Search rankings according to comScore were released this week for May, where US citizens conducted 14.3 billion core searches. Google took an improving 65% of the searches conducted, and despite Microsoft Bing being launched in June, in the month leading up to it Microsoft had only a falling 8%. Yahoo! sites managed almost bang on 20%, with Ask jumping from 3.8% to 3.9% during the month. Bing will be in next months numbers for the first time.
The Recording Industry Association of America has won the re-run of the show trial over piracy with a jury verdict against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four, leading to a $1.92 million award, more than in the first case. There is little or no chance that she can ever pay that amount of money, so we don’t see the point really. The defendant will fight on and file various motions about this being unconstitutional, which to us sounds fair.
French pay-TV operator Canal+ has come up with something we haven’t seen before, a ‘weekend subscription’ which it will test this autumn. The idea is to charge about half the price of a usual Pay TV subscription to get programming from Friday through Sunday.
UK IPTV browser supplier ANT said this week that Korea digital multimedia devices maker, Kaonmedia has licensed the ANT Galio Client for its latest range of set-top boxes. The new range of set-tops will be targeted at the retail and operator markets and are due to launch in Q4 2009.
Rapid TV News reports that Spain’s new government is ready to try once again with Mobile TV and that it will put an 8MHz piece of spectrum up for use, probably with DVB-H. The business model is yet to be decided, it says, but why not let the winner of an auction decide on that, rather than thrust it on them from government level.
French satellite and mobile TV specialist UDcast has won a contract with 21Net, a European Internet operator specializing in broadband Internet access to trains via satellite communications to offer link optimization of its Broadband to Trains system. It will offer Protocol Acceleration and extreme data compression with its WANcompress technology along with Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms.
US researcher In-Stat talks about 5Gbps superspeed USB as the next generation of USB and says it will be in 25% of devices by 2013. It also says that three billion USB devices shipped in 2008 and that consumer electronics devices with USB will rise at a 6.6% compound annual growth rate between 2008 and 2013. So far mini-USB ports have not made significant progress as a connector on mobile phones says In-Stat.
Zoran says that its COACH digital camera processor is being used in the latest Flip UltraHD Camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies, a company recently acquired by Cisco. Zoran has worked with Pure Digital since 2004
Global IP Solutions, this week said it would support a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) implementation of H.264 aimed at video conferencing providers. The GIPS VideoEngine with H.264 SVC will let different parts of the conference to take part according to the bandwidth they have, without downgrading any other participant’s experience.
Verizon Wireless says that it will begin selling the Palm Pre and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Storm 2 within the next six months, according to a speech from its CEO reported by Reuters. He also mentioned the Android devices from Motorola (see separate piece).
Ericsson’s CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg has announced that he will shortly stand down to take over the CEO role at British Petroleum. He has helped Ericsson through perhaps its most tumultuous 6 years and will stay on as a director and chairman, while existing CFO Hans Vestberg takes the reins. Strategy will stay the same, and Vestberg has been with the company for 18 years and has worked for it in China, Sweden, Chile, Brazil and the US.
Consumer Electronics giant Thomson says that its balance sheet restructuring is working and that it is working on a debt for equity swap to eliminate a big chunk of the company’s debt. As a result Thomson’s senior creditors have extended their debt waivers to 24 July 2009.
Streaming video service FilmOn is launching a mobile phone version of its TV player in July says press reports, and a subscription fee of £3.95 (roughly $6) will get you 50 TV channels on any mobile handset which has internet access. The company has also just struck a deal with Edgecast, a California-based content-delivery network provider, to handle broadband bandwidth requirements in the US.
HP and Alcatel-Lucent have announced a 10 year alliance which will see the two companies go out and ‘leverage’ their positions by jointly marketing capabilities to service providers and enterprises. We thought that this is pretty much how they have always worked but they say they are offering to transform communication networks into converged, next-generation infrastructures, and will jointly market the capability.
Ars Technica reports that future FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has said that he is happy to look into exclusivity arrangements between handset makers and cellular operators – such as that which operates between AT&T and the Apple iPhone. He is reported as saying that if he finds any distortion, he will act accordingly. What he did not say was that he thought there was any problem, only that he was happy to have it looked at.
Time Warner and Comcast are joining forces to bring cable TV shows to the internet, but only for paying subscribers and have begun a 5,000 home trial across the US using Comcast customers, giving them access to Time Warner cable networks through the internet.