GIN INC JOURNAL

Wikipedia has signed its first major corporate partnership, a revenue sharing deal with mobile operator Orange that will put branded Wikipedia content on Orange phones.

he Wikimedia Foundation has signed its first major corporate partnership deal with European mobile operator Orange. Under the agreement, Orange customers in France, Span, Poland, and the UK will get co-branded access to Wikimedia Foundation content, including a specific Wikipedia channel and both mobile and Web-based widgets to pull Wikipedia content to their mobile devices or Web pages. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Orange will be sharing some revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation currently gets most of its operating capital from user donations.

"The Wikimedia Foundation is dedicated to spreading knowledge to as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible," said Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner, in a statement. "Orange's leadership in mobile and focus on innovation makes them an ideal partner to help us extend our reach."

The Wikimedia Foundation has turned down approaches from corporate entities before, and claims it wouldn't be open to letting commercial enterprises tap into their user communities or commerce-enable something like a Wikipedia page. However, corporate partnerships are apparently on the table for companies that aim to extend knowledge to everyone. A second phase of the partnership will apparently explore creating "simple but innovative" services drawing on Orange's complete portfolio of communications services, including potentially leveraging Wikipedia content to Orange's IPTV platform.

Lawyers for Pirate Bay have demanded a retrial after it's revealed that the judge in the trial is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sits on the board of Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

Is it a conflict of interest? The founders of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay were in the dock for breaking copyright law, and the judge in the case, Tomas Norström, was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sits on the board of Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

However, his association with those bodies wasn’t revealed until this week, after the verdict – a year in jail for each of the four men and a $4.5 million fine – had been handed down.

Now lawyers for The Pirate Bay are demanding a retrial, claiming the judge had a conflict of interest.

However, the judge denies that, telling Swedish radio:

"These activities do not constitute a conflict of interest."

It will all apparently be decided by the court of appeal. Peter Althin, lawyer for defendant Peter Sunde, said:

"I will point that out in my appeal, then the court of appeal will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited."

"In the autumn I received information that a lay judge could have similar connections. I sent these to the court and the judge was excluded in order to prevent a conflict of interest. It would have been reasonable to then review this situation as well," he told Swedish radio.

The mobile industry has been keeping a careful eye on Nokia's "Comes with Music" service, which builds the license fees for unlimited music downloading into the cost of a phone…and lets users keep all the music they downloaded once their deal expires. Although the service had been given a frosty reception from mobile operators—who have been busily trying to develop their own revenue streams around downloadable media—the business model is one of the first to try to build license fees for media into the cost of a device itself…and then encourage users to buy a new device once their service expires.

Comes with Music isn't up and running in North America, but Nokia has rolled it out in five European markets, including the United Kingdom.

However, UK media consultancy Music Ally reports that Comes with Music may be off to a slow start—at least in the UK. According to Music Ally, Nokia has managed to sign up about 23,000 Comes with Music users in the UK to date…a figure far lower than many industry-watchers would have expected.

Nokia has apparently refused to confirm the figures, but says it is actually pleased with the Comes with Music launch so far, particularly in markets like Singapore. Nokia claims Comes with Music customers are downloading a few hundred music tracks in their first few weeks of use, and the majority of those downloads are being down via PCs rather than over-the-air via mobile devices. Nokia also says a decent catalog of local and regional music is important to the service with local content accounting for more than a third of downloads in Comes with Music markets. Nokia also told Music Ally that Comes with Music customers are downloading up to 20 times more back catalog titles than Nokia Music Store customers.

When Nokia launched Comes with Music it indicated it expected it would have to refine and revise its business model over time to make the service appealing in different markets; the company hasn't indicated whether it plans any changes to Comes with Music for the United Kingdom. Nokia has said it plans to bring Comes with Music to the United States, but hasn't yet revealed any launch details.

Storage maker Seagate is looking to win over the hearts (and wallets) of eco-concious desktop computer users with its new Barracuda LP line of 3.5-inch desktop hard drives. Available in 1, 1.5, and 2 TB capacities, the drives spin at 5,900 rpm and the company claims they can consume as little as half the electricity of a typical desktop hard drive—although, over the entire life of the drive, Seagate is only claiming up to a 44 percent reduction in energy consumption. What's more, up to 70 percent of the materials used in the drive can be recycled.

"Growing demand for power-efficient computing systems is not just a data center phenomenon as more builders of external storage devices, desktop PCs, and home networking systems work to provide customers with products that combine power-efficiency with rock-solid performance," said Seagate's VP pf personal systems marketing and strategy Joan Motsinger, in a statement. "Seagate is pleased to deliver a new low-power product line in our Barracuda family that enables system builders and end users alike to attain a higher level of environmental friendliness while cutting costs."

The drives sport an SATA interface, 32 MB of on-board cache, and an average latency of 5.5ms. The drives can peak at transfer rates of 300 MB/s, although sustained transfers will be about 95 MB/s; the 1.5 and 2 TB units consume an average of 5. Watts at idle, while the 1 TB version consumes just 3 Watts.

Seagate hasn't announced shipping dates for the Barracuda LP series, but pricing should start at $118 for the 1TB version, moving up to $156 and $358 for the 1.5 and 2 TB versions.

The description of the game Baby Shaker in the iPhone App Store read:

"On a plane, on the bus, in a theater. Babies are everywhere you don't want them to be! They're always distracting you from preparing for that big presentation at work with their incessant crying. Before Baby Shaker, there was nothing you could do about it. See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!"


Shaking the iPhone would eventually bring red Xs over the baby’s eyes. You won. In fairness, it came with a warning never to shake a baby. The app for the phone, from Sikalosoft, cost 99 cents, and went on sale on Monday. On Wednesday it was removed after being noted by the Krapps website and receiving protests, including one from Sarah Jane Brain Project, one of whose founders, Patrick Donahue, wrote to Steve Jobs and Apple:

"As the father of a three-year-old who was shaken by her baby nurse when she was only five days old, breaking three ribs, both collarbones and causing a severe brain injury, words cannot describe my reaction."

Apple withdrew the game and issued a statement saying:

"This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store."

"We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention."

There was no comment from the game developer.

The question, of course, is how it came to be approved. It’s not long since Apple was almost Puritanical in its outlook, even rejecting an app that made farting noises, but of late it had relaxed a little.

Mobile audio developer Aliph has announced its new Jawbone Prime noise-canceling Bluetooth headset, promising an order of magnitude improvement in noise reduction, plus a swath of fashionable colors to appeal to even the pickiest fashionistas. Aliph's original Jawbone headset was released about a year ago to solid reviews; the Jawbone Prime aims to improve on the original with improved noise reduction that takes out an additional 6 to 9 db of background noise while leaving the speaker's voice strong and clear.

"We watched our customers closely and saw how they struggled to be heard in extreme noise environments. So, we focused our engineering team to go deeper on the tough problems like crying babies, pounding jackhammers, beeping elevators and the like," said Aliph CEO and co-founder Hosain Rahman, in a statement. "We are excited to announce Jawbone Prime, with orders of magnitude better noise suppression, so our customers can continue their conversations wherever they happen to be."

The Jawbone Prime's NoiseAssassin 2.0 technology implements a digital approach to wind nois reduction, and the headset also includes Acoustic Voice Activity Detector technology as a fail-safe mechanism when the Jawbone Prime's voice activity sensor does not touch a user's face: if the activity sensor loses contact, the headset switches to a traditional noise-canceling mode Aliph says is as good as any other headset on the market. But when the activity sensor touches a users' face, the NoiseAssassin technology kicks in. The Jawbone Prime supports Bluetooth 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and 2.1+EDR.

The Jawbone Primes will be available in a broad range of colors, including black, brown, platinum; special "Earcandy" colors include red, yellow, green, and purple.

The Jawbone Prime is available for pre-order now for $129.99; the units are set to go on sale May 2 at selected retailers in the U.S., and are available in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, Norway, and Canada.

Last last year, Nintendo announced a partnership with Japan's largest advertising agency Dentsu to bring a video distribution service to the Wii gaming console. Now, industry reports have Nintendo getting set to launch the service on May 1 in Japan under the name "Wii no Ma Channel"—and, reportedly, the service will include support for the Nintendo DSi handheld as well.

Nintendo's original plan had been to offer original content for the service, rather than redistributing existing television or movie programming, with an emphasis on family-oriented content. The Wi no Ma Channel will appear on-screen like a family room, where Mii avatars can congregate. The service will offer both free and paid-for content (although no specific titles have been announced yet). Perhaps more interestingly, the Wii no Ma Channel will also extend to the Nintendo DSi handheld via an application called "Dokodemo Wii no Ma" (roughly, "Wii no Ma Anywhere"), which will enable users to download video from the Wii to the DSi for portable viewing. Users will also be able to download sponsor coupons—say, for a fast food restaurant—that can be scanned from the DSI screen when a user wants to redeem it.

Nintendo has not announced any plans to launch a Wii video service outside Japan.

The Australian government technology agency CSIRO has reportedly reached settlements with all the companies it had been suing for patent infringement regarding a technology built into 802.11g and later Wi-Fi wireless networking. The patent covers portions of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) implementation that first appeared in 802.11g. Although aspects of the patent were openly questioned by other players in the industry, CSIRO doggedly pursued 14 technology companies over patent infringement, including Japanese-owned Buffalo Technology, which had its products banned from the U.S. market for a time in part because CSIRO won a judgement against Buffalo.

Although CSIRO sued some 14 companies for infringement—and some of those companies, in turn, countersued CSIRO—the long-running case never made it to court, apparently in part because CSIRO wasn't asking for exorbitant royalty fees; that meant the cost of negotiating a settlement with CSIRO was likely far less than the cost of taking the case to trial. Industry watchers were skeptical how well CSIRO's rather broad patent would hold up in court. Terms of CSIRO's settlements with Wi-Fi equipment makers weren't released, but the agency apparently intends to put money from the settlements into research, same as it would with commercial implementations of any of the technology it develops.

There's no denying that Apple's App Store has been wildly popular amongst iPhone and iPod touch users—"Shaking Baby" applications aside—and that Microsoft, RIM, Palm, Nokia, and others are all looking to emulate Apple's success with application stores of their own. Just to underscore how far they have to catch up, however, Apple has announced that customers have downloaded over 1 billion programs from its App Store since it launched a little over nine months ago.

"The revolutionary App Store has been a phenomenal hit with iPhone and iPod touch users around the world, and we'd like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve the astonishing milestone of one billion apps downloaded," said Apple senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller, in a statement.

The actual downloader of the billionth program was 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey, of Weston, Connecticut: he will receive a MacBook Pro, a Time Capsule backup system, an iPod touch, and a $10,000 iTunes gift card. Apple has previously given out prizes for download milestones from its iTunes music store.

The Apple app store claims to offer more than 35,000 programs in 77 countries, many of which are available for free, with commercial applications tending to run from $1.99 to $9.99, with some exceptions.

Apple is planning to release its iPhone 3.0 operating system this summer, which many industry watchers expect will help solidify the iPhone's strong position in the iPhone market, and may help it further integrate with enterprise and corporate systems, an area where Apple has historically only been a bit player.

Chinese electronics manufacturers have officially unveiled the first CBHD disc players, China's home-grown alternative to Blu-ray (and, formerly, HD-DVD) which it hopes will jump-start a market for high-definition video in mainland China. Like Blu-ray, CBHD uses a blue laser to read high-capacity optical discs, although CBHD discs have a physical structure more like a traditional dual-layer DVD that could make it easier for existing DVD manufacturers to produce CBHD titles. CBHD is based in part on Toshiba's defunct HD-DVD format, and uses AACS copy protection. Dual-layer CBHD discs can accommodate about 30 GB of data.

Chinese manufacturers Chinco and TCL are getting ready to put their first CBHD players on sale, with prices starting around 2,000 yuan (roughly $293 USD), which makes them substantially cheaper than Blu-ray players, in part because CBHD players don't have to pay the licensing fees associated with Blu-ray. As for content, China hopes to have at least 100 movies available on CBHD by the end of 2009…including titles from major Hollywood studio Warner Bros.

The president of TCL Corp has been quoted as saying his company hopes to sell as many as 10 million CBHD players this year, piggybacking on rising popularity of HD televisions in Chinese urban markets. However, many industry watchers don't expect CBHD or or Blu-ray to truly take off in China anytime soon. It remains to be seen whether CBHD discs will become a notable industry in China's notoriously bootlegging-friendly environment: CBHD movies are expected to be priced at 50 to 70 yuan (about $7 to $10 USD), leaving plenty of room at the bottom of the market for illegal distributors.