Companies – Page 52 – Digital-Lifestyles

Intel Announces Solid State Drives And Green Processors

Just like clunky eight track cartridges, brick sized cellphones and desk hogging CRT monitors, the trusty hard disk could be heading for oblivion as Intel announce their first move into the flash drive market.

Intel Announces Solid State Drives And Green Processors Yesterday, the electronics big boy elbowed its way onto the Flash Memory table clutching news of their Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, offering USB 2.0/1.1 interfaces.

Despite its instantly forgettable name, Intel reckons that the NAND flash memory can whip the spinning botty of hard disk drives and removable USB storage devices, offering nippier boot times, embedded code storage, faster data access, silent operation and lower power consumption.

Although no one’s predicting that flash memory will replace hard disks quite yet (mechanical drives still enjoy a considerable cost advantage at large capacities), Greg Matson, product marketing manager for Intel’s NAND flash memory division reckons they could provide a more reliable and cheaper way of storing information on PCs for emerging markets.

The drives could also be fitted into PCs and servers as a way to speed up the boot process, and thus deprive workers of a good excuse to pop out for a walk, “while the PC’s starting up.”

Intel is currently keeping schtum about the pricing for their Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drives (it doesn’t get any more memorable the second time around, does it?) but the capacities will vary from 1GB to 8GB, with 8GB drive not expected to emerge until the end of the year.

Intel Announces Solid State Drives And Green Processors Source

Intel’s Green Xeon Processors

Elsewhere, Intel were giving their Eco-Trumpets an extra long parp with the announcement of two new Quad-Core Xeon processors – the L5320 and L5310.

Intel claims that these offer between a 35 and 60 percent reduction in power consumption on low-power, quad-core processors designed for high end users like data centres, blade servers and financial industries.

“Intel has really responded to the industry’s call to deliver unprecedented breakthroughs for datacenter energy efficiency,” frothed Kirk Skaugen, VP of Intel Digital Enterprise Group and GM of the Server Platform Group.

“IT managers can get outstanding quad-core Intel Xeon server performance today and at no premium to dual-core products,” he added.

Via

PS3 Home: The Virtual World Multiplies

The Virtual World Multiplies Sony is gearing up to launch a rival to popular online virtual world Second Life later this year. Playstation Home is a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) in which a user adopts an avatar (a digital character which represents them) which they are then free to move around a virtual world, interacting with other avatars. In their Developer FAQs (PDF), Sony describes the project:

Home™ is a real-time 3D, networked community that serves as a meeting place for PLAYSTATION3 (PS3) users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share content and even build and show off their own personal spaces.

It looks like Home may well be going beyond Second Life in a few areas. Gaming is the most obvious, perhaps unsurprisingly given the link to the Playstation. Users will be able to play various different arcade games around the virtual world through their avatars. So I might decide to go for a virtual drink in a virtual pub with my virtual friends, and I would then be able to have a virtual game of pinball on a virtual pinball machine. You get the idea.

Probably more interesting is the ability to meetup with someone in Home, and then play a Playstation game with them over the Internet. Whilst the playing over the Internet idea is far from new, it is a unique way to approach it. It adds a social dimension to game play (along with the included voice chat) which could possibly make Internet gameplay far more addictive.

Sony are also taking user generated content seriously; as a user of Home I will be given, for free, an apartment, which I can then hang my own pictures up in and customise to my heart’s content, presumably buying various virtual items from Sony to add to my dream virtual home.

UGC is absolutely crucial for such games; it creates a feeling of ownership over the game for every individual user, making it far more sticky.

Commerce is not being overlooked. Sony state in their FAQs that:

Home prioritises community and entertainment over ecommerce. That said, we believe that there will be ample opportunities for businesses and individuals alike to generate significant revenues from the Home platform.

This is similar to the approach taken by Second Life and other MMO games, and it makes a lot of sense. Sony, and others who set up business in Home, will be able to make vast sums of money selling things which do not really exist and which cost little or no money to develop. In the modern world of games consoles being sold at a vast loss, manufacturers are looking at every possible avenue to create additional revenue streams.

Second Life has been hyped enormously, with pop concerts and press conferences from real bands and companies happening exclusively within Second Life. Despite this, I have always held Second Life in the greatest disdain; I spent about 15 minutes playing it some time ago and was struck by the pointlessness of it all. Whilst there are many, many people who are fans of such games, I have rightly or wrongly assumed that they are either people without a social life, who are fascinated in the technology or who are only able to create meaningful friendships through such a program.

I do not, however, treat Playstation Home with the same disdain. It seems that Home has a purpose, namely gaming, which should give the whole virtual world meaning. If I were able to afford a Playstation 3, I think I might well enjoy a quick stroll around Home to find someone to play against, and then actually playing the game with them. In Second Life all that is possible is the stroll, and I think that if virtual worlds are to live up to the hype, they have to offer more than a stroll.

[Engadget was a useful source]

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz. He is the co-founder of the Oratos Media technology blog network, and his personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!

BT Try To Vary Payphone Pricing

In their constant pursuit for higher profits, BT have put a request into the UK uber-regulator Ofcom, to allow them to charge different prices for phone calls depending on where the phonebox is located, claim TelecomTV.

BT Try To Vary Payphone Pricing BT is under a legal obligation to provide phone boxes up and down the length of the UK, which they claim numbers 63,795. BT say that 40,500 of these phone boxes are unprofitable.

BT is attempting to negotiate a three-year deal that would let BT “determine the acceptable pricing of pay-phone calls.”

Try to get out of their obligations is not really playing the game is it? It’s not like their obligation to payphones is news to them.

It’s got the ring about it along the lines of charging for directory enquiries. When BT was allowed to start charging for calls to directory enquiries, it was only ‘normal’ landlines that were effected. Calls to find out phone numbers were free from Payphone, as BT removed the printed telephone directories from them. A few years later BT had the rules changed and started charging from payphone, despite not returning the printed directories.

BT claim that calls from payphones have dropped off by 40% in the last four years, no doubt due to the considerable rise in uptake of mobile phones.

Digital-Lifestyles thinks this doesn’t make it right that people who live in remote locations should have to pay inflated prices for using the same payphone and connecting to the same phone network as everyone else, just because BT wants to make more profit.

(via)

HD Photo: Microsoft’s JPEG Death Dream

The 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft is trying to get the world to shift from the global-standard JPEG format to their relatively newly-announced format, HD Photo.

HD Photo: Microsoft's JPEG Death Dream Last week Microsoft went on a PR offensive to promote the new format, despite them having published the specification in November last year.

It’s claimed that HD Photo offers twice the efficiency of JPEG – meaning the same quality of photo will take up half the amount of storage.

Despite the HD at the start of HD Photo, there is no connection to the HDTV standard or format.

It’s not surprising to hear that Windows Vista has native support for HD Photo images, and it can be easily added to Windows XP. Microsoft have also released a beta version of a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, enabling people to save files in HD Photo format. They’ll not be charging for it, even when it’s released.

Bold, to say the least
Microsoft’s attempt to convert the world to using their new photo format is, to say the least, pretty ambitious given how every camera in the world uses the JPEG format to store images.

Frankly we think Microsoft would have stood a better chance of success with HD Photo five plus years ago, before the price of storage, both of hard disks and portable memory formats, started plummeting. The same applies for the claims of needing less processing power to decode HD Photo images, as most new computers have more processing power than their owners know what to do with them.

Their best chance of success will be to try and get photographers who shoot in RAW (uncompressed) format to save their images down to HD Photo, tempting them with less loss in their photos than JPEG currently provides.

Wikipedia on HD Photo

EU Comments Add Pressure To Apple iTunes

The heat on Apple to open up their iTunes/iPod combination went up another notch following an interview with Meglena Kuneva, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Commissioner.

EU Comments Add Pressure To Apple iTunes In the interview with German weekly magazine Focus, published today, she poses the following question, “”Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod?” It’s followed by a couple of words that are going to make uncomfortable reading for Apple, “I don’t. Something has to change.”

Music bought on the Apple iTunes online shop cannot be played on any other music player, apart from Apple’s iPod.

Kuneva is carrying out a review of the eight basic laws which govern cross-border consumer rights.

Pressure has been building for quite a while against Apple, with the latest, most significant one being in January as the Norwegian Consumer Watchdog, declaring iTunes to be illegal.

Previous actions have been, the approval of France’s ‘iTunes Law,’ after Apple narrowly avoided the French courts over their FairPlay DRM back in 2004.

Apple leader, Steve Jobs, wrote an open letter at the start of last month, entitled “Thoughts on Music,” where he said he’d drop DRM “in a heartbeat,” but was hamstrung by the content owners not allowing him to do so.

Meglena Kuneva – EU site

Friday Snippets: Mobile Web; Palm iPhone Rival?; iLaunch Launched

Slow mobile web Three Quarters Of Consumers Naffed Off With Mobile Web

According to a study by the Online Publishers Association, only a quarter of punters who have used the mobile internet were chuffed with the experience, with the biggest complaint being tardy load times.

The report also found that 76% of UK consumers were able to access the web from their phones with more than half of that total connecting to the internet.

Find out more mobile related facts here: online-publishers.org

Palm Hire Ex-Apple Hotshot Designer

We still can’t work out if they’re going to be bought out or not, but the New York Times is reporting that Palm may be planning their answer to the iPhone after hiring former Apple computer engineer, Paul Mercer.

Palm iPhone Mercer joined Apple in 1987 and was the lead designer of Version 7 of the Macintosh finder before founding a software tools firm called Pixo which was involved in designing the first version of the iPod user interface.

Described as, “the best of the best in this space,” by Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster, Mercer recently worked for Samsung to design their Z5 MP3 player, which went on to be a monster hit in South Korea.

New York Times

Apple launches iLaunch

Steve Jobs unveils new product-unveiling product:

“The iLaunch runs Keynote-formatted presentations in high definition through a built-in projector while displaying a 3-D rotating image of the product.

Apple iLaunch Voice-recognition software, Apple’s most advanced to date, can recite a speech highlighting the features of the device while injecting several clever digs at competitors.

Should a product demonstration experience a glitch or malfunction, the iLaunch boasts a complex algorithm that can automatically produce humorous and distracting quips.”

The Onion

Skype Downloaded Over 0.5 Billion Times

Skype has announced that its VoIP software has been downloaded over 500 million times since its inception in August 2003.

Skype Downloaded Over 0.5 Billion Times A pretty staggering number, even when you realise that it includes all of the downloads and possibly all upgrades of the software (* We’re in the process of checking this with Skype HQ).

Working out that this averages just under 11m downloads per month is pretty meaningless, as in the early days there were very few people knowing about Skype, or even how to pronounce it. In the early days some numpties called it Skype-eee – and we bet that the guilty keep that one quiet these days.

Some numbers that are worth looking at – because they’re pretty mind blowing – are that Skype is being downloaded at the rate of six times per second; Skype to Skype minutes in Q4 2006 alone totalled 7.6 billion minutes; and in September 2005, Skype had 54 million registered users. Today it has over 171 million registered users worldwide.

Skype CEO and co-founder Niklas Zennström shares the love and enthused, “The entire Skype team owes its success to the global community of registered users we have today who tell their loved ones how much they enjoy using Skype.”

The original Skype users were mostly people who had used Zennström previously wildly popular product, Kazza, a P2P file-sharing application. Much of the knowledge his team had built up in handling considerable amount of data sharing between machines was invaluable in building the bones of Skype.

Skype is now just part of everyday life. A product that you couldn’t imagine being without. A pretty impressive feat in anyones book.

The Next Newspaper Web-olution

The Next Newspaper Web-olution In the wake of US newspaper USA Today recently unveiling a new version of their site with more cutting edge ‘new media’ features than any other, I thought it might be a good time to have a look at the challenges posed to newspapers by the onslaught of new media, what they are be doing about it and what they should be doing about it.

The Challenge
Undeniably new media (that is, the general availability of the Internet and the new types of publishing it enables, such as blogs and podcasting) has had a significant negative impact on circulation of newspapers. There are roughly two schools of thought over why this has occurred. The cynics would argue that it is because the ‘old media’ no longer has the trust of the public, and instead people turn to indie publishers, such as bloggers and podcasters, to provide information on what is happening in the world around them. A more moderate viewpoint would be that the Internet has lowered the barrier to entry into the publishing industry to such an extent that anyone and everyone can publish content (the long tail effect), thus inevitably reducing market share of the big players. It would seem that this view is the more sensible.

If newspapers wish to stay relevant therefore, they are forced to innovate in the realm of new media. Their future circulation is at stake, and if they fail to successfully capture market on the web they miss out on potentially millions of pounds worth of advertising a year. Hence the effort the newspapers are putting into finding a way forward.

What are they doing about it?
The biggest, and perhaps most notable addition to the newspaper’s content production is audio visual content (AVC). AVC refers to anything from podcasts to video blogs to video news reports. These are of crucial importance because of the value they provide to the consumer’s experience above and beyond that found in the newspaper.

The Next Newspaper Web-olution The recently relaunched Times Online seems to be taking this the most seriously with the launch of an entire AVC section. They are currently providing over 10 different podcast series, and video content from their Iraqi correspondent and a car review show. Whilst the Times Online is making an admirable effort, my personal favourite newspaper podcasting effort is that of the Comment is Free section of the Guardian Unlimited website. I particularly enjoy their Media Talk podcast, to which I devotedly listen every week.

Another noticeable theme is the rise of user generated content (UGC). This is when users add any of their own content to a site, whether by means of a blog comment, uploaded video or anything else. This is an important trend for newspapers to be adopting for two reasons. The first is that users have come to expect the ability to add their thoughts to a story; provision of comments enhances conversation, and thus interest in the story and ‘stickiness’ of the site as users return to read comments in response to their own. The second reason is that UGC is ideal for any business looking to monetise content through advertising because it provides virtually free content, next to which can be placed fee-paying ads.

Almost all the recent newspaper Website relaunches (such as that of the Times and the Telegraph) have the ability to add comments, as well as more the forward-looking Guardian Unlimited, which has had the feature for some time. However, by far the most adventurous in UGC is the recent relaunch of the USA Today site. USA Today is building a fairly robust social network around their content, which allows users to comment, have their own avatar, ‘recommend’ (effectively digg) stories as well as a profile page.

Taking it further
Over time it is clear that the journalist will have to become an expert in all types of media. They will have to be able to easily transition from writing a story for a newspaper to producing a podcast interview to setting up and tweaking an installation of WordPress. Whilst many journalists will be struggling to be as technically proficient as this requires, I believe the necessary skills will develop over time.

The temptation will be for newspapers’ websites to become more and more like a combination between Weblogs, Inc and Digg, with loose editorial control and use of wisdom of the crowds to determine top stories. It is crucial that this is resisted, because to move in this direction would mean that newspapers would lose their unique selling point of quality, carefully edited content.

The challenge, therefore, is for newspapers to continue to innovate without losing sight of why they are important sources of news. If they succeed, they will continue to flourish, otherwise perish.

FunkeeStory SMS Backup For Mac Treo Users

FunkeeStory SMS Backup For Mac Treo Users The Palm platform has traditionally enjoyed a lot of support from Mac users who can perhaps relate to the platform’s status as a great working product that isn’t as well known as it should be (or maybe it’s because it’s simply not Windows?!).

Anyhow, Mac based Treo users might well be interested in this lovely little app for backing up and storing text messages from a company called FunkeeMonk Technology.

Treo owners will already know that its threaded text message interface is the best in the business, but mustard keen SMS fiends often end up having to delete older conversations as the none-too voluminous memory of the Treo fills up.

FunkeeStory SMS Backup For Mac Treo Users The FunkeeStory application lets Mac users back up and archive SMS messages and conversations by installing a conduit and an attractive desktop viewing application.

The application retains the threaded chat views and also supports multimedia content, so photos, audio and video clips can be viewed on a Mac, or emailed out to friends.

FunkeeStory SMS Backup For Mac Treo Users All the messages are searchable and the program offers international language support.

Created by Mac fan Joe Goh, the program is available from the Funkeemonk website for $19.95 – FunkeeMonk Technology.

Windows backup options
We took a look around for something similar for Windows Treo users and came across the $10 Treo Desktop application which offers similar functionality but without a conduit.

Cheapskates on either platform can also use this free online converter sms2csv.php which does the job but is about as basic as it gets.

Firefox And Safari Browser Market Share Rises

Firefox And Safari Browser Market Share Rises Like hungry puppies with sharp teeth, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari Web browsers continue to chew and gnaw away at the juicy legs of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).

According to new figures from Web metrics company, Net Applications, February saw both Firefox and Safari grab a bigger share of the browser market as IE’s share continues to shrink.

Firefox – which comes in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux flavours – increased its share from 13.7 percent in January to 14.2 percent, while the Mac OSX Safari browser had a small but noticeable shimmy upwards, from to 4.7 percent from 4.85 percent.

Despite dropping in the rankings, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still retains the Billy Bunter share of the browser market, devouring 79.1 percent (down from last month’s 79.8 percent.)

Firefox And Safari Browser Market Share Rises “After a minor hiccup in January, Firefox seems to be back on the offensive in February,” said the fabulously named Vincent Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing and strategic relationships.

“January showed a brief halt to Firefox’s assault on Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share. Could that have come from new Vista machines?” asked Mr VV.

Before any hands could be raised in answer, the double V man delivered his verdict, “Possibly, but it appears that browser users have gone back to switching to Firefox, Safari and Opera.”

The well liked Opera browser also saw its market share rise a smidgeon, but it’s still deep in the niche territory, registering just 0.79 percent in February, up from 0.73 percent from last month.

Net Applications