News — Into Tech

Entertainment: Sony buys Bertelsmann out of joint music business

August 5, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

Japanese electronics group Sony is buying its partner Bertelsmann out of their Sony BMG music joint venture, in a deal worth $1.2bn (£614m) to the German media group.

The move could provide privately-held Bertelsmann, whose RTL unit owns British television channel Five, with the financial firepower to buy all or part of BSkyB’s controversial 17.9% stake in ITV.

The sale, which needs regulatory approval, is part of Bertelsmann boss Hartmut Ostrowski’s plan to dispose of under-performing or non-core businesses.

Last year, online piracy helped push music sales to their lowest level for a decade, down 8% globally to $19.4bn, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Sony BMG’s sales dropped 4%, to $4.1bn, last year as digital revenues failed to make up for declining sales of CDs. The company, has been aggressively cutting costs and has seen profits more than double to $178m.

Bertelsmann is not moving out of music altogether but re-focusing its BMG business on the more lucrative area of rights management. It will take over a number of European music catalogues from Sony BMG including more than 200 artists, who will be distributed by Sony.

Sony has been negotiating with Bertelsmann for several months about acquiring full control of Sony BMG, which they created in August 2004 by pooling their music labels.

Sony BMG already had $600m in cash on its balance sheet, which was split equally between the two owners. Bertelsmann will take all that cash, plus Sony is paying a further $600m for the business.

Sony BMG will now become Sony Music Entertainment Inc (SMEI). Its CD manufacturing and distribution will continue to

be split between Sony’s manufacturing arm, Sony DADC, and Bertelsmann’s services offshoot, Arvato Digital Services.

Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of Sony Corp said: “This acquisition will allow us to achieve a deeper and more robust integration between the wide-ranging global assets of the music company and Sony’s products, operating companies and affiliates. It enables us to offer a total entertainment experience to consumers.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Internet, LAN, Sony

Netbytes: Jack Schofield reviews HubPages

August 4, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

You may have heard a lot about Google’s Knol recently, but you have probably never heard of HubPages. This is a pity, because while Knol is based on the same idea – inviting users to create pages on topics they know about – HubPages looks better, reads better, and is better organised.

I am being a little unfair to Knol, of course. The service was only announced in December, and opened to the general public on July 23. It will certainly improve. HubPages, by contrast, is already two years old, and Squidoo – another site based on exactly the same idea – is even older. But by learning from these pioneers, Google could have done a much better job with Knol.

Most of us have compared Knol to Wikipedia: they could have called it Googlepedia. But both Knol and HubPages do two things very differently from Wikipedia. First, they identify their authors, who take full responsibility for their own pages. Second, they provide a way to make money, though I suspect most contributors won’t make much.

Writing knols or hubs is therefore a competitive rather than a collaborative sport. A thousand people can all create pages about the same topic and hope the best one wins.

But there are also differences. Knol has a desperately dull home page with text links to articles about Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding, Evolving Trends in Laparoscopic Surgery, and so on, and most of the featured articles are very academic. HubPages has a colourful invitation to “Publish your passion”. It features articles about Beatles album cuts, the Top 10 Most Expensive Items On eBay, How to Identify Poisonous House Spiders, and so on. It takes a populist approach.

Hubs are easier to browse than knols. HubPages uses tags to create subject categories such as Love, Health, Finance, Shopping and Business. You can also browse by author, request a hub if you can’t find what you want, and chat with other hubbers in the online forum.

In these respects, HubPages is more of a social networking site. If you like one of Shalini Gupta’s hubs, for example, you can vote for it, leave a comment, browse her other 260 articles, download some of her ebooks, and become a fan – she has more than 600 already. She’s popular partly because one of her subjects is writing hubs for profit.

So far, HubPages has published more than 50,000 hubs and attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month. It also makes more than 90% of its revenue from Google Adsense advertising, and Google features HubPages as a case study. For a small start-up, this is success. Can that success continue now that Google has invaded its turf?

HubPages gets most of its traffic and almost all its money from Google, but what if Knol’s pages appear consistently higher in search results than those from HubPages, Squidoo and similar sites? Google’s search is closed and proprietary, so we have no way of knowing if it favours Knol unfairly. But we’re watching.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Ebay, Google, LAN, Shopping, Traffic

Broadband suppliers blame slowdown on housing crisis

July 31, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

Britain’s broadband boom is stuttering as consumers grapple with rising price and the crumbling housing market. Four of the UK’s big six providers yesterday announced that the past three months saw demand for high-speed internet access down on the previous quarter and down on last year.

With many households looking to rein in spending and able to access the internet at work, the industry believes growth over the summer is likely to be even slower.

Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk business is the UK’s third largest ISP. Yesterday it cut its prediction for annual broadband customer growth by 50%, to between 200,000 and 250,000, after saying it signed 44,000 new customers in the three months to the end of June – compared with 126,000 last year, and 109,000 in the first quarter of 2008.

Chief executive Charles Dunstone said: “It is a combination of fewer housing transactions, because buying a house is a key time when people change supplier, and more people buying mobile broadband instead of fixed line access.” The market is also maturing, he said, with more than 60% of UK households having broadband.

Orange, owned by France Telecom, is the UK’s sixth largest ISP. Yesterday it admitted it actually lost 44,000 broadband users in the quarter, more than the 31,000 it lost in the three months to end March, and the 5,000 who defected last year. Orange now has just over a million customers.

Market leader BT, meanwhile, added 103,000 new broadband customers in the three months to end June, down from 150,000 in the previous quarter, and 174,000 last year. It now has 4.5 million broadband users.

Chief executive Ian Livingston said that new technologies it plans to roll out over the next few years would greatly increase download speeds and could push growth – but that is a little way off. BT shares were clobbered yesterday, having their biggest one-day fall since the dotcom bubble burst, as investors saw a dramatic drop in first quarter cashflow and revelations that margins at BT’s closely watched IT services business have gone backwards, and its pension fund has gone into the red.

Livingston, who only took over from Ben Verwaayen at the start of June, tried to reassure the City that despite having a net cash outflow of £734m over the three months to the end of June, several hundred million more than expected, BT is still on track to generate £1.4bn by the end of the year. The fact its pension scheme has gone from a £2bn surplus before tax last year to an £800m deficit this year, meanwhile, is due to inflation affecting the way the fund is valued, he added.

Analysts were unimpressed. “Protestations from the company that the year will turn out OK may not carry much weight in the current environment, and the share price would seem to be reflecting doubts over the sustainability of the dividend,” said Martin Mabbutt at Nomura. “Poor start to the year” was the headline on a post-results note to investors from Citi.

Gloom surrounding BT was deepened by news that profit margins in its IT operation, BT Global Services, were slightly down on last year and will be lower for the year because of currency fluctuations. BT maintains that the unit (40% of group revenues in the first quarter) can make profit margins of 15% within two to three years, and it is cutting costs. But with first quarter margins of 9.5% down from 9.8%, investors remain highly sceptical; shares in BT closed down 23.7p at 173.9p, wiping £1.8bn off the value of the company.

Another broadband provider, BSkyB, said yesterday that it had added 200,000 customers (half already taking its satellite TV) in the past three months, compared with 229,000 in the previous quarter and 259,000 last year.

Sky announced a drop in annual profits to £60m from £724m because of a £616m plunge in its 17.9% stake in ITV, but said it remains on track to increase its 8.98 million pay-TV customers to 10 million by 2010, with a third also taking broadband.

With more than 1.6 million broadband customers, Sky is now at the heels of fourth-placed Tiscali, estimated to have lost customers in the past quarter. The Italian-owned firm is for sale, with Carphone Warehouse and Sky potentially interested. Tiscali and the UK’s second ISP, Virgin Media, report next week.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Internet, Internet Access, LAN, Satellite

Ask Jack

July 31, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

Blu-ray iMac

We’re looking to buy an iMac, but there’s no indication of if or when Apple is going to offer Blu-ray drives.
Rachael Johnson

JS: It’s more than three years since Apple joined the Blu-ray Association’s board and more than two years since Sony announced Windows laptops with built-in Blu-ray drives, so Apple’s silence is a mystery. The iMac is based on the same Intel technology that is found in Sony and other laptops that play Blu-ray discs when running Windows XP or Vista, so it’s not clear why there has been a delay.

However, Apple needs to offer the H.264/AVC High Profile and VC-1 video and various audio codecs, support the Blu-ray Java interface software and implement the required DRM (Digital Rights Management) system – none of which it appears to do, so far. Monitors must also support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), but Apple’s website doesn’t actually say if any of its screens support it, and Apple’s Cinema Display screens do not. This makes it impossible to predict when Apple will finally offer Blu-ray, but I’d guess it would come with a new range. You could, of course, connect an external Blu-ray drive, such as the LaCie d2 (£546 at Amazon.co.uk), to an iMac if you wanted to use it for storage. If you want to play commercial Blu-ray movies, I suspect you’d be better off buying a standalone player or a Sony PlayStation 3.

From Tiny to Bit.ly

Until two weeks ago, it was all TinyURL. Now it’s all Bit.ly. I can’t find an article explaining the difference. Is there one?
Tim Gossling

JS: Both services let you paste in a very long web address then provide you with a short code that redirects to it. The main thing that Bit.ly adds is URL tracking: in other words, we get a number for how many people clicked each link. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly also keeps a copy of each page. For more details, see bit.ly/3Z5DAA

Closing Task Manager

There seems no way to close the Task Manager in Windows Vista other than rebooting. Once opened, there is no close button, and right-clicking does nothing.
Callum Brown

JS: Normally you can close applications by clicking the cross in the top right hand corner or by pressing Alt and F4. Not having a close button was a bit of a mystery, but a Microsoft Knowledge Base article reveals that Task Manager has a Tiny Footprint Mode. Briefly, double-clicking the top border of the window will bring back the usual controls. This applies in Windows XP as well.

Failed update

I was trying to update Windows Defender in XP but the application declared that error code 0×80241001 prevented this. Afterwards my browser, Firefox, kept crashing.
Alan Braddock

JS: The error code indicates that an update was not installed successfully. The Microsoft Knowledge Base describes two ways to fix the problem. If that doesn’t stop Firefox crashing, try uninstalling Firefox 2 and then reinstalling either Firefox 2 or 3.

LA in a TIFF

I submit environmental reports to a local authority. It says: “TIFF files are required for archival purposes as they are uncompressed which means they retain image detail and are stable (ie, do not degrade through successive opening and closing and saving)” unlike JPegs.
David Lynn

JS: JPeg files are “lossy” – they use a compression system that loses some detail – but opening and closing images does not cause any degradation. However, loading a .jpg image into a paint program and saving it can cause degradation, even if you don’t change it. There is no reason to do this, of course, but paint programs typically have a quality setting somewhere, so you will be re-saving them at “95% quality” or whatever. The rule is therefore not to mess about with original images, only with copies. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a very old but very flexible format and it provides the option for lossless LZW compression, for example.

Backchat

Meriel Whale wanted an MP3 player with a built-in FM radio. On the Ask Jack blog, Paddydog suggested using a mobile phone: “The Sony Ericsson W960i has all the benefits of a Walkman and great sound quality. It also has FM radio and a capacity of 8GB.” I also suggested only buying DRM-free tracks, and Peter Killick adds: “You need to make people aware of the big quality differences between what you get from different suppliers for more or less the same cost.” An MP3 from Play.com might have a bit rate of 320kbps and one from Tesco Digital only 128kbps, he says.

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Codec, Hd, Intel, Internet, LAN, Mac, Microsoft, MP3, Sony

Gamesblog: Why being pirated can be profitable

July 30, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

The world of browser-based Flash games is the industry’s last bastion of unregulated, every-coder-for-himself anarchy. There are thousands of sites out there, offering access to free online games, most supported by ads. The sad thing is, very little of this revenue finds its way to the developers. Recently, my brother-in-law Nick Harper, a creative director at Ubisoft, started designing his own Flash games, more for fun than profit – which, as he quickly discovered was just as well. “It’s the wild west out there. There are a lot of sites that are well known for ’stealing’ games from legitimate portals and running them with new ads, thereby siphoning the revenue. Flash game developers are often students or teenagers just hoping to earn some spare cash. They don’t have a huge amount of business acumen and many portal owners are willing to exploit this.”

Tech company Mochi Media thinks it has the perfect answer. It runs a service named MochiAds, which allows Flash game developers to embed ads within their games, usually between levels, which means that Mochi pays royalties every time someone plays, even if the game has been pirated. As product marketing manager Ada Chen explains: “When the games spread across the internet, no matter where they get ’stolen’ to, our ad gets displayed.”

This isn’t going to turn every Flash coder into an overnight millionaire. As Harper explains: “The amount of money varies depending on the location the game is played and whether the user clicks on the ad or not. This creates a constantly fluctuating value called an eCPM – it’s how much money you earn for every 1,000 plays of your game. An average eCPM is around $0.40, so if 1,000 people play your game you earn 40 cents. To do well you need to get around a million hits on your game.” This isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Last year hit strategy game Desktop Tower Defense was getting 9m players a month.

And Mochi Media isn’t alone in formulating new revenue models for coders. Nonoba.com has just launched a new payment system allowing developers to offer games for free, but then to charge for extra levels or in-game items. This is a hugely popular model in Korea, and is just catching on in the west.

But why does it matter that developers are properly remunerated for these projects? Simple. The better the potential rewards, the better the products. As Chen puts it: “I think we’ll begin to see much richer, more elaborate and more complex games emerging.”

In short, it is important that the people producing offbeat games feel it’s worth their while carrying on.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Internet

Jack Schofield: Is WiMax the next mobile computing revolution?

July 30, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

New portable PCs are in flood at the moment, with announcements from companies such as Lenovo, HP, Sony, Toshiba and Acer. This is not a coincidence. It has been triggered by Intel’s announcement of the new Centrino 2 platform, codenamed Montevina, which is being used in more than 200 new laptops.

Five years ago, the launch of the Centrino platform had a big impact on the market, and led to most notebooks having built-in Wi-Fi. Montevina is the fifth iteration of this platform, and calling it “Centrino 2″ suggests that Intel has similar hopes for it. However, that doesn’t seem likely. Montevina is an upgrade worth having, but you may not notice you’ve got it.

The main change is the inclusion of faster Core 2 Duo processors, codenamed Penryn, based on a new 45nm process technology, instead of 65nm. The new processors use less power and emit less heat, which should result in thinner notebook PCs with better battery life. They will also work with faster (but pricier) DDR3 memory chips.

Vista buyers will be pleased to hear that the new chip set includes Mobile 45 Express graphics, which Intel reckons is roughly 70% faster than the X3100 graphics in the previous Santa Rosa platform. You also get some video-processing in hardware, which should help with playing DVD and Blu-ray movies on the widescreens that now seem to have taken over. As usual, the graphics fall short of top gameplaying standards. However, Montevina lets you switch between the built-in graphics and a separate graphics processor without restarting the PC. Using the built-in graphics for word processing, web browsing and similar tasks saves battery power.

The one thing that could make Centrino 2 revolutionary is its support for WiMax, or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, the 802.16 standard. This is, to put it crudely, a long-range version of 802.11 Wi-Fi. One of its aims is to deliver broadband speeds – perhaps 10Mbps – to mobile users. Wi-Fi works over metres, whereas WiMax works over kilometres.

However, Mobile WiMax will only become compelling when two things happen. The first, expected “later this year”, is the release of Intel’s Echo Peak – the codename for a card that supports both W-Fi and WiMax. This could make WiMax as common as Wi-Fi is today. The second thing is the arrival of WiMax services.

If you live in the US, you can be reasonably hopeful about both of those things. If you live in the UK, you may not get either in the near future. According to the WiMax Forum, “currently there are more than 305 deployments of WiMax services in 118 countries worldwide”. Some are being rolled out in the UK – one is in Milton Keynes – but most mobile users will probably have to wait until Ofcom auctions its “4G” spectrum and the winner(s) get round to installing transmitters and developing service platforms.

I think WiMax should be a global standard, like GSM. However, Ofcom is selling off our 2.6GHz wireless spectrum on “a technology and service neutral basis”. This means phone companies will be able to buy it and use it for something else – such as LTE or Long Term Evolution – instead of WiMax.

LTE, the next version of 3G telephony, is still under development and won’t appear for years.

This doesn’t mean WiMax is doomed. I’ve already seen an LG home router that provides both Wi-Fi and WiMax, and cybercafes could adopt them. With WiMax, you should have no problem getting broadband in your garden, or several streets away.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Intel, Internet, Sony, Wi-Fi

Telecoms: Vodafone may offer cheaper deals

July 29, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

Speed is of the essence, according to the new chief executive of Vodafone, as the mobile phone company battles with the growing impact of economic uncertainty in its core European markets.

Vittorio Colao, who took over from Arun Sarin following Vodafone’s annual meeting yesterday, said the company may also need to increase the number of cheap-rate deals it offers in order to attract and retain European customers who are feeling the pinch.

“I like speed,” he said, when asked to differentiate his management style from that of his predecessor. “I know that nothing excites our people, our staff and makes our customers proud of being with Vodafone like seeing things happen quickly.”

“I don’t think that economic challenges will necessarily slow us down,” he added.

The need for Vodafone to react quickly to a slowdown in its core European markets became obvious last week when its shares slumped 15% – their biggest ever one-day fall – after the company was forced to admit that revenue growth had stalled because of a dramatic slowdown in Spain.

Colao – who told shareholders yesterday that it was a “great privilege and great responsibility” to take over the helm – admitted that the company will have to “adjust our commercial policies” because of macroeconomic conditions, but refused to criticise the strategy followed by his Spanish managers who have helped increase Vodafone’s market share over the past few years.

“If having a strategy wrong means outgrowing the competition 11 quarters one after the other, then I would like to be wrong in many places,” he quipped.

Colao also stressed that the company will continue to look for opportunities in emerging markets to offset slowing growth in Europe. While Sarin took Vodafone into Turkey and India, Colao is trying to finalise a deal to buy out its partner in South African mobile operator Vodacom, which has operations in several other African countries.

That deal took a step closer yesterday as Vodacom announced it had secured a deal to bring on board a number of black investment groups – including Thebe Investments and Royal Bafokeng, one of South Africa’s richest tribal groups – as part of the country’s move to increase black economic empowerment. Vodafone would have to have added black investors to its deal and Vodacom’s move means any deal should progress more smoothly, with the new investors retaining their shareholdings.

At yesterday’s annual meeting, several shareholders alluded to the tough times that Sarin has suffered at the helm, including a boardroom spat over strategy with some of the “old guard” who worked closely with former boss Sir Christopher Gent.

Sarin, however, told the meeting: “There have been ups and downs in the last five years but frankly in a changing world, changing company, changing industry there would be ups and downs. There are always legacy interests that don’t want to change.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: LAN, Mac, Stress

Tepid response to rival search engine launched by ex-Googlers

July 28, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

A Californian start-up co-founded by engineers who helped create Google’s market-leading technology launched a rival search engine yesterday. It claims to scan three times as many web pages as Google but met with a lukewarm response.

Cuil.com, pronounced “cool.com”, may present a problem for people who access the internet at work, as it is just a small typing error away from an Italian hardcore pornographic website, Culi.com.

The website claims to have indexed more than 120bn web pages compared with Google’s estimated 40bn, was set up by Anna Patterson, its president, who worked at Google and helped create the company’s index of the internet, which is consulted when a search term is entered.

Her husband, Cuil’s chief executive and fellow co-founder Tom Costello, is a former researcher from Stanford University, where Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met, and worked with IBM on its search technology. Russell Power, its fellow co-founder and Cuil’s head of engineering, also worked at Google. The team has raised about $33m (£17m) from Silicon Valley investors.

The website looks very different from Google, presenting results – with pictures in many cases – in a magazine-type format rather than as a long list of links. Cuil claims to have an edge by looking not just at words but the concepts they embody.

A search for “Radiohead”, for instance, will bring up not just the band’s own website but ticket sellers and lyrics. But the site is far from perfect: the Radiohead search pulled up a picture of a woman in twin set and pearls as its second link. The website also crashed several times yesterday.

As one commentator on the technology website TechCrunch put it yesterday: “If this wasn’t started by some ex-Googlers, nobody would give a hoot.”

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Google, Internet

Netbytes: Metacritic spots the turkeys

July 28, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

If you’re planning to see a movie, rent a DVD, buy a CD or – most importantly – a video game, then Metacritic is the place to go. It reads the reviews so you don’t have to, then adds up the ratings to provide a single metascore out of 100. It’s a consensus view, and it carries weight.

Of course, you could argue for days about whether Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which scores 93) is a better movie than Raging Bull (92), but that’s not the point. What you can instantly see from Metacritic is that The Dark Knight gets a green light (82), Mamma Mia! is on amber (scoring 51, with mixed reviews) and Space Chimps is at red (35). Job done.

Metacritic has some powerful rivals in the movie business. IMDb, for example, provides the most amazing detail, while Rotten Tomatoes adds news and features to its metascoring. Where Metacritic wins is in covering DVDs, TV series, audio CDs, books and video games, as well as new movies.

Metacritic’s scores are particularly important in the games business, as the site’s co-founder and games editor Marc Doyle explained to The Guardian’s games blog. A moviegoer spends $10 and two hours on a movie, whereas a gamer can spend $60 on a title expected to last 30 to 50 hours. Buying a game is a bigger commitment, so there is more incentive to find the best.

Metascores are compiled from a highly select group of (mostly American) sources such as daily newspapers, weekly magazines and prominent websites. The emphasis is on quality, not quantity. Each review is converted into a numeric score, but again, not all reviews are equal: the big names carry more weight, as decided by Metacritic’s section editor. Metascores change as more reviews appear, but quickly settle down. For those who care, the site has a long explanation: How We Calculate Our Scores.

One drawback with Metacritic is that it doesn’t go very far back. The site was launched in January 2001 by three “former attorneys who were happy to find a more constructive (but less profitable) use of their time”, and was acquired by CNet Networks in 2005. It generally doesn’t cover titles launched in the 1980s and 1990s, though it is adding classics “as time and resources permit”.

Also, Metacritic doesn’t cover everything. It doesn’t attempt to cover all the new CDs and books that appear every year – there are too many – or “straight to video” movies. If titles are not being reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Empire and similar publications, or websites such as Pitchfork, Salon and Slate, then there won’t be any scores for Metacritic to tally.

And if you want more depth in support of a metascore, Metacritic provides brief quotations and links to the original reviews (if they are on the web). Just as a way to find from three to 33 good reviews of a recent title, Metacritic is worth knowing.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Internet, Internet Tv, LAN, Microsoft, Tv Series

Game review: Buzz! Quiz TV

July 23, 2008 By I T Leave a Comment

Imagine a quiz show getting upgraded from a local TV network onto prime-time digital TV – that’s the step up Quiz TV has made from its predecessors. It’s got everything we loved from the earlier editions, but high-def graphics give the game a shine like never before and a wider range of character animations creates a more stylish look. Buzz! has gone from a “show” to a “network” allowing you to pick which quiz genres you’d like to play – from music, movies and TV, to sports and science. New rounds are enjoyable to play and with more than 5,000 questions it’s the best-stocked Buzz! so far, but the killer offering is its online capabilities. The ability to play online, or create and upload your own quizzes for PS3 gamers to play globally really adds to its appeal, giving it that next-gen edge.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Digital TV