2006/09/22

The fight for AOL UK continues and now Tiscali UK comes into the foray

AOL's UK business is up for sale, rumours have been flying round (including Vodafone being in the bidding), but now it seems the battle is between BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse.

Tiscali UK also seems up for grabs (having recently purchased Home Choice/Video Networks) and BSkyB and BT may be in the battle for them.

The consolidation wars continue and the big broadband players seem to be: -

BT Retail (2m+ broadband customers)
NTL:Telewest (2m broadband customers)
Carphone Warehouse (600-700K+)
BSkyB (Easynet) (?)
Orange (?, peaking at 12,000 per day sign-up)
Pipex (570K)

Vodafone will be interesting to watch as they have just done a deal with BT.
T-Mobile - who knows.
O2 bought Be, but they are tiny (only 40,000 customers - but now they have the resources to grow the company and infrastructure).

2006/09/21

Google Analytics

WOW, they are very impressive. Easy to set-up (if you've already got a Google Mail account, just add it to your services). Then Google give you some code and you paste it into your web page, Google does all the rest.

It's all graphically represented, nice pie charts/graphs/etc. The overlay piece is very cool. It shows where people are coming from, how they got there, what they're looking at and more.

If you want to be anal about your site statistics, Google Analytics is the way to go. Really WOW.

2006/09/18

Canon's new Ixii (Ixuses)

Canon has announced some new cameras in their Ixus range.

The Ti900 has an all titanium body, 10MP sensor and the new DIGIC III processor which supports noise reduction and face-detection technology for £315 +VAT.

The i7 replaces the tiny iZoom, it also uses the DIGIC III processor and has a 7.1MP sensor. It costs £210.

Apple updates Bootcamp

Bootcamp 1.1.1 is available for download. It now supports the new Core 2 Duo processors in Apple's new iMac and MacPro's.

Download here

Adobe update Creative Suite

Adobe are updating Creative Suite Premium to version 2.3, however it's a cost upgrade (around $159).

It will contain Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX as well as Acrobat v8 which now has shared authoring capability (but at a cost to subscribe to the service).

It should be available in October.

CSR develops WiFi VoIP chip

CSR the chipset designers have developed a reference Wireless VoIP phone (UniVox) which has a bill of materials of about £11.

The phone supports 802.11b and g and 802.11i, WEP and WPA security.

As well as supporting SIP it also supports IAX2 (Inter Asterisk Protocol) which traverses NAT in a friendly manner.

It will allow the production of cheap WiFi phones.