The European Union has laid out a new set of rules for mobile phone users wandering over the hills and plains of Europe in a move that should see bills slashed by around 60 per cent.
Anyone who’s used their mobile phone in Europe will have experienced the pain of the wallet draining bill when you get home, but the new rules will see text message charges cut to €0.11 (before VAT), a substantial reduction on the current €0.28 rate.
Pirate Party International, the political party closely linked to The Pirate Bay file sharing site, have won a Swedish seat in the European Election and are reporting “significant results” in Germany.
In Sweden they (Piratpartiet) gained 7.1% of the votes, Which they claim makes them “the largest party in the segment below 30 years of age.”
Disappointing to see that two Hollywood studios, Universal and Warner Bros, have taken legal action against Zattoo, a service that streams live TV to computer screens.
Zattoo isn’t a fly-by-night operation and has legal agreements with the TV channels that it shows over its service.
The pen-pushing Eurocrats in Brussels are ready to ban large screen plasma TVs if a new EU standard goes through this spring.
The EU is displeased with the vast energy needs of plasma screens, which are thought to hog four times as much power than regular screens, and produce four times as many carbon emissions.
Last.fm is expanding their service away from just computers on to mobile phones, with Vodafone.
It looks like the relatively recent corporate owners of Last.fm, CBS, are flexing their biz dev muscles, aiming to gain back some of the considerable investment they made in the music service.
Never be fooled. Things always take a lot longer to change than you think they will – particularly where the mass adoption of a new technology is concerned.
The PVR lesson
When I started writing about TiVo back in 2001, I saw “PVR’s are a vital piece in the jigsaw.”
Cable subscribers in France, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands and Belgium are in for a treat.
Cable Europe, the self-described body representing leading Cable operators in Europe, have announced that they will be bring 100 Mbps Broadband services to their customers.
After having seen the highly impressive demonstration of Wikitude, we just had to find out more, so Digital-Lifestyles spoke to Philipp Breuss, who has lead the development of Wikitude.
Philipp previously worked for Sony but gave this up to make the development of the Wikitude software which he describes as “the most exciting things that we ever did.”
He’s been building the application for the last year, but as a mobile travel guide for Android that also uses Mobile Google Maps and Text from Wikipedia.
Vodafone has announced that the new Blackberry Storm will only be available on their network initially in a number of different countries including the UK and Netherlands.
We heard news from Gary McKinnon’s law firm, Kaim Todner, that the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’) has ruled against their recent application to have Gary’s extradition to the US halted.
The temporary prohibition of McKinnon’s extradition, as granted by the ECtHR on 12 August, is now effectively lifted and the authorities of the United Kingdom are now free to extradite our client to the United States.