NXP have had a Set Top Box (STB) playing Flash for quite a few years now. They’ve moved this on now play Flash videos, enabling them to support YouTube and other Internet video services without the need for a separate computer – and from the comfort of the sofa.
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NXP: Navigating And Playing YouTube Videos on a STB: Podcast And Video
Philips Launch Aurea
Philips continue their run of staging press event differently. At IFA they started with a stage with dancers, before the boss came on stage to tell us all about the wonderful things they’d been working on.
(more…)Social Networkers Warned Over ID Theft
A credit information group has warned that users of popular Internet networking sites may be putting themselves at increased risk of suffering identity theft
(more…)China Unblocks English Wikipedia, Mostly
Quick catchup news. China has modified their content blocking – or Great Firewall of China as it’s sometimes called – to allow through the English language version of Wikipedia to be seen in China.This change only took place at the beginning of this week. My experience the week before (while in Beijing), was that results were show in Google, but when clicking on the Wikipedia links, they would timeout with nothing displayed – classic firewall blocking behaviour.
(more…)Napster Mobile: O2 Ireland Is First
O2 Ireland has become the first European mobile operator to offer Napster Mobile.Napster Mobile lets people search, browse, preview and purchase content from Napster’s 2.2m+ track music catalogue.
The service is launching on O2’s 3G i-mode handsets with the hope that non i-mode handsets should be available by March 2007 on O2 Active.
From the beginning of next year O2 Ireland customers will also be able to access a copy of their mobile downloads on their personal computers giving them the flexibility of having their music downloads both on the go and at the PC, all from one universally recognised music brand.
One of the difficulties with moving a service like Napster from the large PC screen to a mobile handset could be the restrictions of the screen size. To alleviate the problems of navigating such a large number of tracks, the new Napster Mobile service also features a recommendation engine which makes content recommendations based on each customer’s personal taste in music. Nice.
Waking up to consumers demands, users of the service will also be able to access tracks that they purchase on the mobiles, on their PCs, from the beginning of next year.
Ericsson is powering the backend of the service – an interesting change from Nokia, who normally provide the technology to do this.
O2 has spend a considerable amount of money tying themselves to music, attempting to benefit from all of the ‘cool’ that it can bring. You only have to witness the party they threw at IFA last year to understand how successfully they’ve been with it – it was definitely the best party at IFA, rammed full of young things gyrating.The service is already running at NTT DoCoMo in Japan (also i-mode), SunCom Wireless and Cingular in the US. Plans for further European operator are being finalised, with Portugal expecting to be the next.
NEC’s Chip To Play Blu-Ray And HD-DVD
The almighty ruck between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could have found a bridge for the consumer.The clever sticks at NEC have come up with a chip that will play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks.
A smart move for NEC, this could save the consumer having to make a choice between the two formats they have little or no knowledge of, but are being told that they simply must have.
The difference between the two standards is pretty considerable, not just in the capacity of the disks that Blu-ray has tried to make much of – as they saw it as a competitive advantage. One of the major differences is the interactivity, with Blu-ray going the route of Java, giving them both a considerable processing overhead in the machines that need to play it and huge flexibility in the depth of interactivity that can be achieved.
It’s not the first time that bringing together the two formats has been suggested. Over a year ago Samsung said that they’d produce a dual format player. Mysteriously they’ve dropped this idea, and gave a serious amount of umm-ing and ahh-ing when asked about it at IFA this year.
NEC is telling all those who will listen that the chips should be shipping from April 2007 onwards.
Vodafone Casa Fastweb Comes To Life
In the general rush of all mobile phone companies desperately try not to get sidelined, Vodafone Italy have just announced a tie-up with Italian broadband provider, FastWeb.Customers will be be able to use their normal Vodafone services on their mobiles, make mobile voice calls to fixed line phones at fixed rates whilst at home and have access to Fastweb’s broadband network, which covers approximately half the population of Italy at speeds of up to 20Mbps.
FastWeb bill themselves as “Italy’s leading alternative broadband provider,” and with under a million customers (874,300), they’ll benefit from having Vodafone selling their services from Vodafone shops around Italy as well as to their current 24m cellular customers.If mobile companies don’t start offering fixed line services, they feel they’ll lose customers to people who do, with the single bill for all communications being the strongest pull.
We recently reported that O2 Germany has gone the same route offering DSL, Vodafone UK tied up with BT and Vodafone Germany launched similar services on 1 Sept.
News Corp Buy 51% Of Jamba For $187m!
News Corp has reportedly shelled out $187.5m to buy 51% in Jamba (Jamster in the US), the mobile phone ringtone company who came to prominence with the Crazy Frog ringtone.What!, was the cry around the Digital-Lifestyles offfices. How much …. and for what?
Many had the same reaction when Murdoch bought MySpace for $580m a year ago. These same people had to quickly readjust their view as member accounts rose to 100m and they signed a deal with Google that brought in $900m.
Here’s a few of our theories as to why they might have splashed so much cash on this.
News Corp are very gun-ho about content to mobile … well actually all platforms now. It may be that they hoping to buy large amounts of Jamba’s already-paying customers. We saw Jamba at IFA in Berlin (where they’re based) and the stand was indeed filled with eager young-things, trying to look cool, in their self concious way – ideal clients for content.
The WSJ is reporting initial offerings are expected to be ringtones, wallpaper and short clips from the popular Fox animated series The Simpsons.With this purchase, you could assume that News Corp want to move into this space very quickly, as building an infrastructure to deliver content to mobiles isn’t exactly beyond the realms of achievability. Jamba obviously have a lot of expertise in delivering content, primarily ringtones, to mobile phones.
Verisign bought Jamba for $266m in 2004 at the height of the Crazy Frog promotion. We thought at the time it was a very strange fit for a company that provides services.
Skype Hits The Pleasure And Pain Of The Mainstream
The news that OFCOM is to review its position on Voice Over IP services (VOIP) – the way we can make low cost or free phone and video calls currently from our PC’s generally using call centre-type headsets – is part of the evolution of these types of service from guerrilla geek to middle class mainstream. Now that Tesco’s are marketing VOIP services it’s fair to say that it’s a ‘regular’ service/product.VOIP service providers are predictably angry over OFCOM’s meddlesome intervention and have asked why such a code of practice is needed. OFCOM will try and tread a fine line between existing heavily regulated voice service providers and the new upstarts who hitch a cheap ride on the existing infrastructure.
Along with the news that VOIP is likely to face some of the requirements that traditional telcos have to deliver on, comes the announcement that Philips Electronics are bringing to market, for year end, a cordless DECT phone. If anyone asks you, DECT is the rather nifty acronym around Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications.News of the new DECT handset, the Philips Voip841 broke at a recent consumer electronics show in Berlin. The phone will allow callers to use Skype’s service without being connected to a PC and is likely to hit both landline and mobile companies. The Phone will access your regular home line and broadband and allow you to call other Skype account holders for the grand sum of nothing.
Prices for the new device are not yet released, but industry observers are talking of a figure around a £100 to make this potentially cost saving purchase.BBC World Cup Website Scores!
When it comes to World Cup football Web coverage in the UK, the BBC isn’t just dribbling past its rivals – it’s positively crushing past them, according to figures released by Nielsen NetRatings.England’s dull-as-ditchwater victory over Ecuador in the first knock-out round pulled in the biggest UK audience to sports and gambling sites of all the matches so far, with one million users pushing the weekly audience to over 3 million for the first time.
Of that figure, the BBC Sport website attracted 1.58 million unique visitors overall last week, recording an average viewing time of 11 minutes.
This amounts to a hefty 58 per cent share of the weekly sports and gambling audience, with the official Yahoo FIFA World Cup Website coming over like a bunch of Third Division cloggers, managing only a fifth of that traffic.
The Beeb’s closest rival was Sky Sports, which managed 423,000 unique visitors, each hanging about for an average of five minutes each, followed by Premium TV (419,400), FIFA World Cup (298,000), Sporting Life (209,360) and Yahoo Sports (187,000).
Interestingly, the Sporting Life site proved the ‘stickiest’ with punters spending the longest time on the site (an average of 36 mins each).Overall, the World Cup has seen a 51% growth in online punters visiting sports and gambling websites in the UK over the last four weeks.
Match by match analysis
Breaking the figures down to individual games, the report shows that the first match against Paraguay attracted an online audience of 979,000 users with the BBC grabbing 51% of that total, followed by Trinidad & Tobago (885,000 users, BBC with 51%), Sweden (936,000, 47%) and Ecuador (1,016,000, 47%).The BBC added that when the worldwide traffic was added to the total, its overall sports traffic as high as three million unique users.