Digital-Lifestyles

Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

  • Five May Buy Flextech

    Jane Lightning, speaking at a Royal Television Society event last night, dropped an unsubtle hint that Five are considering buying Flextech, the content arm of Telewest.

    While the rest of the industry is still speculating about the proposed merger with Channel 4, Lightning, Five’s chief executive said “Flextech could be one of the options we are looking at.”

    Well, it either is one of the options they’re looking at or it isn’t. I’ll fetch my deerstalker, pipe and magnifying glass for a second and say that they most definitely are looking at it, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place. Oh, and it’s rumoured that Five execs paid a visit to Bill Huff, the fund manager who holds 20% of Telewest, in March.

    Flextech would bring Bravo, Challenge, Living, Trouble and the half of UKTV that isn’t owned by BBC Worldwide.

    With C4, Sony US and Disney also sniffing after Flextech, they’d better get a move on.

    Telewest are keen to sell the company to get out of debt and concentrate on its upcoming marriage to NTL, and are looking for about UK£750 million (€1.1 billion) for it.

    Flextech

  • ITV to Invest More in Digital Brands

    Good news if you’re over 35 and/or like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here – the UK independent broadcaster, ITV is to invest UK£36 million in its two digital channels, ITV2 and ITV3, by scrapping its plans for a children’s channel and choosing instead to focus on News and its digital offerings.

    This means that ITV2 has its programme making budget doubled to UK£24 million, and ITV3 gets UK£13 million for its launch later this year.

    ITV2 is going to use that extra cash to buy in American imports to compete with Channel 4 and Sky – so rather than attract an audience with original programming it’s going to buy in the content that the others channels show in the hope that it will somehow wrestle views away from them.

    By making the investment, ITV hope to triple their total revenues to UK£150 million (€225 million) by 2007. Net advertising revenues are up 4.9% over this period last year, but viewer share continues to fall.

    ITV

  • Loudeye Acquires OD2

    Loudeye, a business to business digital media company has acquired Peter Gabriel and Charles Grimsdale’s On Demand Distribution (OD2) business.

    The move will effectively double Loudeye’s revenue, and has created the world’s largest digital media company.

    OD2 provide outsourced digital distribution for companies like Coca Cola when they want to launch an online music store. Customers include HMV, MyCokeMusic and Wannadoo, but combined Loudeye and OD2 will have more than 200 customers across the world.

    Jeff Cavins, Loudeye’s president and chief executive officer said in a statement: “By combining with OD2, the leading digital music service provider in Europe, we become the largest business-to-business digital media provider in the world with the largest licensed digital music catalogue in the industry,” “This significantly strengthens our solutions for our customers globally and immediately expands our customer relationships and partner opportunities. Together OD2 and Loudeye deliver a powerful, next-generation digital media platform to enable companies to launch complete digital music offerings around the world. In addition, this will globalize Loudeye’s content management, piracy protection and promotion services and will enable us to leverage OD2’s broad reach and strong customer relationships to expand our business into new markets.”

    “OD2 and Loudeye share virtually identical goals, vision and passion for the future of digital music and I see tremendous opportunities for our combined company to drive digital media deployments worldwide,” said Charles Grimsdale, co-founder and chief executive officer of OD2. “Our proven success managing the specific challenges of pan-European digital media deployments will be a strong asset for Loudeye and significantly raises the barriers to entry for other service providers looking to enter the European market. Furthermore, Loudeye will enable us to offer a much broader range of new services to our current customers and extend our capabilities into such fast growing areas as the wireless arena.”

    With online music sales across Europe predicted to reach €1.3 billion by 2007, there is a lot at stake in the industry – expect more mergers and disappearances over the next 18 months.

    On Demand Distribtion

    Loudeye

  • Microsoft Patents Method for Transmitting Data Using the Human Body

    Microsoft this week patented a technique describing the “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”. Basically, they intend to use live bodies as a data bus for transmitting data to local devices – your watch, for example.

    The network requires “a body of a living creature for coupling the first device to the second device and for conducting the electrical signal” in order to operate.The envisaged system is intended to reduce much of the redundancy between the devices you carry around with you today – your PDA, phone and MP3 player all require battery power, plus much of the gear you have on you at any one time has a speaker or a display or its own keyboard. Microsoft want to take out this duplication and distribute it around you, with devices communicating by sending electrical signals, well, there no nice way of putting this: through your living flesh.

    I hope they nail down the security on this far tighter than they do on their operating systems because it could could bring a whole new meaning to “port sniffing” if hackers managed to get into it.

    I think I’ll stick to Bluetooth for the time being, thank you – at least if I suffer a seizure when my mobile rings, it’s only because it’s Simon chasing an article.

    The patent

  • Busy Times for Vivendi

    Vivendi Universal Games has announced a restructuring that will mean the loss of 350 jobs.

    Blizzard, VUG’s key games developer, is said to not be affected, which is just as well as the studio’s forthcoming Worlds of Warcraft MMORPG (repeat after me: massively multiplayer online role-playing game) has many gamers in an absolute froth of goblin-smashing anticipation. If WoW doesn’t revive the parent company’s flagging fortunes, then nothing will.

    If you think that’s bad, it gets Messier.

    The former Vivendi Universal chairman Jean-Marie Messier was arrested on Monday for his part in a massive share buyback scheme. It’s alleged that the company spent at least €1 billion (UK£1.5 billion) propping up its share price in 2001, buying back 21 million shares in September 2001, just 15 days before publishing its financial results.

    Messier has been taken into custody in Paris and is expected to cool his heels there for a couple of days before being charged.

    Messier’s woes began around the time he was booted out of Vivendi in July 2002 after the billions of euros of acquisitions he made nearly destroyed the company.

    Vivendi Universal

  • US Department of Justice: VoIP Fosters Crime, Drugs and Terrorism

    The US Department of Justice has hit out at the growth of voice over IP (VoIP) communications services because they make surveillance and wiretapping difficult. Not being able to listen in so easily could foster “drug trafficking, organised crime and terrorism.”The VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act

  • Microsoft Planning Paid Anti-virus Service

    In a move that is sure to be unpopular with many, Microsoft quietly let slip that it is working on an anti-virus subscription service. MS recently acquired anti-virus company GeCAD in June 2003, and this is the first sign that it is working to release a product based on its acquisition.

    Mike Nash, corporate VP for security at Microsoft said at a dinner with journalists in Seattle “I want to make sure customers have another choice. Some people will continue to use Symantic, and some will use ours.” Symantic’s share price then slid down 5% almost immediately.

    Many people are furious that Microsoft is looking to make money out of a problem that is related to the many security flaws in its products, and considered to be perpetuated by poor coding in MS software such as Outlook and Internet Explorer.

    Microsoft will have to tread carefully with this one – even if they make their product free and bundle it with Windows, thus providing maximum protection, they will probably be accused of anti-competitive practices and end up in court.

    Oh, the irony.

    Microsoft’s security site

    AVG – free anti-virus software

  • Skype Planning VoIP to Plain Old Telephone Service

    Skype, an application that allows users to make free VoIP calls using broadband connections is planning to introduce a new product for calling land line and mobile phones. Called SkypeOut, the service lets subscribers make cheap calls to people with “real” phones in 20 countries.

    Skype’s global rate for these calls ranges from about €0.05 to €1, depending on how pitiful the bandwidth is into the country you’re calling.

    The service is backed with a new version of Skype which has an on screen keypad for dialling destination numbers.

    Skype

  • Nokia’s Five New Phones

    Nokia have been accused of some rather dull designs over the past year, whilst Sony Ericsson and Motorola have pushed ahead with fashionable handsets packed with smartphone features.

    To combat this, Nokia have just unveiled their new range – five handsets, three of which are clamshell designs. Nokia have steered clear of the clamshell phone format up until now, whilst other manufacturers have embraced it and made it popular. Nokia’s dull phone portfolio may have earned it that drop in market share reported by Gartner: down to 28.9% in Q1 2004, from 34.6% in Q1 2003.

    “We have now sharpened our product portfolio in key areas, bringing new phones to the market in the mid-range, and adding more clamshells to our offering,” said Nokia chief executive officer Jorma Ollila.

    The three main phones are aimed at business and leisure users, with a further two “affordable”, entry-level models with less features. Having said that, “less features” still manages to include colour displays and some rather nice styling.

    The first of the main phones is the 6630, a smartphone based on the Series 60 operating system, and is the first dual-mode tri-band phone for 3G networks. Nokia also claim that it’s the World’s smallest 3G phone. Somehow, they’ve managed to get a megapixel camera and an MP3 player in there too.

    For business customers, the 6260 incorporates push to talk technology and a VGA camera into its fold design. Nokia describe it thus: “it is more than just a clamshell, it’s a fold with a twist!” Just stick to designing phones, guys.

    The 6170 is another clamshell camera phone, in stainless steel no less, with push to talk and the usual five hundred or so features.

    These phones are all interesting because it looks like Nokia are finally starting to listen to the criticism they’ve faced over the last 18 months and are innovating – also what is now classed as an entry-level phone has a level of sophistication unthinkable just two years ago. After network providers accused phone manufacturers of not having suitable handsets available, 3G phones are finally moving into the mass-market.

    For my money, Nokia’s new keyboard gadget is a winner. Remember those chat boards that were popular a few years ago for keying in text messages on your mobile? Nokia have a Bluetooth wireless keyboard for all that now, and it even folds up. When GPRS means that email is on the move is much more usable these days, this keyboard will save lots of fingers and eyesight. Just as well, considering how tiny the phones are now.

    Nokia’s new phones

    Bluetooth keyboard

  • Mobile Phone Market Set to Rocket – 600 Million Phones Sold This Year?

    Gartner are predicting healthy business for the worldwide mobile phone market this year, since 153 million unites were sold win the first quarter of 2004, up 34% on the same period last year.

    “Another record quarter of mobile phone sales resulted from an Asia/Pacific market buoyed by purchases for the Chinese New Year, healthy growth in emerging markets and surprising numbers of people in mature markets choosing to upgrade their phones,” said Ben Wood, principal analyst for mobile terminals research at Gartner. “Based on first quarter results, we believe worldwide mobile phone sales will exceed 600 million units in 2004.”

    The top five phone vendors (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson) all saw increases this year, though Nokia lost 5.7% of its market share. Nokia’s bad news is possibly attributable to a less than dazzling range of products this year and a number of network operators in Western Europe sourcing their phones from the Finnish company’s competitors.

    Mobile phone sales in North America grew 30%, with customers opting for colour displays and integrated cameras, demonstrating that America is catching up with Europe both in percentage penetration and the sophistication of the handsets available.

    Gartner