Geographic

UK Punters Are Feeling The MP3 Music Love
A new survey by Q Research discovered that a third of UK consumers aged 11 to 25 were slapping down up to £5 a month on digital tunes, with three per cent shelling out £25 or more a month.
Not all the kids are feeling the digital love though, with 45 per cent of respondents spending but ne’er a bean on music.
A hefty 85 per cent of respondents were found to be owners of MP3 players with the ubiquitous Apple iPod being the most popular device by a long chalk.
The survey found that the young ‘uns were the biggest users of free download services – almost half – but 43 per cent of under 16s were still paying up to £10 a month, with a hardcore nine per cent splashing out as much as £10 to £25 a month.
When it comes to the real big spenders, the lucrative 20-24 year olds sector were flashing the most cash, with two thirds spending up to £10 a month on downloads, and 16 per cent spend from £10 to £20 a month.
Downloading tunes direct to mobile phones is still a niche interest though, with punters put off by the high cost.
Liz Nelson, chairman of Q Research, commented that the survey showed that, “while there is already a very buoyant market for paying for MP3 files from the internet among young people, they are very aware of the cost of downloading files to their phones.”
“This finding is underlined by other projects we have done, where we have discovered opposition among young people to watching video or receiving video ads to their mobiles because of the cost,” she added
Source
20 February, 2007
Wikipedia Goes Top Ten In The US
Wikimedia Foundation’s popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia has now become one of the most popular websites in the US.
According to analysts comScore Networks, Wikipedia elbowed itself into a top ten place for the first time in January, with its 42.9 million unique visitors earning it a ninth place ranking.
This puts the site ahead of web big-hitters like The New York Times, Apple and Viacom, who ranked 10th, 11th and 12th in January 2007 by comScore’s figures.
Although Wikipedia has hit the top ten spot in other countries, its rise in the US has been dramatic, with the site only managing a 33rd spot with 18.3 million unique visitors in January last year.
By July 2006 it has soared up to the 18th spot with 28.1 million unique visitors and by November it was hovering outside the hallowed top ten slot with 39.1 million unique visitors giving it a 12th place ranking.
ComScore explained that the Wikipedia total also includes other Wikimedia sites, like Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks and Wikinews, but said that the vast majority of the traffic comes from the Wikipedia encyclopedias.
Although it seems like it’s been around for ages, Wikipedia only started in January 2001 but can now boast 1.6 million articles on its English-language site, and over 5 million articles in other language sites.
Wikipedia sites also perform well globally, with comScore ranking them sixth overall in December 2005, ratcheting up a total of almost 165 million unique visitors.
Wikipedia
19 February, 2007
Blair To Write To Each Road Pricing Petitioner
Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of attention drawn to the huge number of votes cast by the British public in an online petition calling for the “Prime Minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.”
Over 1.5 million people have signed to show that they reject the idea from the UK government to force UK drivers to have to pay £200 for the privilege of having all of their car journeys monitored, recorded and charged accordingly.
On Saturday, the Guardian newspaper picked up on the idea that, as part of the registering views on the site, users had to enter their names, postal and email addresses, giving the UK government direct contact with each and every person who used the petition to voice their disapproval on the road usage charging scheme. They postulate that this gives them the opportunity of contacting the objectors directly to try and cajole them into changing their minds.
Quite if this is something that the petitioners realised when they placed their votes is unclear.
The site itself isn’t doesn’t really help either “our email will not be published, and is collected only to confirm your account and to keep you informed of response to this petition.”
Closer examination of the Privacy Policy makes it a little clearer- “unless you ask us not to, to write to you a maximum of two times about the issues raised in the petition.”
The straw poll that we’ve taken among some of those who had placed their votes, felt their email addresses were only required to validate the vote. They weren’t aware of the chance to opt-out of being contacted at a later date.
Blair writes about writing
Sunday’s Observer sees Tony Blair publishing a piece explaining what a great idea it is to have over 1.5 million people telling him he’s wrong, and how it has sparked debate … which luckily enough was just what he wanted … he tells us now. (Let’s hope he doesn’t mean like his nuclear power debate).
He goes on to say “What it has given us is the ability, which was simply not there before, to engage with those who have signed the petition,” he then confirms that “Over the next few days, I will be sending out a response to everyone who has signed the petition against road charging, explaining the problems the country faces and why I believe road charging is surely part of the answer here as it is in many other countries.”
So is the whole e-petition idea a ruse just to find out who opposes government policy – then use this information to write to them directly to ‘inform them of why they’re wrong not to be thinking the same way as the government.
If they find out this isn’t successful with all of the voters, they will be taken into detention centers and have it beaten into them (OK, I made this last bit up)
I suspect people will want to have their say, but when they receive government spin in return, will stop using their real email addresses and start taking advantage of temporary email addresses like Temporary inbox.
The Petition
Many people have also questioned whether they should pay yet more money to use their cars as there’s already an effective tax per mile of car usage – the heavily taxed petrol that the UK government already imposes.
19 February, 2007
MySpace Ruled Not Liable In Texan Sex Case
The family of a 13-year old girl who was allegedly sexually assaulted by someone she met via Myspace have had their lawsuit against MySpace thrown out by a Texan judge.
As we’ve covered previously, this family was one of four who are pursuing MySpace for not taking sufficient effort to protect their children.
As the LA Times reports, “the ruling appears to be the first time a federal court has extended to social-networking sites the same broad free-speech protections granted to Internet service providers,” which if correct will have far reaching consequences. We imagine that all at MySpace will also be breathing a huge sigh of relief.
To protect the anonymity of the young girl, she was referred to as Julie Doe, through the case. The court papers revealed that when she joined MySpace, she had listed her age as 18, despite only being 13 years old at the time.
The Judge, Sam Sparks, was very direct in his ruling dismissing the case, “If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace.”
Not deterred by the ruling, Adam J Loewy, the Austin lawyer who represented the girl, said they planned an appeal, adding “We were prepared for a very long battle in this.”
16 February, 2007
‘Red Ring of Death’: BBC Watchdog Highlight XBox 360 Issue
Last night the BBC Consumer TV programme, Watchdog, had a pop at Microsoft and the XBox 360 over its reliability.
Many of the people who had purchased X360’s were finding that their machines were failing a short time after one-year warranty period had expired. The BBC say that 250 of them had contacted Watchdog to complain.
The most common cause of failure? The “Red ring of death” that indicates that their Xboxes have become Ex-boxes. The name comes from the front panel of the X360 which shows three flashing red lights, where normally there are green. If all of the lights but the first section are flashing, this indicates a general hardware failure has occurred.
When Xbox fan-boys contact Microsoft, they’ve been told that they have to shell out £80-85 to get their little dream machines fixed, as they out of warranty – even if it is just a little.
Many are attributing this failure to the machines running too hot. Anyone who has played the X360 will know that those babies run _loud_, due to the significant amount of fan-age they require to keep them running cool enough.
Microsoft have issued a statement, the first paragraph of which is
“The vast majority of Xbox 360 owners are having an outstanding experience with their systems. That being said, we have received a few isolated reports of consoles not working as expected. It’s important to note that there is no systemic issue with Xbox 360 – each incident is unique and these customer inquiries are being handled on a case-by-case basis.
The BBC are a little slow on the uptake with this as the problem has been debated on bulletin boards for a mighty long time. Having said that, getting it on broadcast TV is about the best thing that can happen in resolving these problem.
As is usually the case with this type of thing, people who have had their plight discussed, (not so) mysteriously get their machines replaced, after fighting with the companies for ages. A case in point is Alex Ainsow, who has now not only been offered a replacement console, but has had the deal sweetened with some new games.
Rumours of Xbox 360 ver 2.0 have been circulating, with one of the items being that the fan has been made much quieter. This would point to the chips having been reworked to get their operating temperature down.
Previously, Watchdog was fronted by Anne Robinson who later went on to present The Weakest Link. At that time, it struck us that Watchdog was the most aptly name programme on TV.
BBC Watchdog on Ring of Death
Microsoft: Xbox 360: Three red lights flash on the Ring of Light
14 February, 2007
Virgin ‘iTunes for Games’ Announced
Virgin have announced their intention to create an iTunes for Games. The service, to be called, A World Of My Own, will offer video games for download.
As with the majority of The Bearded One’s businesses, this is a partnership with another company, in this case, Game Domain International, who will be providing the technical know-how. The marketing and sizzle will come from Virgin.
They’ve decided to abbreviate A World Of My Own, AWOMO.
Knowledge of their intentions dates back to June last year.
Downloading games isn’t new. Services like Steam have been working since 2004, but while these services have appealed to the hard-core of gaming, they’ve never really broken out to the general public.
Virgin chucking their marketing muscle behind is likely to change that. Beyond that there’s the great cross promotional opportunities, between Virgin Media (NTL/Telewest cable as was) and even their airlines.
AWOMO are taking a different approach to the plain-looking Steam, as the environment will be 3D, with different areas – think Second Life meets games distribution.
We hear that the Koch Media Group, Europe’s largest PC games distributor who work with major brands such as EA, Ubisoft and Deep Silver are in discussions with Virgin about the service.
Virgin used to be pretty big in games during the BBC Micro days, but fell out of love with it and sold it all off before the ’90’s got going.
It’s planned that the service will start in March this year. Let’s just hope they come up with a better moniker than AWOMO.
A World Of My Own
14 February, 2007
Google Breaching Belgian Copyright: Judge
Belgian courts have ruled that Google is in breach of copyright.
The case was brought by Copiepresse, a copyright protection organisation that was representing 17 [UPDATE (thanks Michel) French-speaking] Belgian newspapers, complaining that both Google’s search and News service were in breach.
Their complaint is that their news pages are being cached by Google, thus, in their view, offering free access to their valuable content. Google’s argument is that they only display a headline and a short part of the content and also point out that they drive huge amount of readers to the newspapers Web sites.
This action was first launched last August in the Belgian courts. Google lost the case and was directed by the judge to remove the offending articles from the Google.be site and corresponding news service and post messages to their home pages. Google appealed the decision and lost yesterday.
Copiepresse is also pursuing similar action against Yahoo and MSN and it’s reported that they are in touch with copyright groups in Norway, Austria and Italy.
It is understood that Copiepresse is pursuing Google for payment for access to their content. Google has stated that this will not happen – not surprisingly as _every_ other publication, worldwide, would be asking for the same.
Google respect both robots.txt and metatags that enable any Web pages publisher to exclude them from being included in the Google index. As Google’s Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs, points out, if asked, Google will remove content if requested.
Confused
We’re very confused by the ruling. How do these publishers think people are going to find their content without a search engine pointing them? Sure, their regular readers will still visit their home pages, but their potential readership will not be aware of the quality of their writing.
Copiepresse
14 February, 2007
Motorola’s 3G MOTORIZR Z8 Announced
We reckon there could be moist spots breaking out in the gussets of mobile phone freaks everywhere with a veritable onslaught of new phones being announced today.
First to catch our eye was Motorola’s bendy-shaped 3G MOTORIZR Z8 phone sporting a novel ‘kick-slider’ (a what?!) and purring along on a Symbian OS handling up to 3.6Mbps HSDPA.
The curved profile is supposed to make the phone sit more snugly against your noggin, with the 15.3-mm thin form factor ensuring you can grab a place on the Cool Dudes Table.
Decked out in a natty black body with green trim, the MOTORIZR Z8 features a 1.4 x 2-inch, QVGA 16 million colour display and a twin camera set up, with a 2 megapixel camera on the back (with 8x zoom and lumi LED light) and a lower spec’d VGA jobbie up front for video calls.
The handset can record in either MPEG-4 or 3gp (for MMS) and includes 90MB of internal memory and a MicroSD expansion slot to keep you stocked up with up to 4GB’s worth of photos, video, and tunes on the move.
There’s also A2DP stereo Bluetooth audio onboard, support for SMS, EMS, MMS 1.22 messaging and SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, SSL/TLS2 email.
The Moto boys claim a battery life of up to 5-hours 3G talk time or up to 16 days standby, but the cheeky monkeys haven’t come clean about what network frequencies are supported yet.
Motorola
12 February, 2007
Omnifone Announces Rival To iPhone/ iTunes Service
You may not have heard of them yet, but feisty Brit mobile music company Omnifone have announced one of the first big challengers to Apple’s soon-come iPhone/iTunes Store service.
Called MusicStation, the new service will dish up an “all you can eat” menu for European users, with music downloads starting at £1.99 ($3.88) per week
Initially launching their service in Europe and Asia this year, the London based company says that it’s already secured partnerships with 23 mobile network operators giving them access to a customer base of 690 million subscribers in 40 countries.
“MusicStation will give users of any music-capable mobile phone the ability to legally access, download and enjoy an unlimited amount of music, from a global music catalogue supported by the music industry, all for a small weekly fee, wherever they are,” enthused Omnifone Chief Executive Rob Lewis.
“We will ensure the vast majority of Europeans have the freedom to choose MusicStation by the time iPhone arrives in Europe. We will give consumers the choice they deserve,” he added.
Users subscribed to the service can search, download and play tunes on their mobiles with the option to sync content with home PCs to create playlists sharable with other MusicStation users.
Unlike the iPhone service, MusicStation lets users download tracks over the air across a data network, giving music-hungry punters an instant fix, wherever they are.
“By leveraging the hundreds of millions of handsets sold every year by operators to deliver MusicStation into the global market, we believe we can give Apple a run for its money in digital music provision,” chest-thumped a tiggerish Lewis, adding, “except that with MusicStation users don’t need a credit card, computer or broadband connection.”
Predictably, music tracks will come with digital rights management and be delivered in the eAAC+ format (that’s enhanced advanced audio coding, in case you’re into knowing that kind of thing).
As well as music, the service will feed punters personalised news, new release details, ticket sales and concert listings, along with recommendations for new songs based on their listening habits.
With songs and playlists being held on a centralised server, content can also be recovered and downloaded in the event of some steenkin’ tea-leaf nicking their phone.
MusicStation say that music content will be supplied by both major and independent labels – including Universal Music Group – as well as local artists.
http://www.omnifone.com/
12 February, 2007
Vodafone Mobile Services Expansion: The Why
Vodafone has made three days of surprising announcements. Three of them for Web services soon to be accessible over their mobile network (MySpace, eBay and YouTube) and the other relating to the building out of their 3G networks in the future (analysis).
We thought it would be worthwhile taking a look as to why this might be happening and why it’s come at this time.
Why the push?
Well, lots of other companies are moving in to tread on Vodafone’s toes – example – Virgin Mobile now with NTL/Telewest TV/broadband/telephone service – as all forms of communication converge.
Vodafone is pretty much a mobile only company. They’re trying to change this, through deals with BT to offer fixed-line broadband and similar offerings in Italy and Germany. In the converged game, they’re pretty weak.
This weakness is leaving their previous highly-profitable dominance of the mobile space threatened.
They’ve been aware of the benefit of differentiating their service through providing access to content for a while, but these recent moves mark a serious step forward.
Previously it’s been about them providing the means of accessing content from third parties, games, music, etc. These most recent deals are about access to services.
I know content is being accessed, a la YouTube, but they’re actually providing access to the service … one that happens to be providing content.
What’s the benefit?
There’s many advantages to Vodafone on this.
Short term it’s about making people associate Vodafone with being on the leading-edge – “Wow, they’ve got MySpace and YouTube!”
It’s unclear how far this benefit will extend into the future, as more phones become easier to browse the Web, where these services live.
eBay, MySpace and YouTube all have fanatical following. When people become embroiled in them, they _must_ find out what has _just_ happened. They’re a modern day replacement for TV soap-operas.
Obsessions like these drive people to choose mobile phones that enable them to get access – and Vodafone will be shouting this from the roof tops to encourage people to switch to them.
Interestingly, those three services are also used by a great deal of people who don’t have a strong technical understanding. People who don’t know that the whole Internet is available through the Web Browser on their mobile phone. This changing is just a matter of time.
Another short-term benefit for them is the amount of revenue they’ll end up generating. We imagine that it’s cost Vodafone a pretty penny to get exclusives from all three services, but this will be made up by the seriously boosted data charges that they’ll be clawing in.
MySpace is pretty rich with bandwidth hungry media – lots of photos, and many many pages to check. Same for eBay.
The real earner for them will be YouTube. You’ll struggle to find an application that uses as much data as video and with the ability to pass links to favourite videos, subscribers will be helping their friends run up big data charges too.
9 February, 2007