Content Market Monitor V2, Edition 33

I have referred to the Content Market Monitor several times in this blog. CMM is a newsletter project which I inherited from participation in the EU project ACTeN. As it has a readership of some 2.000 people in 92 countries, I just could not let the opportunity slip away to hold on to the newsletter.

You will see the integral e-mail edition of the newsletter monthly from now on in this blog. If you want to receive the newsletter in your own mailbox, please register.


Edition number 33, December 2005

Content Market Monitor (CMM) is a monthly newsletter on content and content-related technologies, started during the EU-funded ACTeN project (Anticipating Content Technology Needs) from 2002 to 2004.

The Content Market Monitor newsletter is produced monthly by:
- I.T.C. - Institute for Computers (http://www.itc.ro/): ACTeN site deployment and CMS;
- Electronic Media Reporting (Jak Boumans, jak@euronet.nl): editing.

For more info on ACTeN go to www.acten.net.
To subscibe to the e-mail edition of the Content Market Monitor go to
www.acten.net/cgi-bin/WebGUI/www/index.pl/newsletter_registration
For the daily content blog: http://www.buziaulane.blogspot.com/
To unsubscribe mail: unsubscribe@acten.org

Content trends for 2006
For the content sector, 2005 has been a good year. The activities in the sector could grow and these activities got monetised. What will be the trends for 2006? ( more... )

EU: 30 mln euro for AV search engines
The European Commission has published the 6th call in the framework of the IST programme on December 12, 2005. The program has a budget of 140 million euro. Proposals will have to be handed in on April 25, 2006. ( more... )

Japan and Europe get ready to compete with Google and Yahoo
The Japanese industry goes hand-in-hand with Japanese universities and the country's government in order to compete primarily with Google, but also with Yahoo. To do so Japanese companies from the electronics, telecommunications and media sectors, in cooperation with the government and the country's leading universities, intended to develop technologies for Internet search engines. ( more... )

A blue year for HD DVD
The fight for market share between HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD has started with announcements over availability of equipment, content and disc capacity during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the first week of January 2006. ( more... )

Update needed of TV without Frontiers
A proposal to update the EU’s 1989 “TV without Frontiers” Directive, to keep pace with rapid technological and market developments in Europe’s audiovisual sector, was tabled by the European Commission today. In line with the principle of better regulation, the proposal aims to reduce the regulatory burden on Europe’s providers of TV and TV-like services and to give more flexibility for financing audiovisual content by new forms of advertising. The proposal will also create a level playing field for all companies that offer TV-like services, irrespective of the technology used to deliver them (e.g. broadcast, high-speed broadband, third generation mobiles). The Commission therefore proposes replacing disparate national rules on protection of minors, against incitement to racial hatred and against surreptitious advertising with a basic, EU-wide minimum standard of protection for audiovisual on demand services. This new policy approach should accelerate the advent of a seamless single market for TV and TV-like services and promote a strong and creative European content industry. ( more... )

Agenda of Europe's publishing leaders
Europe's senior newspaper, magazine, books, online and database publishers spoke out today in Brussels at the joint Commission-industry Publishers' Forum, united in their call for light-touch regulation to help them compete in the global new media age and to maintain press freedom fundamental to democratic society. ( more... )

Golden Future for Newspapers
Publishers are struggling to develop a new business model to reap revenue from users of a medium who from the Internet's earliest days have usually balked at paying for content. Yet for all that, we may be at the dawn of a new golden age of newspapers. ( more... )

Digital paper commercialisation funded
Philips has developed digital paper on the basis of E-Ink technology. It has started up a production factory for digital paper, named Polymer Vision. Another spin-off I-Rex Technologies is the application company. The company develops applications for the business market; the company names hospitals, education and publishers. It has developed the I-Rex Reader, a reading tablet, named Ilead. But you can also make annotations on it. I-Rex has developed a system, which automatically change the information in pages; so there is no scrolling, but turning leaves. ( more... )

Key trends in telecom for 2006 and beyond
This report by Paul Budde from BuddeCom in Australia starts by looking ahead into 2006, providing some of the more obvious predictions, but, perhaps more importantly; it then looks at the longer-term, underlying trends that are driving these developments. By highlighting and briefly analysing these trends companies can strategically position themselves for the ongoing telecoms boom that we expect to continue for at least the next three years, and most probably four years. The report covers the Internet economy, the ongoing developments in video-based broadband, and the new business models and industry structures that are required. NGNs and VoIP, mobility, wireless broadband, content and mobile data are discussed. ( more... )

2005 Year in Review: DRM Standards
Digital Rights Management is a difficult subject. But if you want to know the present state of art, read the series, written by Bill Rosenblatt in DRM Watch: DRM standards, DRM technology, DRM-enabled content services and DRM related legal cases. ( more... )

AOL sorted out, at least for the time being
AOL has had a rough ride since September 2005. The investment raider Carl Icahn demanded a break-up of the AOL-Time Warner Inc. merger. The best thing for the merger he saw was a break-up in four parts. This would make the corporation more valuable for stockholders. So far AOL-Time Warner has not listened to Icahn, risking another attack in 2006. ( more... )

3i invests €20 million in internet payment service
3i, world leading private equity and venture capital company, today announces a €20 million investment in Zug (Switzerland) based Webpay AG, owner of market leading "Click & Buy", a pan European product for internet retailers. ( more... )

UK TV channel buys community site
The UKT commercial TV channel ITV has bought the community site Friends Reunited for 175 million GB pounds. The merger will rank on the eight place of UK sites in terms of unique visitors. Friends Reunited will increase ITV’s traffic and bring ITV a marketing channel to sell online advertising. It will also provide opportunities to promote ITV programmes and channels online. ( more... )

Wellcome drives open access in UK
Wellcome has made a deal with three major publishers of scientific research: Blackwell, Oxford University Press and Springer. The deal includes free access to thousands of research papers available on internet. Last year the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee called for the results of scientific research funded by the British taxpayer to be made freely available to all on the web and asked the government to help universities fund digital archives. ( more... )

Legal music downloads gain terrain
Sharman Networks, the distributor of the P2P file-swopping software Kazaa has cut off Australians' access to the Web site for newcomers. The shutdown was undertaken to comply with orders from Australia's Federal Court. While people with an Australian IP address who have already downloaded Kazaa can continue to use it, Sharman is warning them not to do so. ( more... )

Ambient findability
The social software solution for Mac bears the exciting name of Delicious Library. It is a piece of software by which you can scan the barcode on any book or CD and, as if by magic, tons of metadata about the products pop up from the web. For the time being this goes for many English language products, but not for other languages. ( more... )

African heritage
The word heritage is not often used in connection with Africa. While Europe, the USA and China have full policy programs in this field, no word is heard about the heritage of Africa. But Heinz Ruther, professor of Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, is working on a project aimed both at preserving the sites, and also at making them accessible, in virtual form. Besides physically mapping the sites, Prof Ruther also hopes to provide a socio-historical analysis of them. African experts who will provide additional material such as early maps, travellers' documents and any scientific analysis of the structure. ( more... )

TV and movies on your mobile
There is a lot of activity going on with TV and movies on mobile. A brave new world for rich content is being heralded, but who is going to look. Philips is offering a chip for TV on your mobile. The Finnish telecom company has trialled streaming TV on mobile. US telecom network Sprint is offering downloads of four movies for 6,95 US dollar per month. ( more... )

Internet domination by men is slackening
The internet was dominated by men in its early days, but by 2000 and continuing on to today, the user population has been evenly divided between men and women. Further, the proportion of women online is nearly equal to that of men. A review of the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life surveys between March 2000 and September 2005 highlights some particularly interesting trends and correlations: Young women are more likely to be online than young men. And black women have surged online in the last three years. ( more... )

Corporate blogging
Many companies think that they nee to have a blog as this will raise the credibility of the company and increase the product sales. The report Measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation shows that blogs can be influential and have impact. The white paper uses the case of Jeff Jarvis who had a run in with Dell’s customer service. ( more... )

Heard it through the grapevine
Consumer taste sharing is driving the online music business. That is the conclusion of a report of the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society for the market research bureau Gartner. New features of online music stores, as well as stand-alone products and services, are designed to help users share their taste in music and satisfy the inherent desire that music fans have to share their favourite music. Additionally, these tools have important potential cultural benefits that reinforce the value of music and the music economy. ( more... )

Announcement 1: 3rd VociNet workshop
The 3. EADIM Instructors Network Conference will take place together with the third VOCINET workshop from March 3-5, 2006 in Vienna together with the EUROPRIX Multimedia Top Talent Festival. It will deal with the topic: “Teaching for contents on different platforms”. ( more... )

Announcement 2: Developing Interactive Narrative Content
The reader gathers 22 articles by sagas_sagasnet experts and selected participants dealing with a broad spectrum of issues to be considered when developing interactive narrative content, as well as on the expanding field of interactive media itself. The collection covers iTV, interactive film, games, mobile applications, installations; gathering interactive theory essays, descriptions of experimental applications, relevant articles on legal issues or teaching methods for interactive film... ( more... )

Announcement 3: Spatial Portals
Spatial Portal gives an interesting outlook in the evolving developments in geographic information. It will not only make information more accessible but also more easy to interpret. It will change information in content. ( more... )

Announcement 4: e-Content: Voices from the ground – The Sequel 2.0
This book is a sequel to Content: Voices from the ground Version 1.The book was produced for the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Genf (Geneva, Switzerland) in 2003, now the update has been produced for the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. In 2003 the book was produced by the jurors of the World Summit Award Grand Jury in Dubai, in 2005 it has been produced by the WSA Grand Jury of Bahrain. In 40 contributions the authors present their view on the content situation in their country. ( more... )