BT Rich Media has cuddled up to Sportfive, a French sports marketing group, and announced a partnership to make 2006 Football World Cup qualifying and friendly games available to fans streamed over broadband on the Internet.
Under the terms of the agreement, Sportfive – owners of the largest portfolio of European qualifying games – will use the BT Rich Media platform for publishing and distributing the video content.
Football bonkers viewers will be able to choose between 250Kbps or 500Kbps quality streams for approximately £7 (~US$13 ~€10), or alternatively download the entire match to keep forever for around £5 (~US$9.50 ~€7). As a long suffering Wales fan, I have to admit that there’s several games which I never wish to see again!
Not every match will be available online though, with only untelevised games being available to stream/download.
The games will be served up on http://www.qualifiers2006.com and promoted to over 10 million users via a range of affiliate sites such as soccernet.com,.teamtalk.com, sportinglife.com and rivals.net .
BT Rich Media will also be using the same technology to stream the forthcoming Scottish BT Cup Final at ScottishRugby.org.
PalmOne has formally launched its Treo 650 in the UK – more than six months after jammy Americans got their mitts on the keenly anticipated smartphone.
The handset includes useful quad-band GSM/GPRS connectivity for voice and data, with the bundled VersaMail email application supporting a single Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 ActiveSync account and multiple IMAP and POP accounts.
Even with WiFi, Treo users will still be missing out on the killer VoIP application, Skype, so I asked if there were any plans to introduce a version for the Palm platform.
Despite attending an official product launch, I left none the wiser as to when the Treo will actually be available or what other network carriers (apart from Orange) will be offering the phone. Naturally, there wasn’t a peep about pricing plans either.
Nokia has launched three new Nseries mobile multimedia handsets, capable of taking print-quality pictures, playing MP3s, reading e-mail, browsing the Web sites and viewing mobile TV.
Nokia N90
Images, videos and sound can be stored on the phone’s internal 31 MB memory or on the supplied 64 MB RS-MMC
Joe Coles, Director of imaging product marketing at Nokia, stressed the consumer demand for camera-enabled mobiles: “The number one reason why people today purchase new handsets is the camera. Indeed, we foresee that by the end of 2005, over half a billion people worldwide will own a camera phone.”
After several years of delays, Microsoft has assured computer-makers that Longhorn, the next version of Windows, is on track for release by the end of next year.
Longhorn aims to boost security by placing cryptographic keys in special silicon chips built into PCs – a more secure solution than the current practice of storing encryption locks as data on a hard drive.
This would offer a built-in method to let users view and print graphical documents, without the need to install the application that created the original file – in other words, a rival to Adobe Systems’ popular PDF technology and PostScript page description language.
Digital-Lifestyles were on hand to witness a new world record being created, as former World Text Champion Arttu Harkki used a Treo 650 smartphone to type the fastest-ever email on the move using a QWERTY keyboard – using a single thumb.
Before the record attempt could start, Hein Le Roux, official adjudicator from Guinness World Records explained the rules, “There are a lot of phones that incorporate QWERTY keyboards, and we need to make sure that the record is standard across all models. For this reason, we asked Arttu Harkki to type using just the thumb of one hand.”
As the stopwatch-toting Le Roux looked keenly on, Harkki’s mighty uni-thumb went supernova as he bashed out the following message:
Once I’d recovered from the high octane excitement of watching someone write a text message repeatedly, I asked Le Roux what the previous record had been, and was surprised to find that there hadn’t been one, because this was a new category.
AbbiTalk, a West Sussex-based provider of Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephony services, is talking tough about its cut-rate broadband call packages, that offer customers extra telephone lines with discount local and UK call charges and no line rental.
Prices start at £149 for “AbbiTalkBasicOne”, which provides one extra phone line, a unique number with Pre Pay phone account, an adaptor and a DECT digital cordless phone with digital answering machine.
No line rental is charged and there’s no need to use a computer to make the calls as these are accomplished through the standard cordless handsets.
Samsung announces a prototype hard disk drive that includes flash memory, promising longer battery life and less hard disk woes for laptop users.
The hard disk would only spin up when the flash memory’s “write buffer” was full, reducing the time and power needed to keep the drive’s rotating media spinning.
As part of Toshiba’s 20th anniversary celebration of the first laptop computer, the company has brought back its libretto line of ultraportables, starting with the miniscule U100.
For maximum security, the pint-sized palmtop wedges in a biometric, integrated fingerprint reader with the 60 GB hard drive being protected by Toshiba’s ‘EasyGuard’ technology.
Measuring in at a humble 8.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches, the libretto U100 retails for US$1,999 (£1,045/€1,500) in the US, with a possibility of a European release this summer.
Sweatband-toting sporty types will be pleased to learn that Nokia has introduced a new handset for active-minded consumers, the Nokia 5140i camera phone.
Water-bottle clutching joggers will appreciate the ‘Fitness Coach’ application, offering an ‘always-on’ personal trainer that (apparently) “encourages users to go the extra mile or finish the last set.”
The phone also includes the 
Ericsson has reported a thumping great rise in quarterly profits, helped by the deployment of 3G networks.
These figures fly in the face of predictions from investors and analysts that sales would drop steadily for the big telecoms firms as Chinese manufacturers took over the industry.