Digital-Lifestyles pre-empted and reported thousands of articles on the then-coming impact that technology was to have on all forms of Media. Launched in 2001 as a research blog to aid its founder, Simon Perry, present at IBC 2002, it grew into a wide ranging, multi-author publication that was quoted in many publications globally including the BBC, was described by the Guardian as 'Informative' and also cited in a myriad of tech publications before closing in 2009
There were unhappy faces around the Digi-Lifestyles office this week when our seven year old fridge freezer – keeper of the vital beer cans and supplies of cheese – went on the blink.
The Servis fridge freezer had been taking a somewhat jazz/funk approach to its duties in recent months, but at the beginning of last week it unilaterally decided to instigate Operation Meltdown.
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Research In Motion has announced its first ever multi-band phone to pack Wi-Fi, the BlackBerry 8820 Smartphone.
The slinkiest BlackBerry to date, the 8820 offers a good ol’ fashioned hardware QWERTY keyboard (we like them), a large 320×240 display, trackball controls, onboard GPS (Global Positioning System)and EDGE/GPRS/GSM cellular and Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g) connectivity.
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We’ve shouted at it. We’ve shaken our fists at it. We’ve even given it a kick when it starts playing up and sometimes felt like inflicting serious damage on the thing, but we’ve never gone as far as this particularly aggrieved chap in Hanover, Germany.
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Trebles all round at Twofour Digital as they announce the winning of the three year contract to produce and host the webcasts of all proceedings from the House of Commons and House of Lords, made available through the Parliament Web site.
The webcasts include live coverage of all UK parliamentary proceedings and Select, Public Bill and General Committees as well as selected archive footage.
We imagine this is in no small way due to Phil Haggar now being within the Twofour fold, them having bought his Makeni Webcasting production company back in April this year.
What’s the relevance? We first met the very competent Mr Haggar when he ran Westminster Digital way back in 1999 – whose business backbone was … Webcasting Parliament.
It appears that Twofour’s ambitions don’t stop there, besides growing through acquisitions of companies, it’s also working for the European Parliament to design and deliver a ground breaking webTV channel broadcasting scheduled content in 20+ languages.
iPhone’s appear to be taking out chunks of the wireless network at Duke University in the US.
We won’t get all technical on you by delving in to the tech-laden reasons as to why it _might_ be happening – they still don’t know how it is happening for sure – but the upshot of it is they think the iPhones are generating up to 18,000 requests per second.
Barrages like this are crippling the WLAN kit, as it tries to deal with and make sense of each of them.
Duke have been in touch with Apple about the problem, but so far the communication with Apple has been “one-way.”
Given the number of tech mad loonies that have bought iPhones in the US, it is a little strange that no other sites have recorded the same problem.
For the details on the story, trot over to Network World
We received a newsflash from the Wall Street Journal (I guess they would be the first to know) at 4:27 this morning that the Dow Jones board had voted in favour of the News Corp take over, with only Leslie Hill, a member of the Bancroft family, and Dieter von Holtzbrinck abstained from the vote.
Christopher Bancroft – who it is understood is actively seeking alternatives to the News Corp. bid – left the meeting early.
It’s reported that News Corp. was “grateful” to Dow Jones board for its vote.
News Corp have been trying to get their hands on Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, to add to their already large portfolio of highly influential media titles and companies around the world.
The next, and possibly final stage, is for the Bancroft family to approve the boards approval. Given the family has asked for more than $60 per share in the past – the current News Corp offer, valuing the company at $5Bn – it’s anyone’s guess which way it will go.
There’s been considerable concern voiced about how good an idea it is for Rupert Murdoch to be in control of a major force of financial reporting in America.
We nearly fell off our chairs when we saw the Independent reporting that Virgin-backed games company, A World Of My Own (AWOMO) were hoping to list for $1Bn in London and Frankfurt.
The Big Idea is that people will use the 3D world of AWOMO to download their games.
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Brit audio firm Pure Digital have announced a new affordable and rather dapper DAB and FM clock radio called the PURE Siesta, which offers market-leading standby power consumption and a host of green initiatives.
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Ofcom has floated a proposal to simplify the process of moving your mobile phone number to another provider and cutting the transfer time to within two hours, a stark contrast to the five days it takes now.
With the two hour goal just over two years away, Ofcom has ruled that the mobile industry must reduce the time taken to a getting-close-to-reasonable two working days, starting on 1 April 2008 (why do UK organisations persist in using 1 April? It’s so open for abuse if problems arise).
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Although vinyl was supposed to have gone the way of clicky-clunky 8 track cartridges, Betamax and clackers, the format refuses to die, with new figures showing that sales of 7in singles actually rose in first half of this year.
As sales of CDs continue to plummet, the tenacious 45 keeps on rocking, with UK industry group BPI, revealing that 7in vinyl sales were up 13%, with the White Stripes’ Icky Thump scoring up the highest weekly sales for a 7in single for more than two decades.
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