orlow Hollywood is going after advertising companies who help fund pirate websites, and has now won a landmark victory.
The radio audience ratings service RAJAR has published the first full quarter of figures since the launch of a DAB trade-in scheme called ‘Radio Amnesty’, fronted by ubiquitous luvvie Stephen Fry. The aim was to induce households to exchange their FM radios for a DAB radio. The result? DAB’s share of digital listening has fallen for the first time.
A new report commissioned by Google, and timed to coincide with the first ever Parliamentary debate on the company today, puts itself and the internet at the heart of the British economy. But it does so by using some creative and interesting definitions.
The European Court has upheld the right of copyright businesses in the EU to ask for a ‘private copying levy’, but slapped down Spain for applying it indiscriminately. The Court was hearing a case brought by the Spanish music collecting society SGAE against a storage vendor called Padewan. Spain provides a case study in how … Read more
Nokia has bowed to international pressure and agreed to end the cruel and unusual practice of programming natively for the Symbian OS. It still wants developers to target Symbian, but using the more humane Qt APIs instead.
Nokia has also torn up the OS roadmap, and will speed up the delivery of new functionality to users in chunks, as and when it’s ready, instead of in milestone releases. In less prominent statements, Nokia has clarified what had become a very confusing development picture.
Jim Griffin’s bold plan to take P2P file sharing out of the black economy, and into the one that deals with green folding stuff, flopped because it couldn’t explain to songwriters how they’d get paid.
The European Commission has approved a French scheme to subsidise music downloads for 15-25 year olds. The taxpayer will contribute €25 per user per year to every “Carte Musique” cardholder, which entitles the user to €50 worth of downloads. The cardholder will stump up the other half of the cost of the card.
The proposal had been pending EC approval, which has now been granted in the name of “preserving pluralism and cultural diversity”.
You may have had your fill of Nokia analysis and features, but I’d like to draw your attention to one more – one that’s very special. The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat has published a report based on 15 interviews with senior staff. It reads like the transcript to an Oscar-winning documentary where the narrative thread is held together entirely by the talking heads.
The report is very long on detail and short on opinionising – and for those of you fascinated by technology and bureaucracy, something quite interesting emerges. What we learn is that the company’s current predicament was fated in 2003, when a re-organisation split Nokia’s all-conquering mobile phones division into three units. The architect was Jorma Ollila, Nokia’s most successful ever CEO, and a popular figure – who steered the company from crisis in 1992 to market leadership in mobile phones – and who as chairman oversaw the ousting of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this year.
In Ollila’s reshuffle, Nokia made a transition from an agile, highly reactive product-focused company to one that managed a matrix, or portfolio. The phone division was split into three: Multimedia, Enterprise and Phones, and the divisions were encouraged to compete for staff and resources. The first Nokia made very few products to a very high standard. But after the reshuffle, which took effect on 1 January 2004, the in-fighting became entrenched, and the company being increasingly bureaucratic. The results were pure Dilbert material.
Rather like the old Soviet Politburo, the goal is internal conformity, rather than exciting and surprising the punter. Read more at The Register
My name is Andrew Orlowski from The Register, I was looking for an illustration to try and bring a very old debate to have a fresh perspective, and I came across this in my library, which is an extraordinary book written by a gentleman called Yoneji Masuda. The book was written in 1980 and it was the Japanese plan to computerise Japanese Society on Cybernetic lines. It was a very modest project. It would have cost about $65 billion in the currency at the time, and plans included robotically controlled personal transporters, he forecast the death of the television by about 1985; an “information sharing” society would follow, democracy would be reborn. Much of this utopian rhetoric is stuff we have heard since then, but we are in a very interesting time, I think, for digital networks and for society.
We are faced with a paradox, very briefly, I will try and encapsulate it in about a minute.