Category: Content

Content

MSN Search’s Revamp

Moogle? Goomsn? The news MSN Search service is out of the stables today, and despite what might be under the hood, Microsoft have obviously been inspired by Google’s clean, easy to use interface. Basically, they’ve taken most of the ads off.

After a year in development and US$100 million (€82 million), Microsoft’s MSN Search tool is still just a front end for Yahoo’s technology. For the time being.

To catch up with Google and Yahoo, Microsoft are gearing up to launch their very own, in-house developed, search tool this year. Webmasters will get a chance to vet its performance and accuracy before it goes live, baring in mind that MSN Search has had a odd and unfortunate habit in the past of dropping results from some sites competing with MS. Hope they manage to track that bug down and fix it.

In an interview on this week Yusuf Mehdi, head of MSN Search said, bafflingly “If this is a next-generation airplane, this is only the inside of the engine.” The first person to tell me what that means gets the usual prize – a bad CD from my collection. Come on people, I’ve still got a few left.

Microsoft’s MSN Search engine is currently third place in the US – Google deals with 35% of all internet searches, Yahoo takes a healthy 30% and MSN has 15%. They have a lot of catching up to do, but a strong band, new search engine and integration with MS’s operating systems (if they’re allowed to!) might just put them at the front of the field.

MSN Search

UPDATED: BT Cuts Broadband Prices By Up to 25%, but caps downloads.

With many companies getting in on the cheap broadband bandwagon, BT has been losing customers to upstarts like Wanadoo and Tiscali. In a effort to attract more customers, and keep the ones that it has, the British telco has announced cuts across their range of consumer broadband packages. And about time too, as they were the most expensive provider out there.

The standard BT Broadband package is down from UK£27 to UK£25 (€40 down to €37.30) for a 512k connection, whilst the BT Yahoo! Broadband 1mb product gets cut down to £30 from £41 (€44.75 down to €61.16) – more than a 25% reduction.

No doubt BT’s broadband competitors will react almost immediately with price cuts of their own, in order to keep winning business, but the question is: how low can it go?

UPDATE: The bad news is, that bandwidth is now capped.

BT have written to their customers to explain:

“So that we can continue to offer our best possible price to customers, we’ll be introducing a usage allowance of 15GB of data a month. This is more than enough for the vast majority of our customers – for example, you can still download up to 3,000 music tracks every month. ”

“You’ve absolutely no need to worry: the usage allowance will only be applied from early 2005 and, based on your current usage levels, you won’t be affected by this change to your Terms & Conditions.”

The danger here is – what happens when you want to view video on demand on your PC? At 2 megabits per second, a 2hr film will use up 1.9 gigbytes of storage, so you’d get just under nine films a month and no browsing or music. We’ll be coming back to this and exploring it in greater depth in the next few days.

BT’s broadband pricing

FindLaw: 56% of Americans Oppose RIAA Lawsuits

A survey by legal website FindLaw has found that 56% of those polled were opposed to the legal actions currently being undertaken by the music industry. With the Recording Industry Association of America stepping up its action and the new Pirate Act coming into effect, then this dissatisfaction can only increase.

3,400 people have been sued since last September – more than 600 of those cases have been settled for an average of US$3000 (€2,473) each, netting the RIAA at least US$1.8 million (€1.48 million). No case has gone to court, no artists, ostensibly the victims of file trading, have received any of this money. Recent figures suggest that CD sales are up 10% on last year, legal music download sites are doing such good business that the market is rapidly becoming crowded.

FindLaw surveyed 1000 participants and found that 56% were against the lawsuits, 37% supported the action, and 7% had no opinion. Opposition is higher amongst younger people, with nearly two thirds of those between 18 and 34 objecting.

Quoted on the FindLaw site, Professor Sharon Sandeen,intellectual property law tutor at the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota said: “Although the RIAA’s lawsuits are unsettling to many, they are based upon sound law because it is a clear violation of copyright law to make a verbatim copy of a protected sound recording,” says “The underlying public policy at work is the notion that without copyright laws, musical artists would be less inclined to create music and, as a result, there would be fewer sound recordings. So the individuals who complain about the lawsuits should ask themselves: ‘Would I rather live in a world with freely distributed but less music, or pay for the music I enjoy so that there will be more of it?'”
“I suspect that many people, when educated about the purpose of copyright law, support the law,” Sandeen continued. “Public opposition to the lawsuits may be due, in part, to what some people consider hard-handed tactics by the RIAA.”

FindLaw, legal news and commentary

Peppercoin Aiming for More Efficient Micropayments

The basic flaw with small monetary transactions, whether internet related or not, is that the processing charge levied by banks and credit card companies eats a big chunk of the value of your original sale.

The road to creating an efficient micropayment system is littered with the corpses of those who didn’t make it – ecash, digicash – weathered corpses stripped clean from their deaths in the late 90s.

Yet, deep down inside, we know that micropayments must work. Like the first farmer who experienced frustration when he tried to pay for some wood with a cow, only to be told “Sorry mate, I can’t change that – have you got anything smaller?”, we know there must be a way of making transactions more efficient.

Peppercoin, backed by the R in RSA, Ronald Rivest, have brought the micropayment system up to the 21st century, and have launched version 2.0 of their service. Peppercorn 2.0 is aimed at online retailers who shift low-priced digital content and physical goods, or offer subscriptions and pay-per-use services – so it won’t just be ringtones then.

The company has concentrated on making the experience as transparent as possible for the user, as customers can use their credit card to pay a merchant without having to register or create an account. Neither do they have to pre-deposit any money to get started – I can think of at least two micropayment systems from about 1997 that owe me at least US$3.

Merchants and vendors don’t even have to be web-based – one of the key applications of Peppercoin is in coin-op games. The new version of Golden Tee Golf (coming to a pub near you) will feature the Peppercoin system to provide cashless purchases. If I’m hearing you say big deal, then consider that punters spent US$350 million (€288 million) playing this one game last year alone. Peppercoin are well aware that when you allow people to use their credit card at point of sale, they will usually spend more.

The new service works by aggregating low-priced transactions across many consumers, merchants and payment providers, reducing the average processing fee for each individual sale. Customers pay by entering their credit card details online, or by swiping their card through a reader on the device they are paying to access.

Customer service is cleverly automated to keep costs down, with integrated bills and automated pre-dispute resolution dealing with most cases before expensive people have to get involved.

How efficient is the payment system? Peppercoins fees work out at about 10% of a US$1 transaction, which the company claims is 70% less than the usual card not present processing fee.

Peppercoin

UK Download Chart Launches September 1

The Official Chart Company has announced that legal music downloads will be getting their own chart from September 1 2004. “The rapid growth of legal download music sites has shown the music industry that downloading is the future,” they said in a statement.

It looks like they’ve finally cottoned onto the fact that there’s not much point in doing a singles chart if only eight people are buying them. iTunes UK has sold 450,000 downloads since launch, against the 500,000 CD singles that were sold during the same period.

Now that we have a number of high-profile legitimate music download sites in Europe, there’s finally somewhere to collect reliable data from. ITunes, Napster and MyCokeMusic.com and others will be providing metrics. Where’s Bleep, eh?

Since those sites are doing very good business by all accounts, it’ll be interesting to see what total sales numbers are. I personally can’t wait to see what effects demographic spread, the complete lack of content from some labels, and the fact that under-18s don’t have credit cards will have on the new chart. However, when The Beatles’ back catalogue finally comes online, the charts will be entirely dominated by those irritating mop-topped shriekers once again.

The number one downloaded track last week was the Pixies’ Bam Thwok, which is an iTunes exclusive. Happily this reinforces my point about the demographic skewing of the new chart: the last time the Pixies were number 1 was …. never, having last bothered the single-buying public in 1991 with a brief stint at 27.

The BBC is considering broadcasting the chart on Radio One. Surely they should be webcasting it?

The Official Chart Company

Sun’s Radical Java Update

Sun Microsystems, purveyor of all things Java have introduced the most significant update to their platform in five years.

Java2, Sun’s write-once-run-anywhere software platform, popular in everything from mobile phones to PCs to smart cards has gone from version 1.4 to version 5.0.

Previously known as Tiger (stripy mammal, now mostly employed to sell breakfast cereal), the new release hopes to address previous concerns related to speed and scalability. This release of the platform has over 100 new features, including updates to the language and metadata. The amount of memory required by the virtual machine and code has been reduced, and new management tools have been included to help developers and administrators keep track of resources, applications and services. The compiler and code interpreter have been tweaked, providing performance that exceeds C++ … in some applications.

Java was originally seen as a computing platform for small devices, but got a new lease of life with the world wide web as a way of adding interactivity to web applications on a variety of host machines. Recently, Java has received a second huge boost in the form of mobile phones – many modern phones incorporate a Java virtual machine so that games and applications will work across a range of mobile hardware.

Java2

H.264 Codec Adopted for Next-Gen HD DVDs

The DVD Forum has ratified the new H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) for inclusion in the forthcoming High Definition DVD platform.

The H.264 codec, formerly known H.26L, was was developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (responsible of course, for the various MPEG formats) and the International Telecommunication Union, and has now been ratified into the MPEG-4 codec. The codec enables a variety of video content to be compressed for transmission and decompressed for playback in a highly efficient way.

Apple has already made an announcement to the effect that H.264 will be included in a release of its QuickTime platform next year.

“Apple is firmly behind H.264 because it delivers superb quality digital video and is based on open standards that no single company controls,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing in a statement.

H.264 is intended to be used on a number of platforms, and as such covers a wide spectrum of bandwidth requirements – from HD television to mobile phones. The codec is highly efficient, and has been demonstrated playing back 1920×1080, 24fps HD movies at up to half the data rate of MPEG-2. Less data means room for more channels – or better audio and video.

Don’t expect HD playback performance on your new mobile phone – Apple’s test detailed above required a dual processor G5 to do the playback. The new codec will be more suited to digital television broadcasts to phones and mobile movies with a much lower resolution.

How H.254 works – and it’s not too technical, either

MPEG resources on the internet

Man Charged For Google Adwords Extortion

Michael Bradley, a California resident who claims to have developed a program to generate fraudulent clicks on Google’s Adword service, was arrested at the company’s offices and charged with extortion.

Bradley had threatened to sell the software to spammers if Google did not give him US$150,000 (€123,400).

The fact that the software is designed to trick Adwords into registering more clicks, and therefore more revenue for the customer from Google, coupled with trying to extort money out of Google by then threatening to sell the software earned him a speedy arrest and freedom on a US$50,000 (€41,100) bond.

He’s pleading not guilty.

More about adwords

Mixing on Mobiles with Orange Fireplayer

Orange are launching a new service – Fireplayer, which allows users to download tracks and remix them by adding effects. Attendees at Glastonbury were the first to get their hands on the new service, and it launches to the rest of us on July 1st. Fireplay currently offers 20 tracks for remixing, but the company is hoping to expand the range to offer more choice.

Fireplayer is available as a free download from the Orange World portal. Your finished masterpiece than then be saved to your mobile as a TrueTone ringtone to impress/offend your friends/travelling companions.

Also launching on 1st July will be Orange’s new music service, the imaginatively titled Music Player, where subscribers will be able to download and listen to music directly to their mobile phones. Given that the service will launch with only 200 tracks will no doubt be somewhat of a hindrance to uptake. However, Orange see mobile music as critical to their future and have a history of successful innovation and so to expand the range of available music, they are conducting talks with all major labels. Tracks for Music Player are a proprietary format, but perhaps this is the beginning of music labels seeing mobile phones as a secure platform for content distribution?

Tracks for Fireplayer cost UK£3.50 (€5.25), music downloads for Music Player cost UK£1.50 (€2.25)

Orange

US Senate Passes Pirate Act Without Hearing

The US Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) act has been passed by the voice vote in in the Senate on Friday. The act still has to be passed by the House and signed by George Bush, but already carries a US$2 million (€1.64 million) budget for civil lawsuits against violators in 2005.

The act allows the Department of Justice to sue alleged copyright infringers, in addition to those cases brought by the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA are naturally very pleased that they have some backup in the hundreds of cases they have bring launching.

“I commend the passage of these common sense proposals that offer flexibility in the enforcement against serious crimes that damage thousands of hard-working artists, songwriters and all those who help bring music to the public,” Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “These acts will provide federal prosecutors with the flexibility and discretion to bring copyright infringement cases that best correspond to the nature of the crime, and will assure that valuable works that are pirated before their public release date are protected.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rightly points out on their website that no money from any of these cases goes to the artists whose work is being infringed.

Orrin Hatch, a Republican Senator who is one of the sponsors of the act, has a related project up next, the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act. This act sets out to penalise companies for producing technologies that can potentially be used to pirate content – such technologies include CD writers and iPods. Aside from the obvious loss of personal freedom and backwards technological step, the EFF is concerned that the act could be misused – if your competitor manufactures something that you don’t like, say the iPod for example, then you can claim that it has the potential to infringe copyright.

The Department of Justice

The Electonic Frontier Foundation