Telia is planning to build the next generation mobile network called 4G, and they think they will be the first company in the world to offer its services. A service which is said to be ten times faster than 3g! In Sweden, Ericsson will be developing the technology, where as in Oslo, Norway, chinese Huawei got the deal. Though Ericsson already started building the LTE network there.

Erik Hallberg at TeliaSonera says there will be a commercial launch in 2010 and that they hope to launchvery early that year.

The 4G network technology is also called LTE, but it seems I won’t be having the pleasure of ever using it, unless I go to Stockholm or whatever city they might choose to include in their launch. They say they will be delivering it to high population density areas only, which exclude me. Like I covered in an earlier article about Telia, I can’t even get 3G reception in my house, nor my summer house. Seems I’m pretty much off the map. The Tech Map. Yeah, I get 3G reception a few yards outside my house…

Everyday there’s a struggle going on in my head about what is really going on in the world, or more specifically in Sweden, as of late. We’ve always been early adopters of technology and often somewhat pioneering some fields. We have 7.2Mbit mobile broadband/3G network (a.k.a. 3.5G a.k.a. Turbo 3G), 24Mbit ADSL broadband for many, many homes via the standard phone jack, 100Mbit and hell, 1Gbit connections for the lucky few.

The struggle that is going on in my head is this: I can not get any what so ever 3G reception for any of my cell phones in my own house, which is by no means located out in the woods. Heck, more often than not I can’t get more than 40% of 2G reception! When I do have full 3G signal, being anywhere else, and do some speed tests, I’m lucky if I hit 1.5Mbit. And now, Telia is starting to test out their up and coming (if tests are successful) 100Mbit ADSL.

I have a 24Mbit internet connection to my house and I’m well below the maximum distance to the connection platform which delivers it, and yet, I can only get a maximum of 14-15Mbit download speed. I’m sticking to download speed in this article, although upload speed is lacking as much. My 14-15Mbit of download speed is commonly considered to be good and that I should be “thankful” for such a good connection, and yet I am paying for, as advertised, 24Mbit. Just like I am paying for the 7.2Mbit data plan on my cellphone.

I spoke with Telia today and the nice lady told me that they are preparing for the tests right now, and if they’re successful, they might start to roll out the upgrades early 2009. And here I am, with no 3G signal in my house. And paying full price for my 7.2Mbit data plan producing a weak 0.2Mbit at this particular moment (and any other giving moment in my house), a 24Mbit internet connection that gives me about 55% of what I’m paying 100% for… When will we stop accepting these outrageous facts? I fail to come up with any other product or service where one might accept a result of a bleak puny percentage of what you pay for and hope to get. Yes, you can always cancel within whatever number of days, but really… What options does it leave us with? Let’s just face it, being connected is becoming less and less a luxurious option in life and more a necessity. A fair comparison could be a phone line, any phone line, mobile or not. Would you pay 100% to get a line 10% of the times? I know so many people who’ve gotten replacement cellphones and discounts on their cellphone bills due to poor reception (that should not be, when comparisons have been made for the case).

A friend of mine had an 8Mbit internet connection producing a mear 3-4Mbit in his house, and after dawging Telia for 6 months he got 6+Mbit all of a sudden. So, shouldn’t we either pay for what we can get, or get what we pay for? Obviously, it can be done.

The nice Telia lady told me that for this 100Mbit upgrade to happen, they need to upgrade the connection platforms, which are located here and there all over our communities. Manual labor it is.

This takes me back a few years to when I called up Telia and asked for the opportunity to upgrade my connection upload speed, a request that was denied with the reason “it’s not possible, the hardware can not produce this”. And about a year or two later, with absolutely no hardware upgrades made anywhere, this was starting to roll out nationwide.

100Mbit ADSL… and not even good cellphone reception in my house… Oh, and I checked something else out. A house dead center in the city, was scheduled to get its connection platform upgraded to handle 24Mbit in late January 2009. It’s just funny I guess… 24Mbit been out for years. Oh, and did I mention the Swedish government used to own Telia?

But joking aside, what it is, is really human negotiation, between the buyer and seller. I asked Brian Kupetz, Director of Development for the La Canada, CA based company Zigabid to tell me a little about what makes Zigabid so unique:

Zigabid allows buyers and sellers to sell entertainment tickets without a fixed price. It’s is the first company to offer a dynamic pricing model for tickets, with many competitors introducing similar features in 2009. The concept is rather simple: tickets are a commodity and should not sell at a fixed price, they should sell like any other commodity in which pricing is market-driven.

The initial feature set we have introduced is a negotiation system which provides buyers and sellers the means to determine a mutually agreeable sale price. The ticket market space is extremely crowded and Zigabid not only differentiates itself from Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Stubhub and Tickets Now by its stock market style functionality, but it is also very transparent about its service fees.

Zigabid is restricted to the US so far, so I haven’t had the pleasure of actually using their services myself, but since I was part of the development, I know that it’s real simple to use. I asked Brian how many tickets their system is currently holding, and he said that they have an estimate of 200′000 seats listed, mostly sports and concert tickets.

A rather bleak home page greets me when I go to www.mtvmusic.com to watch the miracle that is the MTV Music website, where we now can watch music videos, all for free, right there in the web browser. The home page has a rather pretty lead image, well, a number of images in fact, but below that, there’s just an unbalanced column of video thumbnails with the title “Vintage Videos”. But who cares?! I want my Run DMC!

You can even embed the videos! A very nice initiative by MTV Netwworks. But the website doesn’t seem all that… developed. Well, it is “Beta”. The FAQ page says “Coming soon… ” with the page title “Copyright”, and as you can see in the column to the left, the information about the video, comments and rating is rather confusing. There’s no call to action below the Rate This Video title for one. And the comment for this video is inaccessible. If you look under MTV Music API, there’s a note stating “For now, registration is only required for commenting in our forums.“, but that’s the forums. I figured maybe you have to be logged in to view the comment, but there’s no way to register! Nor to sign in!

I’m not all that impressed by the quality of the videos, but I’m not the one to complain. The audio sounds pretty good, I guess that’s more important. Maybe the video quality will improve in time like when YouTube rolled out “High Quality” videos, but I wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

So after a few minutes of digging around, watching some dandy videos, I thought “What about censorship?”. So I tried searching for the word “F*ck” (spelled out properly of course, don’t ask me why this particular search term, I just wanted to search for something dirty), and I got this semi censored result:

Pretty funny ey? I also watched the notorious video “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. and it was the clean version. This doesn’t necessarily mean they censor videos though. I can’t think of a song that includes a dirty word that might tell me if they do censor videos at the moment, but I’m sure you can find one if you start digging through the archives.

Yo, VIP! Let’s kick it! Alright, Stop!

Word to ya mother

At long last, YouTube offers the feature of deep linking, to link to a certain point in a YouTube video. This is done by adding a short tag to the end of the URL, a tag that looks like this “#t=4m45s”. 4m meaning four minutes and 45s meaning 45 seconds, and this would take you 4 minutes and 45 seconds into the video. Duuh. Anyway, just add in the time you want to link to in the video. Very useful feature!

Click the link and see for yourself, this is what the URL would look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZjMgbRUsZM#t=4m45s

There’s no easy copy’n'paste type way of using this yet though, you’d have to mark the time using that thing we call memory, the human memory, you know? Not a To-Do list, Stickies or Notepad… Or you could try a piece of paper and a pen. I don’t think I own a pen anymore… Whenever I actually DO use a pen, I cramp up in five seconds, can barely write my darn signature. Damn computers making me lazy.

OK, sure, you can write the time down however you like, but my point is, you have to copy the URL for the video and paste it wherever you’d like to paste it, and then add in the specific time for the specific point in the video you want to link to, at the end of the URL at the above noted fashion.

Via TechCrunch

The startup Spotify has really achieved something here. I’m using the Spotify application on my MacBook Pro, and it’s running so smoothly. It’s a very light application streaming music to your computer. It looks very much like iTunes in many ways, only the interface is dark grey. I am using the free account with the invite I got, which is the advertising-funded version of Spotify. So far I’ve heard one third-party ad, and some Spotify ads saying I should get Premium account if I love music as much as they do. Which I might very well do. The ads seem to run with an interval of 20 minutes, and the Spotify ad was only about 10 secs, while the third-party ad was more like 25-30 seconds long. Not bad at all. Oh, as I’m typing this, I just heard two shorter third-party ads in a row.

There is no way to browse music, not by artist, nor by album, songs or genres. It’s all search based Google style, even with spelling suggestions if you get no hits on your search. However, you can get creative with your searches, like they state in their FAQ: “you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop.“. That particular search results in 0 hits though.

I have read some reports from people saying that they are experiencing connection problems with the application, which is to be expected I suppose. It is after all only a few days old. I have however not had any problems at all in the two days I’ve been using it. When connection issues occur, cached music still works. The application caches as much music as you let it cache (up to 100gb) under settings to minimize network strain, which is calculated to run below 256 kbit/s, which means 3G/Turb-3G connections should handle the traffic easily.

The sound quality is nice. Not fantastic, but very good at the very least. They say in their forums, as people asked about this and some had some complaints about the audio sounding “flat”, “We are currently using Ogg Vorbis q5, i.e. up to approx. 160kb/s.“, which seems fair to me.

A bonus feature if you use Growl is a nifty message like this when the song changes, if you change it yourself etc. Beautiful indeed.

It responds to the Play/Pause, Previous and Next buttons on my Apple Wireless Keyboard, which was a surprise, and I think that’s a great feature! However, it does not respond to the Apple Remote Control, which is a real shame, that would have made the experience (for me) far greater, as I have my Mac Mini and iPod at a distance in the office, controlling them remotely. Obviously, it’s a feature outside the norms of delivering a great software application to the general public, but if we’re really lucky, and participate in the forums, we might see it happen.

Some more information about Spotify, which is a Stockholm, Sweden-based company, you can check out this article on TechCrunch and here’s an official video:

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

It’s so nice to see there’s movement on the VoIP front these days. Considering the mobile market and its progression the last few years, one might presume it might move towards a full share hold of the market. Even functionality aside with it’s big touchscreen, this device truly look amazing.

OpenPeak Inc., today announced a production-ready version of its OpenFrame™ IP media phone platform based on the low-power Intel® Atom™ processor. Designed to drive new revenues for service providers, the OpenFrame device converges voice, data, video and mobile into a single touchscreen-based home communications center that can dramatically simplify everyday family and media interactions.

Read more at openpeak.com.

Nu tar Universal steget och utmanar de illegala sajterna med gratis nedladdning på nätet. En första version av tjänsten lanseras i december.

Vivendi Universal, världens största musikkoncern, kommer via internetsajten Spiralfrog erbjuda gratis nedladdning av musikfiler på internet i Nordamerika. En så kallad betaversion av tjänsten lanseras i december. Universal Music Group (UMG), som ingår i Vivendi-koncernen, är ledande i branschen och hade i fjol en marknadsandel på 25,6 procent.

U2, Eminem och Elton John ingår
Bland bolagets artister finns världskändisar som U2, Eminem och Elton John. “Unga konsumenter kommer att få ett övertygande och lättanvänt alternativ till piratsajterna”, säger Spiralfrogs vd Robin Kent i ett pressmeddelande. Det var på tisdagen oklart om det även blir en europeisk version av tjänsten i framtiden enligt Amy Levin, taleskvinna för Spiralfrog. Enligt Kent kommer sajten att bli ekonomiskt hållbar om annonsörerna är relevanta för den unga publiken. Målgruppen för satsningen, musikkonsumenter mellan 13 och 34 år, beskrivs samtidigt som “en dröm för annonsörer” av vd:n.

Nedladdning växer kraftigt
Marknaden för nedladdning av musik på internet omsatte i fjol 1,1 miljarder dollar och växer kraftigt. Den domineras för närvarande av Apples Itunes, som säljer musikfiler för nio kronor styck på den svenska marknaden. Enligt tidningen Financial Times har Itunes omkring 80 procent av den legala marknaden för nedladdningar av musik från nätet. I fjol såldes 60 miljoner mp3-spelare, som används för att lyssna på de nedladdade filerna och antalet nedladdade musikfiler uppgick totalt till 420 miljoner, enligt branschorganet IFPI:s senaste rapport. Men musikindustrin brottas sedan länge med piratsajterna, som enligt IFPI står för 98 procent av nedladdningarna på nätet. Hur artisterna, vars alster kommer att finnas på Spiralfrog, ska få betalt är ännu oklart. Spiralfrog förhandlar samtidigt med andra musikkoncerner om samma typ av avtal som det som nu träffats med Vivendi Universal.

Source: expressen.se