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

  • AOL Buys Advertising.com

    America Online Inc, the world’s largest distributor of disposable CDs and apparently also an interactive services company, has announced that it has signed an agreement to hand over US$435 million (€359 million) in cash for Advertising.com, the internet’s third largest advertising network.

    Advertising.com plans and optimises online campaigns for more than 800 advertisers, and also works with some 1500 online publishers to bring them 110 million unique visitors every month. About 70% of all US internet users encounter Advertising.com’s work in the course of a month’s surfing.

    This is AOL’s biggest deal since it merged with Time Warner, and shows that there may be some life in online advertising after the bubble burst after all. AOL, having ditched its broadband product and now staring at declining dial-up business, is understandably keen to drive growth in other areas, and believes that content and services are what it’s best at.

    Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO, America Online, Inc., said, “Online advertising is showing very strong growth across the industry, and the acquisition of Advertising.com underscores AOL’s determination to strengthen its competitive position. Advertising.com has built a profitable, scalable and highly attractive business. This acquisition is a strategic move that will bolster AOL’s advertising business, building on the strides made in the past year.”

    Advertising.com

  • Company Websites Spreading Spyware

    Symantec are warning web surfers of a new trend in spyware and adware infections – visitors to a number of corporate websites are getting a bit more than they bargained for.

    It’s claimed that organised crime groups in Eastern Europe are hacking corporate sites and installing code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer to install spyware and other unwanted applications on visitors’ PCs without their knowledge. Spyware can be used to harvest personal details about a computer owner such as bank details, whilst adware can be used to hijack browsers and display unwanted advertising to users.

    Microsoft has not yet released a patch for the flaws, leaving millions of PCs open to infection. Although the browser flaw is well publicised, there is still some confusion surrounding how hackers are installing the script on web servers running Microsoft’s IIS service in the first place.

    The ISC incidents site reports: “We still do not know how the IIS servers are originally infected with the JavaScript or the modification to the configuration files… The visitor’s browser is re-directed to the Russian URL listed below [Ed: Clearly we’re not showing this] where a known Trojan program (msits.exe) is downloaded, along with some additional malware. Again, if the user’s machine is updated with current AV software, this malware is detected and blocked.”

    Without listing the companies responsible for spreading the infection, they state surprise that the unwitting culprits “include businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched.”

    Free anti-spyware and anti-virus software:

    Ad-aware

    AVG anti-virus software

    A browser with less security holes in it:

    Mozilla 1.7

  • Hotmail Enters the Storage Wars

    Hotmail is the latest contender to offer large amounts of storage to its subscribers – up to 2 gigabytes if you pay a US$19.95 (€16.46) subscription. Users of the free Hotmail service will get 250mb, as a response to GMail’s 1 gig, advertising-funded, service.

    By GMail’s standards, 250mb seems almost mean, but then Hotmail aren’t going after the “never delete anything” crowd. The new 2 gig incarnation of Hotmail will be called Hotmail Plus, and will allow users to send attachments of up to 20mb – and will have no graphical adverts on the web frontend.

    As a bonus, all 170 million subscribers will get email anti-virus checking and MSN Calendar. It’s about time that the anti-virus product was integrated as that’ll cut down on much of the infected spam that is flooding mailboxes worldwide. A frightening release from BT yesterday stated “46% of all email traffic in Europe will be spam in 2004 and by 2008 this will rise to 71%.”

    Interestingly, a Neilsen report in May had the number of Hotmail subscribers down at around 34 million.

    Hotmail Plus

  • Microsoft Asks for Hearing Delay

    Microsoft have asked the European Union, by way of a 100 page appeal, to delay a Commission ruling regarding its distribution of Windows Media Player.

    If the stay request is granted, it may well delay the the EU court’s final verdict by several years – during which time Microsoft will be able to continue distributing Windows Media Player in its usual manner. Obviously this renders the EU ruling against Microsoft completely useless.

    The ruling was intended to force MS to share interface information with competitors so that they could integrate their own media players with Windows, and to provide a version of Windows which does not have Media Player pre-installed.

    Brussels also fined the company €497 million (US$602 million), but this will make little impact on a company with at least €50 billion (US$60 billion) in cash reserves.

    Since the appeal may take up to five years, which is effectively forever in digital media terms, Microsoft will be able to expand the installed base still further without sharing information with competing software manufacturers, or providing a choice of media player to those who don’t want WM9 – or WM11 as it may well be by the time the ruling comes into effect. Microsoft originally had (from March 24 this year) 90 days to offer Windows without Media Player, and 120 days to begin sharing information.

    Europa

  • Five May Buy Flextech

    Jane Lightning, speaking at a Royal Television Society event last night, dropped an unsubtle hint that Five are considering buying Flextech, the content arm of Telewest.

    While the rest of the industry is still speculating about the proposed merger with Channel 4, Lightning, Five’s chief executive said “Flextech could be one of the options we are looking at.”

    Well, it either is one of the options they’re looking at or it isn’t. I’ll fetch my deerstalker, pipe and magnifying glass for a second and say that they most definitely are looking at it, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place. Oh, and it’s rumoured that Five execs paid a visit to Bill Huff, the fund manager who holds 20% of Telewest, in March.

    Flextech would bring Bravo, Challenge, Living, Trouble and the half of UKTV that isn’t owned by BBC Worldwide.

    With C4, Sony US and Disney also sniffing after Flextech, they’d better get a move on.

    Telewest are keen to sell the company to get out of debt and concentrate on its upcoming marriage to NTL, and are looking for about UK£750 million (€1.1 billion) for it.

    Flextech

  • Qwest to Launch VoIP Service to Boost Internet Telephony

    Qwest Communications are to launch OneFlex, a new voice over IP (VoIP) service, in July. The product is aimed at both business and home consumers, and will require VoIP phones to use. OneFlex has conference calling, voice mail and other added features, all controlled from a web interface.

    Qwest are looking to roll the service out to 20 US metropolitan areas by the end of the year, but is launching in Boise, Denver and Phoenix. It uses the Qwest iQ Network and is intended to appeal to customers who want to get their broadband and telephone service from a single source, and is of course cheaper than standard long distance.

    VoIP is facing a slow start in the US – a recent survey from Ipsos-Insight revealed that 50% of public did not know what VoIP was, and some 60% of the people who did know were confused about how it actually worked.

    About Qwest

  • SCEA President: Cheaper Broadband is Critical for Future Consoles

    Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) president, Kaz Hirai has said that broadband, and cheap broadband too, is going to be essential for future of games consoles – and you can bet he’s talking about the PS3.

    His presentation to the Congressional Internet Caucus focussed on Sony’s content strategy for their next iteration of the absurdly popular PlayStation console brand. Sony, and indeed most console and games manufacturers, are placing a lot of emphasis on online gaming as it carries a lot of potential for microtransactions – a constant stream of small charges for extra content, access to games and services. The notable exception here is Nintendo, who have done their best to hide the fact that there is a broadband adaptor for the GameCube and will even happily prosecute UK games stores if they dare try to sell one.

    To encourage the growth of online gaming, and therefore the microtransaction business model, Hirai argues that broadband subscription fees need to be cheaper.

    Hirai emphasised Sony’s commitment to online gaming by saying “For the next generation console, online is going to be like air conditioning in a car. You’re going to need it.”

    Kaz Hirai’s presentation

  • European iTunes Stores Sell 800,000 Tracks in One Week

    There was a distinct lack of surprised faces yesterday at Apple’s announcement that their European iTunes stores sold a total of 800,000 tracks in their first week of operation.

    The most popular store was the UK version, accounting for 450,000 tracks out of the total. In the week that OD2 was acquired by Loudeye, iTunes sold 16 times more tracks than its closest competitor. Best cash that cheque as fast as you can, Peter. No figures are available from Napster.

    One ploy for attracting sales was to release the first new track for 13 years from the Pixies exclusively on iTunes, though I’d like to see how much direct impact this had as there can’t be that many Pixies fans left still alive.

    iTunes

  • ITV to Invest More in Digital Brands

    Good news if you’re over 35 and/or like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here – the UK independent broadcaster, ITV is to invest UK£36 million in its two digital channels, ITV2 and ITV3, by scrapping its plans for a children’s channel and choosing instead to focus on News and its digital offerings.

    This means that ITV2 has its programme making budget doubled to UK£24 million, and ITV3 gets UK£13 million for its launch later this year.

    ITV2 is going to use that extra cash to buy in American imports to compete with Channel 4 and Sky – so rather than attract an audience with original programming it’s going to buy in the content that the others channels show in the hope that it will somehow wrestle views away from them.

    By making the investment, ITV hope to triple their total revenues to UK£150 million (€225 million) by 2007. Net advertising revenues are up 4.9% over this period last year, but viewer share continues to fall.

    ITV

  • Loudeye Acquires OD2

    Loudeye, a business to business digital media company has acquired Peter Gabriel and Charles Grimsdale’s On Demand Distribution (OD2) business.

    The move will effectively double Loudeye’s revenue, and has created the world’s largest digital media company.

    OD2 provide outsourced digital distribution for companies like Coca Cola when they want to launch an online music store. Customers include HMV, MyCokeMusic and Wannadoo, but combined Loudeye and OD2 will have more than 200 customers across the world.

    Jeff Cavins, Loudeye’s president and chief executive officer said in a statement: “By combining with OD2, the leading digital music service provider in Europe, we become the largest business-to-business digital media provider in the world with the largest licensed digital music catalogue in the industry,” “This significantly strengthens our solutions for our customers globally and immediately expands our customer relationships and partner opportunities. Together OD2 and Loudeye deliver a powerful, next-generation digital media platform to enable companies to launch complete digital music offerings around the world. In addition, this will globalize Loudeye’s content management, piracy protection and promotion services and will enable us to leverage OD2’s broad reach and strong customer relationships to expand our business into new markets.”

    “OD2 and Loudeye share virtually identical goals, vision and passion for the future of digital music and I see tremendous opportunities for our combined company to drive digital media deployments worldwide,” said Charles Grimsdale, co-founder and chief executive officer of OD2. “Our proven success managing the specific challenges of pan-European digital media deployments will be a strong asset for Loudeye and significantly raises the barriers to entry for other service providers looking to enter the European market. Furthermore, Loudeye will enable us to offer a much broader range of new services to our current customers and extend our capabilities into such fast growing areas as the wireless arena.”

    With online music sales across Europe predicted to reach €1.3 billion by 2007, there is a lot at stake in the industry – expect more mergers and disappearances over the next 18 months.

    On Demand Distribtion

    Loudeye