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CoolZone: Nokia Open Another Content Channel
Today Nokia announced CoolZone, a Bluetooth-based distribution system that lets mobile phone users locally browse, pay for and download content on their mobiles while they are in shops supporting it.
When entering a CoolZone, the mobile user can download an application, customised for the retailer or service provider. Through this they can browse and download music, ringtones, wallpapers and videos which can be DRM protected. Paying for the content will be done at the shops till or using premium-rate SMS.
Firmly throwing the ‘retail opportunity’ language switch to on Sakari Kotola, Director, Nokia Ventures Organization said “Rich digital content is widely available and requires an efficient distribution channel. Local mobility solutions create new types of business possibilities to individuals, location owners and enterprises. CoolZone is a Bluetooth technology based content distribution system available to any retailer or location owner who wants to offer or sell digital content to their customers, and thus enhance the in-store experience,”
CoolZone is the short hand term to describe the Nokia Local Content Channel Solution. This consists of client software for the phone (Symbian client for Series 60, Java for Nokia Series 40 and other manufacturers’ phones), a small multiradio Nokia Service Point (LCP10) installed in each service location and the Nokia Service Manager (LCM10) for centrally managing the service points and the content. While the service is currently Bluetooth based, WLAN will be one of expected additions in the near future, as more phones will offer WLAN capability.
As the user of the service needs the user to download an application to use the service, we can imagine little hacking groups are already forming plans to hang around near these shops offering their own ‘applications’ with similar names to unsuspecting, or inexperience users.
While see this as a good step forward as a new ways distributing content – frankly we’re surprised it’s taken so long to come to reality, we’d thought of it years ago – it’s acceptance among retailers will depend on the financial deal for the operators of these shops. Any retailer considering this will need to realise that anyone in their shop using this service will not be looking at the goods on their shelves when they’ve got their face stuck in their mobile, figuring out which tracks they want to download.
This could go some way to explain why the first limited trial is publicly available at three Free Record Shop music stores and three Rober’s Coffee cafés in Helsinki area, Finland – they have no conflict of interest.
It may be that the slight headless-chicken-mode surrounding digital music current – as those who don’t really understand what is happening but are wowed by the huge growth of iPod – will lead the retailers to blindly jump forward to have CoolZones on their premises.
CoolZone will also be demonstrated at the Nokia Mobility Conference 2005 in Palau de Congressos de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain during November 2-3, 2005 with content from EMI.
Nokia CoolZone
31 October, 2005
Linus Torvalds awarded Microsoft and Windows trade marks by mistake
Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has, thanks to HP Sweden, been awarded the registered trade mark for Microsoft and Windows.
Linux fans worldwide – don’t get too excited, just prepare to laugh your socks off. This very temporary assignment blunder was in fact carried out in an HP advert in thrice weekly mag, Computer Sweden.
Nestled down low in the small print of an advert for some HP servers which run unix/Windows and Linux, the following text can be found
“Microsoft and Windows is registred trademarks in USA and is owned by Linus Torvalds.”
Ouch.
HP were initially quick to pass the buck, placing the blame on the ‘London advertising agency’ that they say should have read the copy more closely. Then on reflection, they decided that they too should have read it too.
Hilariously the advert is for an HP range of servers call Integrity. Oh dear, HP will take a while to live this one down.
Quite who originally spotted this blunder in the small print, isn’t known, but we suspect that it’s someone with a very keen eye for detail – verging on the fanatical.
Many thanks to the top Swedish spotter, and Digital-Lifestyles friend Anders M Olausson who spotted this being covered tragically in the magazine where the original error was made.
Linus Torvalds on Wikipedia
28 October, 2005
All Your Google Base Are Belong To Us
All Your Google Base Are Belong To Us – headline explained
The web wires are waxing wildly with rumours about Google Base, a hush-hush Google project that “accidentally” appeared on the Web for a few hours yesterday.
The “inadvertent” (yeah, right) unveiling of base.google.com sent bloggers into a screengrabbing frenzy, prompting the search engine giant to confirm that the fleeting snapshot was indeed a legitimate Google page.
Under pressure from bloggers, Google company product manager, Tom Oliveri, revealed a little in his blog:
“You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on.
We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps.
We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news.”
The screenshots revealed an entry page where Google suggests the type of information to submit to Base, with one sharp eyed Dutch blogger Wouter Schut, saying that the test pages also included presets for housing, products, reviews, services, travel, vehicles and want ads.
A Google Base screengrab posted on flickr revealed the following text:
“Post your items on Google.
Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types ofcontent. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures
You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will helppeople find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on therelevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.”
Naturally, the speculation-o-meter has been in overdrive ever since, with many believing it to be the start of a foray into the online classified field, with Google placing popular services like eBay and Craigslist directly in their sights.
This service would let individual punters submit classified adverts for free on Google Base and could possibly signal the imminent arrival of the much rumoured Google Payment (aka Google Wallet) product.
Rumours have spun up to tornado force by a recent Classified Intelligence report which claimed that Google had been discretely asking job boards and other classifieds providers to submit feeds of their listings.
And while we’re speculating with such wild abandon, we can’t help thinking that if Google Base does indeed materialise, Google could offer sellers a GoogleTalk button for their listings and offer similar functionality to the much-anticipated SkypeMe buttons on eBay listings…
Google Base
27 October, 2005
Sky Says Easynet Purchase “Solves All Problems”
BSkyB’s Director of Product Management, Gerry O’Sullivan couldn’t help sounding smug as he took centre stage at The Connected Home conference in London today.
“Those of you who read the papers may have noticed we bought a small Internet company last Friday,” he announced. “To have a combination of satellite distribution and broadband connectivity solves all problems”.
O’Sullivan’s presentation focused on Sky+ and stated the need for a “whole home solution” but he was keen to distance himself from existing IP-based offerings such as the Windows Media Player.
While Microsoft’s Cynthia Crossley and Telewest’s Mark Horley nodded collaboratively to Merlin Kister of Intel’s assertion that “We mustn’t be close minded and pick a winner. It’s important for all players to work together,” O’Sullivan looked disinterested.
“I’m a fan of Media Player – but my mum doesn’t want a reminder to renew her anti-virus subscription while she’s watching Coronation Street,” he said.
And, in response to an audience show of hands revealing nearly all had regular problems with programme crashes on their PCs, O’Sullivan added:
“There’s zero tolerance (among our customers) for that sort of unreliability and pain…we can only roll out products that you switch on and they work.”
And BSkyB has the money and ambition to keep turning out products it thinks consumers may need – the five day old Sky Gnome for example, enabling you to listen to satellite radio in the garden, or the new movies over IP service, Sky By Broadband – due to launch in the next two weeks.
The third generation Sky+ boxes have 160GB of space – only half are visible to the consumer – the other 80GB of disc space is for BSkyB to keep as a store for future ‘on demand’ programming, O’Sullivan revealed.
Horley mentioned that Telewest was launching its own 160GB PVR in early 2006, with the WHOLE disc available for recording “as we already offer video on demand”.
Sky can’t support true VOD – it’s satellite distribution network has limited bandwidth and lacks an intrinsic return path – but do consumers care?
With Sky+ proving a virtually churn-free proposition (apparently 90 per cent of viewers say they’re very satisfied), Easynet on board and plenty of money in its pocket, O’Sullivan can’t help but smile – looks like BSkyB is onto a winner.
The Connected Home 05
27 October, 2005
Networked Home “too confusing” for consumers
The futuristic vision of a connected home with content moving seamlessly from our TV to our PC and on to our mobile device is still a long way off, according to key speakers at The Connected Home conference in London today.
While David Sales (pictured right) from BT Entertainment waxed lyrical about broadband; Microsoft’s Elena Branet praised IPTV; and Mary Francia of Philips presented the Streamium product range; they conviently avoided the the area of interoperability.
It took Dimitri Van Kets (pictured left), from Belgian telco, Belgacom, to voice what many were thinking by announcing that the networked home was “little more than a mass of standards” and “too confusing” for the average consumer. Unless the service providers get together and educate customers, he said, true home connectivity was never going to happen.
Sky Interactive’s Paul Dale, speaking from the audience, said he’d been annoyed when a perfectly legal DVD of Thomas The Tank Engine wouldn’t play on his Windows Media Player. Luckily he’d been able to hack into it – but clearly this wasn’t the preferred way forward!
Paul Szucs of Sony said that service providers should “try not to lose the plot with content protection”, adding that “consumers simply want their devices to work together and share content.”
The mood was best summed up by Peter King of Strategy Analytics: “We’re not going to move any further without a massive consumer awareness programme funded by all players in the chain.”
Even Microsoft’s Branet admitted there was a need to “focus on educating consumers”.
But until the key players stop operating in silos, this isn’t going to happen.
Microsoft
Streamium
26 October, 2005
BT Starts Trials Of 8mbps Broadband
BT is planning to turbo-boost broadband connectivity by quadrupling basic connectivity speeds to 8mbps nationwide and giving the service a snappy name, “ADSL Broadband Max”.
Compared to some of the competition, BT’s current 2mbps basic broadband connectivity speed (quadrupled from 500kbps to 2mbps earlier this year) makes a glacier look light footed, so the upgrade is desperately needed to keep customers from straying elsewhere.
The 8mbps service will see BT reaching the theoretical top ADSL speeds it announced when the broadband service first launched in 2000.
BT has said it will begin trials of its ADSL Broadband Max service next month in London, Cornwall, South Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with the trials gradually expanding into a national 8mbps roll out starting in spring 2006.
Cameron Rejali, managing director for products and strategy at BT Wholesale, was on-message, “BT is committed to ensuring everyone benefits from the broadband revolution, whether they live in valleys, villages or city centres”.
With the industry rapidly consolidating, BT is coming under increasing pressure from newly merged uber-telecos like Telewest/NTL and Sky/Easynet, with the former already offering speeds of more than 8mbps for no extra charge on existing broadband subscriptions.
Elsewhere, BT has started trialling optical fibre broadband services in Wales, connecting business to ultra-high-bandwidth services using strands of blown fibre run along using existing telegraph poles.
This technology saves BT having to mess about digging optical fibre trenches to properties and reduces costs of delivering optical services in “the last mile”.
BT
26 October, 2005
Apple Sued Over Scratchy iPod Nanos, Motorola Miffed
More details about Jason Tomczak’s class action against Apple for releasing defective iPod Nanos have emerged on The Inquirer’s site.
In the action, started in a San Jose district court, Tomczak alleges that the iPod Nano’s easily-scratched screen renders the display unreadable and thus breaches state consumer protection statutes.
Tomczak alleges that Apple kept on shifting the Nanos even when they knew that there were problems with the design and by failing to recall the MP3 players, the company “passed the expense, hassle and frustration of replacing the defectively designed Nanos along to class members”.
The plaintiff alleges that with Steve Jobs whipping the Nano out of his pocket in a TV advert, Apple led consumers to believe the machine was durable.
Tomczak argues that even this simple act could lead to a scratched screen, claiming that the resin used in the product was not as thick and strong as in previous iPods.
The plaintiff wraps up his case by alleging that Apple knew about the dodgy quality problems before release but, “fierce competition on the digital music industry” compelled them to release it anyway.
Motorola miffed at Nanos
Things aren’t looking too happy-clappy for the Motorola’s iTunes music phone either, with analysts Bloomberg reporting that it may not be performing as expected.
American Technology Research analyst Albert Lin noted that as many as six times more customers are returning the Rokr phones than is normal for new handsets, and Motorola Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander said he is disappointed with the phone’s marketing and plans to fix it.
“We got off to a little bit of a rough start”, Zander said last week, “People were looking for an iPod and that’s not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there”.
Ironically, things haven’t been helped by the iPod nano appearing on the scene straight after the phone’s launch, with the ultra-small pocket rocket holding 10 times the amount of songs for half the price
You can’t blame Zander for being a bit miffed after Apple invited his company to be the first to launch an iTunes phone and the immediately stole their thunder with the Nano announcement.
Pocket-lint.co.uk reported that he exclaimed “Screw the nano!” in a previous statement which was later receded.
Motorola is reported to be launching a new series of phones to tailored around music in the future.
Pocket Lint
The Inquirer
24 October, 2005
Sky/Easynet Purchase: Analysis
As we reported last week, Easynet has been bought by Sky – as long as they get shareholder approval, but since Sky have offered a premium on Easynet’s shares, this should be a done deal.
This is the first broadcaster (in the UK) to take control of the telecom’s infrastructure required to deliver a triple-play of voice, Internet and video, though it’s likely Sky will use the broadband piece to complement its satellite delivery channel. This does give them the much need backchannel that has been elusive so far (requiring dial-up to access SkyActive and other services).
This could be a major blow for THUS who provide telecoms services for Sky as well as hosting various services (THUS developed parts of the WapTV service with Sky). Sky accounts for around £30m of THUS’s revenue (about 10% of their total) which could potentially go to Easynet which would make a huge dent in THUS’s revenue figures, though a lot of it is very low margin.However it might put THUS in a poor financial situation when viewed by the city.
Even though Sky are buying into LLU, Easynet only cover around 250 exchanges and currently all the voice goes to BT (Easynet use the shared metallic path LLU option), while Sky are likely to want to take the phone service as well (they already have a SkyTalk package using CPS provided by THUS). Sky will need to invest to make this a reality as well as increasing Easynet’s coverage. They have said they want to go into around 1000 exchanges, so that’s a build out of around 750 – which won’t be cheap (probably another £100m’ish at least).
For Sky that may be enough as it will cover all major city centres and that’s a big plus for Sky who estimate they can’t reach 20% of their potential audience due to issues with coverage (i.e. no satellite line of site due to buildings in the way, or no way to mount a dish, multi-tennant buildings etc). LLU will give them the means to reaching these people.
It still begs the issue of what’s going to happen when BT roll-out their 21CN and attack all 5,600 local exchanges and also offer a triple-play, but at least Sky will have a lead on them and already have the content ready to roll. BT are likely to be the winners longer term, but at least Sky may have a fighting chance in urban areas.
If all the LLU players aggregated infrastructure and competed on services, they could build a 21CN of their own now. LLU competition is going to be fiercely competitive with Wanadoo, AOL, Sky and even Be offering a triple-play – all competing for the same customers. – as well as BT (who will have nationwide coverage) and not ignoring NTL/Telewest who are also going into LLU.
The LLU operators have got maybe a 2 year window before BT get their act together, if they don’t do something co-operative now, in 2 years a lot of them will just be passing memories.
Easynet
Sky
24 October, 2005
BSkyB to Buy Easynet: Official
UPDATEDSky has today confirmed that it is offering £211m to buy publicly listed UK ISP, Easynet. This follows a period of general speculation, after Easynet issued an official statement on Monday past that they were subject to a possible offer.
Sky are offering 175p per share, around 81% above Easynet’s market price of a week ago.
Not surprisingly, the current Easynet price is now up 44% at 171p.
With this purchase, Sky buys straight into broadband in the UK, gaining a foothold in the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) market, with 232 unbundled exchanges already under Easynet’s belt.
Importantly Sky have bought into Easynet’s expertise at unbundling exchanges, which, when combined with Sky’s financial clout, will lead to serious competition to the, (in our eyes), feeble rollout of DSL by BT. We also imagine that there will be sweaty brows at Telewest/NTL, the UK cable company over morning coffee.
Sky will gain income from broadband subscription and possibly entice further subscribers to their TV service taking them to their stated aim of 10m. Far more important is a new channel to deliver content through – one they have total control over. They like that.
This move puts BT’s broadband IPTV service on a less secure footing, which, as we broke at the end of September, plans to launch in Summer 2006. At the very least, BT won’t have it all their own way.
Sky has been talking for a while about broadband-delivery ambitions as well as other paths, indeed Sky COO, Richard Freudenstein confirmed as much just over a month ago.
Brace yourself. The news is going to be awash with opinion pieces second guessing what this all means to the future of broadcast and broadband in the UK …
Easynet
Sky
21 October, 2005
Wi-Fly; ISS Falling; i-Tunes 6 – Teenage Tech News Review
Wi-Fly
BBC news is reporting that BT is testing wireless broadband. What was that I heard? Been done already? Ah well, this is a new twist on a relatively old concept: These guys are using a balloon flying at 24km of altitude to send and receive wireless internet signals. This could mean a new way of accessing data: Although there are currently a number of ways of accessing the Internet on a laptop while on the move, these involve either overpriced GPRS connections over mobile networks, or few and far between Wi-Fi access points, which are not necessarily free either.
What this technology might enable, if it takes off (sorry, bad pun), is to enable laptop users to be finally able to use an affordable data service on the move that doesn’t suck speed-wise and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to use.
Guess what else? The team doing the initial research on the project are from my local university, literally five minutes down the road!
Is it a bird, is it a plane…
…No, it’s the ISS falling from the sky. ITAR-TASS reports that the latest ship to dock with the ISS has failed to boost it’s altitude, as it’s rockets failed after burning for only 3 minutes.
The ISS floats at around 350km above the earth, and at this point in space, there is still a significant amount of drag caused by the earth’s atmosphere. What this means when it’s at home, is that the atmosphere causes friction on the ISS, which means that the space station is constantly losing altitude. What prevents the ISS from falling from the sky are occasional boosts from visiting spacecraft. There is a graph of the ISS’ height and it is clearly visible that it is currently at the lowest that it has ever been at. If the space station’s height deteriorates lower than 300km, it is easily possible that it will fall out of the sky and land on earth, or burn up in the atmosphere.
Although the ISS is kinda cool, I do still have my doubts as to it’s usefulness: What the hell is it actually good for? This is the view of a lot of people in the scientific community, and a lot of people think that it might as well be de-orbitted and the money spent on it every year spent on a better cause. Imagine if the $6.7 Billion that NASA is spending annually on the ISS and the shuttle program went to better causes. Imagine what impact that money would make.
Besides, I want a space elevator, dammit!
Oooh Aaargh, ‘cos we’re pirates!
A few days ago, Digital-Lifestyles covered the new video enabled iPod and accompanying iTunes 6 software. iTunes 6 allows you to download selected TV shows and other content for a fee from the iTunes music store. What if you want to add other recording and stuff to your iPod? Hack-a-day has an article on how to automatically download TV shows via Bittorrent.
They also have an article up on how to use the Tivo To Go software which accompanies the Tivo to transfer Tivo recordings to your iPod.
These hints should help all you cheap skates out there to enjoy a nice, free, iPod video viewing experience. Of course, it also means that it will be possible to watch shows on the iPod not yet available for purchase from the iTunes music store.
Enjoy!
21 October, 2005