Software – Page 26 – Digital-Lifestyles

IGF: Independent Games Festival 2007

Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

The CMP Game Group established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers. They saw how the Sundance Film Festival benefited the independent film community, and wanted to create a similar event for independent game developers.

The competition, now in its 9th year, awards a total of over $50,000 in prizes to deserving indie creators in Main Competition, Student Competition, and Mod Competition categories at the IGF Awards Ceremony, which will be held the evening of March 7, 2007 at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA, and is one of the highlights of the Game Developers Conference.

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Games Gone By: A history of video games – GameOn

Game On exhibition, Science Museum, London

Most people think that video gaming starting in the 1970s and 1980s with classic games such as Pong, Space Invaders and Pac-Man, but the real story of video games goes back even further. Come along and discover the machines, the people and true stories behind the birth of the games industry as speakers from the International Game Developers Association delve deep into gaming’s past.

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Video Games: Look of the future – GameOn

Our computers and consoles have an amazing amount of processing power, creating realistic lighting, textures and characters. How is this done and are there limits to what can be re-created on a screen? Discover, with Dr Chris Doran of Geomerics, what the games of the future will look like.

Held at the Science Museum.

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Xbox 360 outsells Wii And PS3 in US Over Xmas

Xbox 360 outsells Wii And PS3 in US Over Xmas It truly was a battle of the consoles this Christmas, with big-hitters Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony all looking to set the Yuletide cash tills ringing.

According to analysts at the US research firm NPD, Santa’s bags were mostly straining with Xbox 360’s over the festive period, closely followed by the Nintendo Wii, with the PS3 trailing in third place.

Preliminary findings from NPD revealed that the Xbox 360 outsold both the Wii and the PS3 in the US, with around 2 million Xbox 360s shifted between the start of November 2006 and Christmas.

Xbox 360 outsells Wii And PS3 in US Over Xmas
Not far behind was the eagerly awaited Nintendo Wii which registered 1.8 million sales, while the PS3 could only muster a mere 750,000 Stateside sales.

According to NPD, these figures represent a huge leap from November’s figures which saw 511,000 Xbox 360s, 476,000 Wiis and 197,000 PS3s flying out of the stores.

It’s worth noting that Nintendo’s Wii didn’t launch in the US until 19th November – nearly three weeks behind the Xbox 360 – with the first batch of stock reported as selling out in hours.

Xbox 360 outsells Wii And PS3 in US Over Xmas It was a similar situation in the UK, with Nintendo Wii’s near-impossible to find in the shops (yes, we were looking too and someone’s still waiting for their Christmas present!).

One of PC World’s flagship stores in the West End told Digital Lifestyles that their consignment of Wii consoles went almost as soon as they came through the door, although we noted no shortage of XBox 360s in the store.

NPD is expected to release the complete figures for December later this month.

NPD

Sidekick 3: UK T-Mobile Launch

T-Mobile U.K. Launch T-Mobile Sidekick 3 T-Mobile UK has announced the launch of the T-Mobile Sidekick 3, the number one accessory for users who can’t get enough of email and instant messaging on the move.

Already a huge hit in the States, the pocket-filling 131mm x 59mm x 23mm (5.2″ x 2.3″ x .9″) Sidekick comes with a flip out display which displays a full QWERTY keyboard and a large 65k colour, transflective TFT display supporting a 240×160 pixel resolution.

Sporting a trackball that lights up like a Christmas tree, the phone also packs a 1.3 Megapixel digital camera with LED flash and a media player for MP3 playback, supported by a mini-SD card slot for storing up to 2GB of music and party photo files.

T-Mobile U.K. Launch T-Mobile Sidekick 3 Jet-setting socialites will appreciate its tri-band support (850/900/1800MHz), enabling them to keep up their vital text messaging on both sides of the pond, with EDGE offering extra nippy Web surfing.

The phone offers MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger connectivity, with support for up to 10 simultaneous active IM conversations. Perfect for teenagers!

T-Mobile U.K. Launch T-Mobile Sidekick 3 The GSM Sidekick also comes with Bluetooth connectivity 1.2 for wireless headsets and vCard transfer and 64MB of SDRAM/64MB Flash memory.

The Sidekick is being offered with T-Mobile’s excellent web’n’walk unlimited data tariff for £7.50 per month in addition to a voice plan.

T-Mobile
Sidekick 3 (hugely over the top Flash promo site)

The Venice Project: Overview

The Venice Project: Overview The rumours of Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark next project have been whirling around for about six months since sold Skype to eBay for $2.6Bn, the two are focusing their talents on TV with The Venice Project.

To date, the pair and their team have had a lot of success in disrupting industries. They’ve had a pop at the music business with Kazaa, the telephone business via Skype and now the television business. Time for the TV world to take note.

This weekend, the Financial Times has picked up on the story, re-igniting the media interest.

The Venice Project (TVP) employed their first programmer on 1 January 2006, so have had nearly a year to get the software to the point where it’s ready to be noticed. The beta release came out on 12 December and since then they have a reported 6,000 on the beta program.

The Venice Project: Overview

We suspect the FT piece was part of a carefully-managed media campaign, as TVP will need to start attracting the advertisers that will support the content being show for free to the users of TVP.

What does TVP do?
On their blog, the TVP team outline their desires/drivers for the project. The founding idea – TV isn’t good, so it needs fixing.

It’s not Skype TV as some publications have reported.

TVP is headquartered in Leiden in The Netherlands it also has other offices in Toulouse, France; London and New York. Its CEO is Fredrik de Wahl, and it looks like they’ve built up quite a few employees.

The Venice Project: Overview

The FT are reporting it will carry “near high-definition” programmes, while TVP speak about TV-quality.

We’ve seen some screenshots of the service and, even despite its early beta-stage, it looks pretty slick. The video runs in full screen, with a high quality image being shown. Additional content and EPG features are laid on top, with the video still viewable underneath.

Content for the beta-trial is coming from some pretty big names in the media business including Warner Brothers.

The adverts that are shown on the service, allow it be free. We understand from one of the beta testers that the adverts are not too intrusive and pretty short.

The Venice Project: Overview

It’s not just the P2P
On a simple level, TVP is software that enables the delivery of video content to individuals using P2P to ease the distribution, while radically reducing the price of getting it out there. Indeed most of the mainstream media are focusing their attention on TVP using P2P.

We think this misses the biggest change the TVP could bring about. Recommendation and tagging of content will make the content findable – one of the biggest headaches when the worlds content is available to a viewer.

Once programmes have been selected to watch, we understand that there will be tools to let people discuss the shows as they are going on – thus bringing a community around the TV shows. There are add on services that offer this, but its inclusion as an integral part of the system will make it second nature to contribute to.

It appears that TVP will avoid the need to apply DRM to the content as “the bits and bytes being collected on your computer are fragments of a stream,” as Fredrik de Wahl, the project’s chief executive told the FT. We can see that there is logic behind this, but doesn’t address the fact that, for the programme to be shown, they need to reside on the machine while they are being shown. In truth, all that needs to be achieved with the technology is to pursue the content owner to put their content on it.

The Venice Project: Overview

The Venice Project is definitely one to watch. We hope to get on the beta program soon, to give you a more in-depth view and understanding of its impact.

The Venice Project TVP

Images courtesy of Choose Chris

DRM-Interchange Alive And Living In Korea

DRM-Interchange Alive And Living In Korea As we’ve been covering for ages, Korea is super forward in many things electronic.

Now they’re leading in their treatment of DRM – making different DRM schemes interchangeable.

DRM systems are used to restrict what people can do with their digital media, normally audio and video. This pleases the content owners considerably, but consumers are finding it frustrating that media they are buying on one service will not play on all of their portable music players – eg music bought on iTunes cannot play on a non-iPod player.

By making DRM system interchangeable, the hope is that everyone remains happy – the content owner, because the content stays ‘protected’ by the DRM and the consumer because they have the freedom to move it to any playing device they have.

DRM-Interchange Alive And Living In Korea The Koreans are achieving this by the EXIM standard for online and mobile music service. EXIM stands for Export/Import which was developed Korea’s Electronic & Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and INKA Entworks. It should be wide reaching as up to 90% of online music sites and 70% of portable music devices deployed in Korea at the moment use DRM solutions based on the EXIM standard.

What differentiates the Korean mobile music market is that all phones sold since 2003 have a USB connector, which is used to transfer music they download via their computers, to their mobiles. This is sometimes called sideloading.

DRM-Interchange Alive And Living In Korea SK Telecom, the largest mobile provider in Korea as finally agreed to open up their handsets and service to allow music from third party services to be used. Until now only content authorised by SK could be loaded onto their phones.

James Ahn, CEO of INKA Entworks, was clearly excited at the prospect, “SK Telecom’s decision to implement the EXIM standard is an important milestone because of its dominant position in the mobile phone services and online music services markets. We’re happy to have SK Telecom as a partner.”

ETRI
INKA

YourMinis Review:Ajax Homepages Explained

YourMinis Review:Ajax homepages Explained What are Ajax homepages?
Examples of some of the ideas behind the new spate of Internet applications, described by those in the know as Web 2.0, include Ajax, RSS, aggregation and user generated content. Most types of applications tend to choose just one or two characteristics of Web 2.0, but if there is one space which typifies the approach of the new Web, it is Ajax Homepages.

The companies behind them, want you to set them as your browser homepage, and they each provide a multitude of ‘widgets’ for you to drag-and-drop onto your homepage, updating you on incoming email, latest items in RSS feeds you are watching. These widgets can also work as mini programs, providing functionality from calculators to free sending of text messages. The early releases came from Google (who decided to go out on a limb, naming theirs the Personalised Homepage), Netvibes and Pageflakes. In this article I want to give you a quick rundown on why I think Ajax homepages are becoming increasingly important and what challenges they face if they want to become successful.
YourminisThe best way to do this is probably through a case-study of my favourite Ajax homepage, yourminis. It’s actually inaccurate to call yourminis an Ajax homepage, since it is built with Flash, a different Web technology. That doesn’t matter, because what I’m really interested in here is what one might call the ‘ideology’ of these Web 2.0 homepages rather than the underlying technology.

When you first visit yourminis, you are given a page with default ‘minis’ (their word for widgets). These include a Digg module and a YouTube module, amongst others. It is possible to add more minis from an impressive selection that includes a calendar, an email module, the iTunes chart and an MP3 player. Yourminis is aiming to become a place where you can pull in information from all round the Web from the sites that interest you, and be able to quickly see what is new since you last opened up your browser. If you’re into photo sharing site Flickr, you can see the latest photos from there. You can set it up so that the latest posts from Digital-lifestyles appear.

There are so many possibilities, and that’s the whole point. No-one uses the web in exactly the same way, and so what yourminis and the applications like them are trying to do is to allow you to create your own personal portal, far more flexible than the attempts of the last Web revolution, such as MyYahoo, which was hard to customise and offered far less content in the first place.

YourMinis Review:Ajax homepages Explained

A feature that I particularly like about yourminis is the ability to publish pages that you have produced, so that your friends can see them. You could use it for research, or a more colourful example used by Goowy’s CEO, Alex Bard, is a page dedicated to a favourite band, with the latest news about them from various fan blogs combined with album art, all with their music playing in the background.

So, now you know why you should use a product like yourminis, but what does the future hold for them? A key challenge faced by providers of these Ajax homepages is monetisation; users would undoubtedly react badly to any attempt to plaster banner ads, or even contextual text links, onto their page that they have created. This was one of the questions I asked Goowy’s CEO when I interviewed him recently, and his approach to the monetisation of yourminis involves ‘value added revenue generation’. An example of this might be the affiliate revenue earned by yourminis when a user buys something from ebay using a mini on youminis. Around the biggest players (particularly Google), an ecosystem of third party developers producing widgets for the service is developing. As this happens, and the process of developing widgets becomes easier, the flexibility of the systems can only increase.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!