UK sales of video game hardware and software in 2008 have lept to £4.034 billion, so say industry body ELSPA.
Looks like fans of video games are refusing to listen to the doom-sayers and have been buying video games in ever larger numbers taking software sales to £1.905 billion.
Now the detail …
We managed to get a brief hands on with the Peek email gadget at the WiredStore in New York and thought we’d share a few impressions.
This little fella is designed for one thing only – accessing mobile email over the GPRS data network – and comes with a full keypad and a 240 x 320 pixels colour screen (with a rather small font size).
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.
Virgin Media is set to be the first of Britain’s ISPs to roll out a superfast 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) domestic broadband service.
Virgin’s current fastest offering is 20Mbps, and the new service will put them ahead of the current speed title holders, Be Broadband, who serve up a speedy 24Mbps service for £17.50 per month.
If you hadn’t noticed(!), today is iPlayer day.
The BBC Internet blog is covered in posting from various of the BBC bloggers, so many, that they run way over the front page.
Anthony Rose, Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, Future Media & Technology (blimey he must have a wide business card!), who oversees iPlayer, has recorded a video (not surprisingly playing in an iPlayer viewer).
He goes over his history with iPlayer and then projects forward into features and functions that he’d like to see incorporated into iPlayer in the future.
iPlayer 3, as it’s being labelled, will be available Q1 or Q2 in 2009 and will incoporate social features.
The BBC, ITV and BT have announced a proposal to create an “open environment for broadband connected digital television receivers.”
It’s an initiative open for all UK public service broadcasters, device developers and other ISPs, which they hope will lead to a new generation of subscription free devices, carrying free to air channels and a huge selection of on demand TV services like iPlayer and ITV Player, as well as the potential for films, shows and interactive content from a range of other providers in standard and high definition.
AMEE, a company that provides Internet-based calculation and storage of the carbon footprints, has received ‘substantial’ Series A funding from O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures (OATV), Union Square Ventures (USV) and The Accelerator Group (TAG).
The recent story about Wikipedia being censored by a large number of UK ISPs has raised a lot of blog post/ tweets / column inches about quite how terrible / good it is that our Internet is not free and open.
Wake up UK! … this ain’t nothing new.
Given all of the attention on the banning of Web sites in the UK (read Wikipedia / Scorpions album), we thought we’d give you the inside view on how it comes about.
The setup
If a member of the public raises an objection to a Web site to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the IWF takes a look at it to judge if it’s objectionable (btw – they’re one of the few bodies in the UK legally allowed to view the child pr0n)
We really, really wanted to get along to the first HomeCamp event – which covered the now-realistic world of automating your home.
Due to a change of circumstances on our side, we couldn’t make it. Much to our relief IBM Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer Dr Andy Stanford-Clark (who you may know from his house that Twitters) said he’d cover it for Digital-Lifestyles’ readers. Thanks Andy!
A couple of Saturdays ago I went to the first “HomeCamp,” at Imperial College in London.
HomeCamp was an “unconference” (a conference where the participants decide what form and content it should have, on the day) to look at areas of home energy monitoring and home automation.