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A glimmer of hope for the UK music industry?

It's been a long time since we've seen the words "strength" and "sales" used in the same sentence of a press release by Britain's music trade group, the BPI. Today, however, the group is breaking with the dismal recent tradition to publish some promising news.

In 2007 and early 2008, the BPI reports, digital sales (which includes, but is not limited to, downloads of tracks from iTunes and mobile ring tones, plus music streaming revenues) was up yet again. Digital is particularly dominant in the sale of singles, accounting for 85 per cent of all Top-20 single sales in the year to March 31, 2008. Online music stores have now sold more than 200 million tracks to British consumers since early 2004. The impact is being seen on the music industry's balance sheet. The BPI says digital now accounts for 8.6 per cent of the UK record company sales of £943.4 million.

But when looking at album sales, the compact disc is still king. The CD accounts for 95 per cent of  all album sales in the UK. In this respect, the UK is a stand-out market. Britons bought 2.3 CDs per capita, more than any other market. Viewed through this lens, the humble download has a long way to go.

Are online ID cards the answer to forgotten passwords?

A consortium of tech heavyweights led by Google, Microsoft and eBay's PayPal think so. They have formed the ominous sounding Information Card Foundation to push for the introduction of an online ID card that will act as a substitute for the jumble of passwords we try to keep in our head. One industry-accepted card would also be all that was required at online shopping sites, the thinking goes, removing the hassle of filling in the same details every time you visit a new online merchant. Supporters even say it will crack down on identify theft and online fraud.

As Robert Blakeley, a research director at the Burton Group, one of the advocates of the plan, told The New York Times, with an online ID card “you don’t have to depend on a password, so there’s no phishing opportunity.”

Solving the vexing issue of managing multiple passwords and eliminating the requirement that web users reintroduce the same personal details on any site that requires registration has been in discussion for years. I recall in the early part of the decade predictions that computers would soon come equipped with fingerprint readers to identify users and do away with passwords and forms. As CNET's News.com points out, Microsoft recently introduced its own card policy to little effect.

The hope is that an industry standard will get an online ID card system off the ground. "We need to come together in a neutral body to continue to promote the adoption of this technology," Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity and chairman of the ICF, told CNET. Don't bet on that sales pitch working in Britain.

Is multitasking turning us into unproductive dolts?

The New Atlantis explores this idea with a well-researched article concluding that our 'info overload' routine is a poor way to treat our brains. For starters, the practice of processing multiple stimuli simultaneously is, contrary to popular opinion, a time-waster as the brain naturally requires a period of recuperation to shift from one task to another. And the practice of responding to emails, text messages, Facebook queries and Twitter tweets, on top of what you are supposed to be doing, is less than ideal for long-term learning as it creates "a bottleneck" of responses in our brain and causes stress.

As the article states, "In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 'multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.'"

You've been warned.

After seeing off HD-DVD, Blu-ray outpaces DVD sales

Here's the latest indication of Blu-ray's market momentum: the number of Blu-ray players in homes in Western Europe will surpass ten million by the end of the year, putting sales of the new-generation player well ahead of DVD player sales at this point in its existence a decade ago, according to a new report by the UK's Futuresource Consulting. How far ahead? The Blu-ray installed base will be more than six times larger than DVD at the same point in its sales cycle, Futuresource says. The big boost, of course, comes from sales of Blu-ray-based PlayStation 3 consoles, but the non-gamer market is growing too.

"Comparing the first few years of uptake," Jim Bottoms of Futuresource says, "the early indications are that BD [Blu-ray] player sales are running way ahead of DVD after the same time period. 2008 represents year three for BD and ... we anticipate more than ten million players, including PS3, in use by the end of this year. Looking back to DVD’s early years, we see that closer to 1.5 million DVD players were installed by the end of year three."

Movie studio execs are already betting big on Blu-ray sales this year, expecting a $1 billion windfall from movie and TV series sales on the new format in 2008, Home Media Magazine reports. Each of the studios is expected to make a big push for the second half of the year with a series of new releases, making the players a more tempting offer around Christmas time. Also helping matters is that retail prices of players are continuing to fall, though not nearly as far as they would have had HD-DVD remained in the market for at least a few months longer.

EU to mobile operators: Two weeks or else!

Here's some potentially welcome news for holidaymakers grousing about ever-escalating petrol prices. Viviane Reding, the EU telecoms commissioner, has given mobile operators two weeks to cut roaming rates on texting and data downloads or she will introduce her own price cap, just in time for the summer holiday season, Reuters reports.

Ms Reding says operators have until July 1 to introduce reduced rates or she will force them to cut tariffs, but not before she names and shames operators by listing their tariffs on a public website. "On the basis of those prices I will then decide if it's necessary or not to have a regulation proposed," she said.

Ms Reding is calling it her final warning. Earlier this year, she spoke of "the horror" of "terribly expensive bills" for roaming mobile customers. In February, The Times reported it costs as much as 49p to send a text from a European country. The GSM Association claims the price has fallen to about 22p in recent months.

This reporter is puzzled by such an assertion. Traveling regularly in Europe, using Orange and 3 Italia, I often pay twice the quoted GSMA rate, and sometimes more. I don't know if Brussels forcing mobile operators to slash prices is a good thing, but what would be nice is some consistency from country to country.

Ever wondered what your rival earns? Click here

Here's a dot-com start-up that's bound to cause some headaches for vain bosses and secretive HR managers everywhere. Launching publicly this week, Glassdoor.com offers worker drones a voyeuristic view inside the top tech shops, publishing average salaries, workplace reviews and employee approval ratings of CEOs at Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple and a handful of others. (The idea is to expand the tell-me-yours-and-we'll-reveal-what-others-are-saying model to other industries). The anonymous contributions collected already are causing a stir.

The most discussed element of the site so far is a comparative chart that shows what Microsoft and Yahoo! employees thought of their bosses as the two companies wrestled over a merger deal. The approval rating for Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang tanked (roughly in line with the share price) in mid-May, just as corporate raider Carl Icahn stepped in and dressed down Yang and the board. "I know this because of...Glassdoor.com," writes CNet's Jim Kerstetter.

There's also juicy salary details elsewhere on the site. The average salary of a Microsoft software engineer tops $98,000 (based on the 30  anonymous Microsoft software engineers who shared their details with Glassdoor.com). This is eerily in line with Yahoo! and Google, both at $99,000. Microsoft and Google earn higher marks in workplace satisfaction, both scoring 4.2 on a scale of 5.0. Yahoo! clocks in at 3.8.

Why is that? Let Yahoo! employees explain. There are now 53 workplace reviews purportedly from Yahoo! workers. Reviewers appear to like their fellow employees but are less than thrilled with the job, complaining of nepotism, a glass ceiling for women, layers and layers of bureaucracy and one barely coherent rant from a London-based Yahoo-er who agitates that the company is "making huge profits through its active support of the shark finning industry" in China. Who knew?

We look forward to Glassdoor's expansion into politics, when we will get to see what White House or Whitehall staffers think of their bosses.

Microsoft's dilemma: 9 in 10 Brits now use Google

Microsoft continues to fight a losing battle in its attempt to reel in Google, the runaway leader in internet search.

In May, Google performed 87 per cent of all internet searches conducted in the UK, according to Hitwise, the research company, and 68 per cent of searches globally.

That's an increase of 9 percentage points on the same month last year in the UK, and means that Google is now in a more commanding position than ever to capitalise on the fast-growing internet advertising market, which is predicted to grow to $80 billion by 2010.

Over the same period, Microsoft's share of UK searches declined from 5 per cent to 4 per cent, and Yahoo!'s from 9 per cent to 4 per cent.

So far the Office of Fair Trading has not considered the implications of Google's impressive lead, which at the current rate would stretch to give it a greater than 90 per cent share of all UK searches at some point near the end of the year.

It will not do so until someone complains, it told Times Online today - but declined to say whether it had received any such complaints.

"Generally we respond to complaints," an OFT spokesman said. "If anyone thinks that there's either abuse of a dominant position or a lack of competition (in a given market), then we consider each case on its merits."

By law, the OFT is not able to disclose whether it has received any complaints about Google, the spokesman said.

A competition lawyer at a major City firm said that he had heard of complaints having been made about Google from within the internet industry, but that so far the OFT was not proposing to take any action.

"There's no sin about being dominant - the only sin is when you start to abuse that dominance," the lawyer said.

He said there were a range of factors the OFT would consider in any case about Google, including whether it discriminated between advertisers - or agreed to deal with some and not others, whether it charged execessively, or whether engaged in 'predation', where prices are dropped significantly in an attempt to squeeze out competition before being raised again.

Google has already been subject to scrutiny by European authorities, but has so far emerged unscathed. The European Commission said in July last year that it would review Google's $3.1 billion acquisition, one of the largest brokers of online ads, but it approved the deal in March.

Broadband: why the countryside can't catch up

Few people will be shocked to hear that British broadband is faster in cities than in rural areas. What is more surprising is that the gap is likely to broaden before it narrows.

Our attempts to conjure up a 21st-centrury network from a 19th-century infrastructure have created a multispeed internet in which those living furthest from a telephone exchange have to put up with miserably slow download speeds. BT is doing its best to coax data through copper wires at ever-faster speeds, but its efforts are likely to upgrade the fastest connections while doing nothing to help those stuck with the slowest.

A new technology – new to Britain, at least – will boost web performance by a factor of three, but only for about a million homes in the London area. Even when coverage is extended to ten million homes next year, most of those will be in areas where high-speed cable connections are already available.

Without a huge investment in building a national fibre-optic network, there’s little that BT or any other company can do to improve the broadband experience for people living a long way from telephone exchanges.

Satellite uplinks offer fast, dedicated internet connections, but the cost is prohibitive, and wireless options such as WiMAX and mesh networks have yet to make much of an impact. They are, however, increasing in reach and speed, and that’s a huge disincentive for the people who would have to pay for a national fibre-optic infrastructure: no one wants to make a multibillion pound investment in a network that will soon fall quiet as web traffic takes to the airwaves.

The result is that the slower pace of rural life is like to be complemented by slower internet connections – and the resultant frustrations for social and business web users – for some time to come.