Vodafone Mobile Broadband Is Great: UK Price Drop

Vodafone Mobile Broadband Is Great: UK Price Drop TooFrom the beginning of July, Vodafone UK is dropping the price of their Mobile Broadband service to £25 a month or a ‘designed to get you to take the monthly offer,’ £8.50 for 24 hours.

There’s also a new feature that gives the ability to continue data connections, while you’re in select European countries for £8.50 for 24 hours.

All of these prices exclude VAT.

They are pitching it as a real alternative to fixed-line broadband and Wi-Fi.
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DS2 Powerline Communications Thrash Wi-Fi On Apple TV

DS2 Powerline Communications Thrash WiFi For Apple TVPowerline chipset supplier, DS2, has been conducting some speed tests with their 200Mbps product in an attempt to prove how much quicker distributions within households can be using their Powerline Communications (PLC) than rival technologies and products.

As we all know, there’s a (sometimes major) difference between the claimed performance of network products and what it delivers in the real world. Some of this is down to legitimate things like error correction overheads, but lots of it is down to other factors.
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Apple In Video On Demand Talks With Hollywood Studios

Apple In Video On Demand Talks With Hollywood StudiosApple is knee deep in advanced talks with some of Hollywood’s biggest hotshots as it prepares to launch an online film rental service to challenge cable and satellite TV operators head on.

According to a report in the Financial Times, the company is looking to sign up enough studios to provide a mass of in-demand premium film content.
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Beijing Could Go Wireless: Rumour: WBFA

Beijing Could Go Wireless: Rumour: WBFAIt was mentioned at the World Broadband Forum Asia in Beijing that an unnamed Chinese Government Official has said that they hoped that Beijing will become a city bathed in Wireless before the World Fair arrives in China in 2010.

They also hope for Shanghai to benefit from city-wide coverage too.

We’ll dig around to try and find out more over the next few days.

I’m in Beijing for the Broadband World Forum, so thought it would be interesting to pick stories from the local press on their reporting of technology news.

200m DSL Customers Worldwide: China Broadband Numbers Huge

The DSL Forum today announced that the total number of DSL connections worldwide has exceeded 200 million at the World Broadband Forum in Beijing.

It’s estimated that this significant milestone was passed in April this year (2007), less than a year since the announcement of the passing of the 150m level.

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First BBC Show Broadcasting In Second Life Tonight

First BBC Show Broadcasting In Second Life TonightTonight sees the first BBC TV programme broadcast in Second Life – The Money Programme.

Not surprisingly, the subject will be virtual worlds with two sections being covered – free to enter worlds like Second Life and pay for services, or Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft.
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Big Brother UK Drops SMS Voting Completely

Big Brother Drops SMS Voting CompletelyFor years Big Brother has been actively encouraging the audience to vote using SMS messages from the mobiles.

No more. They’re completely dropping the SMS voting, claiming “the mobile phone operators cannot process the votes within a time frame suitable for the voting procedures on the programme.”

When did this change? Is this a new development?

The failure of SMS voting is NOT news
I remember speaking to the tech wizards at the Australian Broadcast Company (ABC) back in 2004 at Broadcast Asia who told that they decided that they could not legitimately use SMS voting as the delivery of it was not reliable enough, especially if there was a need to do it within a certain time period – like gathering votes before a deadline.

They opted for another mobile-based technology, that although slightly more involved for the viewer to use, at least gave a truthful representation of what was going on.

TV, Music and Marketing: Their Current Response To Digital Media

We know Tech is hitting all media businesses, but how are they currently responding?

Howard Scott went along to a meeting, Talking Tech, organised by the European Sponsorship Association to investigate the current state of play – covering the world of TV, Music and entertainment marketing.

Today’s piece covers North One TV; tomorrow, Sony BMG; and the final piece, Kempster, their work with European football and the conclusion.

Highlighting through italics are ours.

ESA Sponsorship Forum 2007 Talking Tech Write UpESA Talking Tech
Another day, another conference. A couple of weeks back I attended the ESA Sponsorship Seminar entitled Talking Tech. Even though the title was “Talking Tech” I didn’t let that put me off.

It was aimed at the Sponsorship industry with a slant to how digital tools (lots of reference to new media, but is it still new?) have/can/will later that side of the marketing business.

The panel of speakers for the event had some interesting people on board, and in my usual style I’ll go through each of them in turn now.
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Optiarc BD-M100A: Blu-ray Burner First From Sony NEC

Optiarc BD-M100A: Blu-ray Burner First From Sony NECOptiarc, the product of the joined Sony and NEC’s optical storage divisions, has released the BD-M100A, their first Blu-ray Burner.

It burns single and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE Blu-ray discs, giving a storage capacity of up to 35Gb and 50 Gb respectively. It also supports BD-ROM and BD-AV discs.
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