Digital-Lifestyles – Page 194 – 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

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

Odeo Bought By Founder: Obvious Corp Opens
Odeo, the audio blogging company formed by Evan Williams of Blogger fame, has been bought by one of its founders, Evan Williams.
He’s formed a new company, Obvious Corp, with a number of people he worked with at Odeo, and used his own money to purchase all of the assets Odeo and Twitter, placing them in Obvious Corp.
Evan plans that the organisation will be compact and fast acting. Building a number of Web-based businesses that mutually support each other, passing traffic and users amoung themselves.
Background on Odeo
Starting a couple of years after Google bought Blogger, Odeo provided tools to help those wanting to create podcasts – the intention was to replicate the success of Blogger in the (then) forthcoming world of podcasting.
Evan formed Odeo with what was originally his next door neighbour, Noah Glass, in the days before Blogger was bought. Noah had started a Web service called AudBlog which let people post audio recordings to their blogs using a telephone.
By Evan’s own admission, Odeo lost its way and he’d taken a long, hard look at what he was up to.
Odeo had plenty of money in the bank. We could have held out for a couple years. But we had to look at the risk and the opportunity cost. Just because we could spend the money doesn’t mean we should. Did it seem like continuing on the path we were on would be the best use of both the money and the time of everyone involved? It did not.
Odeo was started with a $5m VC investment from Charles River Ventures and a number of angel investors. It’s understood that they have regained their original investments.
26 October, 2006
Happy ‘Birthday TV’ To Me
No it’s not the time for you to throw me a lavish surprise celebration ‘do’ (mark 9th August in your diaries for that one), it is time to tell you about the gift for those who have nearly everything … or nothing.
Hidden away in the schedules of the Wrestling Channel (where else?) is another sign of the converging of old and new medias .. Birthday TV.
As they say in their schedules.
Birthday TV is the brand new, magical TV channel that lets you celebrate your friends’ and family’s birthday by broadcasting your special messages to them on live TV.
The Wrestling Channel has identified that the User Generated Content (UGC) so successful for the guys behind YouTube, is the key to getting their cash registers ringing. As well as inviting viewers to submit (legal) wrestling-related material for ‘my TWC,’ it’s decided to sell off some of its airtime for celebratory purposes.
The intention is that this new programming will start with Birthdays and then open up into other anniversary days to help it fit its ongoing remit ‘as your big day tv’ and it’ll also put the content on the Web for further targeted enjoyment. Merry Christmas TV and Happy New Year TV are already in planning.
There’s been a market in TV airtime for quite a while but buyers have generally used their slots for TV Infomercials. Channels like Open Access on Sky Digital have also experimented with making time available to purchase in their schedules, as channels look at alternative revenue streams expect to see more of this type of programming.
BirthdayTV prices start at the pretty reasonable level of £30 for 15 seconds, with a minute coming it at £100. Booking is via an online form, with video being sent in by post, at least ten days before broadcast.
Birthday TV
26 October, 2006
AMD Complete ATi Purchase
AMD, the second largest microprocessor manufacturer has complete the purchase of graphics, chipset and CE specialist ATi Technologies in a deal worth around $5.4Bn.
From day one they’re talking a new game – “Fusion.” The integration of the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level. Interestingly they claim this will give them a significantly increase in performance-per-watt – benefitting both portable devices, by giving them longer results from batteries, and more efficiencies for mains-powered computers, vital in the world we’re entering with a need to keep an eye on power consumption. The Fusion products are expected late 2008/early 2009.
Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer summed it up, “With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life.”
The capabilities of graphics processors have been gathering pace over the recent years to the point where they come close to rivaling the main processor themselves.
To get hold of ATi, AMD are splashing $4.3Bn in cash and also handing over 58m AMD shares. $2.5 billion of the cash mountain comes courtesy of a term loan from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding. The intention to do the deal was made in July this year.
At the time of the original announcement there was some speculation that ATi rival, nVidia would sell to Intel. This didn’t come to pass, possibly because already has a strong graphics chip division. To minimise the impact of todays deal on nVidia, Mike Hara, Nvidia’s vice president of investor relations, told Reuters, “It reinforces our philosophy that we don’t want to be tied up. I don’t think anything changes. In fact, what we’ve already felt and seen I think gives us the energy to push faster.”
AMD
26 October, 2006
BT’s Digital Vault Opens
BT has launched a ‘virtual vault’ offering a secure online location for broadband users to safely stash personal files.
The service comes in two flavours, with the free BT Digital Vault Basic service letting users manually upload photos, emails, music, video files and contact information up to a storage capacity of 2GB.
The free service is open to anyone, not just BT Broadband customers.
For users requiring more storage space and automated back-ups, the full BT Digital Vault service costs £4.99 a month and includes a generous 20GB online storage capacity.
Automatic back ups
Billed as a quick and easy way for home users to securely back up their data, the package includes the BT Digital Vault Backup Manager which automatically detects when users have updated the content of files flagged for backing up.
The manager then synchronises the data with the copy stored in the Digital Vault, with no user intervention needed.
Data uploaded from the user’s PC is encrypted as it is transmitted with the password-protected files being stored in BT’s secure data hosting centre, which is accessible from any Web connection.
“People are often unsure about how to keep their online data safe… if you want to share your holiday snaps with a friend, retrieve important files, or backup files on your laptop when you’re away from home, it’s all possible with BT Digital Vault,” said Gavin Patterson, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer division.
Currently, only the service is only available to PC users, running Windows 2000 and XP.
BT Digital Vault
25 October, 2006
T-Mobile HotSpot Phone Merges WiFi/Cellular Services
Cellular phone provider T-Mobile US is offering a service, HotSpot @Home, giving unlimited calls to US phones via WiFi. This in itself isn’t big news, but what is significant is that callers leaving the range of the WiFi will automatically switch to their cellular service. Initial roll-out is limited to Seattle.
This type of service has been long-discussed, but several technical barriers stood in its way, primarily handing the call from the WiFi-connected call over to the cellular network, without losing the conversation, or a break in the speaking. It’s pretty complex.
Beyond the mechanics of the call hand-over, the riddle of when and how the subscriber would be billed when transferring to the cellular network – and stopping that billing when they reconnect to WiFi has also caused great confusion for a long time.
Cellular reception within peoples home is often pretty ropey, so using their WiFi service will give considerably better reception – making them happy bunnies.
To use the service, three items are required – two pieces of hardware and a service plan. Once the special cellular/WiFi handset has been selected (which look surprisingly decent) and the Wireless hotspot router is installed on the home network, all that is required is the add-on ($19.95/month) on top of the normal $39.95.
The two handsets currently available are the Samsung T709 slider or the Nokia 6136 flip.
BT has been offering a similar service in the UK for a while under the product name BT Fusion. The difference with BT Fusion is it uses Bluetooth to handle the wireless calls at home rather than WiFi.
T-Mobile is the mobile communications subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, the German telco incumbent.
They have spent considerable effort over the recent years not only building and owning their cellular service, but doing the same with their WiFi network, clearly understanding early on that WiFi would be a significant threat to cellular services.
T-Mobile HotSpot Phone
25 October, 2006
Apple: All MacBook Pro’s Now Intel Core 2 Duo
Apple has updated its whole MacBook Pro range of laptops to run Intel’s Core 2 Duo range of processors. They claim a 39% speed improvement.
There may be a few who will be a little peeved with this. Many people jumped on to the new Apple range of laptops when it was launched back at the start of this year. At that time they were using the plain-old Core Duo chips but even those gave a considerable speed improvement – two to three times the previous G5 equivalent. They were universally celebrated.
Those keen little things, who shelled out for them, might be a little down in the mouth to find a new, even whizzier version coming out.
The rest of the specs of the machines have remained the same, including the outside casing. We covered the specs in detail at the original launch, or if you want to delve into the depths of the specs, take a look at the Apple site.
Pricing
2.16 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro – £1,349 (inc. VAT)
2.33 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro – £1,699 (inc. VAT)
2.33 GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro – £1,899 (inc. VAT )
25 October, 2006
Mobile Phone Sales Set To Hit One Billion For 2006
Global mobile shipments are set to hit one billion this year for the first time.
According to researchers IDC, a total of 254.9 million units were shipped in the third quarter of 2006, up 7.9 per cent from the previous quarter and a hefty leap of 21 per cent from the same quarter in 2005.
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker saw record performances from all top five top industry vendors during the first three quarters of 2006.
“Shipping nearly a billion units in a single year is a significant milestone, but just as important is the journey it takes to get there,” mused Ramon Llamas, research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.
“Emerging markets have presented tremendous opportunity for vendors to provide users with their first handsets, and some users may already be looking to upgrade to another phone. Similarly, replacement handsets are a popular option for those in mature markets, especially as new features such as music have gained momentum,” he added.
Ryan Reith, research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker noted that, “the strong growth in the third quarter was very comparable to the growth we saw in 3Q05, as the trend of vendors and carriers working to prep for the holiday season begins.”
“Handsets that provide music functionality are now very visible in the industry. Mature markets are at a point where it is worthwhile for the carriers to launch these devices with strong marketing campaigns behind them, knowing that consumers are willing and ready to use their device as a music player as well as a phone,” Reith added.
The big boys break records
Nokia turned in another superlative performance, exceeding expectations and setting a new industry record by shipping 88.5 million units in the third quarter, cruising past its previous record by 4.8 million units, with the telecoms giant reporting double digit growth in the Far East, Europe, US and Chinese markets.
Records were also broken at second-placed Motorola, who enjoyed their sixth straight quarter notching up growth of around 40 per cent or better, helped on by the success of their RAZR phone.
Samsung managed to shift thirty million units in a quarter for the first time, while the number four vendor, Sony Ericsson notched up a healthy twenty million units.
IDC
25 October, 2006
Samsung Launches Upgraded Q1 Ultramobile PCs
With ne’er a parp on their usual raucous PR trumpet, Samsung have quietly shuffled out two updates to its Q1 ultra mobile Origami PC range.
Samsung’s Origami machines run a tablet version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and look to fill a niche in the market for between laptop PCs and PDAs.
Sporting a 7in LCD monitor with touchscreen functionality, the Origami measures up at around half the size of a regular laptop PC, but still offers full-fat functionality, with users able to surf the web, play games, watch movies, listen to music and make notes
Weighing 1.7 pounds, it’s light enough to carry around for a few hours which is a good thing because that’s when the battery will conk out (battery life is measured at a rather disappointing three hours.)
The updated Q1-Pentium comes with a 60 GB hard disk and 1 GB RAM, and substitutes a nippier Intel Pentium M 723 1GHz processor for the original Celeron M 900MHz processor.
The other new model – the Q1b – uses a cheaper Via Technologies’ C7 1GHz processor, and is fitted with a 40 GB hard disk and 512 MB RAM.
Samsung said in a statement that these new PCs are available in some European and Asian countries and in the U.S – we spotted one site advertising the Q1-Pentium for $1,250 and the Q1b $900.
Samsung Q1
24 October, 2006
Firefox 2.0 Launches Today
The final version of the Firefox 2.0 browser is expected to be released into the wild today.
Our browser of choice for some time now, the update to the open source browser includes onboard anti-phishing controls, built-in RSS and XML feed-viewing capabilities, and a new inline spell checker.
Firefox is developed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, and a spokeswoman commented that the final version was substantially the same as the final beta, with the program scheduled for free download sometime this afternoon.
The release comes days after Microsoft launched their catch-up Internet Explorer 7 upgrade, which saw the program finally introduce tabbed browsing – something that Firefox users have been enjoying for years.
Firefox 2.0 also features a new “close” button on its tabs – with links opening in tabs by default – and a handy Session Restore feature restoring windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session, with the ability to restore previous sessions after a system crash.
“If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those web pages and content is pretty disruptive,” commented Mozilla VP of products Christopher Beard. Ain’t that the truth, Chris!
An enhanced search feature will offer search term suggestions for punters using the integrated text box to search Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com, with a new search engine manager making it easier to add, remove and re-order your fave engines.
Although Firefox has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and made a real impact on Microsoft’s near-monopoly of the browser market, recent figures from OneStat.com reveal that global usage of the browser slumped 1.44 per cent from July, and now stands at 11.49 per cent.
Internet Explorer still rules the global roost with 85.85 per cent of the market, increasing 2.8 per cent since July while, global usage of the Mac-only Safari browser is just 1.61 per cent, down 0.23 per cent from July.
Firefox 2.0 release notes
24 October, 2006
Scrybe Online Organiser: A Google Calendar Buster?
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube.
Calendar app
The slick Web 2.0 interface lets users drill down through calendar dates, with the context sensitive display intelligently expanding and contracting to display the required information.
Boasting sharing and collaborative tools, the program handles multiple time-zones beautifully with a polished interface and a neat feature which ran alternate time zones alongside diary pages.
According to the video demonstration, users will be able to seamlessly import popular document formats like Word, Excel and Acrobat, with lists cut and pasted from Excel automatically being converted into a ‘To Do’ list. Very neat.
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane.
Offline, Online…
What’s unique about Scrybe is its ability to let you work on your organiser while you’re offline, with any changes synching to your online account once you’re connected again – great for getting work done on a plane journey.
When it comes to syncing all this information with portable devices, Scrybe has gone for the oldest format of them all: paper.
It a rather daring (some may reckless) move, the program appears to forgo all thoughts of trying to sync to Palms, PDAs and smartphones and offers PaperSync – a series of clever, foldable templates that can be printed out, folded and tucked into your back pocket.
What we think so far
So far, we’re very impressed with the interface, the offline functionality and the ambitious re-jigging of the calendar app, although the seeming lack of proper phone/PDA integration looks to be a potential Achilles’ heel.
It may be great having your week’s agenda folded up in your back pocket, but any notes you make are going to have to be manually added back into your PC at the end of the day. And where’s the email integration?
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon.
Mind you, if it looks and runs as well in the real world as it does in their promo video, Google’s usability and interface team may be sent back into the lab for some hasty overtime.
Scrybe
24 October, 2006