Mike Slocombe

Palm LifeDrive “Mobile Manager” Appears On Amazon
After months of rumours on the Web, details of palmOne’s new LifeDrive PDA have finally shown up on Amazon.
Engadget.com reported that the listing confirms that the US$499 (~£262 ~€385) device will come with a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive, SD card slot, 320×480 hi-resolution colour display (with portrait and landscape viewing) and offer Bluetooth and 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless connectivity.
The LifeDrive handhelds will be powered by a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and run on the Palm GarnetOS, which includes support for wireless connections such as Bluetooth.
The device will be a little larger than palmOne’s latest high-end model, the Tungsten T5, sizing up at 4.7 inches tall, 2.8 inches wide, and a pocket-threatening 0.8 inches thick. It will weigh 6.8 ounces.
According to sources, the music-playing device will use Pocket Tunes and sync with Real’s Rhapsody music service, suggesting that it could be seen as a turbo-charged challenger to Apple Computer’s US$199 (~£104 ~€153) 4GB iPod Mini.
NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes is able to play MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV files and the unit will also support full screen video and photo playback.
Business users will be catered for with the bundled DocumentsToGo software supporting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Acrobat files.
The unit also comes with ‘Camera Companion’ software for transferring photos to and from the device, with ‘Drive Mode’ allowing users to plug their handheld into the USB port on a PC and have the microdrive appear as a removable drive.
The LifeDrive comes with USB 2.0, so transferring files onto the microdrive should be a fairly nifty business.
Despite black leather clad doomsayers predicting the death of the PDA, palmOne clearly thinks that a hard drive-based multimedia device able to take advantage of the immense software resources of the palm platform could be a winner.
There’s certainly industry interest elsewhere, with Dell rumoured to be considering a hard drive based handheld.
Although there’s been no official announcement from palmOne, the LifeDrive is expected to launch in the US on 18th May, 2005.
palmOne
Palm LifeDrive on Amazon
Engadget coverage
9 May, 2005
BlackBerry Harvests More Than 3 Million Subscribers
Research In Motion (RIM) have announced that that the BlackBerry wireless communicator now boasts 3 million worldwide subscribers, with one million subscribers added in less than six months.
The rise of RIM users has been astonishing. BlackBerry subscribers reached the one million mark in February 2004 with that figure being doubled in less than ten months as the company reached two million subscribers in November 2004.
“It’s an exciting time as BlackBerry continues to enjoy enormous success and rapid growth around the world,” purred Jim Balsillie, Chairman and Co-CEO, Research In Motion. “With over 50,000 retail points of presence, accelerated geographic expansion and the anticipated addition of 100 new carriers in 2005, we are scaling our operations for the five million and 10 million subscriber milestones.”
BlackBerry Enterprise Server’s ability to integrate with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise (and other existing enterprise systems) has proved a hit with corporate customers keen to take advantage of push-based wireless access to e-mail and other corporate data.
Individuals and smaller businesses have also been attracted to the BlackBerry Internet Service, which allows users to access up to ten corporate and/or personal e-mail accounts (including Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and many popular ISP email accounts) from a single device.
Looking to the future, RIM is teaming up with Microsoft and IBM to extend instant messaging to BlackBerry subscribers through Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 and Lotus instant messaging.
Pulsating with confidence, the company says it is gearing up to cope first with 5m subscribers and then 10m users, although it failed to give any idea of when they might expect to pass these hefty milestones.
With the NTP lawsuit now resolved, RIM is free to follow its European initiative and license its Blackberry Connect software to US mobile phone vendors, so we can expect to see more third-party phones and handsets connecting to the service.
Recent figures revealed that BlackBerry recorded a 76 percent increase in its total sales in the first quarter of 2005, while its main competitor Palm saw its sales slide by 26 percent.
Research In Motion (RIM)
RIM settles NTP lawsuit for $450m
9 May, 2005
Google Web Accelerator Gets Flak, Website Goes Down
It was a bad weekend for Google as the entire site was rendered unavailable on Saturday night and their new Web Accelerator application drew criticism on privacy and security concerns.
The free Web Accelerator app was designed for broadband users to speed up access to Web pages by serving up cached or compressed copies of sites from Google’s servers.
Within hours of release, critics were pointing to a flaw that meant that users could be served cached copies of private discussion groups or password-protected pages.
The issue was first discovered when users of Backpack, a wiki-like service for individuals and small businesses, complained that their Web pages were suddenly disappearing.
Jason Fried of 37signals, the company behind Backpack, discovered that Google’s Web Accelerator was behind the problem, explaining in his company’s blog, “Google is essentially clicking every link on the page – including links like ‘delete this’ or ‘cancel that.’ And to make matters worse, Google ignores the JavaScript confirmations.”
A clearly miffed Fried continued, “So, if you have a ‘Are you sure you want to delete this?’ JavaScript confirmation behind that ‘delete’ link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.”
Deeply unchuffed, Fried complained that “Google’s Web accelerator can wreak havoc on Web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI.”
Other users of Google’s tool also found themselves loading pages previously cached by other users on Internet forums – letting them view that user’s account information and private messages (Web Accelerator doesn’t cache secure Web sites written in “HTTPS”, so online transaction sites were unaffected).
Web publisher have raised concerns that, if Google is caching the publishers content and readers are using the Google cached version to access the information, the number of people that the server logs are reporting as accessing their content may not truly reflect the number of people reading their site. If this is the case, there would be a direct hit on the publishers advertising revenue.
Conversely, there are others claiming that there were other problems associated with the application’s ability to prefetch Web sites that are never viewed by a user – this could inflate page view numbers and exaggerate views of advertising banners.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Web products, acknowledged the problems while downplaying the threat, saying that it had only affected a small number of sites.
“It looks worse than it is. We’ve cached the page with that username on it. But you are not actually signed in; you couldn’t operate as that person,” she added, before cranking up the PR spin machine, “We’re committed to provide users the utmost of integrity in security and privacy, and we’re working with urgency to solve this problem,” she added.
The program is currently no longer available from Google, with a notice on the Web Accelerator homepage saying, “We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.”
Sadly, things went from bad to worse on Saturday night when the world’s leading Internet search engine shut down from 6:45 to 7 p.m. eastern time, with some users experiencing longer outages.
It wasn’t just the search engine that had gone down – Gmail, Google News, Froogle and the entire caboodle of Google’s services had all vanished off the face off the earth.
Curiously, when some surfers typed in ‘google’ they found themselves being redirected to a SoGoSearch page, sparking rumours that the site had been hacked.
Google spokesman David Krane pooh-poohed such talk, declaring, “It was not a hacking or a security issue,” while insisting that that the problem was related to a DNS (Domain Name System) problem.
Google Web Accelerator
Google speed bump draws scorn
9 May, 2005
Mobile Penetration In Europe To Hit 100% By 2007: Analysis
Cell phone penetration in Western Europe will hit 100% by 2007 as mobile-loving customers continue to scoop up multiple phones and phone cards.
A report by management consultancy Analysys Research revealed that active mobile penetration – which excludes phones that have not been used for about three months – would rise to 98% in 2006 (up from 90% in 2004) and eventually exceed 100% in western Europe.
The consultancy also warned that the market would stagnate in markets where operators shunned the cheaper pay-as-you-go offerings in an attempt to benefit from more lucrative contract deals.
(Contract deals usually involve customers signing up for 12-18 months, thus delivering stabilised customer revenues – or, as they call it in the trade, ARPU – average revenues per user.)
“In countries such as France and Germany, operators have an opportunity to increase penetration by marketing pre-paid offerings, which is often the best way to attract certain segments of the population, but they should not lose sight of profitability,” commented report co-author, Alex Zadvorny.
“Italy, where ARPU has been in line with the Western European market average and registered the slowest decline among the major European countries between 2000 and 2004, is a good example of how the prevalence of pre-paid does not necessarily suppress ARPU,” be continued.
In countries like Italy, Sweden and the UK, growth in penetration has shown no signs of abating, with penetration rising from 93%, 93% and 89%, respectively, in 2003 to 104%, 103% and 101% in 2004.
Although some people might think that the rise is fuelled by drug dealers toting multiple phones for ‘business’, the increase is actually explained by customers buying multiple phones and/or SIM cards.
Zadvorny explained that sales were also boosted by 3G, giving opportunities to “stabilise and potentially even grow voice ARPU by using the efficiency of the technology and offering large bundles of minutes”
“At the same time, in order to take advantage of the mobile data services opportunity, operators need to address factors such as transparency of pricing, standardisation and ease of use of devices, and the implementation of the relevant billing systems,” he added.
Analysys expects mobile service revenue to grow at a healthy 9% per year between 2004 and 2007, with 3G video phones creaking open more wallets with an alluring fare of video, Internet and music services.
Analysys
6 May, 2005
WiMAX Cuddle Between Sprint And Intel
With a manly backslap, Intel and Sprint have announced that they will work together to advance development of the 802.16e WiMAX standard.
WiMAX is an acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (snappy, eh?) and the technology aims to provide wireless broadband connectivity to fixed, portable and mobile devices without the need for line-of-sight to a base station.
The two companies will share technical specifications and equipment trials, and run interoperability tests to examine possible wireless broadband devices and services.
In case that sounded too simple, here’s Oliver Valente, CTO and VP of technology development for Sprint, to baffle you with a buzzword remix: “Our relationship with Intel will help validate requirements, drive key ecosystem development needs, formulate network strategies and define the potential for advanced wireless services adoption”.
Intel has been bigging up WiMAX with an eye to repeating their successful experience as the leading provider of Wi-Fi chipsets.
Although doubters of WiMAX maintain that competition with the 3G cell-phone service will render the technology redundant, both Intel and Sprint view portability as a winning approach to the technology, insisted that WiMAX “can provide high-capacity wireless broadband coverage and services throughout metro areas and an enriched multimedia user experience.”
Sean Maloney, another executive with an impossibly long job description (“executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Mobility Group”) added: “WiMAX technology has the promise to deliver new broadband services to consumers globally.”
The partnership hopes to draw on Sprint/Nextel’s substantial holdings in 2.5GHz spectrum band, although it’s been described as a “messy complex band” by wireless specialist Joe Nordgaard of Spectral Advantage, who added, “It’s going to be very difficult to come out with a common worldwide solution similar to Wi-Fi.”
Intel WiMAX
Sprint WiMAX
6 May, 2005
Yahoo Video Search Leaves Beta, Adds Content
Yahoo has pulled a fast one on its rivals by unexpectedly taking it’s five month long ‘Beta’ video search service to a full release, and adding some new media partners to provide searchable material.
The service enables Web users to find and view a wide variety of video content including news footage, movie trailers, TV clips and music videos.
The announcement comes just days after Google had proudly paraded new partners for its beta video search service, which lets users search closed captioning content and view still shots of video clips.
Google has also been seeking original material by inviting users to submit their own video to the service.
Finding video content on Yahoo’s new search facility is easy enough: type in the relevant keywords and you’ll be taken to a results page showing thumbnails of the video files. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the hosting page with an option to directly view the video.
Sources for Yahoo’s new search feature have been expanded to include CBS News, Reuters, MTV, VH1.com, IFILM.com, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, as well as an assortment of independent producers and content pulled by spidering the Web for video content.
In the interests of research, we rummaged around for naughty porn, but couldn’t find anything too racy – until we spotted the ‘turn safe search off’ option. Clicking on this released a veritable cascade of filth that would send Mary Whitehouse’s graveyard residence spinning in turbo mode.
This latest development adds more fuel to the almighty bun fight currently being battled out between Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves and less well-known names like Blinkx, as companies compete to grab a juicy slice of the lucrative video search advertising business.
These companies clearly understand that in the future of a near infinite number of sources for content, the consumer is going to become very confused and possibly overwhelmed by choice, unless someone, or a service guides then through it. Having identified this, they’re all chasing it.
Yahoo Video Search
5 May, 2005
3 Get Granada’s Celebrity Wrestling TV Footage To Mobiles
UK third-generation mobile phone network 3, have teamed up with TV production and distribution company Granada to bring the popular ITV show, Celebrity Wrestling, to video mobiles for the first time.
(Note to readers unacquainted with this particular TV show: it’s a series of dreadful wrestling matches featuring barrel-scraping Z-List ‘celebrities’ desperately seeking tabloid fame).
The new agreement will give 3 network users access to the show’s ‘highlights’ with the added ‘bonus’ of backstage outtakes.
Gareth Jones, COO of 3 thinks the idea is a whoop-de-do winner: “TV shows like this are ideal for our ‘Today on 3’ service, we’re tapping into programmes that we know our customers really enjoy and we’re providing it to them in bite-size chunks on 3.”
Building up to a crescendo of celebrity-fuelled excitement, Jonesy went on: “Our customers are watching Celebrity Wrestling at home on TV, reading about it in the newspapers and through this new agreement with Granada, they can now watch the highlights on 3.”
Katrina Moran, Granada Interactive lined up for a synergistic snog: “We’re excited to be working with 3 and delighted to see Celebrity Wrestling proving so popular on 3’s video mobile network. We know Celebrity Wrestling fans won’t want to miss any of the action, with 3 they can watch their favourite moments on the move and even get the backstage uncut action too.”
Lord knows who would want to fork out for this dreadful tack, but Granada will be supplying around sixty video clips to 3 customers over the course of the eight week series, with the clips charged at 50p each (or included within add-on packages).
Why anyone would want to fork out to view the cray-zeeee backstage antics of a load of stretching-the-definition-of-the-word ‘celebrities’ on a mobile screen sure beats us, but it provide ample proof of the old adage; ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’.
Celebrity Wrestling
Granada TV
5 May, 2005
T-Mobile Trials 2Mb WiFi On Southern Trains
T-Mobile is offering a free WiFi pilot service on Southern Rail’s busy London-to-Brighton train service in readiness for a full launch in June.
The service, part of a £1 billion improvement project for Southern Rail, will be rolled out on 14 trains supplied by 60 Wi-Fi base stations along the route.
T-Mobile have been trialing the service for several months, with a limited amount of base stations offering 256K upload speeds and download speeds at 2Mbit. T-Mobile has said these speeds will be upgraded on launch.
Despite limited publicity, freeloading passengers have been using the service, with T-Mobile logging seventy-five users over a ten day period from 1st April.
Most of the users were morning commuters, alerted to the service by stickers in the carriage windows.
From June onwards, passengers will have to fork out for the service as T-Mobile introduces its national HotSpot prices.
T-Mobile manager for WiFi Jay Saw was in full corporate PR spin mode as he enthused: “We are the only operator that has placed GPRS, 3G and WiFi at the centre of its strategy. That differentiates us from the competition. We’re the world’s largest network – by our own definition.”
“The Brighton Express has four million regular commuters. We’re the first to install broadband on a train,” beamed Saw, adding that, “Southern, along with our own research and feedback, tells us that there’s a lot of demand. And the feedback from the early users so far has been very positive. We are trying to maximise the value of dead time for commuters.”
Nomad Digital executive chairman Nigel Wallbridge, whose company is responsible for the build and operation of the WiFi network, sounded positively loved up as he set his backslap motors to full: “In my business life, I have rarely had a better experience than working with T-Mobile and Southern, and the railways rarely get good press in Britain.”
We hope to have a hands-on test of the service shortly.
Southern Railway
T-Mobile UK
5 May, 2005
iPod shuffle Scoops Up 58% Of US Flash Player Market
Purring like a cat recumbing in cream, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple’s iPod shuffle has snaffled a 58 per cent share of the flash-based digital media market in the US.
The iPods shuffle’s market share rose from 43% in February to 58% in March, with Oppenheimer positive that the flash-player market share will continue to grow.
He told Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich that Apple was “supply-constrained in March” suggesting that the figures for April will be more sales-tastic.
According to Apple’s own figures, the company now boasts a 90 per cent share of the hard disk-based MP3 player market and 70 per cent of the digital music download market.
Apple’s CFO asserted that “Apple isn’t feeling the competitive heat yet” from other digital media device manufacturers like Creative, Sony, iRiver and others, insisting that Apple “doesn’t appear concerned” about the threat from music-playing mobile phones.
Positively glowing with confidence, Oppenheimer claimed that MP3 capability in handsets will be more complementary than a replacement, with handsets suffering from “a worse user interface and limited battery life,”
Despite the much-publicised non-appearance of the iTunes-capable Motorola handset, Oppenheimer was equally upbeat about working with mobile phone operators.
Milunovich expects Apple to reveal iPods with wireless and video capacity before Christmas, guessing that new Ipods will be able to play short video clips.
Apple Exec: Shuffle Grabs 58% of Flash Player Market; What Cell Phone Threat?
5 May, 2005
Webroot: Spyware Makes $2bn a Year Claim
Anti-spyware firm Webroot have produced a survey which claims that spyware – invasive programs that generate pop-ups, hijack home pages and redirect searches – generate an estimated US$2bn (~£1.05bn~€1.54bn) in revenue a year.
The report suggests that a huge number of consumer computers are infested by some form of spyware, with their SpyAudit software revealing that 88 per cent of scans found some form of unwanted program (Trojan, system monitor, cookie or adware) on consumer computers.
Based on their scans from the first quarter of 2005, the vast majority of corporate PCs (87 per cent) were also found to have undesirable programs or cookies lurking within.
Excluding cookies, more than 55 per cent of corporate PCs contained unwanted programs, with infested consumer PCs crawling with an average of 7.2 non-cookie infections.
Dastardly system monitor programs (key loggers) were found in seven per cent of consumer and enterprise PCs scanned using Webroot’s software, down from 19 per cent in Q4 2004.
Lallygagging trojan horse programs were found on 19 per cent of consumer PCs and seven per cent of enterprise PCs, a figure unchanged from Q4 2004.
“To combat spyware effectively, the anti-spyware industry must be fully informed about the origins of spyware, its growth path and the impact it has on consumers and businesses,” warned David Moll, CEO at Webroot.
“Our previous Quarterly SpyAudit Reports have provided a numerical analysis of spyware’s growth, but our industry has been lacking a comprehensive resource that fully documents the spyware threat. The State of Spyware Report fills that void and delivers the most in-depth, expansive review and analysis of spyware to date.”
Webroot’s data comes from an analysis of stats from Webroot’s consumer and corporate SpyAudit tools and from online research conducted by Webroot’s automated spyware research system, Phileas.
Although most spyware is associated with flesh-tastic porno sites and deeply dodgy warez sites, Phileas recognised 4,294 sites (with almost 90,000 pages) containing some form of steeenkin’ spyware.
Here’s the science: Webroot reached their figure for the value of the spyware market by multiplying the average number of pieces of adware per machines (4.38, they say) by the number of active users on the net (290m – according to Nielsen Netratings) times the value of each adware installation per year – US$2.25 (~£1.18~€1.73), a figure derived Claria’s filing that it made US$90m (~£47.3m~€69.5m) a year from 40m “users”.
Although these figures seem disturbing, many industry eyebrows have arced skywards at Webroot’s figures, with an article in Techdirt suggesting that the company might be trying to pump up its own value by exaggerating the threat.
The scathing piece points out that Webroot is using a highly controversial method of including “mostly harmless tracking cookies” and lumping them in with spyware to boost the apparent size of the market.
Webroot Justifies Its Own Over-Valued Existence
Webroot
4 May, 2005