Unlock your phone, avoid the scams

I recently put my cell phone in the washing machine. I know, not a clever move but it was late, I was tired and I had too many pockets. So when I put my clothes out to dry the next day, I discovered my brand new Sony Ericsson would do nothing but vibrate. Thankfully, my girlfriend at the time had just received a new phone which she didn't need and let me keep hers. But that is only where my troubles started.

I tried using my card in it (which surprisingly still worked) but the phone was from a different provider so it would not read the card. So started my quest to unlock my telephone. I tried various shops around my neighbourhood, but the prices were ridiculously high because the phone was new. I tried at least 5 different places, they all said they could do it. Two of them did not even have the necessary codes and the other three wanted me to pay around a third of the telephone's actual price.

So I turned to the Internet. I tried various websites that gave out free codes, but of course their resources are limited so I could not find what I needed. Then I checked out sites where you pay and they provide you with a code to unlock your phone, but a few minutes of research later I realised the number of scams people are running involving this service. All I wanted was to simply type "unlock cell phone" and get a result, but things are never that simple.

Or are they? I was recently given the above link by a friend to a website that unlocks cell phones. Unlocktotalk.com is a guaranteed service that will unlock your phone and you can be sure you are avoiding scams as it is an established business. They have a very well organised site that is easy to navigate and get you to the code you need for your model telephone. What impressed me the most with them is the fact that if you have fallen victim to a scam and you email them the receipt sent to you by that website, they give you a 25% discount. So you can either wait a few months for the shop round the corner to get the codes and unlock your phone, or you can stay one step ahead of the game.

Tesco goes into banking

You know how on Saturdays you get up slightly earlier than you would on a Sunday to go out and do your weekly shop, buy some things for the house, maybe pop into the bank, perhaps pay in some money or withdraw some for the weekend, check your balance, maybe set up a standing order, get the newspaper, and fill up the car on the way back? Well at least it will be a far shorter journey from one service to the next.

Tesco is poised to buy the 50% stake that the Royal Bank of Scotland holds in Tesco's personal finance branch for £950 million, thus making the business wholly owned by the supermarket mammoth, so that it may develop its existing services, such as insurance (car, home, personal), and add new services, such as current accounts. They will also intensify their marketing campaigns for these services, in order to become a worthwhile competitor to other banks on the high street.

Even though Tesco has had insurance services for while now, it still only holds a small percentage of the market in that service. The supermarket company now hopes to improve their stake in the market by hiring former RBS execs to be on the board. It is strange that the same place where I bought half a kilo of Turkey breast fillet last night, at a reduced price of 90 pence I must add, will now also be able to arrange for my rent payments. Not necessarily a bad thing (although I can't really see an upside either) but definitely strange. Like a huge sort of creature that mutates,engulfs and incorporates what grows around it.

I'm dying to run into someone 15 years from now who runs a finance department but who started off in the frozen food section.

Internet piracy approaching the end?

I hope you are as lucky as I am to have caught the Knock Off Neville advertisement. For those of you who are not lucky enough to have seen it, it's a silly attempt by some ad exec to make downloading uncool, but so enjoyable to watch in its ineffective unrealistic childishness. They might as well go and pull file sharers' hair. Although I find this approach sophomoric to say the least, it does not detract from the fact that illegally downloading film and music is a grave concern to the media industry. But a new approach that I must say may be much more effective has been found.

In a plan agreed between the UK's largest Internet Service Providers and the government, persistent music sharers will start to receive letters warning them to stop illegally downloading and sharing music or face lowered bandwidth. As Internet speeds have increased over the last decade and MP3s are the most popular way of listening to music, the circulation of "ripped" CDs through file sharing networks has increased exponentially.

Virgin, BT, Tiscali, Orange, Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB have all signed up in order to warn their subscribers to desist from sharing music illegally. Initially, the companies will send letters to their users with high records of downloading. If the users continue despite the warnings, their speeds will be limited, thus making it extremely time consuming to do anything on the web while downloading large files.

The reason I find this will be the most effective is because of some of the characteristics of filesharing culture. I have known people in the past that were prolific filesharers. As a teenager I was Internet illiterate, but I had friends that were on the forefront of downloading music, either through networks such as Napster or by person to person filesharing done through chatrooms. It seemed strange to me that they exchanged so much music. Hundreds of records went back and forth. The numbers were so high that it was impossible for them to hear all the music they had received. But in many cases it was not a question of listening to a record from a band they liked, it was just collecting. It was, and probably still is, a fetishistic collection of music, to a certain degree.

This is why I find the "slow down" approach so clever. It may be fun for them to download music and they may ignore the letters sent to them, however when checking their email becomes as time consuming as it did when 56kbps was the fastest you could go, and they have to leave their pc on overnight to load a page with several high quality photos on it, the fetishism will give way to practicality. The plan has also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association of America, which has also been losing money through the circulation of their films on line.

So perhaps the end of free circulation of copywrited information on the Internet is approaching. With many companies now seeling filesharing services it is obvious that pressure would be put on those who offer the same services for free. But we will have to wait and see what happens.

Apple sales soar, problems loom

It seems as though other mobile telephones have ceased to exist since the advent of the iPhone. You could have the newest, most hi tech, up to date phone, and you would still not be the coolest one in the room if there was anyone with an iPhone.

So what could possibly be wrong? What with a 41% increase in sales everything should be fine and dandy at Apple. And yet, problems seem to be looming, problems concerning MobileMe, their service that synchronises all your Mac devices. Basically it stores all your contacts, emails, etc. in an online server - a "cloud" - and then forwards the information to your Mac computer, iPhone and iPod so you can have the same updated information on all machines.

Or at least that was the plan. What has really happened is that a number of features that were advertised in connection with this product don't work exactly as planned. As of last week the HomePage application could not be accessed and certain users were also facing problems with Me.com, which stopped them from accessing their mail.

Also, the "push" technology that forwards information updates to your other devices does not do so immediately, but rather synchronises devices up every 15 minutes. There has also been a delay in the introduction of iDisk File Sharing, but Apple has come out and apologized for some these delays.

But that is where the statements end, and there is something more, something that adds insult to injury, and that is the fact that customers who signed on for a trial account have been charged the full membership fee, according to claims made last week .

So not all going exactly as planned then... but for some strange reason I feel confident that they will repair all these problems quickly and will get back on track. I don't know exactly why I feel so confident, it might be because all my other Mac gear has always worked fine. Still, I'm going to wait a while before I join the cool iPhone crowd.

Yahoo survives by the skin of its teeth

I've been observing Yahoo's situation over the last few weeks and joked like many others I'm sure, that it should be renamed "Yahoo?". In my last post on the subject, several execs had already abandoned ship with more poised to take the plunge. Then deals failed with Microsoft after Yahoo turned down a buy out offer, then went back to that offer which had been taken of the table, and rejected a new offer from Microsoft to buy only their search branch. Complicated, I know.

Even though the deal Yahoo finally agreed on made them more money than selling their search branch to Microsoft would have, shareholders were not happy and stock started to drop in value. That is around the time that Mr. Icahn, who holds 5% of Yahoo's stock, started his campaign to have the entire board replaced with his own nominees at the shareholder's meeting in August. If that plan had gone through, parts of Yahoo would probably have been sold off to Microsoft, however the company managed to defuse the situation by agreeing to appoint Mr. Icahn and two of his nominees to the board.

Thankfully for Yahoo, Mr. Icahn was unable to convince other major shareholders that there was no other option than to sell, so there is no immediate plan for a deal with Microsoft. The main point of conflict was the amounts Microsoft was prepared to pay for Yahoo or just their search branch, which led Yahoo to striking a deal for a new kind of search engine with Powerset.

With the shareholders' meeting just round the corner, it seems that Yahoo will pull through this one and remain under the same leadership for the time being...

Google beats Microsoft, Mercedes and BBC in the UK

Well things seem to be turning up for Google. It has just come in first in a poll of brands preferred in the UK, it has managed to save our private information in the lawsuit against it by Viacom, and it has recorded 35% rise in profits this second quarter, even though their prediction was slightly higher.

Some are disappointed with Google not hitting their target profit, but a 35% profit increase is not to be laughed at. Neither is the fact that the company has managed to bump Microsoft and Mercedes out of the top two positions in the top consumer brands poll, according to the BBC. The same source reports that Google also came top of a superbrands poll in the beginning of the year, taking the place of the BBC itself, and I can't say I'm surprised.

With UK consumers spending £26.5 billion online in the first six months of 2008, it would make sense for one of the best search engines out there to make a tidy profit, even if it is not as high as they predicted. Apparently, the rise in the cost of food, fuel and the cost of living in general is nudging people towards doing their shopping from home, on the computer. And to do any of that, you first need to search for what you will buy.

Just take a step back and you will see why Google is so popular. It plays an integral part of our lives, in almost all sectors, personal and professional. It sometimes seems that Google has become synonymous with the Internet itself. Will Microsoft's attempt to improve its own search engine help it catch up? Will Viacom's lawsuit damage Google?

New Tomb Raider "Underworld" out in November

I was not a fan of the first Tomb Raider. For some strange reason I did not find the gameplay appealing and the amount of times you had to go through the same stage to get it right made it seem like more of a chore. However, all that changed when I played the most recent instalment of the game which was atmospheric and very exciting. However, I am strictly a PC gamer and all the fancy new controls make it impossible for me to play anything that complex. But I do love to watch others play.

So I am hoping that my ex-flatmate gets the new Tomb Raider, Underworld, which is due for release in November (18th for the US, 21st overseas). Having checked out trailers and TV spots on the game it looks incredible. The design team has used a combination of new lighting and shading technologies, in combination with some old school technologies just for shading, giving the game the quality of an old film.

These stunning visual designs are put to good use in the new environments that have been created for the game which takes you deeper and deeper underground. The game kicks off in the middle of the Mediterranean sea where Lara is looking for some underwater ruins while battling sharks (use the sticky grenade), and as she continues on her quest has to follow underground passageways through ruins, where natural predators give way to supernatural guardians.

Some of the monsters are enormous and extremely well designed in all details. Lara will also be able to fight them using her new moves that allow her to fire at two different targets with her two guns simultaneously and to even use melee attacks while firing if she is surrounded by several creatures. There are also brand new moves for Lara to be able to traverse through the environments, ant they look like they were taken out of an Olympic gymnastics set.

The game looks seriously good and designers claim that gameplay is challenging but not punishing. I know that there are Lara fans out there pre-ordering as we speak. Retailers are sure to run out quickly, but you can save yourself the wait in the queue and just pre-order from HMV, Play.com, or Tesco. There is also a selection of clips on YouTube that feature gameplay and trailers for the game.

Amazon and Sony Bravia HD online video rental

A few weeks ago we heard that Sony was trying to reclaim a portion of the market that it had not paid enough attention to, software. The electronics giant is the largest electronic goods producer in the world, but was losing out on very large profits seeing as customers were using their equipment with other companies' software. And Sony announced that the new Sony Bravia HD would include an online rental store on their TV sets. This plan will soon come to fruition with a deal between Sony and Amazon for an online video rental and sale scheme.

The New York Times reported that Amazon.com's video rental service, which will allow customers to start watching around 40,000 films and TV programs, will launch soon. However, the main difference between this and other online rental stores is that the customers will not need to wait for files to download to their computer, rather they will stream the videos online. Apparently, films and shows from most major companies and networks will be available on this service, however films and shows from ABC and Disney will not be available due to the company's close ties with Apple, whose iTunes store will be one of the major competitors to this new online store.

I dream of getting a Sony Bravia HD. I really do, a screen so big that it will force me to move the sofa all the way to the other side of the room. It's a bit pricey for me now (but not as expensive as it used to be), but hopefully I will be able to get one soon, maybe after the credit crunch. And if I invest in a such a luxury piece of equipment, I might as well order a couple of impressive films that I do not own and watch them on an enormous HD screen.

Viacom and YouTube agreement reached

I was upset a couple of weeks ago when I found out about Viacom's victory in their litigation case against Google, specifically concerning their subsidiary YouTube. Viacom's win in the courtroom meant that Google had been ordered to hand over all the information on all the users of YouTube, because an estimated 160,000 clips that infringed the media giant's copyright had been viewed 1.5 billion times.

However, privacy protection groups around the world were outraged by what they considered to be an invasion of privacy, as Google would have to hand over IP addresses and personal YouTube account information on all of their users.

Thankfully, an agreement has been reached that will protect Viacom's interests, while at the same time will keep our personal information out of their databases. In negotiations between the two companies a deal was struck for Google to indeed hand over the information required by Viacom, but they are to remove user names and IP addresses.

But is the $1 billion lawsuit enough to break YouTube, and if so is the Viacom giant about to swallow another media company? Our names may not be in a database, but we may see one of the greatest user content driven sites become another advertisement playground, where watching a clip on squirrel catapults will also require me to see what's on MTV or Comedy Central, or what film is being released next month by Paramount and Dreamworks. Before you know it, we might even have to pay for it, and free Internet services, such as Skype, is what makes the Interent such a wonderful place.

McAfee tests Spam activity in UK

Very much in the path of Morgan Spurlock in the “Super Size Me” documentary about an exclusive McDonald’s diet and Giles Coren and Sue Perkins in the recent “The Supersizers Go...”, anti-virus developer McAfee gathered up a number of volunteers from ten countries to play the role of internet un-savvy guinea pigs in a pioneering experiment around spam emails for 30 days.

The parameters of the experiment would include a brand new laptop with a basic McAfee anti-virus software given to the 50 participants instructed to browse the net to their liking. For documentation purposes, all participants were requested to create and daily update an online diary so as to record their experiences and thoughts as the experiment progressed. In the end the overall impact of spam would be evident, countable and easily shared with the rest of the world.

Eventually by the end of the 30-day experiment the 50 participants, who in the end of the experiment got to keep the infected laptops as a reward for their hassle, shared 104,000 unsolicited messages - more than 70 a day each. That not being the worst effect, they witnessed their laptops’ day-by-day degradation followed by numerous crashes.

YouTube viewers' habits to be given to Viacom

In a ruling that many view as an unofficial infringement of online privacy rights, a US court has ruled that Google is to reveal the viewing habits of any of their users who have ever watched a video on YouTube. This court case was an ongoing battle between Google and Viacom regarding a number of clips on YouTube which Viacom considers are massive copyright infringement.

Therefore, Google will have to provide the login details and the IP addresses of all its users. So more than 12 terabytes of information will be turned over after an estimated 1.5 billion views were recorded on material Viacom holds a copyright on.

It is somewhat shocking that a media company will now know what millions of people around the world have watched and what they tend to watch. I know very few people who have not seen a clip that should not have been uploaded to begin with, but YouTube had introduced a filtering tool after Viacom's initial concerns had been expressed, in an attempt to limit the number of clips that should not legally be there.

My main fear is what will happen to YouTube after it is proven that people uploaded and watched copyrighted material. If further action is taken by Viacom we will see a site that has been somewhat independent and a platform for users to express themselves, bought out and become part of a media behemoth. Not to mention the number of additional advertisements that will appear.

Seeing as YouTube recognised its mistake and introduced filtering systems, do you think it is right that our viewing habits and other personal infomartion will become property of Viacom?

Diablo 3 looks impressive

I remember spending summer afternoons geeking out with my brother in front of the PC, slaughtering demons and what not to an ecclesiastic soundtrack. It was 1996, and Diablo was one of the best games of the year. It was a bit difficult to explain the pentagram on the box to my nan, so I just hid it. It's been more than a decade and my flatmate still plays Diablo 2, so it was through him that I heard of the amazing news that Blizzard has announced the upcoming release of Diablo 3. No exact date has been set for the game yet, however there is a lot of info on the new features. Game designers for Blizzard have said that the game will be ready when it is perfect.

The Barbarian will still be featured as one of the character classes players can choose, while some of the old favourite moves have been retained. A new character will also be introduced, the Witch Doctor, with special moves that control his enemies' minds and summon pets to help him stay out of harm's way. The characters come in either male or female a very politically correct move on Blizzard's part.

But the most impressive feature of the game has to be the interractive environment, which allows you to tear down walls or blow up tables and doors. In their gameplay video one can see a wall being torn down to completely obliterate a group of zombies.

Gameplay has been simplified to the point where one can play the game with only the mouse, although veteran Diablo players will prefer the mouse keyboard combination. The game's graphics designers have not gone for a hyper realist approach, but rather kept a more retro fun design for the game.

It is a welcome game by all us PC gamers who feel left behind in the advent of games consoles with complicated gamepads. Once again I can use my incredible typing and mouse skills to dispatch demons. I think my social life will suffer...

Microsoft trying to catch up with Google through Powerset

It must have been somewhat embarassing for the behemoth that is Microsoft to get turned down twice by Yahoo in the whole search engine debacle. Even though the results were mixed for Yahoo (they made more money than they would have done if they had signed with Microsoft but are in danger of being sued by their shareholders and execs are migrating away from the company), Microsoft now has to find a new way to update its Internet searching capabilities, and hopes it has done so through a new deal struck with Powerset.

Now Powerset is developing a whole new way to search the web using semantic web technology. Well, you still type in words and it gives you results, however the search engine looks for the words in their logical context, thus providing more accurate results in relation to what the user wants to find. According to Businessweek, this type of search is more useful to users looking for more detailed results in categories where there are many websites with the same keywords, and in that sense perform better than Google. The word is that this new technology has impressed Microsoft enough to offer $100 million for it, a fraction of what they were prepared to pay Yahoo and got turned down.

So this new technology, albeit very complex and costly to develop, could be just the ticket for Microsoft to catch up in the Internet search department which Google dominates at the moment. They have enough money left over from the deal that didn't go through. Lets see if they make it back to the top...