OK, you’re used to us breaking news here, but here’s one that slipped through without us noticing. We think it’s sufficiently important for us to swallow our pride and report it anyway.
In an inevitable move, an LA production company, Carson Daly Prods, has signed talent/development deal with Brooke “Brookers” Brodack, who has made quite a name for herself on YouTube. We’re sure you do, but just in case you don’t know what YouTube is, it’s a phenomenally popular Web site that holds videos watched at the rate of about 40m per day.
While it is predictable (yes, we’re surprised this type of deal hasn’t happened sooner too), it doesn’t make it any less significant. What was previously known as ‘the entertainment industry’ (music, films, tv, etc) has been very slow on the uptake to even notice that the ‘people’ have been madly creating their own entertainment and sharing it online. It finally looks like they’ve started to notice … and not only that, but guess what? It’s a pool of cheap talent to plunder, one without agents and prima-donna salaries and demands. That should get them listening.
Brookers, as she’s known as by tens of millions of YouTube viewers has been posting videos for about nine months, mostly featuring her doing pieces to camera, often miming to sound tracks.
The one that brought her to wide attention was her homage to Gary Brolsma’s Numa Numa.
It’s clear that Brookers has gone a number of steps beyond just plonking herself in front of her Web cam (as many homages do), they’re more of a production, using changing camera angles and locations.
Of course it’s not all about TV deals, realising the size of her audience, she’s recently posted an entry asking for people to donate to her car fund. Very cheeky.
How many people will continue to be able to show their talent like this in the future isn’t clear as various music industry voices have been talking about stopping ‘their music’ in personal videos. Strange – we thought it actually promoted the music.
Ofcom has just issued guidance that GPS repeaters are probably illegal in the UK, both in their use and their sale.
GPS devices need to be able to receive the positional information from satellites. Initially this involved having line-of-sight to the ‘birds’, but as chip-sets have improved, they’ve become more sensitive, so requiring less direct sight. If GPS units work within buildings, they do so at the sacrifice of accuracy. Even with the chip improvements, GPS will not work within buildings, and certainly not underground.
Brits are going wild for the latest technological innovations according to market research firm GfK in its biannual ‘UK Technology Barometer report.’
Not surprisingly, smartphones continue to set the cash tills ringing with a big increase in sales, while single-function PDAs are carrying on their slow decline, with sales slumping by 38.3%.
Last week the French legislature approved a new law which could radically change the landscape of digital audio. The so-called ‘iTunes Law’ is designed to break the control hardware manufacturers exert over the type of content that can be played by their digital music players and software. The result would be that companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Napster would have to make their data formats interoperable, thereby opening their systems to music from rivals. A regulatory body could be set up to police the sector.
The iTunes Law does, however, leave a get-out for the tech companies. A newly-added clause permits artists to exercise control over additional DRM. In short, artists could object to their music being transferred into other formats, thereby ensuring that current practices could continue unaffected. This loophole would require renegotiation of existing contracts, something Apple et al may wish to avoid given record companies’ desire to recoup perceived losses due to piracy. Lawyers observed that the new law is complex and its impact will be difficult to judge until it is tested in court.
UK British music recording industry trade association, the BPi, has today issued a statement that they have “successfully jumped the first hurdle in its battle to have unauthorised Russian download site AllofMP3.com declared illegal.”
The argument of the BPI is that AllofMP3 has no right to be selling the music, as they aren’t licensed to do so. AllofMP3 counter that they are “authorized by the license # LS-3М-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) and license # 006/3M-05 of the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (FAIR).”
Something will go wrong sooner or later with nearly one-fifth of all notebooks, with a new hardware component needed to sort the problem, according to a new survey by industry analysts Gartner.
Laptops have also shown a significant improvement, with features like suspension mounting of hard drives and rubber bumpers between laptop lids and keyboards helping keep the damage tally down.
Motherboard fry-ups and hard drive breakdowns are now the two main sources of failure for desktops, a situation brought about by the increasingly complexity of the things, with more components being integrated into the motherboard.
Symbian, the smartphone OS company, are pulling a smart move (pun intended) by offering free assistance to Universities and their lecturers to have Symbian programming skills built into courses. Very clever.
As a sweetener to the lecturers to get involved, Symbian will provide “exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.” Pretty healthy if you fancy running a software development company and want to get exposure for your potential products, or you’re getting a little bored of Uni life and fancy impressing those in industry that you’re a bit of visionary.
As you may recall, we first reported the 
The transfer and negotiations around the unit are likely to have given BT some food for thought as to how they can manage the disposal of business units they do not see as key, or that are giving rates of return below the main business’s targets.
Some commentators expect ITV’s share price to renew vigour over the coming weeks, as rumours of a fresh takeover are fanned by its institutional shareholders. This is despite poor audience performance and strong competition from a publicly owned, but very commercially managed, C4. There are those who are keen to take over the ITV helm where Greg Dyke so publicly failed.
Some wonder why the continued interest in ITV as the deregulated non-linear future hurtles closer, but in truth, ITV has a value in both its content and brand that may be undervalued. The channel when compared against the triple and ‘four-play’ options that are so exciting the Telco executives, still has programmes that viewers will seek out. The next 12 months are critical to the brands long term success, as it’s multi channel strategy is tested by the Freeview expansion of C5 with two more channels. Not forgetting the move of Channel 4’s film channel to an advertising supported free to air proposition, a strong assertive strategy could turn the corner for the dominant UK commercial player but more On Digital type disasters could spell a long and unpleasant demise.
The other left field possibility is that US media titan Time Warner in selling off its UK AOL business has an eye on acquiring a much bigger UK fish that looks astonishingly like the UK’s main commercial TV network- eyes should be glued to the unfolding drama.
In the wake of the dot com boom, then the dot com collapse, equipment vendors have been feeling the fall-out and mergers seem to be the way to reconcile the collapsing markets. The Nokia-Siemens merger announcement bears witness to this.
Siemens, a German giant
Companies such as Huawei (“wu why” sometimes pronounced “who are we” which fits their appearance into markets that they had no presence in until recently) are starting to make serious dents into the Tier 1 telecoms/ISP markets.
Now they’ve established themselves in the ISP market, the surrounding markets are being worked on (and since most ISPs are now owned by telecoms companies, it’s the telecoms markets that are easiest to move into).