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Technology Newsletter |
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WelcomeWelcome to another edition of the Prompt Newsletter. There’s an Apprentice frenzy this week, as we celebrate the return of our favourite reality show. But it’s not all TV - we also look at new touchy-feely phone technology, mobile phones on planes, why games in the UK may soon be subject to the same classification system as films and the reason apes may be responsible for an upsurge in online gambling. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, why not visit our blog? Hazel Butters, CEO - Prompt Communications Technology NewsApprentice Frenzy The UK version of The Apprentice has been an annual event for the BBC since 2005, and we love the reality show here at Prompt. The launch of the new series has us positively giddy with excitement. As the new entrepreneurs / sacrificial lambs gather to compete for a job with Sir Alan Sugar, we thought it would be useful to fill in our non-British readers with a profile of this powerful businessman. Sir Alan Sugar is a self-made millionaire from Hackney, East London. After leaving school at 16, he started selling car aerials out the back of a van that he bought for £100. In 1968, Sir Alan founded the electronics company Amstrad, the maker of PCs and word processers in the 1980s. However, the 1990s saw the reputation of the Amstrad name put on the line after problems with unreliable hard disks. Amstrad was sold to BSkyB for £125 million in July 2007, and now Sir Alan makes his millions from property in Mayfair. Anyone that has played the English version of Monopoly before knows that this is the dark blue colour, and the most expensive to buy. Sir Alan is now estimated to be worth over £800 million. Apprentice Frenzy: Even the Apprentice is on Facebook these days… The BBC has launched a new application for Facebook to accompany the new series of the Apprentice. Members of the site will have their networking skills put to the test, as they get involved in a virtual business environment. Users will be able to create their own board of directors and invite friends to fill each important role. Once on the board, players can get involved in a variety of activities. Of course, the real fun of the show is the double dealing and backstabbing that goes on within teams, and the BBC promises this in the Facebook application too. Plus, players can sack people, though this can come back to haunt them. It all sounds like good fun and it’s certainly an interesting way to promote a new TV show. If it takes off, maybe we’ll see more TV-themed apps. I’m personally hoping for one based on 24, where users can take Jack Bauer-style revenge against people who won’t stop pelting them with sheep. Apprentice Quote of the Week “It wasn't as though I had marked ‘shark’ as ‘hamster’.” Apprentice participant Raef, after being accused of wrongly labelling the fish he was trying to sell. |
US Media News
GigaOmMedia recently launched a blog about Open Source software titled Ostatic. The site aims to help readers discover and evaluate useful applications while collaborating with a network of peers. Vindu Goel will join The New York Times as deputy technology editor on 1 April. Goel is currently a business columnist at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. He has been with the Mercury News for nine years and has served as an editorial page writer, business editor, deputy business editor and assistant business editor for technology. In his new role, Goel will cover developing technology with a focus on web content. Network World has launched Stiennon on Security, a daily blog written by Richard Stiennon. Stiennon on Security will cover internet security and cyber crime issues such as hacking and cyber warfare. Network World is a weekly magazine for network information systems professionals. Steven Levy is leaving his role as senior editor and chief technology writer for Newsweek at the end of March to join Wired as a staff writer. Levy has been with Newsweek since January 1995. He has served as a contributing editor and columnist, senior editor and chief technology writer at the publication. UK Media News
Eleanor Dallaway has been promoted from assistant editor to editor at Infosecurity, an international magazine covering information security. Dallaway replaces formed editor S.A. Mathieson, who recently left the publication. TechRadar has appointed Patrick Goss as news editor. Goss was previously technology editor for MSN's Tech and Gadgets site, which he launched in 2007. TechRadar currently has 750,000 unique users a month and provides 24-hour news coverage from reporters in the UK, US and Japan. The New Statesman has hired Jesse Armstrong as a contributing editor. He joined the current affairs magazine at the end of February. The magazine has also announced that Armstrong has been writing for its previously anonymous Tactical Briefing column. The Financial Times is relaunching its FT Wealth supplement to target global citizens with personal assets of more than £1 million on top of the value of their property. The quarterly supplement will be revamped into a high-quality magazine. In its new format, FT Wealth will cover asset allocation, real estate, emerging markets, and investment alternatives. FT Wealth will also discuss topics such as philanthropy, and family and social issues. FT Wealth will be distributed in the UK, European and Asian editions of the FT from the 28 March. Tech Totals3.3 million 2.2 million $1.7 billion |
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Touchy-feely phones for you Haptic technology researchers are taking that vibrating sensation familiar in reactive gaming console controllers and putting it into modern touch-screen smart-phones to make navigation more intuitive. NewScientist reported this week that a team headed by Stephen Brewster at the University of Glasgow can embed actuators in devices such as iPhones that will give users of graphical keyboards and scroll bars the feedback sensation of physical controls and reduce navigation errors. In tandem, Californian firm Immersion is developing software called VibeTonz that can intelligently control these actuators to the greatest effect using pulses measures in milliseconds that can give subtle sensations to fingertips similar to rough textures, inclines, concave buttons or buffers. The technology will be presented at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Florence, Italy, next month. Online gambling boom is monkey business Two seemingly unrelated stories this week have pinpointed the true culprits responsible for the current explosion in online gambling in the UK. Firstly, research company Screen Digest released a report predicting a growth in online gambling UK consumer spending by 2010 from the current annual spend of £660 million pounds to £1.6 billion, and from 1.1 million active gamblers only two years ago to 2.1 million. So who’s to blame: Advertising? Technology? Society as a whole? No actually - it’s chimps. According to The Telegraph, “modern humans are willing to gamble to gain favourable outcomes because our ancestors shared potentially rewarding foraging and hunting techniques with chimps”. In a new study, common chimpanzees were found to be more likely to take risks in seeking food than bonobos, their endangered close relative. In the experiment, five chimps and five bonobos at Leipzig Zoo in Germany were asked to gamble on which upturned bowls contained the most fruit. So what do we learn from this? Simple. Don’t play online poker with chimps. Beating bonobos is easier. “What? I’m on the Plane!” On 21 March 2008, an Emirates flight made mile high history by operating a fully functional in-flight mobile phone call system. The phone call was made at 30,000ft on board an Airbus A340-300 flying between Dubai and Casablanca. The technology, provided by UK company AeroMobile, activates after the aircraft reaches 20,000ft. Phone calls and text messages can be sent and received while the plane is cruising and passengers using the service will be charged a premium roaming rate. Pilots will be able to disable the call making service during night flights. Emirates is planning to equip a second aircraft soon and will spend in total £14m to fit out its entire fleet with this technology. The facility to use Blackberry email and other GPRS data applications onboard has been planned for later this year by both companies. 6,000 phone calls a month are already made by Emirates passengers using their in-seat telephones and the airline claims that there is a demand from the customers for the mobile service. Emirates customer service is highly rated and giving customers what they want is great – except do you really want to be stuck on a flight with half or even a third of the 300 passengers calling their office or loved ones? Is it not annoying enough as a tube/metro passenger already? Social media storm brews up with Billy Bragg Singer/songwriter Billy Bragg has kicked up a storm with a contribution to the New York Times calling on social networking sites to pay musicians for the content they provide. Writing after AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million, Bragg argues that the artists who posted music on the site for free are entitled to a payday now too, alongside the investors and techies who built the site. Mike Masnick, writing at Techdirt, argues that the musicians traded the use of their content for the exposure the sites gave them, and that you can’t change the terms of a deal retrospectively. Bragg does have a point. While social networking sites no longer pay musicians, at least one has in the past. MP3.com, the biggest site for independent artists around the year 2000, paid artists for each song visitors downloaded for free. Artists generating serious traffic to the site got a reasonable cheque at the end of the month. MP3.com is under new management now, and this idea hasn’t been taken up by the new owners or by similar communities like MySpace. But there are costs associated with running a social networking site too: traffic is not evenly distributed, with many artists consuming storage space without bringing a significant number of visitors. Those who do bring in the ears and eyeballs, help to underwrite those who don’t. The issue won't be resolved any time soon. You could argue that supply outstrips consumer demand for new music, pushing its market price to virtually zero. But if there is to be a new generation of professional musicians while music sales continue to fall, one business model might be to once more give musicians a share of the revenue their work generates at social networking sites. What do you think? Leave your comments on our blog. Age rating system for UK video games The British authorities have spent years grappling with the problem of how to protect children from graphic content in video games, and have so far failed to come up with a solution. Movies, whether shown at cinemas or sold on DVDs, have a legally binding age rating, which makes it a criminal offence to allow that content to be sold to anybody under the age prescribed by the British Board of Film Censors, but video games have always been a grey area. Consequently, the age classification system for games has largely been seen as voluntary and therefore difficult to enforce. This confusion has also led to various legal wranglings when the BBFC has attempted to ban some violent games from sale entirely. Now the government wants to change that, and is promising to enshrine in law the findings of a six month investigation into how children can be protected from unsuitable material. The investigation’s recommendations include giving computer games a proper, legally enforced, age rating system similar to the one used for films. The review also proposes a code of practice for social networking services, although it’s currently unclear what this would involve or how it would be applied to services which are run by foreign companies. Given that it’s taken the government over two decades to figure out how to regulate the sale of violent video games to children, we wouldn’t like to hazard a guess on how long it’s going to take to figure out that the internet is a global network and foreign website operators don’t have to follow British rules. Facebook gets chatty The Financial Times reports that Facebook plans to introduce a chat feature for its users. This move is being painted as a challenge to the incumbent chat networks of AOL and Microsoft, but is it really that big a deal? It seems like an obvious step to allow users to engage in live chat with their friends when connected to the site, but it’s not likely to be of much interest to the millions of web users who have no interest in using Facebook. Where things will get interesting is if Facebook decides to open up its chat API so that developers can tie it into third party IM clients, which raises the possibility of Facebook users being able to chat with friends on alternative networks. Unless that happens, we can’t see this being anything of much more significance than a neat new Facebook feature. Website of the weekBy Sean McManus Who wouldn’t want Paul McCartney as a guitar tutor? At this site, leading musicians including Macca contribute video tutorials explaining how to play their songs. As well as contributions from Blur, Supergrass, Idlewild, the Magic Numbers, KT Tunstall, Starsailor and many more, there are films made by the house tutor. The site content is filled out with ‘lite tutorials’, which play a pop song’s promo video and superimpose the chord symbols on top. The videos can be bought for use on a PC or portable video player, but check the details on each one: some of them are protected with DRM which could stop you using the content you’ve paid for in the way you want to. 
We hope you find the Prompt Communications newsletter an interesting read. For any feedback on our newsletter, or to discuss how we can help you with your technology PR, marketing, social media/blogging initiatives, copywriting or surveys, please contact us using the details below. We are always delighted to hear from you. |
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