Companies

Container for all companies

Sky Anytime on PC: One Million Films In A Year
Sky Anytime on PC downloaded its one millionth film on the 14 January neatly marking its first year of operation.
The Sky Anytime on TV service is the renamed Sky By Broadband service, which delivers select Sky’s TV content over a broadband connection to a PC.
Figures for the film downloads could have been larger if Sky hadn’t had to pull the service back in September after their chosen DRM-restriction system, by Microsoft, was cracked.
We’re assuming that the million films that have been downloaded have been paid for, making it a pretty big bonanza, given the films are a wallet-emptying £3.95 each. Once subscribers have paid up, they’re given access to it for seven days, but are restricting to 48 hours viewing window after the first viewing.
Dawn Airey, BSkyB’s managing director of channels and services, was keen to say her piece about it … “We’re delighted that customers have taken to Anytime with such enthusiasm. Sky Movies is the UK’s most popular movie service and we’re able to use broadband to give customers more flexibility in how they watch. The fact that in this first year we’ve already seen 1m movie downloads is testament to customers’ willingness to embrace new technologies and get more from Sky.”
Sky report that the service has gained a quarter of a million registered users in its first year of operation.
24 January, 2007
MySpace Face Four Child Lawsuits
MySpace is being hit with compensation claims by the families of four children who allege sexual assault by adult MySpace members after finding out personal information about them on their MySpace pages.
The families from New York, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas have filed seperate cases in Los Angeles. They’re being represented by Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, Texas and Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas.
They allege “negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation” by News Corp. and MySpace.
These cases don’t appear to fall into the ‘oh this might have happened’ category. Three of the cases have lead to the incarceration of the attackers, one whom is serving ten years in Texas. In the other case the two men have been arrested and are awaiting criminal prosecution.
Not the first claim
This isn’t a first for Barry & Loewy LLP. Back in June 2006 they filed the first lawsuit of its kind against MySpace, for a 14 year old girl who was also allegedly assaulted after contact through MySpace.
They claimed MySpace was “negligent in protecting teenage users despite numerous warnings of the dangers” and “had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the website but did nothing to stop it.” The financial claim was $30 million in damages.
Concerns like these aren’t new to MySpace. Back in Feb 2006, parents were voicing their concerns.
MySpace have taken action. In December last year MySpace took action to kick off known sexual predators.
Be careful
Cases like these will bring into focus the potential dangers to those who reveal details about themselves online, although with a few simple rules, horrible incidents such as these should be avoidable. Most of them being the same rules you would apply in normal, non-online life.
19 January, 2007
Nintendo Wii _Does_ Get You Fit
Mickey DeLorenzo is a man on a mission – to prove that it’s possible to lose weight just by playing his Nintendo Wii.
He’s been the same weight for the last two years and while maintaining his normal diet, complete with the usual Christmas indulgences in food and drink, he managed to lose nine pounds and nearly 2% of his body fat by playing for 30 minutes a day.
He’s been pretty fastidious in his self-monitoring over the six week period, keeping a close eye on his Weight; Body Mass Index (BMI); Calories burned per session/per game; Body fat %; Heart Rate at rest; Wii Fitness Age; and Additional Notes/Soreness.
By his own description, he played it in a “semi-aggressive way.”
I moved my feet, I used full body motion, and I swung my arms to mimic the real thing. If you just stand there and make small moves or sit on the couch and play, I don’t think you’ll see much, if any results regarding exercise.
Oh the pain
It wasn’t without pain, but as they used to say in the 80s, no pain, no gain.
He got hit with two types of pain – physical pain as well as tech pain. On the physical pain side, he report that “my first 3-5 days were brutal. I was sore from shoulder to wrist, I even went as far as purchasing an Icy/Hot patch to sooth my pain.”
The tech pain was him smashing the screen off his girlfriend’s laptop during a game of Wii bowling. We suspect this accident then lead to further physical pain inflicted by his missus.
The details that he presents on the site are pretty extreme, with obligitory graphs too. Those things combined with the subject make it ideal Digg food, and as we write this, we see the article has been Dugg 3655 times.
I did a similar test with the Sony EyeToy a couple of years back, using Kung Fu that came with EyeToy Play. It really got me feeling good, but my appoach was _far_ less scientific. Reading this gives me the impetus to try it again.
Nintendo must be jubliant about this story – providing the perfect excuse for children to pester their parents to buy a Wii.
Hats off and well done Mickey.
19 January, 2007
Skype: Calls To Landlines Go Flat Rate & Skype Pro Announced
Skype are on the move again, this time changing the way that they bill for calls to landlines.
As is their want, it will be brought to in Europe, then rest of world during 2007.
The new charging scheme does away with per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines, replacing it with a connection fee. This fee changes depending on the currency, with Europe paying 3.9 Euro Cents and the UK being spanked 2.9 pence per call, against the current exchange rate equivalent of 2.56 pence. All of these prices exclude VAT.
After the first five seconds of a SkypeOut call, the connection fee will apply.
Some countries will be cheaper, running at 1.7 Euro Cents, these currently include … Czech Republic (including Prague), Guam, Hungary (including Budapest), Israel (including Jerusalem), Luxembourg, Malaysia (including Kuala Lumpur), Puerto Rico and both Alaska and Hawaii in the United States.
This shift around isn’t a bolt out of the blue. Back in December a Skype Executive talked about these connection rates that became effective from 13:00 CET today.
The Skype Unlimited Calling plan in the US and Canada and the Talk for Britain campaign in the UK do not include a connection fee for national calls. Skype to Skype calls continue to be free and calls to mobiles will continue to be charged on a per minute basis.
Setup fees are usually bad news for people who make short calls, as the cost is front loaded, with the nattering classes gaining the biggest benefit from the flat rate.
Skype Pro
To have the privilege of a Skype Pro account punters will have to pay €2 per month. The new Skype Pro accounts also come with free Skype Voicemail and €30 off a SkypeIn number.
Skype Pro
18 January, 2007
The iDontWantOne: Private Eye Mocks The iPhone
The brilliant Private Eye, satirical magazine of the UK, has a fake advert for the Apple iPhone.
The headline? At last, from Apple – The iDontWantOne with a photo of the iPhone underneath it.
The gist of the jest is that it’s over-complicated for normal mortals and is highly likely to malfunction. After you’ve used the phone to call Apple customer support and tried to text them and failed, you can use it as an iBrick with a paper note attached to it saying “Why doesn’t your stuff work properly?”
Full copy is
The ultimate in hand-held technology! Now using the all-in-one device you can take a photo, download songs, play videos, access the internet and then with the iPhone you can ring up Apple to complain that none of the above facilities work. And if the phone doesn’t work you can text the customer services department – unless that doesn’t work either, in which case you can use it as a brick (the iBrick facility) to throw through the window of the Apple store, attached to a lo-tech hand-written note saying, “Why doesn’t your stuff work properly?”
Referring to the oft-used phrase of bad support departments, they have an insert with “Try turning it off and then on again,” underneath a photo of The Steve.
Given Apple’s legal-happy status currently, they may be contacting The Eye – not something that will phase them, they’ve had far bigger legal battles and won before.
Besides the great jests that Private Eye have against the irrelevant, they also carry out real journalism – actually investigating wrongs and exposing them – something of a rarity in most publications.
Private Eye
Private Eye subscriptions
18 January, 2007
Joost: The Venice Project Renamed
The next-market-to-disrupt target of the Skype/Kazaa founders – TV – has it’s latest news. The Venice Project’s working name has been changed to Joost, continuing their penchant for picking weird names – always a benefit when you want the domains(!).
As to the source/root of the name … ? Well it could be that their massive fans of ’80s video game Joust or perhaps it’s a reference to the German for a friendly ‘goodbye’, Tschüss. Who knows? FYI – It’s actually pronounced Juiced.
We’ve been fiddling with the ~~Venice Project~~, sorry, Joost for a couple of weeks now, since Christopher Wood very kindly sent us an invite to join up.
We whacked it on an older (1.5GHz) machine and found that it really didn’t have the horsepower to run it properly. It’s a pretty greedy little number, even running out of steam on a 2.5GHz. The buzz around us beta testers is that currently, it _loves_ taking power/resources.
Clearly the Joost crew are seeing this as a product for the future (not a bad assumption), that will need to have a current processor to run it on. Queue computer and chip makers cheering and clapping.
A couple of beta testers are pointing and declaring that Joost will be the first failure of the founders. We think that it’s waaaaay to early to be calling that. Be patient my headline grabbing-friend and see how it turns out.
Let’s not forget 1) this is still in Beta, 2) Windows Media Centre was a total dog throughout many of its incarnation, taking years to get to the point where it was even usable.
Joost
17 January, 2007
Nintendo Rake In Record Sales
The Nintendo DS has emerged as the top selling gaming device in both the US and the UK during 2006.
According to figures from the NPD Group, the DS outsold the Wii and PlayStation 3 (PS3) over the bumper Christmas holiday period in the US, with 1.6 million Nintendo DS’s flying off the shelves during December, adding to a total sales figure of 9.2 million units.
By comparison, Sony’s much hyped PS3 only managed to sell 490,700 units in December, hindered by supply and production problems.
Americans certainly went waheey for the Wii, with 604,200 consoles shifted in December, backed up by brisk business for extra games.
NPD found that Wii owners bought three extra titles on average, with a huge 86 percent forking out for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Nintendo Owns Europe
Across the pond in Europe, Nintendo managed to shift 500,000 Wiis during December, while in the UK a hefty 200,000 of the next-gen consoles found themselves in the clammy excited hands of game-crazy Brits.
Despite the bumper sales, Wii’s still remain as rare as a Cardiff City away win, with Nintendo Europe MD Laurent Fischer admitting that the company is still “facing stock shortages.”
Record sales
According to UK market monitor Chart Track, UK consumers also bought more than 500,000 Nintendo DS handheld consoles, making it the UK’s biggest games machine last year.
With the Wii whipping up a sales storm and the DS registering record sales on both sides of the Atlantic, Nintendo look set to notch up their most successful financial year ever.
[From PC Advisor and Reg Hardware]
17 January, 2007
Nokia Intellisync Wireless Email now on Sony Ericsson M600 and P990
Nokia are extending their relationship with Sony Ericsson as they take their Intellisync Wireless Email to two more Sony Ericsson devices, the M600 and P990.
Nokia’s Intellisync Wireless Email is their counter to RIM’s Blackberry and Microsoft’s mobile email service, covering wireless email, synchronization for calendars, contacts, files, data and applications.
Where as the competition only works with their own devices, Nokia claims that theirs works with any device and any backend system. This extended deal with Sony Ericsson makes this real.
This solution is primarily aimed at business users, but as people become dependent on digital communications, it’s highly likely that every man (and woman) and his (or her) dog (or cat) will be wanting this kind of thing.
Around the Digital-Lifestyles office we are not big email fans, given that it’s laden with so much junk these days. We, like many others use IM to communicate.
16 January, 2007
Google On Course For Half Of The US Search Market
A new survey has seen Google continuing to exert its dominance on the US web search market, grabbing a huge 47.4 per cent of the sector, up 0.4 per cent during December.
Yahoo, ranked number two, also enjoyed an increase of 0.3 per cent over the same period, giving them a 28.5 per cent market share.
The figures from web audience measurement company comScore Networks revealed bad news for the third placed search engine, Microsoft, whose share dipped by 0.5 to give them just 10.5 per cent of US web searches.
Also heading downwards was InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com search engine, slipping 0.1 per cent to 5.4 per cent.
Google’s rise in the world’s largest internet market seems unstoppable, with the company notching up gains in 16 of the last 17 months.
With an estimated 6.7 billion searches by US web users in December – up one per cent from November – potential advertising revenues are immense, proving ample financial impetus for the search engine giants to embark on endless consumer-wooing feature updates for their services.
The overall US search market has ballooned by 30 per cent since December of 2005, with comScore reporting that consumers performed 3.2 billion searches on Google sites and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo!
ComScore
[From Reuters]
16 January, 2007
Apple Gets Legal On iPhone Skins
Once again Apple’s legal team have rolled into action, this time over mobile phone ‘skins’ based on their new iPhone interface.
Straight after Apple’s iPhone announcement last week, fanboys set about developing a similar interface that would work on devices running Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems.
The skins don’t actually add any new functions to the phones, but once installed offer a pretty new iPhone-like interface, with the icons linking to comparable applications on the phones.
Although the skins were offered for free – and probably served as a great advert for Apple’s as yet unreleased phone – as soon as Apple’s head honchos caught wind of them, they reached for the speed dial and unleashed their ever-busy lawyers.
Letters were fired off to both the creators of the skins and to bulletin board admins where screenshots of the interface had been posted
Both Brighthand and Xda-developers.com forums were on the receiving end of an Apple legal missile, with MoDaCo website owner Paul O’Brien, receiving this stern warning:
“It has come to our attention that you have posted a screenshot of Apple’s new iPhone and links that facilitate the installation of that screenshot on a PocketPC device.”
“While we appreciate your interest in the iPhone, the icons and screenshot displayed on your website are copyrighted by Apple.
“Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website and refrain from facilitating the further dissemination of Apple’s copyrighted material by removing the link to http://forum.xda-developers.com, where said icons and screenshot are being distributed.”
Michael Arrington, of tech blog TechCrunch was suitably unimpressed, “I think this is all complete nonsense. If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter.”
Palm iPhoney interface
Windows Mobile iPhone interface
[Via theage.com.au]
15 January, 2007