the budget version of the BBC testcard was not liked by all

What’s this? The BBC coming to neoco? awesome. Following on from our other iPhone app project success, the BBC have asked neoco to take part in a new series that will involve iPhone development. Part of this involves filming the team at work from brainstorm and concept stage, through development and launch.

Pirate Bay logo

Prosecutors in the trial against the four men who run the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay have called for a one-year prison sentence to be imposed.

Frederik Neij, Carl Lundstom, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Warg are accused of promoting copyright infringement.

The Pirate Bay hosts thousands of links to so-called torrent files, which allow for movies, TV programmes and applications to be shared online.

No copyright material is stored directly on The Pirate Bay servers.

“I believe that the correct punishment should be one year in prison and that is what I am requesting that the district court hand down in this case,” prosecutor Haakan Roswall told the court.

The four men, who deny the charge, have been charged with earning at least 1.2m kroner (104,000 euros) by facilitating copyright infringement.

The film, music and video games industries are seeking about 117m kronor (10.1m euros) in damages and interest for losses incurred from tens of millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.

Prosecutors will sum up in the case later on Monday, while the defence is scheduled to give its closing arguments on Tuesday. A decision in the case is expected to take a few more weeks.

Every now and then something happens to remind me of the power of the Internet and why I love it. The latest came in early February this year when the celebrity gossip website TMZ published a recording of Christian Bale throwing a bit of a strop on the set of his new movie, Terminator Salvation. Within hours the recording had hit YouTube and clocked up millions of views, with people from all over the world listening to it and blogging about it.

The recording quickly became an internet meme and computer geeks the world over flocked to their laptops to create their own versions and remixes.

RevoLucian’s Techno Remix was one of the first: (NSFW)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=PL&hl=pl&v=YTihsJQHt48]

YouTube user ‘TheMaeShi’ went as far as creating their own song: (NSFW)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oFjz6JfACk]

While my personal favourite played out a re-enactment on the streets of Hollywood: (NSFW)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq-ojRAlWJU]

It even got the family guy treatment (NSFW – again!)

Peter tells his friends about his run-in with Christian Bale

Eventually it hit mainstream news channels around the world. The BBC had to apologise for accidentally broadcasting the un-censored version, and even Christian Bale’s mother had her say. Bale was forced to make a public apology for something that he probably never thought would be listened to by millions of people.

Thanks to the internet I got to spend a few hours laughing at an overpaid Hollywood prima donna making an idiot of himself, and you can’t say fairer than that!

BBC1 has just announced that within the next year, all of its programmes will be simulcast as a live video stream on the internet. This makes it the first of BBC’s analogue TV channels to be aired on the web – ITV has already been simulcasting ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 for a year.

The channel will be available via their website, bbc.co.uk, which is being relaunched with improved listings and programme information. BBC Director, Mark Thompson, said that “building on the success of the iPlayer, we want to develop bbc.co.uk to include a broad range of the BBC’s broadcast content, as well as new and interactive forms of media that enable audiences to interact with and contribute to the website.”

Despite the fact that we no longer need a TV to watch BBC1, they are still going to make us pay the licence fee: “You need a TV licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, set-top box, video or DVD recorder, computer or mobile phone to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.”

For the full article, visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/04/bbc.television2

A recent article in NMA has announced ‘poor levels of user take up for branded applications on Facebook’. Branded applications for MTV, Warner Bros and Woolworths were found to have as little as five daily active users. Similarly, applications from Boomerang promoting Fraggle Rock had 31 daily active users and applications for BBC Torchwood, iPlayer and BBC Weather have a combined average of 120 daily active users.

Whilst these examples show bad results for Facebook applications, many have had a great success. We think that the key to succeeding on Facebook is to stand out from other applications. Brands shouldn’t just jump on the bandwagon and create any old Facebook application – they should plan it as they would any other media. Creating something that users will be interested in and find useful, fun or entertaining is key.

The full article can be found here – however you will need to have a NMA subscription to view it…

http://www.nma.co.uk/

Persuasion psychologist Professor B J Fogg has created a course called The Psychology of Facebook. Students at Stanford University in Silicon Valley can take the course, which ‘blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology’.

In terms of his reasoning behind starting the course, he says: “When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion.” He said that a pivotal moment for him came when watching an application on the site go from “literally zero to more than a million users in a week”.

The class dissects a certain aspect of Facebook each lesson, from status updates, to news feeds, poking and writing comments. They study the way the feature works, the psychology behind it and what impression users are trying to convey.

It sounds like an interesting course, but surely by taking this course you are limiting your options a bit?!   Apparently though, the course isn’t just relevant to Facebook, as “the psychology that drives Facebook relates to other online success stories, including those blockbusters yet to be invented.”

Read more about the course at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7357934.stm

According to the BBC, sales of smart phones are predicted to overtake those of laptops within the next 18 months, “as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer”.

And I can’t see any reason why not, as companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola have finally began to convince us that the idea of having a multimedia computer in your pocket, is possible.

“Converged devices are always with you and always connected,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Nokia predict that they will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones this year, as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone.

Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: “All of those single use devices – MP3 players, digital camera, GPS – are collapsing onto the phone. We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things”.

For the full BBC article, visit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7250465.stm

The BBC and ISPs have been rowing over the effects of the BBC iPlayer.  In the first 3 months since its launch, more than 42m programmes have been accessed via it’s  on-demand TV service and ISPs have said that it’s putting too much strain on their networks.

They believe that they shouldn’t have to pay for the extra network costs it causes, or the upgrades needed to cope with the iPlayer – the BBC should pay. According to Ofcom, it’s going to cost ISPs around £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer. Simon Gunter, of Tiscali, is heading the fight for the BBC to help pay this.

The BBC however, believe that the costs of network upgrades should be carried by the ISPs. And he has argued that “content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid).”. In response to this Simon Gunter said it was a “bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business”.

Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk, believes that ISPs are partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they face, as they “have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing”. He thinks that ISPs need to stop using the term ‘unlimited’ to describe their services and make it clear that if people want to watch hours of video content they will have to pay more. However, he also believes the BBC need to compromise.

We’ve just come across a really nice article, explaining how the web has impacted  journalism. The article, written by independent journalist, Bill Thompson, outlines some of the key changes relating to news online, and how they have affected journalism. These include:

• Blogging turning from a ‘curious habit of the self-obsessed into a defining use of the internet for all forms of communication’
• News feeds, aggregators and personal recommendations on social network sites replacing the front pages of major news providers, as the way that people find out about breaking news
• The Guardian moving from a newspaper with a nice website, to an online information source that also publishes a dead tree edition
• New services like Twitter offering alternative ways of getting the news, in the form of short updates about breaking news or links to longer pieces

In terms of the future of journalism, a key thinking point from the article came from a comment made by Solana Larsen, one of the managing editors of Global Voices (a site that offers easy access to many of the world’s bloggers and tries to “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online”). She believes that in 5 years time, the “foreign correspondent” – sent off to a strange land to report on the activities of the “natives” – will no longer be needed. The main reason being that there are becoming more and more places online where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them, and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.

Whether you agree with this or not, the full article is definitely worth a look: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7338238.stm

A new survey carried out by Ofcom has revealed that more than a quarter of eight to eleven year olds who are online in the UK have a social networking profile – despite sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook having older age limitations. Ofcom says that parents need to keep an eye on what their children do online.

The research also shows that 19% of all UK youngsters have a presence on an online social network, with James Thickett, director of marketing research at Ofcom stating that “social networks are clearly a very important part of people’s lives and are having an impact on how people live their lives”.

The Home Office has been working with social networking sites, and is expected to publish a set of guidelines this Friday around best practice, security and privacy. The report is expected to recommend that profiles created by children are set to private by default, or are only viewable by friends nominated by the user. It also suggests that social sites maintain a distinct contact page listing contact numbers, such as 999, children can use to get help.

The Ofcom report looks into the impact of social networks on people’s lives in the UK as part of a wider media literacy campaign and surveyed 5,000 adults and more than 3,000 children. For the full research, visit BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7325019.stm