Mike Slocombe

Disney To Offer Free TV Shows On The Web
Entertainment behemoths Walt Disney are planning on making hit TV shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost” available as free Internet downloads in an initiative to haul in new advertising revenues.
A report in the Wall Street Journal says that the freebie will come with a sting: episodes of the ABC shows will contain commercial breaks that viewers will be forced to watch (until someone comes up with a ‘fast forward past this crap’ hack, of course.)
Episodes of the shows being offered will become available on the Web the morning after they’ve aired on TV.
With the Journal reporting that ten advertisers have already leapt on board – including heavyweights like Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble and Unilever – Disney hopes that the delivery of programs over the Web will turn into a right little earner.
With digital video recorders like TiVo letting slogan-weary viewers fast-forward past the endless onslaught of adverts seen in the US, TV broadcasters are desperately trying to find ways to keep the advertising revenues rolling in.
Disney are hoping that their ad-stuffed free service – expected to be announced later today by the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, Anne Sweeney – will prove a hit with both consumers and advertisers.
Punch ups in Disneyland
In a vaguely connected story elsewhere, we can report that Mickey Mouse’s chums are deeply unchuffed.
Or rather, the ~~poor exploited workers~~ lucky individuals on conveniently short contracts who get to wear the oversized heads and hands of Disney’s lesser characters at Hong Kong’s Disneyland.
It seems that they’re disgruntled with superstars like Mickey and Daffy earning extra wages despite them doing the same job (i.e. wearing a ridiculous costume and waving a lot).
The disgruntled employees have brought the union in, but we’re hoping it ends up in a fully costumed fight.
Disney
10 April, 2006
Carphone Warehouse To Offer Free Broadband?
Carphone Warehouse are going to stir up a hornet’s nest in the telecoms industry if they go ahead with rumoured plans to introduce a free broadband package in the UK.
According to the Sunday Times, the company is expected to offer the public “free” broadband as part of their Talk Talk landline package.
Backed by a huge advertising budget, the promotion is seen as part of Carphone Warehouse’s strategy to elevate their Talk Talk brand into the leading consumer alternative to BT Group.
Carphone Warehouse’s current tally of 75,000 broadband customers puts them miles behind big boys BT Retail and NTL, who boast a mighty 2.3m and 2.8m customers respectively.
Not us, Guv.
At the moment, the company are denying everything about the new free service, although an announcement is expected on Tuesday.
Some industry experts believe that Carphone Warehouse are looking to repeat the soaraway success of fabled freebie ISP Freeserve, who came out of nowhere to overtake BT in the late 90s.
Up until now, Carphone Warehouse have been hampered by having to resell BT’s wholesale broadband product, but a hefty £60m investment will see the company having its own broadband gear in up to 1,000 BT exchanges – potentially reaching 70% of the population.
PR spin-mesisters at Carphone are thought to have christened their broadband campaign “Independence Day”, based on a feeble pun that it will give customers independence from BT.
Some are suggesting that the tag has greater significance, insisting that it reflects the proposed launch date for the new broadband deals – July 4, America’s Independence Day.
Talk Talk
Carphone Warehouse
10 April, 2006
Two Million Brits Use VoIP Services
New research reveals that around two million Brits have used VoIP packages to place calls over the Internet in the last 12 months, with the figure expected to double by this time next year.
Analysts at Continental Research conducted a poll of 3,000 UK adults using VoIP and discovered that Skype was the preferred tool of choice for 48 per cent of users.
In second place was Microsoft’s MSN Messenger boasting a fifth of all calls, with Vonage and BT trailing miles behind at 6 per cent each and Wanadoo barely visible on the horizon at just two per cent.
Punters seem happy with the service, with most saying that they will increase or maintain usage over the next year, with only 1 per cent planning on using VoIP less.
Sound quality was the most common complaint with 29 per cent citing dissatisfaction with what’s reaching their lug’oles.
Mulling on the findings, James Myring, the associate director of Continental Research, told The Independent newspaper that by being early to market, Skype has enjoyed a big “first mover” advantage.
He noted that BT has huge potential to roll out VoIP to customers on a large scale, but warned that, “it will be concerned about losing market share from its fixed line business. For BT, it might be a case of compete or lose.”
Protecting the VoIP future
Elsewhere, the University of North Texas is leading a project to look at ways of protecting VoIP services from voice spam and network attacks like DoS, as well as looking into issues concerning network quality and emergency services access.
The $600,000 (£344,000) investment looks to develop a secure, geographically distributed test bed to seek out VoIP vulnerabilities before the “damage is done.”
Unveiled by the National Science Foundation, the three year security audit will also be used to sniff out potential security holes arising from running VoIP over conventional phone networks.
With VoIP being aggressively marketed, one recent study estimated that some 24 million US households will be hooked up to VoIP services by 2008.
10 April, 2006
Palm OS Free Apps: Our Three Cheapskate Choices
Filez
The essential application Palm forgot to include with their OS!
This fully featured file management and system utility gives full access to your handheld’s files, with the no-nonsense browser letting you view, edit, copy, move and delete files on your Palm, or shunt files to and from a storage card.
There’s also a ton of system information on tap, with three tabbed pages giving details about memory, battery, and syncing status.
A fully featured preference editor lets you view and delete preferences for any application on your handheld.
» Filez
CSpotRun
A free ebook reader for documents in the popular Pilot DOC format, CSpotRun is a no-fuss, tiny (28k!) freeware reader which has long been a favourite with the Palm community.
Supporting Palm Hi-Res (320×320) and Palm Standard (160×160) resolutions, there’s no frills to be seen – not even a splash of colour – but its simple and elegant interface make document reading a breeze.
Scrolling and font sizing options ensure comfortable reading, and there’s tons of free ebooks available from QVadis.
» CSpotRun
AvantGo
The slick AvantGo application lets you download slimmed-down mobile Web sites to your handheld using a desktop or wireless Internet connection – for free!
Offering support for Palm OS5 in 320×320 and 320×480 resolutions, the desktop client lets you sign up to news, sports, stocks, movie listings, RSS feeds etc, with the pages automatically synchronising to your handheld.
The partner Palm application offers a browser to read the downloaded pages and the whole thing is easy to set and configure.
AvantGo restricts users to the amount of MBs of content they can download for free, although we never came close to reaching this limit – despite being subscribed to a host of sites.
» Avantgo
10 April, 2006
Spb Pocket Plus 3.1 Review (85%)
Combining an application launcher with the Today screen, Spb Pocket Plus is designed to add a heap of functionality to your Windows Mobile 2003/5 device.
Taking up a sizeable 1.8 meg of device memory, the program adds customisable tabs to the Today screen, with a drag and drop interface letting you arrange and shunt around icons to your heart’s desire.
The program integrates with a range of SPB plug ins like Spb Weather, Spb GPRS Monitor and Spb Diary, letting users mix’n’match plug-ins to get their Today screen looking just so.
Various downloadable themes offer a range of attractive backgrounds and icons to tart up your screen, with useful indicators for battery life and memory status.
It has to be said that some of the ‘extended themes’ are something of an acquired taste, but SPB have thoughtfully created a Webpage instructing enthusiastic users on how to create their own.
The interface was clean and nicely executed, and we particularly liked the unobtrusive Taskbar Battery Indicator, represented by a horizontal line at the top of the screen, visible in every program.
Other handy features include a powerful File Explorer with ZIP support and encryption, a ‘proper’ close button that actually shuts down a program (a real annoyance with Windows Mobile) and the addition of handy Pocket Internet Explorer functions like multiple windows, full screen mode and view source.
Conveniently, the program can be run off a storage card to save device memory and there’s a ‘Safe Mode’ to help sort out any rogue software causing problems – just like its big brother, this only loads a basic set of drivers on start-up.
At an upmarket $24.95 (~£14.20, ~€20.4) it may not be an essential purchase for Pocket PC dabblers, but for power users managing masses of programs and serial tweakers, we’d rate it as a must-have app!
Our verdict: 85%
Spb Pocket Plus
7 April, 2006
Google Releases Toolbar v2 for Firefox
Google is launching an upgrade to its toolbar for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, adding enhancements to the search box and an antiphishing feature.
Google Toolbar 2.0 will now offer suggestions on the fly for narrowing queries and correcting spelling – great news if yore speling esn’t up to muuch.
The all-new, turbo-charged search box also remembers previous query terms inputted by a user – as well as bookmarks – and serves them up as query suggestions, with a handy drop-down menu letting users select which part of Google’s empire to search.
The new release includes feed integration with the Google Personalised Homepage, with the toolbar automatically detecting Web content available for subscription, and a click of the “Subscribe” button taking users to their preferred feed reader.
Pheck Off Phishers
To help battle against pesky phishers, the upgraded Firefox toolbar includes Google’s Safe Browsing extension.
Previously an optional add-in, this feature warns users when they innocently roam onto Websites that could be a phishing trap, with Google using clever-clogs advanced algorithms and reports about dodgy pages to flag up the iffy sites.
Gmail users should like the new feature that opens mailto: links on webpages straight into a compose window in Gmail – no need to copy and paste emails off Webpages.
“We’ve made searching better by including previous queries, spelling corrections, and suggestions for popular choices”, a company employee purred on the Google Blog.
Google blog
Toolbar 2.0 features
7 April, 2006
Sony Launches Cyber-shot DSC-T30 Digital Camera
Sony America has launched a new digital camera today for the trendy party crowd, the 7.2-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-T30.
Featuring Sony’s familiar sliding lens cover, the T30 measures a designer suit untroubling 90 x 54.8 x 20.2mm, with the 159g mass unlikely to add much bulk to the Gucci handbag.
Sony’s Super Steady Shot optical image stabilisation lets the camera keep on working late into the party, with a high ISO 1000 light sensitivity (coupled with Sony’s Clear RAW noise reduction system), allowing more natural, flash-less pics.
Introduced to the T-Series is a set of selectable colour modes allowing users to choose ‘natural mode’ for subtle colour variations or ‘vivid mode’ for more intense colours – great for reproducing the full range of hues of the pavement pizza at the end of the night.
Shutter lag with AF/AE is rated at a nippy 0.28 of a second, with the burst mode offering 5 shots at 1.1 frames per second – enough to capture a dramatic, alcohol-fuelled dance floor collapse.
Shot-to-shot interval is up on its predecessor, the T9, with the camera taking 1.4 seconds – the slower time a result of the larger files being saved.
Other features include a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 3x optical zoom (f3.5-4.5), a hefty 3 inch “Clear Photo LCD Plus screen” and 58MB of internal memory.
Images can be played back as a slide show option with music function, with the Memory Stick Duo offering up to two gigabytes of additional storage.
Powered by an InfoLithium battery, Sony are claiming up to 420 shots per full charge – nearly double the performance of previous T-series models.
The Cyber-shot DSC-T30 camera will be landing on store shelves in the US next month for around $500. There’s no news about the UK launch and price yet.
Specifications
Dimensions 3.7 x 2.2 x 0.9″, 95.0 x 56.5 x 23.3mm
Weight 169.0 g, 5.9 oz
Sensor Type 1/2.5″ CCD, 7.20 megapixels (effective)
Aspect Ratio 4:3, 3:2
Image Dimensions 3072 x 2304 (7.1 megapixels), 3072 x 2048 (6.3 megapixels), 2592 x 1944 (5.0 megapixels), 2048 x 1536 (3.1 megapixels), 1920 x 1080 (2.1 megapixels), 1632 x 1224 (2.0 megapixels), 640 x 480 (0.3 megapixels)
Capture Speed Continuous: 0.8 frames per second
Image Quality 2 levels
Viewfinder No
LCD 3.0″, 230,000 pixels
Playback Zoom 5.0x max
Lens Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar, 3x optical zoom
Image Stabilization Yes
Focal Length 6.3 – 19.0mm (actual), 38 – 114mm (35mm equivalent)
Aperture Range f/3.5 (wide) / f/4.3 (tele)
Focusing System 5-area Contrast detect with AF assist lamp
Manual Focus possible (5) steps
Focusing Range Normal: 20″ – infinity (50 cm – infinity)
Macro: 0.4″
ISO Sensitivity Auto, 64, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1000
Shutter Speed 30 – 1/1000 second
Metering Modes Multi-pattern, Center-weighted, Spot
Exposure Compensation +/- 2.0EV in 1/3EV increments
White Balance Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent, Flash
Internal Flash Modes: Auto, Auto w/ Red-Eye Reduction, On, On w/ Red-Eye Reduction, Slow Synch, Slow Synch w/ Red-Eye Reduction, Off
Range: 0.3 – 11.2 ft, (0.1 – 3.4m)
Creative Scene Modes Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Landscape, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, High-Speed Shutter, Candle, Magnifying Glass (Super Macro), Soft Snap
Digital Zoom Precision 2x
Self Timer Yes, 2 or 10 seconds
Storage Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Built-in
File Format JPEG
Connectivity USB 1.1
Battery Type Lithium Ion rechargeable, Proprietary NP-FR1 InfoLITHIUM
6 April, 2006
Boot Camp From Apple Runs Windows XP on Intel Macs
After hackers successfully managed to get an Intel-powered Mac running Windows XP operating system last month, Apple has come up with its own, simplified solution.
Now available as a 83 meg free beta download from Apple’s Website, the new Boot Camp application makes it possible for users with a Microsoft installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac.
Once loaded, Mac users simply have to hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows.
If they choose to run Windows, the Mac will run the OS natively, with just a restart needed to return terrified Mac users back to the Apple OS.

How it works
Intel Mac users must first ensure that they’re running the latest version of Mac OS X and that it’s loaded with the latest firmware updates.
After it’s been installed, the Boot Camp software then burns a CD containing drivers necessary for Windows to recognise Mac-specific hardware, before handholding users through the process of setting aside a section of the hard drive for the Windows installation.
The machine is then ready for the Windows installation disc (users will have to buy that separately) – the only tricky part here is manually making sure that XP installs on the Mac’s C drive (otherwie it might overwrite programs and files).
Once the installation process has done its thing and the Mac booted into Windows, users must then slam in their Drivers CD and sit back while it does it thing.
And then – bingo – Mac users are free to wander about in the wonderful world of Windows, with the comfort blanket of the Mac OS just a reboot away,
Release date
Boot Camp will be included in Apple’s next major Mac OSX release (Leopard) which will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.
“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” explained Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
“We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch,” he added.
More information can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp
6 April, 2006
Microsoft ‘World’s Most Valuable Brand’
Two new studies into branding have produced two very different results, with a UK study declaring Microsoft the strongest brand in the known universe, while research in the US saw consumers slapping Microsoft down to near-bottom of their ‘most trusted’ list.
Brand consultancy Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) rated companies by calculating the value their brand was expected to generate in the future.
Microsoft topped the list, with the study showing most consumers held positive feelings about the brand. Andy Farr, executive director at MBO commented, “When you look at what customers and consumers say to us, they do hold Microsoft in high regard.”
“They don’t love [Microsoft] like they love Google but they respect it,” he added just before his laptop crashed.
The survey results were based on a load of marketing guff that involved measuring buzzword-laded criteria like ‘brand momentum,’ ‘intangible earnings’ and ‘brand contribution,’ whatever all that means.
Tech companies hogged four of the top 10 global brand places with Vodafone grabbing the number one UK slot, while Google came in seventh overall for global brands and second for the tech sector,
Big-boy retailers also figured prominently, with Wal-Mart coming in at number six and Tesco notching up 30th place overall and number two in the UK).
According to the study, these are the top ten global brands (rated in $millions):
Microsoft Corporation ($62,039)
GE ($55,834)
Coca-Cola ($41.406)
China Mobile ($39,168)
Marlboro cigarettes ($38,510)
Wal-Mart ($37,567)
Google ($37,445)
IBM ($38,084)
Citigroup ($31.028)
Bose, Dell, and Apple Score High On Trust
Across the pond, a brand study by Forrester Research saw Bose, Dell and Apple Computer being declared as technology brands trusted by U.S. consumers, with users warily eying the likes of Toshiba, Hitachi, Microsoft, Gateway and LG.
Forrester surveyed 4,700 US households between September and October last year to find out how much they trusted 48 technology brands.
The results weren’t too encouraging for the industry, with the survey showing an across-the-board drop in trust in consumer computer and electronics brands – a trend continuing from 2003.
In the survey, only Apple and TiVo managed to register an increase in consumer trust between 2003 and 2005.
With Microsoft’s brand scraping in at a lowly 20th spot out of the 22 companies included in the poll, Forrester’s warned that Microsoft faces big a consumer defection risk.
With a deft turn of marketing-speak, Forrester analyst Ted Schadler observed that, “A decline in trust causes brand erosion and price-driven purchase decisions, which in turn correlates with low market growth.”
“Trust is a powerful way to measure a brand’s value and its ability to command a premium price or drive consumers into a higher-profit direct channel,” concluded Ted Schadler.
5 April, 2006
Firefox Grabs 10 Percent Of Browser Market
Mozilla’s Firefox continues to bite into Internet Explorer’s once-unassailable market dominance, snaffling 10 percent of the Web browser market in March, according to Web audience measurement firm Net Applications.
Their report claims that the free, open source Web browser from Mozilla.org was used by 10.05 percent of surfers last month, a notable shimmy upwards from 9.75 percent in February.
It’s got a long way to go before it starts to rival Microsoft’s behemoth of a browser though, with various versions of Internet Explorer (IE) still hogging 84.7 percent of the market.
Lagging behind in third place was Apple’s Safari Mac-only browser, used by 3.19 percent of surfers, with trusty old Netscape in fourth place with 1.05 percent of the market, followed by Opera at 0.54 percent.
Firefox’s rise has been slow but inexorable, with the improved feature set of version 1.5 helping them garner a 3.34 percent share over the year.
Over the same period, Internet Explorer saw 3.89 percent of their market slip away, with the long wait for IE7 not helping their cause.
“With a strong feature set, aggressive product development cycle, open source platform and by offering the browser for free, Firefox has the strategy in place to maintain its growth,” commented Net Applications analyst with a cool name, Vincent Vizzaccaro
Despite Firefox’s continuing growth, Vincey boy added that Microsoft, “has the much easier task of defending an entrenched position rather than attacking one.”
Get optimising!
If you’re already using Firefox, take a look at the top ten plug ins at download.com and get customising.
Our favourites aren’t on their list, however. We recommend the Spellbound specllchecker , Chatzilla IRC client and the dead-simple-but-useful Copy Plain Text extension which, err, copies text without formatting.
Mozilla.org
5 April, 2006