard tunes.
Arriving on the shelves of Hong Kong and Taiwan stores today, the phone features a slide-out keypad design, a 1.9in, 262,144-colour display and the not-at-all-like-the-iPod clickwheel, which “enables easy navigation by allowing users to sweep the wheel key with their fingers”, according to Pantech.
As well as operating the music controls, the circular control can be used to control menu bars, zoom in on images taken with the phone’s built-in 1.3-megapixel camera and to skip through MPEG 4 videos recorded on the Pantech.
Uniquely, there’s some basic video editing software on board for users to create Fellini-like mini epics on their phones.
S. Jay Yim, Vice President, Overseas Marketing, Pantech, was suitably enthusiastic: “The PG-3600V not only offers a unique design with its finely honed, attractive finish, but it also highlights our efforts to offer the latest, most user-friendly applications to young tech-savvy users. We feel the PG-3600V actively supports the desire prevalent amongst many people to stand apart from the crowd.”
Rounding off the phone’s feature set is stereo audio-enabled Bluetooth and a speakerphone in the 10.2 x 4.7 x 1.8cm package which weighs in at 94.1g.
Needless to say, there’s no UK/European release date set yet.
Specs:
Touch wheel sensor
1.3 mega pixel CMOS camera
Display: 1.9″ QCIF, 260 K color TFT LCD
MPEG-4 recording/editing function
Music player (MP3/ AAC/AAC+/WMA)
Speakerphone
Stereo Bluetooth
SMS/MMS/e-mail
Pantech
15 May, 2006
News Corp To Sell 24 Episodes on MySpace
It comes as no surprise to the more cynical amongst us, but MySpace is set to offer downloadable digital content for sale from its sister company, Fox.
This move is very significant clearly showing the direction that Murdoch is taking MySpace in. It’s going to become a great shop window to its 75 million users, of all of his other diverse types on content.
Episodes from series one to five of the hugely popular ’24’ series by Fox will be made available for download for $1.99 a programme, courtesy of a Burger King-sponsored deal which comes branded with the fast food giant’s tagline “Have it Your Way.”
(We know which way we’d like a Murdoch/Burger King deal, but it’s unprintable here).
MySpace, which is owned by media ubermensch Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has more than 75m registered users worldwide, and according to Nielsen/NetRatings recorded 19.4 billion page views in March – dwarfing the 13.7 billion page impressions at Google for the same month.
To entice users to fork out for the full service, Burger King will be offering free downloads of each of the first episodes from series one and five of ’24’
Building up a formidable synergetic head of steam, Gillian Smith, senior director of media at Burger King, effused: “We know our customers spend a lot of time [on MySpace]. The important thing for us as an advertiser was to make sure we were providing content that resembles entertainment more than advertising.”
The Burger King/Fox/MySpace love-in reflects the growing power of MySpace as a new distribution platform and advertising magnet, leading Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch to wonder what might happen if MySpace developed a search engine of its own
MySpace
15 May, 2006
Skype On-The-Fly Translation Service Introduced
Skype’s new Language Line Personal Interpreter service claims to make it easy to “talk instantly to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, regardless of language.”
Sadly nowhere near as cool as Star Trek’s Universal Translator, Skype’s new offering uses human translators who can collectively offer on-the-fly translation services for more than 150 languages.
The service comes courtesy of a partnership with Language Line Personal Interpreter Services and promises to make it easier for businesses and individuals to babble in tongues to each other over VoIP for just $2.99 per minute.
Subscribers to the service can take part in online conferences with up to five other Skype users with a live Language Line Services interpreter doing all the translation stuff.
The new service, which uses Voxeo’s Prophecy voice platform to automate the process of transferring the call from Skype to Language Line Services, will be available around the clock, with costs being automatically charged to the caller’s SkypeOut account.
Saul Klein, vice president of marketing at Skype, whipped up the PR froth: “Language Line’s Personal Interpreter Service greatly enhances the Skype experience for our growing multilingual customer base.
“Our consumers can now use the Skype technology to easily communicate in the languages their customers and friends prefer to speak,” he added.
In the multinational corporate world, there’s certainly big bucks to be earned from translation services, as Louis Provenzano, senior VP, sales and marketing, Language Line Services, noted:
“Every day, virtually all Fortune 500 multinational corporations, and businesses of all sizes around the world, depend on Language Line Services to assist them in communicating with their customers in their own languages.”
Personal Interpreter Service” for Skype
15 May, 2006