Google mail renamed?

The name Gmail is under threat from various companies because Google didn't trademnark it before the announcement. The search giant is fourth in line to be considered for ownership of the trademark name, Gmail, according to filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Because the office considers applications in the order they were filed, Google could be forced to change the name of its email service in a worst-case scenario.

Google doesn't think that will happen. "We are confident in our right to use the trademark Gmail," Google spokesman Steve Langdon said.

The company announced Gmail on 1 April with much fanfare and registered the trademark six days later. But between 30 March and 7 April, three other parties filed for rights to the name, and they could be considered beforehand.

Google has mentioned the possibility of losing trademarked names for various products in its IPO prospectus under "risk factors".

"We have also been notified by third parties that they believe features of certain of our products, including Google WebSearch, Google News and Google Image Search, violate their copyrights," according to the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. "Our unregistered trademarks include: AdSense, AdWords, Blogger, Froogle, Gmail, I'm Feeling Lucky and PageRank."

Among the three parties that registered for the Gmail trademark was a company by the name of Cencourse, based in Miami, Florida, which filed on 31 March. Cencourse's service is for the "delivery and storage of messages, data and information by electronic transmission over the global computer networks and mobile phones".

Precision Research, based in Santa Barbara, California, filed for rights to Gmail on 2 April. It claims to have a service for transferring email messages for groups of two or more people by means of a global computer network. Shane Smith, CEO of Independent International Investment Research in London, registered the name the following day.

The Gospel Music Association, of Tennessee, filed to register GMAil on 8 April, to represent its email newsletter about Christian and gospel tunes.

Today the story "Google has lost the right to the Gmail trademark in the UK. Starting today, the Gmail service will be known as Googlemail." has come out. The search giant, which first launched Gmail back in April 2004, has voluntarily decided to cede the trademark to Independent International Investment Research (IIIR).

IIIR, which registered the trademark Gmail in the time between Google's webmail launch and the search firm's own attempt to trademark the Gmail name, was one of a number of companies to register the name with the US patent office.

Google said IIIR "contacted us in June 2004 and claimed rights to 'Gmail' and sought a 'business solution'; in other words, they wanted money". Although no official figure has been put on IIIR's request, Google's spokeswoman described the sum as "exorbitant".

In a recent report from IIIR on the name dispute, however, the company said it "considers the proposals it made to Google for settlement of this matter to be fair and reasonable to both parties". In a valuation of the Gmail trademark conducted in a draft discussion document in December 2004, IIIR set the brand's worth at between £25m and £34m although the firm later said it would settle for a considerably lower sum.

Some people have very quick reactions to commercial opportunities. They should settle and get some money out of it, rather than lose the chance in the courts.

Sky's Football rights are coming up.

ITV and NTL have joined up to bid for the next round of Premier League TV rights in an attempt to break BSkyB's exclusive grip on top-flight football. The country's largest commercial terrestrial broadcaster and the most powerful cable operator are willing to offer at least £170m a year for half the games made available in the next auction, for the 2007 to 2010 seasons.

The groups outlined their alliance in a letter seen by the Guardian, which was yesterday sent to the chairmen of the league's 20 constituent clubs. The informal agreement is predicated on the European Commission forcing through its demand - fiercely resisted by the league - that no single broadcaster can win more than 50% of the matches up for auction. The dispute between the EC and the league is at a critical juncture, with both sides due to hold meetings in Brussels next week.

Charles Allen, chief executive of ITV, and his NTL counterpart, Simon Duffy, said in the joint letter that a games quota would not destroy the value of a TV franchise that has poured billions of pounds of BSkyB money into Premiership football. The groups said they would ensure the minimum amount they paid for a 50% share of the games would represent 50% of their current market value, ensuring that a floor is set on the value of the rights. Under those terms, ITV and NTL would pay £170m a year. BSkyB, the current rights owner, pays about £340m a year as part of a £1.024bn three-year exclusive contract to show 138 games a season. "As a means of minimising the risk for the Premier League in changing the auction structure, ITV and NTL would consider offering the FA Premier League an upfront guarantee of at least 50% of the current rights fee in return for 50% of the live matches," said the chief executives.

It is understood ITV and NTL would show the games on the free-to-air and pay-TV platforms. The majority of games would appear on a new subscription channel run by NTL, with the rest appearing on one of ITV's four digital channels. NTL announced a $6bn (£3.3bn) takeover of rival Telewest last week in a deal that will create a cable group with 3.3 million pay-TV subscribers against BSkyB's 7.8 million.

ITV and NTL reiterated their argument that BSkyB does not pay an "exclusivity premium" for the rights, because the majority of its investment is covered by pub and club subscriptions. As a result, more than 5 million Sky Sports subscribers make a disproportionate contribution to BSkyB's profit margins by paying up to £42.50 a month for access to Premiership matches, the letter added. James Murdoch, chief executive of BSkyB, dismissed the claim last month in a heated public exchange with Mr Allen.

The letter concludes by asking the chairmen to lobby the Premier League to consider the 50% quota more seriously. The league intends to auction the rights for the 2007 to 2010 seasons next spring.

"We think this is a fantastic opportunity for the Premier League and its clubs and we are very keen to engage further with the FA Premier League to take this forward," said the letter.

...

BSkyB has won every auction of live Premier League coverage, outbidding rivals in 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2003.

In the 2003 sale, the European commission attempted to ensure that live coverage went to more than one broadcaster by demanding that four packages of rights were sold instead of three. Despite the intervention, BSkyB won all four packages in a £1bn deal.

The commission and the league agreed that the next auction would see the live rights awarded to more than one broadcaster. However, the league is resisting the commission's new demand that no more than 50% of the matches can be awarded to a single bidder.

...

Sky COO Richard Freudenstein said,

"[The offer] has hardly had the club chairmen jumping from their seats," Freudenstein wrote in The Observer on Sunday. "Not surprising, considering they had so recently caused such trouble, with NTL reneging on its £328 million pay-per-view bid with the Premiership in 2000 and, a year later, the fiasco of the £180m ITV Digital default.

"The ITV/NTL stunt was an attempt to influence the European Commission as it considers a case against the Premier League's collective sale of media rights. The proposal could put at risk the health of football at every level; there is a significant threat that it will lead to consumers suffering and is not supported by anybody with the interests of football at heart."

Well, in the meeting...sounds like we might lose 20%...

Premier League chief executive Peter Scudamore has said talks with the European Commission over football TV rights have been "fruitful". The Commission has threatened legal action unless the league changes the way rights are sold for 2007 to 2010. The EU wants to prevent any company winning exclusive rights, such as BSkyB has with the present Premiership deal.

European officials said both sides had agreed that at least two broadcasters had to share rights to live matches. Scudamore had outlined a plan to sell five packages of 28 games each, with no firm allowed more than four packages. EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who had threatened to curtail talks if the league did not come up with new concessions, said the discussions produced "constructive proposals" which "move us closer to an amicable result".

She also promised to give a decision on how the league's proposals were received by Friday, and whether the threat of legal action has been averted. After Tuesday's talks her team said in a statement that packages must be sold in a way "that ensures that at least two broadcasters each obtain a viable and meaningful share of the live match broadcast rights".

Can't wait....

I wanted to have a look at the Joomla CMS ( all the developers came from the Mambo team, after the split with Miro , sad really ) , so to start with I set up apache, php, mySQL with the xampp package from apachefriends.org. It was very easy. Not very secure, with lots of cautions and red boxes, but great for a quick server. It can also switch between php4 and php5 so we can test both – a bonus. I installed on windows 2k, stopped all the IIS services and then ran xampp. It started up fine and the initial web page was just there on localhost. Everything can be run as a service as well.

Installed then checked the status. All seemed ok, apart from the SMTP mail not being there as default. I didn’t need this. Then downloaded Joomla and expanded it into a directory underneath the xampp/htdocs/ folder. Browse to localhost/joomla/ and the Joomla front page comes up. Joomla needs a password on the mySQL setup, so I looked at the command line app to do that, but before I did it, I checked the security page on the xampp opening screen. It shows 5 major Unsecure flages and gives a link to fix three of them. I did it this way. Added a weather secret password for the mySQL and similar for the xampp directory, admin user. It goes in .htaccess. Needed to do this on the localhost machine itself. Need to restart mySQL to pick this password up.

I’ll leave safemode OFF until I get used to joomla. It says that it may be used by some of the packages. Tut tut!

Php comes with the Ming Flash v0.3 module and it seemed to demo OK. Must try that sometime.

Joomla has a similar few pages to do the install, name the db, add the admin weather password etc. Pretty easy. Site came up and I needed to delete the installation pages. Delete the whole directory, refresh and we’re up and away. Glasshouse web site, news, rss feeds etc etc. This could be done in less than an hour!

Admin login to Joomla is site/administrator/index.php
Login to phpMyAdmin is root.

Q’s

Can we run two sites from the same Joomla installation pages?

PayPal seems to have got stronger and is cutting prices. Banks should be worried by this. They will also be worried by other methods of payment coming through, Paying through mobile phones is going to be tested soon. There are already tests of other types of contactless credit card type devices, RFID etc. These are sometimes coming in under the guise of some other reason for the card, eg Oyster are looking at using the card to pay for other items at the station. Limits on amounts or types of purchase need to be controlled in case of theft.

Smart cards can use radio frequency identifiers (RFID), while mobile phones can use Near Field Communication – a similar technology that works on shorter ranges. London Underground's Oyster Card uses Philips' Mifare technology and there are still other variations out there.

People in Hong Kong have been using their Octopus card since 1997. This was used for paying for public transport but has become an electronic cash system. The US arm of HSBC is distributing one million of MasterCard's PayPass contactless cards to its customers, who can now use them in McDonalds, 7-Eleven stores, motorway toll booths and cinemas.

Must be a Google link in there somewhere....

Javascript grids

Saw what looks like a useful grid done in Javascript at activewidgets.com. Sorts etc.

 

Viz Trio struggling to keep up.

Trio has become a bit of a nightmare for us. We (Phil and Colin ) are trying to update all the styles and add some new ones, but the Trio performance is taking so much of their time!. Looks like the old boxes won't keep up with the performance we need. The ops guys are updating to the new nVidia cards, loads of memory, 2Gb if we can, and we need to get those network speeds up a bit if we can. Any performance increase woud be a bonus. Having come from direct Viz control to control via Trio, anything would be a loss in performance, but with new styles, more gloss, operators only just off the training course and older machines, everything has been set against us.

One step at a time. Hopefully, my software has been cobbled together without too many problems. I am looking forward to writing it properly in dotNet. Maybe by Christmas. I shall practice on some of the utilities for Football First and for reading the Opta data. Need to dig out my old xml routines and transfer them to c#. I shall do some tests reading the Champion's League data feeds. Shall I stay with INI files, or should we be putting everything into the less editable, but more flexible xml. I did start using the app.config file, but it looks as though this would normally be read only in a standard installation, so I shall leave it be. Will probably start by making all the INI file data editable through the program interface. Then I can control how it's stored.

 

xbox 360 with media centre software

This Anconia Rocket Post is a bit unstable. Undo not working too well. It would be nice if you could just paste pictures into it, as well. Quite quick tho', and I still like the drop caps! Annoyingly, it will allow a picture to be put in, but not allow you to upload - where are those upload settings for ftp? Maybe only in the paid-for version.

New software update for Media Center XP has enabled the Xbox 360 to become even linked in, allowing extensive media streaming transfer from PC to Microsoft's next-gen console. Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 will allow users to stream movies, music, and photos to their Xbox 360 systems when the console launches in November 2005, and new free or pay-per-view streamable content includes the MTV Overdrive on-demand channel, VH1 VSpot, a Comedy Central on-demand channel, and Akimbo Service, which will offer Media Center customers more than 5,000 programs from more than 75 partners, including British Broadcasting Corp., National Geographic Society, Discovery Communications Inc. and the Hallmark Channel. The software update is free to download from Microsoft's site.

Perhaps we should look at how we could get some Midnight or Sport streams into this sort of a deal. Are we able to stream through the original xbox? or just the new one? There will be a lot of older ones out there that would be cheap streamers for presentations. IP streaming would be good, ie just local servers. Have a look at setting up a streaming server sometime.

This quote came in an email today. Looks like it might be interesting to look at the mobile games sector sometime soon....

"Global games industry to hit a peak value of $58.4 billion in 2007"

"The highest growth will come from broadband, mobile and interactive TV, which are together forecast to generate revenues of $20.6 billion by 2010 - up from $3.8 billion in 2004."

Source: Informa Telecoms & Media

Consoles - the console market is, and will continue to be, the dominant platform throughout the global industry

Handheld - this sector will see growth for both hardware and software sales, driven by the recent launch of new handhelds from both Nintendo and Sony

PC - PC gaming will continue to decline - with revenues falling to half the 2001 total by 2010 - due to factors such as new generation consoles boasting the same functionality traditionally associated with the PC

Broadband - the rapid take-up of broadband, as well as interest in services such as Xbox Live are helping drive the broadband games market

Mobile - as 2.5G & 3G mobile services spread, the mobile games market is due to accelerate extremely quickly over the next few years Interactive TV - still only a small sector within the industry, interactive TV gaming will continue to gain popularity with the spread of digital TV services

Macromedia today announced Flex 2, a major new release of its framework for building Web applications with rich, client-side Flash interfaces. Flash Player 8.5 will add a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), supporting ActionScript 3.0 (AS3)—an updated version of the scripting language that will be compliant with the latest ECMAScript standard. Only Flash movies compiled for AS3 will run on this new VM. The downside of this architecture is that movies and components that use AS3 will not be interoperable with those that use AS2 (e.g. an AS3 movie that loads and displays a nested movie that uses AS2 will not be able to access functions and variables within that movie).

Flex Builder 2, previously code-named Zorn, will be the new IDE for Flex, rewritten from scratch to run on the Eclipse platform. While the current version of Flex costs some US$12,000, Flex 2 will cost less than US$1,000 for the basic components described above. Although you’re constrained to communicating with the server via XML data transfer and SOAP Web Services, you can certainly implement anything you can do with AJAX and DHTML, only with a richer GUI. What’s missing from the package is the server-side component of the Flex framework, which has been split into a separate product for Flex 2: Flex Enterprise Services 2.

Flex Enterprise Services 2 will come with the big per-CPU price tag, but will be significantly upgraded from the server-side facilities provided by Flex 1. The main focus of the enhanced package is the transparent availability of server-side resources (such as database records and enterprise services) within Flex applications.

Although the greatly reduced price tag for developers who don’t need the Enterprise Services package is welcome news, Macromedia do not plan to continue offering free non-commercial/non-institutional licenses as they now do with Flex 1. With students and hobbyist users having obtained free licenses and developed applications with Flex 1, they’ll either have to front up for a license to Flex 2, or be left out in the cold.

Joshua Paine Says:
October 6th, 2005 at 11:22 pm

Does Flex matter with OpenLaszlo http://www.openlaszlo.org/ around? At least the previous version of Flex didn’t look as good or behave as nicely as OpenLaszlo, and the feature sets seemed pretty comparable. OL 3.1 seems to be coming out any day now.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit chewed up the most greenery at the North American box office over the weekend, devouring an estimated $16 million to easily beat its live-action competition. The latest clay-animated feature from Aardman Animations and DreamWorks Animation performed slightly better than industry expectations, but couldn’t quite dig out of the slump in attendance that has been plaguing exhibitors this year.

In addition to trailing Warner Bros.’ recently released stop-motion feature, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, which opened to around $19 million four weeks ago, Wallace & Gromit fell short of catching Aardman’s and DreamWorks’ last clay-animated feature. Released in 2000, Chicken Run opened to $17 million in about a thousand fewer theaters. The fact that Corpse Bride is still a top-ten contender no doubt took a bite out of Gromit’s pay day. However, both films should hand around through the holidays.

The arrival of Wallace & Gromit caused Buena Vista’s Flightplan to lose altitude after two weeks at No.1. In addition to grounding Jodie Foster, the plasticine pals took down Cameron Diaz and Al Pacino. In Her Shoes from 20th Century Fox debuted in third-place with an estimated $10 million, while Universal’s Two For the Money came in at No.4 with around $8.3 million. Rounding out the top five is Sony Screen Gems’ The Gospel. The most profitable newcomer, the low-budget musical drama doubled its money with an estimated $8 million showing up in its collection plate.

Still lively in the No. 6 spot, Corpse Bride scared up approximately $6.5 million bones this frame, bringing its four-week total to around $42 million. That was enough to beat Lions Gate’s Waiting…, a crude restaurant comedy that managed an estimated $5.7 million in its not-so-grand opening.

The most promising prospects for Wallace and Gromit are centered in the U.K., where the flick opens this weekend. It was previewed in nearly 500 theaters and generated a whopping $5 million. The pic’s total overseas take for the weekend was around $9.2 million.


Robots out on DVD

Direct-to-video feature film, Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story. Is a feature-length extension of creator Seth MacFarlane’s popular FOX TV series, Family Guy.

Came across some discussion about haw many cinemas open for some of the new releases. Need to look at who owns which, and how they stand in the competition stakes......

Devotees of Joss Whedon’s short-lived FOX sci-fi series, Firefly, will no doubt be flocking to cinemas this weekend to catch Serenity, the feature-length, big-screen extension of the show. Meanwhile, fans of fantasy writer Neil Gaiman will have to seek out MirrorMask, a CG-intensive Jim Henson Co. production opening in limited release.

Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Jewel Staite and the rest of the main cast form Firefly are back in this all-new adventure that marks the feature directorial debut of Whedon, creator of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Serenity has Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Fillion) and his rag-tag crew getting into hot water when they pick up a brother and sister who happen to be fugitives from a powerful coalition. The Universal Alliance will stop at nothing to reclaim the girl, a dangerous telepath who may pose more of a threat to the crew of the Serenity than the invincible military force or the cannibalistic Reavers simultaneously hunting them down. A video game based on the film is also in development and will be released by Vivendi Universal Games.

Featuring a heaping helping of visual effects by Zoic Studios, Illusion Arts and Rhythm & Hues, Serenity opens in 2,188 theaters, which means it will have some difficulty competing with more widely distributed holdovers such as Warner Bros.’ Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Buena Vista’s Flightplan, not to mention fellow newcomer Into the Blue, a modern-day pirate thriller from Sony Pictures.

MirrorMask opens today in just 18 theaters courtesy of Destination and Samuel Goldwyn Films. Scripted by Gaiman and directed by his long-time collaborator, Dave McKean, the film was completed on a shoestring budget with a crew of 15 British animators right out of art school. MirrorMask reflects Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as it tells the story of a bored young girl who is transported to a surreal universe populated by strange creatures. Gaiman was commissioned to write the tale by Jin Henson Co. co-CEOs Lisa and Brian Henson, who wanted something that was equal parts The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Also opening today is Buena Vista’s period golf pic, The Greatest Game Ever Played, and the limited releases The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio from DreamWorks’ Go Fish, and the Truman Capote biopic, Capote, from Sony Classics.

Banks are so much hard work. Abbey make life difficult.

Pixel sites look interesting. Had a chat to Francis to see the project timescales. Perhaps it could help. We shall think about it overnight and see how we feel later in the week. Let's get the Merchant Id setup tho'. We shall need that on all the sites as we go live with all the projects.

Might expand the 3d stats idea. Chatted to Al. He seemed to think that there might be a chance of funding there, possible with some exchanging of shares etc. The groups website have no web impact at all, really. The music site has some stats, but no links. Perhaps I could offer my expertise to them as well. Lets put a business plan together and see where it leads. Streaming video into the living room, hopefully. let's get a page up at Happy Tuesdays so that we can bring people in to the idea.

Note to the diary - check all the streaming videos, showreels to make sure that they work in all the browsers....

Checking up on our web sites again. Looking at the Alexa stats, easyIndex was almost in the top 1 million sites! Wow. We must have done something right. Unfortunately, the next set of figures take us back to over 4 million'th. We need to get the UK pages setup asap to get the thing flying.

Noticed the high flyer, milliondollarhompage, What an idea, but people are buying it - it's come down to 40million pages a day! Wow. Is it worth getting on the bandwagon? Could be. Lots of copycat sites now. Maybe we should have one of those - with the film angle.

Back to the stats - we need to up our Alexa ranking to match some of the other sites around. I shall monitor all the sites for a while. I can use the Amazon web services protocol.