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  • Sky Takes Mobile TV to iPhone and iPod touch

    UK’s largest mobile TV service is now available for iPhone and iPod touch.

    Sky announced the availability of the Sky Mobile TV App on the App Store. The company has created a dedicated app for the service specifically for iPhone and iPod touch.

    The app allows users to stream live TV via WiFi and the channels available include all Sky Sports channels, Sky Sports News, Sky News, ESPN and At The Races.

    The app also allows to browse the Sky Mobile TV electronic programme guide for free and see what’s on over the next 24 hours. To view live TV, customers will need to subscribe to the Sky Mobile TV service for £6 a month and register for a Sky customer ID. The app is available for free.

    Sky Mobile TV was launched in 2005, and is the largest 3G mobile TV service in the UK, allowing customers to receive over 20 mobile TV channels. The service is currently available to 3G subscribers on 3, Vodafone, Orange, and T Mobile.

    Sky’s sports package already includes live matches from the Barclays Premier League, Scottish Premier League and Football League as well as European Tour Golf, Premiership Rugby and cricket.

    David Gibbs, General Manager for Mobile at Sky, said: “In less than a year we’ve already seen millions of downloads of Sky’s Apps from the App Store. Our new Sky Mobile TV App combines the demand for great live TV on the move with the high quality viewing experience offered by iPhone and iPod touch”

    “Sky Mobile TV offers more choice, control and flexibility for customers ensuring they can access the content they want, at a time that’s convenient to them, on the screen of their choosing,” he added.

    Other iPhone and iPod touch apps from Sky incluye Sky+ Remote Record, Sky News, Sky Sports Cricket Score Centre and Sky Sports Football Score Centre. According to the company, there have been 2 million downloads of Sky apps to date.

  • Skype and eBay Settle with Joltid

    Skype and eBay announced they has reached a settlement agreement with Joltid and Joost N.V. that gives Skype ownership over all software previously licensed from Joltid.

    It also ends all litigation currently pending against the investor group and eBay at the closing of the acquisition (the investor group led by Silver Lake had previously entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in Skype from the company).

    As part of the settlement agreement, Joltid and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis will join the investor group, contributing Joltid software and making a significant capital investment in exchange for a 14 percent stake in Skype.

    As a result, Silver Lake and other investors including Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), will together hold 56 percent of Skype and eBay will retain 30 percent.

    eBay will receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million.

    The deal, which values Skype at $2.75 billion and is not subject to a financing condition, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

    “We will now have ownership of the software previously licensed from Joltid, so we’ll be in control of our technology future,” Josh Silverman, president of Skype, wrote at Skype’s blog.

    “All litigation against eBay, Skype and the investor group ends, so we’ll be free to concentrate all of our efforts on building the world’s greatest communications software,” he added.

    Commenting on the agreement on behalf of the investor group, Silver Lake Managing Director Egon Durban said: “We are very pleased to have the litigation resolved. We remain confident in a great future for Skype, and we look forward to working with Niklas, Janus and the other investors as partners to help the company achieve its full potential.”

    The investor group will no longer include Index Ventures, which has withdrawn from participation. “Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction,” said Danny Rimer of Index Ventures.

  • Epson Develops World's First 4K HTPS TFT Panel for 3LCD Projectors

    Projector applications continue to expand. In addition to being used for business presentations, projectors are gaining wider use in the classroom, in auditoriums and at big events.

    Meanwhile, demand for high-performance products is expected to grow as more and more households enjoy full HD content via digital broadcasts and high definition video players.

    Epson announced that it has developed the world’s first 4K-compatible high-temperature polysilicon (HTPS) TFT liquid crystal panel for 3LCD projectors.

    Measuring 1.64 inches diagonally, the new panel supports displays with resolutions up to 4096 × 2160 pixels.

    With a resolution of nearly 8.85 megapixels, 4K panels offer four times the resolution of full HD (1920 × 1080), making them ideal for the high resolutions required by special applications such as industrial design, architectural design and simulations, as well as for presentations and projecting four full HD images at the same time.

    Epson says they have employed the latest process and C2 Fine technologies in the new panels and developed a new, original driving method optimized for 4K resolution to achieve high-resolution projected images with “outstanding” brightness and contrast.

    C2Fine is an original Epson technology for achieving high-quality images with high contrast by combining an inorganic liquid crystal alignment layer with vertical alignment technology.

    In contrast to the organic alignment layer process, the inorganic alignment technology uses inorganic material to create the surface onto which the liquid crystal molecules align. The layer thickness is controlled at the molecular level, and the alignment structure is generated with a contact-less process, thus there is no problem of unevenness.

    Epson will show ultra-high resolution images including 3D when it exhibits a prototype ultra-high resolution projector using the panel at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition (Inter BEE 2009) to be held at Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan, from November 18 to 20.

  • In The Era Of Virtualization: Interview with Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept

    The cloud has been a popular computing term for 2009 and going into 2010 will likely see the rise of that term as content become more accessible from multiple location as opposed to being locked down by local storage.

    Already users of cloud computing are experiencing more success as costs are lowered, work and necessary files are accessible from anywhere, reducing the need to be directly in front of a computer in the office or at home. More incredible is the access mobile devices have now in accessing necessary files, content, and sites as we move into an era where virtualization becomes more commonplace.

    Intercept is a virtualization company within the UK specializing in desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and storage virtualization. A very large part of their business is based in the cloud. Majority of our clients seek virtual hosting for their enterprise computers. They  basically help develop a system allowing generic access, via the cloud, to any application that a company has.

    When asked about the innovation of Intercept, Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept replies, "we are now in the process of putting together some new services which are now launched which is exchange share point and we’ve got another CRM coming on site soon."

    Fear of the Cloud

    Richard Gilder

    For many companies, much like it is with anything new, there is still that hesitation when adopting new ways of doing business. The cloud has been on the receiving end of both criticism and praise, and ultimately both sides have solid cases, it’s strong companies and good practices that can prevent catastrophic data loss and ensure a smooth changeover and maintenance of the idea.

    "I think the biggest fear is actually within the wording that your putting your data and storing it ‘in the cloud’. This is actually probably the most frightening thing about it. Its going via the cloud and will be completely replicated to multiple data centers for redundancy purposes," says Richard.

    The idea of giving up that control on your content and not having it locally stored is not an uncommon fear. Looking at things on a more personal level, using simplified tools like Google Documents has raised severe concern over ownership of content placed on equipment that is not technically "yours."

    If content is suddenly gone, what is the actual cost on the client. In terms of personal documents, it may be subjective, but when working with large corporations, the loss could be financially devastating. Releasing the grip on the the way things have always been done is most certainly an uphill battle, but thee are many factors that can make cloud computing appealing to the client.

    Money savings in terms of man power and equipment is a major selling point, reduction of carbon footprint is huge for the green enthusiasts, consistent and professionally reliable customer service personnel to answer questions for clients and address their needs, and finally, a long list of client success with the transition of locally stored data and applications to virtual cloud services.

    Advancements In the Field of Virtualization

    Significant advances have been made in the field of virtualization in just the last few years, but do the clients grow at the same pace, or does Intercept see that the technology completely outpaces the needs of the user?

    "Generally the clients infrastructure is growing at a rate in which the technology is actually growing faster," says Richard. "We’ve had a tough couple of years with a country wide perspective in people spending upward with technology has lapsed slightly."

    In the last two years alone Richard has seen people and companies become incredibly receptive to change and enthusiastic with the coming technologies. Intercept tends to focus the clients on the scalability, hardware savings, and most importantly in today’s green focused society, energy savings.

    It’s apparent that technology is not the only thing advancing at great rates, but also the reduction of the carbon footprint by many companies like Intercept that offer large scale businesses the ability to tap into a virtual network in order to get their job done.

    "Its an absolute colossal benefit and I think this should be pushed more and more from a green point of view. We run green government events, we run green events across the country and we should be pushing this side of things. We all are very very worried about climate change certainly not just in the UK where it rains a lot but within the global environment." Richard responds when asked what he and Intercept feel with regards to the green impact of virtualization.

    Conferences and Expos

    Intercept is always providing briefings in the UK regarding the virtualization market. The IP Expo is their biggest event for the quarter thus far, but several Ustream events are being planned right after Christmas.

    They had 5 seminars which they ran focusing on some of their key clients, such as Windsor & Maidenhead, which show colossal cost savings up in excess of 350,000 pounds the first year, all the way through to Ed Lowry’s, which is a very large law firm in London who virtualized their infrastructure over the last couple of years.

    Plans are being made currently for the 2010 year where they hope to continue their success at demonstrating the bonuses of moving to the cloud and worrying not about the data and not about the company’s security, but rather where the company is going and how it can be more successful. Richard Gilder, CEO of Intercept says shifting that focus for them is what he likes to do.

  • Running Web 2.0 Campaign: Interview with Ben Self, Founding Partner of Blue State Digital

    Today’s connected society has relied on technology to help provide successful campagins in marketing, outreach, converting, establishing, ultimately looking for one thing…results.

    Most recently the United States was embroiled in a political race that was heated and highly contested. Many through their name in the hat, but in the end it was down to two major candidates from two of the major parties. What these candidates needed was a campaign that could provide results and that is where Ben Self and his company, Blue State Digital came into play.

    Blue State Digital is a full service creative and strategic firm dedicated to providing results for their clients. They also offer a tiered system that requires no downloads, installs, or plugins, but rather stays online for the client to log into as needed to check on their campaign, analyze results, and with accessibility on mobile devices, makes it easy for the client to stay connected.

    With their focus on design, strategy and implementation of their plan, they were able to become a part of the winning team that would eventually win the presidential campaign and make a major footprint for their company in the White House.

    What Their Software Does Best

    Ben Self

    Realizing how important it was to reach out to as many people as possible, Blue State Digital did what many thought was impossible. Blue State’s overall plan was to help put their client in front of as many people as possible, crossing boundaries of wealth, race, religion and age.

    Using new media tools and digital outlets they were able to tap into a market that has otherwise been apathetic to the voting process, and in doing so truly used their tools to change the way elections will be held in the future.

    Blue State Digital claims itself to be “the leader in online fundraising, advocacy, social networking, constituency development for nonprofit organizations, political candidates and causes, and corporations.” Though just starting in 2004 they’ve been able to acquire an impressive clientele list to include President Obama, Walmart, Alliance for Climate Protection and Communication Workers of America.

    When asked what separates their products and services from the rest, found partner Ben Self had this to say, “the thing that I think makes it really interesting and important is that it has been rigorously tested through our analytics department.”

    Ben went on to discuss how thorough the process of testing is using a contribution page as an example. He discusses how an extra form field can increase or decrease the donation amount, how something on a website might impact how long a person is on the page, and other such, what he calls “minor tweaks,” can impact the end user’s experience.

    On Social Media Tools

    Ben Self comments that social media has been given a place on a pedastool by too many people that do not understand the essentials of a true marketing campaign. He sees these networks as only tools for his company to use, while useful, should not be considered a sure thing.

    “And so we view some of the external social media sites, the Facebooks, the Twitterers, those things, as not necessarily the secret to the success, as they are a way of reaching out to people,” Ben responds to an inquiry on social media tools.

    His takeaway point from this conversation was definitly to never forget that putting something online for the sake of being online is not helpful to anyone. Interactive campaigns and outreach are not billboards, but rather a focused, and strategic measureable way of exchanging information and data.

    Blue State Digital recognizes that social networks are extremely useful in directing people to new websites, but Ben stresses that great content and a compelling message will hopefully keep them on your site and encourage them to follow through with the call to action of the campaign you set out to do.

    Metrics & Reporting

    Stated at the beginning of this article, results are what the clients are looking for. To get these, it’s vital that any campaign have a solid method of acquire metrics and an easy to comprehend reporting process so that the metics can be analyzed effectively. Ben recognizes the importance of sending a mass email, for example, but more importantly it’s how that person will interact with that email.

    “It’s things like open rates, click through rates where it emails, it action conversion rates where you go through that. It’s like everyone who signs a particular petition and how many follow through and send out and invite your friends to sign the petition as well. How many of those friends then come along and sign it. Its the qualitative side of measurement as well so what issue brought these individuals in originally, what should we be talking about with them ongoing,” says Ben Self in an example of how metrics can be measured from something as simple as an email campaign.

    In a bold statement Ben says that no action online goes without a way to measure it in some way. That is what Blue State Digital looks to capture and report. The key ingredient to their system is focusing in on what YOU are doing.

    Andicom 2009

    Blue State Digital was featured at Andicom 2009 in Colombia where Ben has been asked to discuss the case study of the Obama campaign.

    “It doesn’t matter if you are a politician, or a corporation or a nonprofit or a university or a film, we’ve worked with clients in all sorts of organizations, but that people are expecting the internet to not just be a broadcast medium anymore. They are expecting interactivity and giving a few examples of how you can build that interactivity honestly and transparently and then giving some best practices for engaging with people after you’ve built that website and once you’ve brought them there,” Ben says of his speaking topic.

    He adds that Blue State Digital wants to ensure that they share “the basics of online organizing along with a few best practices that hopefully people can take away from no matter what industry they come from.”

  • Report: Looking Forward to Ultra-High Definition TV

    While the market for High-Definition TV has hit the mainstream, the industry has already started speculating about the commercialization of Ultra-High Definition (UHD).

    Market research firm, In-Stat, believes there will be a lengthy time period before the UHD market reaches a critical mass of 5% household penetration.

    However, as the initial market debuts over the next five to ten years, there will be ample opportunities for technology companies, manufacturers, service providers and media companies to experiment with business models and strategies to make UHD a strong business in the long term, as the In-Stat analysts claim.

    UHD formats provide between four and sixteen times the resolution of Blu-ray or 1080p high definition as well as 22.2 multichannel three-dimensional sound.

    “This is a vast improvement over the currently available end user viewing experience in the home,” says Michelle Abraham, In-Stat analyst.

    As originally proposed, UHD comes in two levels of resolution: 7680 x 4320 pixels (i.e., 8K resolution), and 3840 x 2160 (i.e., 4K resolution).

    The In-Stat report says the rising popularity of high resolution digital cinema will expose consumers to high resolution content. Then, early UHDTVs will be made available to provide a digital cinema high resolution viewing experience in the home.

    Ultimately, broadcasters will start offering UHD content to an addressable market of UHDTVs, between 2017 and 2022.

    In-Stat expects the total installed base of UHDTVs Europe to approach 5% household penetration until 2021, and increase to over 28.2% penetration by 2025.

    In Asia-Pacific, Japan will be among the early adopter countries.

  • Vordel Introduces Cloud Service Broker to Manage Multi-Domain Services

    Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), released the Vordel Cloud Service Broker that aggregates and manages multi-domain services.

    Organizations who wish to use Cloud services in conjunction with their own SOA and those of their partners face major issues related to reliability and trustworthiness. One significant challenge is aggregating services from multiple domains including Public, Private and Community Clouds – into coherent composite services and applying policies to them.

    The Vordel says its Cloud Service Broker solves this multi-domain problem by registering services from all three domains into a single repository – the multi-domain registry repository – enabling monitoring, management and policy enforcement.

    The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services.

    In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place. This becomes a single point at which compliance to Service Level Agreements, compliance to privacy and security mandates, and usage statistics can be viewed.

    Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides audit trail of Cloud service usage – analytics of Cloud Computing usage includes not only raw usage information, but also information about service quality, patterns of usage over time, and identity of users.

    It also allows developers to link together local applications with Cloud-hosted applications. The local applications may be accessed via Web Services interfaces, via database calls, via message schemes such as MQ or JMS or simply via the file system.

    Throttling is the “surge protector” of Cloud Computing. If an application makes a high number of calls to a Cloud service then the Verdel’s new service can deflect a portion of the calls to back-up service, newly provisioned for this purpose.

    Vordel CEO, Vic Morris, speaking about the Cloud Service Broker at VordelWorld in Dublin, said "Trust is a major barrier to Cloud adoption particularly among enterprises. It’s clear that many organizations see the value of incorporating Cloud Services into their IT infrastructure, but they also have concerns about the reliability and performance of these services outside their domain of control.

    “The Vordel Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues by providing a trustworthy and reliable onramp to Cloud services allowing businesses to monitor and manage them in the same fashion as their own internal services. This means that composite applications can be built in a completely seamless fashion offering users full visibility, trust and control," he added.

  • Best Buy Brings On-Demand Entertainment to Its Customers

    Best Buy and Sonic Solutions announced a strategic relationship that will result in a new Best Buy customer offering in its line-up of digital entertainment products.

    The new on-demand movie and entertainment service will be powered by Sonic’s Roxio CinemaNow.

    To power this offering, Best Buy has entered into a multi-year agreement in which the company plans to license and deploy Sonic’s Roxio CinemaNow technology and services platform to make on-demand digital content delivery a standard feature on connected consumer electronics devices sold throughout U.S. Best Buy retail stores and BestBuy.com.

    Roxio CinemaNow is a part of Sonic’s Roxio family products that enable consumers to manage personal digital media content and give an access to premium Hollywood entertainment on a broad range of connected devices. It is also powering internet movie delivery for Blockbuster.

    Under the terms of the agreement, Best Buy acquired warrants enabling it to purchase shares of Sonic Solutions common stock.

    To foster the consumer appetite for obtaining on-demand premium content electronically, Best Buy intends to embed the Roxio CinemaNow technology on a wide array of devices – web-connected television sets, portable media players, PCs, Blu-ray Disc players, set-top boxes, and mobile phones – from a variety of manufacturers.

    The company says they expect to undertake a marketing program to educate consumers about the increased convenience, flexibility, and choice digital content delivery affords.

    With the new Best Buy service, consumers will have access to buy or rent an extensive library of content including new movies, TV shows, independent films, and older catalog movies, which they will be able to access on devices in the broad ecosystem.

    It is anticipated that new titles will often be available on the same day they become available on DVDs in retail outlets. Together with their Studio partners, Best Buy and Sonic plan to also collaborate on new service and content offerings, including those that leverage digital copies to bridge physical disc sales and electronic sell through.

    "With Best Buy’s focus, we expect on-demand entertainment to quickly grow into a mass market activity, with digital sell-through and rental becoming a significant new revenue stream for content owners," said Dave Habiger, president and CEO of Sonic Solutions.

  • Motorola Becomes a First-Mover Again

    “Android provides differentiation today, but may not tomorrow,” says recent Canalys report on Motorola’s market strategy.

    During its Q3 earnings call on 29 October, Motorola’s Co-CEO Sanjay Jha announced the company’s quarterly profit of $12 million, up from a $397 million loss a year ago.

    Canalys analysts state this was primarily driven by aggressive cost-cutting and the improvement was reflected in a stock price rise of more than 12%.

    Despite the overall positive result, the troubles faced by Motorola’s handset division continue. During the quarter it recorded sales of $1.7 billion, but made a loss of $183 million, shipping just 13.6 million devices.

    More positively, less than two months after announcing the CLIQ, Motorola introduced its second Android smart phone – the DROID – earlier in the week. The DROID is the first announced phone to support Android 2.0, with all the enhancements that brings.

    DROID will be available in the US exclusively from Verizon Wireless from 6 November. It will cost $199.99 with a new two-year contract after a $100 mail-in rebate.

    According to the report, Verizon is pitching the DROID aggressively against Apple’s iPhone and the device fills an important gap in the operator’s smart phone portfolio.

    “For Motorola, this partnership is an invaluable opportunity to rebuild its status within the handset market and draw attention to its Android-centric strategy,” it says.

    For the past year, Motorola has put significant effort into streamlining its platforms, having previously produced an array of smart phones on Windows Mobile, Symbian and various forms of Linux.

    The company aims to reduce its reliance on feature phones and will hope to be able to push Android down into higher volume, but more price-sensitive segments over time.

    Canalys claims the quick rollout of DROID following the CLIQ demonstrates that the company is moving in the right direction, having suffered from portfolio stagnation following the earlier tremendous success of the RAZR.

    Both the DROID and the CLIQ may do well in the US in the short term, but there can be no room for complacency. Over the coming months the market will see a huge influx of Android devices from top-tier handset brands as well as from vendors very focused on delivering devices to operators at lower cost.

    “For Motorola to maintain momentum it will need to be able to differentiate itself from the many other Android products that will be available in 2010, and it will need to do this on the international stage. China will be critical. Motorola has enjoyed success with its Linux devices there in the past and it will need to replicate this success and build upon it with its Android devices.”

    Analysts conclude that the company will also need to ensure that the devices it produces compete on quality as well as price, ensuring that a focus on getting Android into the middle-tier of the market does not result in compromises that lead to products that deliver an inferior user experience.

  • VOIPFUTURE First to Monitor Multiple GB/s Links at Full Line Rate

    Call connection quality is a key factor for customer retention and churn in today’s NGN/IMS networks. Live traffic monitoring is essential for voice service assurance. Monitoring today’s carrier Ethernet links requires full line rate processing capacity.

    VOIPFUTURE, a vendor of Next Generation Technology (NGT) for the analysis and diagnosis of voice quality in VoIP networks, claims the company’s Smart Monitoring Probes are the first to monitor multiple GB/s links at full line rate.

    RTP Monitoring Probe generates detailed diagnostics for every 5-second of a call stream. The company says this "innovative voice quality evaluation technology" provides precise information about individual in-call quality as well as network-wide service status.

    Smart RTP Monitoring Probe is a standalone solution providing unattended 24 / 7 operation on a standard industry platform in place of proprietary hardware.

    According to VOIPFUTURE the solution is deployable in VoIP networks of any size and any vendor – from private corporate up to carrier networks. The Smart RTP Monitoring Probe can be placed at different keypoints in the network – carrier interconnections, broadband access, core network links and corporate WAN.

    It passively and permanently monitors real time traffic in the VoIP network. An alarm is signaled should any loss of quality occur. An alarm is signaled only after the quality falls below the level set.

    Detailed analysis and diagnostic information are available for service level monitoring, network performance optimization, VoIP troubleshooting and customer care management.

    “Our innovative evaluation algorithm together with superior performance was the winning factor for our carrier projects,” said Jan Bastian, VOIPFUTURE CEO.

    “Our solution helps uniquely to boost network performance and reduce churn,” he added.

    The company says their carrier grade platform processes more than 4,500 concurrent calls (G.711, 20ms) on a standard IT server, making them the leading vendor for high performance RTP monitoring.

    VOIPFUTURE’s RTP Monitoring performance has been tested and certified by EANTC – European Advanced Networking Test Center, which offers vendor-neutral consultancy and test facilities for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and enterprise customers.