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
Nokia has unveiled their latest move to bring themselves ever closer to being associated with video content and its creation.
They’ve sponsored four prominent UK people known for design and style (what a virtuous circle this sponsorship deal turned out to be – video & style) to make short films, using the short shot by Gary Oldman.
The conclusion of yesterdays piece on BTPodshow: The How and Why. If you’re looking for the podcasts, they’re at the end of this piece.
Delivering the content
Another major advantage for PodShow is the delivery of their content to consumers. PodShow majors on audio content, which is not too difficult to deliver over the average broadband connection. The story changes when many people are watching on-demand video content. Getting this type of content delivered smoothly across the network has always been a headache. This only multiplies when the majority of the content moves from predominately audio to video.
When I put this forward to BT’s Patterson, his answer was revealing, “Increasingly you’ll see the QoS (Quality of Service) layer being important.”
BT will be able to make sure that the content on BTPodShow will be able to be delivered without a hitch. Content from other sites without a close relationship with the network owner might not be so fortunate, and the viewers/listeners of their content might get bumpier delivery.
Don’t Bloggers and Podcasters hate big brands?
While there will be many of the current podcasters that will reject the idea of posting their content on something as corporate as a site with a BT moniker, they only make up about 5% of the population of the potential customers for this.
BT understand and acknowledge this. BT is a generalist, so they aren’t interested in the 5%, it’s the 95% of the remaining population that interests them.
Will it succeed?
With BT huge reach, it’s hard to imagine that this service won’t become familiar to the UK public, especially as we understand there’s a considerable advertising budget assigned to it. As to whether they’ll take it to their hearts and use it as they repository of choice is quite another matter.
The call for UK content has gone out – they call it the ‘UnDition’ and they say that they’ve “been inundated with great content, and some really crappy stuff too that is simply hilarious.”
Looking at the site as we publish this piece, there’s very little content on the UK site. The four pieces that are currently publicly viewable … how shall we put it … leave room for the UK talent to shine.
The deal with BT can’t have hindred Podshow raising $15m dollars from VCs at the end of September.
We assume the big advertising push won’t hit the UK public until there’s quality to show.
Recorded podcast interviews
Gavin Patterson, group managing director, consumer division and group marketing, BT
Adam Curry, President and Co-founder, PodShow
Ron Bloom, CEO and Co-founder, PodShow
Vonage have launched a new means of making VoIP calls on you PC – a USB stick with headphone socket.
The invite to Vonage’s event to launch the V-phone billed it as ‘The World’s smallest phone.” Whether you feel that is a marketing spin or correct is personal interpretation.
It’s not a phone in old understanding of it … but frankly, what is? The USB stick has Vonage Talk software pre-loaded on it, with a detachable stereo earpiece/microphone and you’ll be left with 250Mb of usable memory. You also get a new Vonage phone number. All for £20.
With it, you can use any PC as a way to send and receive phone calls on a Vonage – even PCs without the Vonage software installed. To use it, just plug the neat USB stick in with the the headphone, the software temporarily runs and you’re ready to go. When you’ve finished chatting, simply software-eject the USB stick and remove it. There’s nothing left on the machine.
Skype has done a similar thing through a deal with SanDisk to have their software on their Cruizer USB stick. We’ve used it and found it pretty impressive. The only thing missing is the headphone socket.
We think this kind of approach – temporary software – will become more common as computing become ubiquitous and more a utility than rarity.
Currently sending our productivity levels downwards at a worrying rate is the hideously addictive Scrabble for the Palm OS by Handmark.
Looking – and playing – just like the classic board game, the program offers the familiar Scrabble board layout, with drag and drop tiles which are stored at the bottom of the screen.
Just like in the real world, you can shuffle the order of these around so you can plan and prepare killer words, but -sadly – you won’t be able to ‘find’ blank squares under your foot.
The game offers two player modes: Friendly or Tournament.
Friendly mode is like playing against drunken mates where you can try and insist that ‘Zyptq’ is actually a real world, and force the program to accept words that aren’t in the included Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary.
There’s also a “Suggest Move” option for those times when you can’t think of any words bigger than, err…um….”to.”
In the Tournament mode you play by the standard Scrabble rules, with challenges being automatically checked by the built-in Dictionary.
The game offers four levels of automated computer opponent: Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, or Expert.
We arrogantly waded in at Expert level, and after being totally humbled repeatedly by an onslaught of obscure words we still don’t believe exist, we slunk down to Novice level where we still only managed to win about half of the games at first.
If you get bored having your sorry ass whipped by the computer, you can also take on real life chums, either by passing the Palm PDA around (the game will hide your tile rack from opponents) or via IR beaming and Bluetooth.
Conclusion
Although this game has been around for a very long time on the Palm OS, it’s still a hugely playable classic and easily holds its own against modern games.
The interface is attractive, simple and easy to use, with the computer opponent tough enough to keep you coming back for endless humiliations.
Even in expert mode, the computer was able to come up with challenge-destroying words almost instantaneously, so the only thing slowing the game down was our own ineptitude.
Since we installed the game on our Palm Treo 650 (it works fine straight off the card, by the way), we’ve been more or less addicted to Scrabble, having quick games whenever we find ourselves in a Post Office queue, waiting for friends or, err, going to the smallest room.
The game is also available on the Pocket PC and although both versions are a tad pricey at $19.95, we reckon they’re worth every penny.
Features: 85%
Gameplay: 90%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 80%
Overall: 90%
Handmark Scrabble for Palm OS
Handmark Scrabble for PocketPC
A few week back, BT confirmed that they have closely tied themselves with US podcast aggregator, PodShow, so closely in fact, that they’ve stuck BT at the front of PodShow domain to form BTPodShow.
We were at the launch of the service a few weeks ago and chatted to Gavin Patterson, group managing director, consumer division and group marketing, BT; Adam Curry, President and Co-founder, PodShow and Ron Bloom, CEO and Co-founder, PodShow. Strangely for the launch of a podcast network, we were the only ones there recording interviews.
Looking for the podcast interviews? They’ll be available in part two tomorrow.
Rather than just rattle off the news, we felt it was worthwhile digging a bit deeper and understand the How and Why of the deal.
What makes this interesting?
Quite a few reasons really. Not the least being that, showing a change of approach, BT aren’t making the service exclusive to only their network – their normal approach to try and encourage people to subscribe to their DSL service. BTPodShow will in fact be open to anyone in the UK.
This alone shows a major shift within BT that shouldn’t be underestimated. It demonstrates an understanding that, although they dominate broadband provision in the UK (with nearly 3m accounts of their own, without all of the BT Wholesale lines sold via other UK broadband providers), they can’t own the whole market.
Having acknowledged this, they’ve clearly decided that they just as well make some income from the people who don’t buy broadband from them.
Where does the income come from?
While the financials of the deals haven’t been disclosed. We understand that there will be a revenue share between the two parties, expected to mostly come from advertising income.
The PodShow side of the business is responsible for finding, maintaining and managing the relationships with the advertiser. At launch they reported that they had 40 global brands lined up to advertise on the network. If these are unique to the UK version, or are extension of relationship they already have with their previous site isn’t clear.
Why this deal. Why now? BTVision
We think a major reason is BT Vision, their soon to be launched ipTV service.
BT have recognised that the current fodder broadcast on TV, will not continue to satisfy the wants and desires of the public in the future. In the words of BT’s consumer division group managing director, Gavin Patterson’s words, “The trend to user-generated content, and social media networks is clear cut. We see ourselves as a distributor of content. What we anticipate is more people wanting get involved with creating content.”
To fill the gap left by the dissatisfaction with ‘normal TV’, they have to open a collection channel for the content to flow to them and then build a collection of User Generated Content (UCG). While they could build PodShow’s technology themselves, it’s clear that BT don’t want to miss out on this, wanting to get into this area quickly, as confirmed by the speed at which they put this deal together.
We wondered if the higher resolution video might not be put out on the Website, but reserved for BTVision, to which Patterson said, “The experience that people have over the Internet will not be sufficient for the TV space. I anticipate it will happen.”
The advantages for PodShow are obvious. If they export this idea to any other country, they’ll be able to hold BT up as their first partner, something that really can’t be beaten.
As BT have a near monopoly on broadband and land line provision in the UK they can expose BTPodShow to the 17m ‘customer relationships’ they have, not just to encourage people to go to BTPodShow to watch the content, where they’ll make income from advertising, but to encourage those same people to produce and upload content.
Moves like this cannot help but strengthen BT as a media brand in the mind of the public – especially the youth. Vital for their service growing in the future.
Continued in the concluding piece, covering the advantages for PodShow and the chances of success of the service.
Ofcom has announced that Ed Richards is taking over the uber-communications agency CEO reigns, effective today.
As we back in January), the then current CEO Stephen Carter was leaving.
Richards name has been in the frame for a long time. He’s politically very well connected, given that he was previously the UK Prime Minister’s Senior Policy Advisor on media matters.
Watchers of all things Ofcom, our good buddies OfcomWatch see the challenges for Richards to be
* Steering Ofcom through its day-to-day implementation of the various strategic reviews. This means real bread-and-butter regulatory work like conducting radio spectrum auctions and supervising BT-Openreach as it starts to deliver on its Sept 2005 undertakings. Gone – for the most part – are the days of strategic thinking combined with predictive statements about the future.
* Ensuring that Ofcom’s voice is heard on key issues. Ofcom to its credit, tend to think and act in an evidence-based manner, but are surrounded by a regulatory environment which is highly politicised. This has been particularly true in both the media and new media, an area where Stephen Carter’s Ofcom often produced good thinking, but was unable to translate that into actual policy (eg, BBC charter review). Richards comes from the political world, and this might benefit Ofcom in that respect.
* Being a champion of ‘better regulation’ in dealing with the European Commission, health advocates, and other populist causes.
Given they spend all of their time studying Ofcom, who are we to argue of them.
Following on from Daniel’s opening piece on Picnic06 on Monday, we conclude today.
I was really looking forward to John Thackara’s talk entitled “Global issues demand creative leadership” but it was skipped and he went pretty much straight into chairing the “The creative business leaders debate”. He did mention that he’s usually the one to ask “why” are we doing all this [technology innovation], asking what will it be used for and is that so good anyway? But then he ignored those questions completely and followed a more boring corporate line.
Overall, there did seem to be a lack of social comment. There was much more focus on ‘business needs to get investment and customers’ rather than benefits to society – call me old fashioned but we need to ask more ‘why’ and ‘what for’ questions.
Yet again there seemed to be an inverse relationship between the size of the company and the content of the presentation. MTV, Google, World Directories failed to inspire beyond a little spark here or there. Too much reliance on videos within a presentation didn’t help. And, of course, they can’t tell us anything new as they’d blow their competitive advantage.
To be fair I didn’t see all the keynotes nor attend all the workshops. It was simply not possible. It was a very full programme. I was a bit of a conference butterfly, catching a bit here and there, putting my oar in when I could and, of course, couldn’t pass up that free massage.
The production was slick and impressive. But more could have been done to inspire and challenge us; more focus and discussion on issues and less corporate plugs. Perhaps the real benefit of this event was the networking, which there was plenty of. This was an ambitious event and I’d say that, on the whole, the team at Cross Media Week pulled it off.
Incidentally, I found my accommodation (a room in a shared flat 5 minutes cycle from PICNIC) on craigslist – so it works for something. A bicycle came with the deal. Cycling around Amsterdam is always fun. Everything is so close. And sitting outside, by a canal, having a quality meal, one may ask what else is there to life?
A new report examining the role computer and video games can play in education was released today by ELSPA (the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), in association with the UK Department for Education and Skills’.
Entitled ‘Unlimited Learning: The role of computer and video games in the learning landscape’ it uses a number of exclusive case studies on the benefits of games when used in learning. An example is a college in Nottinghamshire who results appear to be near unbelievable. They’ve seen key skills increase to a 94% success rate, compared to the national benchmark of 22%. They attribute much of this to incorporating the commercial game ‘Neverwinter Nights’ into its teaching plan.
Lord Puttnam of Queensgate CBE summarised, all be it at length, the major points, highlighting the strengths of the method, “Increasingly video games are being recognised as a powerful tool for learning. Yes of course they are entertaining and a lot of fun, but they’ve also the ability to inspire and motivate. They hold out the tantalising prospect of personalised, responsive and thoroughly enjoyable learning experiences, irrespective of age, or ability. They can promote ideas, they can stimulate conversation, challenge thinking and, critically for the future of our highly skills-dependent economy, they can encourage problem solving.”
Some will find it surprising that it’s not just young joystick twitchers that are benefiting from learning through games. E-learning expert, Professor Stephen Heppell, who has been studying this area for years explained, “The curious thing is that we’re seeing people playing games and challenging themselves with their computers right across the age range, literally womb to tomb. (We take our hat off to him for being the first person to use the ‘Womb to Tomb’ phrase, which, from this point forward, we will never tire of using.)
Of course there will be many cries of education being dumbed down, but I clearly remember chatting to friends at school about how much easier it would be if what we needed to learn could be set to music – given that we knew the lyric of every song that we liked.
Report: ‘Unlimited Learning: The role of computer and video games in the learning landscape’(PDF)
With its bottom spanked raw by a damning expose on the BBC’s Watchdog programme, beleaguered TalkTalk boss Charles Dunstone has admitted that they screwed up the launch of their free broadband service.
As we reported in June this year, the company – owned by the Carphone Warehouse – was experiencing problems keeping up with demand for their ‘free’ broadband offer which gave punters unlimited landline telephone calls and broadband access for £20 per month (plus a one-off £29.99 connection fee.)
After the launch of the service in April, more than half a million people signed up, but thousands failed to get connected and were forced to endure interminably lengthy waits on pay-per-minute helplines.
Speaking to the BBC’s Watchdog programme, Dunstone admitted the company bungled the launch, saying that the company had been overwhelmed by the number of people signing up, with their call centre staff unable to deal with customer demand.
“I got it wrong. I didn’t realise that free broadband was going to have the effect on people it has,” he whimpered.
Charles feels your pain
Clearly displaying a penchant for understatement, Dunstone commented in his blog: “We have had our fair share of negative publicity of late, and I more than anyone know how frustrating it has been trying to get through to us if you had a problem.”
We somehow doubt that he knows how frustrated Vie Marshall, from London was with his company.
The Watchdog site reports that after signing up in May 2006, Talk Talk completely failed to connect her to the Internet, even managing to lose her details three times.
She soon learnt all about how useless their call centre was too, on one occasion spending 56 minutes 40 seconds waiting on the line.
Donald Beal, was so fed up with TalkTalk’s crap customer service that he cancelled his contract after seven weeks, only to find that the company continued to bill him for a further two months – even though they’d already acknowledged his cancellation request.
They then went on to ignore his letters, emails and phone calls before referring his account to debt collectors.
TalkTalk broadband is, err, a “beautiful child”
After admitting that it had been a “bruising experience for everyone at Carphone Warehouse”, the relentlessly upbeat Dunstone chirped on, “as things start to improve, I hope people will appreciate that what we did was for the best for all consumers, and whilst giving birth to free broadband was painful, it is now turning out to be a beautiful child.”
He added that the company has now hired more staff and that by Christmas, anyone calling a TalkTalk call centre will get to speak to a living, breathing human, not a robotic automaton. Too kind, Charles!
Even with the extra call staff, TalkTalk has said that it can still take anything up to a month for the broadband connection to be turned on after the telephone ‘go-live’ date.
A survey released by Best of Stuff suggests that nearly a third of Brits own up to 15 gadgets.
The survey revealed that 30 per cent of those interviewed were the proud owners of 15 gadgets or more, with 60 per cent spending a hefty £5000 on gadgets every year.
Not surprisingly, mobile phones topped the charts as the ‘most treasured gadget’, with 34 per cent of respondents insisting that they simply could not live without one.
The trusty ol’ gogglebox came in a close second with 27 per cent of the vote, and 46 per cent of those surveyed reckoned that the fabbest new innovation in the market is HDTV.
Brits were found to be most excited about Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation 3, with 44 per cent getting moist at the thought of its launch next March, while Nintendo’s Wii was dampening gussets to the tune of 24 per cent of the vote.
But it’s not all love-love-love in the world of gizmos, with 40 per cent of respondents declaring themselves disappointed with their gadget’s battery life, pointing the finger of blame at MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones as the worst offenders.
* Ensuring that Ofcom’s voice is heard on key issues. Ofcom to its credit, tend to think and act in an evidence-based manner, but are surrounded by a regulatory environment which is highly politicised. This has been particularly true in both the media and new media, an area where Stephen Carter’s Ofcom often produced good thinking, but was unable to translate that into actual policy (eg, BBC charter review). Richards comes from the political world, and this might benefit Ofcom in that respect.