The perfect entertainment system is the key to movie, tv, sports watching or video gaming experience. I am honestly surprised at the number of people out there who think that a movie is just a movie no matter how you are viewing it.
How wrong that is. And how simple it is to set up a [...]
Nokia has mobile phones in entry-level for the mass as well as they have their highly distinguished Vertu brand for the class. Nokia mobile phones have placed themselves in all technologies and innovations. Not to forget their counterparts like Samsung phones, Lg phones, Sony Ericsson phones etc. Even they have well established themselves in different [...]
There are thousands of websites covering the Beijing Olympics, and many people will turn to the ones run by their favourite newspaper, TV channel or local Olympic association. In the UK, for example, we have the British Olympic Association’s site for Team GB supporters. But over the course of the games tens or even hundreds of millions of people will visit the official Beijing Olympics site. Is it up to the job?
It should be. The first conference on the site’s design was held in 2003, where the focus was on accessibility. The official site has to cope with several languages – for example English, French and Spanish, plus Arabic and Chinese. It has to cope with people who cannot see, or cannot hear, or have limited movement. Ideally, it should also be able to work with different hardware, operating systems and browsers including PCs, terminals and mobile phones.
This creates a lot of tension. For maximum accessibility, you can’t beat plain text. However, web designers generally want their sites to be colourful and compelling, with lots of images and videos. Finding a balance involves lots of compromises.
A large part of the official site also has to be functional. Visitors want to know what’s on where and when, and how to get to it. They want to know which athletes are competing for which teams. They want to know who won, whether the Olympic record was broken, and so on. This is not a trivial task when you have more than 10,000 competitors appearing in 37 venues.
Given the size of the challenge, Beijing 2008 doesn’t do badly. It has a traditional menu on the left that covers the obvious categories such as news, schedules, athletes and venues. On a horizontal menue across the top are Olympic days, but no dates. The numbering runs from -2 to 16, with the opening ceremony (Friday) on day zero. Monday August 11 is therefore day 3, not day 4.
The site does have lots of videos. Most of these seem to be in Windows Media Video (wmv) format, which offers fast streaming with WMP9 or later; some are in Real Media format. Even before the games opened, I found videos were already having to stop for buffering. For Olympic video, YouTube may do better.
Beijing 2008 isn’t attempting live video, but there is a box headed Olympic Video on the right hand side. Select your country and it pops up a new browser window that offers some coverage. The UK link leads to EurovisionSports.tv, while the USA links to NBC’s nbcolympics.com.
There are some annoyances. First, I couldn’t get the Olympics E-map to work at all. Second: you need to allow popups because Beijing 2008 frequently opens content in new browser windows. Third, it doesn’t offer a “text larger” feature for Internet Explorer, and the default text is quite small.
It will be interesting to see if London 2012 can do better. There are only 1,479 days to go!
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The mobile phone operator 3 is understood to have sold well over 100,000 Skypephones, its mobile handset that includes the free Skype service, highlighting the growing attraction of free internet-based telephony services that threaten phone company revenues.
The success of the phone, which is made by the Chinese manufacturer Amoi, highlights the growing popularity of mobile versions of VoIP - voice over internet protocol - services.
VoIP services use the internet instead of traditional telephone connections to route calls between users. Though Skype is the largest and best known, there are a host of VoIP providers and they have already become popular among computer users, who can plug headsets into their PCs to make calling easier.
The rising popularity of mobile phones that can access the internet, and networks that can support the sort of fast connections needed for such calls has created a real demand for mobile VoIP services. Companies such as Fring, Vyke, Jajah and WiFiMobile have already launched services.
Though the quality can be patchy, the fact that calls are free makes up for any degradation in service. With the Skypephone, for instance, customers can talk to other Skype users for more than two hours a day for no extra charge, regardless of where the person called is located.
The newest of the UK’s five networks, 3 reckons its cost base is one of the lowest in the industry. It has seen usage of the Skypephone rocket since it was launched in November - more than 1m minutes of Skype usage are passing over the 3 network every day. The operator is hoping new customers attracted by the Skypephone will also spend money on its network.
The company, which refused to comment, is also understood to be planning to launch a new version of the Skypephone this year. It will use the next generation of fast wireless technology - high-speed downlink packet access, or HSDPA.
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One of the dotcom boom’s great survivors will today take the plunge with his latest venture, an internet incubator and its first offspring, a web operation that helps small and medium-sized businesses find the professional services they need.
Maziar Darvish’s most recent dotcom business, AIM-listed Internet Business Group, merged with online marketing group TMN this year. Now he has started Neutron Ventures, one of the first internet incubators in the UK since the bubble burst. Incubators, which promised to take ideas and turn them into multimillion-pound online businesses, failed to live up to the hype in the late 1990s.
Neutron, which is funded by Darvish and a number of private investors, will take majority stakes in its companies, with its first venture, AssuredTrade.com, going live today. It helps small and medium-sized businesses buy everything from accounting and legal services to office cleaners by putting a tender on the website that potential suppliers can view. Suppliers who want to bid for the tender pay a small fee for the contact details.
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Time for a stupid invention we think. This one comes in the form of a ‘joke’ satnav device designed to remind you what it’s like to have a nagging woman in the car for those times she’s unavailable to moan in person, so probably shoe-shopping or getting her hair cut.
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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.
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Blogging looked like fulfilling Andy Warhol’s prophecy that everyone would get their 15 minutes of fame. Xiaxue, however, has been famous for five years, and has turned into a full-time professional blogger, attracting around 300,000 visitors per month. Singapore’s National Library Board has added her to its electronic archives. She may have passed her peak - marked by her Best Asian Weblog award in the 2005 Bloggies - but there’s no sign of this lippy former student/waitress going away.
Xiaxue (”snowing”) has described herself as “just a normal girl who got rather lucky”. Her real name is Zheng Yan Yan, aka Wendy Cheng, and she’s now 24. She started blogging in April 2003, and could easily have sunk without trace. Instead, she became, briefly, a celebrity blogger for The Straits Times newspaper, a Maxim columnist, and co-starred in a sort of reality TV series, Girls Out Loud. She now does a fortnightly series, Xiaxue’s Guide To Life, which runs on Munkysuperstar’s web-based TV channel, clicknetwork.tv. There are quite a few on YouTube.
If you want to know about blinging your long nails with crystals, getting a tongue piercing, losing weight, cooking live crabs, shopping for slutty clothes or fitting out your totally pink Princess Room on the cheap, Xiaxue is your girl. She’d be an ideal Big Brother contestant.
Part of Xiaxue’s appeal is that she’s offensive, by Singapore standards. “Singaporean (Chinese) guys,” she wrote, “like girls who keep quiet and nods in agreement to everything they say, rather than a girl who speaks up for her own opinions. They like girls who are weak, diminutive and vulnerable, not girls who are strong and can protect themselves.” They must also dress modestly and be virgins.
Xiaxue - perhaps corrupted by reading California-based Sweet Valley High books - is the opposite of this Singaporean ideal. She’s bitchy, swears, wears “chio” (pretty but provocative) clothes, writes in intimate detail about things like panty liners, and flaunts her American boyfriend, Mike. It provokes hundreds of comments.
She also generates controversy by attacking other bloggers. One famous post dealt with the Top Seven Most Disgusting Bloggers in Singapore, including Xiaxue. She attacked herself for being a fake, short, fat and ugly. “She is so hao lian [arrogant] of her stupid angmoh [caucasian monkey] boyfriend,” she wrote. “SPG!” Sarong Party Girl: the ultimate insult.
Some of Xiaxue’s posts are labelled as advertorials: she’s paid to write about products, review restaurants etc, and she also got a free “nose job”. Since she’s always writing about the things she does and the products she buys, these aren’t much different from her usual slang-packed, heavily illustrated (and skilfully photoshopped) posts. You can take it or leave it.
As you’d expect, most of Xiaxue’s readers - around 70% - live in Singapore or Malaysia. For the rest of us, she’s a virtual tourist spot, providing an uncensored, unmediated and somewhat voyeuristic peek into a different society. Every nation should have its own Xiaxue, and perhaps they do. We just don’t know about them.
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HMV is extending to its high-street stores a controversial VAT-avoidance scheme that it currently operates solely through the group’s website, which is based offshore. The move will offer shoppers discounts and free delivery on out-of-stock titles, at the expense of Treasury coffers.
The retailer is planning to install instore “HMV Delivers” kiosks in its 250 stores. Customers will be able to place orders for CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and console games and avoid the 17.5% VAT charged on conventional instore purchases.
The terminals bring a ballooning offshore tax ploy, already exploited by major music and DVD websites including HMV.com, to Britain’s high streets. The ploy is a fundamental challenge to the government’s direct taxation regime. If copied by other high-street chains and supermarkets, it could divert hundreds of millions of pounds from the Treasury. Woolworths is also testing similar terminals in three stores.
HMV’s new terminals offer “free home delivery” not from the group’s London distribution centre, but from its base on the Channel Islands tax haven of Guernsey. The extra expense of postage is paid for many times over by avoiding VAT.
HMV initially refused to answer questions on its Guernsey operations, telling the Guardian that VAT-free transactions were blocked on all store terminals. But sample purchases at a number of stores showed this was not the case. HMV then said that after trials of various pricing strategies in a few stores, it planned to restrict VAT-free purchases on terminals to products the customer is unable to find on shelves because they are out of stock. This will “remain a convenient, but very marginal channel for customers and sales,” a spokesman said. He added the main function of the terminals in the future would be to offer digital downloads.
The tax ploy, which is not unlawful, works by exploiting a VAT exemption on goods priced below £18 that are imported by individuals into the UK from outside the European Union. Known as “low value consignment relief”, it has been enshrined in European law for 15 years. But the arrival of online retailing has seen the relief, originally designed to ease the administrative burden on marginal trade, exploited on a scale that was never anticipated.
Initially, HMV was slow to exploit the VAT ploy on the web, seeing cut-price internet retailers as a threat to its stores. In recent years, however, the group has been catching up fast with the pioneers of the VAT relief scheme, such as Jersey-based Play.com. HMV.com gets 1m hits a week.
In March 2007, new chief executive Simon Fox put HMV Guernsey at the heart of his strategy to turn around the struggling retailer. He pledged to expand online sales through the group’s Channel Islands base from 6% of HMV’s UK sales, to 20% by 2010, and promised to double spending on marketing the website.
HMV told the Guardian its VAT-free sales for the last financial year amounted to about £50m. The loss to the Treasury in unpaid VAT was £8.75m.
HMV’s parent company, HMV Group, incurred a total UK corporation tax bill for the same 12 months of £11.4m. More than £8 in every £10 of sales from HMV.com for the last financial year related to VAT-free purchases. Of the 200 bestselling CDs and DVDs available on HMV.com, 196 titles qualify for VAT exemption.
Analysts at Lehman Brothers, the group’s corporate broker, have suggested HMV will have to grow web sales to more than £200m by 2010 if Fox is to meet his target of generating 20% of earnings online. The Guardian estimates HMV’s Guernsey website may be costing the Treasury more than £30m a year in lost revenue in two years’ time.
The British government has put pressure on authorities in Jersey, who have taken actions against a small number of operations deemed to have set up in the island purely for the purposes of exploiting the relief. Officially, ministers and the tax authorities have for years had VAT relief operations under “close review” and have said they will consider cutting the £18 threshold or removing exemption from CDs and DVDs.
Last month, the Treasury’s financial secretary, Jane Kennedy, was asked in parliament to clarify the scale of low value consignment relief not just on CDs and DVDs, but on health food supplements, contact lenses, flower deliveries and all product categories. She pointed to official estimates in 2006 of around £90m a year in unpaid VAT - a figure tax campaigners believe is out of date, and too low.
Nevertheless, home delivery exports to the UK have become a major industry in the Channel Islands. Retailers are struggling to find staff and warehouse space on the islands to meet demand. Of the seven CD-selling websites most visited on the internet in the UK, as defined by web traffic monitoring firm Hitwise, all exploit import VAT relief.
HMV does not advertise the difference between many of their store prices and those available in VAT-free, home-delivery web deals. Here are examples:
Desperate Housewives
Series three DVD: instore, £27. HMV.com, £17.99. (All HMV.com prices include home delivery).
Prime Suspect
10 DVD boxed set: instore, £25. HMV.com, £17.99.
Brothers and Sisters
Series one on DVD: instore, £30. HMV.com, £17.99.
There Will Be Blood
DVD: instore, £14.99. HMV.com, £12.99.
Harry Potter: Years 1-5
10 DVDs. Instore, £25. HMV.com, £17.99.
Coldplay: Viva la Vida
CD: instore, £10.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
Duffy: Rockferry
Instore, £10.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
Paul Weller: 22 Dreams
Instore, £9.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
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Looking at digital SLR cameras, most appear to use xD cards. I already use SD cards. What is the difference?
Maurice
JS: The SD (Secure Digital) card standard was developed by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba to provide a small protected storage format for devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are now miniSD and microSD versions, plus SDHC cards.
The SDHC cards look the same but are generally incompatible with older devices that lack SDHC support, so this is the main point to watch. Digital SLRs that use SD cards are available from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic and Samsung.
The xD (extreme Digital) storage format is similar, but was introduced later by Olympus and Fujifilm. This now has variants called Type M and Type H, so again, watch out for compatibility problems. Since xD is less popular that SD, prices are usually higher and cards will fit fewer devices. Frankly, I can’t see any reason for choosing xD rather than SD or CompactFlash - an older but very reliable format that uses a much bigger card - and I avoid the numerous Sony Memory Stick cards for the same reasons. If you have multiple devices, then it should be cheaper and more convenient to stick to a couple of popular formats, instead of having a different type of card in each device.
I like Outlook Express but cannot use spellcheck with my new laptop because it has only French spelling.
GP Ray
JS: Funnily enough, this is a common complaint, because Microsoft Office 2007 installs English, Spanish and German files that are incompatible with Outlook Express 6. This is a problem because OE does not actually have a spellchecker: it borrows one from Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works. Microsoft’s Help Centre article offers a solution. It says: “There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet”. One popular option is Vampirefo’s Spell Checker For OE, which is also available from SnapFiles. You could also use the inline spellchecker in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 with IE7Pro. If you really want to try to fix the problem, however, Tech-Pro.net has an article on How To: Fix spell checking in Outlook Express 6.
For several years I have been very satisfied with Microsoft’s Picture It! program. However, having changed my computer, it is no longer available.
JH Prentice
JS: Microsoft’s Picture It! was included in the Microsoft Works suite and subsumed into the Microsoft Digital Image Suite. Microsoft discontinued it after adding most of the features to Windows Vista. However, your old CD could work: according to web reports, Picture It! 9 and 10 will work in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode and check the box “As Administrator”. Sadly, the very easy photo retouching features were not added to Vista, and I don’t know of any other program that takes the same non-geeky approach. The closest may be an online Flash-based picture editor, Picnik. Otherwise, Paint.net is a good free picture editor for Windows, though it’s in the traditional mould.
One of my three anti-spyware programmes keeps reporting a Trojan backdoor in the internat.exe Windows file. This has a large query as its icon, and properties describes it as a Keyboard Language Indicator Applet. If I let the program remove it, or if I delete it myself, then it promptly reappears.
Richard Parish
JS: Try running a search for internat.exe, the name of the software that detects it and “false alarm”, because that’s what it probably is. There are at least two versions of internat.exe, one of which puts a small blue square in the SysTray to let you change languages. Most UK users don’t need this feature and don’t run it. This has a question mark icon and is about 20K. The Trojan version is about four times larger and has a zip file icon. If it also says “Hello. I’m NetSnake” on startup, then it’s definitely a virus. For more information, see Symantec’s write-up.
· Bill Taylor has come up with “a very simple typo that causes a Word document to be closed without saving” - which was Stafford Linsley’s problem. It’s “Ctrl+W - an unadvertised keyboard shortcut for Close”. He says he learned the hard way by typing “When” and hitting Ctrl instead of the shift key. I’ve previously recommended Ctrl-W as a quick way of closing unwanted popups and browser windows.
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