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

  • BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute Billing

    BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute BillingAs of today BT is reshuffling its phone pricing structure. In a typical move of a power-crazed ex-monopoly, it’s giving with one hand and taking away with another.

    The ability to get going on this was given by Ofcom when they lifted restrictions on BT’s UK landline pricing structure.

    The ‘giving’
    BT hasn’t had the take-up with its bundled packages that it had hoped. From today, subscribers of its Option 2 & 3 package will receive around a third price cut. The included-evening/weekend calls to landline packages will move to £3.95 & the all landline calls to £9.95. This is the packages that they’re trumpeting – shame that most people won’t benefit from it isn’t it?

    The other part BT is drawing attention to, is the reduction in price of calls to 0870 and 0845 numbers – the sort of numbers most people have been forced to call to speak to their banks. Oh … and they tell us that they’ve reduced the price of calls to mobile phones.

    Almost to add insult to injury, BT is offering all of their 16m subscribes 25p off their monthly line rental at the end of the year- TWENTY FIVE PENCE! We’ve just wasted that typing this. Of course, much to our distress, most broadband services (supplied by BT Wholesale) need to pay the line rental. Why should we? and how much longer can this be allowed to continue? Come on Ofcom.

    BT Change From Per Second To Per Minute BillingThe ‘taking’
    The majority of BT’s 16m customers pay per call on the Option 1 scheme. Sadly for them, things won’t be such a bargain. BT is changing their standard charging unit from per second to per minute – not something that we’ve seen since the wild-west days of early mobile phone companies, where the cowboy operators tried to extract the maximum amount of money from the suckers customers.

    We think it more than sneaky that BT have given people Call Minder, their free phone answering service, then charge people a fixed fee (3p) or ‘setting up’ the call, then charging whole minutes. When many people get an answer phone, they hang-up because they don’t want to leave a message, or to try to call their mobile – in the meantime BT will collect the setup fee PLUS a whole minute charge, for a couple of seconds.

    As to how much the minute will be – we don’t know. We’ve looked, really we have, pretty hard too – we’ve even tried to use their price list search – but to no avail. Isn’t it a bit of a give away that if you need a search engine for your price list, you’re possibly going to be confusing the customer.

    Interestingly, for the first time, BT have listed Skype on their pricing structure on the press release. Welcome to the future BT.

    If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, and fancy trying to extract pricing information, you can have a look at the BT Together site.

  • Vodafone 3G On Apple MacBook Via USB

    Well they got there finally, Vodafone UK have announced that they’re releasing the less than catchy named Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Modem in the Autumn. It will support their 3G data service and, surprise, surprise, connect to computers using a USB lead. Rather neatly the software disks aren’t needed, as they’re installed directly from the modem.

    This advance will broaden out the service to any machine that doesn’t have a full sized PCMCIA/PC Card slot because it’s too old, or it’s too modern, like the some of the new laptops which only support the smaller ExpressCard, or their Apple Macintosh’s that might not support either.

    Connection to the HSDPA network, in optimum conditions, will be a healthy 1.4Mbps receive and 384Kbps transmit. Currently Vodafone high-speed 3G network covers the major conurbations in the UK, but not the whole of the UK. Their stated plans are 75% of the population by summer 2007.

    There will be a suggested limit of 1Gb of data transfered a month. Those who do not comply “may be asked to moderate their usage,” and persistent usage in excess of the limit “may also result in suspension or termination of the customer’s service.”

  • One Laptop Per Child Programme Claims 4 Million Orders

    One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million OrdersYesterday, a spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme revealed that Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have all tendered commitments to purchase one million Linux laptops through the ambitious US-based programme.

    As we reported back in November last year, OLPC aims to distribute millions of Linux-based laptop computers to needy children in developing countries around the world, all for free.

    The Linux-based laptops come with their own power sources (including wind-up) and offer a dual-mode display, which gives users a full-colour, transmissive DVD mode and a secondary black and white reflective and sunlight-readable display at 3× the resolution.

    The hard-disk free machines – still in the ‘concept’ stage – will be powered by a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, and come with 500MB of Flash memory.

    Sporting four USB ports, the laptops will be fitted with wireless broadband that allows them to work as a mesh network.

    One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million OrdersThis means that each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbour and create ad hoc, local area networks for sharing data and connections.

    The OLPC has stated that it will begin production when it has paid-for orders for between five million and 10m laptops, and plans to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007.

    Nicholas Negroponte, head of the OLPC project and former director of MIT Media Labs also sees the project as a means to promote the mass adoption of Linux.

    One Laptop Per Child Program Claims 4 Million OrdersSo far, AMD, eBay, Google, Nortel, Red Hat, and a number of other technology companies have all signed up to help support the project

    Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the project though, with India’s Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee describing it as “pedagogically suspect,” adding that the country needed to put teachers in classrooms before worrying about buying laptops for students.

    (To be honest, we had to look up what ‘pedagogically’ meant, and can tell you that it means “In a didactic manner”)

    One Laptop Per Child

  • Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns?

    Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? BSkyB results for the last year were broadly in line with predictions, but seasoned watchers of all things financial, recognise tell-tale signs of a flattening of the growth curve. The company has managed its spend on programming well, but technology costs remain high, with significant outgoings on expensive High Definition equipment, that won’t bring instant revenue returns.

    Sky, as the company brands itself in the UK, looks increasingly like a utility platform-come-broadband wars‘ that are unlikely to see any great financial gains for those taking part.

    As Telcos have become drawn into offering entertainment packages to make their own offerings ‘sticky bundles’ – that their customers are loathe to detach themselves from – the entertainment companies are forced to provide competing phone and broadband packages, along with the capability of on-demand TV downloads. This won’t be cheap, as Sky has already found to date with its Easynet purchase, and may prove to be more expensive, if they decide to acquire the UK AOL subscribers from Time Warner.

    Sky’s average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) has dropped by £4 and along side this they’re facing stiffer competition from Freeview, the UK Digital Terrestrial platform. Freeview now has a free-to-air movie channel (Film 4) and is due to add two further entertainment channels provided by the UK channel ‘Five’ this autumn. Cost-conscious multi-channel homes will continue to gravitate to this low frills platform.

    Sky, like pay-TV services worldwide, has a high churn rate, although its managed to reduce this, it remains somewhere over 10% (that’s the percentage of subscribers over the past year who ended their subscriptions). Achieving this has been costly with increased promotional spend and marketing offers to keep current subscribers signed, which has in-turn hit the bottom line.

    Sky Results: Long-Term Concerns? James Murdoch the CEO of BSkyB told the corporate world that “Our industry is changing faster than ever before and for Sky, 2006 has been an important and exciting year.”

    With the NTL/Telewest /Virgin mobile merger and its re-brand starting to gather traction, it looks like Sky can look forward to even more excitement in 2007.

  • Archos 404, 504, 604 PMP: Details

    Archos 404, 504, 604 PMP - Details LeakedDetails are still a little murky on this one, but some information on the upcoming range 404, 504, and 604 PMP devices are bubbling on up on t’internet.

    The Archos 404 (already being dubbed the ‘Page Not Found’ player by some wags) looks set to a high-spec’d affair, sporting a 30 GB hard drive, a 3.5″ LCD display (320 x 240 px, 16 million colours) and MTP/UMS capabilities.

    The thing looks like it will be able to play just about any multimedia file you throw at it too, with built in support for MP3, WMA, WAV, JPEG, BMP, PNG, MPEG4 ASP (Level 5), XviD, DivX 4, DivX 5 and WMV9 (up to a max resolution of 704x 480 @ 30fps, 720 X 576 @ 25fps).

    Inside the highly pocketable player (100 X 77 X 15 mm, weight 190g) there’s also a PDF viewer on board, a handy PDF viewer and a built in speaker.

    Audio playback battery life is claimed at 15 hours, dropping to 4 hours with video.

    Archos 504/604
    We’ve no details on the Archos 504 yet, but we can tell you that the Archos 604 offers the same feature set as above, but adds a man-sized 4.3″ display (480 x 272 px, 16 million colours) screen in a slightly bigger case (130 x 78 x 16mm, 260g.)

    Archos 404, 504, 604 PMP - Details LeakedAccessories ahoy
    Archos are rumoured to be producing an optional DVR station for all the new units, capable of recording video from external sources using MPEG4-SP (DivX 5.0) with ADPCM up to maximum 640 X 480 @ 30fps)

    As with previous Archos models, there also looks to be a range of add-ons being made available later, including a line-in recorder, USB host module, and camera.

    The players are expected to ship in October, although Archos have made no official announcement yet.

    Archos

  • Internet Killed The TOTP Star

    Internet Killed The TOTP StarTo a long, long fanfare that we began to fear would never end, Top of the Pops, the world’s longest-running weekly music show, was finally killed off last night.

    A classic example of how the Internet is changing consumer’s habits, the once High Priest of Pop found its viewers tumbling as music fans flocked to the Web for the latest tunes, news and videos.

    Despite being a major landmark on the UK music map for what seems like centuries, a new generation of impatient, tech-savvy and Web-connected listeners were hardly likely to warm to a format that only offered a distilled breakdown of chart acts once a week.

    Why wait?
    Way back when we were lads, music delivery on demand wasn’t quite the slick operation it is now, with music starved teens reduced to hanging about in smelly phone boxes, dialling ‘160’ and shoving in their 2p’s to hear a crackly rendition of the song of the day (which you hoped wasn’t the Wombles).

    But kids today – spoilt rotten!

    Thanks to the Internet, music lovers can now instantly gorge themselves on zillions of new tunes through social networking sites like MySpace, immerse themselves in vast oceans of songs on pay-per-download sites like iTunes or smuggle in tune booty from pirate sites like SoulSeek.

    With this kind of personal music delivery, the days of families sitting around the gogglebox for a weekly fix of pre-programmed music entertainment are long gone, with music fans able to listen to music whenever they feel like it, via their computers, mobile phones, iPods and media players.

    Internet Killed The TOTP StarThe figures back up the story too, with a recent survey revealing that people spend longer on the Internet than watching television, with the audience for Top of the Pops crashing to around a million viewers from its once-lofty peak of more than 15 million.

    MTV
    Meanwhile MTV are still battling on with the launch of a community-style site at MTV.co.uk followed by a new channel called Flux which will let viewers control what is aired on the station, and offer live chat with other users

    Aimed at challenging the big-boy social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo, MTV are hoping their new product will appeal to the wired generation.

    Angel Gambino, vice president of commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK & Ireland told Reuters, “If audiences are spending more time away from the TV it is important for us to make sure we have a really compelling product.”

    “It’s critical to our success to make that transition from a broadcasting company to a multiplatform media company,” she added.

    Whether MTV’s new interactive TV service will manage to make inroads into a music market increasingly driven by the Internet remains to be seen, but it’s clear that traditional heavyweights like record labels and MTV are very unlikely to enjoy the domination enjoyed in the past.

  • Megabit 2006

    31.Jul – 6.Aug.2006 The approach to Megabit is super casual. It’s made by the people who attend, for the people attending. Sounds fun. They describe it like this …

    Megabit is an open air network event unlike any other event. We try to combine interesting lectures on new technologies, security and other interesing stuff with hanging out with people you would otherwise probably only meet online. Quite some things are organized by participants, including this website.

    Amsterdam, Holland http://www.megabit.nl

  • Kazaa Owners Settle Lawsuits Globally

    Kazza Owners Settle Lawsuits GloballySharman Networks, the company that distributed the file-sharing software, Kazaa, has finally come to an agreement with the media companies that have been chasing them for years throughout courts around the globe.

    The details of the settlement was covered by secrecy clauses, but the Associated Press is reporting the settlement figure as $115m, which they say has mostly been paid by Sharman already. The media companies will drop all of their law suits.

    As part of the settlement, Sharman has agreed to discourage online privacy using ”all reasonable means.’ How this is be achieved is unclear. Kazaa was specificaly designed to be distributed, making it’s very hard to have any control over the network. It’s design would make the use of filtering software, which would remove or block copyright material, difficult.

    Being upbeat Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks, enthused, “This settlement marks the dawn of a new age of cooperation between P2P technology and content industries which will promise an exciting future for online distribution in general and Kazaa users in particular.”

    Kazza Owners Settle Lawsuits GloballyIt’s understood that the settlement doesn’t require the media companies to provide their content to Kazaa, but equally it doesn’t forbid Kazza carrying copyrighted material, if done ‘legitimately.’

    Given the software has been downloaded over 398 million times to date, the media companies could well see the benefit utilising the P2P network.

    There was some shock in November last year when Grokster, who like Sharman made software for distributed file-sharing networks, changed their minds and closed down their service.

  • Win A Copy Of The Long Tail Book

    Win A Copy Of The Long Tail BookWe’ve just published a review of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson’s new book

    The Long Tail is an important manual for the new economics of the Internet and digital culture. As well as demystifying the numbers it provides an essential guide to how to navigate a world where everything is available, all the time.

    High praise and we think that it’s a sufficiently important book that you should have your own copy.

    We chatted to the lovely people at Random House and they’ve kindly furnished us with five copies.

    All you need to do is run through our Readers survey, which should only take on 5-7 minutes of clicking.

    We will of course also be so very grateful – which should give you a lovely glow inside.

  • The Long Tail Book Review (95%): Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More

    The Long Tail Book Review: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More
    by Chris Anderson

    Published by Random House (UK), Hyperion Books (USA),

    Retail price – UK £17.99, USA $24.95

    Buy the book from Amazon US or Amazon UK
    Buy the audio book from Amazon US

    Summary
    The Long Tail Book Review: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More (95%)The Long Tail is an important manual for the new economics of the Internet and digital culture. As well as demystifying the numbers it provides an essential guide to how to navigate a world where everything is available, all the time. Score: 95%

    Review
    Every once in a while a book comes along that completely captures and defines a particular period. Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital defined the blossoming digital culture of the mid 90’s, now The Long Tail shows how the Internet will radically change our habits and behaviour.

    Chris Anderson illustrates how our buying habits have been shaped by the economics of big business, creating the blockbuster culture; the selling of a narrow range of products to the biggest possible group of consumers. Anderson shows how the Internet, through companies such as eBay, Google and Amazon, radically changes that, allowing us to be more exploratory and specific about what we buy.

    “The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

    Anderson provides and eloquent and detailed analysis of various aspects of Internet culture and business and illustrates how the explosion of niche markets and filtering tools will allow us to zero-in on things that interest us, potentially shattering the hold that large manufacturers and retailers have exercised since the mid 20th century.

    The Long Tail Book Review: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More (95%)The Long Tail effect is not limited to buying and selling, the process by which the book was written is a case in point. Anderson (editor in chief of Wired magazine) published the original Long Tail article in Wired back in October 04. The article rapidly became a hit and mushroomed into the Long Tail blog which Anderson used to publicly research and test his theories. Shortly before the publication date earlier this month, Anderson released copies of the book to bloggers across the globe for review. The process is a perfect example of a product being tested and developed publicly, thereby generating enough word of mouth interest to create a ready market for it. The strategy was proved a resounding success by the book’s appearance in Amazon’s top ten non-fiction list on its publication day.

    Although The Long Tail is a business book, it is also about culture in general and how it’s changing. Freed from the constraints of the blockbuster culture, the consumer is able to delve into niches he never knew existed and also to contribute in a way that was not previously possible. The success of social software services such as Flickr and YouTube has allowed the audience to create and share their own material generating a genuinely new, interactive media which is actually competing in some respects with mainstream broadcast media.

    The Long Tail Book Review: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More (95%)Some have taken this to mean that Anderson is sounding the death knell for blockbusters, something which he was at pains to counter on his blog, “Hits Aren’t Dead” he said, “I never said they were. What is dead is the monopoly of the hit. For too long hits or products intended to be hits have had the stage to themselves, because only hit-centric companies had access to the retail channel and the retail channel only had room for best-sellers. But now blockbusters must share the stage with a million niche products, and this will lead to a very different marketplace.”

    While not all the ideas in The Long Tail are Anderson’s own, like any good journalist, he manages to articulate the complexities of a difficult subject in a lucid and entertaining style.

    Summary
    The Long Tail is an important manual for the new economics of the Internet and digital culture. As well as demystifying the numbers it provides an essential guide to how to navigate a world where everything is available, all the time.

    Score: 95%

    Published by Random House (UK), Hyperion Books (USA),

    Retail price – UK £17.99, USA $24.95

    Buy the book from Amazon US or Amazon UK
    Buy the audio book from Amazon US