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May 13, 2008

Virgin Media completes high speed trial

by David Allen
It seems amazing but Virgin Media are actually planning to roll out their high speed broadband later on in the year. The network is said to be capable of reaching 50 Gbps which is astonishing when compared to some regions that can only receive a broadband connection speed of 1.5 Gbps! This announcement from Virgin Media follows a trial which involved testing their connection speed over a long distance. ...



Carphone Warehouse out of running for Tiscali

by David Allen
Carphone Warehouse out of running for Tiscali
Despite having offered £550 million for the UK division of Italian based Tiscali, it would appear that they have been left of the list of selected bidders. If this turns out to correct then it will deal a serious blow to the plans for Talk Talk to be able to compete with the other UK providers. Tiscali were initially looking to ...



BBC upheld complaints about soap

by David Allen
It was said to be the storyline of the Easter holidays, but many viewers were shocked as the soap Eastenders descended into a dark place. The storyline centred on a couple, the “Brannings”, where the wife drugged her husband and with the aid of her lover, took the lifeless body to the forest where they intended to bury him alive in a coffin. These scenes covered two episodes shown ...



Vodafone preparing to extend mobile broadband

by David Allen
It may down to the amount of complaints or just down to business expansion, which is probably what the real reason is! But never the less Vodafone have announced that they will at last be rolling out the top speed mobile broadband of 7.2 Mbps to other parts of the UK. At the moment this type of high speed connection is only available at the main UK airports and ...



Everyworld Released By Streamezzo & Neuf Cegetel

by Rohan Parker
Everyworld Released By Streamezzo and Neuf Cegetel
The company behind Universal Software Platform, which is the program that resolves fragmentation in the mobile industry and is the basis of the Mobile Internet, Streamezzo, have announced that their Experience department have now completed the Everyworld platform. This new platform has been launched by France's number-one broadband and mobile provider, Neuf Cegetel. Everyworld breaks ground by offering a stable ...



May 12, 2008

Google connects friends across the Web

by Janet Harris
Google has released a preview version of 'Friend Connect', a service which makes it easy to add social networking features to a website. With Friend Connect, a Web publisher can add a small piece of code to their site, to immediately provide social networking features, without having to carry out any complicated programming. With 99% of sites not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market. ...



Lax control lets teenagers buy inappropriate material online

by Lin Freestone
A nationwide survey among 1,000 male and female teenagers aged 13-17 years found that young people are consistently trying to buy inappropriate material online. In thousands of cases across the country they are successfully buying alcohol and adult DVDs as a result of poor levels of age verification. Recent advances in online technology mean websites can now immediately verify anyone who tries to buy or access material which could ...



BBC in trouble again over live concert

by David Allen
It is the highlight of the year for Radio 1, when they put on the One Big Weekend series of concerts, which covers a wide range of musical tastes and is branded as the first UK music festival of the year. However showing the concert live on BBC3 is always going to be a risky affair, and this proved right with the performance by Madonna. The BBC have reportedly ...



BT looking to sell its data centres

by David Allen
It looks as if BT is looking to off load their data centres, and they are already in talks with the US based computer maker Hewlett Packard. The price that BT is looking for, for this part of their global organisation is around £1.5 billion. The two companies are already partners in the international market for providing large organisations and companies with IT and Telecoms solutions, having signed an ...



Virgin Media to offer Netgear routers

by David Allen
Following a successful partnership agreement, Netgear are going to provide Virgin Media with their wireless G Routers, which will be named the Virgin Media Wireless Router. This equipment will be offered to all new Virgin Media subscribers for a low price or in some cases will be free. The routers are said to enhance the service being provided through the fibre optic broadband packages. Both companies believe that the ...



BBC in charity cash scandal

by David Allen
Is there never going to be an end to the scandals that surround the premium rate phone calls which viewers make, when it comes to voting for the winners on certain TV programmes? Or is it just that these phone polls have created such a mistrust of those who run them, that they are scrutinised more thoroughly than before? Whatever the reason, the outcome is going to be the ...



Sky and Virgin talk about channels

by David Allen
With a change of senior management in both camps, it would to be a great time for the two sides to start talking, in an attempt to try and sort out the dispute over the Sky’s channels once and for all. There is no doubt that Virgin Media are suffering, whether or not this is as a direct result of the loss of channels, in particular Sky News and ...



Carphone Warehouse to offer £550 million for Tiscali

by David Allen
With the ink still wet on the billion pound cheque from Best Buy, there are plans already being made to spend it. The founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone has confirmed that the company have put in an offer for the UK division of Tiscali. However the offer for Tiscali UK only requires half of the money from Best Buy, the offer being £550 million, leaving a nice ...



May 9, 2008

Virgin stays with Big Brother

by David Allen
Having taken the sponsorship over from the Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media have once again decided to continue with their Mobile division sponsoring the Big Brother reality programme for series nine. Carphone Warehouse pulled out of the deal with Big Brother when, in the celebrity show in early 2007, the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty suffered abuse at the hands of Jade Goody and some of the other contestants. Sponsoring this type ...



Owner of Five hit by drop in ads

by David Allen
The owner of Channel Five, RTL, have been experiencing some problems with their advertisers as the market would appear to have dropped slightly for the first quarter of 2008. But RTL do have anything up to seventy channels across Europe and are reporting that the down turn in advertising revenues is not just restricted to the UK, it is a Europe wide problem. This is good news for the ...



May 8, 2008

ITV Fined for serious breaches of code

by David Allen
The communications and media regulator, Ofcom, has finally come up with the amount that ITV will be fined for some of the most serious breaches of the broadcasting code and even their own terms and conditions. ITV will be fined a record breaking £5.68 million by Ofcom for the misuse of premium phone lines for competitions related to TV programmes. However despite the hefty fine, there were in fact ...



Broadband users get usage calculator

by David Allen
With the talk of usage and penalties for when a user goes over their allotted limit, sometimes users may be getting too close for comfort. For many users, not knowing how much time they spend surfing, it is hard to know how close they are getting to their limit. Luckily the internet service provider PlusNet has created a broadband calculator. This is where a user can put in their ...



Carphone Warehouse expands into electrical retail

by David Allen
Always looking to expand into new territories, the Carphone Warehouse has signed a £1.1 billion deal with the US electrical retail giant Best Buy. The deal will see the existing Carphone Warehouse stores in the UK and across Europe stocking up with cheap electrical goods, such as computers and TVs. In this agreement it will see Best Buy take a fifty per cent ownership in the retail division. It ...



Broadband goes down the drain

by David Allen
For some time this method of providing super fast broadband, by feeding the cables through the sewers and drains, have been bounced around, but finally a decision has been made. The first place to benefit from being connected to a network that is capable of obtaining speeds of up to 100 Mbps, is going to be the town of Bournemouth which is situation on the south coast. The work will ...



May 7, 2008

Force.com Investment Challenge announced

by Janet Harris
Salesforce.com, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) specialist, and venture capital firm, Eden Ventures, have announced the £1 million Force.com Investment Challenge. The challenge, which is a UK first, aims to encourage independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop SaaS applications on the Force.com Platform. Force.com is the world’s first Platform as a Service (PaaS). It allows developers to create business applications on-demand and without software, enabling companies to quickly translate their ideas ...