Sony BMG Music Entertainment has announced that it intends to add copy-restricting software to its latest CDs.
The software is designed to limit consumers to making no more than three copies of a CD, and marks Sony’s determination to bolt on restrictions to a twenty year-old music format that currently makes copying and digital distribution a breeze.
This year has already seen more than two dozen copy-restricted titles released – including albums from the Backstreet Boys, the Foo Fighters and George Jones – and Sony has flagged its intention to beef up their anti-copying campaign.
Rival US companies haven’t been too impressed with the restrictive software thus far, saying that the software was too easily defeated and that working versions did not allow consumers to transfer music to portable devices and music players as freely as the industry would like.
Instead, they’ve been badgering Apple Computer to amend its software and “make its technologies compatible with copy-prevention tools”.
A major sticking point is that the restrictive software used by Sony BMG is currently incompatible with Apple’s popular iPod.
This doesn’t affect Apple computer users – they can freely copy and transfer music from the restricted CDs to their iPods – but consumers using Microsoft’s Windows software won’t hear a note, although they will be able to transfer music to Windows Media-supporting devices.
Thomas Hesse, president for global digital business at Sony BMG, said Apple could “flick a switch” to amend its programming to work with the restrictive software.
“It’s just a proprietary decision by Apple to decide whether to play along or not,” Hesse said. “I don’t know what more waiting we have to do. We think we need to move this forward. Time is ticking, infringement of intellectual property is happening all over, and we’ve got to put a stop to it I think.”
Analysts suspect that Sony is playing to the gallery a tad here, seeing as a Web site set up by the company will happily despatch emails to users explaining how they can unlock the CD’s software and make music files available for unlimited copying and transferring.
Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2, summed up the move by Sony BMG by describing it as a “very interesting public negotiation”.
A report by compilers Mintel International has revealed that pets are being ousted by consumer electronics in British homes. 
The study observed that, “In those families with children, the demand for pets may not be as strong as it once was, since many children now prefer to immerse themselves in the world of computer games and TV programmes”. 
But it’s not all bad news for our precious pampered pooches and treasured tabbies, with the report revealing that sales of pet food, accessories and pet insurance have rocketed by 24 percent in the past five years, reaching a total of US$6.5 billion. 
With the rise of home entertainment robots like the Sony Aibo and the forthcoming Nintendo virtual pet game, Nintendogs (where virtual dogs will respond to voice commands and bark at passing Nintendog consoles), we wonder how long it will be before children think that pets live on batteries. 
US scientists have created imaging technology that lets viewers enjoy what they claim to be the first truly three-dimensional holographic movies. 
Made by Texas Instruments, these clever puppies are currently used in television, video and movie projectors and incorporate a computer that processes an incoming digital signal several thousand times a second. 
If you look at interferograms on a PC screen, all you get is a series of random black dots creating an effect that looks a bit like a telly on the blink. 
Emerging blinking from their underground laboratories, the overworked boffins at Samsung have announced the creation of the SGH-E620 Bluetooth voice recognition phone which is a Bluetooth mobile with – you guessed it! – voice recognition technology. 
Vodafone has made their service more alluring to international business travellers by cutting roaming charges on their 3G data networks. 
According to analysts Gartner, the new prices demonstrate that operators are currently charging too much; “This is a sign that mobile operators are starting to recognise they charge too much for roaming data services,” they added, as your writer’s head nodded vigorously in agreement (while making snarling noises in the direction of T-Mobile). 
Gartner noted that with Vodafone only selling sold 300,000 3G data cards since launching the 3G data network in January 2004, the company is hoping that the reduced roaming charges will boost this figure. 
BT has unveiled a smarty-pants phone designed to integrate landline and mobile phone technologies. 
BT Fusion is part of the company’s strategy to lure back customers wooed by mobile telephonic temptresses touting cheap calls. 
“The future will be convergence”, insisted Livingstone. “This is going to be a market that grows fantastically over time even though it might take a while to get going. We still expect many millions of converged handsets by the end of the decade.” 
Calls to landlines originating in the home will be ratcheted up at BT’s regular rate of 5.5 p (10 cents, €0.08) for up to an hour. 
Frontier Silicon have announced the “world’s first multi-standard, multi-band mobile digital TV chip set”. 
In a fug of industry-speak, Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier Silicon, told the Broadcast Asia Conference in Singapore, “We strongly believe that regulatory, spectrum allocation and installed infrastructure issues could considerably slow down the deployment of MDTV worldwide. With our experience in developing pioneering semiconductor solutions for digital broadcasting, we recognised this as a company early on and deployed resources to develop multi-standard ICs. Our aim is therefore to remove this barrier by quickly introducing a solution, and we are on course to introduce our Kino 3 solution in 2006”. 
Korea is expected to see commercial MDTV services based on DMB rolling out during 2005, with the UK and Germany following in 2006. 
In a veritable orgy of mobile manufacturing, Nokia has launched a grand total of seven new handsets, including a dual camera 3G device and their most feature-rich CDMA phone yet. 
The 3G multimedia-tastic 6280 is a compact WCDMA/EDGE sliding handset sporting a 320 x 240 pixel screen, a 2 megapixel camera (with a VGA front camera for video calls), a removable mini-SD card and a built-in FM radio. It’s expected to appear on the shelves in the fourth quarter 2005 for EUR375. 
“The growth prospects on the CDMA front are extremely encouraging. The CDMA market is expected to grow at pace with the overall handset market and the global CDMA handset volume is expected to increase by 10 to 15 percent year-on-year in 2005,” he said. 
The last of the slider phones is the 6111, which has more than a passing resemblance to the hugely successful i-mate JAM phone, although the screen is much smaller at 128×160 pixels. The camera contains a 1-megapixel camera and 6x digital zoom and retails for around EUR270. 
On the same day that Nokia went forth and multiplied with seven new phones, rivals Sony Ericsson announced four new handsets, aimed at increasing its presence in the low end and mid-market sectors. 
There’s 32MB of memory space on the phone for shunting on ringtones, wallpapers, still shots and video footage, with a built in music player and FM radio taking care of multimedia. 
The S600 comes with 64MB of onboard memory, but sadly, there’s no memory card on offer – presumably it’s been left off so as to not compete with the higher spec’ed K750 model. 
Flipped open, the twin-display phone offers a 1.8″ 128 x 160 pixel, 65k colour, TFT main screen, supported by a 101 x 80 pixel, colour secondary display on the outside. 
These days, a smartphone/PDA isn’t worth sniffing at unless it comes with a built in camera and a shedload of internal/external memory for storing mobile snaps on. 
When you install the Pocket PC program, there’s also an option to install the Resco Album Generator on your desktop PC – this program lets you create photo albums ON your desktop and then have the pictures and the album information transferred to your handheld device on the next sync. 
In full screen mode, the keypad can be used to scroll through picture collections manually, or users with tired fingers can set up a slide show and choose from a selection of transition fades and effects. 
