Services

Service offered

Skype On-The-Fly Translation Service Introduced
Skype’s new Language Line Personal Interpreter service claims to make it easy to “talk instantly to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, regardless of language.”
Sadly nowhere near as cool as Star Trek’s Universal Translator, Skype’s new offering uses human translators who can collectively offer on-the-fly translation services for more than 150 languages.
The service comes courtesy of a partnership with Language Line Personal Interpreter Services and promises to make it easier for businesses and individuals to babble in tongues to each other over VoIP for just $2.99 per minute.
Subscribers to the service can take part in online conferences with up to five other Skype users with a live Language Line Services interpreter doing all the translation stuff.
The new service, which uses Voxeo’s Prophecy voice platform to automate the process of transferring the call from Skype to Language Line Services, will be available around the clock, with costs being automatically charged to the caller’s SkypeOut account.
Saul Klein, vice president of marketing at Skype, whipped up the PR froth: “Language Line’s Personal Interpreter Service greatly enhances the Skype experience for our growing multilingual customer base.
“Our consumers can now use the Skype technology to easily communicate in the languages their customers and friends prefer to speak,” he added.
In the multinational corporate world, there’s certainly big bucks to be earned from translation services, as Louis Provenzano, senior VP, sales and marketing, Language Line Services, noted:
“Every day, virtually all Fortune 500 multinational corporations, and businesses of all sizes around the world, depend on Language Line Services to assist them in communicating with their customers in their own languages.”
Personal Interpreter Service” for Skype
15 May, 2006
Google Splashes 4 New Tools
Google took the opportunity of their annual press briefing at the Googleplex to inform the assembled hacks of four new applications. The theme they were trying to push was ‘honest we _are_ a search company.”
In no particular order, the new apps are …
Google Notebook
Yet to be launched, but supposed to be making an appearance next week. Used when you skip around Web sites and want to gather bits and pieces from them such as text, URLs and graphics. These will then be stored online and you can choose to make them available to others.
Google Trends
Ever wanted to have access to the information that Google gathers on all of the billions of searches that flow through their simple search box? Yes, you’re not alone, we’d love to as well. This is the closest that Google is going to let you get to it. Type in a search term and you’ll get a plot of how popular the term has been with peaks highlighted on particular news stories.
There’s also a feature to compare two search terms, our favourite so far being good vs evil (glad to see good winning). Breakdowns that can be further explored are cities, regions and languages.
Google Co-op
Adds user knowledge to the power of Google’s search engine. Individuals or companies will add their particular knowledge to sites or searches that they share with people who subscribe to them. Those who you do subscribe to, will appear in your google search results.
This is what we’d long imagined. It’s an expansion of the idea of blogging where people gather knowledge and share. Could become the most significant announcement of the set, marking the next stage in search.
Google Desktop 4 & Google Gadgets
Not surprisingly the fourth release of this app that indexes all of the content on your machine, including what you get up to online. When this first came out, we realised that Google had beaten Microsoft as they’d become the way to locate your document on your PC, side-stepping Windows Explorer.
Everyone and their wife appear to be knocking out different versions of Apple’s Dashboard or Desktop Widgets. For examples Yahoo bought Konfabulator (arguably ‘the original’) and then gave it away to the Yahoo-faithful.
Like Yahoo, Google are making them programmable, so code-fanatics will be able gain global fame.
Either this is a me-too product, which is pretty unlikely, or one step further into Google taking over Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop, by placing apps on the desktop.
Google Trends
Google Co-op
Google Desktop 4
12 May, 2006
Judge Harry Edwards Attacks FCC Broadband Wire-Tap
EFF-fans and electronic freedom groupies have a new poster boy who comes from an unlikely profession. They’re normally attracted to open-source code-a-holics, or white hat hacker, but this one’s a judge.
On Friday, Judge Harry Edwards tore a few strips off the associate general counsel, Jacob Lewis, representing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He was one of three judges at a hearing of the federal appeals court, investigating whether the US government have the same right to tap VoIP phone conversations as they currently have with ‘normal’ phone lines.
The quotes that Reuters are reporting are pretty choice. In a response to hearing their arguments, he replied, “This is totally ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re making this argument.”
He didn’t stop there, later letting them have it with both barrels.
“Your argument makes no sense,” Edwards told Jacob Lewis, an associate general counsel with the FCC.
“I’m sorry I’m not making myself clear,” Lewis said.
“You’re making yourself very clear. That’s the problem,” Edwards replied.
Wow, that is cutting.
The ride wasn’t so rough from the other two judges, with the second, David Sentelle, appearing to side with the FCC, especially for Internet phone services. The last, Janice Brown kept her thoughts to herself.
We await the T-shirts flooding the market.
FCC
EFF
8 May, 2006
Yahoo Tech Shopping Site Launches
Search engine big-boys Yahoo have unveiled a shopping site for consumer electronics backed up by expert advice and user-contributed reviews.
Shoving their size nines into a market long dominated by CNet Networks, the new Yahoo! Tech shopping and advice Website will offer hundreds of thousands of products with user ratings and reviews.
Spod-free advice, no anorak required
Yahoo is hoping that by offering a site free of the spoddy techno-jargon of gadget enthusiast sites, consumers will warm to their no-nonsense, straightforward approach.
“What we are trying to do is to make it simple to choose and use the technology that is easiest to use,” said Patrick Houston, general manager of Yahoo! Tech, formerly editor in chief at CNet.
“We built Yahoo! Tech for people who might not have the time nor inclination to learn about bits and bytes,” he added.
The magazine-style site will use Yahoo’s tried and trusted community tools to help users find information about products and prices and share their opinions with friends, family and other consumers.
Using an attractive and simple interface, products can be sorted and filtered by price, brand and expert rating with the option to compare online prices for the best deal.
Where consumers are looking to spend money, advertisers are always ready and willing to slap up enticing banner ads, and Hewlett Packard, Verizon Wireless and Panasonic have already signed up.
Content
Yahoo will be populating the site with content from “trustworthy publications from around the Web who may or may not be official content partners,” as well as their own staff editors and writers, and Yahoo! users.
A weekly video clip called ‘Hook Me Up’ will dish out ‘geeky wisdom’ to haul heel-dragging technology Luddites into the bright electronic age, aided by Yahoo’s ‘Emergency Makeover Technicians.’
The company is also reported to have licensed reviews from the “Dummies” series of How-to books, Consumer Reports, PC World and PC Magazine.
The new Yahoo! Tech is currently focussed on the U.S. market, with Houston saying that there are no imminent plans to expand into other countries.
http://tech.yahoo.com/
2 May, 2006
Skype Scoops Up EMI Music Deal
Uber music giants EMI Music Publishing have announced a deal with hotshot VoIP upstarts Skype to sell music on Skype’s new retail website.
Skype’s new international digital music service will make tunes from EMI’s hefty catalogue legally available on a worldwide basis.
When it comes to songs, EMI – the world’s largest music publisher – has tons of the puppies (we’re talking over a million copyrights), including drunken karaoke favourites like ‘New York, New York’, ‘Singing in the Rain’ and ‘Over the Rainbow.’
The deal includes downloads, ringtones and subscriptions, with EMI Music Publishing being employed as a music consultant for the new service.
The deal is significant as it’s the first major online music deal to be agreed on a global basis – previously, music retailers had to laboriously license songs individually on a country-by-country basis.
Roger Faxon co-CEO of EMI Music Publishing was ready and willing for some Monday morning gushing, dishing out the kudos to Skype, EMI and composer royalty collectors the MCPS-PRS Alliance for their help.
“We could not have better partners than Skype and MCPS-PRS in our ongoing effort to break down the barriers of online licensing of music. EMI is committed to bringing the best music in the world to all the consumers of the world and this deal is a major step in fulfilling that goal,” he gushed.
Skype is yet to set a launch date for its new online store.
Skype
EMI Music Publishing
24 April, 2006
Google Calendar Finally Launches
Search giant Google has announced a free, Web-based ‘shareable’ calendar service called, appropriately enough, Google Calendar, which allows users to post up events and share them with others.
Calendar owners can send out invitations to their chums and keep track of their responses and comments (like, “Bog off weirdo – we’re not coming to your party”).
Conveniently, friends can still receive and add responses to your invites even if they don’t use Google Calendar themselves.
A neat ‘Quick Add’ feature uses Google’s clever-clogs technology to understand phrases like, “Dinner at the Old Scrote And Hounds with Tony, 1.30pm Saturday” and automatically slap it in the right place in your calendar.
Gmail Integration
Gmail can also recognise events mentioned in emails, letting users add events without leaving their Gmail inbox.
Naturally, you can search your own calendar, with Google adding the ability to search public calendars to look for interesting events to add to your own diary (like Cardiff City FC fixtures, for example).
Powered by Javascript and XML, the calendar offers support for Microsoft IE 6.0+ and Mozilla Firefox 1.07+, although users will need JavaScript and cookies to be enabled for the calendar to work.
Based on open calendar standards, events can be imported from popular programs like Microsoft Outlook and Apple iCal, while schedules can be viewed by any external application or device that accepts iCal or XML files.
Taking on Yahoo!
Although Google is offering compatibility with Yahoo’s popular calendar service (events can be shared between the two services), there’s no question that they’re looking to move in on Yahoo’s patch.
In fact, Google have added a whole page explaining how users can migrate their entire Yahoo! Calendar to Google Calendar, which suggests that things might get a little lively between the two services soon.
Google Calendar
13 April, 2006
Carphone Warehouse To Offer Free Broadband?
Carphone Warehouse are going to stir up a hornet’s nest in the telecoms industry if they go ahead with rumoured plans to introduce a free broadband package in the UK.
According to the Sunday Times, the company is expected to offer the public “free” broadband as part of their Talk Talk landline package.
Backed by a huge advertising budget, the promotion is seen as part of Carphone Warehouse’s strategy to elevate their Talk Talk brand into the leading consumer alternative to BT Group.
Carphone Warehouse’s current tally of 75,000 broadband customers puts them miles behind big boys BT Retail and NTL, who boast a mighty 2.3m and 2.8m customers respectively.
Not us, Guv.
At the moment, the company are denying everything about the new free service, although an announcement is expected on Tuesday.
Some industry experts believe that Carphone Warehouse are looking to repeat the soaraway success of fabled freebie ISP Freeserve, who came out of nowhere to overtake BT in the late 90s.
Up until now, Carphone Warehouse have been hampered by having to resell BT’s wholesale broadband product, but a hefty £60m investment will see the company having its own broadband gear in up to 1,000 BT exchanges – potentially reaching 70% of the population.
PR spin-mesisters at Carphone are thought to have christened their broadband campaign “Independence Day”, based on a feeble pun that it will give customers independence from BT.
Some are suggesting that the tag has greater significance, insisting that it reflects the proposed launch date for the new broadband deals – July 4, America’s Independence Day.
Talk Talk
Carphone Warehouse
10 April, 2006
Two Million Brits Use VoIP Services
New research reveals that around two million Brits have used VoIP packages to place calls over the Internet in the last 12 months, with the figure expected to double by this time next year.
Analysts at Continental Research conducted a poll of 3,000 UK adults using VoIP and discovered that Skype was the preferred tool of choice for 48 per cent of users.
In second place was Microsoft’s MSN Messenger boasting a fifth of all calls, with Vonage and BT trailing miles behind at 6 per cent each and Wanadoo barely visible on the horizon at just two per cent.
Punters seem happy with the service, with most saying that they will increase or maintain usage over the next year, with only 1 per cent planning on using VoIP less.
Sound quality was the most common complaint with 29 per cent citing dissatisfaction with what’s reaching their lug’oles.
Mulling on the findings, James Myring, the associate director of Continental Research, told The Independent newspaper that by being early to market, Skype has enjoyed a big “first mover” advantage.
He noted that BT has huge potential to roll out VoIP to customers on a large scale, but warned that, “it will be concerned about losing market share from its fixed line business. For BT, it might be a case of compete or lose.”
Protecting the VoIP future
Elsewhere, the University of North Texas is leading a project to look at ways of protecting VoIP services from voice spam and network attacks like DoS, as well as looking into issues concerning network quality and emergency services access.
The $600,000 (£344,000) investment looks to develop a secure, geographically distributed test bed to seek out VoIP vulnerabilities before the “damage is done.”
Unveiled by the National Science Foundation, the three year security audit will also be used to sniff out potential security holes arising from running VoIP over conventional phone networks.
With VoIP being aggressively marketed, one recent study estimated that some 24 million US households will be hooked up to VoIP services by 2008.
10 April, 2006
Google Releases Toolbar v2 for Firefox
Google is launching an upgrade to its toolbar for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, adding enhancements to the search box and an antiphishing feature.
Google Toolbar 2.0 will now offer suggestions on the fly for narrowing queries and correcting spelling – great news if yore speling esn’t up to muuch.
The all-new, turbo-charged search box also remembers previous query terms inputted by a user – as well as bookmarks – and serves them up as query suggestions, with a handy drop-down menu letting users select which part of Google’s empire to search.
The new release includes feed integration with the Google Personalised Homepage, with the toolbar automatically detecting Web content available for subscription, and a click of the “Subscribe” button taking users to their preferred feed reader.
Pheck Off Phishers
To help battle against pesky phishers, the upgraded Firefox toolbar includes Google’s Safe Browsing extension.
Previously an optional add-in, this feature warns users when they innocently roam onto Websites that could be a phishing trap, with Google using clever-clogs advanced algorithms and reports about dodgy pages to flag up the iffy sites.
Gmail users should like the new feature that opens mailto: links on webpages straight into a compose window in Gmail – no need to copy and paste emails off Webpages.
“We’ve made searching better by including previous queries, spelling corrections, and suggestions for popular choices”, a company employee purred on the Google Blog.
Google blog
Toolbar 2.0 features
7 April, 2006
Google Increases US Search Dominance
After reporting Google’s huge dominance of the UK search market, new figures reveal that it also looks set to grab a gorilla-sized chunk of the US search market.
According to the latest statistics from ComScore Networks, Google is increasing its lead over rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, with its US domestic market share soaring to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent in the same period last year.
While the vintage champagne corks popped (or water, if we know Google’s public modesty) in Google’s San Francisco’s offices, it was Woodpecker cider for the fading stars at Yahoo who saw their market share slump to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago.
Elsewhere, Microsoft’s MSN share of the search market tumbled down to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent , while Time Warner’s America Online saw their popularity ebb in a downwards direction, falling to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.
Only the newly rebranded Ask.com could muster any cheer, with the Jeeves-less company seeing their share rising to 6 percent from 5.3 percent.
Analysts reckon that that Google could be on an unstoppable roll, with RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan commenting, “We see little to stop Google from reaching 70 percent market share eventually; the question, really, comes down to, ‘How long could it take?”
Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine predicted that, “Google’s increased market share and better monetisation of queries will lead to an increased share of ad dollars relative to competitors in the first half of this year.”
Fine also said that Google’s clear strategic focus on search will continue to give the company a competitive edge in the coming months as leading competitors “struggle” to improve their search platforms.
Microsoft fightback
Although Google looks to be running away with the search market, things may get interesting later in the year when Microsoft roll out their new Live.com search and Windows Vista and IE7 packages.
“Microsoft is making a business and technology transition that could affect search in the short term. The company has placed its bets on long-term gains,” commented Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox.
“Strangely, Microsoft seems to deliver best when the pressure is greatest. So, Google gains might actually benefit Microsoft over the long haul,” he added.
29 March, 2006