CampaignTV Launched By Labour Friends

CampaignTV LaunchesWith rumours of a possible election in the UK, we wonder if there’s a co-incidence that one of the Labour parties media strategist has launched a Web site called CampaignTV.org, whose major focus is on politics.

Don’t expect too much balance in the politics on offer, but they’re not hiding that away either. In their words, “CampaignTV is the first free to view, independently-owned Labour-supporting internet TV channel.” That’s fair enough, as there’s plenty of pro-Conservative Web site around.
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Joost Goes Public: Comment

Joost Goes Public: CommentWe’ve been watching Joost since the days it was The Venice Project.

Well yesterday it left its invite-only beta stage, opening up for all to sign up. Given the large interest we saw in people wanting to sign up for the Joost beta when we offered it, we imagine that the take-up will be strong.
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Radiohead Tell Fans: “Pay What You Want”

Radiohead Tell Fans: Pay What You WantRadiohead have long been known as a band who like to do things differently, and their approach to selling their long-awaited seventh studio album certainly breaks new ground, with fans invited to pay whatever they like.
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BBC Vision Goes Multi-Platform. For Real This time?

BBC Vision Goes Multi-Platform. For Real This time?The BBC is to bolster multi-platform commissioning. “Again?” I hear you cry.

Do you remember back as far as 2002 when Ashley Highfield, then Head on New Media at the BBC, was telling everyone who would listen … or write about him … that the BBC wouldn’t commission any new programmes unless they had an interactive media element built into them?
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NXP: Shaping The Future Of Digital Media: Podcast: IFA

NXP Nexperia PNX5100: HD TV 2 Is Coming: IFA 2007If you want to know where consumer electronics are moving, there’s no better place to find out than via the people that make the chips that will power these devices.

One that came into being last year that really impressed us last year at IFA was NXP, a spin-off from Philips, essentially what used to be their chip R&D division.
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One Billion PCs In Use By The End Of 2008

One Billion PCs In Use By The End Of 2008The number of personal computers in use around the world will exceed one billion by the end of next year and grow to a mighty two billion by the year 2015, according to a report by a leading market research firm.

Forrester Research’s new paper, “Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast, 2007 To 2015,” calculates that the world will be clattering along to the sound of a billion computer keyboards by the end of 2008, hitting two billion in 2015.
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Attention: A Cure For Information Overload?

Information overload is a buzz phrase which has been getting a lot of use recently. It refers to the enormous amount of information which we now consume (largely because of the level of accessibility to content which the Internet gives us), and the challenges that that creates. Another important issue is the Long Tail, as recognised by Chris Anderson, and the way that relates to content. In other words, there is now far more information available which makes discoverability much harder.

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Yahoo Mail To Go Unlimited

Yahoo Mail will be upping the ante in the Web-based email market.

Yahoo Mail To Go UnlimitedThere’s been back and forth between Yahoo and Google, following Google launching Gmail with an at-the-time world-shattering 1GB of storage back in April 2004.

To mark their 10-year web-mail birthday, Yahoo are proposing giving people unlimited storage for their email, quite a step up from the 4MB that they launched with.

To put some numbers to the escalation of the demands for email, David Nakayama, Yahoo’s group vice president of engineering, points out that in the early days, Yahoo’s “total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

Yahoo Mail To Go Unlimited

Now don’t expect all of this to be available today, as even Yahoo’s mighty mass of server farms might buckle under the demand. Instead they plan roll it out gradually over the coming months.

Don’t go thinking that you’ll be able to use your Yahoo mail account to hold all of your data, Yahoo will have anti-abuse limits in place to protect users, the details of which are currently unclear.

Many of us at Digital-Lifestyles swear by Gmail as our email package of choice, but we’ve hit the 2.8GB limit a few times of late and if Google don’t make the jump to copy Yahoo’s infinite offer, that may be enough for some of us to jump over to Yahoo. So come on Google.

Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery

The Kendra Initiative is hosting a Cross-Media Summit about Content Delivery next week, on Friday 9th March in London.

The full day event, running at the Frontline Club, is billed as “The Strategy, Technology and Business Case for Content Description, Visibility, Search and Discovery.”

The event is aiming to tackle one of Digital-Lifestyles hobby horses – In a sea of infinite content, how do you, as a willing content consumer, locate the content you want to use? As Peter Buckingham, Head Of Distribution and Exhibition, UK Film Council puts it, “The biggest threat is obscurity.”

The approach of this free-to-attend event is from the content owners perspective, looking at what is the weakness of current metadata standards; if they can be adapted to work better; if not, what is the appetite for more metadata standards for cross-media description?

Metadata standard are all very well, but often live within a bubble of non-implementation. The need for metadata-creation tools and how to persuade the industry to use them will also be covered.

We spoke to Daniel Harris (mug shot above), founder of Kendra, “It’s all about making things work, making the open marketplace work together. We’re really pleased to see how many people are coming along to it, creating a universal meta data.”

“As with all industries that involve connecting people, some people [involved in this] gain from there being a problem, but people are seeing that they can work outside their industry sector. This is a cross-industry problem that we’re trying to solve.”

So far around fifty people have signed up including representatives from important players such as Patrick Attallah, CEO, ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number); Keith Hill, Head of R&D, MCPS-PRS Alliance; Mark Stuart, Principal Engineer, Pioneer Digital Design; Iain McNay, Board Member, AIM (Association of Independent Music) and Chairman, Cherry Red Records; Rich Lappenbusch, Director, Microsoft Entertainment and Board Member, DDEX (Digital Data Exchange).

Being tech driven, those not able to physically attend will be able to hook in via Instant messaging and Skype.

The event will be free and sponsored by Makeni.

Kendra Initiative Cross-Media Summit for Content Discovery