Digital-Lifestyles

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

  • UK Analogue Radio Switch-Off Date Announced This Year

    UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has said that she will be reviewing digital radio adoption with the view to switching off the analogue service. The date for the switch-off is expected to come later this year. The statement came in the foreword to new report published by the Digital Radio Development Bureau.

    The analogue TV signal is due to be switched off in 2010, but the government is yet to give any indication of the date that it expects to switch off the analogue radio signal.

    Digital radios have enjoyed a strong growth in the UK, with sales up 444% this year – 600,000 have been sold this year already, and prices are set to fall to around £50 for some sets, with the development of new chips.

    Many listeners are also enjoying radio through their internet connections, and indeed some sources estimate that, rather than a dying past-time, radio listening is set to grow by 10% over the next five years.

    The Independent on the analogue radio switch off

  • Mini iPod Gets a Global Launch

    iPod Mini, the tiny hard drive-based music player that suddenly makes standard iPod players look the size of a bus (with thanks to my newly-developed conscience there for rewriting that to take out a reference to Kirsty Alley), has finally got a global release date.

    After months of component shortages, Apple are now confident that they can supply global demand. Coming to a shop near you, the player will cost about UK£179 (€268) in the UK – but will without any doubt be considerably cheaper everywhere else in the world.
    10:35 08/07/2004 When? 24th of July.

    The iPod Mini will be competing with the lower end of the digital music player market, and will probably steal even more of the market from Rio and Creative. No doubt the imminent arrival of Sony’s new models prompted a personal visit from Steve Jobs, Return of the Jedi-style, to the Toshiba factory to encourage productivity. My thoughts go out to those poor workers who were possibly beaten to within an inch of their lives to produce enough 4gb Microdrives to ensure that no rollerblader will have to go without a pink MP3 player in Hyde Park this summer.

    (Simon has asked me to point out that, to our knowledge, no-one was actually harmed in the production of the iPod Mini.)

    iPod Mini

  • Siemens to Buy BBC Technology

    Siemens Business Services (SBS) has been announced as the BBC’s single preferred bidder for its Technology division. There are a few hurdles yet to go – the deal is still subject to approval by BBC governors, the Secretary of State for Culture, media and Sport and needs to be cleared by the European Commission under EC Merger Regulations.

    Once approved, the contract will run for ten years and is worth up to UK£2 billion (€3 billion).

    The BBC is hoping that SBS will provide skills and expertise to reach its goals over those ten years, as well as substantial cost savings, estimated to be at least UK£20 – 30 million (€30 – €45 million). The corporation has been considering selling off its technology division for at least the last ten years, and, having finally done so represents a further slimming down of the corporation. The last big sell off of this type was a few years ago when the BBC disposed of properties to Land Securities Trillium – this of course gave rise to the Legend of the £50 Lightbulb Replacement Fee.

    With a staff of 1400 and turnover of UK£230 million (€344 million), BBC Technology has a number of high-profile customers outside the corporation, including BSkyB, DirectTV, ESPN and Hutchinson 3G.

    BBC Technology

    Siemens Business Services

  • Square Enix Games on Vodafone Live!

    Role-playing game connoisseurs were seen weeping tears of joy today after Vodafone announced that they had teamed up with Square Enix to produce content for Vodafone live!

    live!, (the bane of copywriters, editors and just about everyone believes that, in order to be useful, a language should have a consistent grammar that isn’t broken just so that marketing departments can sell things), is a content delivery service for Vodafone customers.

    The first up of two titles will be Aleste, a port of the 1990 Master System game from Toppan. Whilst not exactly Ikaruga, it should provide some twitch-gaming fun with some imaginative (well, for the time) bosses and power-ups.

    The next is Actraiser, a 1991 SNES RPG with world-building elements and a side-scrolling play dynamic.

    Tantalisingly on the horizon is a mobile version of Drakengard, which can be described as Panzer Dragoon meets Dynasty Warriors. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

    The excitement in this deal lies in the future – Square Enix have a back catalogue made up of the very best RPGs in console history, and if they choose the right properties, many thousands of fans will happily hand over cash (or bags of gil) for Final Fantasy yet again, just to play it on another format.

    Vodafone live!

    Square Enix

  • Tuning In To Visual Radio

    Nokia has high hopes for a new service that sends images and information to mobile phones, synchronised to a FM radio station.

    Nokia's 7700 showing Visual RadioA new revenue stream

    Mobile phone manufacturers and network operators are developing more and more virtual products for their subscribers – ringtones, wallpapers, games, music, you name it. The favoured charging model preferred by networks is a little but often, hence subscriptions to text alerts, music downloads and other services that extract small amounts of cash from users repeatedly, over a relatively long period.

    Given the age of many phone owners, music is an important part of their lifestyle, and so consumes a fair chunk of disposable income – this is what prompted manufacturers to converge the mobile phone with the radio. Whilst it’s certainly handy, there was always an air of missing potential about having a mobile with a radio – two communications streams that didn’t meet up: until now, that is.

    Radio met GPRS – and Visual Radio was born.

    Visual Radio (VR) is a traditional radio broadcast, backed up and accompanied with information, photographs and graphics displayed on a compatible mobile phone. Handset owners can see immediately what track their favourite radio station is playing and explore more information about the artists, or see what’s coming up next. You can all see the potential for album promotions, competitions and quizzes – and advertising. The service can also be used to sell ringtones and logos – other micropayment-sized virtual goods popular with network operators.

    Nokia describes the basic service thus: “You will never again have to wonder WHO is playing WHAT on radio – now you can get detailed information on any piece that is being played. During the news you can SEE what they are talking about, weather reports can now show you the maps and tables of sports results can easily be viewed. Entering the middle of a talk show, you can see what has been discussed so far and what is coming up next. Valuable business news or urgent news alerts can be received at any time onto your screen without having to interrupt the broadcast over the air.”

    It also enables radio stations to interact in new ways with their audience – by allowing listeners to vote on popular topics, and getting input from people who perhaps would never phone into a show, but would like to interact nonetheless.

    VR is currently available on the rather odd looking Nokia 7700, but the company intends to release more compatible handsets in the future.

    How does it work?

    The system itself is extremely simple: Visual Radio runs in parallel with a traditional radio broadcast, and is transmitted to the user’s handset via GPRS.

    A reasonably informative and immersive service can be transmitted in about 200 kilobits per hour, but can vary enormously depending on the amount of graphics used on the service.

    The attractive part here is that there’s no additional subscription for the end-user to have to buy into or extra payment system – she just pays for the GPRS data on her mobile phone bill as she would normally.

    The service is currently only available for FM broadcasts, but there’s no reason why it can’t be deployed for AM stations, and indeed Nokia are exploring this.

    Nokia has selected HP as its technology partner to bring VR to the market. HP sells the solution to mobile operators and FM radio stations worldwide, as well as provides installation, consulting and integration support. In addition, HP hosts and manages the VR service using standards-based HP platforms.

    The VR application is part of the phone software, embedded in the handset’s hardware, and is not a downloadable application. This strikes me as odd: why not make it a Series 60 application and therefore deployable to all Series 60 phones with FM receivers?

    What does it take to produce a Visual Radio feed?

    VR is basically an XML feed sent to the phone’s browser through a standard GPRS connection. It’s simpler than HTML – there are fixed regions on the phone’s display, and certain content types can only go in those regions. By positioning objects relatively on the screen, similarly to web stylesheets, pages can scale to suit phones with different sized displays.

    Graphics are highly optimised, and the preferred format is PNG, keeping button sizes, for example, down to typically less than 1k.

    One page of VR, or slide, can be less than 3k in data.

    Pages are extremely easy to create, and the process doesn’t get in the way for producing imaginative content – keeping punters interested beyond the novelty stage will be the tricky part. No special tools are required – once the basic templates are worked out, the station (or a third party) can use use an off the shelf package like Dreamweaver to layout pages.

    The pages are also timecoded – so that the content is synchronised with the broadcast, images are cached to the phone so that slides are complete and ready when a song starts.

    Once the VR pages are produced, they are sent via the internet to a hosting centre operated by HP, and then sent to network operators who transmit them to handsets, on a region by region basis.
    A side view of the 7700What’s the business model?

    VR is essentially a low bandwidth sales tool. VR users pay for the GPRS data they download – and hopefully buy ringtones and other products advertised on it. The network operator also splits the money made from the GPRS streams with the radio station responsible for the broadcast. The radio station also has a new channel to sell. advertising on.

    Sophisticated monitoring facilities are built into the service: the network operator can see how many “listeners” are tuned into the visual radio stream at any one time – providing valuable metrics for the radio station and its advertisers. This also enables the broadcaster to vary the amount of bandwidth and other resources deployed in response to demand.

    Where is it?

    Visual Radio is currently being transmitted by Helsinki’s KissFM station, and is available to TeleSonera subscribers.

    Nokia has a chicken and egg situation here – it needs to sell the idea of Visual Radio to broadcasters as a popular service, but it also needs a range of content to entice users to take part. So far, uptake from both broadcasters and the public is disappointing – but it’s early days.

    Visual Radio

  • Senate Moves to Outlaw P2P Applications

    Orrin Hatch, Senate Judiciary Committee chair has moved his focus to P2P applications, claiming that they encourage children and teenagers to infringe copyright.

    In a recent statement, he said: “It is illegal and immoral to induce or encourage children to commit crimes. Tragically, some corporations now seem to think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal. Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of ‘free music.’”

    Fairly emotive language. Given that FTP software and email are much more popular ways to distribute potentially infringing content, will legislation curbing those applications be next? Who makes the decision on what is an appropriate program? Clearly the legislation can be misused to stifle the development of legitimate applications and businesses.

    The bill is backed by the RIAA and co-sponsored by Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

    Hatch has argued that the new bill will not make devices such as iPods and CD recorders illegal – indeed the freedom to make non-infringing copies goes all the way 1984 Sony Betamax case where the US Supreme Court ruled that VCRs and similar copying devices were legal. Hatch asserts that the bill only targets companies that “intentionally induce” consumers to infringe copyrights – but the law is vague enough to allow it to be targeted at many common devices, say P2P groups such as P2P United.

    The RIAA regard the legislation as tightly focussed, and RIAA chair and CEO Mitch Bainwol praised it in a statement this week: “This bill places the spotlight squarely on the bad actors who have hijacked a promising technology for illicit means and ignoble profits. Legitimate uses of peer-to-peer are upheld, while those who intentionally lure consumers into breaking the law are held to account. Under this legislation, the path to legitimacy remains clear: Respect the law and block the exchange of works the copyright owner has not authorized.”

    The sponsors of this bill are being blinkered into a view that is entirely concerned with the profits of one group – the music industry. The backers of the Induce act are rallying towards just one group at the moment, because that’s where the money is.

    What about all of the legitimate applications for P2P software? P2P technology has a promising, legal, future ahead of it if it does not get hobbled by these misinformed people.

    Take, for example, the BBC’s Interactive Media Player project. The only way to distribute this content economically is to rely on a P2P network – yet all content will covered by a digital rights management system.

    Of course, the bill will only outlaw the production of P2P applications within the US – it has no teeth elsewhere, and will not apply to programs developed abroad. Using a P2P application is not illegal – he will have to outlaw the possession of such a program to have any real effect. And they wouldn’t do that, would they? Don’t bet on it – remember it was Hatch who suggested the development of software to destroy the computers of people who downloaded illegal music files.

    More details on BBC iMP

  • UN: We Can Beat Spam in Two Years

    The United Nations has decided to tackle spam – and it thinks it can do it within two years by standardising legislation around the world. The International Telecommunications Union is hosting a meeting on spam in Geneva bringing together regulators from 60 countries, the Council of Europe and the World Trade Organisation.

    Hopefully their anti-spam strategy will be to get them all in one room and crack their heads together until they agree to do something for a change. Yes, I have had a lot of spam today, thanks for asking.

    “(We have) an epidemic on our hands that we need to learn how to control,” Robert Horton, the acting chief of the Australian communications authority, told reporters: “International cooperation is the ultimate goal.”

    The UN intends to provide examples of anti-spam legislation for countries to adopt, to make prosecution and cross-border co-operation easier. How this will be regarded in countries that make a profit from sending spam is yet to be seen.

    “If we don’t work together,” said Robert Shaw, Internet strategy expert with the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU), “we may see millions of people abandoning the Net entirely, out of frustration and disgust.”

    You’ve got that right, Bob. I’ll be back in two years to see if the UN’s strategy worked.

    The ITU estimates that 85% of all email is now spam, compared to “just” 35% last year, and that anti-spam protection now costs computer users US$25 billion (€20.2 billion) a year. Roughly enough to feed everyone on the planet.

    ITU

  • Bulldog’s 4Mps Broadband Service

    Good news if you live in central London and are after a fast, reasonably cheap internet service – Bulldog, who were acquired by Cable and Wireless in June, have launched a 4Mps product for UK£30 (€44.88) per month. Bulldog 4 is being offered through the company’s own exchange equipment in 39 London exchanges, made possible by BT’s local loop unbundling programme.

    Richard Greco, CEO of Bulldog said in a statement, “Having our own infrastructure enables us to do this, unlike other Internet Service Providers who are restricted by BT’s wholesale offerings.”

    The connection is 4Mbps down and 400kbps up — still faster than most ADSL packages, but a deterrent to peer to peer uploaders.

    This is sure to set a fire under BT whose 512kpbs product is only UK£5 (€7.47) cheaper than Bulldog 4.

    Bulldog 4

  • 3D Mobile Menus

    Is this really easier to read?HI Corporation have launched a new 3D menuing system for mobile terminals. The company believes that by presenting menus in 3D, depth of field enhances the users’ visual recognition of icons.

    The menu application will be used as an extension to its Mascot Capsule Engine, a 3D engine already adopted by the three major carriers in Japan and licensed around the world to Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

    The company’s plans don’t stop there though – it sees potential for the new UI in many other mobile devices with LCDs, such as digital cameras and camcorders.

    With applications like Swerve and Mascot reaching phones around the world, I have to ask if advances in menu systems like this actually make using small devices easier, or if it’s just a way of selling new devices to customers. After all, people do have a tendency to judge a device not just on its looks and perceived capabilities, but tend to make a decision on its sophistication based purely on its display UI.

    HI Corp

  • Microsoft Smart Phone, Sierra Voq, on Sale in Europe

    Nifty fold-out keyboardSierra Wireless’ Voq phone, a handset built around Microsoft’s Smartphone Platform, has just gone on sale in Holland, through Dutch carrier KPN.

    The 5 ounce phone contains a 200MHz XScale processor and has 48mb of Flash memory alongside 32mb of SDRAM – expansion is through the usual SD card slot. The display is 2.2 inch, 64,000 colour LCD. A flipout QWERTY keyboard differentiates the phone from most other handsets, emphasising that it’s a business phone for emails. Or for youths that like to send a lot of text messages.

    The phone is not yet available in the US – though is expected to be on sale within the next two weeks, priced at about US$500 (€404).

    KPN