Filed under: Cellphones

The European mobile phone community was rocked by the news today that DVB-H (or Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) is set to become the new standard for mobile TV across the Union. The technology -- a superset of DVB-T -- has been spearheaded by Nokia, and this move is meant to help widen the system's audience. Though the move has been opposed by some EU states, such as Germany and Britain, the standard is being pushed through. "DVB-H will be published by the Commission in the list of official EU standards," said an EU executive, adding that, "As a result, all EU Member States will have to support and encourage the use of DVB-H for the launch of mobile TV services, thus avoiding market fragmentation and allowing economies of scale and accordingly affordable services and devices." So much for our fledgling standard, DVB-X (the X is for extreme).

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Take note, Zune dudes and dudettes: the Zune Originals engraving -- which has heretofore been relegated to the 4GB and 8GB flash versions of Microsoft's new player -- is now available on the big daddy, the 80GB. That's right -- now text, wild graphics, and combinations of the two can be emblazoned upon your media player, serving as a testament to your original and inimitable personality till the end of time. Did we mention it's free? Motor over there and check it out, right this second.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Apple TV wannabe?

Review From the Apple TV to D-Link's Media Lounge and Netgear's Wireless Digital Media Player there is currently no shortage of ways of getting PC-held content onto a TV screen and home audio system without wires. As with most things in life, while some of these products are of a truly fine vintage others prove to be merely vin ordinaire.

Beacon extinguished

Facebook looks set to scale back its advertising ambitions after one of a suite of new features aimed at milking cash from user data was slammed as creepy.

A few months ago we wrote about a somewhat bizarre lawsuit where the family of a teenager sued Creative Commons after a photo of the girl was used in an ad campaign by Virgin Mobile Australia. The details were a bit strange, and it appeared that the family (and its lawyer) were a bit confused themselves, leading them to sue parties that were not responsible at all. What happened was that a youth group counselor had taken a photo of the girl and posted it to Flickr with a Attribution 2.0 license -- meaning that anyone could use it, even for commercial purposes, so long as they gave credit for who took the photo. Virgin Mobile Australia then went and used the photo and others (with attribution) in a poster campaign for its mobile phone service. The girl later discovered all this when someone in Australia spotted the ad campaign with the Flickr URLs on the poster, and thought it was interesting enough to take a photo of the ad and put that up on Flickr. Her family then felt that she was being taken advantage of and found a lawyer who sued Virgin Mobile Australia, Virgin Mobile USA and Creative Commons. It's a stretch to think that even Virgin Mobile Australia has done anything wrong here (it followed the terms of the CC license), but there is simply no rationale for suing Virgin Mobile USA (a totally unrelated company to VMA) or Creative Commons. After all, Creative Commons hadn't done anything here other than exist.

If anything, the family could sue the photographer for posting the girl's photo with a CC license without permission -- but, instead, the family included the photographer as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. So, basically, they were suing CC because the photographer didn't understand the license he had chosen and he felt he deserved some money for his own misunderstanding as well. Thankfully, the family and its lawyer seem to have finally (after the fact) taken the time to realize that Creative Commons and Virgin Mobile USA have nothing to do with this lawsuit and have withdrawn the suit on those two firms (I assume the case against Virgin Mobile Australia will still continue). Unfortunately, however, their inability to figure this out before the lawsuit ended up costing Creative Commons approximately $15,000.

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

iSuppli -- the market research firm that keeps us up to speed on exactly how much each iPod pads Steve's wallet (among other things) -- has recently published its list of top players in the 2007 semiconductor market, and lo and behold, AMD isn't even in the top ten. It's noted that while Intel's chip revenue is expected to rise 7.7-percent in 2007, AMD's sales are predicted to sink some 22.7-percent for the year. Of course, AMD had only risen into the upper echelon of this list for the first time last year, but now it has fallen back to 11th, trailing the likes of Samsung, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, Sony, NXP, Intel and Texas Instruments. If you're interested in seeing the details behind the numbers, be sure and hit the read link below. Oh, and please do keep the fanboy comments respectable, will ya?

[Via PCWorld]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!