Good to hear that Pace Micro, veteran UK supplies of technology, have signed another deal to supply Sky with Set Top Boxes.
Pace tell us that in their latest round of contract awards from Sky, Pace has won additional Digibox business for the 2007 financial year.
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BT are to offer those who sign up for their Business Broadband Voice service – VoIP to you and me – an option of having a local phone number connected to it. At a charge, naturally.
BT is calling the service “Geographic Numbers”, ie what you’d normally have if you had a landline phone line from them.
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The BBC is set to unveil a “significant” move into the videogames market, according to a report in The Scotsman.
The Corporation – still smarting from the humiliation of being caught out ripping off viewers taking part in TV phone-ins – is expected to unveil their new gaming strategy next week at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival.
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Text to Speech (TTS) processing has come on leaps and bounds from the early days of jerky, rough renditions of robotic-type chatter yesteryear.
A lot of the quality is truly amazing – very life like – but it appears that some systems still really doesn’t know how to deal with jokes.
Just now a friend (I assume) sent me an SMS joke, but sadly they misdirected it to my landline, not the mobile.
BT have a service in the UK where text messages can be sent to landlines and read out over the phone.
So you all have the joy of listening to the joke, I recorded it, just so you can enjoy the flat humour of it.
I found it took a couple of times of listening to it to actually understand what the joke was!
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/tiger-woods-joke.mp3]
As we’re not fans of football, we’re constantly amazed at how keen people are to watch the game that involves people kicking a pig’s bladder around an oblong section of grass. Ho, Hmm.
Never one to not take the opportunity of cramming more football into people lives, Sky TV has teamed up with a load of other ‘newspapers’ owned by media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to create 24-7 Football.
It’s a new on-demand service that will offer video highlights and goal clips from the Barclays Premier League and UEFA Champions League on mobile phones.
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The BBC Dr Who Spin-off, Torchwood, set and shot in Cardiff, Wales, has been sold to US TV network HDNet.
We popped off to the Firebox “Xmas in July” do last week and we saw loads of goodies that they’ll be bringing out between now and christmas.
The first that we’ll bring to you is the Ion Tape2PC. We all know about the Ion Audio USB turntable and how popular they’ve been.
Not one to stay still Ion have now moved on to capturing other digital media.
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Yesterday the UK’s Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) demanded sites such as YouTube to be closed, for encouraging CyberBullying.
Proposed by Kirsti Paterson at the national conference held in Harrogate, the motion was “Conference deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour.”
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BSkyB has agreed terms to buy set top box maker Amstrad in a £125m deal.
The two companies have already been working together for several years, with Amstrad supplying around 30% of Sky’s set top devices – with those orders making up a hefty 75% of its business.
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Sky have announced, in the presentation of their final year accounts, a joint venture with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe to offer PSP owners in the UK and Ireland a content download service.
Saying that PSP-owners can “turn their devices into personalised on-demand video libraries,” will be a big boost for the PSP UK-side, where Sony claim that there’s 2 million of the blighters.
The start date has been pencilled as “early 2008,” making it the first in Europe. With delivery to the handheld via wireless or PC-connection, it’s that expected content such as “sports, entertainment, movies, music and animation,” will be available, interestingly from “both Sky and 3rd party channel partners.”
Sky is being really prolific in distributing its content (apart from Virgin customers :) ), arguably better at it than the BBC – whose have a specific remit to do so.
Financial terms were not disclosed.