Digital-Lifestyles

Content

Content in its shift to become digital

  • Wireless Wippit

    Wippit, a London-based P2P subscription music service has launched a new phase to their product, allowing customers to download full length audio and video tracks to mobile devices as well as associated truetones, polyphonic and monophonic ringtones and wallpapers.

    Customers will no longer need a PC to make the most of the Wippit service, as they can simply install an application to their phone by sending a text message. The application then allows subscribers to download and play music or videos whenever they like.

    Paul Myers, CEO and Founder of Wippit said “When Wippit launched the first legal P2P service in 2001 we offered ringtones so that our users could find everything in one place. After that we introduced the first mobile search facility for MP3’s and downloads, including the incorporation of sound recognition technology. Downloading directly to your mobile phone is the logical next step on the path we’ve been treading since launch. We’ve been waiting for the handset and network capability to catch up, and now it has.”

    Wippit also announced a partnership with SlamTV, the mobile entertainment provider, to bring high quality, fully-licensed music and video to mobile phones.

    Neil Marshall, Sales and Marketing Director for WebTV commented “SlamTV co-operating closely with a strong brand such as Wippit, can only be good news. Wippit’s mobile customers will now have access to over 300,000 music and video files from some of the world’s major music labels and content owners.”

    The Wireless Wippit beta test will feature alternative content from Wippit’s online service though it will be cross-promoted. Video will cost UK£3.00 (€4.40) and audio tracks will cost UK£1.50 (€2.20), truetones UK£4.50 (€6.60!!!), polyphonic ringtones UK£3.00 and wallpapers and monophonic ringtones UK£1.50.

    Wippit

  • Judiciary Committee Votes Custodial Sentences for File Swappers and Spyware

    The US House Judiciary Committee has voted for criminal penalties for individuals that install spyware on PCs and for movie pirates.

    A new copyright bill, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act is calling for sentences of up to three years in jail for individuals who illegally share US$1,000 (€819) worth of copyrighted material over the internet. That, plus the promise of being sued by the RIAA should be enough to deter most people from ripping off music.

    When the House Judiciary Committee approved the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, Congressman Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, said in a statement on his website: “Piracy of intellectual property over the Internet, especially on peer-to-peer networks, has reached alarming levels… This legislation increases cooperation among federal agencies and intellectual property owners, and assists federal law enforcement authorities in their efforts to investigate and prosecute intellectual property crimes.”

    Additionally, people who install spyware on victims’ PCs for the purpose of stealing identities and personal details will also face prison sentences. The Internet Spyware Prevention Act, sponsored by Bob Goodlatte and Lamar Smith is to go towards the full Congress and suggests jails sentences of between two and five years depending on the severity of the case.

    Since the CAN-Spam act was entirely toothless, time will see just how effective these two pieces of legislation will be if they finally become law.

    Lamar Smith

  • Audiofeast Internet Radio Service

    Audiofeast have a new service, designed to help listeners get the most out of internet radio – using their Virtual Broadcast Network, subscribers can rip internet radio stations for time shifting, or listening on their MP3 player.

    The service features more than 400 channels of news, sports, business and entertainment radio programming in an “all you can listen to” format for PCs, MP3 players and other mobile devices.

    “Our goal is to reignite the passion consumers once felt for radio programming, and deliver that experience on a portable player in high fidelity,” said Tom Carhart, AudioFeast’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Although the market for MP3 players and online music services has undergone explosive growth in recent years, the task of searching for compelling content and loading it on a portable player is still a difficult, time-consuming and expensive process for consumers. Unlike track-at-a-time downloads, AudioFeast delivers a vast library of radio programming that is constantly refreshed, affordable and ready to listen to whenever you are.”

    The company have licensed media from more than 70 partners, including Bloomberg Radio, BBC Radio, Discovery Channel, History Channel, NPR, SportsNews Radio and The Wall Street Journal Radio Network.

    The service uses Audiofeast’s Virtual Broadcast Network, a secure distribution system which is actually based on P2P technology to keep distribution costs down. Like a TiVo, Audiofeast allows users to skip, pause or rewind radio broadcasts, and transfer them to their portable devices for later listening. The client is compatible with players Creative Labs, Dell, iRiver, iRock, RCA and Rio, with more being anounced. iPods aren’t directly supported, but since MP3s aren’t protected, you can transfer your files manually to your player.

    The company intend to launch a music service in October top complement their existing product. A one year subscription costs US$49.95 (€51).

    Audiofeast

  • Bluetooth Video at IBC2004

    Forbidden Technologies will be broadcasting IBC TV News footage to visitors’ mobile phones thanks to their new video Bluetooth technology.

    Highlights of the previous day’s coverage taken by IBC’s camera teams will be broadcast directy to thousands of visitors via Bluetooth.

    “The mobile sector offers tremendous brand and revenue opportunities for broadcasters and production houses by creating a highly targeted, direct channel for the delivery of content,” said John Holton, IBC Exhibition Chairman. “We’re delighted to be leading the way by working with Forbidden to offer visitors the very best view of IBC 2004 on their mobile phones.”

    The service is based around two tools from Forbidden. The first, FORmobile delivers video along with a branded player via Bluetooth or GPRS WAP to compatible Symbian handsets. The second, FORscene, is a web-based editing tool alowing broadcasters to digitise, compress, edit and publish clips for delivery to mobiles.

    “We receive the footage from the IBC news teams at around 10am each morning, and aim to mobilise the content for distribution within half an hour,” said Stephen Streater, CEO of Forbidden Technologies. “By compressing, editing and publishing video in such a short time frame, we not only provide mobile users with compelling, up-to-date news content, but are making use of an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of our unique portfolio to production houses and content owners.”

    IBC 2004

    Forbidden Technologies

  • The Nokia 9300 – the New Communicator, Only Smaller

    No doubt you’ll remember the Nokia Communicator – you’ve probably sat opposite some bloke in a meeting who had one, and I bet he had an air of desperation tinged with coolness about him. Cool, because he thought he had a nifty gadget, desperation because it was enormous and the battery was about to go any moment.

    The Communicator, apart from the Trekker name, was a good idea and the various updates and iterations since the first model have improved many of its features and attributes. However (there’s always a however, isn’t there?), other more useful (and certainly smaller) smartphones have appeared, and people failed to see the point of the Communicator after a while.

    Nokia are back with another attempt though, and a valiant effort it is too. The new 9300 is 50 grams lighter and several centimetres smaller around the waist – Nokia are touting it as “a new high-end smartphone with both beauty and brains.” The company is hoping to see it in a lot more shirt pockets, and tellingly, handbags.

    The tri-band 9300 retains the original hinged format, opening up to reveal a full keyboard and a 65,536 colour screen. Navigation has been improved with a joystick for getting around menus, and eight function keys. Users can expand the 80mb built-in memory to up to 2 gig with an optional MMC card.

    The new phone runs the Series 80 OS, and includes software for connecting to various email servers, browsing the internet and a built in office suite, including a PDF reader.

    “The Nokia 9300 will appeal to a wide range of professionals who want powerful functionality from a data-enabled device without compromising the look, comfort, simplicity and usability of a standard mobile phone,” said Niklas Savander, senior vice president of Nokia’s business device unit. “We believe the Nokia 9300 strikes that balance in one stylish smartphone, without sacrificing the combined functionality that many people require but until now could only get from carrying multiple products.”

    Where’s the camera then?

    The 9300 will be available in the first quarter of 2005, though no pricing details have yet been publicised.

    The 9300

  • Atari’s Flashback

    The Atari FlashbackIt’s been some time since Atari last brought out a game that was actually worthy of the brand. The Atari logo you see on games now is just that – a logo. Infogrames bought the name a few years ago to add credibility to their business, and the Atari of the 00s has nothing to do with the proud days of the 80s with Nolan Bushnell and (sniff) Crystal Castles.

    Atari are to release a new console – well, it’s actually an old one, a 2600/7800 hybrid with two dozen games from the the platforms’ heyday. Called Atari Flashback, the console plugs directly into your television and has two two-button, joystick controllers.

    The Atari 2600 games are Adventure, Air Sea Battle, Battlezone, Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Crystal Castles, Gravitar, Haunted House, Millipede, Sky Diver, Solaris, Sprintmaster, Warlords, Yar’s Revenge, and a previously unreleased title, Saboteur. The Atari 7800 games are Asteroids, Centipede, Desert Falcon, Food Fight, and Planet Smashers.

    The company will also be releasing Atari Anthology, yet another collection of back catalogue titles for PS2 and XBox, featuring 85 games from the company’s history, with some superflous gameplay modes such as “Trippy” and “Double speed” . There have been a few Atari collections released lately, this seems to be a super-set of them with Gravitar and Battlezone being amongst the previously tricky to find titles.

    Now that the company has fully leveraged their old IP, how about some shiny new games that are worthy of the Atari name?

    Atari

  • BitPass Secure More Funding as Content Spurs Micropayment Growth

    Good news for micorpayment companies – now that there are actually things worth buying, the forcast for the industry is very healthy indeed. Recent research by TowerGroup estimates that the market for internet and mobile payments will reach US$11.5 billion (€9.52) by 2009, in the US alone. Mobile payment companies like SimPay in Europe must be popping the champagne corks as mobile phone adoption in Europe is traditionally ahead of the US.

    To capitalise on the expected growth, BitPass has secured an additional US$11.75 million (€9.72 million) in funding from a group of investors including Worldview Technology Partners, Steamboat Ventures (the venture capital arm of The Walt Disney Company), RRE Ventures and others. Existing investors Garage Technology Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital and Amicus Capital also participated in the round.

    The money will be used on the company’s sales and marketing efforts, plus enhancing the company’s product and customer service support.

    BitPass’ payment system is geared towards a wide range of online content, such as music and games, and offers secure anonymous payment. No software is required either – just a recent browser.

    BitPass is backed by Guy Kawasaki, who said of the company: “BitPass is the most exciting opportunity I’ve seen since the Macintosh. Since my days at Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), I have loved technology that empowers the little guy. BitPass does exactly that. This could create a business model for companies and individuals where there was none before.”

    BitPass

  • Zappware Launch Interactive Television Browser

    Zappware, a solution provider for interactive television, have produced a browser platform for set-top boxes. The browser uses an XML-based page description language allowing broadcasters and content providers to re-purpose existing material or develop new content without having to use or learn proprietary system. Since XML is well adopted and understood throughout the industry, production houses can start using the icTV Gateway platform immediately.

    The platform will be officially announced during IBC2004 and consists of a client mini-browser in the set-top-box and a scalable server infrastructure at the distribution point.

    The server infrastructure translates high-level application data into code for the set-top box, whilst the mini-browser allows users to navigate and view content whilst using a minimal amount of the receiver’s resources. The system employs some clever caching technology to make the best of the limited bandwidth available for iTV applications of this type.

    Zappware’s iTV solutions are currently employed on the MHP, liberate and MSTV platforms, in markets throughout the world.

    Zappware

  • Atzio’s Peer-to-Peer Television

    Atzio, a content delivery software company, have developed a form of peer-to-peer distribution for television networks. They predict that P2P will revolutionise the legitimate delivery of TV and video content via the web, whilst broadcasters like the BBC are looking at using the peer to peer technologies to make content distribution cheaper.

    Atzio have combined time-shifted media with a “data swarming” mechanism to lower distribution costs – as in the P2P model, a piece of media is divided into small blocks and downloaded from multiple hosts using bandwidth from each machine’s internet connection. Using this technology, a broadcaster does not have to buy huge amounts of bandwidth as its audience effectively becomes the distribution method. A welcome side effect of this model is that, the higher the demand is for a piece of content, the easier it is to get as it will be stored in more places.

    The BBC have looked at P2P, amongst other options, for the distribution of their Creative Archive and other content. P2P systems like this are ideal for distributing large files to many users, such as entire films, TV programmes or games – and can be extremely cheap as customers do the distribution for the content publisher.

    Atzio’s Peer to Peer Television uses a custom client to secure content against unauthorised copying and distribution, with an integrated playback interface. The network is closed and controlled by the content provider, so unauthorised or infringing materials cannot be distributed and quality of product is assured. Users can browse a content provider’s catalogue for titles and then download them immediately (like video on demand), to a schedule (like a PVR), or add them to their wishlist for viewing much later. A system of this type could replace a DVD-by-post business model quite easily.

    The network is compatible with the major DRM systems out there, including Windows, DivX and Real Networks.

    How Peer to Peer Television works

  • Wotbox – Local Search Engines, Globally

    Wotbox, a search engine vendor specialising location-targetted searches, in has launched eight new localised sites covering Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.S.

    The London-based company wants to reach web users around the world by providing tightly-targeted search facilities in surfers’ native language.

    Director Mike Nott said:”We’re trying to give international users more choice by providing another local search option for them. We also wanted the interface for non-English sites to be in the native language, making it easier for local users.”

    Wotbox