Tag: duncan geere
Nokia wants to ditch DRM from Comes With Music
Nokia’s “Comes With Music” service, which offers unlimited music for a small amount bundled into the price of the of your phone, is unfortunately hobbled with DRM.
The ways things are set up means that any tracks you download are locked to one handset and one PC and if you want to do anything else, then…. well, you can’t do anything else.
However, Nokia doesn’t want it that way. Nokia understands that music should, in its very nature, be sharable with people you love. That’s why it wants to get rid of the DRM. Nokia’s director of global digital music retail, Adam Mirabella says:
“We have dialogues going with all of our partners and Digital Rights Management-free is also on the roadmap for the future integration of Comes With Music.”
Don’t hold your breath – I doubt we’ll see this for at least a year – but it’d certainly be nice, and would certainly make me retract most of my criticism of the service.
(via Music Ally)
Bebo and Slicethepie announce partnership
Second-tier social network Bebo and innovative fan-funding mechanic Slicethepie have got together to offer an attractive proposition for both Bebo users and bands using the Slicethepie service.
Slicethepie works by crowd-sourcing the A&R process, something that I strongly advocated in my series of posts on innovating digital music. People can invest in bands, and once a band has enough to make an album, any investors get a share of the revenues from selling that album, as well as a credit .
The partnership means that Bebo users will be able to review and rate content on the service, and will be paid a small fee for doing so. Bands that get financed via the Bebo showcase will gain a promotional package that Bebo claims is worth £50k, that’ll include an album launch party, promotion on the Bebo homepage, and exposure to major label A&Rs.
The first “Scout Room” on Bebo will go live this month, so if you’re in a band, it’s definitely worth a look. Just make sure you’ve got a strong presence on Bebo too. What does Bebo get out of it? More bands on a service that’s struggling to compete with Myspace, let alone Facebook’s dominance of the sector.
Eee Box gets an upgrade, and HDMI-out
The humble Eee Box B202, which we liked last year, has been granted an upgrade by the technology gods. It’s now the Eee Box 206, and comes with an HDMI-out slot, meaning that you can plug this baby into your TV and watch high-definition content. It even comes with a remote control.
Specs-wise, it’s got an Atom processor, 160GB of hard disc space, 1GB of RAM and Wi-Fi. It comes with Windows XP, but I’d advise replacing that with Linux or Windows 7 swiftly. Don’t replace it with Vista though, whatever you do. For that, Asus is asking £309, which isn’t too bad for an HD-capable machine.
What do you reckon? Would you recommend this for a parent considering plugging a PC into their TV? Or something else? Share in the comments.
(via Tech Radar)
Skittles changes homepage to Twitter search for "Skittles"
Skittles, the little fruity sweets, have done a bit of a makeover on the Skittles.com homepage. The page now shows the real-time results for a Twitter search for “Skittles”, with a floating box to tell you a little more about the page.
There are several aspects to this that are interesting. It’s another massive step towards mainstream for Twitter (I bet Skittles is hoping that the service doesn’t go down). It’s also a massive step towards “the conversation” for Mars, which is a company that’s been plagued with criticism in the past, though admittedly not as much as rival Nestlé.
In fact, although there’s not been much stirring on the PETA message boards at the time of writing, it’s surely only a matter of time before the people behind sites like MarsCandyKills.com start flooding the service with highly-negative Tweets.
Some call this the campaign backfiring. I don’t think so. I think that it shows bravery, and a belief that the general public doesn’t really care. Personally, I think far more positively about the company that it’s happy to publicise its criticism, and I’ll be disappointed if they cave.
Skittles.com (via @robbrown)
O2 and Orange refuse to stock Nokia N97
A row has erupted between Nokia and network operators Orange and O2 over Nokia’s plans to pre-load the Skype VoIP service onto the N97.
The N97, Nokia’s flagship touchscreen phone due in June, is eagerly anticipated around here, but networks fear that including Skype on the device could cause them to lose voice revenue, with customers opting for cheap unlimited data plans over plenty of free voice minutes.
It’s prompted “high-level discussions” between the companies, which is code for “someone up top is very angry”. O2’s official comment says “We are currently working with Nokia to understand their Skype service and the business model around it.”
It’s interesting that the major operators have such a problem with the service, especially given the runaway success that Three has seen with its Skypephone and followup Skypephone S2, and the awards that the Facebook-and-Skype-integrated INQ has recieved. I’m sure Three will happily take O2 and Orange’s customers for the N97.
(via Pocket Gamer and Mobile Today)
Spotify signs up a quarter of a million UK users, and 800,000 a million users worldwide
Ad-supported streaming music service Spotify has managed to recruit a quarter of a million UK users to its excellent music service. It’s a nice milestone for the service which is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in digital music for a long time.
But Spotify isn’t resting on its laurels. On its official blog, the company is inviting users to hassle their favourite bands and labels to join the service. They recommend hunting down a band’s label, cross-referencing it with their uber-list of labels they have deals with, and if it doesn’t match, then asking them to email [email protected].
What are you missing that you want to hear on the service? Go hunt them down, and then tell us in the comments below.
(via NMA)
UK Government donates a thousand old PCs to charity
Fancy a bit of a feel-good story for Friday afternoon? The UK Government’s Department for International Development has decided to ship a thousand laptops that it doesn’t use any more to Africa. It’s all being done through charity Computer Aid, who we’ve covered before.
The laptops, previously in use by civil servants, aren’t OLPCs or any other low-cost, low-spec machines – they’re proper full-on laptops. They’re going to organizations like the Prof. Iya Abubakar Community Resource Center in Nigeria, which helps local people start their own businesses.
Rumours that each laptop is chock-full of confidential documents and databases are so far unsubstantiated.
Windows 7 gets laundry list of changes
Have you been testing out the Windows 7 beta, and clicking that little ‘feedback’ button in the top right of every Window? Well, Microsoft has been listening, and they’ve just announced a massive list of the changes they’ve made as a result of the feedback.
The full list is here, but there’s a few highlights that I’ll share with you if you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing. Firstly, there’s plenty of functionality for making things more obvious on the taskbar, along with keyboard shortcuts. There’s also a multi-touch onscreen keyboard (so you can shift-tap stuff).
There’s better format support too, and anything that can’t be played will be filtered out of Windows Media Player, so it doesn’t bother you. There’s also resuming video from sleep with actual files, like you would with a DVD, and some changes to what the Windows team call ‘needy windows’ – so you can see when a program wants your attention.
The full list is worth a look, because it’s got a lot more detail in. Most of this stuff we’re unlikely to see until release, though. Are you looking forward to it? Is there anything missing that you think needs changing? Let us know in the comments.
Apple PowerBook explodes in London office
Laptops don’t explode much. When they do, it’s usually rather on the spectacular side. Rather spectacular, therefore, were the scenes in the London office of an unnamed marketing company the other day, when an Apple Powerbook went KABOOM.
First, it started smoking, and the laptop’s user called the IT manager. It stopped, and he picked it up, but when he put it back down again it suddenly went BANG, caught fire and started shooting sparks everywhere. After evacuating the office, he returned to the laptop to find six-foot flames shooting out of it. He hit the fire alarm, and legged it.
After a fire marshall showed up, he used most of a fire extinguisher on the burning wreck, which calmed it down temporarily, but as soon as he stopped, it started flaming again, just as vigorously as before, with the inside red hot and glowing. They then waited for the fire department to show up.
Apple is checking the serial number to see whether it was part of the series whose batteries were recalled a few years back. If not, it could prompt another recall, but it’s just as well that this was in an office. In an empty flat, or a car or plane, things could have been a lot worse.
(via the Inquirer, who have plenty of good pictures)
Facebook gets democratic – encourages voting on terms of service
Following last week’s kerfuffle involving Facebook, its terms of service update and the subsequent rolling back of said update, the site’s been very careful about how it communicates with the public. On CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog today, he’s announced a new approach to how the site is run.
First of all he’s published two documents. There’s a set of Facebook Principles, and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, the latter of which will replace the existing terms of service document. However, they’re not in force yet.
Zuckerberg wants you, if you’re a Facebook user, to go through and read both documents and comment on the changes. Any controversial sections will go up for a vote. It’s an interesting approach for the site, which has been stung by criticism in the past for not listening to its users.
Hopefully the community can come to some kind of agreement with the site’s lawyers, and a compromise can be found. The worst case scenario here is that no agreement gets reached, and the site is stuck with its existing ToS. That wouldn’t be good for anyone.
