Tech Digest

devolo introduces dLAN 200 AVdesk - 200Mbps home networking

devolo is continuing to encourage us to use our home wiring for a home network, boosting its data transfer speeds on the dLAN 200 AVdesk to an impressive 200Mbps.

According to devolo, the dLAN 200 AVdesk has the bandwidth to support full multi-media home networking through the whole house. With transfer rates of 200Mbps and ADSL2+ technology, the HomePlug can support HDTV, video-streaming, Voice Over IP and high speed Internet. And it's plug and play, with the adaptors featuring Ethernet connectivity, allowing PCs, broadband modems and routers, games consoles and set-top boxes to be quickly connected to the network.

The dLAN 200 AVdesk units are available from 11th October, retailing at £99.99. The Starter Kit consists of two adaptors and costs £179.99.

devolo website

One Minute Video Review: Philips Living Colours

Philips showed off some concept designs this week at their Sense and Simplicity event, as well as some products which will be released soon. This is their Living Colours product, which promises to transform the ambience of your house through some special lighting. They're set to come to the UK next year.

One Minute Video Review: Parrot Photo Viewer

I took a look at the Parrot Photo Viewer, which is designed to display photos from your phone or other Bluetooth equipped photo device. You can pick on up for £150 here. 

Sonos adds musical alarms and improved internet radio to its wireless music systems

We've covered Sonos a number of times in the past. It's a music system that hooks up to amplified devices in any room of the house, allowing streaming of your music to each device from your PC or any other device connected to the system, with access via a full colour controller. If you've hesitated over buying, you might like to know that it's been improved with alarm functionality and improved internet radio access.

The improved Sonos goes under the name Sonos System Software 2.0 - and is available as a one-button software update or as part of a newly-purchased system. The upgrade turns every Zone Player into a musical alarm, with clock, snooze, sleep timer, and scheduling to wake you up otr send you to sleep with your favourite music or internet radio station. The internet radio is also improved, with country-specific categories for listing stations and an improved guide that includes instant access to more than 300 stations. 

That's not all - there's also improved language support, automatic indexing of your music library, scheduled updates on a daily basis (if you want to download new podcasts), improved scrol wheel performance for finding tracks, an increased maximum library of 50,000 tracks and gapless MP3 playback.

Prices for systems vary - check out the website for your nearest dealer.

Sonos website

Yay or Nay: Apple "iTV"

Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's plans for superiority over your living room TV by telling us that "iTV" (work in progress on the name) will be available from early next year.

Yay or Nay to the iTV?

Is iTV, coupled wirelessly with a decent desktop computer running iTunes, going to be a hit in the living room? Is this Apple innovation or too little too late? Will Apple be able to get the killer content needed for a system like this to work well, or will it turn out to be a niche system?

Share your thoughts below.

Apple's grand plans: iTunes, movies, iTV, home entertainment Appleised...

Steve Jobs delivered a speech yesterday that initially sounded like a basic product and software update but became a glimpse at Apple's plans for moving into the living room. Here's the highlights:

iTunes 7

We expected an upgrade to the iTunes software. Available to download right away, the software better manages music and other digital media (most of which we can't get hold of in the UK yet). There are new views to display your music by track, album or virtual CD rack. Apple have offered anyone with an iTunes store ID free album art downloads, so long as that music is in the store of course.

The virtual CD rack looks pretty good, assuming you get a decent amount of album art - otherwise it looks a bit empty.

An aside, though, is that I've found both iTunes 6 and 7 crash out on an Intel Mac when trying to run the visualiser. Hopefully that'll get fixed in an update, unless it's something to do with my setup. Anyone else noticed this?

Movies

We also expected the iTunes Store to begin selling movies in earnest. What we got was something that seemed to show that deals are still to be done, and there could be licensing problems. Apple have managed to get Disney-owned studios on board (hardly surprising). Oh, and just to make us jealous, this is all US only at present:

Today, there are 75 films online from Walt Disney, Pixar, Touchstone, Miramax. Apple will be adding more each week and month. Downloads will reach near DVD quality (at least for a NTSC DVD) at 640x480 resolution. Steve Jobs cited a 30 minute download on a 5 Mbps broadband connection.

New releases will cost $12.99 for the first week, then $14.99. Many other titles $9.99. Steve says that they hope to go international on this from 2007, and that iTunes movie releases will be on the same day as the DVD.

New iPods

Read about the new Shuffle, nanos and 5G iPods.

iTV

The 'one more thing' this time is the iTV (working title) - Apple's planned entry into the centre of your living room.

Steve built up to it by talking about getting movies and TV programmes on your iPod and your computer (a Mac of course, he said he was biased) - but how about when you want to watch movies on your new big screen flat-panel TV (who doesn't?)

The solution? iTV - a box half the size of the Mac Mini that acts as a set top box in your home cinema setup, and wirelessly or via Ethernet streams digital content from your Mac or PC. It'll have a built in PSU, USB, Ethernet, 802.11 wireless technology (G or draft N is not clear), optical audio and HDMI ports, and RCA stereo audio. It will have an advanced Front Row system and use the Apple Remote.

Now, assuming that content is coming from your computer, and that content is available, there's no reason why this can't be released in the UK at the same time as the US - sometime in Q1 of 2007.

Apple don't usually do these advanced announcements, but it does make sense as a taster because the other announcements weren't that cutting edge and on their own (with or without John Legend playing at the end of the show) might've been a letdown - that's one problem of all the pre-event hype.

What do you think to these announcements? Will Apple make a bigger impression in home entertainment and gain control of your TV?

Solwise HomePlug Ethernet Adaptor - home networking through your home wiring

   Solwise has introduced the HomePlug Ethernet Adaptor, which streams a home network over your home wiring, with speeds up  to 200Mbps.

The HomePlug Adaptor can support full multimedia home networking throughout the whole house including simultaneous High Definition (HD) and Standard Definition (SD) video distribution, whole-house audio, VoIP and high speed internet in addition to data networking. Enhanced Quality of Service (QOS) also provides the guaranteed bandwidth reservations for multimedia streaming including TV over IP (IPTV), higher data rate broadband sharing, online gaming, VoIP and for extending Wireless LANs coverage.

It's plug and play and can be used wherever there's a plug socket. It also comes with a 128-bit AES encryption ensuring that your network communications is secure. Expect to see the HomePlug Ethernet Adaptor in late October for around £75.

Solwise website

Friday interview: HP Labs' Huw Robson on how Memory Spots will revolutionise your digital media habits

Tech Digest first wrote about HP’s Memory Spot technology in July, when it was announced. It’s basically a tiny piece of silicon that holds megabytes of data, and can be wirelessly interacted with using a special read-write device. It’s like a turbocharged RFID chip - although if RFID means nothing to you, just go with the ‘computer the size of a grain of rice’ metaphor.

Anyway, it’s got many applications, including medical (embedding Memory Spots into patient’s wrist-bands with full medical and drug records), business (attaching Memory Spots to paper documents with a full record of all the corrections and additions made to the text) and consumer (stick them on your photo prints to add music, commentary or ambient sound when touched with the right device).

I talked to Huw Robson, director of the Media Technologies Lab at HP Labs in Bristol, to find out more about what the Memory Spots could be used for, how long until they’re actually available, and some of the issues around them.

“What we’re trying to do here is wake up storage federated around objects and media in a way that hasn’t been done before,” says Robson. “It was driven by digital photography, and particularly the idea of adding audio to photographs, whether it’s ambient sound recorded at the time you took it, your commentary, music to give you a bit of background, or even a dead relative speaking.”

Frankly that last one’s a bit scary, but you get the general idea. In a sense, it’s doing what you might do with a photo slideshow on your computer, just with a print. When the idea was still mainly photography-related, HP experimented with other methods, including a magnetic strip along the bottom edge of prints, and something Robson describes as “a big fat digital paperclip”, which didn’t work. Hence moving to the idea of tiny bits of silicon.

“The whole question was could you achieve what we wanted to achieve?” he says. “RFID chips typically have a few hundred bits, maybe creeping up to a thousand. It’s enough to give you a unique ID, go off into a central system and use it as a reference to pull back information on that item. So it’s good for stock control, but not for what we wanted to do, storing richer data on there.”

Speed of data transfer was also an issue, as HP wanted to be able to read data off these chips in seconds, not minutes. The current prototype Memory Spots have a 10-megabits-per-second transfer rate, and a storage capacity of up to half a megabyte. And yes, it really is the size of a grain of rice (see left), although for ease of use (i.e. not losing the things down the back of the HP Labs sofa), Robson says the researchers have made them bigger using a suitably high-tech futuristic method.

“We stuck them on a piece of office lamination sheet, and cut them into half-centimetre shapes,” he says. “It shows how robust they are that we can do that. But it also gives a possible use – you could give a user a whole sheet of these things, or have a roll of them inside a printer, which could then be stamped on as you print documents.”

You read or write to a Memory Spot by holding a read-write device (or a phone or PDA with the read-write device in it) millimetres away from the Spot – almost touching it. The Spot receives power through inductive coupling from the device, which can then extract whatever content is stored on the Spot. Having to practically touch it has several benefits, according to Robson.

“There’s no chance of somebody sidling up and reading these things without you knowing,” he says. “And we also have security on board and encrypted keys and all that stuff. Because it’s not reliant on a Wi-Fi network, there’s no lag in getting the data off the Memory Spot. And it’s also positive in another way: touching is so instinctive and natural as far as consumers are concerned. There’s an immediate and powerful simplicity of use.”

One of the issues around Memory Spots is what devices you use to read and write them. There’s two ways of looking at this, says Robson. For commercial and enterprise type applications, HP or partner companies could make dedicated Memory Spot read-write devices, which could be PDA-like devices, or wands, or whatever suits that application.

However, if Memory Spots are ever going to be used for the more consumer-friendly stuff – the photo soundtracks and so on – the technology to read and write the Spots needs to be in mainstream consumer devices, right? Which means mobile phones and PDAs. Robson agrees.

“For consumers, the ultimate application is if it becomes an ubiquitous standard, like Bluetooth, which is in most of your handheld devices. That requires us moving towards standards to make that work, so it’s a longer time-frame. We’re talking to quite a few companies, but it will take quite a few years to have a robust standard with the buy-in from enough companies to make it take off.”

In other words, while HP could put Memory Spot technology into, say, an iPaq PDA fairly soon, it’s going to be a while before you see a Memory Spot-enabled RAZR phone hit the market. Robson says a commercial or enterprise deployment of Memory Spots could come within a year or so, but it’s likely to be two to three years before the technology finds its way into consumer devices.

Another factor will be cost. It’s hard to say how much each Memory Spot will ‘cost’, partly because it’ll depend on whether tens of thousands of them are being made for an enterprise application, or billions for widespread consumer use. In the former case, Robson reckons a single Memory Spot might be around 50p, but in the latter, the price could come down to pennies.

“Volume means the price can come right down,” he says. “We’re not using any cunning special silicon technology. We’re making them using the standard silicon process, on a wafer, and we can take full advantage of Moore’s Law.”

In truth, some of the most quoted applications for Memory Spots seem a bit… impractical. How many people really want to have a soundtrack for their printed photos? Especially when so many of us now share our photos using email or sites like Flickr. But in many ways, the best thing about Memory Spots is the technology’s flexibility. Robson says new uses are being suggested all the time, some of which seem to me to have more appeal.

For example, what if the Memory Spot attached to your print didn’t have a soundtrack, but instead held the digital JPG of that photo, enabling you – or whoever you sent it to – to get a perfect copy made of the print at some point in the future? Or if every CD in HMV came with a Memory Spot on the front that you could touch your mobile phone or iPod to in order to hear some samples?

“It’s a fascinating bit of technology that’s taken us a bit by storm,” says Robson. “Loads of people have ideas about how we could use it, so we have to whittle those down and pick the most appropriate. We don’t think there’ll be Memory Spots in everything. Well, not in our visible future, anyway…”

Monday interview: Amino's Mike Leigh on taking Internet TV back to the living room

In some ways, YouTube is just a big melting pot of stuff you've already seen on normal TV. I spent 20 minutes in tears of laughter at a succession of 'animal falls off furniture' clips last week (yes, I know I need to get out more), while there's enough ageing soft-rock vids to fill a week's worth of VH1. But plenty of it is original too, from bonkers lip-synchers through to worryingly-honest videobloggers.

Many of us could happily fill a whole evening surfing YouTube rather than settling down onto the sofa to watch proper TV. But why can't we have the best of both worlds, and watch a few hours of hilarious web clips from our sofas, on the telly rather than on a computer monitor? It'd be like Home Entertainment 2.0 (and I'm claiming that term if it ever takes off).

An announcement today from IPTV firm Amino seems to answer this request. The company is launching a device called the AmiNET125i, which is a set-top box "which allows consumers to browse and access video content from the Internet on their television". Great, YouTube on the telly! Well, not quite. But Amino's Mike Leigh explains what it's about, and how the company expects it to change web-heads' viewing habits. 

The driving force behind AmiNET125i (if I'm honest, I reckon they could have come up with a catchier title) is the fact that most telecoms companies are using a walled garden model when it comes to TV. Sign up to, say, NTL, and you get a choice of channel packages, but they're still channels that have a commercial relationship with NTL.

Leigh likens it to the AOL approach in the early days of the Web, with its  walled garden of content. Yet at the same time, there is a parallel trend that younger people are drifting away from watching TV at all, in favour of getting their entertainment online.

"There's this almost maverick renegade trend of people saying 'I want to see the content when I want to see it, through my own navigation'," says Leigh. "They want to go and pick it out of YouTube, MySpace, Bebo or wherever. And that trend will grow as that 16-24 year-old segment gets older."

The press release announcing AmiNET125i is a little misleading, in that it quotes an industry analyst talking about YouTube, Google Video and iTunes, while elsewhere it mentions MySpace. The device won't actually let you watch content from these sources on your TV, at least not in the early days.

Instead, it's designed to deliver Windows Media 9 and MPEG-4 video streams to your TV direct from your broadband connection, whether wired or wirelessly. The device also supports Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10, and includes an embedded HTML 4 browser with JavaScript support, to resize content to your TV screen.

So what can you watch? Amino has partnered with Internet TV firm Narrowstep, and will initially be offering the latter's portfolio of channels, which includes everything from GolfBug.tv, ITV Local and The Baby Channel through to Martial Arts TV and Teachernet. Which is all very cool, but it sounds a bit like... a walled garden.
 
Leigh accepts that, but says the aim is to get people used to the concept before launching them into full unfettered access to Web video. Amino has three target audiences in mind for the box. Firstly, there's ex-pats – people living abroad who want to watch TV channels from their native country. He gives the example of Polish people who've come to live in the UK, so I daresay the Daily Mail will be frothing at the mouth over AmiNET125i any day now for encouraging this sort of thing.

Secondly, there's the niche audiences: cyclists, golf nuts, and so on. They're the core audience for many of the channels that Narrowstep provides. "Many of these channels have audiences of 200,000 to 400,000 people," says Leigh. "You can make a decent business model out of running those channels, but they wouldn't interest the likes of NTL/Telewest. Rather than expect people to watch that on their computers, we're putting the content where it deserves to be: on TV."

Finally, Amino is also targeting businesses - accountants, lawyers, surveyors or anyone who needs to do continual professional education. For home use, in the early days Amino plans to offer AmiNET125i to ISPs who can us it to add extra value to their broadband packages (and also try and avoid the trend towards broadband becoming a free 'commodity'). But Amino has ambitions beyond this.

"In 18-24 months time, we want to expand from that model to being something where you might get your broadband access from an ISP, but then you'd buy this set-top box from Amazon, Dixons etc, and then get top-up cards which are read by the set-top-box to give you specific paid-for content, whether it's Hollywood movies or Playboy. Anything where you need a subscription or to check who you are."

Again, this is all cool, but will it mean watching literally whatever you want on your TV, and particularly user-generated content from YouTube, MySpace and so on? Leigh says there are a few issues that will need to be sorted out, including the business model of how sites like YouTube make money. But there's also technical challenges.

"Nearly all the content out there now has been prepared with Windows Media 9 and Microsoft DRM in mind," says Leigh. "But Google and Yahoo are using Flash 8 codecs, so that question needs to be resolved. It doesn't make a difference to us, as we can write the codecs, but what configuration does the box need to run?"

Of course, one pertinent question is whether those 16-24 year-olds Leigh mentions are fussed about bringing Web TV back to the living room? After all, they seem quite happy migrating away from sitting on a sofa watching stuff, towards sitting in front of a PC doing stuff, including watching but also all the interactivity that goes around it. Do they want to be dragged back to the lounge?

"It's true up to a point, but on the other side, those people are now or will very soon be buying HD televisions, and who want the large TVs that both presentationally and socially make an impact," says Leigh. "If there was content that they could put on their TV rather than on a PC, I think they would be very keen to."

But in that case, surely they won't want to watch grainy web videos on their big screen? Leigh points out that as people upgrade their broadband connections, the quality of Internet TV will improve, which will start to solve this problem. But he has other thoughts.

"If you've got HDTV and you're watching HD content, do you want to go back and watch channels on a PC that you could otherwise get on a TV? No. It's a regressive move. It may take a while for that content to be presentationally HD, but it will certainly be a better viewing experience than on a PC. I won't say that very soon we're going to get HD content from YouTube or even Narrowstep, but people will start to look at viewing on a PC as inferior to viewing on a TV, and especially so if that content is fit for a shared experience."

AmiNET125i is an intriguing device, and the idea of Internet TV on your, well, TV is a great one. But when someone invents a box that really does give you access to unlimited amounts of user-generated web videos, that's when things will get really exciting. AmiNET125i is at least a first step to bringing those thousands of lip-synchers into your living room. I think that's a good thing, anyway.

IFA 2006: Philips' second generation wireless hi-fi - the WACS7000

Being a sad old music lover with a  huge pile of CDs I was naturally the core target market for Philips WACS700 wireless music center which debuted last year. Although I thought it worked well, I had a few reservations, specifically about its rather limited connectivity.

Philips appears to have listened the pleas from me, and a host of other reviewers, and have addressed many of my concerns with the second generation wireless music player the WACS7000.

It still has the core facilities-  decent B&O style design, streaming from the main unit to other slave units which can be dotted round the house and the very clever facility which means you can set the system up so that music follows you round the home. But Philips has also added support for iPods and a USB slot for memory key devices and upped the hard disk to 80Gigabytes.

The iPod functionality comes via an optional dock which connects the player to the unit and also recharges it. You can listen to tracks on the Apple player through the system and control the iPod (in its most basic functions) via the remote control. The dock also supports and has additional functionality with Philips GoGear music players.

The USB slot means that users can listen to tracks stored on flash memory devices as well as load up the device with tracks from the WACS7000.

Other tweaks include more choice in compression rates, improved Gracenote functionality and faster transfers for tracks to the hard drive.

Philips has also introduced an alarm clock for the system in the guise of the WAK3300. Designed to sit by your bed it can be programed to wake you up each day with a different track that is ether streamed from the main unit or stored on the device.

The system will go on sale in the UK later this year, while,the WAK3300 should be in the stores in October.

IFA 2006: Daewoo plan for wireless high-def TV

A whole host of manufacturers have recently been teaming up with MetaLink, a company that specialise in wireless media streaming technology based on the draft 802.11n specification - the next generation, higher-bandwidth wi-fi that should have sufficient capacity to stream multiple HDTV around the home.

The latest to partner is Daewoo, as announced at IFA 2006 today. It's next-generation set-top box (STB) will allow for just that - multi-streaming video around the home.

There's not a huge amount of detail on Daewoo's next-gen equipment yet, but other manufacturers to do the same thing include Philips and LG, so it's something that is sure to gain ground as both HD and wireless comms move forward over the next few years.

I've written about the concern over standards compliance - but if things continue like this we may just end up with a de facto standard with everyone using MetaLink WLAN technology to power their connected homes and worlds (oops sorry that's a Philips-ism). What I'm wary of is seeing a standard turn into a manufacturer tie-in (Microsoft anyone?) - hopefully that won't happen despite 802.11n not due to be officially ratified until at least mid-2007.

MetaLink do seem to be the real winners here so far, but in an consumer electronics world currently dominated by cables, a decent wireless solution that's as good as wired is a very welcome prospect.

Daewoo UK website
802.11 specifications explained at Wikipedia

Asus WL-700gE router with built-in hard drive

A nice variation on the router has been introduced by Asus in the form of the WL-700gE, which has all the expected wireless functionality, but adds a portable hard drive so you can access shared files and media from a multiple machines.

The WL-700gE features USB connections so printers and speakers can be shared over the network, as well as allowing you to share data from USB flash devices over the network. It also has a 160GB drive - enough for up to 12,000 minutes of music, 120,000 jpegs or 70 hours of video. You can download files to the drive even with your PC Off, with support for up to 7 BitTorrent streams and 10 FTP files in a simultaneously.

It's coming soon, with a US price tag of around $500 (around £265). Not cheap, but certainly potentially very useful.

Asus website

More routers:

D-Link’s wireless 3G router
Cheap Wi-Fi router - if you share your connection

Wednesday interview: Robin Shephard of Eleksen on the future for smart fabrics

Smart fabrics were once The Future (in between pet robots and Segways, if my memory serves me correctly. But I still don't see too many people walking down my local high street controlling their iPods by thumping their coat sleeves.

Eleksen is one of the few companies that's actually released smart fabric products, working with firms like O'Neill, Spyder, Kenpo and Koyono as well as launching its own products.

"The smart fabrics market has been discussed and considered for many years, but it's never really begun to happen," says CEO Robin Shephard. "But now it seems like it's really beginning to develop and take off." Read on to find out why.

On one hand, smart fabrics can be used to create the wallet-cum-keyboards that will be familiar to PDA fans. And while there are interesting developments coming in this area - more of which later - it's the other strand of the market that's more interesting yet less successful: fashion.

Incorporating technology in clothing has thus far been mainly a case of putting iPod controls in ski jackets and rucksacks. But even then, it seemed to be something that the clothing companies were just experimenting with to surf the techno-bionic-zeitgeist. With seams. But their attitudes are changing, says Shephard.

"The iPod has changed the way that companies in this market look at products," says Shephard. "They don't just consider functionality. There's a lot more emphasis on lifestyle, sex appeal and form factor. That's been important in the development of the smart fabrics marketplace."

Pricing is another factor. It's now much cheaper to produce 'smart' jackets and bags. So while a few years ago you could expect to pay $250 or more for a smart-fabric ski jacket, now Eleksen's tech is in jackets selling for around $99 in the US. This, together with the boom in devices like the iPod, means smart fabric products aren't just targeted at rich geeks who ski - a limited demographic, you'd think.

"12-18 months ago, it was about marketing smart clothing for the geeks," says Shephard. "We're getting to a position now where we can start talking about dumb clothing. I'd like to think that in one or two years time, people will be wondering why their clothing CAN'T do anything, rather than whether it can. The price point will mean you might as well have this technology in there to control the variety of devices that you might have on your person."

This is helped by the fact that the fashion industry is apparently throwing its weight (no jokes about models, please) behind incorporating more technology into its clothes - particularly the newer designers who are both more tech-savvy, and keen to explore new ideas.

Shephard says the development of wireless technologies has been a key factor too, reducing the need to have wires dangling all over the place. "They can really make the technology disappear into their products now," he says. "You don't see it, but you still get the functionality. It's taken time for both sides though. Fashion is a new world for me, I've never really been associated with fashion or design. So while they're scared of electronics, I'm equally scared of them!"

There's also rapid developments in Eleksen's less fashionable side of the business - the device input products. Those PDA wallets for example. Shephard cites as an example Microsoft's recently announced Ultra-Mobile PC platform - lightweight computers that don't have a keyboard.

"It's conceptually an interesting idea, but it does necessitate new ways to put information into it," says Shephard. "You can use the device screen itself, but we're working with Microsoft on a variety of new products, like carry cases and covers, which double up using our smart fabrics as data input devices. They're completely soft-programmable too, so they can be a writing pad one minute, a mouse pad the next, then a QWERTY keyboard."

But back to the clothing to finish off. Something Shephard says intrigues me, that once we have flexible screen technology, we'll see another leap forward in wearable smart fabrics. What does he mean? Big Brother on people's jumpers? Please no. But thankfully, that doesn't seem to be on the agenda yet.

Instead, it means tying in with another Microsoft technology, Windows SlideShow. I thought it was just about laptops having secondary screens to show important information, but apparently it could also have applications for clothing.

"It's about bringing you information from your laptop or Ultra-Mobile PC like emails, text messages or meetings on a remote screen," says Shephard. "There's no reason why this couldn't be a flexible screen on the arm of your jacket. That's the next step for this wearable technology, although it's a couple of years away."

BT and Universal team up to offer video downloads (but with a free DVD!)

Big news from BT. Nope it is not the announcement of the launch of its broadband TV service BT Vision, that’s coming in the autumn, rather the company has announced a deal with Universal to offer the film company’s movies for downloads via its BT Vision website and, in the future, via its BT Vision set top box.

Starting from the end of July consumers will be able to download the movies from the BT Vision website to their PC paying between £7.99-16.99 for the privilege. The really odd bit is that for their money consumers not only get one copy for their PC and another which they can port onto a mobile device, they also get a DVD of the movie through the post a few days later. Dan Marks, CEO of BT Vision, suggested that this was because of research which showed that three times as many people would subscribe to the service if a hard copy was included.

The movies will be in a Windows media format and will play on any ‘plays for sure’ Windows Media compatible devices. Eddie Cunningham, chair universal Pictures UK, acknowledged that the BT deal was the first of many, so don’t rule out Universal movies on your iPod video then. The movies, the first of which will include King Kong and Pride & Prejudice, are around 1-2 Gigs in size and take from around ninety minutes to download on a two Meg connection.

While the website move makes sense for BT the big push will inevitably when BT launches its BT Vision set top box service in the autumn. There users will be able to download the Universal movies to their set top box. BT says too that users will be able to access the movies any time, and won’t necessarily need to store them on the BT Vision box’s hard disk.

Monday interview: BT futurologist Graham Whitehead on why intelligent agents will roam in your connected home

The connected home used to be a pipe-dream for the consumer tech industry. If it wasn’t internet-connected fridges / microwaves / nostril-trimmers, it was big firms like Panasonic, Microsoft or Orange showcasing their visions of future homes where every device would be connected to the network and able to talk to each other.

In 2006, this futuristic utopia is finally hoving into view. Broadband rollout is steaming ahead, gadgets of all kinds are having Wi-Fi stuck inside, and the prospect of triple or quad-play TV/broadband/phone/mobile bundling at least gives us hope that the devices on the end of those may work together more seamlessly.

Want to know what all this means? Talk to a futurologist like Graham Whitehead, who works for BT Exact, the research arm of BT. "We're about to witness more change in the next 10 years than in the previous 150!" says Whitehead. "Things are going to move very fast indeed..."

As you may know, BT has been busily planning to rebuild its network for the 21st century, chucking out its existing Public Switched Telephone network in favour of a spiffing new internet protocol (IP) network. It’s being trialled in Cardiff this year, but by 2009 the whole of the UK should be hooked up to it.

"You'll have this big core network, then DSL to your home to deliver everything, and then you'll have Wi-Fi around the home so that everything can be connected," says Whitehead. "Your TV set will be Wi-Fi-enabled, your fridge...”

Tsk, those pesky internet fridges will still be around then. Advantages to the new network include better-quality voice calls and all manner of on-demand content services. But Whitehead is equally excited about the idea that human beings can “be extracted from the process of finding information”. No, this doesn’t mean robots doing your Google searches. At least, not yet.

Instead, it’s about ‘intelligent agents’ - small pieces of software that reside within your network helping you grapple with the huge mass of content and information that can be squirted down your broadband pipe. Whitehead gives the example of a TV agent.

“When there are 4,000 channels of digital TV coming to us, as stupid little humans we'll be unable to cope!,” he says. “The TV agent will effectively sit next to you, learn what you like, and then sort, sift and pre-digest what's coming in. For example, if it knows you like science programmes, it will see one that's on, talk to your diary agent to see if you're out, and if you are it'll tag the programme for recording."

Okay, so it’s a supercharged TiVo in one sense, but it’s the ability of these agents to interact with each other and the wider network that’s interesting. Whitehead cites other examples - a banking agent, for example, that can interact directly with your e-banking service (presumably along the lines of ‘he’s out on the lash again tonight, if any debits come through from Stringfellows, DON’T authorise them...’)

Of course, these agents will also function as gatekeepers, ensuring you’re not overloaded by the sheer weight of information. And spam.

“Gone will be the ability for an advertising agency to do a piece of video, seed it in a TV channel and then have customers come back and find them," says Whitehead. "It will become more of a one-on-one relationship. As an advertiser, I'll have to reach out and stroke you."

If the thought of a leering Michael Winner reaching out of your connected TV set to stroke you puts you off, don't worry (although if it excites you, seek help). Whitehead's vision is of a more benign form of opt-in advertising - the logical conclusion of current promotions where, say, Amazon might send you an email every so often alerting you to a new book by an author whose titles you’ve bought in the past.

"That's not spam," says Whitehead. "In the future, your book-reading agent might go out saying 'Any new books?', and because your agent has gone out and touched, it gives permission for people to come back to me. I see spam decreasing in the network as this targeted specific stuff comes through based on your likes and dislikes."

"You'll also have blocking filters," he continues. "If your book-reading agent goes out to Waterstones and Amazon, that gives those companies permission to come back into the system and give you information. But if a company comes back and is annoying, it would be deleted from the permission tables."

Naturally, all this throws up issues of privacy, security, and concerns that your book-reading agent might do a HAL, go mad and order the collected works of Barbara Cartland. But that’s the sort of stuff that will need to get worked out as the new IP network is deployed.

Check back on Wednesday for Part 2 of the interview, where Graham explains why the new network is safer. Oh, and why robots are our future too.

Zyxel P-660HW: ADSL2+ router/modem on a budget

Looking for a home networking solution on a budget that's better than what your ISP provided when you signed up for broadband? If so, the Zyxel P-660HW could be for you.

It's the entry-level offering in a new range of products from Zyxel and at just £47.99 including VAT it's definitely a low-cost networking solution for the home or small office.

The price includes a USB wireless adapter, and this solution can also be used with the PL100 PowerLine Ethernet adapters for where signal strength is weaker.

Amongst the features that you expect to find on much more expensive products are a 4-port Ethernet hub, Media Bandwidth Management - allowing administrators to alter Quality of Service (QoS) settings to cater for critical network traffic like video and audio streaming - Firewall Security, IP Management, and Roaming Support.

As is usually the way, the spec sheet is littered with acronyms and technical details, but I hope to get my hands on one in the next few days, so you'll either get a report from me on how good it is, or I'll be sipping cappuccino from the local Internet café having knackered my Internet connection!

Anyone for Dynamic DNS?

Video and audio streaming around the home still a decade away?

It may not be what the likes of Philips - with their connected home concept - and other manufacturers want to hear, but a leading music technologist, John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, says that neither consumers nor technology is anywhere near ready for successfully streaming audio and video around a home network.

Ironic given that Sonos are one of the manufacturers of wi-fi music streaming systems. They, along with Apple and others are banking on the digital home coming soon - but maybe not as soon as the hype might suggest.

There's plenty of potential, it seems, now that MP3 and video players, music on computers and, err, dodgy downloads (not me guv) have gone mainstream. The time will come when these people want to stream that music and video to their hi-fi's and TVs.

Though the next generation of wireless technology is due for approval towards the end of next year, and manufacturers have pushed alternative wired solutions like the HomePlug system that sends data through standard electrical wiring, McFarlane still thinks the digital reality is at least ten years away - at least for the mass market and not just the early adopters.

According to Forrester research, only one in five people with a home network use it to stream music. Of those who don't have a home network, one in six don't even know what it is.

NTL Telewest believe that wireless networks will be in 'the majority of homes' by 2010, but quite how effectively those networks will be used is another matter.

What do you think? Is the digitally networked, streamed entertainment home close at hand, or years away? Are you an early adopter or are you quite happy with more traditional entertainment solutions?

Read

MAGICBOX Imp

We’ve caught wind of the MAGICBOX Imp before although I had forgotten quite how amazingly similar it looks to the Acoustic Energy Wi-Fi radio. Still, the Imp’s RRP is a good deal cheaper at £150. For that outlay you get access to over 2,500 free internet radio stations from absolutely anywhere in the world. It connects via Wi-Fi so you’ll need to have wireless broadband access.

You can also connect straight to your own home MP3 music collection and the BBC’s ‘Listen Again’ service. These are now available in Selfridges and Harrods so if you want one you can pick one up when you go to ogle that 102” LG plasma.

More Wi-Fi:
Sony's LocationFree TV hits the UK
Find your nearest Wi-Fi hotspot easily

Terratec's Noxon 2 - access net radio through your home network

I read somewhere earlier this week that wireless net access is now classed as "mass market" as opposed to an add-on for a select few. So a device like Terratec's Noxon 2 should have a ready-made audience, especially amongst the music lovers out there.

The Noxon 2 audio accesses your network to tune into over 2500 internet radio stations from countries all around the world, or it can access your entire MP3 archive from your computer (including tracks with DRM protection). Admittedly, browsing so many radio stations could take up half your day, but luckily you can browse by either country, genre or station name. There's also a USB slot of you want to add music from MP3 players, memory sticks or other external devices.

Operating is simple, using the integrated keypad, whilst the high contrast display gives you all the information about your music. It's available later this month, retailing for around £150.

Find out more

Compare prices online for the Noxon 2

More for the wireless home:
Sonos ZonePlayer 80 music system
D-Link's DSM-520 high definition media player

Sonos ZonePlayer 80 music system

  The latest version of the Sonos wireless system - the ZonePlayer 80 (ZP80) - caught our eye at this year's CES. Well, the good news is that this multi-room music player is set to hit UK stores by the end of this month.

So what does it do? Well, by simply connecting a ZP80 to any amplified device, it adds your audio equipment to your wireless music system. Add units in different rooms (up to 32 if you live in a mansion) and you get all your music wherever you are. The ZP80 supports a huge list of digital audio formats plus internet radio streaming. It also features auto-sensing line-in connectors - that means if you plug in a CD player or an iPod, all that music goes on the network to enjoy in any room.

And you can wirelessly control all your music from the palm of your hand with the full-color wireless Controller. Pick a room, pick a song and hit play.

The bundle includes two of the compact ZP80 units and one Sonos Controller. The total price is around £779 and it should be available at authorised Sonos dealers by the end of the month.

Sonos website

More for your wireless home:
Nabaztag - the Wi-Fi Bunny
The Grohe wireless digital shower

D-Link launches DSM-520 high definition media player

D-Link has announced the latest addition to its MediaLounge range - the DSM-520 Wireless HD Media Player, a device for streaming music, photos, and high-definition videos to your home entertainment system.

The DSM-520 includes a USB 2.0 port in the front panel for instant access to media stored on removable USB flash drives or hard drives. It connects to your existing home network using either 802.11g wireless technology or via an Ethernet cable  for streaming of a variety of formats, including high-definition video in either Windows Media Video 9 or MPEG-4 format, allowing you to enjoy videos with resolutions of up to 1080i on your high-definition television.

For compatible TVs, the DSM-520 features HDMI connection. Other video connectors include component, S-video, and composite output, ensuring compatibility with virtually all sets. The DSM-520 also supports coax and optical digital audio output for digital surround sound.

The unit is available soon, with a price of £188 (excluding VAT).

More for your wireless home:
Nabaztag - the Wi-Fi Bunny
MBox wireless music network

Plane Simple

Propellerhead reader Allan Harper wants to know where he can find plans for top flight paper aeroplanes? Well, he went to the right place and our resident web guru was able to point him in the right direction with a good selection of programs and websites devoted to the gentle art of aerial origami.

Nabaztag - the Wi-Fi Bunny

Ever thought of how much time you waste messing with your mobile, checking your email or looking for website updates? Why bother, when a cute bunny can do it all for you!

But this isn't any ordinary bunny, this is Nabaztag - the intelligent Wi-Fi Bunny and the first of a new breed of interactive personal companions. Permanently connected to the internet via a wireless connection, he handles your personal information 24 hours a day. Set his behaviour through your personal profile on his website - the more you tell him, the more interactive he becomes. For example, Nabaztag will wiggle his ears when you get an important message, or his nose will turn blue when rain is on the way. I'm hoping there's also a barrage of abuse when your team concede a last minute goal.

There are different levels of service - "free rabbit" offers you messages and alerts without charge, while "full rabbit" offers additional feed alerts, the ability to send MP3s and personalised email, with Nabaztag actually reading out your received messages. More disturbingly, Nabaztag can also marry - or rather, form a relationship with your best friend's bunny. The less said about that the better I think! Available from this month priced around £80.

Find out more

More gadgets:
The Electrosmog Detector
PC circuit board lamp

The Grohe Wireless digital shower

Following on from the Videospa TV comes more technology for the bathroom in the shape of the Grohe Wireless digital shower. This wireless shower can be switched on and off from any room in the house, allowing you to step out of bed and straight into a shower already running at the exact temperature you require.

The remote system can be programmed for each member of the family or for different times of the day (if you want a cold shower to wake you in the morning and a warm one to relax at night). The remote wirelessly connects to a concealed base unit, which uses your settings to adjust and mix the water to your setting. When the ideal setting is found, a visible or audible signal will highlight this. There's also a split-second response if the water flow changes, adjusting the flow to the right temperature accordingly.

Sounds great - but beware if you have any jokers in the house who might "accidentally" press a different setting once you're in! The Grohtherm Wireless! Shower system costs around £744.   

Find out more www.grohe.co.uk

More technology for your bathroom:
The Videospa bathroom TV
Toilet seat of tomorrow

NTL trials 100MB service

What speed is your net connection? For most people, it's still 1MB or 2MB, with the promise of 8MB+ for many of us in the coming year. Well, if that brings a smile to your face, you might be interested to know that NTL will soon be trialling a 100MB service.

The trial will use the NTL network in conjunction with BitTorrent's P2P client and CacheLogic's P2P content caching and will evaluate ultra high-speed, legal video downloads of popular movies and TV shows in the UK. The download speeds proposed should facilitate multiple HDTV streams throughout the home and of course, super-fast web surfing.

It all seems like the start of genuine "on demand" entertainment down the line. Get saving up for that media box!

More NTL:
NTL trials 10MB service
NTL suffers customer wrath

MBox wireless music network

Now where have I see this before? I know, it's the Thecus one Terabyte Media Box that we featured recently. It looks like Evesham have done a little work with the concept, incorporating the MBridge network music player to create wireless music streaming for the home.

Download tracks to your PC, then transfer your collection to the MBox.  Using your existing or the built in network, the MBox streams your digital music library to up to five MBridge players throughout your home. Plugging the MBridge adapter into any hi-fi or powered speaker system allows you to listen to different music in different rooms. The player displays full track information and a remote allows you to skip through your vast collection of tracks.

The MBox uses dual hard drive to back up your data for secure storage and can also host other forms of media. You can pick up an MBox with two 160 Gigabyte hard drives for around £600. Additional players cost £149 each.

More media storage:
Thecus Media Box
Epson P-4000 multimedia stoarge viewer

CES 2006: Sonos adds ZP80 ZonePlayer

The incredibly cool Sonos wireless music system has enhanced its range by introducing a slightly smaller version of its ZonePlayer. Unlike the bulkier ZP100, this ZP80 has dimensions of 136.0 x 136.8 x 74.0 mm and comes without a built-in amp. This acknowledges the fact that many people will already have existing Hi-Fi systems (especially if you have the cash to blow on a Sonos) so it isn’t always the best solution to let your ZonePlayer take over all the amplifying duties. The ZP80 offers all the usual ZonePlayer abilities including a huge list of digital audio format support, internet radio streaming, analogue auto-detecting line-in connections, plus added compatibility for audio services Rhapsody 3.0 and Audible. The fact that it costs over a hundred quid less than the ZP100 makes the Sonos system a little more reasonable in price. The new ZP80 goes for £269 and will start shipping in spring.

Read

More CES wireless goodies
MicroLink dLAN Audio
Linksys internet security camera

Extend music coverage with MicroLink dLAN Audio

Music rental services such as Napster-to-Go are great for keeping up with the latest sounds - but often limited to one machine. To spread it further around the house, you could try the devolo MicroLink dLAN Audio adapter.

Music can be sent over household electrical wiring to any room in the house, linking a PC to a Hi-Fi or powered speakers to stream their music wherever you want it. Simply plug your PC into the adapter and connect Hi-Fi or speakers into the MicroLink dLAN Audio wherever you want the music streaming to.

It's plug-and-play - so no need to drill holes or install additional cables, just plug into any domestic power socket.

If you want to move round music around the house, it's available in the UK for around £120. For more information visit www.devolo.co.uk.

CES 2006: Linksys internet security camera

Linksys has launched a compact wireless-G internet video camera at the CES, allowing users to monitor their home or office through a web browser located anywhere in the world.

The internet video camera has its own IP address, enabling easy connection to an existing network. Once connected to a home network and the net, the user is able to see the camera view from any Windows PC. The camera also features automated monitoring - when motion is detected, a video feed of up to two minutes is recorded. In addition, alerts can be set up via text message, phone or email, warning about the disturbance.

No price has been set as yet, but you can find out more by visiting www.linksys.com

Via Pocket-Lint

Profit by telling the future to Motorola

Once, work, home and leisure were completely separate locations. Wireless technology has given us the freedom to integrate all three. To help visualise the next generation of seamless mobility, Motorola has launched MOTOFWRD, a competition for innovators to show how tomorrow's society will answer the consumer demand to live life, wherever, whenever and however.

Students focusing on science, technology, engineering, writing, film and other arts and science disciplines can submit entries, including essays, white papers, short stories, short films, comic strips or digital art to express their view of seamless mobility.

There will be one grand prize awarded, which includes a new Bluetooth®-equipped car, £5,000 in cash, a suite of the company's most advanced seamless mobility products and a six-week summer internship at a relevant Motorola office. Three runners up will receive seamless mobility product prize packages.

For more information visit www.motorola.com/uk/motofwrd

More wireless solutions:
Wireless speakers for your iPod
Digital cameras go wireless

Trust reveals USB Bluetooth adaptor with EDR technology

Bluetooth has seen a few shaky periods, not to mention the wealth of bigger nastier networking alternatives constantly trying to muscle in on its turf. In spite of that, the technology is still going strong, mostly in thanks to its presence inside a vast proportion of mobile phone handsets as well as many other portable devices and its easy-to-use nature. Trust’s development of EDR or Enhanced Data Rate technology could help to expand the capabilities of the networking tool. EDR is boasts the ability to create connections between up to seven devices simultaneously and offers up to three times faster data transfer.

This USB adaptor should provide a useful networking connection between Bluetooth enabled phones, headsets, printers, PDAs and will the increased transfer rate will reduce the amount of power sucked up by elongated connection times. The Trust Bluetooth 2.0 EDR USB adapter will be available from the end of this month for around £17.99

Read

More Bluetooth devices
Nokia does a BlackBerry
Palm adds a pair of PDAs

Linksys goes Skype

More evidence that VoIP is going mainstream comes today from Linksys. The company has teamed up with Skype to offer a new wireless handset for the service which enables users to make VoIP calls without having to be at their PC. Linksys offers a complete package, the Internet Telephony Kit (CIT200), which includes a handset a USB base station that plugs into a PC and a charger.  The handset supports the various flavours of Skype including SkypeOut and SkypeIn and it will also collect your Voicemail. It’ll available in time for Christmas and should retail for £99.99.

Is iTunes video less about the iPod and more about the living room?

Just a thought, but it seems like the new video section of the iTunes store could be more about Apple using Macs and its Front Row application (it allows users to remote control the video on their Mac) to gain a foothold in video streaming for the home rather than for users to port video on to their iPods. In the Uk, and most of Europe at least, phone users have easy access to music videos via mobiles. So while you can imagine that iPod owners might want to download a few videos to take with them on their portable device (which probably isn't going to be a huge money earner for Apple), in the long run iTunes 6.0 and its video capabilities could be more about Apple taking on MTV, Real, Virgin etc as users straeam video to their TVs via their PC.

IFA 2005: Thomson's Digital Media Bridge

Interesting new stuff from Thomson, who at IFA is parading something called a Digital Media Bridge. It sounds like it does all the usual things in transporting music, films and photos from a computer to a TV set. However the story here is that Thomson is claiming that it is HD compatible supporting 1080 lines (interlaced) for high-definition viewing of stills and 720 lines (non-interlaced) for films. Its is compatible with a host of formats too including MP3, WMA, AAC and WAV format sound files, as well as MPEG 2, MPEG 4, WMA9 and DivX videos. It has been out in the US for a while, but you get the impression that Thomson has delayed a Euro launch until there's whiff of HDTV in the air. It should go for around £250.

Humbersiders crowned gadget kings (and queens)

What is going on? Last week a property programme on Channel 4 voted Hull as the UK's worst place to live. This week the very same place, most famous for Philip Larkin and, er, The Beautiful South, is revealed as being home to some of the nation's biggest gadget lovers. According to the Intel poll, nearly 62 per cent of Yorkshire and Humberside folk own at least one of the 14 home entertainment essentials* while among those in the South East and London it's just 58 per cent (surely more than that own a mobile phone?). Maybe people in Hull are buying more gadgets because there's not that much to do around town. Or maybe it's that the survey is more likely to get picked up by national press if it has an unexpected 'northerners love gadgets more than southerners' angle. Call me cynical, but I suspect the latter. Anyway, like all surveys it makes interesting reading so we've cut and pasted the highlights of the press release for you.

* satellite tv, digital radio, mobile phones, DVD player, MP3 players/iPods, computers, laptops, the internet, digital camera, gaming console, in car satellite navigation, wireless networks in the home and cordless phone

Highlights of the report include: ·     People in Yorkshire and Humberside own the most satellite TVs (92% vs the lowest in Wales and South West 71%) and MP3 players (56% vs the lowest in N.Ireland) ·       The most gaming consoles can be found in homes in Northern Ireland(68%). The East Midlands owns the least (30%) ·       Home wireless networks are most popular in Scotland (36%) compared to 3% in the North East ·      Only when it comes to congestion-choked London, the South East tops the poll with 17%owning in-car satellite navigation systems ·      Only 77% of people in the West Midlands claim to have mobile phones ·         The Welsh have the most digital video cameras (59%). People in East Anglia have the fewest (27%) ·      The North West has the most DVD players (93%)       The survey also reveals that must-have gadgets are no longer just for men and young people - both gender and age gaps are closing. Women and the over-50s both own at least seven of the 14 home entertainment essentials compared to men and the under-50s who both own 8 out of 14 items.

The survey also reveals that must-have gadgets are no longer just for men and young people - both gender and age gaps are closing. Women and the over-50s both own at least seven of the 14 home entertainment essentials compared to men and the under-50s who both own 8 out of 14 items.

Video streamer with hard disk

Another winner from the H&B stable is the AV-3620 wireless multimedia receiver. Designed to sit under your TV the device, which has the biggest on/off switch we've ever seen, plays all manner of formats including MPEG 1,2,3 and 4, as well as WMAs, MP3s and JPEGs.

It features an integrated wireless card for hooking onto your network and has a 3.5inch hard disk drive slot, so you can basically slot in whatever sized storage capacity you want. I guess you’ll use it to record TV on to the hard disk or just stream video from your PC. Price details shortly.

Massage bed

We love the idea of gadget-packed beds. Slip an LCD TV into its base along with internet access, a music system and drinks cabinet and we’d probably never leave it ever again. So good to see that Vi-Spring is getting into beds that offer that little bit extra. Its new Virtuoso Verdi is an adjustable bed with a massage function positioned both at the head and foot which apparently effectively stimulates the circulation while creating a relaxing sensation for the whole body.

It also comes with a remote control allowing you to create your ideal position for your head/pillow. It is available in cream faux suede, mocha, mushroom and beige, the company is keeping quiet about price though.