Category: Wireless

Wireless connections

First European “Over the Air” Music Download Service Launched

mm02, UK cellular provider, have launched the first European “over the air” music download service.

To use the service, prospective customers must buy a separate music player, the “O2 Digital Music Player” (O2 DMP), which connects to the online service through their mobile phone, either via an Infra-red port or a short cable. Once connected via GPRS, they are able to browse the selection of music, preview tracks and then purchase them. Previews are not charged for and take around 20 seconds to start to play, but when a track is bought, it is downloaded to the device, which takes around 3.5 minutes, the customer will be charged £1.50 (~$2.55, ~€2.15). While it does not look like good value when compared with what is the current industry standard of 99c, mm02’s Kent Thexton claimed the price “fantastic value for money, for less than the cost of most ring-tones customers can purchase and own an entire chart track”.

Siemens designed the DMP on behalf of mm02 and will also run the DRM-protected content aggregation and platform hosting.

The music is encoded using a CODEC called aacPlus, a combination of MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ SBR (Spectral Band Replication) technology developed by the German company, Coding Technologies. They claim the compression can reduce the size of audio files by up to half. Given the limited bandwidth available on cellular networks, it is important that the files are as small as possible.

A wide range of handsets are compatible with the service, meaning that at launch, more than 1.2 million O2 customers can access this service.

The music content is being supplied by BMG, Universal, AIM and Warner Music and it is hoped that up to 100,000 tracks will become available.

Once downloaded, the music is stored on a 64MB SD Memory Card that slots into the device. Tracks can be played back on the O2 DMP or transferred to a PC using the Memory Card but will remain locked with their DRM. The DMP can also play back MP3’s

mm02 are hoping for a good take up as in a previous trial of 300 UK and German customers, an average of five tracks per user per week were downloaded.

mm02

Coding Technologies – aacPlus

Satellite Broadband for Ethiopian Including its Schools

Ethiopia Telecom, the now-private incumbent telco in Ethiopia, has signed a $25m deal with Hughes Network Systems to deliver broadband data services countrywide. This deal follows closely on the heals of a similar deal with ChinaCast, to provide the same, Direcway broadband satellite network service.

As wireline communications around the country are far from comprehensive, Tesfaye Biru, managing director of Ethiopia Telecommunications Corporation commented, “Satellite is the only solution that allows us to provide digital, always-on, reliable service no matter where our customers are”.

One of the first Ethiopian projects is the creation of a national distance learning network, SchoolNet, connecting schools across Ethiopia. Biru says “The DIRECWAY broadband satellite solution allows Ethiopia to expand its national commitment to provide quality education to all our students by reaching our 28.7 million school age children nationwide with the latest in educational tools.”

A valiant pursuit, but given their low level of funding and lack on consistent electricity supply, it is not clear what equipment will be at the receiving end of the signals at the schools. But with the right backing and support, this method of providing widespread education could potentially change a countries future.

They plan to begin network installation in June and are scheduled to complete by year end 2004.

Nokia N-Gage Games Possibly Cracked

The world of introducing convergent devices is a tricky one. Following on the heals of their combined music player/mobile phone, Nokia launched their mobile phone/music player/games machine, the N-Gage, in October and its has been a shaky start. Before its launch, lots of people were less than positive, and following it, the reviews have not been great.

Despite Nokia claiming to have shipped 400,000 units to retailers, the number of customer sales is thought to be low. This has lead to some discounting, to the point where it was available for 1 pence in the UK, if you took a particular service contract out with it.

Nokia will be following the business model for other games platforms, sell the box for a minimum margin (or try to minimise your losses), then make your money in the medium to long term on licensing games for the platform. The same theory as razors and razor blades. Clearly this model only works if you sell the games as well.

Nokia will not like the latest news. A Swedish hacking group claim that they have got around the protection system that ensures that N-Gage games only play on the N-Gage. They have showed photos of the some N-Gage games running on a Siemens SX1, it’s not clear if these are mock-ups or real.

If true, the impact is far reaching. Games written for the N-Gage will run on any phone running the Symbian operating system and according to Symbian, over 2.68 million handsets were shipped with their OS in the first half of 2003.

The damage does not stop with them only losing sales of the N-Gage hardware, but that once the games have been extracted from the N-Gage and are stored digitally unprotected, people will be able to download them – not have to buy them for between $35-$40 each.

SX1 playing N-Gage games – Screen shots

BT to Sell Content Through Street-located Kiosks

BT have joined up with a partner, Ringtones Online, to offer ringtones, graphics and games for mobile phones. Potential customers will be able to freely browse a dedicated website on the street using the BT Internet Kiosks, then select, preview and purchase their choices. Payment can either be by inserting cash directly into the machine or electronically using credit card, text or by calling a premium rate phone number. Customer will pay £2 for the content, expect for games, which will be £4.50. By offering them from the street they are hoping to encourage the impulse purchasing.

BT has been spending lots of money installing these electronic kiosks in to high street around the UK. Providing a small-form colour screen, trackball and a keyboard, the blue-coloured phoneboxes, which are unusual in the UK, have so far reached over 1,400, with over 90% of them having broadband access.

They see them as a way to offering Internet-based services and products to people who don’t have Internet access at home or at work.

We think this is an interesting distribution point that has been gradually adding services, both physical, such DVD rental via lastminute.com and electronic, such as photo & video services, enabling friends to send more animated messages.

BT Internet kiosk

Over 1m Bluetooth Units Shipping a Week

Six years after its launch, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that they are now shipping over one million Bluetooth devices a week. They hold this up as proof that Bluetooth has now moved out of hype and into reality.

It is generally thought that laws being enacted around the World, that forbid car drivers to hold their mobile phone while driving, are providing a significant contributions to the increased in these figures, and that this will only continue.

One concern in the Bluetooth circles are the number of non-ratified devices that are being brought in to the market, with TDK estimating that as many as half of products sold in shops are made by companies that are not member of the Bluetooth SIG. The industries big worry is that these devices will not function correctly and Bluetooth generally starts to get a bad name.

Bluetooth SIG

New LGE Mobile Phone Includes 1.1 Mega Pixel Camera

LG Electronics have unveiled their latest mobile phone, incorporating a PDA and 1.1 mega pixel camera which can record one hour of video.

The handsets (LG-SC8000, LG-KC8000), which incorporates the ability to record one hour of video, and edit photos, runs on Windows Pocket PC 2003 and has 192MHz of memory. It features a slide-down keyboard, helping to keep its size down, while maintaining a large screen size, 2.8 inch TFT LCD capable of displaying 262,000 colours. They plan to release it in Korea at the end of the year.

We feel this looks and sounds like a significant step forward in integrated mobile device design and can’t wait to get our hand on one.

LG Electronics

Nokia Show Wireless Digital Photo Frame

Back in 1999, Sony brought out the first digital photo frame, not that you would probably know about it as there aren’t that many around – it cost $900. Since then many more companies have brought them out for considerably less that Sony’s initial offering, many of them new companies but also from more well know brands such as Kodak.

Most have used removable memory (Memory Sticks, SD, etc) to get the photos in to the frame, others have had phone sockets on them.

Nokia have now entered the business and have announced the Nokia Image Frame SU-4 and SU-7, which makes perfect sense given their camera phones.

The SU-4 received photo’s via an Infra-Red port. The SU-7 is more interesting as it adds to the IR transfer by allowing a SIM card to be inserted into it and use MMS to send photos to it.

Nokia have made no comment on pricing but with it being reasonable, we can see these getting popular.

The frames that don’t need to physical need to you to load the content on to them – you can upload images remotely – are the ones with the better future. Those who have bought this type, such as the dial-up Ceiva, for relatives and friend have nothing but praise for the concept.

Nokia SU-4

Nokia SU-7

Ceiva

FlashCast to Provide Channels on Mobile Phones

Macromedia is now talking publicly about FlashCast. Siting on top of the mobile phone’s resident Flash Lite player, FlashCast is a framework that enables channels of content to be downloaded and presented on a mobile phone. After a one-off download of the channel structure, small packets of content are updated when the handset is within service. There channels, currently text and graphics, are then presented to the user to be browsed as and when required, regardless of if the handset had reception.

ZDNet has an short video interview with the CEO of Macromedia that also give an idea of how a channel might look. He also reveals that DoCoMo has shipped two to three million handsets with Flash on board.

There is no official information available from Macromedia currently, but Mike Krisher has written a background to FlashCast and his piece carries out some comparison with Qualcomm’s BREW – a similar concept.

Given platforms live or die by the amount of content on them, it would seem likely that the large amount of content that is already authored in Flash make it more likely that FlashCast would succeed over BREW.

ZDNet interview video

Mike Kirsher – background to FlashCast

Tony Ball to step down as Sky CEO – official

After much speculation over the last few days, Sky has confirmed that Tony Ball will step down as BSkyB’s Chief Executive or in the words of the Sky press release “he has decided not to renew his service contract with the Company”.

He’ll stay with Sky until a successor has been appointed – “likely to be well before his current contract ends on 31st May 2004”. The industries view is that there are some large commercial changes likely at Sky, as changing the CEO is often a signal to this is Murdock companies.

Speculation is rife as to the successor, but a fair amount of the smart money is on James Murdock, who is currently with Asia’s Star TV.

BSkyB is the dominant digital TV platform in the UK with nearly seven millions homes supplied through satellite.

Sky press release