Looking for new sources of revenue beyond their Internet telephony service, Skype have announced a deal with Warner Music Group to flog ring tones and artist images.
The agreement – the first between a music company and an Internet telecoms outfit – will see Skype marketing the ring tones and artist images.
The tie-in will see Warner Music Group supplying the ring tones to Skype, with each song snippet being available for 68p (€1, $1.50), with pricing for artists’ mugshots yet to be announced.
“We are excited that more than 70m Skype users around the world will now have the ability to enjoy content from Warner Music artists,” said Alex Zubillaga, executive vice-president in charge of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music (that’s some job title – we wonder if he meets people saying, “Hi, I’m Alex Zubillaga, EVPICODSABD at Warners?”)
The service is launching with Madonna as a “featured artist” with Skype adding: “In the coming months, consumers will be able to download master ringtones from WMG artists including Madonna, Green Day, Mike Jones, Paul Wall, D4L, T.I., and many more to Skype’s leading Internet calling service.”
The move sees eBay looking to cash in on their considerable investment in Skype, and with an estimated 74m registered users, there’s considerable scope for some juicy ringtone-shifting action.
Ringtone sales have proved a surprise hit for mobile operators and content providers, coining in an astonishing $4bn in worldwide sales in 2004 – around 10 per cent of the $32.2bn worldwide music market.
Not surprisingly, record companies love the additional bonus revenue scooped in from ringtones, particularly as their emergence comes at a time when sales of compact discs are in decline, partly as a result of illegal music downloads (and partly as a result of their greedy pricing strategies).
For the first time in its long history, Eastman Kodak is generating more annual sales from digital imaging than from film-based photography.
But it’s not all good news though, with the company reporting that total losses could top an eye watering $1 billion, as a result of the hugely expensive restructuring demands required by a potentially risky shift to digital.
The company is still half way through the arduous task of restructuring the business for the digital world, and has already laid off some 25,000 workers.
Fortunately for Kodak, Christmas proved a highly profitable period with sales of its EasyShare Printer Docks surging 95%, and sales of kiosks to drugstores and other outlets up 23%.
Google have released version 4 of their popular toolbar for Web browsers, with groovy new features to lure more visitors to their sites.
The Bookmarks functionality has also been enhanced to allow users to create and label bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer – something noticeable missing from arch-rival Internet Explorer.
By ramping up the feature set Google is hoping to grab a larger share of Web users (and thus more advertisers) and steal a march on Yahoo and Microsoft who both offer their own toolbars.
The average laptop is stuffed full of data worth more than half a millon quid.
According to the study – taken from 1,700 quantitative interviews with general employees and IT managers – over three quarters of respondents (80 per cent) laboured under the misconception that their employer had a safe copy of all the emails on their PC.
We raved about the auto-everything Fujifilm F10, so when we heard that they were producing an updated version of the camera offering more manual controls, we were happy to dust off the chequebook and place an order.
We remain impressed with the results, with the high ISO rating letting us capture natural-looking images where other cameras would be reaching for the flash or crumbling into a noisy mess.
With no new dedicated controls to control aperture and shutter settings, exposures had to be adjusted through a rather clunky interface that involved doubling up the main four-way controller and central MENU/OK buttons – not always without confusion.
For folks seeking a simple, all round point and shoot camera, the F10 remains our first choice, but for photographers keen to take advantage of Fuji’s outstanding low light abilities with the ability to control exposure manually, the F11 is well worth the extra £30 or so.
Shutter speed 3 – 1/2000 th sec
In a significant new development, Channel 4 will be allowing their viewers to watch their new comedy program, ‘The IT Crowd’ online and on-demand in advance of their TV broadcast.
The online debut is a first for a terrestrial broadcaster in the UK and apes a similar strategy employed by US network NBC, which launched the US version of The Office online last year.
Channel 4 are saying that this is the first time that they’ve premiered a full episode of a new series, adding that they find it “particularly exciting ” to be airing such a “high profile and apposite programme.”
The program has already received substantial online coverage already with sites like MSN, Yahoo! and Wanadoo running features, and Channel 4 are hoping that the coverage will help in pull in viewers.
After many years of trotting around town with pockets stuffed full of a Palm PDA and a mobile phone, we decide that an all-in-one PDA/smartphone combo would be the best way to reduce our ostentatious trouser bulge.
The left hand side sports the camera button, volume control and voice memo switch, none of which are particularly well placed (it’s all too easy to fire off the voice memo/camera switched when turning the handset on).
Performance
News has broken that two men in the UK have been found liable for file sharing their music. The first ruling of its kind in the UK.
Having been found liable, the two are now exposed to the BPI’s legal fees. Given the City law firms the BPI use, where it’s not unusual to pay £200/hours for their services, it’s going to be an expensive business. BPI have stated that “Total costs are estimated at £13,500 and damages are expected to take the bill even higher.”
Seven branches of the already-wireless central Seattle library are going WiFi. The 
Neither report, it seems, is talking of the inevitable spectrum conflict looming as domestic WiFi proliferates, and City WiFi spreads through the same areas.
“There is a long queue of companies waiting to undergo the same certification process. Then, they can proceed to ‘wave 2’, covering security and quality-of-service, and when they too are certified, we can expect to see larger numbers of products actually reaching the market,” was one comment. But Solis added:
Despite being billed as the “Killer-Sound Phone” by makers Pantech & Curitel, we’re happy to report that the PT-L1900 doesn’t emit a murderous noise beam, but is in fact a top notch music phone.
Back to the phone, the mid-size device (102X48X25.7mm) is dominated by a large, two inch, 240X320 pixels (QVGA), 262k colour TFT LCD display screen, with a slide out keyboard for phone functions.
The makers claim up to 190 hours of standby time and up to 3½ hours of talk time.