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
Novell have done a great collection of spoof ads of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” series, you know, the ones that had a UK launch in January this year.
While playing to the same music and video style, it mocks the self congratulatory styles and adds a third character … Linux. Rather than the obvious blokes, it uses a woman to represent Linux.
As you know the Sony’s European edition of the PS3 went on sale on Friday with the expected effort from them and their associated PR organisations to try and make a big thing about it.
We didn’t bother covering it, as we’ve said quite a few times before, we didn’t think the PS3 was going to set the world (or at least the UK) alight.
It’s too expensive (£425 retail) and doesn’t offer the consumers enough to make it a must have – even when they’re trying to make the most out of it having a Blu-ray player.
Proof of the lack of interest can be found on UK eBay, the strongest, most immediate guide on the current market price of items.
Looking at the finished auctions, there is a sea of red prices, showing that items aren’t selling, a big “up yours” to the people who thought they were going to be buying their PS3 and flogging it on for a big profit.
The PS3 items that have sold are around £320 – £410, well _below_ the current retail price. In the lowest case, nearly £100 below – THREE days after the launch of the product. Not the normal behaviour of the public if they’re excited.
The initial signs for the PS3 aren’t going well, but Sony may well have anticipated this by re-jigging hardware design to make them cheaper in preparation of a price drop.
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?
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.
For those of you who have been wondering who will be supplying the software to Miglia following their falling out with Elgato, you need wait no longer.
Miglia have not only signed a deal with software suppliers Equinux, but have a package available already with the software, called The Tube. They’re calling the hardware and software bundle the TVMini Express.
Simon Ellson, CEO, Miglia Technology enthused about their new partners, “‘TV from a different perspective’ is our mantra and Equinux undoubtedly provides the most effective ‘starter’ application to allow Miglia customers to watch, record and put TV on their iPod, easily.”
Equinux are confident with the swift reaction of the software, as they tell us it was written “from the ground up” in Cocoa, Apple’s object-oriented application environment designed specifically for developing Mac OS X-only native applications. ie it wasn’t written for Windows and ported over to the Mac.
All of our US readers who might be getting excited about this will have to bite their hands in frustration. As Equinux point out at the bottom of their page, “DVB-T is not available in the US, Canada and some other regions, so TubeStick will not work in those countries.”
TVMini Express is available now with a retail price of £39.95, €49.95 or $69.
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).
There’s been three weeks of hoo-har in the UK about television stations using Premium Rate Telephone Services (PRS) to extract income from the phone-willing programme viewer. Whole TV channels have been stopped in the process.
Ofcom has just announced that it will be carrying out an inquiry into the whole area.
It sounds like there’s going to be a few feathers ruffled. Viewers and a range of other stakeholders have raised serious concerns with Ofcom regarding apparent systematic compliance failure on the part of a number of broadcasters, whose actions appear to contravene existing consumer protection rules.
Hearing how serious this is, does give clues as to why the TV stations acted so swiftly in suspending the availability of their PRS.
Many have criticised some UK broadcasters for creating programs whose sole driver appears to be collecting as much money as possible from the viewers.
The inquiry will be led by Richard Ayre, a former Deputy Chief Executive of BBC News. He is expected to receive extensive input from the premium rate services regulator, ICSTIS, who are already investigating a number of individual cases.
The fragile relationship between TV viewer and the TV stations appears to have been damaged further by the PRS announcements over the recent weeks.
Ofcom Chief Executive, Ed Richards said: “Widespread concern about the use of premium rate telephone lines by broadcasters and editorial standards in those programmes has raised serious questions about trust between broadcasters and viewers.”
The scope of the inquiry includes
Ayre expects to report his findings to the Ofcom Board and the Content Board by early summer.
As you may remember, we at Digital-Lifestyles are big fans of the Polycom Communicator. It’s a well made USB-addon for Skype that lets you carry out clear, hands-free conversation over Skype – it also doubles as a quality speaker to listen to music when travelling.
Polycom have announced that they’re going to support more VoIP software than just Skype on the current Polycom Communicator C100S and bring out a non-Skype version of it too, subtlety called the C100 (no S). The outside of the C100 only differs by not having a (S) Skype button on the left of the cluster in the middle.
The newly supported VoIP packages are scheduled in two lumps – CounterPath’s eyeBeam and X-Lite IP soft phones and the Polycom PVX PC-based desktop video conferencing application, becoming available in April this year and BroadSoft’s BroadWorks Communicator IP soft phone anticipated in July.
Current owners of the C100S will be able to download software drivers to enable support.
The Polycom Communicator C100 is scheduled for worldwide availability in April, with a suggested retail price of $149, 124 Euros, £84.
After weeks of speculation and one official delay by Apple last month, Apple has now announced that they are shipping the Apple TV unit from today.
From its name, you’ll guess that it’s an Apple unit to be connected directly to a TV, giving the chance to listen and watch content via the iTunes software. The WSJ, who have had it for the last 10 days, is reporting that the unit can only be used with Widescreen TVs, as there isn’t support for 4:3 screens – a surprising limitation. They also report another limitation – the screen can only be connected to the Apple TV via HDMI cables or component jacks.
To get the most out of it, the diminutive Apple TV (it’s only 8 inches square) cannot be used as a stand-alone unit, but must be used in conjunction with either a Mac running OSX, or a PC running XP – both of which need to be running iTunes 7.1 or later. The direct to Internet connectivity is currently very limited, only giving access to film trailers and the like.
(We wonder if the lack of support for Windows Vista is a deliberate move).
Related to that, we recently noticed when we installed iTunes on our latest PC, that it already has support for Apple TV built in to it in the Preference settings (see image).
Getting around the different forms of content is done by the Apple Remote, so a keyboard/mouse combination is not required.
The content gets to the Apple TV via cabled-Ethernet, or WiFi, running at the yet-to-be-ratified 802.11n, which has a theoretical maximum speed of 540 Mbps.
The unit has a 40Gb hard drive that Apple says can “store up to 50 hours of video, 9,000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of each and is capable of delivering high-definition 720p output.”
It’s with some amazement that we’re seeing official Apple comments about a product coming from someone apart from The Steve, to that end Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing enthused that “Apple TV is like a DVD player for the Internet age—providing an easy and fun way to play all your favourite iTunes content from your PC or Mac on your widescreen TV.”
Apple tell us that it’s shipping from today, priced at £199 in the UK and $299 in the US.
For folks a little bored of staring at the vast expanses of white space around their Google homepage comes the news that the page is finally skinnable.
Writing in her company’s blog, Product Manager Jessica Ewing, enthusiastically announced the initial release of half a dozen themes with “many more on the way.”
Themes are selected by clicking on a new interface which shows thumbnails of the six themes: Classic, Beach, Bus Stop, City Scape, Sweet Dreams, Tea House and Seasonal Scape,
All of themes are dynamic and change their appearance according to your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season.
Once you’ve inputted your post /zip code, the graphics will change to reflect your local sunrise and sunset times.
“So if you happen to be stuck in a windowless office, you can at least crack open a cold one and watch the sun set over your desktop,” commented Ewing.
Personally, we couldn’t think of anything worse than being stuck in a windowless office and relying on Google to tell you when the sun has gone down, but we get her point.
The themes are implemented via CSS (style sheets) and take the form of a large graphic across the top of the page (made up of a single repeating image so it’s still quick to download) with the page tabs switching to complementary colours.
It’s all very pretty but we’ll be looking forward to some slightly more interesting designs before we lose our old-school clean’n’simple Google homepage.