UK

Play Bestival: Learn Ukulele Via MySpace
Our Sister site, Ventnor-Blog, has been scooping the world with announcements of who and what will be appearing at the amazing, manic extended weekend that is Bestival.
Besides the now-known amazing acts of The Beastie Boys, Chemical Brothers, a whole slew of talented ladies, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble and many others will be appearing.
The latest mold-breaking announcement of today is that willing punters, will themselves be able to play on stage at this coming Bestival, if they’re willing to pick up a ukulele and learn to play it.
That’s all very lovely, but what’s the relevance for Digital-Lifestyles? Well, the innovative way that enthused Uke holders will get up to speed on the required songs is via MySpace.
The whole jolly lot is being organised by the venerable Dulwich Ukulele Club (background) through the Night of 100 Ukes’s.
On there, in the lead up to Bestival, will appear details of the songs, the lyrics that need to be learnt and the cords that need to be sweated over in pursuit of Ukulele-nirvana.
The majority of preparation through practice will be done in the privacy of Uke-ers homes, but besides the planned rehearsal at “a central London pub” in August, Who knows, they might even choose to use Skype to Live to have remote practices.
We’re going to keep an eye on this one, both in our personal pursuit of Uke-ism and to watch how this MySpace-driven mass learning works out.
Night of 100 Ukes’s MySpace
Bestival
Bestival Latest News
4 April, 2007
Over Half Of UK Adults Have Home Broadband
Industry body Ofcom has published its Digital Progress Report, the result of taking a long goosey gander at current trends in the UK broadband industry up until the end of last year.
The report found that half of all UK adults live in broadband-connected households, up 11% from 12 months ago and a hefty seven times increase from 2002.
Folks connected to broadband lines are getting good use of it too, with 63% of adults using it daily, while 30% went online at least once a week.
Video content was viewed by 51% of adults with broadband at home, with 26% watching video clips every week.
Over two thirds (70%) of broadband-connected adults bought products or services online, and over half had carried out banking transactions.
Broadband users were found to spend on average 9.1 hours online per week, over double the amount of people still connecting via screechy modems in dial-up.
Although just under half of users had no idea how fast they were connecting to the Internet, the report put the average headline connection speed at 3.8Mbps (up from 1.6Mbps in 2005).
Voice over IP (VoIP) services like Skype have seen an increased take up, with one in ten adults making calls over the Internet, double the amount compared to the end of 2005. Of those using VoIP, 14% said they were making calls daily with a further 30% making calls several times per week.
Bundling
Bundling was found to be an important factor for consumers choosing their ISP, with 40% of all adults with broadband at home using other communications services from the same provider.
Wi-Fi
Ofcom found that just over a fifth (21%) of of all UK adults owned a Wi-Fi enabled laptop in February 2007, with a third of that total using public hotspots to access the internet. The amount of available public hotspots was counted at around 12,000 in September 2006, up 32% from the previous year.
Mobile Internet
The report found that despite one in three UK adults saying that they owned an Internet-enabled mobile phone in February 2007; only half had ever actually used the thing to go online.
It seems that a ‘lack of need or interest’ put off the majority of users (43%), with cost the second reason (31%).
Ofcom
3 April, 2007
Avoid Corporate Coffee Chains With The Delocator
If you travel around the UK a lot and find the homogenisation of High Streets into identical rows of bland coffeeshop multinationals a deeply depressing experience, you may find delocator.org.uk the perfect site for your needs.
Bearing a passing resemblance to the ‘store locator’ seen on the Starbuck’s site, the delocator lets you type in a UK post code and find the nearest ‘non corporate cafe’ near you, with a drop-down menu for selecting the distance range to search, from 1km to 15km.
The site’s still in early days and because it relies on users to input recommended cafes, the coverage isn’t as complete as it might be, but the author told Digital Lifestyles that he intends to add more functionality ‘in the Spring’ (he’s also asked for help in running this site – contact him here.)
Despite this, we still managed to find two non-corporate cafes within a 1km of us, with the results displayed in a text box containing a description of the cafe and address details, accompanied by a zoomable Google map.
Delocating the world
The first Delocator website started up in America, tasked with “assisting the public in finding and supporting independently owned cafes” and proved a great success, with over 5000 independent cafes across the States being inputted by users.
The site encouraged other activists to create their own delocator site using a downloadable toolkit, with a second site being set up for Canadian users, delocator.ca, with the UK site now being the third of what may turn out to be a multinational anti corporate franchise (now there’s a concept!).
With Starbucks promising to open a new branch every fortnight for the next decade in the UK, we reckon local, independent coffee shops need al the help they can get.
Free Rosey Lee in the East End
Elsewhere, Starbuck’s shiny new store in Whitechapel in the East End of London found itself the subject of an unusual protest last week by those cheeky scamps, the Space Hijackers.
Setting up a stall and dishing out free fair trade teas, tasty home made sandwiches and delicious cakes to passers by, the protesters hoped to illustrate “what the area will be missing if Starbucks and their ilk are allowed to settle in.”
Naturally, the urban75 website went along to lend their support (and scoff some tasty banana cakes) – see their photo report here
2 April, 2007
VBox: Virgin Free TV DTT Launched By Virgin Media For Non Cable Customers
Virgin Media has ramped up the availability of its quadplay (broadband, phone, mobile and TV) services beyond its cable franchise network with today’s announcement of a new digital TV service.
Using the digital terrestrial television platform (DTT), Virgin will be offering a new set-top box to lure customers with the promise of over 40 free-to-air TV channels and over 25 digital radio stations, an eight-day, Virgin branded, on-screen TV guide, interactive content (via the trusty red button) and plug ‘n’ play installation.
Perhaps cocking a snoot to Sky’s energy-scoffing box, Virgin say that their set top box will offer low power consumption and use just 1/15th of the energy of a standard 60W light bulb (we could work that out as a percentage for you, but it’s still Monday morning).
The box is a wee little puppy too, measuring up around the same size as Ye Olde VHS tape (19cms by 9cms) and comes with a remote control and a nifty remote control extender so you can still use the remote if the box is hidden away somewhere.
Virgin will be dishing the boxes out for free to any non-cable customers subscribed to their twenty quid 8 Meg broadband and Talk Anytime phone bundle, or there’ll be a £40 charge to non-cable customers taking a broadband service on it’s own.
Philip Snalune, managing director of non-cable (bit a duff job title that, no?) at Virgin Media, said:
“Launching a basic TV service into non-cable areas enables us to expand availability of our quadplay of broadband, phone, mobile and TV. This is just the first step and our aim is to offer more advanced TV services in all areas throughout 2008.”
Virgin Media
2 April, 2007
BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3G
The BBC are going to start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones within the month.
Three UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.
As well as the TV channels, eight radio stations will also be included – Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.
Appropriately enough the announcement by Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, was made at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress.
The BBC haven’t done a great deal of content on mobiles, not that they’re not keen on it, as you’ll be able to tell from the comments of Richard Halton, “The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.”
They hope to learn lots from this trial, as Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC said, “The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC’s future mobile strategy.”
We’ll keep our eyes on this.
30 March, 2007
Ofcom To Regulate VoIP In UK
Ofcom have just announced a new regulatory code for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service providers operating in the UK.
With predictions estimating that there could be as many as three million VoIP users in the UK by the end of this year, Ofcom clearly felt it was time to set some base rules for the industry to adhere to.
They’re broadly divided in two – prescribed information to tell the consumer before they sign up and once they have signed up, making them aware of the limitation of their access to the emergency services.
For a long time the lack of solid emergency (999) number access has been used by the incumbent telecos to try and stem the growth of VoIP. Their argument? If someone calls 999, there is no assured way of telling if that person is calling from Basildon, Birmingham, or Beijing, as the handset just needs to be on an IP connection, to attached to the end of a specific piece of wire, like a landline is.
Before June 2007, all VoIP providers will be required to make it clear :-
- whether or not the service includes access to emergency services (some operators may choose not to provide any support at all);
- the extent to which the service depends on the user’s home power supply (Standard telephones are powered by the phone line itself, where as Broadband services require external power to a number of different boxes to function);
- whether directory assistance, directory listings, access to the operator or the itemisation of calls are available; and
- whether consumers will be able to keep their telephone number if they choose to switch providers at a later date. (This is known as number portability, and would seem reasonable to offer, given it is standard throughout the rest of the telecoms markets).
If a customer decides to sign up for a VoIP service, the provider has additional obligations around emergency calls:-
- secure the customer’s positive acknowledgement of this at point of sale (by ticking a box, for example);
- label the capability of the service, either in the form of a physical label for equipment or via information on the computer screen; and
- play an announcement each time a call to emergency services is attempted, reminding the caller that access is unavailable.
29 March, 2007
UK PS3 Price £100 Below Retail On eBay
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.
26 March, 2007
Information Revolution Fails To Attract Popular Support
Readers in London may have noticed in the past couple of weeks, posters on the tube and elsewhere advocating an ‘Information Revolution’, in response to the fact that one company allegedly controls 80% of the information on the Web. No more information is given, but the ad suggests a visit to information-revolution.org to find out more.
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.
I didn’t think any more about it until a storm erupted on the blogosphere a few days later. Ask guilty of astroturfing! screamed the headlines. The search engine had launched a deceptive marketing campaign (astroturfing because of the attempt to impersonate grass roots activity – get it) without disclosing that they were behind it. Finally getting round to looking at the campaign Website, I discovered a blog, including a post on why the ‘revolution’ had been forced to ‘go underground’:
The regime supporters are telling us to “advertise” the features we have, rather than wage an underground revolution. If only we had a choice! Everyone knows that: A) you have to try a feature to really understand it, and most people have been brainwashed that they don’t need to try another search engine’s features and B) advertising doesn’t work anymore!! That’s why we had to go underground.
Not to mention the factually inaccurate statement that the Internet is 15 years old – the world wide web is 15 years old. The Internet, as we all know, was born well before that. But we can’t blame them for the mistake, because, apparently ‘The Red Bull ran out at 1am on Saturday, so this post may not make much sense!’
My encounter with this revolution, which will inevitably result in a world changed forever in about a week’s time, was last Saturday evening, when a nice man from Ask offered me a free badge and a T-shirt in Covent Garden, from a peculiar-shaped trailer. I declined the gift, although I was very tempted to make my evening out more exciting by making use of their free Internet access inside the trailer. I was interested to see, however, that they had responded to the blogosphere by plastering an Ask logo on the trailer. Maybe the revolution felt that it was gaining enough momentum to come out into the open.
I didn’t tell the nice man from Ask this, but I have a suggestion to the revolution which I will tentatively put forward here (although those nasty spies from Google might also pick it up); build a better product. The route to market domination is not through silly campaigns where no-one can work out what is being advertised, but through making a product which is such an improvement over the existing market leader that people are prepared to switch. A departing thought; if Ask does manage to build a better product, and become the new monopoly, I wonder whether they will continue to advocate using search engines other than the most popular?
26 March, 2007
Ofcom Announces Premium Rate TV Inquiry
There’s been three weeks of hoo-har in the UK about television stations using Premium Rate Telephone Services (PRS) to extract income from the phone-willing programme viewer. Whole TV channels have been stopped in the process.
Ofcom has just announced that it will be carrying out an inquiry into the whole area.
It sounds like there’s going to be a few feathers ruffled. Viewers and a range of other stakeholders have raised serious concerns with Ofcom regarding apparent systematic compliance failure on the part of a number of broadcasters, whose actions appear to contravene existing consumer protection rules.
Hearing how serious this is, does give clues as to why the TV stations acted so swiftly in suspending the availability of their PRS.
Many have criticised some UK broadcasters for creating programs whose sole driver appears to be collecting as much money as possible from the viewers.
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.
The fragile relationship between TV viewer and the TV stations appears to have been damaged further by the PRS announcements over the recent weeks.
Ofcom Chief Executive, Ed Richards said: “Widespread concern about the use of premium rate telephone lines by broadcasters and editorial standards in those programmes has raised serious questions about trust between broadcasters and viewers.”
The scope of the inquiry includes
- Consumer protection issues and audiences’ attitudes to the use of PRS in television programmes;
- The benefits and risks to broadcasters in the use of PRS in programmes;
- The respective compliance and editorial responsibilities of broadcasters, producers and telecoms network operators and others involved in those programmes;
- The effectiveness of broadcasters’ and telecoms operators’ internal compliance procedures, guidelines and arrangements to ensure compliance with Ofcom and ICSTIS codes;
- The inquiry will also propose recommendations on actions necessary to restore confidence and trust.
Ayre expects to report his findings to the Ofcom Board and the Content Board by early summer.
22 March, 2007
HDForAll Pressure Ofcom on HD Freeview
On the day after news of the date of the first English town to start to go full digital on the delivery of TV, we’re reminded by HDforAll that Ofcom currently doesn’t have plans to set aside any of the freed up frequencies for HDTV usage.
Despite a successful trial run in London during 2006, where HD was delivered over Freeview, the only available ways currently to watch HDTV is via Sky satellite or cable.
One of the major reasons that the UK Government, and in turn, Ofcom is so keen for transferring everyone from the current analogue TV service to digital, is that it will free up large swathes of frequency. Ofcom’s plans are to auction this, and other frequencies off to the highest bidder, as we’ve covered a couple of times.
Not wishing to be left out of the HD world, the BBC are also keen to not just rely on Freeview delivering HD and to this end the BBC Trust have been given a provisional Yes for a FreeSat service capable to deliver their HD.
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 Ofcom’s site.
The public appear to be behind having HDTV on Freeview, nearly 5,000 have signed an e-petition (now closed) and there’s another one urging that
spectrum be made available for citizen and community uses – a la open access cable in the US.
A survey carried out at the end of last year, also found that the vast majority of people, no matter what platform they use, want HD to be available on Freeview – 96% of Freeview, 91% satellite and 92% cable users.
HDforAll
Ofcom’s Digital Dividend Review
16 March, 2007