Content

Content in its shift to become digital

AOL Talk Phone Service Challenges BT UK Landlines
AOL today trumpeted its intention to muscle into the UK phone business with the launch of a home service offering unlimited calls for an introductory flat rate of £7.99 (~US$14, ~€11) per month.
AOL UK – which has more than 2.3 million subscribers, including more than one million on AOL Broadband – will be the launching the AOL Talk service for its AOL Internet subscribers tomorrow, with the standalone product going on sale later this year.
The service will include unlimited UK local and national calls of any duration, day or night.
By tempting its users to dump BT and take advantage of their cheaper phone bills, AOL UK is following the lead taken by Tele2, TalkTalk, Tesco, and a host of other providers.
The introductory flat rate, valid until 30 June 2005, applies for the first 12 months of an AOL Talk subscription, after which customers will shell out for the standard subscription fee of £9.99 (~US$5.5, ~€8) per month.
Johnny-come-lately subscribers signing up after 30 June 2005 will pay this standard monthly subscription fee.
AOL claimed that the package also includes “competitive” mobile and international rates, offering an example tariff of 5p/min weekend calls to Vodafone.
Chief executive Karen Thomson said she wanted to give home phone users “competitive, easy-to-use services, with costs that are genuinely transparent and highly competitive”, adding that the flat rate package offers no hidden charges or limits on the time customers can spend calling UK landlines.
AOL Talk is based on Carrier Pre-Select, allowing customers with a BT landline to switch home phone providers without changing their phone number or line.
BT line rental fees will continue to apply to users of AOL Talk, but the ISP may offer wholesale line rental (WLR) at a later date giving consumers the option of incorporating line rental and call charges on the same bill.
AOL UK
AOL And Wanadoo VoIP Services Overview
16 May, 2005
OneCare From Microsoft Gives Live PC Health Check
Microsoft has announced that it would begin testing OneCare Live – a PC-health care fix-it all application – with a general release sometime next year.
Battered by Window’s less-than-glowing reputation as the des res of choice for viruses, Trojans, spyware apps and a host of other lurking undesirables, Microsoft is trying to soothe the worried brows of its consumers and make home PCs safer.
Microsoft says that OneCare, a security-software product, will do more than just battle against malicious attacks that flood inboxes with spam and spawn screenfulls of evil pop up ads.
The company intends to make it a preventive tool that will keep personal computers healthy with an easy-peasy automated system that takes all the guesswork and hassle away from the computer user.
As well as virus, firewall and spyware protection, the program will include performance and reliability tools offering automated maintenance tasks such as disk cleanup, hard-drive defragmentation and file repair.
Windows OneCare will also offer backup and restore capabilities, enabling automated backup of files by category on CD and DVD
“Customers don’t differentiate between security issues, maintenance issues and support issues,” observed Dennis Bonsall, Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s Technology, Care and Safety group. “They just want someone to take care of it.”
OneCare is a separately sold subscription-based service designed to work as a mainly “hands-off” application, quietly doing its good deeds in the background while sending security updates to users’ computer systems without them having to download or install the fixes.
From this week onward, Microsoft will begin testing the OneCare service amongst its own employees, before launching an invitation-only beta version for consumers in the summer
You’d think that the entry of the world’s biggest software maker into the anti-virus and security market would send feathers flying amongst established big names like McAfee and Symantec, but McAfee President Gene Hodges was all chilled out: “For people buying security software, it’s typically all about trust. Who do they trust to secure their computers and do this on a reliable basis? Microsoft, even though it’s a huge, powerful company, is going to have to prove to people that it can build good products and do the job well.”
Symantec were quick to throw an equally nonchalant shrug, issuing a statement last Friday saying that it was ready to compete with Microsoft, while confidently pointing out “the strength of the relationships we have with tens of millions of consumers around the world.”
We remain a little less-than-convinced that Microsoft haven’t the potential to seriously torpedo the profits of the current security big guns, and Van Baker, an analyst at researcher Gartner seems to agree,
Commenting that the Microsoft product could be attractive to less tech-savvy users, Baker opined; “Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro all offer a fairly complex offering and customers don’t know what else they need to worry about,” Baker said. “Microsoft is simplifying what is right now a mess, and in addition to protecting you, it’s also going to make sure that your computer runs well.”
Windows OneCare Live
16 May, 2005
BBC Backstage Lets Developers Fiddle About With Their Innards
The BBC has let rip with a new beta service that invites Web developers and designers outside of the organisation to start fiddling about with their content and “create cool new things”.
Launching in the summer, the BBC Backstage site gives code monkeys, app writers and graphics types the opportunity to bend and twist BBC digital content into new shapes.
The project lets developers get their greasy mitts on a collection of feeds and other tools for “re-mixing” and re-purposing the BBC’s offerings in different ways.
“We want to promote innovation and creativity on the net by opening access to some of BBC’s content and services,” enthused co-project leader Ben Metcalfe.
“Essentially, backstage.bbc.co.uk is enabling developers to create new contexts and user experiences around BBC content, like creating alternative ways to navigate, or remixing it with content and services from other providers like Yahoo,” he continued.
The UK broadcasting goliath made a commitment to support social innovation in response to last year’s Graf Report, and this is echoed in their plans to develop an open community where people can share expertise, ideas, and collaborative efforts.
Contributors can join an email discussion and chat away with technical and design staff from the BBC’s new media departments.
The BBC is hoping that by letting creatives fiddle about with their innards, fun, innovative and just plain bonkers new ways of presenting content may emerge, with the possible spin-off of stimulating a UK market for creative venture capital.
By opening up its content feeds and its “API” – application program interface – the BBC hopes that anyone with the right skills can use the digital content to create new search tools, or groovy ways of displaying that content.
An API is essentially a set of computer protocols and tools for building software applications, and the BBC intends to release new APIs gradually, as negotiations with other parts of the BBC take place.
The project is open to just about anyone, and if some bright spark comes up with a particularly cunning idea, the BBC might take it further in collaboration with the developer.
It’s not all about profit though, with the BBC hoping that contributors will create prototypes on their Web sites to be freely shared with others for non-commercial use.
Users won’t be tied to the BBC either, so if a proposal looks interesting to a third party company, they are free to take them further too.
This approach makes particular sense for applications designed for a specific device – such as a PDA – on which the BBC couldn’t justify dishing out their precious licence fee money.
The beta launch this week is designed to get developers to come up with suggestions about the kind of material they’d like to fiddle about with.
Although it is a significant move for a major content provider like the BBC to publicly offer their APIs, Web big boys like Google and Yahoo have already taken the step of making their APIs available for programmers to create applications.
Opening up material to communities of developers can drive real innovation, although it should be noted that it’s not a free for all, with rules in place detailing what is permitted under the agreement.
“We want to identify online talent and exciting propositions that use that talent and showcase that to the world. We want people to have fun with our content as well,” explained Mr Metcalfe.
BBC Backstage
Graf Report
BBC news cover Backstage
13 May, 2005
Gates Damns Apple iPod And Blackberry With Faint Praise
Microsoft ubermensch Bill Gates foresees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice among portable music players, while dismissing the popularity of Apple’s iPod player as unsustainable.
“As good as Apple may be, I don’t believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,” he commented in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface – like the iPod today – and then lost its position,” Gates added.
Isn’t it just so obvious that Gates hates the success that Apple has found? It drives him crazy. He thought it was going to go away, and has now realised it isn’t.
It’s now clear that Gates and Microsoft are on the attack, gunning for iPod. How do we know that? Well, previously Microsoft used to refer to it in the generic – “Portable music players.”. Now it’s iPod, and Apple are being praised, even if it is damned by faint praise after that. Something tells us that Steve Jobs will be deriving huge pleasure from this.
Apple currently has around two-thirds of the global market for MP3 music players, which can store thousands of songs on compact disk drives or teensy-weensy flash memory chips.
iPods have shifted off the shelves faster than a ferret on a frying pan, with Apple selling more than 5 million iPods in the last quarter.
Apple’s white wonder now faces increasing competition from a mightily miffed Sony who are keen to claw back the dominance it once enjoyed with its iconic Walkman brand, and from mobile phone companies busily integrating MP3 players into handsets
“If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates told the newspaper.
Sadly for old Billy boy, Microsoft’s smart phones have been overshadowed in the US by Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, boasting over 3 million units sold so far with a bright future predicted.
The recent release of Windows Mobile 5.0 reflects Microsoft’s determination to become a big noise in the burgeoning market for digital movies, pictures and music and grow beyond its core Windows operating system business.
Gates said that their new Windows Mobile 5.0 – which pops up e-mails on a user’s phone as soon as they arrive – would be a cheaper alternative. “The BlackBerry is great, but we’re bringing a new approach,” he said.
“With BlackBerry, you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software.”
“Therefore,” he added, before going for the karate-kick killer boast, “I’d venture the prediction that Microsoft will make wireless e-mail ubiquitous.”
Microsoft
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
13 May, 2005
XBox 360 Launched on US MTV. UK Tonight
Xbox 360, Microsoft’s successor to their popular Xbox gaming console, will be “unleashed” tonight at a celebrity-packed launch broadcast on MTV, which shows at 8pm in the UK. It was launched on US MTV last night.
With a press release positively hyperventilating with hyperbole, Microsoft breathlessly extols the virtues of their new games machine, dramatically waffling on about “a dawn of a new era in entertainment.”
Unlike the manly, chunky lines of the first-generation Xbox, the 360 has been given the ladyboy treatment, with smooth, concave lines covering the rippling muscle lurking below.
And there certainly is a beast in the box, with the unit powered by a custom-made IBM PowerPC-based three-core chip running at 3.2GHz, supported by 512MB of GDDR3 RAM – enough beefy brawn to keep up with even the nippiest modern PCs.
Graphics performance should be speedier than a rocket-assisted rabbit too, with an ATI GPU running at 500MHz, backed up by 10MB of embedded DRAM.
The Xbox will ship with a 12X dual-layer DVD-ROM drive – supporting progressive-scan DVD movies and a host of DVD and CD formats – three USB 2.0 ports, two memory unit slots and support for four wireless game controllers.
Users will also be able to stream media from portable devices or Windows XP PCs, as well as rip music to the Xbox’s detachable (and upgradeable) 20GB hard drive.
Networking needs are catered for with a built-in Ethernet port and support for 802.11a, b, and g Wi-Fi protocols.
“With the first generation of Xbox, our ambition was to change the way people think about video games,” said Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer at Microsoft. “Starting today with Xbox 360, our ambition is to transform the way people play games and have fun.”
Microsoft – never one to understate their case – are claiming that they will “unleash the greatest game lineup in the history of video games” when the Xbox launches in North America, Europe and Japan over Christmas.
They’ve certainly persuaded a gaggle of major league gaming companies to come onboard, with initial releases including NBA 2K6, Call of Duty 2, QUAKE 4, Madden NFL 06, Need for Speed Most Wanted and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 06.
“Xbox 360 marks the beginning of a renaissance in video games,” whooped Don Mattrick, president of Worldwide Studios for Electronic Arts. “The unbelievable Xbox 360 games in development at Electronic Arts will accelerate the industry’s mission to make video games the pre-eminent form of all entertainment.”
All the games are designed for high-definition, wide-screen televisions, although they’ll work on regular TVs.
Players will be able to access Microsoft’s free Xbox Live online service, which allows them to connect with friends through Xbox Live voice chat, send and receive text and voice messages and stuff their detachable Xbox 360 hard drive full of downloadable demos, trailers, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins and community-created content
Gamers who shell out for the premium service, Xbox Live Gold, can join multiplayer online games and enjoy enhanced options for online game matchmaking and a greater ability to provide feedback on opponents.
Naturally, gamers love to customise their experience, so there’s a camera option to let vain players add their mugshots into games or even see their friends onscreen as they frag them to an inch of their worthless lives.
As is the current vogue, the appearance of the actual Xbox can be customised too, with a range of interchangeable Xbox Faces on offer.
Although the system is aimed at mad-for-it gamers, the Xbox is also a full entertainment system offering DVD movie, CD music and photo playback support.
So long as they’re equipped with a USB 2.0 port, MP3 players, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PC port can all plug into an Xbox 360 system to stream music and photos.
Xbox 360 players can also access recorded TV and digital movies, music, video and photos stored on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005-based PCs through any Xbox 360 system in the house.
We’ve yet to get our greasy paws on a machine, but Microsoft have certainly raised the stakes with their new Xbox, although arch rivals Sony have yet to, err, unleash their PlayStation 3, a potentially more powerful box offering support for new high-capacity Blu-ray discs.
With both units enjoying enthusiastic support from game makers and gamers, some of the real bloody battles could soon be taking place off-screen.
Promo video for Xbox 360 (Windows Media)
If you thought Xbox 360 was just about gaming, skip to 3 minutes into the video to see how they’re transforming it into a media centre.
XBox
13 May, 2005
TVOD: Telewest’s VOD Plans Revealed
Telewest Broadband today announced plans to transform its TV service, giving consumers greater access and control over additional digital programmes.
The UK giant intends to roll out TV on demand – where sofa-lolling users pick programmes from a menu and watch it whenever they want – to all its one million digital TV customers by early 2006.
Telewest are also widening the range of on-demand programming available and boosting the existing movie service, currently offering over 200 current and library titles.
The extended service will include the best of the previous week’s programmes, including 60 hours of BBC content, at a cost of jack-diddly-squat to customers.
There will also be a mix of free and subscription services including popular TV series, music videos and niche content.
Customers can view programmes just like watching a DVD or video, with options to watch it when they want, and then pause, fast forward and rewind to their heart’s content.
Following the initial launch of TVOD in Bristol, Telewest will introduce the service in stages throughout the second half of this year, starting with 26,000 customers in Cheltenham who are set to receive the service in early July.
Telewest Broadband has the highest percentage of TV customers taking digital, currently 87%, of any cable company in Europe and North America.
Eric Tveter, president and chief operating officer at Telewest sunk deeper into his deluxe executive chair and glossed: “We are transforming TV as we know it by giving consumers both a superb choice of programmes and the flexibility to watch them whenever they want. We don’t ever want to hear our customers say there’s nothing on the box or that they have missed their favourite programme.”
“And while digital TV goes from strength to strength,” he cackled triumphantly, “analogue has finally had its day.”
Digital TV, comms and broadband behemoths Telewest are clearly keen to stamp their feet all over digital TV market, investing around £20 million (~US$13.6m ~€29.3m) in the development of TV-on-demand and personal video recorder (PVR) services in 2005.
Telewest
12 May, 2005
Oxford DVB-H Trial: Content Partners Announced
NTL Broadcast and O2 have revealed the first batch of channels to be part of their forthcoming mobile TV trial in the Oxford area, announcing an initial 16 channels including Cartoon Network, CNN, Discovery Channel, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel.
The six-month trial will roll out to 350 O2 customers using the new trialled in Finland.
Dave Williams, O2’s chief technology officer, saw the mic and clicked into action: “We believe that mobile broadcast TV has the potential to sit alongside our existing customer services based on GPRS (2.5G) and 3G mobile data networks. Mobile broadcast TV aims to be a cost effective method for transmitting high quality content from one source to multiple customers whereas 3G is ideal for providing bespoke content to users.”
Terry Howard, head of media business development at NTL Broadcast, also fancied a bit of quote action: “This trial will give a useful insight into how the new technology performs, and we intend to use that information to inform the broadcasters, mobile operators and Ofcom about the consumer appeal of the service. We look forward to welcoming other channel providers and terrestrial broadcasters on board for the trial.”
To support the trial, NTL Broadcast is building a new broadcast network of eight DVB-H transmitters to cover 120 square km around Oxford that will enable the lucky participants to receive digital television on the move. To enable a commercial service to be launched in the UK, Ofcom will need to license spectrum and O2 is already lobbying the UK regulator to bring forward plans to distribute radio frequencies for mobile TV services.
O2 will soon begin the process of recruiting triallists from the Oxford catchment area: but young ‘uns, silver surfers, crumblies and grannies need not apply: O2 is restricting insisting that participants be between 18 and 45 years of age. The ageists!
NTL
O2
12 May, 2005
Mobile Web Initiative Launched By The W3C
If you’ve ever accessed the Web through a mobile phone or PDA, you may be familiar with the annoyance of finding some sites inaccessible, hard to read or just a right royal pain in the Bluetooth.
Hopefully, such experiences will soon become a distant nightmare thanks to the good folks at W3C, who have just launched their Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), designed to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a much happier experience.
The problem has traditionally been that content providers have difficulties building Web sites that work well on all types and configurations of mobile phones, so two working groups have been formed by the W3C to push the adoption of its standards for browsing on mobile devices
“Mobile access to the Web has been a second-class experience for far too long,” Web founding father and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said in a statement. “MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first-class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile Web experience worthwhile.”
The MWI, first proposed late last year, is composed of two working groups: The Best Practices Working Group – who will publish guidelines and best practices for Web content authors – and The Device Description Working Group, tasked with publishing a database with descriptions that content authors can use for tailoring their pages to various devices.
It’s not the first time that the W3C has focused on the actual application of its recommendations rather than their design, with their 1997 Web Accessibility Initiative focusing on education, advocacy and technical development to make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities.
“Web access today is so fundamental, that it shouldn’t be hampered by wires,” table-thumped Philipp Hoschka, W3C’s deputy director for Europe.
“Through this initiative, we’re committed to improving the state of the art in mobile Web content production and mobile access,” he added.
W3c
12 May, 2005
Nokia Sensor, A ‘Social Bluetooth Application’
Going up to people and actually introducing yourself has become, like, so uncool with the introduction of the Nokia Sensor Bluetooth widget.
No longer will you have to fumble for those awkward opening lines – instead you can let your phone do the introducing for you, as prospective partners wandering into range are automatically forwarded your profile.
Described as a “social Bluetooth smartphone application”, the free-to-download Nokia Sensor program runs on Series 2.0+ phones.
Here’s how it works: after downloading the software, you must set up a personal homepage (dubbed a folio) which can be shared with other Sensor users.
This folio includes your profile (pictures, snappy bon mot etc.), a file sharing page (where you can put mugshots, amusing photos, video and audio) and a Guestbook.
As lustful lotharios enter a nightclub, their phones can be set to automatically start scanning for other Sensor users over Bluetooth.
Once connected, the user can look through other people’s folios, and if they like the look of what they find, they can message them and possibly consider doing something really radical – like putting down the bloody phone and talking, like normal people.
The Sensor app comes with the usual yoof-tastic features, like Buddy Alerts, which tells you if someone you know is nearby (isn’t that what eyes are for?) and ‘Group Codes’ which bleep when someone with similar interests is lurking in the area.
We can see mischievous users running wild with the Guestbook feature – which lets people leave messages and comments on other people’s phones – and can only imagine the fragile teenage egos that will be crushed by an empty ‘popularity measure’ (which tells users how many times their Folio has been viewed).
The Nokia program is very similar to the existing Mobiluck application and reflects how the increasing sophistication of smartphone technology is creating new ways for mobile interaction.
With the Series 60 phones growing in the mass market it looks like this kind of social networking is going to have a significant impact amongst its target demographic (i.e. young).
Be kinda handy for people plying nefarious trades, when you think about it.
Nokia Sensor
MobiLuck
11 May, 2005
BBC Opens Up RSS News Feeds
The BBC has opened up its RSS news feeds to commercial Websites for the first time, with a new set of terms and conditions letting other sites integrate the BBC feeds for free, and free from offline contractual negotiation.
Previously, RSS feeds for BBC new stories have only been available to individuals via RSS Readers, but this move will put the UK broadcasting giant in direct competition with heavyweight news agencies in the RSS market, such as Reuters and the New York Times.
Opening up the service to other sites means that Webmasters can utilise BBC content on their own sites, with available feeds being marked by an orange RSS button on BBC pages.
A comprehensive range of feeds will let users subscribe to specific sections and not just the homepages, so that connoisseurs of real football could just subscribe to the white knuckle excitement of the BBC’s Cardiff City FC homepage.
Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News Website said: “Liberating the availability of our content for re-use is an important step for the BBC. We’ve been a bit cautious about it up to now but there’s a real demand for us to provide this service. If we are to build public value it’s important that we respond to this demand.”
BBC News and Sport headlines will initially be offered as RSS feeds, with other parts of the BBC expected to be rolling out feeds over the coming months, possibly including the latest film reviews or updates from the Top of the Pops Website.
The BBC’s site – a firm favourite in the office – remains one of the world’s busiest Websites, with figures for April 2005 showing 18 million click-throughs generated by the feeds to the bbc.co.uk/news and bbc.co.uk/sport Websites for the month.
BBC RSS
11 May, 2005