The BBC is set to unveil a “significant” move into the videogames market, according to a report in The Scotsman.
The Corporation – still smarting from the humiliation of being caught out ripping off viewers taking part in TV phone-ins – is expected to unveil their new gaming strategy next week at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival.
(more…)
The UK’s number one mobile company O2 has dumped its flagship i-mode mobile Internet service after failing to attract enough customers – just two years after launching the service.
The ‘umbling turnaround came about after the company revealed that it had only managed to woo 546,000 customers to sign up to their i-mode service in the UK and Ireland. That may sound quite a respectable figure, but it only adds up to just 3 per cent of their 18 million customer base.
Not that long ago, a 24″ CRT TV screen sat in your living room would mark you out as a well-wedged consumer, drawing envy from lesser mortals squinting at bedsit portables or bog standard 20″ units hired out from the once mighty Radio Rentals.
Come the 90s, impressively well dimensioned Plasma and LCD screens started to take a hold in upmarket homes, with the slimline, stylish goggleboxes expanding to wall filling screen sizes of 37″, 42″ and upwards.
(more…)
Kudos to BT for putting on an impressive launch for their new range of techie goodies coming out for the winter season.
The launch was 34 floors up near the top of London’s landmark building, the BT Telecom Tower (still known to old folks as the GPO Tower or the Post Office Tower), with the press launch taking place inside the revolving restaurant.
(more…)
We’ve seen some mighty weird things on the Internet over the years, but this American- based Profes- sional Pageant Photo retouching site easily has to be one of the spookiest things to appear on our screens for a long time.
(more…)
If you’re fed up with the relentless blueness of the standard XP theme but can’t be arsed with all those fiddly downloadable theme programs, maybe you’ll warm to the Royale theme.
It’s apparently an unreleased Microsoft XP Media Centre theme that was leaked out to the web, and it looks rather purdy in a shiny but dark’n’moody Vista-esque sort of way.
(more…)
BSkyB has agreed terms to buy set top box maker Amstrad in a £125m deal.
The two companies have already been working together for several years, with Amstrad supplying around 30% of Sky’s set top devices – with those orders making up a hefty 75% of its business.
(more…)
By the looks of a product leak slipping around the web, Samsung look set to make a big break with their traditional mobile phone designs with the release the all-metal i550.
Running on Symbian OS S60 UI, the phone bears some design similarities with Sony-Ericsson’s W880, and is rumoured to be Samsung’s first Samsung GPS-enabled smartphone – and the company’s first bar shaped phone.
The 3G and HSDPA (3.6 Mbps) phone also sports a generous 2.6″ display and wedges in a 3.2 megapixel camera (plus a low red front mounted camera for video calls), dedicated keys for GPS, music player and Internet browser.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of the hugely popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has outlined his plans for a new search engine service to rival Google.
Wales’s new start-up firm Wikia has bought up a web crawling technology called Grub from LookSmart, and released it under an open source licence. Like the famous SETI project, Grub relies on users donating their personal computing resources as well as human editors.
(more…)
Impatient lotharios and time-challenged romance hunters should welcome the launch of online dating service, Match.com’s new MatchMobile text application.
The new service for cell phones sends subscribers text messages when they get a ‘wink’ or e-mail from another Match.com subscriber, and if they don’t like the look of them, they can also search for other potential matches from their mobiles.
(more…)