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24/24 Video By Orange France Gets Paramount Deal
Orange France have picked up a deal with the US studio Paramount Pictures, to distribute their content in France.
It’s not just old content that will be available, but new productions from Paramount including DreamWorks titles, which will be among the latest films available.
Orange France customers with a broadband digital television package or a High-Speed Internet package will be able to enjoy a Video-On-Demand programming schedule including the studio’s latest releases, such as Mission Impossible III, Over the Hedge and World Trade Center, among others.
There’s over 2,500 films, in French or original language versions with subtitles, available on the 24/24 Video service currently, which costs from 3 Euros to rent for 24 hours. Usual features such as unlimited viewing, pause functions and fast forward and rewind are available.
12 April, 2007
Google Developer Day Announced
All of you budding code-aholics take note, Google is hosting ten Google Developer Days in their various offices around the world on 31 May.
They’re going to have workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Google have been running a few of these already with much smaller capacity. A few have happened in Silicon Valley and a couple in London that we’re aware of, but this is on a much bigger scale.
The program is being headed up by code-fan pin-up girl Marissa Mayer, who’s Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. She was one of the first 20 people to join Google (just imagine her stock options!) and the first female engineer hired by them.
They’re rolling out some of their top talent to get the code-kids hot under the collar. Get ready for this …
Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing); Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London); Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid); Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit (Mountain View); Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View); Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps senior engineer (Sydney); and Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).
The subjects they’ll be covering also sound pretty enticing. Here’s a cross section, “Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp,” “Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, Open Source and Other Developer Initiatives” and “Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets and the Google Data APIs.”
What does Google get out of this?
Google’s going to be lashing all of their cash, time and resources on this, so what’s driving them?
Well, people become more familiar with how to write programs to use their applications via the published API’s, which means the potential for extra advertising income for Google.
That’s all well a good but more importantly, Google get to spot the hottest programming talent around the world and can in turn try to persuade that talent to join the Google gang. Meaning Google ends up with the best programmers, not their competition.
Smart, eh?
Locations
- Mountain View, California
- São Paulo, Brasil
- London, United Kingdom
- Paris, France
- Madrid, España
- Hamburg, Deutschland
- Москва, Россия (That’s Russia to you)
- Tokyo – Japan
- Sydney, Australia
- Beijing,China
Those who can’t make it don’t need to be left out, Google will offer live streaming webcasts from its Mountain View office and provide a YouTube™ channel with videos of Google Developer Day sessions around the world.
Google Developer Day
11 April, 2007
Joost v0.9 Out: Grab Your Name Quick
There’s a new version of Joost just out today – v0.9 – and amongst the changes, is the switch from using an email address to login to using a username.
Any of those who were slow getting on the Skype-train and ended up with a crummy username take note, you need to act fast to get your name of choice.
To add to the pressure of this, Joost are also giving an extra five invites away to each Joost Member, so the names are disappearing fast.
What else is different with the new version?
The first thing you’ll notice when it starts up is that it now opens in full screen.
The ident has been moved from its previous dominant central position to the bottom right hand corner. The upcoming programme name has now taken its place now middle centre.
There’s been a little fiddling with the icons. Of particular note is the design and function of the one to the right of the channel name. It still brings up the programmes that are available on the channel, but it now has a back button that takes you to a menu of channels – logical really.
Content rating also appears to have been added – or perhaps I haven’t previously looked at any content that needed rating.
Picking The Prodigy, Smack My Bitch Up (Live), I was met with a screen asking me to confirm that I was indeed over 18 (quite why it was needed to see this is anyone’s guess). Interestingly the muted video appeared to run in the background, while I was working out exactly just how old I was.
Those of you who have been watching the development of Joost, will notice that the adverts are getting just a little bit longer and more corporate. The latest addition appears to be an advert for IBM notebooks, while it is visually interesting (for the first viewing), it’s hardly cutting edge funk-ville.
The only downside we’ve found so far is that it crashes – not something that we had a problem with in Joost or The Venice Project before.
Ooo … and we’ve seen there’s a promo video up on the Joost site too (new to us). It’s here below for your delectation.
[QUICKTIME http://static.joost.com/videos/joostvideo.mov 320 240 false true]
Joost
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
Complete My Album Launched By Apple iTunes
As is often the case, there’s been rumours circling for a long time about the possibilities of Apple launching an add-service for iTunes, to give credits for tracks purchased.
Today they’ve announced it’s for real. The new Complete My Album will give iTunes users 79p credit per track for each track on an album that they decide to purchase, if they’ve bought the tracks individually first.
To illustrate, a user who’s already purchased three 79 pence singles and decides to buy the corresponding £7.99 album would be able to download the remaining songs to complete the album for just £5.62, without having to pay for the same tracks again.
Well done for Apple for launching this, but frankly, it only seems right anyway.
There’s two caveats. Customers only have 180 days from the purchase of the first track to buying the whole album, and it doesn’t looks like it’s going to be all albums as they’re referring to “qualifying albums.”
The music industry don’t really have an option in increasing the likelihood of punters buying more music from them. Complete My Album is just such a offering. As to whether people will be tempted into buying those extra tracks from the album, that they purposely didn’t buy when they were originally buying the track is quite another matter.
29 March, 2007
Yahoo Mail To Go Unlimited
Yahoo Mail will be upping the ante in the Web-based email market.
There’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.”

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.
29 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
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
GodTube Jumps On YouTube’s Tails
It will be interesting to see if the now-formidable legal department of Google drops a letter to a new site, GodTube that apes their YouTube video service.
GodTube, you won’t be surprised to hear, shows videos that praise god. It’s yet to launched, with the expected out-of-beta date being 1 May.
Looking at the site, loving god doesn’t necessarily mean that you observe the rights of those who have gone before you. The less-than-coincidental name similarity isn’t the only thing that will remind you of YouTube. GodTube also closely-mimics the general look and feel of YouTube.
Similarities don’t end there, they even stretch to the GodTube strapline Broadcast Him, only a small adjustment from YouTube’s Broadcast Yourself.
Listening to GodTube’s CEO, Chris Wyatt, speaking on Fox News, he claims to have “come up with the idea for GodTube” when he was attending a seminary in Dallas. Quite what the idea he came up with he didn’t elucidate, but if it was “I know let’s copy YouTube, but call it GodTube,” we’d hardly call it an idea.
Wyatt is keen to tell everyone about how well it’s doing, claiming that within 60 days it was the most-trafficked Christian stream video site on the Internet. His ambitions don’t appear to stop there, as if they continue at this rate, Wyatt claims they “will become the most trafficked Christian Web site on the Internet.”
By trafficked, we assume he means the amount of bits that they shift. As they’re putting out video (the most bit-laden content format available), his claims start to sound significantly less impressive.
One area GodTube differs significantly from YouTube is in how open they are in showing the videos of those who want to upload content to their site. YouTube doesn’t put a human filter in the way, understanding that given the number of videos that are uploaded, it just isn’t realistic.
GodTube may struggle with their approach, suffering a plague of videos rather than the mythical plague of locusts. They’re going to pass all submitted content through two manual filters – real people. The first will check if it’s presentable to the public, the second to ascertain its Theological implications!
Here’s a little sample. It’s only a minute long, but will give you an indication of what to expect. Get read for an explanation of a banana. We kid you not.
23 March, 2007
Mac OSX Support For USB Polycom Communicator On The Way
One of our limited number of gripes (thinking about it, it was the only one) we had with the Polycom Communicator was that it was only supported on the Windows platform.
We mourned the lack of Mac and Linux support. Given that all Polycom needed to do was write a driver or two to get it running, we were disappointed that there was no movement on this yesterday.
We got in contact with a Little Bird that’s connected to the company, and after some goading, we heard that Polycom _are_ working on the missing USB drivers. They came close to assuring us that the Mac support should be available this year. There was a lot less certainty about the Linux support.
We want to stress that there’s no official word on this as yet, but we’ve got reasonably high confidence in our source.
Vista Stinks
A point of interest. When we tried to install the Communicator on Windows Vista we found that there wasn’t a driver available for Vista as yet (frankly not a unique outcome with Vista).
22 March, 2007