Geographic – Page 73 – Digital-Lifestyles

DVD Recorders Drop Below £50

DVD Recorder For Under £50 It’s amazing to watch the price reduction of consumer goods. First we saw the free fall of the VHS machines, then DVD players which got to the ridiculous level of £19.99 – with 10 DVD’s.

Now, of course, it’s DVD recorders. Three years ago DVD recorders were costing around £400. Today we were stunned to see that DVD recorders have already got to under £50.

OK, we’ve never heard of the manufacturer, Cello, but what do you expect for that sort of money. We’ve also got no idea what the quality of it is like, or how long it will last. That’s not the point. Here’s something that will let you backup your video material to DVD – either from your video camera, or other Firewire equipped equipment; from S-Video and if you’re really desperate, composite video, or TV.

Product Details

Features

Recording Format
– DVD+RW, DVD+R
Recording Time
– HQ-1 Hr.; SP-2 Hr.; LP-3 Hr. EP-4 Hr.
Playback Format
– DVD±RW, DVD±R, DVD-Video, VCD, CD, MP3, CD-R, CD-RW.
TV Tuner
– For PAL I 05 Modulator Output: CH.21 ~ CH.69

Variable Speed & Zoom with Real-Time Playback
IEEE1394 (DV Input) for Camcorder, S-Video, CVBS (AV Input)

Rear I/O: Input
– Video: Composite Video, S-Video, TV Tuner Audio: R/L Stereo Output: Video: Composite Video, S-Video, YUV / P-SCAN, Audio: 2-CH, Coaxial One Key Recording
IR Remote Control
– 53 keys, 3V infrared Panel keys: Power, Record, Source, CH up, CH down, Play, Stop, Open / Close

NTSC & PAL Playback
21-Pin Full Scart Socket with RGB Output x 1 15 21-Pin Scart Socket Input x 1

See the Cello R100B DVD Recorder for £48.99 at SavaStore

Online Banking In The UK Leaves Customers Short-Changed

Online Banking In The UK Leaves Customers Short-Changed UK banks may be gleefully reporting big fat profits every quarter, but new research from eService provider Transversal claims that online customer service from Britain’s banks has sunk to an all time low.

Their study found that fifty per cent of the major banks surveyed were so rubbish that they were unable to answer a single one of ten basic customer questions asked via their websites (these questions were based on typical customer enquiries about credit card offers, borrowing and mortgages etc).

A minority of banks, however, achieved excellent results, revealing the growing gulf between the best and worst performing banks.

Taken as a whole, the sector registered a lamentable average of 2.5 out of ten, managing to answer just 25 per cent of common questions.

Although this looks like an utterly abysmal score, things have actually got worse over the past year, with only two banks scoring nul points in 2005, and the sector mustering up a mighty average of three questions answered.

Despite 56 per cent of Brits now using online banking, these results suggest that banks are more interested in increasing profits by closing down High Street stores than serving their customers, with further cost-cutting measures seeing call centres shunted offshore into unknown foreign lands, often increasing customers’ frustration.

No email contacts for customers
As if to wind up their customers further, sixty per cent of bank websites didn’t allow consumers to contact them via email, forcing them to ring up and face the horrors of ‘on hold’ phone music.

Online Banking In The UK Leaves Customers Short-Changed Of the forty per cent that bothered to provide an email address, there was clearly no rush to answer their customers’ questions, with the banks taking a leisurely average of 22 hours to respond.

The fastest response was a still-casual 8 hours – a whole working day – while the slowest was a massive 69 hours: enough time, the report noted, for the beleaguered customer to hop on a plane and travel to the offshore centre to ask the question personally.

The study also noted that only half of the major banks troubled themselves to provide a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page, and in many cases these were lurking in dark corners of the site, and not clearly marked for users.

A summary of the overall 2006 average banking results is as follows:

Average number of questions answered online: 2.5 out of 10 (2005 findings: 3)
Percentage of companies that responded to email correctly: 40% (2005 findings: 55%
Average email response time: 22 hours (2005 findings: 17 hours)
Percentage with customer FAQ pages: 50% (2005 findings: 60%)
Percentage with customer search: 60% (2005 findings: 40%)

Transversal

Rural WiFi Boost From Ofcom?

Wi-Fi Boost For Rural Areas? UK regulator Ofcom is looking at plans to introduce high speed Internet access to broadband-starved remote areas by boosting the power of Wi-Fi signals.

Talking to the BBC, James Saunders, chief marketing honcho of Wi-Fi suppliers, The Cloud, welcomed consultation from Ofcom, adding that the turbo-charged Wi-Fi could, “provide great opportunities in rural areas that are currently without broadband. It makes it much more possible to put up a wireless network.”

Current limitations on the strength of Wi-Fi signals in the UK makes it prohibitively expensive to provide coverage to sparsely populated rural areas, but cranking up the power would make it possible to reach far more users without breaking the bank.

The bigwigs and boffins at Ofcom are currently mulling over the pros and cons of three proposals.

The first would see wireless signals (which are restricted to a tenth of the power permitted in the US) in all parts of the UK; the second would see the power increase limited to rural areas only; while the third option would include a balance of the first two plans, backed by a code of collaboration to minimise signal interference.

Wi-Fi Boost For Rural Areas? City networks
Although most UK towns and cities offer outside Wi-Fi access through hotspots in cafes, pubs and libraries, city-wide seamless networks are yet to be established.

Known as mesh networks, these let Wi-Fi’d folks roam freely from hotspot to hotspot without any interruption to their Internet access.

Although such networks are already starting to roll out in the US, the restricted Wi-Fi transmission levels in the UK mean that mesh networks would currently be prohibitively expensive in the UK.

Selina Lo, chief executive of home Wi-Fi antenna firm Ruckus explained, “With lower power you have to use a lot more access points to form the network.”

“A typical network will have hundreds or low thousands of access points. If you have power limits, these nodes have to be closer together and you need a lot more nodes,” she added

Wi-Fi Boost For Rural Areas? Ruckus, who are currently working with Google to test a free mesh network in Mountain View, California, have developed a new Wi-Fi antenna to help home users connect to city networks.

“People running city networks know that the Wi-Fi in customers’ home equipment is not powerful enough to do an outdoor long range connection….our device is designed to bridge that connection,” said Ms Lo.

Interference
Although boosting Wi-Fi signals looks to be a top notch idea, it’s not without its drawbacks in urban areas, where US hotspot operators are already experiencing “significant” interference between suppliers.

Despite this, Saunders said The Cloud was committed to making mesh networks happen in the UK in the future, but warned that, “a number of factors are needed to make mesh networks economical”.

The company is, however, already working with the Corporation of London to deploy a mesh network in the City.

The Cloud
Ruckus
Offcom

BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute Billing

As of today BT is reshuffling its phone pricing structure. In a typical move of a power-crazed ex-monopoly, it’s giving with one hand and taking away with another.

The ability to get going on this was given by Ofcom when they lifted restrictions on BT’s UK landline pricing structure.

The ‘giving’
BT hasn’t had the take-up with its bundled packages that it had hoped. From today, subscribers of its Option 2 & 3 package will receive around a third price cut. The included-evening/weekend calls to landline packages will move to £3.95 & the all landline calls to £9.95. This is the packages that they’re trumpeting – shame that most people won’t benefit from it isn’t it?

The other part BT is drawing attention to, is the reduction in price of calls to 0870 and 0845 numbers – the sort of numbers most people have been forced to call to speak to their banks. Oh … and they tell us that they’ve reduced the price of calls to mobile phones.

Almost to add insult to injury, BT is offering all of their 16m subscribes 25p off their monthly line rental at the end of the year- TWENTY FIVE PENCE! We’ve just wasted that typing this. Of course, much to our distress, most broadband services (supplied by BT Wholesale) need to pay the line rental. Why should we? and how much longer can this be allowed to continue? Come on Ofcom.

BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute Billing The ‘taking’
The majority of BT’s 16m customers pay per call on the Option 1 scheme. Sadly for them, things won’t be such a bargain. BT is changing their standard charging unit from per second to per minute – not something that we’ve seen since the wild-west days of early mobile phone companies, where the cowboy operators tried to extract the maximum amount of money from the ~~suckers~~ customers.

We think it more than sneaky that BT have given people Call Minder, their free phone answering service, then charge people a fixed fee (3p) or ‘setting up’ the call, then charging whole minutes. When many people get an answer phone, they hang-up because they don’t want to leave a message, or to try to call their mobile – in the meantime BT will collect the setup fee PLUS a whole minute charge, for a couple of seconds.

As to how much the minute will be – we don’t know. We’ve looked, really we have, pretty hard too – we’ve even tried to use their price list search – but to no avail. Isn’t it a bit of a give away that if you need a search engine for your price list, you’re possibly going to be confusing the customer.

Interestingly, for the first time, BT have listed Skype on their pricing structure on the press release. Welcome to the future BT.

If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, and fancy trying to extract pricing information, you can have a look at the BT Together site.

Vodafone 3G On Apple MacBook Via USB

Well they got there finally, Vodafone UK have announced that they’re releasing the less than catchy named Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem in the Autumn. It will support their 3G data service and, surprise, surprise, connect to computers using a USB lead. Rather neatly the software disks aren’t needed, as they’re installed directly from the modem.

This advance will broaden out the service to any machine that doesn’t have a full sized PCMCIA/PC Card slot because it’s too old, or it’s too modern, like the some of the new laptops which only support the smaller ExpressCard, or their Apple Macintosh’s that might not support either.

Connection to the HSDPA network, in optimum conditions, will be a healthy 1.4Mbps receive and 384Kbps transmit. Currently Vodafone high-speed 3G network covers the major conurbations in the UK, but not the whole of the UK. Their stated plans are 75% of the population by summer 2007.

There will be a suggested limit of 1Gb of data transfered a month. Those who do not comply “may be asked to moderate their usage,” and persistent usage in excess of the limit “may also result in suspension or termination of the customer’s service.”

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns?

Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? BSkyB results for the last year were broadly in line with predictions, but seasoned watchers of all things financial, recognise tell-tale signs of a flattening of the growth curve. The company has managed its spend on programming well, but technology costs remain high, with significant outgoings on expensive High Definition equipment, that won’t bring instant revenue returns.

Sky, as the company brands itself in the UK, looks increasingly like a utility platform-come-broadband wars‘ that are unlikely to see any great financial gains for those taking part.

As Telcos have become drawn into offering entertainment packages to make their own offerings ‘sticky bundles’ – that their customers are loathe to detach themselves from – the entertainment companies are forced to provide competing phone and broadband packages, along with the capability of on-demand TV downloads. This won’t be cheap, as Sky has already found to date with its Easynet purchase, and may prove to be more expensive, if they decide to acquire the UK AOL subscribers from Time Warner.

Sky’s average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) has dropped by £4 and along side this they’re facing stiffer competition from Freeview, the UK Digital Terrestrial platform. Freeview now has a free-to-air movie channel (Film 4) and is due to add two further entertainment channels provided by the UK channel ‘Five’ this autumn. Cost-conscious multi-channel homes will continue to gravitate to this low frills platform.

Sky, like pay-TV services worldwide, has a high churn rate, although its managed to reduce this, it remains somewhere over 10% (that’s the percentage of subscribers over the past year who ended their subscriptions). Achieving this has been costly with increased promotional spend and marketing offers to keep current subscribers signed, which has in-turn hit the bottom line.

James Murdoch the CEO of BSkyB told the corporate world that “Our industry is changing faster than ever before and for Sky, 2006 has been an important and exciting year.”

With the NTL/Telewest /Virgin mobile merger and its re-brand starting to gather traction, it looks like Sky can look forward to even more excitement in 2007.

AOL’s Steve Case Sorry for Time Warner Deal

AOL's Steve Case Sorry for Time Warner Deal Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, now ex-chairman of AOL-Time Warner, has said he was sorry for the merger between AOL and Time Warner. It is widely regarded as a deal that didn’t go very well, leading to internal wrangling and huge amounts of money being knocked of share values.

In an interview with well known US journalist, Charlie Rose, Case said he still believed the ‘idea’ of bringing together Time Warners content and broadband infrastructure, RoadRunner, with AOL digital expertise was right.

He resolved that “Ultimately it comes down to execution,” and that in this case that hadn’t been successful. Case said he missed the ‘power’ to execute what he thought was right.

When questioned further about it, Case then refered to his current company, Revolution, saying that they will only enter into agreements where they have a controlling interest, so they can “Take a long term view.” We take this as implying that this wasn’t the case when dealing with Time Warner.

When Rose asked him straight, “Was it a good idea, or not?”, Case gave a half smile and then laughed, trying to avoid a direct answer.

AOL's Steve Case Sorry for Time Warner Deal When pushed, Case said from the point of shareholders of the two companies, employees & customers – it didn’t go as he’d hoped, it had been a disappointment and a source for frustration. Given the wide range of those included by Case, we don’t know who else might be disappointed who wasn’t included.

Given the stark choice of, “Sorry, Yes or No?”, Case said, “Yes I’m sorry I did it.”

Watch the video. The section relevant to this story starts at 30 minutes in.

Google Video: Advertising Sponsorship

Google Video: Advertising Sponsorship Google Video has been serving videos to the Internet population for over a year and a half now, both paid download via their Video Store.

Today, when researching a story, we noticed that they’ve also brought in a third model – sponsored playback, a new one to us. Never let it be said that given an opportunity to raise advertising dollars, Google aren’t at the forefront.

Above the video being played back is a banner containing the logo of the advertiser (in this case HP), a couple of lines of advertising copy and a couple of links.

How the financial on this works isn’t clear, but we’d assume that the owner of the contact will receive some payment from the sponsor, via gogole, for each video that is watched, in a similar way that the record companies get paid a small number of pennies when a people play their artists music on a monthly music subscription service.

One interesting feature is that the video is still available for purchase, as the version that is shown is at a lower quality than the for-sale version. Google call the for-free version Preview, although for our purposes, retrieving information from the programme, this is all that we’d need. You could see that other types of programs would benefit from higher resolution.

Google Video: Advertising Sponsorship Clicking on Watch their Ad link opens a new browser session and plays the video advert from … Google Video. All very neat.

It is interesting to note that the cost from Google, in this case 99c, is significantly less than the price when purchased from Charlie Rose’s own site, which is available on DVD or VHS at at least $30.

What is powerful about this rendition of advertising with video content is that the brand is associated with the content, in our case a well known and respected US journalist, and the viewer is given the opportunity of watching the content. They aren’t forced to watch it, as we commented about at the end of the recent review of GoTuit, and are they given the opportunity to stop watching it whenever they feel like it.

Example of Google Video being sponsored by an advertiser.

US Stays Top Of The Spam League

US Stays Top Of The Spam League Once again, America remains firmly rooted to the top of the league of spam-relaying nations, accounting for a hefty 23.2 per cent of the world’s unsolicited email during the second quarter of 2006

Lurking close behind with a 20 per cent contribution to the global spam total is China (inc. Hong Kong), with South Korea in third with 7.5 per cent.

However, the figures from IT security firm Sophos reveal that both China and South Korea have managed to reduce their spam output since the first quarter of the year, unlike the US which has failed to reduce its spam for the first time in over two years.

Botnets of zombies. Aaaieee!
Sophos explained that the vast majority of the spam tracked by the company was relayed by botnets of ‘zombie’ computers hijacked by Trojan horses, worms and viruses, controlled by devilish hackers.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos commented that the introduction of the 2004 US Can-Spam legislation in 2004 had resulted in a regular quarter-on-quarter drop in the proportion of US-based spam, Until now, of course.

“Given the number of arrests, and the huge fines dished out to guilty spammers, it is hard to criticise the US for failing to take action, said Cluley.

“Perhaps the reality is that the statistics cannot be reduced any further unless US home users take action to secure their computers and put a halt to the zombie PC problem,” he added.

Eurospam
When it comes to spam-per-continent, Sophos found Asia the busiest around, but noted that spam relaying in Europe continues to grow.

Europe collectively accounted for 25 per cent of the world’s spam in the first quarter of 2006, a figure that has now increased to 27.1 per cent, overtaking North America in the spam spreading league.

Ruski controllers
There may be no sign of Russia in the “dirty dozen” of steeeenkin’ spam-relaying countries, but Sophos reckons there’s still ’nuff bad boys to be found, claiming that Russian spammers may be controlling “vast networks” of zombie PCs.

US Stays Top Of The Spam League Embedded spam
Spams containing embedded images have seen a huge rise this year, leaping from 18.2 per cent in January to 35.9 per cent in June.

Using images instead of plain text lets spammers bypass some anti-spam filters that weed out spam by analysing the textual spam content.

Pump and dump
Sophos reckons that 15 per cent of all spam emails are now ‘pump-and-dump’ scams, up from just 0.8 per cent in January 2005.

We’ve suffered a ton of these scams which are designed to boost the value of a company’s stock in order for spammers to make a quick profit

“It is worrying to see so many pump-and-dump emails, often with embedded graphics, being spammed out to the general public,” commented Cluley.

“The people that act on these emails are not skilled investors, and do not realise that purchasing the shares is likely to reap no reward, benefiting only the spammers while creating a financial rollercoaster for the organisation in question,” he added.

Although we sympathise with his words, you’d have to be madder than Jock McFruitloop wearing jelly trousers to even consider buying any stocks recommended by these emails.

The Bad Boy tables

Spam relaying countries, April to June 2006:
1. United States 23.2%
2. China (inc. Hong Kong) 20.0%
3. S Korea 7.5%
4. France 5.2%
5. Spain 4.8%
6. Poland 3.6%
7. Brazil 3.1%
8. Italy 3.0% new entry
9. Germany 2.5%
10. United Kingdom 1.8%
11. Taiwan 1.7%
12. Japan 1.6%
Others 22.0%

Spam relaying continents, April to June 2006:
1. Asia 40.2%
2. Europe 27.1%
3. North America 25.7%
4. South America 5.5%
5= Australasia 0.7%
5= Africa 0.7%
Others 0.1%

Sophos

India Embracing Advertiser-Funded Programming

India Embracing Advertiser-Funded Programming It’s not just computer programming and call centres that are being outsourced to India, it now appears that advertising and research on advertiser-funded programming is moving there too.

As the public gains more control over their media due to digitisation, we all know that traditional advertising takes a knock.

The massive Interpublic Group, which includes the advertising agency McCann-Erickson, is creating an Emerging Media Lab in India under one of their companies, Lodestar Universal.

It will not only have the now-inevitable ‘this is what the house of the future’ setup within it, but will be applying all of those highly-educated brains to studying the affects of these medias on individuals and try to apply some matrix to them.

India Embracing Advertiser-Funded Programming Lodestar Universal CEO Shashi Sinha told Television India, “We are in the process of building up a credible measurement system for consumer behaviour in the activation, films and retail space with the launch of the Emerging Media Lab in India. Consumers today are involved in multiple activities at the same time and hence there was a need to churn out some mechanics to measure it.”

Sinha is very optimistic about the future of branded entertainment giving the example of paint manufacturer Nerolac, who are shifting their advertising spend by “starting allocating 20-25 per cent of their spends to the branded entertainment space.” He believes this will shift over the next five years to half of their spend.

Those in the West would do well to gain an understanding as deep as our Indian cousins appear to have.