As you know the Sony’s European edition of the PS3 went on sale on Friday with the expected effort from them and their associated PR organisations to try and make a big thing about it.
We didn’t bother covering it, as we’ve said quite a few times before, we didn’t think the PS3 was going to set the world (or at least the UK) alight.
It’s too expensive (£425 retail) and doesn’t offer the consumers enough to make it a must have – even when they’re trying to make the most out of it having a Blu-ray player.
Proof of the lack of interest can be found on UK eBay, the strongest, most immediate guide on the current market price of items.
Looking at the finished auctions, there is a sea of red prices, showing that items aren’t selling, a big “up yours” to the people who thought they were going to be buying their PS3 and flogging it on for a big profit.
The PS3 items that have sold are around £320 – £410, well _below_ the current retail price. In the lowest case, nearly £100 below – THREE days after the launch of the product. Not the normal behaviour of the public if they’re excited.
The initial signs for the PS3 aren’t going well, but Sony may well have anticipated this by re-jigging hardware design to make them cheaper in preparation of a price drop.
Sitting on the tube, opposite such an ad, I figured that there were only two possible companies which could be accused of controlling 80% of information on the Web; it could plausibly refer to either Internet Explorer’s market share (and would therefore be an advert for Firefox) or Google’s market share. Since I knew Mozilla wasn’t planning any advert like this, I assumed that it was a competitor to Google, and concluded it was probably Ask (since neither Yahoo or Microsoft would manage to think outside the box to such an extent). However, I dismissed that idea instantly as it seemed so unlikely that a well respected company would attempt such a pathetic campaign, and that therefore it must be some new search engine with far too much venture capital. By that point I had lost interest, and began examining the ventilation panel.
Ofcom has just announced that it will be carrying out an inquiry into the whole area. 
The inquiry will be led by Richard Ayre, a former Deputy Chief Executive of BBC News. He is expected to receive extensive input from the premium rate services regulator, ICSTIS, who are already investigating a number of individual cases. 
Her guidance to them is to settle on DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds), a European led development of the DVB-T (Television) standard that is throughout large areas of Europe.
Despite a 
HDForAll are a pressure group made up of TV manufacturers, retailers and public service broadcasters including DSGI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba and BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. They’re keen to remind people that there’s only a limited amount of time left to contact Ofcom to make their views known on auctioning off spectrum to the highest bidder. Background on this and how to respond are available on 
The upload speed will also be upped to 768Kbs, not exactly setting the uploading world alight, but better than a poke in the eye with a stick, non?
It’s quite an interesting approach that’s worthy of a little attention, especially as this will form the basis for the approach for the rest of the UK.
Back in June last year, we heard that 
Sanity appears to have been reached by Vodafone, as they announce a flat-rate of €12/day for data in Europe – but only if accessed from “mobile-enable laptops” from 1 July 2007. It will replace their current per Megabyte service, giving what they say is “practically unlimited data usage,” which is actually up to 50Mb/day.
The quarterly report snappily titled, Communications Market: Digital Television Progress Report, covering the fourth quarter of 2006 (October-December), shows the figures are up from 39% in the same period the previous year, and also from 44.7% in the Q3 2006.