Author: Duncan Geere
"Never Gonna Give You Up" earns author £11 in rickroyalties
It’s funny. Following the YouTube vs PRS spat last week, where the former blocked UK users from watching most music videos, many commenters erupted into anti-major-label vitriol, completely ignoring the fact that the labels aren’t involved in this argument at all.
Instead the debate centres around PRS for Music, which pays something called songwriter royalties, based on ‘public performances’ – YouTube, music in shops, nightclubs, radio, etc. These royalties exist completely seperately from the major label ecosystem, so blaming the ‘big four’ is a little unfair here.
Google’s short-term PR win might be placed in jeopardy, however, after Pete Waterman – who co-write “Never Gonna Give You Up” – revealed that he’s earnt just £11 from the 40 million+ views on the song on YouTube. YouTube wants to halve the fees that it’s paying to the PRS.
UK Music, an umbrella body of umbrella bodies in the British music industry, has labelled YouTube and Google ‘cyncial and exploitative’. It certainly seems to fly in the face of the corportations ‘Do No Evil’ mantra.
What’s your feeling on the matter? Is this a music industry failing to adapt to new technology and consumer behaviour? Or is Google taking advantage of consumer distrust of the music industry to desperately try to make YouTube profitable? Drop us an email, or a tweet, with your opinion and we’ll publish the best.
(via ITProPortal)
The Wacom Nextbeat wireless controller for DJs
Wacom, best known for its graphics tablets has suddenly and unexpectedly announced that it’s bringing out a completely different bit of hardware – a DJ controller.
The Wacom Nextbeat contains a pair of digital audio players, a mixer, a sampler and some fx units. All you need to add is a phat pair of speakers, and you’ll be cranking out the tunes faster than you can say: “Have you got anything by the Shaman?”
The interesting bit is that the main circular unit and the dials above can actually be removed from the unit while it’s still operating. If you want to go see what it sounds like for your audience then you can do exactly that, while still retaining tight control of your mix.
It’ll be out sometime this summer in Europe and Japan, but there’s no word on how much it’ll cost. Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on one – as a bit of an amatueur DJ, I’d love to give this a whirl in front of an audence and see how it compares to other DJ controllers.
Wacom Nextbeat (via Technabob)
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Nintendo DSi
Since its release in 2004, Nintendo has managed to shift nearly 100 million of the diminutive Nintendo DS handhelds. That places the device fourth in the best-selling-consoles-of-all-time list, behind the Playstation, (102m), Game Boy (118m) and the Playstation 2 (140m).
But Nintendo isn’t ready to give up just yet. The company will be launching the DSi on April 4th, which features bigger screens, a faster processor, two cameras and an MP3 player, among other things. I got my hands on it a few days ago, and above you can see what I thought.
Our comments section is broken at the moment, so if you have something to say, then the best way to get in touch with us is via Twitter – we can be found at @techdigest.
Solid state drives to match hard drive prices within "the next few years"
Although solid state drives deliver incredible performance compared to their creaky, mechanical brethren, one area that SSDs have difficulty competing on is price. Opting for an SSD on a laptop, rather than a normal drive, can add hundreds of pounds to its cost, and you’ll likely end up with a smaller capacity too.
Flash marketing manager for Samsung, Brian Beard, says: “Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year. Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years.”
The cost gap exists, Beard explains, because the two drives are built differently. In a traditional hard drive, the spindle, motors, PCB and cables all have a fixed price. Upgrading one of them – the motor, for example, so it spins faster – doesn’t add a massive incremental cost to the unit.
An SSD on the other hand, has a very small fixed cost – just the PCB and the enclosure. If you upgrade the memory units, increasing the speed or the capacity, the price increases linearly. A doubling of capacity will nearly double the price.
There’s plenty of pressure on SSD manufacturers to make their drives conform to the industry standard set up HDDs, but the flash memory market is notoriously unpredictable, so it could be some time things settle down. For the consumer, 256GB solid state drives are only now rolling out into mass production.
(via Cnet)
20 years of the internet: 10 sites that changed my life
The internet is 20 years old today, and that fact made me start thinking about what the internet has given me over the years. I’m not going to get too gushy on you, I promise, but here’s ten websites that have completely changed my life.
What are the internet applications that have changed your life? Our comments box isn’t working at the moment, but you can drop us an email or a Tweet sharing your favourite sites, past and present. Please do, I’d love to hear your stories. Now, without further ado, let’s begin the in-no-particular-order list. Click on the big Hotmail logo to begin.
Second Life and World of Warcraft to be sued by Worlds.com
Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin seems like a rather opportunistic chap. He has a patent on a “scalable virtual world client-server chat system” and a “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space” that he claims any massively-multiplayer game is infringing.
His first target has been NCSoft, a Koreak publisher that’s responsible for the fantastic-but-aging City of Heroes, and the no-subscription-fee Guild Wars. If that litigation is successful, then Thom says he “absolutely” intends to follow up with lawsuits against Activision-Blizzard and Linden Lab, who run World of Warcraft and Second Life respectively.
Thom says he doesn’t want anyone to go out of business, he just wants to be paid for his intellectual property. It’s going to be difficult for him to prove this one, though, given that these patents were filed in 1996 and 2000, and that most virtual worlds can trace their roots back much further than that, to MUDs, MUCKs, MOOs and MUSHes that date from the 80s.
We’ll keep an eye on this story and report back any developments, because victory in court for Kidrin could see the fledgling virtual worlds industry being cut down in its infancy.
(via Silicon Alley Insider, WoW Insider and Massively)
Google Voice launches in the USA
Damn. I want this so bad. Google Voice, formerly known as GrandCentral and acquired by the company in 2006, has finally launched officially in the US. It’s a service that gives you one phone number that can access all your phones, for life, for free.
It’s been invite-only for nearly two years, and there are apparently tens of thousands of people on the waiting list, but Google will shortly be letting some of those people in. Accounts have, in the past, gone for up to $650 on eBay.
The way it works is that you get given a mobile phone number, and then a web interface lets you redirect that number to any phone you like. Going on holiday? Redirect it to the hotel you’re staying in. Leaving the office for an afternoon? Send people to your mobile phone. Expecting a call you don’t want? Put the caller through to the fax machine.
There’s also Spinvox-esque voicemail transcription, text messaging, friend settings (so that certain people can bypass your voicemail) and call recording. There’s even conference calling, and you can add credit to the account to make very cheap international calls, just like Skype.
Sadly, the service is only available in the USA. That’s a big 🙁 for me. When can we get that going down in the UK? It’s got to be possible, right?
(via TechCrunch)
Nintendo hikes up the price of the Wii to £20 more
The credit crunch is biting hard, and it seems that it’s chomping on Nintendo particularly hard – the company is being forced to raise the price of its multi-bazillion selling Wii console. Nintendo says:
“Due to the severe and continuing depreciation of the pound, we are, unfortunately, having to raise our trade price to UK retailers of Wii hardware. The price that they then offer to consumers is, of course, up to the retailers.”
Those retailers are invariably feeling the pinch just as hard, so I suspect it’ll go straight through to the price on the ticket. The Wii currently retails for £180, and this change will add £18-£20 onto that figure. Depressing, in more ways than one.
(via Eurogamer)
Nokify – why Spotify and Nokia should team up
Scandinavia is a cold place. The nights are long, the winters are snowy, and the coasts are fjordy. To stave off the cold, they run their computers all night long, and as a result the populations of the Nordic countries have become rather adept programmers and designers.
They make brilliant stuff, like the Pirate Bay, Ericsson phones, and a smörgåsbord of other exciting inventions, including Nokia and Spotify. In my post this morning about Nokia’s new music phones, I questioned why the two companies hadn’t made friends yet.
After all – Spotify has definite mobile ambitions and is in the process of pumping out an iPhone app. Nokia, on the other hand, dearly want to do more with music, but their Comes with Music service is an awful DRM-encumbred experience. Spotify has brilliant software, but no hardware. Nokia has incredible handsets, but a crappy software experience.
So why not combine? Ditch Comes with Music, which must be a buttload of hassle for Nokia to operate, and get Spotify to do exactly the same thing, but better. Build a year’s subscription into the handset price, and everyone’s happy. Nokia gets a fantastic music service that it doesn’t have to run, Spotify gets a tonne of new happy users, and the phone-buyer gets unlimited streaming music for free.
What could go wrong? Well, that depends on how Spotify implements its mobile experience compared to the desktop software. A constant 3G connection is unlikely, so there’s going to need to be some on-device storage of tracks, even if it’s heavily encrypted.
From what we know of Spotify’s iPhone application, it appears that you’ll be able to cache entire playlists – which would be fantastic. When the device can get a 3G connection, it will, but most of the time you’ll probably want to be playing off the internal memory – for reasons of battery life if nothing else.
A Spotify S60 application is coming, there’s no doubt about that, but with Nokia’s resources, expertise and cash behind the startup, something really exciting could happen that could really be a deal-breaker for someone choosing between a Sony Ericsson, Samsung or Nokia handset.
Best of all, it could finally drop the axe on the aging iPod, providing a fantastic, integrated on-the-go music listening experience with a catalogue in the cloud. I can’t think of anything better.
Spotify and Nokia
It's a coat! It's a bag! It's a tent!
If you travel a lot, you appreciate convergence gadgets – those ones that combine two or three different gadgets into one. Is this going a bit far, though? It’s a coat that also serves as a bag and a tent(!).
The product of designer Justin Gargasz, this is just a concept so you won’t be able to buy it, but it’s pretty well-constructed. Made of Cordura, the excess material when in jacket form is rolled into the lower back to provide lumbar support. The arms of the jacket act as a handle when you’re in bag mode.
The only problem that I can forsee would come if it rained. If you’ve got a soaking wet tent, are you really going to want to put it on to try and keep you dry the rest of the day? One for dry weekends only, I think.
(via LikeCool)
