Content

Content in its shift to become digital

MySpace Mobile Vodafone Deal: Further Details And Opinion
You may have seen the announcement of the tie up between Vodafone Europe and MySpace Mobile we ran a short while ago.
We think this is a pretty big story, so we’ve been chatting to Vodafone and Myspace to get further details and thought we’d fill you in.
The UK will be the first market in Europe that Vodafone will release it in. The dates of the release are being very closely guarded. We tickled and cajouled in an attempt to get it tied down further, which resulted in us finding out it will be the second half of the year. Perhaps later, rather than sooner.
There will be a subscription fee, as is the case in the MySpace Mobile deal with Cingular in the US. The details of costs are currently unannounced.
MySpace Mobile runs on its own application, not through standard Web access. We’re not aware that this has been seen in the wild, so the completion of it may account for the yet-undisclosed release date for the Vodafone service.
Access to the app will be via the yet unannounced ‘selected handsets’ and it will be available for download from Vodafone Live!
Impact
While it might initially appear to be a great deal for Vodafone to capture the youth as customers, there may be clouds on the horizon. In a recent visit to a youth club, it was surprisng to see all of the collected 13-16 year olds using BeBo, with not one on MySpace. When asked why, they replied that they just found setting up and running BeBo a lot easier than MySpace. We can only assume that Vodafone did some decent research on who actually uses it, rather than what MySpace told them … didn’t they?
It’s not clear how much of a market there will be for this. As mobile phones handle Web browsing increasingly better, the need for a dedicated application drops away, as people simply use their Browser on any network. It’s been seen that a well-written dedicated mobile apps can still maintain an advantage – like Google’s mobile email client – due to the restricted interface intrinsic with mobile keyboards.
What will the features be?
The details of what MySpace-ers will be able to do …
MySpace Mobile Features:
* Upload and View Photos
MySpace Mobile allows Vodafone customers to select photos stored on their mobile device and upload them to their MySpace profile. They can also view photos already uploaded on any MySpace profile.
* Respond to Mail
Vodafone customers don’t have to wait to log on to a computer to read and reply to their MySpace messages. From their mobiles, they have the ability to send messages to their MySpace friends, read and reply to messages sent to them.
* Manage Your Community of Friends
MySpace Mobile allows customers view and manage friend requests. They can also perform basic friend searches giving users the opportunity to “click-to-add “friends into their network. They simply locate a MySpace profile they wish to add as a friend, and then select to add this user as a friend.
* Post Comments or Blog Entries
Update your blog live throughout the day by posting new entries on the move, or make comments to other users’ blogs or MySpace profile pages. To post a blog or comment, people simply view the appropriate section and click “Post” to create the entry. Users can save their work at any time, and any information entered will update both the mobile service and the online MySpace profile page.
* View Friends
Customers have the ability to view the friend list of any MySpace profile. The friend list contains a text listing of the friends, which when selected would show the profile picture along with a link to that user’s MySpace page, and the ability to add the friend to your MySpace contact list for quick bookmarking.
7 February, 2007
Vodafone Europe Gets MySpace Mobile
Vodafone Europe has signed an exclusive deal with MySpace to get MySpace Mobile on their service.
Although currently exclusive, MySpace are remaining elusive as to the length of the agreement. When we asked, they declined to be drawn on how long the exclusivity with Vodafone would last, preferring to tantalise with “our ambition is to get MySpace on as many platforms as possible.”
MySpace addicts will be able to feed their cravings when not glued to the computers.
To tantalise potential subscribers further, Vodafone will pre-load it on to ‘selected handsets.’
MySpace did a similar deal in the US with Cingular back in December 2006. In that deal Cingular charged their subscribers an extra $2.99/month, plus data charges for the privilege.
At the time of going to press it is unclear if there will be a similar charging scheme with Vodafone.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
More details shortly.
7 February, 2007
Flick Off AGAIN: Flickr-ites Still Don’t Want Yahoo! Accounts
That’s the response that Yahoo! (the owners of popular Web 2.0 photo sharing site Flickr) were greeted with when they announced that they would be forcing a merging of Flickr accounts with Yahoo! accounts.
Users who joined Flickr before its acquisition in March 2005 are known as ‘old skool’ users, and they use the original Flickr accounts to login, rather than the Yahoo! accounts used for those who joined after the acquisition. Old skool status is heavily valued in the community, and successive Yahoo! attempts to force migration from ‘old school’ accounts to Yahoo! accounts has attracted much controversy.
The migration of accounts is not a technical issue; Old skool members will keep their buddy name and are not forced to use any other Yahoo! services. Given that this is the case, it perhaps seems illogical that there is such a backlash. One old skool user’s view is in a post by Thomas Hawk, a keen Flickr user (and also CEO of a rival service).

Raj Parmer writes “I do not like the way Yahoo impose in this manner. I am an old skool member (which I was in a way quite proud of) but when it becomes mandatory to sign up to Yahoo, I will have to delete all my pics and close my account down and join with one of the other similar services on the net.”
The problem seems to be two fold. Firstly, Flickr users simply don’t want to be forced to give up their ‘old skool’ account; they are proud to have been part of one of the archetypal Web 2.0 products before it hit the mainstream, and do not want to see their status lost.
Secondly, there appears to be a wider problem within the Flickr community, namely concern about the direction in which Yahoo! might change the nature of Flickr. Yahoo! recently announced that it would be making use of Flickr images in its new Brand Universe program, a move which has concerned some users, and other attempts to integrate Flickr further into Yahoo! products are likely to be met with concern.
Unlike the last time Yahoo! attempted to merge old skool accounts with Yahoo! accounts (when they bowed to pressure and relented), it appears that this time they are determined. There may be a small number of old skool users who delete their photos, but there will be no major exodus.
Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!
7 February, 2007
Tiscali Tips In With A Triple-Play Deal
Tiscali has unveiled plans to launch a television service for its broadband subscribers, offering more than 30 digital channels and on-demand programming.
The new Tiscali TV service will be available from next month to customers subscribing to the company’s 2Mbps ‘dual play’ broadband package.
Launching on 1 March 2007, the fifteen quid deal dishes out 2Mbit/s broadband access, serving up over 30 digital TV channels, ‘catch-up’ TV for some BBC programmes, plus access to a further 100 hours of on-demand programming.
The £20 triple-play deal bungs in line rental and free weekend telephone calls, with movies on-demand starting from £2 (€3) upwards, as well as upgrade options including Sky Sports via ‘Sky by Wire.’
Commenting on their new offering, Mary Turner, chief executive Tiscali UK said, “The success of Freeview has shown that customers want more than five channels but don’t necessarily want to pay a high monthly subscription.”
“Our TV service gives customers broadband plus the channel choice they want and free on-demand programming, all for the price you would pay for a standard broadband connection,” she added.
Tiscali will also be launching a new HD-enabled set-top box in July, capable of recording high-definition content onto its built in 160Gb hard drive.
With Tiscali delivering all content via the telephone line, we’re not entirely sure how long HD downloads will take, but we suspect that your ice cream will be well and truly melted by the time your 3hr thriller crawls down the line.
Meanwhile, Tiscali continues to increase its coverage in the major metropolitan areas, and expects to have a footprint of around 10 million homes by the end of 2007.
Tiscali
6 February, 2007
Apple Inc and Apple Corps, Now In Love
Love has broken out between the two Apples – computers and music.
Appropriate with Valentines Day arriving soon – and that it’s the name of the relatively recent Beatle’s album.
We’ve spoken to Apple Corps (music) insiders and learnt that there was genuine shock at them losing the last round of the UK trademark dispute with Apple Inc. (Computers as was – they’ve now dropped the computers part of the name).
Today’s announcement replaces the 1991 agreement between the two and ends up with Apple Inc owning all of the trademarks related to “Apple” with them licensing back certain trademarks to Apple Corps, “for their continued use.”
The terms of settlement are confidential.
With this trademark dispute out of the way, the tables are now clear for a potential deal between the two Apple’s for selling the Beatles music online through iTunes. Some have spoken about the 14 February being the date of the announcement, fitting in with the Love theme again.
Our Apple Corps insider is keeping his cards close to his chest on this one. But if we hear … you’ll be the first to know.
5 February, 2007
Information Overload: How To Read The Web
It is often said that we live in the information era; the Internet is an enormous library of information (some high quality, some not so), with millions of new pieces being added every day. How to keep track of it all?
The Answer
RSS is a technology many (including me) are turning too. If you haven’t heard of it already, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is essentially a way of describing, or ‘marking up’, content in a way which allows it to be displayed in many different ways and in places other than the site which created it. Digital-lifestyles publishes an RSS feed, as do most other news sites, and I am thus able to aggregate many different sources into one system to allow me to read my news more efficiently, visiting only one site rather than many.
Unlike the process of checking websites you were interested in as and when you had time, RSS delivers the content as soon as it is published, whether you like it or not. Whilst you can still choose whether or not to read it within your reader, for many people seeing the notification ‘x new items’ is simply too tempting!
This problem of ‘information overload’ can be solved if there can be found some way of triaging the arriving information – in other words deciding what to read, and what to leave, and this is something that many different companies are working on, with two main schools of thought.
The Personalised Homepage
One option is a personalised homepage, with the more recent (and advanced efforts) coming from companies such as Google, Netvibes and YourMinis. I talked in more detail about these in December. Such a personalised homepage allows you to easily add content from RSS feeds (and other places) and drag them around your page into an arrangement which suits you. The page will typically show just the title of the item, sometimes with a short snippet, the theory being that this allows you to decide at a glance which posts you want to read, and thus click on to display the full item.
The advantage of this approach is that it is a very efficient way to display a lot of information in a relatively small space. The disadvantage is that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not a post is interesting based purely on its headline and a short snippet – with a personalised homepage it is impossible to quickly scan the whole article.
The Fully-Fledged Feed Reader
A second approach, which I have found myself favouring, is the use of a full-blown feed reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines (both online applications) or Newsgator (offline application). Google Reader will allow me to see on a left hand panel which sources have new items, and click through to see them. Alternatively, I can use the ‘river of news’ function which will display all new items in a long list, with each post expanding when I click on it. I find that I am able to get through as many as 100 new items extremely quickly by scanning the post in perhaps two seconds, and then either reading it in detail or using a hotkey to move the reader to the next post. I am able to add a star to posts I am particularly interested in, but perhaps do not have time to read in detail immediately, and come back to them later. The advantage of a feed reader is that a well designed program allows fast scanning of posts in full, rather than just relying on the titles, but the disadvantage is that it is not possible to pick at a glance which posts to read, as they are not all displayed at the same time.
Conclusions
In short, use of a personalised homepage will allow you to get through your news faster but you stand a greater chance of missing out on great content, whereas a feed reader may well take longer, but you are guaranteed to read everything of interest to you. I happen to prefer the feed reader.
Information overload is a problem the Web has been working hard to solve. RSS, because of its efficiency, created new problems, but ultimately moved internet content consumption forward for the simple reason that it allows people to display content in many different ways, allowing people to innovate, and get closer to the ultimate aim of us each reading only the news that we are interested in, and being able to find that news easily.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!
5 February, 2007
Mobile Data Services Set To Rake It In
High speed mobile phones and new gadgets are set to send revenue from mobile entertainment services soaring over the next five years, according to market research firm Informa Telecoms & Media.
Boffins at Informa expect the market for delivering content and services on mobiles to rise from $89.3billion in 2006 to $150billion by 2011.
Mobile music – already the biggest earner – will continue to whip up the biggest wedge of wonga, although its market share is expected to dip from 40 per cent in 2006 to 36 per cent in 2011 in the face of newer consumer technologies like mobile TV and video service.
“Advanced mobile content and services have been slow to take off, but this should not be confused with the deepening relationship that we have with our mobile phones,” commented report author Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
“Over time, users will warm to other data services as well. The mobile web is a prime example: WAP failed to take off when it was first launched, but five years on, more and more users have become comfortable with accessing news or other information on their mobile phones,” he added.
The analysts also predict that the market for mobile entertainment services, including games, gambling and naughty adult content, will more than double during the same period, increasing from $18.84 billion in 2006 to a bumper US$38.12 billion in 2011.
User-generated content is also expected to grow, with Informa predicting that revenue from user-generated services will hit $13.17 billion by 2011.
Full of enthusiasm for the future, Daniel Winterbottom enthused: “The arrival of the mobile web on the mobile handset over in 2007 and beyond will see users embracing the same content they take for granted on their PCs.
[Via]
5 February, 2007
Sony Ericsson W51S Mobile Phone
Sony Ericsson in Japan is launching the snazzy new W51S phone which comes in a striking clamshell package.
The no-fuss, flip out design is pleasantly understated, featuring a textured matt black front with just three icons for notifying the user of an incoming email, call or alarm/reminder.
The Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED) icons look rather dandy to our weary eyes, although work-shirkers probably won’t like not being able to see who’s actually calling before flipping open the phone and getting an irate boss on the line.
Once opened, the phone sports a 2.7-inch display with a 16:9 widescreen which (apparently) employs RealityMAX technology to “enhance picture quality.”
Also bundled on board the phone is a 2-megapixel camera backed up by a fairly healthy 120MB of internal memory and IrDA. As ever, Sony are persisting with their love of all things Memory Stuck, burdening the W51S with a Pro Duo expansion slot.
The W51S measures up at 105 × 48 × 19.3 mm, with talk time quoted at 210 minutes, with a standby time of 270 hours. For the security conscious, there’s also a feature letting users remotely lock and delete data on the handset over the web (Palm Treo users have been able to do this for years via excellent software like Warden)
The phone will be available in black, silver or pink, but there’s been ne’er a whisper from the Sony head honchos about pricing, release dates or even if this funky number will be getting it into the greasy paws of Britlanders.
[ From MobileWhack ]
5 February, 2007
Experiment: Ramping Alexa Ranking
Alexa ranking is something that some people judge their very existance by. They’re not concerned that their family is safe and secure around them, not that they’re in good health, or even take delight in how many friends they have close by. But how important Alexa tells them they to the Internet community – how much the Internet loves them.
They live and die by the rises and falls of their Alexa ranking.
It’s sad, but it’s true.
This leads to the perpetuation of Alexa-ranking watching, and feverish downloading of the Alexa Toolbar on to all and any machines that might be used.
You see, the way that Alexa finds out which Web sites are being visited, is by watching which sites are visited by people who have installed the Alexa Toolbar and reporting this information back to Alexa. Thus the virtuous circle is completed and the Alexa ranking created.
There are flaw with this method of judgement. The most fundamental being that the official Alexa toolbar is only available to run on Windows machines running ie6 and above.
Ramping the Ranking
Many have postulated that a site’s Alexa ranking can be manipulated simply by getting the world and his wife/partner to install the Alex toolbar on their machine and browser to the target site.
It’s understood that within certain Venture Capital firms employees being instructed to visit their client sites in an attempt to boost their Alexa ranking. Not doing so will lower the value of their investment.
We’ve even hear of people setting up farms of PC’s equipped with Alexa-plugedin Browsers automatically refreshing access to the target web site, again to pushing the ranking up.
The Challenge
We though it would be an interesting test to see if we and you, can affect the Alexa Ranking of Digital-Lifestyles.
If you’re up for a bit of unscientific fun, read on.
If you’re an Internet Explorer user, download the Alexa toolbar. Firefox users might get some joy from here. User of other browsers are going to miss out on the fun.
When it’s loaded, pop over to the Digital-Lifestyles site even more frequently than you normally do and let’s see what change we can make to our current 71,247 ranking.
Come on, it’ll be fun.
2 February, 2007
Sony W880i Ai: Tuesday Euro Launch?
Sony Ericsson have let it be known via press invites that there’s a number of new handsets being released in Europe next Tuesday.
What they are and where it’s going on is currently being held close to the chest, but there’s rumours going around that one of them might be the W880i Ai.
There’s some shots purporting to be it floating around on a Swedish site called Mobil.
If the shots are to be believed, it looks mighty svelte, appearing only just bigger than a Bic lighter and as thin as you like.
It’s understood that it feels really solid, with a covering of metal conveying a feeling of quality.
We think it looks pretty hot, but the only thing that holds us back from near-total lust is the size and make up of the numeric keys, that have more than a passing similarity to a 1970’s calculator. Without having our hands on it, it’s unclear how friendly it will be to texting at high speed.
Specs are unclear, but it looks like two cameras, one facing forward, the other, a 2mpx facing back. Walkman branding makes it pretty clear it has music-ness included.
It looks like it’s 3G, which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s so tiny.
We’re really interested in its almost-neon-type interface.
Last, but not least, it looks like it’s heading to the US, as it’s got FCC approval.
Tune in next Tuesday for more details following the press launch, until then have a look at Mobil for more shots of it – and get a handkerchief to catch the drool.
The official I Want My W880 site.
Well done to those at Mobil for the photo scoop and Thanks to Hugo for the pointer.
2 February, 2007