Companies – Page 117 – Digital-Lifestyles

Xpress Audio Messaging – Podcasting Tool from Nokia

Nokia Audio Messaging If you’ve ever wished that your answerphone message mumblings could have a bit more pizzazz, Nokia’s new 7710 handset. Xpress audio messaging could become another tool in the podcasters arsenal, enabling podcasting on the move, without a PC. It will all be down to the power of the audio editing software. We’re keen to get our hands on it to see if our hunch is confirmed.

For the straight messaging, Nokia clearly hopes that this will give them some leverage in the highly competitive – and lucrative – youth mobile phone market:

“Nokia Xpress audio messaging enables operators to differentiate their service offering from competitors, by utilizing existing infrastructure,” explains Juha Pinomaa, Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia.

“For consumers, Nokia Xpress audio messaging combines ease of use, affordability, and adds a personal touch to greetings, congratulations, or allows to share a special moment like a grandchild’s first words.”

Recorded audio messages can be sent to all MMS-enabled GSM handsets and stored and replayed as easily as any other multimedia file, and Nokia will be introducing support for legacy phones within its MMS solution.

The Nokia Multimedia Application Gateway will also enable sending audio messages to phones that do not support MMS, therefore letting even more people hear your pre-recorded masterpieces.

Nokia is so far, the only MMS infrastructure provider to offer legacy support specifically designed for audio messaging. The new audio messaging menu will be integrated in several Nokia handsets introduced in 2005.

Nokia

UK LLU – OTA Say, “Could do Better”

OTA: Local Loop Unbundling Lagging Behind The Independent Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) has issued an update on their progress of ‘local loop unbundling’ (LLU – the process of opening BT’s exchanges to competitors).

The speed of unbundling, or in this case lack of it has a direct effect on the range of competitive broadband providers, and therefore the speed of services that can be provided and their cost.

To date, some 31,000 lines have been unbundled, but the OTA update reads: “Good. But could do better.”

There are reports of variable performance in some operational areas, with performance lagging behind the OTA Key Performance Indicator, ‘Right First Time’. This snappily monikered indicator checks to see if services are being delivered in time to meet customers’ expectations.

The OTA has set a target of 75% with actual delivery being variable at 50-60%. This target rises to 85% in the near future.

The number of lines unbundled has grown from 12,000 in May 2004 to 31,000 lines unbundled by 31 January 2005.

Once again, this falls behind the OTA target, which had specified 50,000 unbundled lines by February 2005.

The Telecoms Adjudicator Scheme is successfully underway, with 14 companies signed up, and encouraging noises about investment commitment, have been heard.

LLU price reductions were implemented from 1 January 2005, and there are more price reductions on the horizon.

Despite all this, LLU operators continue to experience operational problems and variable delivery performance isn’t doing wonders for the operators’ marketing plans.

The Adjudicator’s update tells it like it is: as the orders keep rolling in, operational performance is the key to success for LLU.

Independent Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator
Ofcomwatch comments on it.

Nokia 7710 Widescreen Multimedia Smartphone Released

Nokia’s hotly awaited new multimedia smartphone, the Nokia 7710, has started shipping in Europe and Africa.

Stuffed full of innovative design and smartarse features, the tri-band Nokia 7710 (GSM/GPRS/EGPRS 900/1800/1900), is billed as a blend of smartphone, phone, camcorder and PDA (a “smartcamPDAphone”, if you will).

It’s quite a chunky beast, dominated by a wide, (640×320-pixel) high-quality touch screen with 65,536 colours.

But they’ve stuffed a lot in there: the device includes a full Internet browser (with Flash6 support), an integrated music player with stereo audio, video playback, streaming and recording, a megapixel camera (1152×864 pixels) with 2x digital zoom and FM radio with Visual Radio client.

There’s up to 90 MB internal memory available to users, and its memory slot can accommodate anything up to a 1 GB MultiMediaCard (MMC).

Naturally, such a smartypants device comes with an extensive suite of personal information management software, with support for real-time push email, an antivirus and a VPN client.

Nokia 7710 Depending on the sales package, some mobile media applications and services will be pre-installed on the 128 MB MMC, including Mobipocket Reader. This e-book reading application, already popular on Palm/Pocket PC platforms, gives the user access to thousands of titles including current bestsellers.

Bloggers are supported by Nokia’s Weblogging mobile feature. This lets users instantly publish their (sick bucket please) “life experiences” on the Web, adding pictures and text from their Nokia with ease.

The Nokia 7710 runs on top of Symbian OS with handwriting recognition and pen input. The connectivity options for the Nokia 7710 include a Pop-Port connector with USB and Bluetooth wireless technology for data transfer and PC synchronization.

With other applications available from third party developers (such as Time Out City Guides and the powerful WorldMate weather/traveller program), this sees Nokia shoving their size nines into the competitive world of PDA/smartphones.

It’s a fantastic package, but we will wait and see how it competes with the highly-rated Palm Treo 650 smartphone, which is expected to be released in the UK shortly.

Nokia: New Products and Strategic Alliances Announced

New PlayStation3 Cell Processor to be Revealed

New PlayStation 3 to include super-fast Cell processor The details of the Cell processor chip designed to power Sony’s PlayStation 3 console will be released in San Francisco today.

The result of a devilish melding of the minds of industry giants, Sony, IBM and Toshiba, the chip has taken three years to develop and is reported to be up to 10 times faster than current processors.

Triumphantly billed as a “supercomputer on a chip”, advance reports suggest that this beast of a processor is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by their competitors, Intel and AMD.

Utilising several different processing cores that work on tasks together, the chip has been fine-tuned to be able to handle the detailed graphics common in games and the data-chewing demands of films and broadband media.

New PlayStation 3 to include super-fast Cell processor The Cell’s architecture is described as scalable from “small consumer devices to massive supercomputers” and when installed inside powerful computer servers, is expected to be capable of handling a breathtaking 16 trillion floating point operations, or calculations, every second. Phew!

IBM will start producing the chip in early 2005 at manufacturing plants in the US, with computer workstations and servers being the first machines off the line sporting the Cell processor.

A working version of the PS3 is expected to be previewed in May 2005 but the full launch of the next generation console is not expected to start until 2006.

High-definition TVs from Sony and Toshiba, a Sony home server for broadband content and the PlayStation 3 all featuring Cell are also due to appear in 2006.

“This is probably going to be one of the biggest industry announcements in many years,” boasts Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research firm. “It’s going to breathe new life into the industry and trigger fresh competition.”

But it’s not all pat-on-the-back stuff with rivals publicly questioning whether Cell’s potential can be realised – while they hastily get to work on alternative multi-tasking methods.

IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal ‘superbrain chip’ (ft.com)
PS3 Portal News
PS3Land.com
PlayStation 3: The next generation (CNet)
PlayStation 3 chip to be unveiled (BBCt)

RSA to Secure Nintendo DS for Wireless Gaming

Nintendo DS protects wireless gamers with RSA encryption Games console maker Nintendo is adopting encryption technology developed by RSA Security to encrypt wireless traffic between its new Nintendo DS portable game console.

The game console is the company’s first major mobile gaming product since the popular Game Boy Advance, and contains the embedded messaging and communication tool, Pictochat with its wireless networking technology.

According to Nintendo’s press release, the DS’s wireless capabilities will initially allow up to four players to virtually blast the living daylights out of each other (and send taunting instant messages to their victims) on DS units up to 100 feet away.

The wireless feature uses both the standard 802.11 wireless technology and Nintendo’s own proprietary digital rights management protocol and will also allow certain games to be shared and played interactively among users.

Naturally, with all that expensive software flying through the air, game publishers and developers needed to be assured that their games wouldn’t be disappearing into the ether, so the RSA BSAFE technology has been brought in to protect the digital rights of game publishers for titles shared wirelessly.

Nintendo DS protects wireless gamers with RSA encryption The same technology has also been employed by Nintendo to protect game demos that are issued on a trial basis for play in retail stores and other demo environments.

Nintendo also intends to introduce an Internet ‘hub’ to allow users to challenge fellow DS gamers anywhere on the planet.

Nintendo
RSA Security
Nintendo DS portable game console

Gran Turismo 4 day – 22 February US, 9 March EU

Gran Turismo 4 launch The anticipation around the release of Gran Turismo 4 has been, to put it mildly, huge. Sony are hoping this Playstation2 only game will be their Halo2 type blockbuster.

Sony has announced that it will be releasing it in the US on 22 February. Europe will have to wait until 9 March, but will gain from having an additional 10 cars on top of the 700 or so that are in the Japanese version, which launched on 28 December last year. We’re not sure that an extra 10 cars will actually make up for the delay.

The Gran Turismo series has to date sold more than 37 million and this will be the first version that has networked play, which is one of the reasons we’re covering it. At release it will come with LAN play, the ability to play it between a number of machines on the same network. This will be followed ‘later’, possibly late 2005, by the full network play, letting people play across the world. This was knocked back after Sony experienced difficulties with inter-country gaming.

Reaction so far has been that it looks stunning, easily the graphically best title to appear on the Playstation 2.

You can tell that a game is going to make a big impact – and have a significant marketing campaign behind it, when a company like Nissan decides to launch a special version of a car to coincide with the launch. The 350Z Gran Turismo 4 Edition will be limited to 700 cars in Europe and feature things like extra power in the engine and specific wheels. The features we’d really like to see on this very quick car – a pause or reset button, if you get in to trouble when driving it – are unlikely to be provided.

Gran Turismo 4
Nissan launch 350Z Gran Turismo 4 Edition (PR)

Microsoft Search Squares up to Google

After receiving a sound pummelling in previous rounds against the mighty Google, Microsoft has produced a leaner, meaner more bad-ass search engine – and this one looks like it might go the distance.

Ditching their previous reliance on the Yahoo/Inktomi search index, the all-new MSN Search service has been created from the ground up using a Microsoft-designed proprietary index (although the company are still using Yahoo-owned Overture to deliver Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising).

With a spartan, advert-free interface straight out of the Google school of design, the minimalist screen lets users search for keywords from a rich range of sources including web pages, news feeds, images, news headlines, Encarta, music downloads and files on user’s PCs.

All the usual gizmos are on board too, with MSN Search offering word definitions, mathematic calculations, conversions, sports information and just about everything else that their competitors provide.

The new product reflects the intense competition in the increasingly important Internet-based search technology market. With Google already offering a free e-mail program, photo-editing software and a desktop search program for finding files on Windows computers, this development can be seen as Microsoft trying to protect their turf.

But will it be good enough to provide a viable alternative to the current search industry big boys, Yahoo! and Google, both of whom have more market share than Microsoft in the search business?

Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com isn’t completely convinced:

“The core search engine is good and a welcomed new “search voice” in the space. However, it does not make a massive leap beyond what’s offered by Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves — the other three major search companies that provide their own voices of what’s deemed relevant on the web.”

This week’s MSN Search launch probably won’t have much of an immediate impact on the search-engine market, but backed by an advertising budget the size of a small country’s GDP, we can expect things to heat up nicely in the coming months.

The timing of the launch, the day before Google announce their first full year trading results may also not have been coincidental.

MSN Search
Wikipedia: Pay per click
searchenginewatch.com

Microsoft and Macrovision Join Forces

In a move sure to annoy and frustrate pirates and possibiliy home users, Microsoft has struck a deal with copy-protection specialists Macrovision to make it harder for consumers to swap video content.
The technology aims to stop people making copies of TV shows and movies using analog connections between devices (e.g. linking a set-top box to a television).

Up till now, the big studios and content providers have been more concerned about preventing high quality, digital to digital copies, but now they’re getting in a sweat about users recording the output of a DVD player onto a computer hard drive.

Unlike most digital copy protection schemes, Macrovision doesn’t scramble the signal, but it blasts out a pulse of electronic energy along with the video as it is played. Devices such as DVD recorders will recognise this signal and refuse to record the content.

The new deal also enables Microsoft’s Windows Media software to detect this signal in incoming analog video streams. Future versions of the software may allow content to be stored for just 90 minutes or up to a week.

Upcoming versions of Microsoft’s Media Center Edition operating systems will allow users to make a temporary copy that can be stored for one day and then rendered unusable after that time.

By hammering down digital rights management, the idea is that the entertainment industry can to take advantage of emerging revenue channels without remaining confident that their rights are protected.

How your average consumer, keen to make a copy of the Antiques Roadshow at home, might respond to all this technology is another matter. One option they might take is to replace their Windows machine with another type that doesn’t place this restriction on them.

Macrovision
Microsoft

TiVo SDK: looking to influential new pals, new ideas, anything!

TiVo SDK Squeezed on both sides by ever-competitive satellite and cable providers, TiVo is trying to woo third party developers into creating compelling new add-on services for their product.

The company has rolled out a Software Development Kit (SDK) in the hope that it will create a vibrant market in application for the TiVo. The SDK has been released on to SourceForge, a home for open-source software.

To stimulate the market, they’ve got the ball rolling with three initial add-ons: a weather information plug in, an RSS reader and a game, with users needing a Series 2 TiVo, a home network and broadband connection to take full advantage of the applications.

The move is part of a larger strategy, code-named Tahiti, which lets DVRs download information and content from the Internet. Howard Look, who regales under the magnificent title of ‘vice president of application and user experience’ at TiVo was heard excitedly exclaiming, “All the great ideas don’t have to come just from us.”

Some users may feel that there haven’t been enough great ideas coming from anywhere recently.

Although TiVo boxes are well regarded for their easy-peasy interface and excellent aesthetics, many feel that it’s being left behind by newer technologies. Sales haven’t matched expectations (only 2 million boxes so far) with the company racking up truly eye-wateringly large net losses (half a billion according to Om Malik).

Clearly something hugely impressive has to be pulled out of the bag to turn the company around, but posters on Slashdot weren’t exactly overwhelmed by TiVo’s announcement, but then Slashdotters are rarely overwhelmed.

If they’re represeantative, it seems that what many users really want – instant commercial skip, sharing recorded programs with other devices and free channel guide services – isn’t on TiVo’s horizon and barely anyone seemed excited by the somewhat less enticing prospect of bolt-on weather forecasts and an RSS reader.

TiVo does have a very enthusastic base of owners, many of whom are capable of developing software, so this could be a very wise move for TiVo. We wait with bated breath to see how many applications arrive.

The Developer Toolkit
Slashdot discussion: TiVo to offer SDK

$100 PC Touted by Negroponte for Developing World

$100 PC Touted by Negroponte for Developing World A $100 (€76, £53) laptop computer for the developing world has been touted at the World Economic Forum in Davos by Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of MIT’s Media Lab.

The computer will have a 14-inch color screen and will run the Linux operating system. According to Red Herring magazine, Negroponte is looking for support from companies such as chip giant AMD, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corporation.

The first units could be ready in about 18 months, Red Herring said.
The developing world is increasingly a target of technology companies – Microsoft has built a slimmed-down version of Windows XP for the Indian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Russian markets, as part of its Windows XP Starter Edition pilot programme. In part this reflects its desire to fight off Linux, which is becoming increasingly popular in these new markets.

Another source of PCs for the developing world is recycling. Every year in the UK 3 million PCs taken out of service, but many are still in good working order. In contrast most schoolchildren in the developing world graduate from high school not having seen a computer in the classroom, and there are a number of charities which take these PCs and reuse them in the developing world.

In related news, MIT has announced that Media Lab Europe, launched in 2000 by the Irish government and MIT will close on February 1 due to a shortfall in financing.

MIT
Red Herring