BT are to offer those who sign up for their Business Broadband Voice service – VoIP to you and me – an option of having a local phone number connected to it. At a charge, naturally.
BT is calling the service “Geographic Numbers”, ie what you’d normally have if you had a landline phone line from them.
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Nokia has signed a deal with Microsoft to put PlayReady on some of their handsets.
Nokia say that they “plan to support PlayReady across a range of S60 and Series 40 devices starting in 2008.”
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News reaches us from Helsingborg, on the gorgeous west coast of Sweden, that some sneaky chap has registered their car license plate as G O O G L E.
Joakim Jardenberg, the clever fellow who thought up the jolly wheeze, has also blogged the adventure (for those of you who read Swedish!).
He raises some interesting points about brands and by extension, individuals registering trade marks as car registrations, while pointing out that “one of the highest valued brands in the world, Google, is now my number plate.”
Anyone for “adPlate or plateSense,” japes Joakim, who is a development manager at the newspaper, Helsingborgs Dagblad (who have the super cool short domain name hd.se).
What’s Google reaction?
Rather amusingly, Joakim’s been on to Google Sweden and has had a response from Maria Göth, their PR manager.
Google have made a statement about … not making a statement, which reads
We cannot make a statement before we know exactly what has happened. The persons at “Vägverket” (The authority which is responsible for the roads and car regulations) who handles personal number plates is on vacation but we shall contact them on Monday.
We await further news with bated breath …
Many thanks to Anders Olausson, long time chum on Digital-Lifestyles for the pointer.
Text to Speech (TTS) processing has come on leaps and bounds from the early days of jerky, rough renditions of robotic-type chatter yesteryear.
A lot of the quality is truly amazing – very life like – but it appears that some systems still really doesn’t know how to deal with jokes.
Just now a friend (I assume) sent me an SMS joke, but sadly they misdirected it to my landline, not the mobile.
BT have a service in the UK where text messages can be sent to landlines and read out over the phone.
So you all have the joy of listening to the joke, I recorded it, just so you can enjoy the flat humour of it.
I found it took a couple of times of listening to it to actually understand what the joke was!
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/tiger-woods-joke.mp3]
As we’re not fans of football, we’re constantly amazed at how keen people are to watch the game that involves people kicking a pig’s bladder around an oblong section of grass. Ho, Hmm.
Never one to not take the opportunity of cramming more football into people lives, Sky TV has teamed up with a load of other ‘newspapers’ owned by media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to create 24-7 Football.
It’s a new on-demand service that will offer video highlights and goal clips from the Barclays Premier League and UEFA Champions League on mobile phones.
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The BBC Dr Who Spin-off, Torchwood, set and shot in Cardiff, Wales, has been sold to US TV network HDNet.
The all-things-eco Website, Treehugger, has sold to US TV network Discovery.
Treehugger and it’s UGC site, Hugg.com, will fit into Discovery’s initiative called Planet Green, which has committed over $50m to spread the Green message, including the aim to introduce the first 24Hr Green TV Channel.
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We popped off to the Firebox “Xmas in July” do last week and we saw loads of goodies that they’ll be bringing out between now and christmas.
The first that we’ll bring to you is the Ion Tape2PC. We all know about the Ion Audio USB turntable and how popular they’ve been.
Not one to stay still Ion have now moved on to capturing other digital media.
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Yesterday the UK’s Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) demanded sites such as YouTube to be closed, for encouraging CyberBullying.
Proposed by Kirsti Paterson at the national conference held in Harrogate, the motion was “Conference deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour.”
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If you thought that your sonic toothbrush gave you the ultimate teeth clean, you haven’t heard about the latest sonic brush from Philips – the SoniCare FlexCare.
Philips have worked hard to try and improve on, what felt for us to be just about as clean as it was possible to get. The new handset has got 80% less vibration, it’s 30% smaller, 16% lighter and has an impressive 77% reduction in energy consumption when compared with the Philips Sonicare Elite.
This thing is bonkers. When we gave it a go recently, we could not believe the pure zing we felt in our mouths post-brush. You’ll find that once you”ve used it, it will be hard to go back to anything less.
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