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August 30, 2010

Online dictionaries to finish off the printed Oxford English?

by Darren Allan
The e-book market is a growing one, and with the emergence of the iPad – a recent survey said 41% of tablet owners preferred reading on their Apple gadget to the printed medium – alongside a cheaper Amazon Kindle, that growth is being spurred on. It also seems that even classic reference works such as the Oxford English Dictionary ...



August 28, 2010

ONS says 9.2 million Brits have never been online

by Darren Allan
The Office for National Statistics produced a report on Internet access yesterday, which showed that 9.2 million people in the UK have never been online. That figure represents 18% of the population, almost one in five. At least that number was down from the figure the ONS reported in 2009, which was 10.2 million people, indicating that in the ...



August 20, 2010

Gaming now edges music and movies in online popularity, says Ofcom

by Darren Allan
According to Ofcom's recent Communications Market Report 2010, online gaming has now become marginally more popular than downloading music or films. Very marginally, mind you. The statistics from the organisation's research showed that 39% of those surveyed played games online, which was up from 38% last year. 38% professed to downloading songs and films, which was down from 39% ...



July 27, 2010

Half of Brits are mobile phone addicts

by Darren Allan
In a not-really-all-that-surprising set of survey results, Birmingham Midshire Savings has discovered that 51% of Brits never leave home without their mobile. And the BM Savings research also indicated that 44% of folks said they couldn't live without their mobile phone, they were that addicted to it. The survey, which was highlighted by The Mail Online, also revealed that 75% of respondents ...



July 26, 2010

UK surfers don’t want to pay for online content

by Darren Allan
A recent survey by financial services provider KPMG has discovered one clear fact: British people don't want to fork out money for online content. Or at least, UK citizens are much less likely to want to pay for the privilege of visiting a site than people of other nationalities. The Independent reports that 81% of Brits surveyed said they would ...



July 20, 2010

Times Online loses 66% of readers

by David Allen
When News International announced that it would be charging its online readership to access the Times online, industry experts forecast that the readership would fall away by around ninety per cent. In fact, it seems that the experts underestimated the loyalties of the Time readership as figures released show that the Times Online has lost sixty six per cent ...



July 8, 2010

Online privacy rules introduced

by David Allen
The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has now launched a new set of guidelines designed to protect the personal information that all internet users and organisations store online. The Personal Information Online Code of Practice informs organisations that store data online, how they are able to use this data and that there is a need for transparency in the way ...



July 1, 2010

Silver surfers thrive as over 50s take to net

by Darren Allan
It seems that there's been a surge of older people getting online – the so-called silver surfers, those over 50 who are on the net. According to UKOM, the The UK Online Measurement Company (an arm of research experts Nielsen), 1.9 million new surfers got connected to the web in the past year up until May 2010. Of those folks, ...



June 25, 2010

Fairsharemusic new charity music downloading service

by Darren Allan
Fairsharemusic is a new music sharing service with charitable ambitions. It works much like any MP3 downloading store, with the notable exception that half of the site's profits are given to various charities. These include the British Heart Foundation, Great Ormond Street, Oxfam, Sue Ryder, the WWF, NSPCC and Amnesty amongst others. You can choose which charity you wish to donate ...



June 22, 2010

Online shopping boosted by World Cup

by David Allen
It seems that in May online shopping reached £4.5 billion or the equivalent of £73 person for every person in the UK. According to the retail sales experts IMRG Capgemini, online shopping is 22 per cent higher than the same period last year and up 3 per cent on the previous month, April. It seems that although the World Cup ...



June 21, 2010

DirectGov to explain budget on Freeview

by David Allen
Tomorrow is a very important day for the UK, with the first emergency budget that the country has seen for a long while, which will affect just about everyone in the UK at varying levels. When the budget is shown live on the TV, it is not always possible to find the points that affect the individual, as each ...



June 18, 2010

Every 7 seconds a web con takes place

by David Allen
During the past year, over 3.7 billion phishing emails were sent to UK based recipients. These emails are designed to fool people into revealing their personal or financial details. According to CPP, a life assistance firm, in the UK alone someone is a victim of this type of crime every seven seconds, with the average financial loss being around ...



June 10, 2010

BBC will show Glastonbury online live

by David Allen
The BBC has announced that it will be live streaming the entire coverage of the Glastonbury 2010 event. All of the content across all three stages will be available to stay-at-home festival fans on the BBC website at this location - bc.co.uk/glastonbury. Content will also be available through the red button service, as well as the usual coverage on BBC2, ...



June 8, 2010

Bletchley Park archives to go online

by David Allen
During the second world war Bletchley Park, located just outside of Milton Keynes, was one of the country’s best kept secrets, but today the archives collected over the war years are about to be published online. The work will be carried out by the staff at the Bletchley Park Trust with the help of HP, which will be providing ...



Big Brother 11 will be streamed online

by David Allen
With Big Brother 11 starting this week, Channel Four is pulling out all of the stops to make the last series of the show the most accessible to its fans. To make sure that nothing is missed and as an alternative to watching the World Cup at work, fans of the show will be able to watch live streaming ...



June 5, 2010

New online and advertising boss at ITV

by David Allen
ITV have been searching for a commercial and online expert, the company seem to have the answer to their requirements in the former GCap Media boss, Fru Hazlitt. Fru Hazlitt will now become the managing director of ITV’s commercial and online division when she joins the company on the 2nd August. This is a new role within the ITV organisation, ...



May 27, 2010

Free films from LoveFilm

by David Allen
With the FIFA World Cup in South Africa starting in less than two weeks, for businesses not associated with the football are having to think up alternative methods of attracting customers or risk losing out for three weeks or so. The DVD rental service LoveFilm, think that they may have the solution to this problem as they launch the ...



May 21, 2010

SeeSaw offers pay to view service

by David Allen
The video on demand (VoD) provider, SeeSaw, which is based on the old Project Kangaroo technology, is moving into the territory of pay TV by offering its users up to a thousand hours of content. It will cost just 99p to £1.19p for an episode or from £3.99 to £17.99 for an entire series, depending on the amount of ...



Newspaper archives to go online

by David Allen
Putting the newspaper archives from the British Library online may seem like a simple enough task but according to the organisation, the four million historic pages from the national newspaper collection will take around two years to complete. But that is just the tip of the newspaper iceberg as the collection actually consists of thirty eight million pages and ...



May 20, 2010

Project Canvas seeks another partner

by David Allen
With the future of the online TV service known as Project Canvas still hanging in the balance with the BBC Trust, it seems that the service is looking for another partner to sign up as a member. Currently Project Canvas has the BBC, ITV, Channel Four, Five, BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva on board, but in order to move the ...



May 6, 2010

Webby win for BBC Online

by David Allen
The BBC’s online presence has won two of the so called “Peoples Voice” awards at the Webby awards. These are awarded in recognition of excellence on the internet. Winning awards through votes from the public is always better than winning those judged by a panel of industry experts and both awards won by the BBC were in fact voted on ...



May 5, 2010

Demand for eBallot increases

by David Allen
With the general election about to take place tomorrow, the turnout is normally key to how the parties do. The more people that vote the higher the chances of a different style of government, but a low turnout means most seats will remain in safe hands. According to a recent survey, in order to get more people voting the ...



April 29, 2010

UK competition aims to find future cyber-security experts

by Darren Allan
The Cyber Security Challenge UK has been put together by a group of businesses, police and government organisations, in an effort to boost the UK's level of cyber-defence. The competition began this week, seeking to find those with a real talent for thwarting the “bad guys” on the Internet. A series of challenges will determine who has the relevant skills ...



March 17, 2010

Lords pass the digital economy bill

by David Allen
The House of Lords has allowed the government’s digital economy bill to slip through its hands by approving it and letting it pass back to the House of Commons for final adjustments and approval. Yet has enough been said about this bill and do consumers even realise its implications? It seems that while this bill has been working its way ...



March 9, 2010

Security questions called into question

by Darren Allan
So we're all well aware of the issues surrounding online passwords – and why you should use a difficult to guess series of letters and numbers. Preferably with some cases thrown in for extra security. And, of course, never use the same passwords for different accounts. But research from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh has criticised one largely overlooked ...



Watchdog urges government to refocus broadband strategy

by Darren Allan
A consumer watchdog's latest round of research has indicated that many poorer UK citizens who aren't connected to the Internet view the web as irrelevant to them. These findings come from Consumer Focus, and are aimed at the government who are currently trying to get more low-income families online, with their universal service commitment which aims for 2Mbps broadband ...



March 3, 2010

Government draws up another plan to get millions online

by Darren Allan
The UK government has set another target for getting a greater percentage of the UK online. It's thought that some 12.5 million British citizens, about a fifth of the country, don't have the means to access the Internet. The government wants to rectify this situation for 60% of those unfortunates (7.5 million people) by the year 2014. The focus will be ...



February 24, 2010

ITV selling mobile products

by David Allen
ITV is launching a new online shop where fans will be able to buy merchandise related to some of the broadcaster’s top shows, such as Coronation Street, Dancing on Ice and Emmerdale. The store is being created by ITV Studios Digital Productions and will offer all sorts of products to download. These will include ringtones, screen savers and wallpapers, ...



January 26, 2010

E20 gets nearly 2 million views

by David Allen
It seems such an obvious thing for the BBC to do and yet it has taken so long for the corporation to create an online soap opera based on the hit show Eastenders. For the BBC everything that it does has to be right, otherwise any mistake or bad call will inevitably come back to haunt them at some ...



January 5, 2010

Philips testing TV doctor

by David Allen
There is no doubt that providing healthcare for the elderly is expensive and yet this is the time when people need to be looked after more than any other time of their lives. One firm is currently testing a system in the UK that could not only revolutionise the care that patients are getting, but all of this can ...



January 4, 2010

Studios looking for digital releases rather than DVD

by David Allen
It seems that the studios are looking to online digital TV to make a profit rather than releasing content on DVD first. It used to be the other way around, with the DVD release coming before the shows or films were shown on the television, but in a switch to the current trend, the Showtime cable TV service in ...



December 29, 2009

TV VoD will beat broadband VoD

by David Allen
According to recent research it would appear that Video on Demand (VoD) through the television is likely to outperform the traditional method of receiving VoD through a computer. The research, carried out by WPP's Kantar Media, studied responses from a survey called FutureProof, which asked around 2,500 people aged over 12 about their viewing habits. The responses included 453 Virgin ...



November 12, 2009

Broadband takes the Call Of Duty strain

by David Allen
The release of what is expected to be the biggest selling computer game of all time, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, had some the UK’s broadband providers worrying about the strain on the networks. What made this even more worrying for the ISPs and the players too, is that if the network failed then there would be no online ...



October 30, 2009

Google launches OneBox service

by David Allen
The search giant Google is getting into the online music business with the launch of its OneBox service. The music search business helps users find and buy music online and in order to provide this service Google has partnered with some of the industry's finest such as Lala, iLike, Pandora, Imeem and Rhapsody, to provide a free steaming service. Users ...



October 26, 2009

Post Strikes could mean consumers turning to the web

by David Allen
It is claimed that broadband services could be boosted because of the postal strikes, according to the tech site IT Pro. The technology is there to assist businesses, but there appears to be problem when it comes to understanding exactly what is out there to help. The problem for businesses is two fold; firstly there is the potential of ...



October 23, 2009

Online presence for Eastenders

by David Allen
As if there is not enough coverage for the top BBC show Eastenders, a spinoff is being planned for a twenty part series following the lives of four new teenage characters. However, before viewers reach for the remote, this spin off series is for the web and will be written by thirteen new writers aged between seventeen and twenty ...



October 16, 2009

OFT to look into online pricing

by David Allen
The Office of Fair Trading is looking into some of the pricing practices that some online stores and comparison sites regularly use. The study is going to look into all aspects of online shopping. One of the practices complained about is “Drip Pricing”. This is commonly used by airlines, when the online price is shown but, in order to ...



October 13, 2009

Ten million Brits have never been online

by Darren Allan
A new report from the Digital Inclusion team says that over ten million adults in the UK have never been online – almost half of that number due to their economic circumstances. The government funded organisation, whose aim is to help disadvantaged Britons get connected to the Internet, said that because of this situation some of the country's poorest ...



October 9, 2009

STV goes global

by David Allen
The Scottish based broadcaster, STV, is lifting the restrictions placed on its online catch up TV service, allowing it to be viewed by audiences around the world for the first time. Removing the UK-only restriction opens up regional programmes that are rarely seem outside of Scotland to ex-pats and other interested viewers, through the STV Player. STV has been spending ...



October 8, 2009

Online football fans urged to check speeds first

by David Allen
Much has been made of plans for the World Cup Qualifying match between the Ukraine and England being shown exclusively on the internet. The main reason for this is that it should have been shown live on pay-TV broadcaster Setanta, which went into administration in June, and since no other broadcaster wishes to pay to show the match, ...



October 1, 2009

Online advertising overtakes TV advertising

by David Allen
For the first time the online advertising spend has overtaken the advertising spend on TV, with the search engine Google making the most of this revenue stream. The online advertising spend increased by 4.6 per cent during the first six month of the year, taking it up to £1.7 billion, whereas advertisers spent £1.6 billion on television advertising, down ...



Hooked Brits spend 30 hours a week online

by Darren Allan
A survey commissioned by uSwitch has estimated that the average UK citizen spends some 30 hours a week on the Internet. This is a figure which uSwitch describes as “astonishing”, although it has to be pointed out that it includes time spent online at both home and work during weekdays. According to the research, on a weekday the average person ...



September 8, 2009

Young broadband users want info on privacy

by David Allen
There is a growing demand from the younger users of the internet for help and advice on how to keep their personal details safe online. According to the regulator Ofcom, in a survey of youngsters aged between eleven and sixteen it was found that fifty four per cent needed some sort help or advice on keeping personal data that ...



Areas of high online credit fraud exposed

by David Allen
When it comes to online credit card fraud large cities would seem to be the favourite place to set up, but according to the fraud screening firm The Third Man, a market town in County Durham is in fact the worst place in the UK for credit card fraud. Shildon is a standard market town and the residents do ...



September 4, 2009

BBC should charge for online services

by David Allen
The BBC should start charging for its online services such as the iPlayer and BBC News, according to the boss of Five, Dawn Airey. The BBC is fast becoming a victim of its online success, with iPlayer a great example for all to see, and this online expansion just keeps growing. The issue for other online content providers is that ...



September 3, 2009

Password promiscuity puts Brits at risk of cyber-fraud

by David Masters
Over 1.7 million Brits risk being caught out by cyber-criminals because they use the same password for all their online accounts. New research found that nearly half (46%) of UK adults use the same password to log in to banking, shopping, and social networking sites. A further 54% confessed to using variations of the same password across all sites. Nearly one in seven ...



July 21, 2009

Ofcom launches kids online safety video

by David Allen
With the school summer holidays underway there are fears that kids will be spending more time online, and therefore parents and carers should be aware of the dangers, according to the regulator Ofcom. With access to the internet greatly improved, around sixty six per cent of children aged between five and seven will be using the internet at home. ...



July 8, 2009

Online video viewing grows by 47%

by David Allen
The amount of video being watched online by UK consumers has increased by a massive forty seven per cent over the past year, according to comScore. It is a bit of a mixed bag as to what sort of content is being viewed, but it is YouTube that still remains on top with a massive fifty eight per cent ...



June 25, 2009

Parents not monitoring kids’ online activities

by David Allen
Every now and then an issue arises that sparks parents' interest in what their children are getting up to online. This can be a news story or something they may have heard from other parents, but the good thing is that they take more control over children’s online activities. However this may not last, probably due to work and other ...



June 12, 2009

BT launches online business kit

by David Allen
The internet service provider BT is looking to help new businesses set up their own websites. Customers already with BT, on the Business Total Broadband Option3, will be able to sign up for the Online Start Kit for just £5 per month. However, for new customers, the pack is going to cost £199. Business customers will be getting access ...