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Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a landmark alliance (no, not that alliance) this week to fight a particularly pernicious e-mail scam: hoax lottery e-mails. Yes, in case you were wondering, people do click on these get-rich-quick spam e-mails, handing over money to fraudsters in the hopes of a big payoff down the road. In fact, with the economy such a mess, it is feared that more unsuspecting netizens will be lured into the scam, the companies contend.
As a result, Microsoft and Yahoo! are teaming up with the African Development Bank and money transfer specialists at Western Union on a global awareness campaign that will essentially say: if a complete stranger e-mails you out of the blue to tell you you've won a cash prize, it's wise to ignore it. And never, ever send money upfront to a stranger in order to cash in a promised prize.
You'd be surprised at how many people fall for this scam. As part of the campaign, Microsoft has just completed a study of 4,930 net users in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark. The findings? A startlingly high figure of 113 respondents -- or one out every 44 survey participants -- said they had lost money to an internet fraudster in the past year. And, a further 27 per cent of respondents said they thought it likely that they too would fall victim to some kind of online fraud attempt.
Digital cinema has been touted as the future of the silver screen. It promises sharper picture quality, improved acoustics, and, for Hollywood bean counters, cheaper distribution costs and piracy protection. But for all the hype, the global rollout seems to be slowing down. The latest figures from media consultancy Screen Digest says the number of digital cinema screens in existence had reached 7,230 by the end of the first-half of 2008. That's a better than nine-fold increase since the end of 2005, but it appears to fall well short of the forecast of 17,000 digital screens by 2010, as Tech Central first reported two years ago.
The UK is one of the culprits for the slow-down. Still Europe's leading market, the UK has seen just "a handful of new" digital screens in the past year. There is a slowdown in North America as well.
The biggest obstacle at the moment is rounding up the considerable capital needed to make the switch from celluloid to digital projectors. The price tag for smaller cinemas to make the upgrade, the UK Film Council estimates, would be more than £50 million. As a result, the number of digital screens in the UK has remained steady at about 300 screens in the past year, Screen Digest reports.
Continue reading "Digital cinema rollout hits snag" »
Barack Obama picked up two key endorsements on Sunday. You know about the nod from Colin Powell, which seems to have nudged Obama further ahead in the most recent polls. The other came from geeky Silicon Valley, where Eric Schmidt, the Google chief executive, will hit the campaign trail for the Democratic presidential candidate, The Wall Street Journal reports.
An endorsement from Silicon Valley is no small feat for the Democrats.
Despite being located in a dark blue state, Silicon Valley has a fair number of staunch Republicans among current and former tech heavyweights. John McCain counts former eBay chief exec Meg Whitman, the ousted Hewlett-Packard chief exec Carli Fiorina and John Chambers of Cisco as advisors, the WSJ points out. For Schmidt, already an Obama advisor, it was an easy call. And, the newspaper reports, with Schmidt on board, it could mean other tech honchos start to throw their weight behind the Obama campaign in its final weeks.
Who could be on the list for the next geeky endorsement? According to BusinessWeek, Obama is drafting a shortlist for a cabinet-level chief technology officer to spearhead job creation in the tech industry and to oversee the rollout of country-wide broadband. The names include Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, the Princeton University professor Ed Felten and internet grand-daddy Vint Cerf, also of Google.
And John McCain? No word yet. Perhaps the man who brought us the BlackBerry will inform us via Twitter.
Germany's Office for Information Security, or BSI, suspects it is. According to Mashable and Google Blogoscoped, a German TV news programme carried this weekend a BSI warning alerting its fellow countrymen to use the recently launched Chrome browser only sparingly -- "at least for anything other than experimental tasks", Mashable writes.
A translated version of the BSI warning, running on Blogoscoped site, reads:
The Federal Office for Information Security warned internet users of the new browser Chrome. The application by the company Google should not be used for surfing the internet, as a spokesperson for the office told the Berliner Zeitung. It was said to be problematic that Chrome was distributed as an unfinished advance version. Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet.
BSI is apparently spooked that, with Chrome, Google can hoover up yet more details about a web user's online activities. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Just as Gmail was launching four years ago, privacy advocates worried that Gmail was snooping on users' inbox to deliver targeted adverts. More recently, Electronic Frontier Foundation, published its concerns about Chrome's "Omnibox" feature. Anything that is typed into the box is sent back to Google's data vaults, which will store about 2 per cent of all details, including search terms and IP addresses.
Here's some ammunition for the family values wing of the Republican Party. According to a Cnet News.com investigation, adverts seeking casual sex posted to Craigslist Denver soared in the past week while, you guessed it, Democratic Party faithful converged on the Mile-High City.
News.com's Declan McCullagh reports that "on average, 425 posts on Craiglist's 'Casual Encounters' area appeared throughout the first three Sundays in August. But this Sunday, when tens of thousands of people had arrived for the convention, 763 posts appeared -- an 80 per cent increase." To illustrate the spike, News.com posts a chart showing "Casual Encounters" adverts remaining more or less stable in the previous weeks, but rocketing up as of Sunday.
It would be unfair to say all of the rise is due to amorous out-of-towners from the Democratic Party (or indeed the legion of journalists who followed them into town.) Still, as News.com points out, there are some adverts that carry phrases you'd only hear at the DNC, or perhaps in Washington DC during the Clinton years. They include: "Looking to service a young Democrat" or "Here 4 DNC? Come get sexual with me."
In the interests of balance, Mousetrap also looked at the Casual Encounters listings for St Paul/Minneapolis, the site of next week's Republican National Convention. The findings? An even bigger spike. In the past seven days, the "W4M" adverts (for the unitiated, that's "woman for man") posted to Craigslist St Paul/Minneapolis jumped from 390 to 914 week-on-week. We did not find any specific references to the RNC (perhaps it's too early, perhaps Republicans are more discreet -- insert your theory here), but there were Nascar fans and boating enthusiasts looking for a chance fling, and somebody who just wants to "kill time before the flight leaves town".
On second thoughts, perhaps the Republicans should keep this information under their hat.
The feature in Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft's latest browser upgrade, that has tech reviewers buzzing today is Microsoft's patent-pending "InPrivate Browsing" -- a way to surf anonymously without recording a search history. It also turns off the tracking of cookies or form data or any of the flotsam that gets cached on our computer as we hop from site to site. According to a lively back-and-forth debate among readers on The Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog, the "InPrivate Browsing" feature also results in faster downloads. (This reporter cannot yet vouch for this. I'm on a Mac, and Microsoft is limiting downloads of the beta version of IE8 to Windows users.)
While the "InPrivate" feature appears ideal for those wanting to mask their browsing tracks -- hence the nickname "porn mode" -- it could also, some argue, sink the business of targeted advertising, Google's main revenue earner. There is some rationale for this. Despite steady defections, IE, depending on where you live, is still the dominant browser by at least a two-to-one margin. If web surfers get into the habit of browsing in stealth mode, ad-targeting data is bound to misfire, or, worse for Google, not turn up at all.
IE8 is also Microsoft's answer to the upstart Firefox, which has been steadily eating into IE's once-dominant market share for the past three years. In Europe, Microsoft IE's share of browser usage fell to 65 per cent in March, according to Xiti Monitor, the last month for which head-to-head figures are available. That same month, Firefox in Europe topped 28.8 per cent of the market.
Firefox's market share has since grown to more than 30 per cent, thanks to the successful launch of Firefox 3 in June, Xiti Monitor adds. Mind you, IE is faring much better in North America, where it has a 73 per cent share, Net Applications reports. Still, IE has fallen a long way from its 90 per cent dominance in 2004 and 2005.
There's a lot riding on IE8. After years of neglect, it's good to see Microsoft finally innovating in this vital area of software design. Even if it is meant just for Windows users.
That's what media analysts at Futuresource Consulting are predicting, at least in the US. The UK-based media consultancy released on Tuesday a bullish new sales forecast for the high-definition discs, saying they expected Blu-ray to top 10 per cent of all recordable media discs sold in the United States and a more meagre two per cent in Britain and France by year-end. Next year, Western Europe is expected to catch up with the US, helped by cheaper players and a larger installed base of Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles.
The good news for those holding out is that the price of Blu-ray players is expected to creep lower in time for Christmas with several brands introducing sub-£150 devices in the UK and sub-$200 in the US, Futuresource says. (A quick glimpse of Amazon.co.uk shows Pioneer and Sharp have already broken through the £150 floor.) Sales of Blu-ray players are already well ahead of DVD players at this point in its existence a decade ago, Mousetrap reported in June. They're well on their way to selling more than million players (including PS3) in Europe by year-end.
Disc sales too are on target. Futuresource predicts 45 million Blu-ray will be sold in the US this year. And by 2012, Blu-ray disc sales will catch or be close to catching DVD by 2012, the group says.
2007 was a good year for British cinema owners as ticket sales ticked up an admirable 4 per cent year-on-year, reversing consecutive down years, the UK Film Council recently reported. But the real growth is still in DVDs and other recordable film media, new research shows.
A new study by entertainment industry researchers at TNS WorldPanel Entertainment and ScreenDigest reveal that more Britons purchased at least one video in 2007 than went to the cinema. More specifically, 58.7 per cent of Britons bought a video last year while just 52.4 per cent of the population visited the cinema to see a movie. Interestingly, video rentals continues to decline -- just 20.7 per cent of the population hoofed it to a neighbourhood rental shop in 2007 -- while DVD sales remain brisk.
The enduring popularity of DVDs (and soon, high-definition Blu-ray discs) has even baffled studio executives. At first, they famously feared DVDs would sink box office sales, not realising that sale of these discs would prove to be a major revenue-earner. Now, there are concerns that the extraordinary growth of DVDs will come crashing down to earth. Of course, Blu-ray will keep the market buoyant for some time.
So says comScore, which released on Tuesday new data showing continued impressive global growth to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and even (no, you are not entering a time warp) Friendster. According to the web traffic measurement firm, over 165 million Europeans visited a social networking site in June, up 35 per cent from the same period a year earlier. That compares with a nine per cent jump in North America. North American social networkers totalled 131 million in June. (Europe overtook North America, the pioneering region, in mid-2007 and has extended its gains, comScore shows.)
But the real growth story is not occurring in Europe. That distinction goes to the Middle East and Africa where year-on-year growth was 66 per cent, making it the fastest growing region in the world. Evidently, the region's many panicky governments who would prefer their citizens to keep quiet online (such as Morocco and Turkey), are having little influence over the power of social networking.
Broadband appears to be on the cusp of its second growth spurt -- this time in the form of mobile connectivity. New research from Analysys Mason says that in seven years there will be 2.1 billion wireless broadband subscribers on the planet and that the overwhelming majority will be connecting through the mobile data transmission technology HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access). That's up from 61 million HSDPA subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, Analysys Mason reports.
HSDPA, which is a major technology component of so-called 4G wireless connectivity, will support 88 per cent of mobile broadband surfers by 2015, dwarfing such technologies as LTE and Wi-Max. Wi-Max, which was once regarded as the most promising wireless broadband technology, will be a minor player, Analysys Mason says, with less than five per cent of the overall mobile broadband market.
Still, the market is not going to be that simple for consumers. Expect the three technological acronyms to remain in use as carriers try to woo customers over to their broadband-on-the-go plans.
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