Simon Perry

Joost: SSL Certificate Runs Out – v0.9.2 Released
Joost went ‘off air’ yesterday – ie. no one could use it to access TV programmes.
All was revealed today as to why. The SSL certificates that are used to encrypt all communication between the clients and the Joost servers ran out, as certificates do each year.
Much to their embarrassment, Joost had hard-coded the details of the certificate into their client software. Now they’ve extracted it, they need to release a new build, hence the 0.9.2 release.
Knowing they’d be offline while the software was being rebuilt, they’ve upgraded their Long Term Storage machines replacing them with ones that are four times more efficient. They’re hoping this will straighten out any problems that might have been present with stuttering video delivery.
As Dirk-Willem from Joost says, “this is all part of being a beta.”
Joost Download
11 April, 2007
Google Developer Day Announced
All of you budding code-aholics take note, Google is hosting ten Google Developer Days in their various offices around the world on 31 May.
They’re going to have workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Google have been running a few of these already with much smaller capacity. A few have happened in Silicon Valley and a couple in London that we’re aware of, but this is on a much bigger scale.
The program is being headed up by code-fan pin-up girl Marissa Mayer, who’s Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. She was one of the first 20 people to join Google (just imagine her stock options!) and the first female engineer hired by them.
They’re rolling out some of their top talent to get the code-kids hot under the collar. Get ready for this …
Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing); Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London); Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid); Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit (Mountain View); Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View); Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps senior engineer (Sydney); and Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).
The subjects they’ll be covering also sound pretty enticing. Here’s a cross section, “Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp,” “Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, Open Source and Other Developer Initiatives” and “Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets and the Google Data APIs.”
What does Google get out of this?
Google’s going to be lashing all of their cash, time and resources on this, so what’s driving them?
Well, people become more familiar with how to write programs to use their applications via the published API’s, which means the potential for extra advertising income for Google.
That’s all well a good but more importantly, Google get to spot the hottest programming talent around the world and can in turn try to persuade that talent to join the Google gang. Meaning Google ends up with the best programmers, not their competition.
Smart, eh?
Locations
- Mountain View, California
- São Paulo, Brasil
- London, United Kingdom
- Paris, France
- Madrid, España
- Hamburg, Deutschland
- Москва, Россия (That’s Russia to you)
- Tokyo – Japan
- Sydney, Australia
- Beijing,China
Those who can’t make it don’t need to be left out, Google will offer live streaming webcasts from its Mountain View office and provide a YouTube™ channel with videos of Google Developer Day sessions around the world.
Google Developer Day
11 April, 2007
Frontline Wireless: US Analogue TV Spectrum Raising Much Interest
There’s a scramble for US spectrum by a collection of big-time venture capitalists.
In the same way that UK frequencies are being freed up by analogue TV going digital, a big chunk of valuable frequency will also be coming up for grabs in the US too. The big difference is that the US one is coming up a lot sooner, with the US government having mandated that their analogue switch off occurs on 19 Feb 2009.
Once freed-up, it is to reallocate the frequencies to public-safety organizations and commercial broadband networks.
According to the IHT, one of the contenders is a company called Frontline Wireless, which was formed at the start of this year to try to utilise the 700-megahertz band – by fulfilling both public-safety usage and commercial usage simultaneously.
A key part of their technical solution is the use of Software Defined Radio (SDR), which allows the same device to operate on many different frequencies, using the same chipset, switched by software.
The 700-megahertz frequency is highly favoured as it has a significant capacity, good range and can easily penetrate buildings and other structures.
Frontline has a number of advantages on their side. Not only does it have Reed Hundt, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman acting as Vice Chairman, but the company’s first public investor was K. Ram Shriram, an early Google investor known for his investment acumen. Venture capitalists L. John Doerr and James Barksdale, originators of Netscape, have also jumped on board.
They plan to offer to the public-safety network free of charge, while monetising the commercial side of the network. It’s estimated that they’d spend over $8 billion building out the network.
Frontline Wireless
11 April, 2007
MyMaps Launched By Google: Add Your Bits To Maps: Mini Review
Google is bringing User Generated Content to the Google Maps, by extending it to let users add their own comments, photos and video.
Google Maps has wowed people ever since it moved to the Web from the standalone Google Earth application, letting anyone with a Web browser take a look at both the maps and satellite images of anywhere in the world.
Adding content to online maps, or geographic locations isn’t a new idea. It’s been around for ages and it’s commonly called geotagging, or less frequently Geocoding.
Google Maps has been possible for a while using a combination of Google Maps API and XML, but it wasn’t for the faint-hearted, requiring quite a lot of know-how and skill to add items. It uses an XML schema called KML, Keyhole Markup Language.
Their new version, currently available in ten counties, gets away from this by extending Google Maps to include a simple drag and drop interface.
We’ve given it a go and found it a breeze.
When people create their own MyMaps they are able to define if they are to be shared with the world – coming up in Google search results – or define if they are the remain private.
Adding placemarks is a breeze. Simply select the placemark icon and click on the map area that you want it to appear on. These can be titled and a description added, be that plain text, rich text, or HTML
There are further tools to allow lines and shapes to be draw onto the maps. Once set, these can then have their colours and attributes changed.
Adding photo and video
Photos and video can be added to the maps, as long as they’re hosted somewhere online.
Adding them requires the smallest amount of HTML skill, as they have to be added to the placemarks using HTML code. (pointers)
Once you’ve created you mapping master pieces, you can take the data from Google Maps, out via KML, to Google Earth.
Current competition
Yahoo has offered the ability to attach photographs to maps via their Flickr service for quite a while now (Bestival example) and Microsoft have also had a similar tool Via their Maps Live service.
Google Maps
5 April, 2007
UK PS3 Sales Down 82% In Second Week
The news for Sony and their PlayStation 3 just keeps getting worse.
Early pre-UK-release signs weren’t promising, nor were they looking any better when the UK PS3 was selling for £100 under their release price, a couple of days beforehand.
On the positive side, Sony did claim to sell 165,000 consoles in the UK in the first week – making it the UK’s fastest selling home console to date.
Now the official Chart Track figures, that follow sales in the UK are reporting to gamesindustry.biz that sales of the PS3 in the UK have dropped by 82% during its second week of release.
Software sales are also suffering with “sales of the top two PlayStation 3 titles, Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm, had dropped by over 60 per cent.”
It’s not looking much better for the PS3 in Japan, where Bloomberg is claiming that Sony has sold 812,000 PS3s since November 11, against a mighty 1.95 million Wii consoles by Nintendo.
5 April, 2007
Pace Celebrate 25 Years In Business
Our favourite UK Set Top Box manufacturer is celebrating their 25th birthday this year.
25 years! Staggering how old the industry is now isn’t it?
Waaaaaay back in 1982 they started off selling modems and software. Their first product was a PSTN modem called the Nightingale and we can even remember Pace modems from back when 1200/75 baud modems appeared as an exotic advance from the 300 baud ones that were the standard.
For all of you young ones who weren’t around in those days, that’s 1.2/0.075 Kbps vs 0.3 Kbps. Scarily slow.
Following their modem and software successes, Pace launched their first satellite set-top box (SR640) in 1987 and like all design, it was a product of its time, with a fab HiTech feel about it.
From there, Pace really haven’t looked back. They’ve consistently carried out pioneering development, building up a large selection of industry firsts, including the first digital satellite receiver in the UK, the first PVR (personal video recorder) in Europe, the first low-cost digital terrestrial adapter (thereby creating the freeview market in the UK) and, more recently, the very first H.264 DVB-S2 high definition set-top box in the world.
Their latest and greatest product is a HD DVR, the HR20, which records using MPEG-4.
If you, like us, dear tech trivia fan don’t know the history behind the name of Pace, you’ll be excited to hear that the name Pace came from an innovative shipping company in Australia called the Pacific Australia Container Express.
The Next 25 years
Looking forward to the next 25 years, Neil Gaydon, CEO, give his views of where Pace will be innovating, “Soon we will see multiroom and home networking solutions coming through, that will allow you to watch anything you want from any screen in the house, including mobile TV. When you add the fact you will import your photos and internet entertainment to any screen, your music to any room in the home along with wireless technologies emerging, so removing the need for wires, we are at the early stages of a new TV revolution.”
Best of luck to Pace in the coming years, may they continue their success.
Pace Jubilee
4 April, 2007
Play Bestival: Learn Ukulele Via MySpace
Our Sister site, Ventnor-Blog, has been scooping the world with announcements of who and what will be appearing at the amazing, manic extended weekend that is Bestival.
Besides the now-known amazing acts of The Beastie Boys, Chemical Brothers, a whole slew of talented ladies, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble and many others will be appearing.
The latest mold-breaking announcement of today is that willing punters, will themselves be able to play on stage at this coming Bestival, if they’re willing to pick up a ukulele and learn to play it.
That’s all very lovely, but what’s the relevance for Digital-Lifestyles? Well, the innovative way that enthused Uke holders will get up to speed on the required songs is via MySpace.
The whole jolly lot is being organised by the venerable Dulwich Ukulele Club (background) through the Night of 100 Ukes’s.
On there, in the lead up to Bestival, will appear details of the songs, the lyrics that need to be learnt and the cords that need to be sweated over in pursuit of Ukulele-nirvana.
The majority of preparation through practice will be done in the privacy of Uke-ers homes, but besides the planned rehearsal at “a central London pub” in August, Who knows, they might even choose to use Skype to Live to have remote practices.
We’re going to keep an eye on this one, both in our personal pursuit of Uke-ism and to watch how this MySpace-driven mass learning works out.
Night of 100 Ukes’s MySpace
Bestival
Bestival Latest News
4 April, 2007
Joost v0.9 Out: Grab Your Name Quick
There’s a new version of Joost just out today – v0.9 – and amongst the changes, is the switch from using an email address to login to using a username.
Any of those who were slow getting on the Skype-train and ended up with a crummy username take note, you need to act fast to get your name of choice.
To add to the pressure of this, Joost are also giving an extra five invites away to each Joost Member, so the names are disappearing fast.
What else is different with the new version?
The first thing you’ll notice when it starts up is that it now opens in full screen.
The ident has been moved from its previous dominant central position to the bottom right hand corner. The upcoming programme name has now taken its place now middle centre.
There’s been a little fiddling with the icons. Of particular note is the design and function of the one to the right of the channel name. It still brings up the programmes that are available on the channel, but it now has a back button that takes you to a menu of channels – logical really.
Content rating also appears to have been added – or perhaps I haven’t previously looked at any content that needed rating.
Picking The Prodigy, Smack My Bitch Up (Live), I was met with a screen asking me to confirm that I was indeed over 18 (quite why it was needed to see this is anyone’s guess). Interestingly the muted video appeared to run in the background, while I was working out exactly just how old I was.
Those of you who have been watching the development of Joost, will notice that the adverts are getting just a little bit longer and more corporate. The latest addition appears to be an advert for IBM notebooks, while it is visually interesting (for the first viewing), it’s hardly cutting edge funk-ville.
The only downside we’ve found so far is that it crashes – not something that we had a problem with in Joost or The Venice Project before.
Ooo … and we’ve seen there’s a promo video up on the Joost site too (new to us). It’s here below for your delectation.
[QUICKTIME http://static.joost.com/videos/joostvideo.mov 320 240 false true]
Joost
3 April, 2007
BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3G
The BBC are going to start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones within the month.
Three UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.
As well as the TV channels, eight radio stations will also be included – Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.
Appropriately enough the announcement by Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, was made at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress.
The BBC haven’t done a great deal of content on mobiles, not that they’re not keen on it, as you’ll be able to tell from the comments of Richard Halton, “The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.”
They hope to learn lots from this trial, as Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC said, “The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC’s future mobile strategy.”
We’ll keep our eyes on this.
30 March, 2007
.xxx Porn Domain Defeated By ICANN
After a long time, the organisation behind the domain names on the Internet has voted against .xxx.
The idea behind the .xxx p0rn domain extension (or Top Level Domain TLD, in domain -ese) has been floating around for a very long time.
Back in March 2004 ICM Registry, based in Florida, put a formal application in for .xxx, in response to ICANN’s request for proposals for new TLDs.
Over the time since then, there’s been many back and forths between ICM and ICANN to try and reach a settlement.
There’s been signs of encouragement from ICANN when it has gone to votes twice back in 2005.
Today the ICANN meeting in Lisbon has voted against .xxx. The reasons they list are
- ICM’s Application and the Revised Agreement fail to meet, among other things, the Sponsored Community criteria of the RFP specification.
- Based on the the extensive public comment and from the GAC’s communiqués that this agreement raises public policy issues.
- Approval of the ICM Application and Revised Agreement is not appropriate as they do not resolve the issues raised in the GAC Communiqués, and ICM’s response does not address the GAC’s concern for offensive content, and similarly avoids the GAC’s concern for the protection of vulnerable members of the community. The Board does not believe these public policy concerns can be credibly resolved with the mechanisms proposed by the applicant.
- The ICM Application raises significant law enforcement compliance issues because of countries’ varying laws relating to content and practices that define the nature of the application, therefore obligating ICANN to acquire a responsibility related to content and conduct.
- The Board agrees with the reference in the GAC communiqué from Lisbon, that under the Revised Agreement, there are credible scenarios that lead to circumstances in which ICANN would be forced to assume an ongoing management and oversight role regarding Internet content, which is inconsistent with its technical mandate.
Reading their application back in March 2004, there’s chance for a bit of a laugh.
The proposed .xxx string is clearly appropriate for the sponsored community as other strings were deemed too Anglo-Saxon and had the potential to lead to confusion (see above).
“too Anglo-Saxon” – brilliant.
Many people feel the .xxx TLD to be a good idea, the theory being that if all porn is pushed on to it, children and those not interesting in seeing p0rn won’t just stumble across it by accident. Given the sheer amount of p0rn on the Internet, that’s not a bad idea, but thinking that p0rnographers will adhere to any rules is wishful thinking.
Frankly if ICANN’s thinking is that by not allowing .xxx they think people won’t think there’s p0rn on the Internet, they’re living in a different world.
Rejection of Proposed sTLD Agreement with .XXX
Public comments on .xxx
30 March, 2007