New top level domain for mobile surfing

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Music, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, WWW | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports on DotMobi - a new top level domain for sites that have been configured especially for mobile devices/cell phones.

Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.

Sounds like a bad idea on many levels.  The article goes on to states that:

The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of “device neutrality” have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Channel 4 launch music site

Posted on April 26, 2005
Filed Under Music | Leave a Comment

Channel 4 are to launch a dedicated music site aimed at promoting unsigned bands - Slash Music.

"We used to be a department stuck away in the corner of C4, but now we have become a focus for Andy Duncan and the channel as a whole," says Paul Whitehead, head of business development at C4 New Media.

The vast majority of the content will be free, although Whitehead does not rule out charging "if we felt a piece of content was worth a premium and you couldn’t get it anywhere else".

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