If you’ve owned a few digital cameras or PDAs and switched brands a couple of times over the years, you’ll probably already have a formidable collection of non-compatible memory cards wasting away in your drawer.
Looking around our office, we’ve acquired a mighty pile of chunky compact flash memory cards, Sony memory sticks in various flavours, SD cards and the fairly obscure XD format that was forced on us when we fell in love with the Fuji F11 camera.
Lord knows how much that lot costs us, but it looks like we might have to be dipping into our pockets yet again after Sony have released yet another version of their Memory Stick.
Designed for use in cellphones, the new Memory Stick Micro M2 measures in at just 15 x 12.5 x 1.2mm (about 1/4 the size of the Memory Stick Duo) and is set to compete against similarly Lilliputian formats like the MicroSD, MiniSD and TransFlash memory cards (an ‘M2’ adaptor will let users fit the new cards into Memory Stick PRO slots).
Developed by Sony and SanDisk the new card will ship in March and initially come in storage capacities of 256MB, 512MB and 1GB. In theory, the new Micro M2 cards will eventually be able to offer up to 32GB capacity.
Much as we hate to give any kudos to yet another memory card format, that’s a mighty impressive capacity and offers enough storage space to turn mobile phones into fully fledged, iPod-worrying MP3 players.
As is often Sony’s way, we expect consumers are unlikely to be given much choice whether they want to use the format or not with forthcoming Sony Ericsson handsets already using the format.
With the exception of occasional appearances on third party cameras and laptops, none of the various Memory Stick formats have found much favour with other manufacturers, so anyone tempted by the Sony Ericsson’s new range will have to fork out for yet another memory card format.
Thanks Sony.
It looks like the world is going blog crazy as the number of blogs online doubles every five and a half months, with a brand new blog being created every second.
According to Technorati, around 2.7 million of those blogs are updated at least weekly, with something like 1.2 million total posts appearing every single day. New blogs are appearing at a rate of over 75,000 every day with an average of fifty thousand blog posts being recorded every hour.
It’s not all good news though, with Sifry revealing that “about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud.”
Although cameras are considered to be an essential part of modern mobile phones, a new study has revealed that only a tiny percentage of camera phone snaps are actually being stored or sent.
“However, once they start using their new phones, they are turned off by perceived poor picture quality, slow network speeds, and the difficulty of creating and sending pictures. Our survey found that very few pictures actually make their way out of the handset to be shared with others,” he commented.
After seeing the dire quality of the pictures taken with our 
Consumers wanting to be able to take and send decent quality photos are hit by a double whammy: camera phones capable of taking high quality phones aren’t cheap, and the higher resolution files they create end up costing a bomb in network carrier costs. Best solution? Take along a ‘real’ camera and email it when you get home.
Internet big boys Google and Skype have teamed up with two venture capital firms, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, to invest a mighty wedge into Fon Technology, a Spanish startup looking to build a global network of Wi-Fi hotspots.
For Google and Skype, a deal with FON makes their web-based services more ubiquitously available, with developers gaining access to a new platform for creating and delivering services on a global scale.
“As we continue to grow, we will attract consumers for all three foneros categories and achieve our goal of creating a global WiFi nation. This is a great opportunity for ISP’s, bloggers, developers, early adopters, consumer electronics manufacturers and the ‘average Joe or Jane’ with a WiFi connection to make money by letting other foneros connect to the Net safely and simply,” he continued.
It’s been spluttering and wheezing in its sick bed for what seems like an eternity, but the latest figures from research firm IDC confirm that the prognosis isn’t good for the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Although a bright Christmas period saw sales grow 37.6% over Q3, the trend remains resolutely downward, with the declining market segment driving PDAs into a market niche.
But don’t go ordering flowers for the PDA funeral quite yet, as IDC research analyst Ramon Llamas insists that it’s not all over for the PDA market, with plenty of smaller vendors remaining committed to a more niche PDA market.
With Palm winding down its PDA business and concentrating on its Treo smartphone range, Nelson argues that Palm will have difficulty competing against deep-pocketed rivals like Dell and HP who are currently ploughing big R&D budgets into similar products.
After trying to cheat its way to the top of the search engine pile, BMW has been dropped from global search engine, Google.
As he explains in his blog, search engine ‘bots’ arriving at the BMW site would see a page full of keyword-loaded text, which had been optimised to ensure a high search engine ranking.
BMW now have the dubious honour of becoming one of the highest profile companies to have a website effectively blacklisted by Google, by having their all-important PageRank reset to Zero (German camera manufacturer ricoh.de are also set to be delisted).
Now holding the record for the fastest-selling debut album in the UK, the success of young British indie-rockers Arctic Monkeys shows how the Web has changed both the way in which bands promote and market themselves and how people find new music.
For less than the cost of a handful of flyers, bands can set up their own Websites, offer free downloadable tunes, sell merchandise, maintain free email mailing lists and invite a dialogue with their fans.
With a growing fanbase clambering for more, it wasn’t long before record companies were begging to sign up the band, and last week’s album release on Domino Records saw the Artic Monkeys record-breaking leap up the charts.
How do ‘Normal’ phones work?
Using VoIP over the Internet is a hit and miss thing. We know the Internet is fantastic at coping with problems – if there are network errors, the data is re-routed around the black-spots, and when the error goes or traffic gets congested, it just re-routes the data somewhere else. It’s best to think of the Internet as a loose collection of around 30,000+ networks that happen to interconnect at various places.
VoIP in an ideal world
Security implications and therefore costs are a significant issue. The increase in network traffic that VoIP can bring can have other cost implications, such as ensuring firewalls are “chunky” enough to support the VoIP traffic.
Love music? Love iPods? You might 
Couple of content quickies – 
?The tumbrels are resounding for enemies of Google European head, and former T-Mobile boss, Nikesh Arora, following the “disappointing” financial results. In fact, the results were trivially down, but that was enough, and his head will be anxiously sought by Google in the US, say our stray packet interception team.
And the City doesn’t like people it can’t cut down to size. Give them an excuse, and they will jump on you, which is what happened. That $40m is the excuse they’ve been waiting for. “Misled us with the forecast!”