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| 19th January 2007 |
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Prompt Communications Newsletter
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Dear Reader,
With this week's news that the founders of Skype have launched a new high quality peer-to-peer television service, it seems that the internet is threatening to disrupt the conventional broadcast TV business as significantly as the birth of Napster disrupted the music industry. It's been no secret that this would eventually happen. Consumers have been downloading pirated TV programmes for years already, and it looks like the industry is finally taking the threat seriously enough to start offering legal alternatives.
For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your technology PR, marketing, copywriting or surveys, please email me at hbutters@prompt-communications.com. We are always delighted to hear from you.
Best regards,
Hazel Butters
Prompt Communications
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Technology Update
By Sean McManus and Lance Concannon
US jury makes first Can-Spam conviction
A US jury has made the first conviction under 2003's Can-Spam act. Jeffrey Brett Goodin attempted to defraud internet users by posing as AOL's billing department and sending emails asking customers to log in at his fake website. According to CNET, Goodin could be sentenced to up to 101 years in prison. Can-Spam stands for the rather contrived 'Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing' and has often been criticised as being a toothless law. This conviction could be a landmark.
MySpace to enable parents to spy on their children
Social networking site MySpace is reportedly working on software code-named Zephyr that will enable parents to see what information their children are entering into their profiles. The site has a minimum membership age of 14 but is facing calls from US state attorneys to raise the age to 16. There have been concerns about inappropriate contact between adults and young people initiated via MySpace, but Zephyr will do nothing to stop teenagers from setting up new profiles from public computers without their parents' consent.
First pirated HD DVD film found on P2P network
It was bound to happen eventually. The first example of a pirated movie in the new high definition HD DVD format has been spotted in the wild. The Inquirer reports that cult science fiction movie Serenity has been found in circulation on the BitTorrent network. In theory the HD DVD format features copy protection which should stop this sort of thing from happening, but it appears that this system has already been cracked. Whether many viewers would rather wait an eternity for a 20GB file to download instead of just opening their wallets and shelling out for an original copy remains to be seen.
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Marketing Update
By Elissa Fry and Sally Forge
iPhone My phone!
The launch of Apple's new iPhone later this year, has been marred by business group Cisco filing a lawsuit against Apple to prevent it using the name iPhone, which is a registered trademark of its own. According to Media Guardian online, Apple's much hyped iPhone, being marketed as iPod-meets-smartphone, has been put on hold because Cisco filed a lawsuit in the district of Northern California to stop Apple from using and copying the iPhone brand name.
The name iPhone has been in use by Cisco since 2000 when it acquired Infogear. It seems that Cisco and Apple only ever entered negotiations about the brand name without anything conclusive being agreed upon about brand usage.
Microsoft and AMD reveal Vanishing Point is Vista viral promotion game
"Let's stick one to Bill Gates!!! Send this email on and I promise you'll get some free money and software, and gift vouchers... " Mmm... It would appear that the reality of Microsoft's online promotion strategy is slightly more sophisticated. A technology blog reports that Microsoft and AMD have admitted they are behind Vanishing Point.
The game, which has apparently attracted tens of thousands of participants in search of prizes such as sub-orbital space flights, is in fact a viral marketing campaign. The denouement is pretty complicated, and detailed in the news reports, but involves the free laptops sent to bloggers, mentioned on these pages in previous stories. CNN says Bill Gates even made references to clues in his recent Las Vegas CES show speech.
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Consumer Technology Update
By Fiona Blamey
Burning Crusade concluded in 28 hours
A French gamer has become the first person to achieve level 70 status in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Ten new levels were made available with the game's eagerly-awaited new expansion pack, Burning Crusade, released earlier this week. The gamer, playing as a character called Gawell, reached the final level in just 28 hours, aided and abetted by 40 in-game associates.
The BBC reported that fans queued for hours in Oxford Street, eager to get their hands on the expansion pack, meet the game's designers and win in-game gifts. The release of ten new Warcraft levels may have piqued the ire of one former gamer. In July last year, the player behind level 60 character Malion filmed his character's own in-game suicide, convinced, like Alexander the Great, that there were no more worlds to conquer.
Skype execs launch P2P TV
This week saw the launch of Joost, a new peer-to-peer television service. Masterminded by Skype's CEO, Niklas Zennstrom, and its executive vice president of innovation, Janus Friis, Joost aims to do for television what Skype did for phone calls and the pair's earlier project Kazaa did for music. And that is to put it on a massive, global peer-to-peer file-sharing network, and make it free. Joost will stream high-quality TV programmes over the internet to laptops, PCs and PDAs, removing the need for a television set, licence or cable subscription.
Unlike YouTube, it will only broadcast authorised content from television companies - no user-generated content. Friis and Zennstrom think Big Media will like the ability to target specific demographics with ads, while viewers will be turned on by the search functionality and picture quality. Wired has the full story, which makes interesting reading for anyone with an eye on the future of television.
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On the Blog
This week on the Prompt Communications blog, Sean writes about unsigned band, Koopa, storming the charts thanks to an impressive online following.
US Media Report
By Heather Lynch
Times are tough and Time Inc., publisher of the magazines Fortune, Time, People, and Sports Illustrated, is laying off 150 members of staff, with roughly half of those being editorial positions, according to the Ledger. Last year 600 were laid off, though many of those were from the business side, and a few of its titles were sold off. Along with this year's additional cuts, some of its foreign bureaus are closing, retaining 'laptop correspondents'. It is, however, hiring within its web media.
Time Inc. faces the print industry's decline in revenue from a different position, as it is a public company while its competitors like Condé Nast Publications and the Hearst Corporation are private. The company's financier last year indicated the company was ripe for sale, says the Ledger.
Also, 125 jobs are being cut at New England papers. The New York Times Co., publisher of the Boston Globe among its other New England Media Group titles, last Thursday started offering buyout plans to its staff according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to expand online, with a new technology blog, Bits. The site covers the technology trade shows, and was launched in tandem with the two main US tech events last week, the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld. The blog covers news, delivers product reviews and analysis, and is written by David Pogue and Damon Darlin.
UK Media Report
By Annie Kasmai
Richard Addis, former Daily Express and FT Weekend editor, is set to launch a free daily newspaper covering current affairs, leisure and the arts. The newspaper will target wealthy Londoners and will be delivered every weekday morning to approximately 30,000 homes in upmarket areas. It is thought that Addis will call the publication Newsstand and he plans to commission some articles but largely rely on third party deals for the majority of the content. The goal is to sign deals with successful websites that don't have a print division and use their content in the publication. Addis has partnered with his former Financial Times colleague Ryan Bowman to set up London Bridge Publishing to launch Newsstand.
Vitesse Media, publisher of BusinessXL and Growth Company Investor amongst others, has moved offices and is now based in Central London.
Reporter Marie-Louise Moller is now based in Brussels and is working for Bloomberg. Previously, Moller worked as a reporter focusing on the European Union for Reuters.
Best of the 'Net
By Sean McManus
Earth from the air
Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a photographer best known for his striking aerial photographs. From a helicopter, he captures the Earth's natural beauty, our greatest man-made landmarks and shots of people going about their everyday life. At this website, you can browse many of his most popular photos, sorted by country. You can also download many of the images for use as a Windows backdrop.
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Web 2.0 Watch
By Fiona Blamey
Amidst all the hubbub about how Web 2.0 is changing the media - and by extension, the nature of media relations - it's nice to see some journalists asking the bigger questions about what online social networking is doing to us as human beings.
BBC Newsnight's business correspondent Paul Mason wrote a fascinating piece last week, in which he wonders if social networking and online gaming are becoming a replacement for religious spirituality in our increasingly materialistic, heathen lives.
He argues that the heightened sense of togetherness experienced by people who play games like World of Warcraft, visit virtual worlds like Second Life, or socialise on communities like MySpace is akin to a form of religious ecstasy, in which the 'soul' feels and experiences things that are entirely unconnected with the physical self.
The blurring of boundaries between what is real and what is 'not real' is one of the most interesting facets of Web 2.0. People who participate in online games and virtual communities have become used to representing themselves online as 'avatars', which can be anything from a beautiful woman to a warrior dwarf.
Similarly, many bloggers find themselves inventing a separate 'blog persona', which differs from what they are like in real life. Navigating between 'real' and 'virtual' identities is becoming part of what it means to be human in the age of the internet.
For his article, Mason asked 300 IBM employees who are active in Second Life if they preferred their online self to their physical self. While 90% of them said no, the very fact that the BBC is asking this kind of question suggests that Web 2.0 is doing something quite intriguing to the human psyche. And it's only going to get weirder from here.
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Tech Toon
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