Mobile Stew

ntl:Telewest have finally reached agreement with Virgin Mobile over the
terms of a takeover offer, which values the mobile operator at £962.4m
($1.62bn), together with an agreement to re-brand all consumer operations with the Virgin brand in the future.  The combined company will have revenues of over £3.9bn which will put it on a par with Sky and Vodafone UK.

The new company, Virgin Broadband(??) will be the first company in the UK to offer quadruple play to customers - Broadband, TV, fixed and mobile telephony.  I really think that fourplay combined with the Virgin brand will reshape the way consumers think about communications and entertainment.  Telewest had great success with its tripleplay (TV, broadband and mobile) '3 for £30' campaign.  Imagine how successful a strong fourplay offer will be, ...

Movielink and CinemaNow have both signed download-to-own
deals with major Hollywood studios such as Universal Pictures, Warner
Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox.  Previously only rentals were available but now full movies will be available to download and own at the same time as the DVD becomes available.

I think this is a great move.  The item I find most exciting about this service is not so much that the latest releases will be available, but also back catalogues.  I'm not sure what format they will be using, but even if they supply the raw DVD on a 10Mb connection it will only take around 45-60 mins for movie to arrive.  If they opt for something like DivX that time should be halved - just enough time to make some popcorn.

May Wong has written a brilliant article which explains how many users still don't understand the benefits of HDTV, and how many users have purchased HDTVs but are still watching standard content by mistake.

I have to admit that I'm confused by all the various specs and features, although I haven't made an effort to decipher it all yet.  At the moment a HDTV would be a unnecessary luxury for me as there aren't any HD broadcasts yet in the UK, so I would be buying a HDTV just to use with my Xbox360.

Thanks to some very kind Connected readers last night I've been able to try out the Newsvine Beta service and all I can say is it is amazing.  If Digg and Del.icio.us are Web 2.0 services then Newsvine is Web 2.5. 

Newsvine collates stories from various Associated Press sources, but also allows users to create their own news columns.  These columns can be seeded with articles created by each user or from links to external websites of interest.

Each article can be tagged a-la Del.icio.us, and also voted upon and in a similar fashion to Digg, with popular articles getting promoted to the homepage.

However, Newsvine has some key features that I think will make it stand out from the crowd:



- Revenue:  Any ad revenue from any articles ...

One of the projects that I keep on intending to look into at work is offering an online storage service to our users.  However, I think might have to resurrect this project this year as a combination of falling storage costs and faster broadband is making these services affordable and usuable.

TechCrunch have done a great summary of all the main providers out there, including Streamload who offer a whopping 25GB for free.

More:  TechCrunch » The Online Storage Gang

More speculation that Digg will get snapped up soon.  My money is on Yahoo! or Google.
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I've been doing a review of my finances over the last month or so.  No item has been spared, no matter how small, and I noticed that I was hardly making any calls with my Vonage home phone.

I had a quick look around to see if there was a way to connect my DECT home phone to Skype and I found the uConnect VoIP Converter. This great little device will plugs into a USB port and can connect to any home phone, allowing me to make calls both to Skype users and SkypeOut calls using my handsets.  So, I've made the switch to Skype as there's no monthly service charge, and the international rates, which I need to call my folks in Jamaica, are just as cheap....

Just spotted some new phone tariffs from Telewest that don't seem to have gotten any coverage, even though I think they are quite exciting and an interesting move.  Telewest's new Talk Anywhere service is the first of its kind in Britain and will give consumers a choice of packages with 200, 400 or 800 minutes per month. The time can be used to phone local, national, international, mobile and internet numbers for a fixed monthly fee, which also includes the phone line rental.  Unused minutes can be rolled over to the following month.  The pricing is as follows:

    - Talk Anywhere 200 - 200 minutes for £18 a month, including line rental

The CEO of high street music retailer HMV and Waterstones bookstores has resigned after poor sales over Christmas period, citing increased online competition from Amazon and iTunes.  Once sales from new stores are stripped out of HMV's numbers, sales fell 2.4% compared to the same period in 2004.  In an interview Giles said that 'one of the winners in 2005 was theInternet'. 

It's good to see that the internet is finally having a real impact on the fortunes of high street stores.  For too long they have been able to artificially inflate prices, even sometimes colluding with 'rivals' to maintain margins. 

My article "More Ways To Speed Up Windows XP" got digged yesterday which nearly killed my site so I couldn't wait to see my stats this morning.  Connected Internet got 28K visitors yesterday, an increase of 366% over my usual average and 166K page views, an increase of 1000% over my usual!  I hope Blogware don't come after me as bandwidth usage yesterday was 9GB - my monthly allowance is only 2GB....