The Hermes Project

Hunt threatens to pull Next Gen funding

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:52:00 +0000

Procurement processes at local councils moving at a snail's pace have led to the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt threatening to do a U-turn on the £530m (to potentially rise to £830m) that the government has put aside for rural broadband rollouts in areas where they would not otherwise be financially viable.

Laying down the law to a commons committee the minister said:

"There is £530m on the table to help deliver this, but I have to say that if broadband contracts aren't actually signed by the end of this year I will consider taking this back.

I do not want this to get bogged down in paper procurement."

Hunt went on to emphasise the importance that the government sees in the rollout of Next Generation Broadband services, suggesting that the statements were little more than a shot across the bow of local government - and of course BT has the 'ideal' solution to the problem ... give them every penny of it.

Tumblr passes 15bn page views monthly

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:46:00 +0000

Microblogging and content sharing platform Tumblr has hit 15 billion page views from more than 120 million unique users each month.

The privately held company has focused on usability in making it simple to post updates, a strategy that has clearly worked with nearly 42 million blogs now hosted on the platform, which is bigger in the US than it is here.

Company chief executive David Karp (yes, I double checked the spelling of his surname) said:

"The early growth that we saw was around creators ... our first community was those creators

We didn't set out to build network .. all we wanted to do was make novel tools. But in building explicitly for creators, a widespread network of creators, curators and content consumers was born."

Google kills off more services

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:40:00 +0000

Google have announced yet another round of them killing off services that are not crucial to their growth strategy, much of which is focused around the integration of Google+ into their strategic web assets in the future.

This time the applications are generally lesser known ones, including online photo editor Picnik, Google Message Continuity and data management platform Needlebase. Picnik is the best known of the lot and was picked up in 2010, Google at the time having plans to integrate it into their Picasa photo sharing service - which is being renamed as Google Photos.

The announcement was made on their blog here.

Akamai to open chequebook

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:33:00 +0000

Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider Akamai are one of a small niche (in terms of the number of them) of firms who carry a massive proportion of the Internet's traffic - along with the likes of Limelight - and they are set to make acquisitions this year to increase their revenues all the more according to the company's chief executive Paul Sagan.

Despite their being an economic downturn there is ever growing demand for Internet traffic to be delivered reliably to end users by the likes of Netflix, and Sagan says they will "opportunistically fill holes" in their portfolio in order to achieve a forecasted 11% jump in revenues to USD$1.28bn in 2012.

Akamai's shares have been down - and they had even been the subject of a rumoured takeover bid from Google - on the back of a predicted slowdown in global growth, a key area of future development as Akamai is keen to make revenues outside of North America half of the earnings at some point in the future.

Megaupload closes ... and related news!

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:10:00 +0000

File sharing site Megaupload has been closed down by US authorities who believed that the site was being used as a conduit far copyright infringement on a massive scale as well as racketeering and money laundering, with the FBI initiating the closing down of the Hong Kong hosted site after an indictment was granted.

A US grand jury granted the indictment against seven people connected with the site - with the site's leader, a Hong Kong and New Zealand resident called 'Kim Dotcom' (he changed his surname from Schultz) being arrested after being found in a panic room in his New Zealand home by local police. He has been denied bail whilst US authorities request his extradition.

The FBI and the US Justice Department (DoJ) announced that the site had caused more than half a million dollars of damage to copyright holders, with the DoJ saying:

"This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the US and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime."

The announcement that got the ire of the hacktivists at Anonymous who then took down both their websites and those of rights holders in a revenge attack.

There have been other repercussions as a result of the case too.

Digital locker provider FileSonic has heeded the arrest of the Megaupload founders by turning off the file sharing features of their service, deploying the following prominent message on their homepage:

"All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally."

There could also be a further knock-on effect on other file sharing and digital locker websites like RapidShare and Dropbox, who will at the very least be reviewing their own content hosting policies in the wake of the ruling - which authorities have hailed as a massive anti piracy success.

Megaupload's closure has overshadowed the controversial ruling by a Westminster Magistrates Court judge that 23-year-old computing student Richard O'Dwyer can be extradited to the US over his TVShack website - which hosted links to copyrighted material but not the material itself before it was closed down.

A similar UK prosecution was thrown out last year, but his defence were unable to convince a judge that this was sufficient grounds to prevent an extradition - the ruling for which his legal team will appeal.

EC sets date for ruling on Google / Motorola deal

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:03:00 +0000

The European Commission (EC) will rule on Google's proposed USD$12.5bn takeover of Motorola Mobility on February 13, after they initially pushed back the deadline for making their judgment on the deal as they sought more information on the deal from the search giant.

The deadline had been pushed back from January 10 whilst additional documentation was handed over by the search giant - and US regulators are also considering Google's approach for Motorola's handset division, the acquisition of which would also give them a mass of patents - 17,000 of them - in the ongoing tech patent wars, which many believe is the actual reason for the deal.

Apple shares climb on bumper earnings

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:54:00 +0000

Apple shares are up 10% in after hours trading after the company issued a bumper earnings update in their first quarter (of the financial year) results today.

The quarter - which covered the three months until the end of December - marked the company's highest quarterly revenue and earnings ever as sales of gadgets in the lead up to Christmas served the company particularly well.

In the quarter they sold a whopping 37 million iPhones and a rundown of their revenues by product shows just how they have become an iPhone company with 53% of sales coming from the smartphones:All of the metrics exceeded general analyst expectations in the lead up to the end of the calendar year, with quarterly revenues hitting a whopping USD$46.33 billion, and new chief executive Tom Cook was understandably bullish on the back of them:

"We're thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Apple's momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline."

The press release of the results can be found here on the Apple website.

McDonald's social campaign backfires

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:19:00 +0000

McDonald's are one of those companies who are always accused of some of the worst practice - much of it as being a result of them being the highest profile brand in the fast food industry - and a campaign they have run on Twitter has suggested that they need to develop more of a clue stick in dealing with social media if nothing else.

The Golden Arches tried to launch a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag #McDStories which they supported with plenty of their own launch content, but it was of little surprise to seasoned social media watchers that it was soon hijacked by pranksters, healthy eating advocates and anti corporate America users on the site.

One Twitterer made the point better than most:Another one to add to the annals of social media messups by large brands.

Plusnet updates on fibre plans

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:58:00 +0000

BT-owned 'value' (i.e. cheap) provider Plusnet have revealed more on their trials of faster broadband services running over the FTTC and FTTH deployments that BT's Openreach access division are rolling out (mainly FTTC) - the same network that BT's own 'Infinity' faster broadband service runs over.

Of course the advantage of having multiple brands is that different service propositions can be tested out, which is unsurprisingly something that the commercial bods at BT (Plusnet being part of BT's commercial division within their BT Retail business) have taken advantage of to see how different product offerings map out.

Plusnet launched their FTTC offering in April last year and have invited their initial trialists of the service to sign up to trials of the speed increases that Openreach are planning to roll out to their FTTC network later this year, which will deliver download speeds of 'up to' 80Mb and upload speeds of 'up to' 20Mb - although, like all other DSL technologies, the speed consumers actually receive will be affected by their line length.

Trials are underway of the faster speeds and Plusnet plans to launch them commercially from May 1 - although it's not clear whether they will upgrade their existing customers or offer them as a separate product like TalkTalk's will be. Interestingly they are offering an upstream boost to 'up to' 10Mb for their existing 'up to' 40Mb FTTC based customers (who currently get 'up to' 2Mb upstream speeds) for an incremental £10 per month - an offering that differs from what their parent brand has available.

Those on the trials are apparently currently seeing an average throughput speed of 68Mb, which they will clearly be hoping continue as it will enable them to advertise them heavily presumably - and interestingly Andrews & Arnold have experienced sync speeds on their trial of something even closer to the theoretical headline speeds of the technology within the Openreach trial.

Plusnet will be offering their FTTH offering (100Mb downstream, 15Mb upstream) in the few locations where Openreach have it available for £34.49 per month (excluding line rental) from February 1 (BT's similar offering costing £35 per month) - but have interestingly also suggested that there might be a delay to Openreach's FTTH speed increase plans in saying that the 'up to' 330Mb speeds in its limited network availability areas will happen "later this year" rather than the originally announced "Spring 2012".

The update from Product manager Dave Tomlinson can be found here on the Plusnet site.

China to expand microblogging registration programme

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:51:00 +0000

China's government plans to expand their tests of having users of microblogging services in major cities register their real identities to all users of the sites - in a country where Twitter is blocked and services like Tencent and Sina dominate the sector.

In a move that will apparently control the spread of "harmful information", State Council Information Office minister Wang Chen said:

"Currently, this type of registration is being tested in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We will extend it to other areas once the pilot programmes prove successful. We will focus on newly registering users and then extend it to existing microbloggers. Microblogging is a new medium that can spread information rapidly and have a big influence. It covers a wide population and can mobilise people."

Naturally a scheme such as this in a country with a history of cracking down on dissidents raises serious concern about censorship regimes and harsh action being taken against those not toeing the official line on political matters - and the moves come after previous attempts to force mobile phone users and online gamers to register their identities failed.

Twitter picks up malware specialists

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:45:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of buying social news service Summify, Twitter have opened their chequebook yet again to pick up web based spam and malware protection company Dasient for undisclosed terms.

While the news is a great portent of things to come for us who keep getting spam on the service despite it seemingly following the same form all the time, in the main it's to support their upcoming self serve advertising launch and Dasient will form part of Twitter's "revenue engineering team".

Dasient was founded by former Google staffers who now join the Twitter team.

Sky opens up free WiFi to Unlimited punters

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:29:00 +0000

Sky have started to e-mail customers on their 'Unlimited' (top tier DSL service on their own LLU network) and 'Connect' (their offnet 'up to' 8Mb service which runs off BT Wholesale's network) to invite them to register for free unlimited access to The Cloud, their WiFI Hotspot service.
The move is clearly a 2-pronged one:

To have as many customers as possible on their 'free' service to upgrade to the £7.50 per month 'Unlimited' offering (which is clearly in their interest as they are paying BT Openreach for the rental of the lines while getting limited additional income from the customers - not to mention the usage cap on the 'free' offering being 2GB per month, compared to the 17GB per month that the average UK broadband user consumes)
A defensive measure against BT, who heavily promote the free WiFi Hotspot access that their customers have access to - mainly as a result of the FON community they have built which makes available 0.5Mb of dedicated bandwidth from each of their customers' Home Hubs (unless they opt out of it)

The offering should fully launch shortly across the 8,000 hotspots that Sky have deployed (which is to grow to 10,000) in places like coffee shops, restaurants and in the Square Mile of the City of London.

As with Sky Go, you can expect that an advertising campaign will follow which showcases their content assets and focuses on live sports viewing in particular - with remote access to their significant content library being a massive factor in them buying The Cloud in the first place.

Customers can use their Sky username and password to access the service and the info page they have linked to from their e-mail campaign can be found here. Interestingly customers can register up to 6 devices for The Cloud - but only two for Sky Go.

Deezer launches free offer

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:13:00 +0000

I haven't heard much from music streaming service Deezer since it launched in the autumn, with the company having done a deal with Orange to promote the service to their subscribers in direct competition with the tie-up that competitor Virgin Media have done with Spotify.

A targeted advertisement to users of social media influence tracking service PeerIndex last week changed that, with me receiving the following e-mail offering me the first month of a subscription for free (saving £10):
It's interesting to see how highly targeted they are being in their offer, suggesting a limited marketing spend and wanting to get the most engaged social media advocates talking virally about them.

The offer links through to here for anyone who is interested - I'm sticking with my Spotify Premium subscription myself.

Yahoo! to! cut! jobs!

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:05:00 +0000

Yahoo!'s new chief executive Scott Thompson is set to mark his debut on the big time by announcing a round of job cuts with the company's Q4 financial results, which are set to come out tomorrow.

The report of the losses was cited by influential and well sourced technology blog AllThingsD, which claims that Thompson is following a strategy of making the business lean in his attempts to turn it around ... a heck of a challenge for anyone to try and tackle with Google and Facebook having hugely eclipsed them over recent years.

Thompson is also set to sell off the company's Asian assets now that co-founder Jerry Yang has left the business, a move that Yang was said to be reticent to have executed while he remained at the firm.

Facebook lobbying bill passes million

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:56:00 +0000

Social network behemoth Facebook spent more than USD$1m on lobbying for the first time last year, racking up a total spend of USD$1.35m in pushing their interests over causes such as censorship by foreign governments and international software company regulation.

In the last quarter of the year their bill almost doubled to USD$440,000 but they are still dwarfed by Google who are the biggest lobbying spender in the tech industry in spending USD$9.98 million in 2011.

Microsoft spend USD$7.34 million in an attempt to carry favour with politicians.

Google softens China approach

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:47:00 +0000

After the company's China Crisis in which they effectively pulled out of operations there as a result of alleged government sponsored hacking of the Gmail accounts of dissidents, Google have toyed with how they operate in China since but a recent statement from the company's regional senior executive suggests that they have softened their approach to be more "pragmatic" about operations in the country.

Daniel Alegre runs their Asian operations and said that they are now actively recruiting in the country so that they can take advantage of the popularity of Android in the Chinese market - saying that company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page see that "there is a very large business opportunity in China, and they recognise it".

While they effectively shut down their local operations two years ago, Google emphasise that they have never abandoned the world's fastest growing Internet market, where search is dominated by local operator Baidu.

Google+ hits 90m users

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:40:00 +0000

The user base of Google+ has more than doubled over the last 3 months according to Google chief executive Larry Page, who said that the social network now has 90 million users as a result of their massive advertising push, tight integration with other Google web properties and less than subtle push from the front page of Google itself.

Speaking on the company's earnings call Page said:

"I'm also pleased to announce that there are over 90 million Google+ users - well over double what I announced just a quarter ago on our earnings call. Engagement on Google+ is also growing tremendously. I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: Google+ users are very engaged with our products - over 60per cent of them engage daily, and over 80 per cent weekly."

It's telling though that Page has not revealed what proportion of the 90 million are active users, with many (including me) having tried it out and then stopped using the site as friends tend to be on Facebook and the site's unique features have yet to grab them and keep a hold of them so that they come back on a regular basis.

One prediction has suggested that Google+ is on track to have 400 million users by the end of the year, a figure that would mark impressive growth as they compete with Facebook's 800 million plus user base that is set to pass a billion active users later this year.

Scots fine Virgin and BT over slow road works

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:34:00 +0000

Delays in the completion to schedule of road works have resulted in both BT and Virgin Media being hit by fines by the Scottish Road Works Commissioner.

BT's Openreach access division have been slapped with a £38,500 penalty for failing to reopen roads on schedule after their work, while the cable guys at Virgin Media have been fined the lesser sum of £14,000.

Other utilities have also been fined under the rules that mean that they are liable to cough up if they fail to open 80% of roads on time after the completion of their upgrade works, which will continue to be on a large scale for Openreach as they roll out their faster broadband network.

Netflix faces class action

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:26:00 +0000

Netflix is facing a class action lawsuit from disgruntled investors who claim that the company withheld information about the hike in costs to renegotiate content contracts ahead of the slump in the company's share price when the news did eventually come out last autumn.

The lawsuit has been filed in a Californian court and claims that the company's management team failed to reveal information they should have to investors and calls for compensation for those who invested in the company between December 2010 and October last year.

Netflix - who have now of course launched in the UK too - are yet to respond to the filing, which claims they violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Twitter opens chequebook for social news service

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:15:00 +0000

The increasingly busy acquisitions team at micro blogging service Twitter have dipped into the company's chequebook to pick up Canadian based social news service Summify for an undisclosed sum, the company has announced.

Summify gives users a daily summary of the most shared content from their social news feeds and it will become "a more streamlined service" under the ownership of Twitter according to Twitter, although they didn't give any details on how it will be integrated (if at all) into their main service to sort the plethora of content on a Twitter user's stream to make it more relevant to them.

Announcing the move on their blog the Summify management team said:

"Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it's the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense."

Summify has immediately shut down their Vancouver base with the operations of the business moving to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.

Virgin launches next Bolt / Branson advert

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:11:00 +0000

Virgin Media have launched the second advertisement in their themed campaign to promote the company's programme of doubling the broadband speeds of their customers, which features Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and the world's fastest man Usain Bolt.

The commercial promotes the company's 'fastest ever wireless' coverage and can be seen here:
Virgin Media have also been spending big with billboards and newspaper wraparounds on the giveaway commuter newspapers, pushing the iconic campaign and the speed increase message to their customers.

Tech results roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:49:00 +0000

The results season is underway for the year end figures for some of the leading tech firms, and whilst we wait for it to come around for our ISPs in the UK (when we always learn what their latest subscriber numbers are), releases have started flowing in thick and fast from the tech giants.

Google are of course the company that draws the most attention, with the massive revenues from their advertising driven search business propping up their other operations and having analysts and investors hanging on the every word of company chief executive Larry Page.

Times are tough - relatively of course! - at Google as shown by their results, with the company's shared slumping 10% on the back of their results which showed a surge in costs, pricing being on the wane for sponsored search advertising and a writedown on the company's investment in WiMAX provider Clearwire, which is set to be sold off to Sprint Nextel.

Whilst revenues were up 27% (to USD$10.6bn) on the last quarter and by 29% for the whole year (to USD$37.9bn) with the full year profits up 14% (to USD$9.7bn), Wall Street did not receive them well - but chances are it's only a temporary aberration for the cash rich business that continues to make acquisitions of other tech businesses.

Their great rivals at Microsoft were hit by a slowdown in the PC market as a result of the demand for tablet computers such as the Apple iPad and warned of a knock on effect to their supply chain due to last year's floods in Thailand as they reported a drop in their second quarter of the (financial) year profits from USD$6.634bn to USD$6.624bn compared to the same quarter last year.

Whilst total revenues were up 5% to USD$20.9bn, the detraction of the PC market by 2%-4% in the quarter is a bigger worry to the company given the follow on effect on their Windows operating system division, which company chief financial officer Peter Klein eluded to in saying:

"There's really three things that impacted the consumer side: The supply chain from Thailand, there's some macro (economic factors) and certainly some competition from alternative form factors such as tablets and readers."

Others who have published their results include Intel, who have done well as a result of the continued demand for chips for smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks (profits up 6% to USD$3.4bn in Q4) and IBM who are reaping the benefit of firms continuing to invest in IT in order to reduce operating costs (revenues up 1.6% and profits for Q4 climbing to USD$5.4bn).

eBay have also declared their latest results, with the sale of Skype and continued success if PayPal boosting their revenues and profits to such a level that their shares were up 2.2% on the back of the earning declaration.

Kodak bankrupt

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:43:00 +0000

As expected the famous camera manufacturer Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection as their products have been superseded by the digital age - which is very ironic when you consider that they invented the first digital camera but refused to capitalise on it as it would have cannibalised their revenues from sales of traditional camera film.

Under US law the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection they have filed for allows them to continue to trade and to reorganise the company to attempt to make a success as a going concern from here on in with USD$950m of financing secured for them to operate for the next 18 months - but it's clear they're going to need a huge refocusing of their business if they are going to succeed.

Subsidiaries are not affected by the filing and staff will continue to be paid while the company is reorganised.

Piracy: More prevalent than previously thought

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:34:00 +0000

Ofcom commissioned a study into so-called 'illegal' (or not, see below) downloading of copyrighted content (i.e. piracy) online which has revealed that the issue is wider than previous research has suggested, with around twice as many web users having partaken in it than had previously been thought.

The study showed that as many as 30.9% of web users in the UK had undertaken unauthorised downloads (unauthorised rather than illegal as this is a civil manner and not a criminal one) of copyrighted content and come out alongside a pair of other studies that Ofcom published in order to fulfil their reporting obligation as a result of the anti piracy provisions of the Digital Economy Act.

iPlayer gets almost 2bn requests

noreply@blogger.com (Hermes) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:28:00 +0000

The Beeb have revealed that visits to their iPlayer catchup TV service last year were on the rise with a total of 1.94bn requests for TV and radio programmes from the player coming from the plethora of different platforms that it is now available on.

The number is the highest ever for the iPlayer and, while most requests came from PC users, there was also a significant increase in demand from the other platforms that the iPlayer is available on such as smartphones, gaming consoles, tablets and connected TVs.

The BBC's general manager for Programmes & On Demand Daniel Danker said:

"While 2011 was a remarkable year for BBC iPlayer across the board, the real story was the growth of iPlayer on TVs, mobile phones, and tablets, outpacing PC growth many times over.

Having established itself as a must-have app for smartphone users and the gold-standard for TV on the go, we see huge potential for BBC iPlayer on the living room set in 2012 – the natural home for great TV – as audiences switch on to the benefits of connected TV."

Danker also emphasised that the BBC sees TV as being the natural home for such content being played in the future as opposed to via PCs.