October 25, 2005 at 5:26 am · Filed under Internet, Tech News
Do you have your own website or blog? You can display your most recent My Web links on your site with a My Web Badge. Just select your badge options, and they’ll give you the code to cut and paste into your web page or blog template.
October 19, 2005 at 5:53 am · Filed under Gadget, Tech News
THE introduction of Apple Computer’s video iPod last Wednesday was greeted as an epochal event. The portable, personal, digital world - as you’ve no doubt heard by now - is here, and there is no turning back. And just as it took the vision and brio of Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s founder, to drag the music industry into the 21st century with the iPod and the iTunes online music store, it was only a matter of time before he would do the same with what quaintly used to be known as the moving image.
And so, the video iPod. And with it, Mr. Jobs’s particularly clever coup: sealing a deal with his quasi-estranged partner, the Walt Disney Company, to distribute downloaded versions of such hit Disney-produced shows as “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost” on the new gizmo, at $1.99 each. It’s not exactly 500 channels of entertainment, but it’s a good anchor tenant, supplemented by pay-per-download music videos and other clever features, such as films from Mr. Jobs’ other outpost, the animation studio Pixar.
Only a fool would bet against Mr. Jobs, whose iPod now thoroughly dominates the digital music market against rivals like Sony. But here goes: at first blush, the video iPod is not about to revolutionize Hollywood in the way the iPod revolutionized music.
Why? Two reasons. One is that studios are not rushing to make their most popular movies and shows available for the video iPod (note that only Disney shared the stage with Mr. Jobs last week, and the primary motive may have been its desire to repair relations with Pixar). Perhaps even more important, mobile gadgets with access to everything that is already on television are on the way.
Just last week, EchoStar, the satellite broadcaster, released one such device, a portable personal video recorder called PocketDISH; it got much less notice than the video iPod got. Think of PocketDISH essentially as a pocket-sized TiVo - a small computer that lets you record television shows onto a hard drive with the click of a button - with a screen for watching what you’ve recorded. And like TiVo and its clones, it can record any program you can watch on a full-sized TV at home, and then allow you to fast-forward through the ads when you view it.
The obvious shortcoming of the video iPod (at least in its first iteration) is that by being Internet-based it can offer a scant library of material. Apart from Disney’s hits and whatever else iTunes offers in coming months, other media giants like NBC Universal have not yet fully digitized their vast libraries of shows and movies and made them available via the Internet. They’re worried about piracy, for one thing, but they’re also not quite convinced that there is a good business case for online distribution. Source: New York Times
Technorati Tags: ipod, vpod, apple, television
October 14, 2005 at 12:31 am · Filed under Gadget, Tech News
These are testing times for the team behind one of Microsoft’s most ambitious product launches ever.
In just a few weeks’ time, it will unleash its great white hope of gaming, the Xbox 360, across the world.
But rolling out a next generation games console in the US, Europe and Japan virtually simultaneously is proving to be a greater challenge than anyone imagined.
“There’s a reason no-one has done this before and we are figuring that out,” said Xbox marketing boss Peter Moore.
“If we knew what we were getting into, we might not have done it,” he admitted at a recent Xbox event in Amsterdam.
In the past console makers have staggered the release of a new machine, like Sony did with the PlayStation Portable. The device first saw the light of day in Japan, three months later in the US and almost a year later in Europe. Read on
October 8, 2005 at 12:42 am · Filed under Gadget, Tech News
The average American spends more time using media such as TV and the internet than sleeping, a study has found.
US researchers found that Americans spend nine hours a day watching TV, using the web or talking on a mobile.
One-third of that time is devoted to using two or more media at once, noted Bob Papper, a Ball State University professor who co-authored the report.
“This is arguably in excess of anything we would have envisaged 10 years ago,” Prof Papper said.
Media mad
The team at Ball State University in Indiana looked at media take-up over 5,000 hours among a small sample of 400 people.
They tracked how consumers used 15 different media and gadgets including television, books, magazines, mobile phones, the internet, instant messaging and e-mail.
Media use was the biggest single activity in each observed day and, the researchers said, was undoubtedly the biggest life activity of all.
Top media activity was still watching TV. But in second place was the time that people spent with their laptop and desktop computers.
“When we combine time spent on the web, using e-mail, instant messaging and software such as word processing, the computer eclipses all other media with the single exception of television,” said Prof Papper.
However, the medium that reaches most people in any given day, 94.6%, was the telephone.
Most people, 56.9%, used media in the home but 21.1% did so at work, 8.3% in the car and 13.7% in other locations.
TV viewing
The study confirms many long-held assumptions about how Americans use the media, including the television set’s dominance in American homes.
Separate figures produced by Nielsen Media Research confirm that American families are watching more TV today than they were a decade ago.
In the 12 months up to September 2005, the average American family viewed eight hours and 11 minutes of TV programming a day, a 2.7% increase from the previous year.
A decade ago, from September 1994-95, average total viewing was seven hours and 15 minutes.
But the Ball State study appears to overturn the cliché that younger people are the heaviest users of the web. It found that 18 to 24-year-olds spend less time online than any other age group, except for the over-65s.
A survey earlier this year by the US Pew Internet and American Life project found that on a typical day in late 2004, 70 million Americans went online, a figure 37% higher than four years previously.
These numbers are set to rise in the future as new networking technologies, such as Wimax and 3G, reach millions more consumers.
Spending on internet advertising is projected to increase in 2006 by anywhere from 12 to 27%, according to US media analysts.
But newspapers, despite circulation concerns and competition from the internet, continue to attract more advertising than any other major media, amounting to $46.7bn (£26.84bn) in 2004.[BBC NEWS]
