Digital-Lifestyles – Page 197 – 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

Yahoo And CBS To Offer Local News Videos
Yahoo execs have pressed the flesh and struck up a deal with CBS owned-and-operated television stations to exclusively broadcast local news videos online.
From Tuesday, the syndication deal will see surfers able to view online videos from 16 stations, with each station making between 10 and 20 stories available per day
Under the terms of the landmark deal – the first video agreement between a network-owned TV station group and a Web news provider – Yahoo will make CBS the exclusive provider of online news video, with both companies sharing advertising revenue.
Included in the new service are CBS stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Minneapolis, Miami, Denver, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Green Bay.
“Local news has become one of the most important pieces of a user’s online news experience, and this agreement brings some of the best local TV journalism to the millions of Yahoo News users,” said Scott Moore, head of news and information, Yahoo Media Group.
“One of our key priorities is to offer our users relevant and high-quality local news in each market, and with CBS we’ve found a partner that deeply understands the issues most important to the communities they cover,” be continued.
Surfers will be able to access the video content from both the Yahoo front page and within the news section of the site.
Yahoo News
17 October, 2006
Mobile Clubbing Flashmob Takes Over Liverpool Street
We all remember the flash-mobs of yesteryear, way back in …. 2003, when the first one happened in the UK.
Well, last Wednesday saw the Mobile Clubbing flashmob descend Liverpool Street Station on the East side of London, as flagged by Helen Keegan (Technokitten).
From the photos and the videos, it looks like it was pretty well attended, with what was estimated as a thousand people.
The instructions?
1. Bring your favorite dance music and walkman/mp3/ipod/phone with you
2. Arrive at the station at around 19:15
3. No dancing before 19:24
4. Spread out throughout the whole station concourse
5. When the clock strikes 19:24 DANCE LIKE CRAZY!!
6. Try not to dance in one place
7. Dance like you’ve never danced before
8. Dance for as long as you can
9. Enjoy :)
Come 19:24 they started dancing to their own music, leading to the individual, random gyrations that you can make out on the video – with the added strangeness that there’s no music playing, as everyone has headphones on. James A White goes into more detail.
Thanks to Monkeys & Kiwis and The City Gentleman for use of the photos.
Mobile clubbing
17 October, 2006
Vodafone Lets Rip With A Seasonal Blast Of 3G Phones
Mobile phone giant Vodafone has unwrapped its winter collection of phones which it hopes will work their way into Santa’s sack.
The seasonal 3G handset line-up features phones capable of downloading websites at broadband speeds and includes new handsets sourced from South Korea’s LG Electronics for the first time.
In the face of slowing sales, Vodafone is keen to get punters forking out for higher-paying 3G services and hopes that its new range of ten exclusive 3G phones will get the cash tills rattling at Christmas.
The full range adds up to no less than 24 Vodafone Live with 3G handsets featuring onboard mobile TV; 14 Vodafone Live with 3G handsets featuring Vodafone Radio DJ music service and six 3G broadband handsets – sourced from Motorola and Samsung – delivering HSDPA.
HSDPA
HSDPA – that’s High-Speed Downlink Packet Access to those not hep to the latest acronyms – enables super-nippy access to multimedia extras like mobile TV and music downloads, along with faster laptop access when the handset is used as a modem.
The HSDPA technology should provide speeds of 1.8 megabits per second to start with, rising up to the giddy rate of 14mbps in the near future.
By comparison, existing 3G networks can only muster up a comparably sloth-like rate of just 384 kilobits per second.
“This range of handsets extends Vodafone’s lead in 3G and offers a wide diversity of choice for our customers,” purred Vodafone global chief marketing officer Frank Rovekamp.
Vodafone
17 October, 2006
Jawed Karim: The Third YouTube Founder
There’s bound to be lots of these stories floating around the Valley, as companies started getting bought for large sums of money. It’s going to be the equivalent of being/claiming to be the fifth Beatle.
We feel it’s more likely that this one is true as it’s covered by the New York Times.
Jawed Karim was the third founder of YouTube beyond Chen and Hurley we’re told. He was with them at PayPal, before it was sold to eBay, then at the very start of YouTube, throwing in
“They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions,” he continues, “Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group.”
Beyond the early stages, Karim decided to not take a full time role there but returned to studying instead, for this he reduced his equity holding. After the sale, he’s still a very rich man.
Living what he was building, “Armed with a video camera, Mr. Karim documented much of YouTube’s early life.”
If you’re a struggling entrepreneur reading this, there’s a very interesting section that Karim filmed in April 2005. Fellow founder Chen talked about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50 or 60 videos on the YouTube site. Clearly there are fallow times before growth.
It’s also amusing to see his own site where he’s listed his latest programs – “YouTube, My new company.”
The first piece of video ever put on YouTube.
via NYT
16 October, 2006
Fox Uses Smartphone To Transmit Live TV News
It wasn’t quite ‘citizen journalism,’ but a Fox News cameraman first on the scene of last week’s small plane crash into a New York Upper East Side apartment building managed to stream live footage to his TV network using a standard Windows Treo smartphone.
Scott Wilder was just twenty blocks away when news of the crash broke, so he hot-footed it to the scene, whipped out his phone and was able to report live from the scene using a hand-held Palm Treo smartphone.
The Palm Treo 700w-series mobile was fitted with special software made by CometVision, which lets users transmit video over non-3G networks, using a custom codec that uses much less bandwidth than would normally be required.
The software was set up to automatically connect to a computer at the Fox News studio with one button, and then send an e-mail to notify network producers about the live stream.
Not surprisingly, the live picture quality won’t be kick-starting a bumper blow-out of Fox’s broadcast cameras on eBay quite yet, but it’s a great example of how mobile technology is making newsgathering faster and open to more people.
Thanks to his phone, the Fox News cameraman was able to send streamed live updates from the scene long before rival networks were able to rock up with their snazzy satellite trucks, and opens up possibilities for more advanced citizen journalism in the future.
Comet Video Technologies
[From: Reuters/Hollywood Reporter]
16 October, 2006
Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge Winners Announced
Nokia has announced the winning entries in the Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge global developer competition, dishing out a cool €100,000 in prizes to winning mobile applications developers.
Co-sponsored by Forum Nokia and software monoliths Adobe, the winners in four categories were selected from 117 entries after a 10-month selection process.
The categories were enterprise, music, Macromedia Flash Lite and location-aware applications, with each winner pocketing a €25,000 top prize and a one-year free membership in Forum Nokia PRO developer support program, which is apparently worth €4,000.
Selected by a jury made up of Macromedia and Nokia Business unit reps, the winners were selected from the 20 finalists announced in September this year.
Quickoffice Premier 4 scooped up Best Enterprise Application, with the product allowing users to open, view and edit Microsoft Office documents on the move.
www.quickoffice.com
The best Macromedia Flash application was Foreca – Flash Weather, a natty program that can not only advise you whether that brolly is really necessary, but can offer comprehensive weather forecasts, weather radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts.
www.foreca.com.
InfoTalk Corporation’s Music Finder grabbed the honours for Best Mobile Music Application. The program provides a speedy way to use search for music files using voice commands, with users able to speak a song title, artist’s name or playlist in response to an audio prompt instead of scrolling through zillions of MP3s.
www.infotalkcorp.com.
Finally, the Best Location-Aware Service/Application prize went to Augmentra, whose smarty-pants ViewRanger application offers a unique mapping, navigation and information tool for mobile phones, providing information about immediate surroundings through an intuitive display.
www.viewranger.com.
Forum Nokia S60 3rd Edition Challenge
16 October, 2006
CCleaner Review: Windows Optimisation And Privacy Freeware (90%)
A long time favourite in Chez Digi Lifestyles, CCleaner is a superb system optimisation and privacy tool that comes with the best price of all: nothing!
A featherweight 1.42 meg download, CCleaner is short for ‘Crap Cleaner’ – a perfectly appropriate name, with the program doing an excellent job of turfing out unused and temporary files from your system.
Although the program is freeware and comes with no lurking steenkin’ spyware or adware, it does invite you to install the Yahoo toolbar on installation – just tick no if you don’t want it (we didn’t).
Cleaning out your dutty PC
Once fired up, a click on the ‘analyse’ button will get the program racing through your machine’s folders looking for files that can be removed.
CCleaner takes a high speed shufti in your Internet Explorer Cache, History, Cookies and Index.dat; as well as rummaging about in your recycle bin, temporary files, log files and lists of recently opened URLs and files.
Unlike some similar commercial products we’ve tested, CCleaner proved to be incredibly fast in use, with a full system scan taking a matter of seconds. Very impressive.
Once the program has completed its scan you’re given the option of deleting the files or going back and fine-tuning your scanning options.
Third-party application temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) can also be vamoosed from a long list of applications, including Firefox, Opera, Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, Office XP, Nero, Adobe Acrobat and WinZip.
We managed to clear up over 1.5 gig of space when we first ran the program, and it continues to clear out junk at an impressive rate with each scan.
Registry
There’s also a powerful built in Advanced Registry scanner which helps you get rid of unused and old entries cluttering up your system.
Bashing the ‘scan for issues’ button will produce a list of problems with File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons and Invalid Shortcuts, with the option to individually fix them or just let CCleaner work its magic automatically.
Wisely, the program prompts you to make a registry back-up before it takes off its gloves and starts sorting out the errant entries.
There’s also a handy ‘tools’ interface letting users uninstall programs or simply remove programs from their start up menu, with an ‘options’ menu allowing more advanced functions like user-defined cookie removal.
Conclusion
This is a fantastic program for quickly and effectively zapping unwanted and private information from your PC.
The program’s easy to use interface and support for a wide variety of applications surpasses many of the commercial offerings we’ve seen, and regular use should help you get Windows running faster and more efficiently, while grabbing back precious hard drive space.
Although the program is freeware, those who donate £10 ($20) or more get new releases in advance of regular punters and they can also enjoy the warm glow of knowing that they’re contributing to the continued development of this fine product.
Features: 85%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 90%
Overall: 90%
CCleaner.com
13 October, 2006
Five Download VoD Launches With CSI
UK Broadcaster Channel Five have launched their Five Download, Video on Demand (VoD), service with US series CSI. They’ve previously offered downloads of the car show, Fifth Gear.
The new service is offering straight CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; CSI: NY and CSI: Miami.
This isn’t Just-Another-VoD-Service (JAVS), as there’s some innovation in here. CSI fans are mad keen on the programme (so we understand) and understanding this, Five is offering the episodes seven days ahead of the TV broadcast date. Fans will pay a premium price for this £2.49 vs the usual £1.49 per episode. We suspect that once hooked on receiving the content early, fans using the service will have to continue paying to stay ahead.
Engaging in some mutual back slapping Jane Lighting, Five’s Chief Executive, said: “I’m delighted that we are launching the service with CSI enabling us to offer the highest quality content to viewers with a viewing window which exceeds anything currently in the marketplace,” to which Ted Riley, Executive Managing Director, International Content Distribution, Alliance Atlantis whooped “The first-ever CSI Franchise VoD service outside the U.S., is both a thrilling proposition for U.K. fans,” adding that it “heralds the roll-out of other new media opportunities for this fantastic franchise internationally.”
One of the challenges for this service, as it is with all others – they’re competing against the same content being available on file sharing networks near-instantly available after they’ve been shown in the US – yonks before they hits the UK. Fanatical fan’s will more than likely not wait for the legitimate source and go the file-sharing route. The fact that the programmes won’t cost them anything will be incidental.
Five will be charging either £1.49 or £2.49 per download which we think it pretty steep given the episodes are only available for 14 days and is restricted to one computer. If you’re impudent enough to try the content that you’ve paid for on another machine, you’ll be completely locked out of that content.
To use the service you’ll need to download and install the Five Download Manager and Player which has been provided to them by BT Media & Broadcast, but the base level technology is from Entriq. Entriq’s MediaSphere is used by other companies such as BT Vision and with download services.
As Five are using Microsoft’s DRM, the service is only available to those in the UK who run Windows XP or 2000 and browse through Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and enable ActiveX. Users of Windows XP must use Windows Media Player 10 and 2K users must use Windows Media Player 9.
Microsoft has steadfastly not introduced their latest DRM on the Macintosh, so they’re excluded.
Those of you lucky/unlucky enough to not have the above, can still view the trailers (well we could on a Mac anyway).
Five download
13 October, 2006
Carphone Warehouse Shares Drop On Vodafone News
The Herald is reporting that the shares in Carphone Warehouse took a bashing on the news that Vodafone is switching away from them, to sell their mobile phone contracts through Phones 4U instead.
The shares dropped 13.9%
Vodafone cited that Phones 4U charging Vodafone a lower commission was the reason for the change. We suspect that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.
Carphone (as those in the industry call it) is becoming a major threat to Vodafone as they both move into other areas of communication – in the big communications convergence rush.
Carphone has been building up its bought AOL UK two days ago.
Vodafone themselves have recently moved into broadband, in a deal with BT. With Carphone effectively becoming a competitor, we assume that Vodafone don’t want to carry on giving them money.
If Vodafone’s choice to dump Carphone hurts them more will be revealed in the future. As Roger Taylor, FD for Carphone points out, “Every Vodafone customer that walks into our stores now will not walk out on a Vodafone contract.”
13 October, 2006
iPod (RED); Razr RED; Slvr RED:Help Eliminate AIDS in Africa
If you haven’t heard of (RED) yet, you certainly will – there’s a ton of celebs involved and it’s going to be all over the media. It was created by Bono and Bobby Shriver, Chairman of DATA and it’s already been on Oprah in the US with Penelope Cruz and Kanye West.
(RED) tell us they’re not a charity, they’re a business model. “You buy (RED) stuff. We get the money. Buy the pills and distribute them. They take the pills, stay alive, and continue to take care of their familiaes and contribute socially and economically in their communities.”
Apple have a Nano (RED), which is not surprisingly red. Buying one will give you the prefect opportunity to show that you are supporting the (RED) cause. $10 of each one sold goes to (RED). Apple will also offer a £15 and £25 iTunes (PRODUCT) RED gift card available for purchase at Apple’s retail and online stores next month.
Motorola are the “exclusive wireless partner” for (PRODUCT) RED and have two handsets of the red hue. The red MOTOSLVR is exclusive to the UK and the MOTORAZR V3m is only available in the US. The deal with the phones sounds like it’s actually better for (RED) long term depending on the service provider. With Orange, 5% of your monthly phone bill spend will also be donated to (RED).
We’d normally be dismissive of red-ipod-type-stunts, but an effort like this can’t be a bad thing. Tune in to their blog to stay current.
(RED)
13 October, 2006