Content

Content in its shift to become digital

Skype 1m SkypeOut. Voice Mail and SkypeIn Coming
Skype is proudly trumpeting the fact that more than 1,000,000 users have subscribed to SkypeOut, their premium service offering global calling to PSTN numbers for local rates.
This makes Skype the 1000lb gorilla of the VOIP-category product, worldwide.
“We’re thrilled about Skype’s growth and credit support from users who have told their friends and family about the cost and quality gains they’ve found with Skype,” cooed CEO and co-founder Niklas Zennström, speaking from the CeBIT tradeshow in Hanover, Germany.
“Our one million SkypeOut users prove that savvy consumers will pay for value – and we will continue to delight users by delivering the software and services they seek to realize the potential of modern communications.”
Describing themselves as the ‘fastest-growing global communications tool in history’, Skype have got a shedload of facts to back up their claims: the company now boasts more than 29 million registered users and they’re adding more than 155,000 new users per day.
At most times, 2 million people are simultaneously using Skype to connect with friends, family members and colleagues and ‘Skypers’ have now talked for approx six billion minutes.
The company intend to hang on to their numero uno position with soon-to-be-announced new premium offerings and enhancements to the basic free service.
Hotly anticipated is Skype’s new voice messaging service which is currently in beta trial with pundits expecting an April roll out.
New information on Skype’s website has the pricing details:
“The price for Voicemail is 5 Euro for a 3 month subscription or 15 Euro for a 12 month subscription. If your billing address is in the EU, you will be charged 15% VAT when you purchase a Voicemail subscription. Therefore the prices will be €5.75 (US$6.70/£4) for 3 months and €17.25 (US$20/£12) for 12 months. However, a Voicemail subscription comes free with purchase of a SkypeIn number!”
There’s also a new section in the Skype knowledge base describing SkypeIn, the forthcoming additional pay-for service where you can get a phone number and people can call you (similar in concept to what rival Telcos offer).
Skype have also stated their commitment to expanding platforms beyond the Mac, Linux, Windows and Pocket PC platforms currently available, although there’s been no indication of a Palm release (a source of much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Palm community).
Skype
11 March, 2005
Is 3G Content Delivering? – Pt 2
Unlike the creative whirlwind that accompanied the dot.com explosion, innovation seems to be a lot slower in the 3G content market.
Limited by strict marketing and corporate product strategies, 3G owners haven’t exactly had a lot to shout about when it comes to mobile content.
Although watching tiny video clips of goalmouth action has a certain appeal (particularly when it’s Cardiff City doing the scoring), all of the networks seem to be offering much the same collection of services.
Predictably, there’s already been many lucrative tie-ins with popular TV shows.
Fans of the teen soap Hollyoaks were offered daily MMS picture slide exclusive stories and Celebrity Big Brother fans could download “behind the scenes” shots, updates and summaries of the show.
ITN news got in on the act too, supplementing their mobile news updates with “today in history” style clips trawled from their vast video archives.
Perhaps Vodaphone’s 60-second “mobisodes”, based on the hugely successful ’24’ series was one of the more successful TV offerings on 3G, with scenes written and shot exclusively for 3G.
All twenty-four instalments of ’24: Conspiracy’ ran for sixty seconds with a cliff-hanger ending leading directly into the next instalment, thus keeping consumer’s fingers hovering over the ‘download video’ key.
“Joel Surnow, Bob Cochran, Howard Gordon, Kiefer Sutherland and their entire creative team have built ’24’ into one of the world’s leading television brands. It’s incumbent upon us at the studio to continually develop new initiatives to service, enhance and extend that brand,” commented Twentieth Century Fox Television President Gary Newman.
“The ’24’ mobile series and the licensing and marketing partnership with world wireless leader Vodafone are truly unprecedented in our business, as they capitalize on the absolute latest in technological innovation and represent a whole new way to reach our fans and promote the original television series.”
So far, almost all the 3G content has been linked to a TV show or brand and mobile consumers seem to value the exclusivity of such content.
While this kind of cross-platform repurposing of content appeals to opportunistic TV stations looking for additional revenues, for the mobile platform to flourish as a medium in its own right, it needs content that exists in its own right.
We’ll take a look at what kind of ideas are bubbling up in part 3.
Hollyoaks Interactive
Fox 24
11 March, 2005
Ikivo, Adobe In Mobile Content Deal
AB (formerly ZOOMON), has announced Ikivo Animator for Windows, a Mobile SVG software application for producing high-quality SVG Tiny animations.
Designed to work with the industry-standard Adobe Creative Suite, Ikivo Animator offers tools to let designers and developers rapidly design, animate, test, and deploy rich Mobile SVG content to mass-market devices.
“Adobe Creative Suite has revolutionized print and Web workflows and is now poised to have a similar impact in mobile content authoring,” said John Brennan, senior vice president of business development at Adobe.
“Designers have previously been hampered by the lack of visual design tools for authoring mobile SVG content. Working with Adobe, Ikivo is introducing an effective mobile content creation workflow based on Ikivo Animator and Adobe Creative Suite, enabling designers and developers to create extraordinary content for mobile distribution.”
Ikivo is hoping that their software will soon become an integral tool in a mobile designer’s armoury and we’ll all soon be grooving to Ikivo-created cray-zeee animations on our handsets.
SVG content created in Illustrator CS can be imported into Ikivo Animator where a set of tools will allow designers to move, scale, rotate, and change their attributes over time; embed interactivity; and output the finished animation in SVG Tiny.
In-between cappuccinos, designers can use the preview tools in Ikivo Animator to see how their work will look on different targeted mobile devices.
Designers can then incorporate their animated SVG Tiny graphics into XHTML pages or MMS presentations using GoLive CS.
This new workflow enables designers and developers to prepare animated SVG Tiny graphics, such as comics, infotainment, location-based services, maps, financial services, and – more than likely – really irritating cartoons for distribution to mobile consumers.
Ikivo CEO Stefan Elmstedt comments “Ikivo solutions are being used by major phone manufacturers, such as Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and network operators throughout the world. Now we are extending that value by partnering with Adobe to provide strategic mobile solutions.
The combination of Adobe’s design and publishing power and Ikivo’s unique Mobile SVG software applications create a fantastic push for overall support of Mobile SVG within the emerging market for 2D based mobile graphics.”
Ikivo Animator for Windows is available immediately with Ikivo Animator scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2005.
Ikivo
Adobe Creative Suite
SVG (w3.org)
11 March, 2005
ineen Challenges Skype With Free VoIP/Video Client
With the soaraway success of Skype’s VoIP client, we’ve been waiting for other companies to try and elbow themselves a piece of the action.
Hot off the blocks is the rubbishly named ineen, a new piece of P2P IM software pushing all the right industry buzzword buttons – VoIP, P2P, video conferencing, free, open standards, cross-platform – in a package that the makers are claiming is “easy and free to use”.
If you’re going to try and take on something as popular as Skype, you’ve got to attack its weaknesses. Given a lot of Skype calls and its software are free, you’re not going to compete on price. One vulnerability Skype has is that it’s not based on open standards, despite them being freely (pun intended) available.
Built using Xten’s eyeBeam SDK, the client makes use of SIMPLE for P2P IM and Presence. VoIP is supported by SIP and the Video media is H.263[+].
ineen uses SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] and other open standards which makes it interoperable with various SIP networks including Free World, Dialup, SIPphone, TerraCall and Iptel.org
Sadly, none of the bigger IM networks [AOL/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN Messenger or Skype] use SIP, so you won’t be kissing goodbye to your favourite IM application quite yet.
Ineen offers video conferencing, with conference support for up to four users and audio conferencing for up to ten chatterers.
The interface looks slicker than Frank Sinatra on a hot date, although the less technically minded may run screaming to the hills when presented with its feast of buttons and blinking lights.
What isn’t so slick, however is ineen’s insistence of users using “phone numbers” to create computer-to-computer VoIP calls and we’re a little concerned by the lack of published technical details or details of their business model.
Unlike Skype’s proprietary technology, ineen was created with Open Standards, that it hopes will ensure greater future inter-connectivity.
The software is currently available for PCs and Macs, but there’s no sign of PocketPC and Palm versions on the horizon.
Thanks to Pete Ferne for the tip.
ineen
10 March, 2005
‘Podvertising’ Supports Virgin Radio Daily Podcast
Virgin Radio is making highlights of its breakfast show available for digital audio players like the iPod, in what it claims is a first for “podcasting”.
The station began making its Pete and Geoff show available to download today, saying it is the first UK station to podcast a daily show.
Podcasting allows audio programmes to be downloaded and later replayed on a computer or popular digital audio players such as iPods, Creative Zens or Walkmans.
The BBC has already been experimenting with the new audio distribution model, introducing weekly podcasts of Five Live’s weekly sports quiz Fighting Talk after a successful trial using Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ series on Radio 4, downloaded by more than 70,000 users.
Listeners can sign up to the service on Virgin’s Website, with a link encouraging users to download the free iPodder desktop software for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Once subscribed to the service, listeners will get the latest show highlights every time they synchronise their MP3 player with their computer.
The Virgin podcast sidesteps the still-unresolved copyright issues of distributing music via podcasting by simply editing it all out – Virgin will serve up a half-hour edit of its four-hour breakfast show with all the music, news, weather, traffic and travel cut out.
Interestingly, the UK government Central Office of Information and online travel company Expedia are sponsoring the service via what Virgin cringingly describes as “podvertising”.
Virgin Radio sales director Lee Roberts said: “Radio stations have to adapt to the changing market and new platforms in order to create new revenue channels. We’re proud to be the first with podvertising.”
The Virgin sponsorship deal ensures that their podcasts will be relatively ad-free, although some advertisers may be reluctant to invest too heavily in a format where the ‘fast forward’ key only an iPod twitch away.
Pod casting has already taken off in the United States but has been slow to find an audience in Europe.
Although the format is already creating a few podcasting stars, it has to be said that most of the thousands of personal radio broadcasts currently available to download are home-made, rough-edged, and, frankly, pretty crap.
With increasing sales of MP3 players sales, there’s every possibility that Virgin’s commercial initiative may help push the format into the mainstream.
Virgin Radio Podcasts
Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star (Wired)
iPodder
10 March, 2005
Virgin Electronics Discontinues MP3 Product Line?
Unconfirmed reports are suggesting that Virgin Electronics, the consumer electronics division of Virgin, have become an early digital music casualty with the division discontinuing its product line.
The word filtering through the wire is that Virgin will not be supporting the devices already out in the market and that their PR people have been quietly making calls and asking reviewers to return the units.
Virgin’s range includes a wearable, “teeny weenie” flash-based mp3 player, originally introduced last autumn in 128MB and 256MB flavours, with the latest product update issued in January of this year.
The company had pinned their hopes on the well-reviewed “Virgin player 5GB”, which had the audacity to try and take the iPod mini head-on.
That strategy seems to have failed miserably, with a Virgin spokesperson recently confirming the cancellations to Digital Music News. However, Virgin Digital is not thought to be affected by the Virgin Electronics discontinuation, as each Virgin division is essentially an independent entity.
Virgin Electronics have already been through one metamorphosis, dumping their Pulse line of home electronics gear (including DVD players and cordless phones) last year in favour of focusing mainly on MP3 players.
The Virgin Electronics product halt could be part of a larger industry shake-out, with several portable mp3 player manufacturers under-performing against Apple’s mini-marvel.
Serious contenders like Creative and iRiver look set to go the distance, however, and there’s always the chance that the Virgin brand may reappear at a later date.
Virgin Electronics
Digital Music News
Virgin Electronics, RIP (Om Malik)
9 March, 2005
Apple Shares Fall As Sony And Napster Bite
Apple Computer shares dropped Tuesday as Sony relaunched its famous Walkman line amongst concerns that increased competition from Napster might impact its dominance of online music and portable players.
The soaraway success of the iPod music player has transformed Apple’s balance sheet and its stock price, with the company shining as one of the best performers in the Nasdaq technology index over the past year.
But some industry pundits are predicting that Apple is being damaged by serious competition from a new generation of smaller, sleeker and cheaper MP3 players from the likes of Sony, Rio and Creative and a host of online music services led by Napster.
Shares of Apple have dropped 8.5 percent since the announcement of the stock split on 11 February, and have fallen some 6 percent this week alone.
“Competition concerns are certainly going to influence how this stock trades,” said Warren West, principal at Philadelphia-based GreenTree Brokerage Services, which executes trades for institutional investors such as asset managers and hedge funds. “Investors in general have enjoyed the stock moves, there’s a lot of money that has been made, and people are going to start taking profits _ especially after the split.”
Over the last twelve months, Apple’s share price has gone from US$23 (€17/£12) to an all-time high of US$81.99 (€61/£42) just before the split was announced.
Investors must now decide if the company’s share price can maintain its strength in the face of a market getting becoming increasingly crowded with rival products.
Sony are aggressively targeting the iPod with their Walkman line of digital music players, hoping to woo customers with lightweight and compact flash memory players instead of bulkier, hard drive-based units.
In fact, many of the new iPod alternatives aren’t trying to compete with Apple’s player at the high end but are focussing on consumers who are choosing between cheaper, lower-storage-capacity flash-media players and pricier, entry-level hard-drive players that hold more than 1,000 songs.
The Sony flash-media players will be knocked out for as low as US$130 (€97/£68) – not as cheap as the new iPod Shuffle, but considered to be better value because of a longer battery life and more features.
“Flash is going to be here for a while, because it’s more affordable,” Kelly Davis, product manager for Sony Electronics, says. “People are trying to get more capacity for their dollar.
The new Sony players are expected to give the company the No. 2 position in the portable music player market by next year.
Apple’s iTunes service is also coming under attack, with rival Napster recently boosting its sales outlook with growing demand for its new “Napster To Go” subscription service, expected to generate US$15 million for its fiscal fourth quarter.
Apple is also experiencing competition from music services offered by rivals such as Microsoft Corp., Real Networks, and Yahoo.
The company still remains in good shape though, with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicting continuing good sales for the iPod line.
“Our checks have left us more confident that demand for Apple’s key products most notably iMac, Powerbook, Mac mini and various versions of the iPod continue to be ahead of expectations,” Munster told clients in a research report. “We anticipate that strong demand across various segments of the company will allow Apple to exceed Wall Street estimates for overall revenue and earnings.”
Munster expects the company to report earnings of US$1.04 (€0.77 /£0.53) per share on revenue of US$12.81 billion in 2005, up from previous expectations of a 98% share profit on sales of US$12.25 billion.
Piper Jaffray told clients it expects Apple to sell 3.8 million iPods during the second quarter, including 1 million iPod shuffle models, followed by 4.6 million iPods during the third quarter, with the Shuffle model accounting for 1.8 million of the sales.
Apple Shares Fall on Sony, Napster Fears (PA)
Sony MP3 players
Apple iPod
9 March, 2005
DSC-T7: Sony Announces sexy 5.1mpx Camera – CeBIT 05
(CeBIT, Hannover) Wandering around the Sony products at the pre-CeBIT press conference, I came across the DSC-T7, the smallest, sexiest model whos roots lay with the DSC-T1.
Available in the to-be-expected silver and a sultry black, the DSC-T7 re-introduces a sliding cover that both covers and protects the lens and switches the camera on. Measuring only 14.8 mm / 0.6 in at the lens cover, and 9.8 mm / 0.4in for the main body, it packs 5.1m pixel. The back is taken up with a 2.5″ TFT Hybrid LCD, displaying 230,000 pixels.
As you can see from the shots, this baby is really slim and an instant object of desire. Sony think it will sell well to the female side of society and I wouldn’t be so exclusive – men will want this baby too, but we’d advise against popping it in your back pocket and sitting down.
Nothing definite on release dates or price but the talk in the corridors is it should be around in May for around 375Euro, $500, 260 UKP.
DSC-T7 Specs: DP Review
DSC-T7 Specs: Sony Press Release
9 March, 2005
New BBC Dr Who Episode Leaked Onto Internet
An episode of the new series of the sci-fi drama Doctor Who has been leaked onto the Internet, three weeks before the series is expected to begin on BBC One.
The 45 minute episode was being downloaded from at least three bit torrent sites yesterday, although is unclear whether it was the final cut or mid-production ‘rushes’.
Dr Who was first shown on BBC1 in 1963 and its cheap’n’cheerful props, low tech production values and less-than-convincing monsters managed to terrify several generation of viewers.
Under a hail of protests from its hardcore fans, the series – the world’s longest-running science-fiction television programme – ended in 1989, with a one-off movie reprise in 1996.
Reuters are reporting that the BBC is looking into the possible today, “This is a significant breach of copyright which is currently under investigation,” a BBC spokeswoman told Reuters. Commenting on where it came from, they said, “The source of it appears to be connected to our co-production partner,” she added, referring to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
In 2003, Dr Who was voted the show people would most like to see back on TV.
The eagerly awaited new series, filmed in Wales, features the well respected actor Christopher Eccleston as Dr Who, with former teen pop singer Billie Piper as his assistant.
Naturally, we wouldn’t get involved in illegal downloads, but reports suggest that the new series has lost none of its kitschy appeal, with a bizarre plot involving man-eating dustbins and animated mannequins.
Apparently, the Doctor is still flying around the Universe in his trusty Tardis, although the interior has changed with a darker interior and more hi-tech gadgetry.
In one scene, the Doctor watches the Kennedy assassination – a knowing reference to the first-ever episode of the series, which was screened on that fateful day.
Some American sites who have viewed the episode are already giving it less than flattering reviews, but we suspect that’s as much to do with the cultural differences as anything else.
After all, if you haven’t grown up under the threat of the evil Daleks, how could you ever expect anyone to ‘get’ Dr Who?
Dr Who
Reuters:BBC Probes ‘Dr Who’ Internet Leak
8 March, 2005
Google Desktop Search, Full Release, Searches Audio and Video
Google has taken its free desktop search tool out of beta and unveiled a finalised version capable of searching the full text of pdf files and the metadata of multimedia files.
The beta version could only index the names of such files, but the all-singing final application can index the entire content, including useful data such as song and artist names in music files.
Google product manager Nikhil Bhatla explains: “We’ve taken the product out of beta because now we have all the file types and features that were high on the list of user requests”.
Bhatla also explained that Google hoped that more people would be encouraged to download and install the product now that it’s no longer described as a beta app.
Google introduced its desktop product in October of last year, promptly followed by big search engine providers such as Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and AOL who are all keen to grab a slice of the desktop search market.
Desktop searches are one of the key battlegrounds for search engine companies, who hope that users installing desktop apps will extend their loyalty to the tool maker’s Internet search engine – and thus increase profits from the lucrative, keyword-related online ads market.
Other improvements in the Google desktop tool are support for Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird applications and AOL’s Netscape browser and e-mail application (previously, the product only supported Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express).
The program can now index a veritable army of multimedia files including MP3, WMA, WAV, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, AVI, MPG and WMV.
There’s also a growing range of plug-ins available, letting users index content from a wide variety of sources including instant messaging (IM) conversations from Cerulean Studios’ popular Trillian Pro IM application, mIRC, music metadata files acquired from Apple’s iTunes music store and OpenOffice.org and StarOffice documents.
Interestingly, Google are also looking to a third-party developer to create a speech-to-text plug-in to allow the product to transcribe the content of audio and video files and make it searchable – increasing the indexing capabilities of those files beyond metadata.
Although this desktop search tool is designed for use by consumers, Google have their eye on the workplace too, with the program able to recognise Microsoft group policy parameters on a PC.
Google desktop
Google desktop plug ins
7 March, 2005