Province

Province is now easier to read on the go. Today, we are launching mobile-optimized versions of our website, specifically designed for iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones.

“British Columbians are especially active on the mobile web,” said Province editor-in-chief Wayne Moriarty, “and we wanted them to have access to The Province’s breaking news and sports coverage wherever they want it. Now they have it.”

Go to m.theprovince.com to try it out.

Ten other Canwest newspaper websites across the country, along with news website canada.com, are also launching new mobile sites. The clean and easy-to-navigate sites will allow readers to quickly access breaking local, national and world news, live sports scores and weather, said Steve Buors, Canwest’s vicepresident of digital media.

When readers visit the mobile sites from their phones, the sites will automatically detect the type of device and optimize its design to deliver a superb news experience, said Buors.

“We’ve got to be there,” he said. “This is where consumers are going to get their information.”

Canwest is planning to further expand its mobile reach by developing downloadable applications, Buors added.

A small, dedicated team brought the project to fruition over two months of intense development.

Launching sites designed specifically for mobile users allows advertisers to reach technologically savvy local audiences with targeted messages, said Graham Moysey, general manager and senior vice-president of Canwest Digital Media.

“We are moving aggressively to cement a leading mobile position for our brands and content through the launch of these and other recent mobile initiatives,” he said.

“We promise to bring our readers the best news and information content, where, when and how they want it‚ so optimizing our websites for the most popular mobile devices helps deliver on that promise.”

The most recent numbers from Statistics Canada show 72 per cent of households reported having at least one cellphone in December 2007, up from 67 per cent a year earlier. And the market continues to grow, according to StatsCan.

England community stops Google photo program in its tracks and ignites privacy concerns across Europe

HENRY CHU
Sun

BROUGHTON, England — The good folk of Broughton don’t take kindly to being photographed without permission. Just ask Google.

When the search-engine giant sent one of its special vehicles to take pictures of the village for its Street View program, residents swung into action. They stopped the car in its tracks, called the police and quizzed the bewildered driver for nearly two hours before finally letting him go.

“I don’t think this guy anticipated how angry people would get,” said Edward Butler-Ellis, 28. “We didn’t stand there with pitchforks or anything and block the road with bales of hay, but obviously people were agitated. … A car with a pole with a camera on top of it causes suspicions.”

Those suspicions are being raised across Europe as Google proceeds with its project to document the Earth at ground level. Through Street View, the company offers 360-degree images of roads, landscapes and buildings (including, probably, your own home) to go along with its popular map function.

Privacy concerns, however, have delayed or disrupted the program’s launch in countries in Europe, where, in general, stricter laws on privacy and online data apply than in the U.S.

In May, Greece’s privacy watchdog ordered Google to stop collecting images until it satisfied questions on how long the information would be stored. German regulators have demanded stronger measures to guard against any infringement of privacy.

Last month, Switzerland became the latest to put a check on Street View. A few days after its launch, Swiss authorities told Google to take the program down until conditions could be met, including better blurring of the faces of bystanders.

The issues in Switzerland echo those elsewhere: People’s fears of being photographed in embarrassing or ambiguous circumstances, of having private spaces spied on and of not knowing how the published images might be used by strangers.

“We received many complaints,” Hanspeter Thuer, the Swiss federal data-protection commissioner, said. “In some cases, individuals complained the cameras saw into their gardens. Others complained that they had to justify themselves because the photographs on Google Street View were seen by the public.”

Leslie Cauley
USA Today

Some cellphones emit several times more radiation than others, the Environmental Working Group found in one of the most exhaustive studies of its kind.

The government watchdog group on Wednesday releases a list ranking cellphones in terms of radiation. The free listing of more than 1,000 devices can be viewed at www.ewg.org.

Concerns about radiation and cellphones have swirled for years. Scientific evidence to date has not been able to make a hard link between cancer and cellphones. But recent studies “are showing increased risk for brain and mouth tumors for people who have used cellphones for at least 10 years,” says Jane Houlihan, senior vice president of research at the Washington-based group.

CTIA, the wireless industry lobbying association, disagrees. In a statement it noted that “scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices do not pose” a health hazard.

That’s why the American Cancer Society, World Health Organization and Food and Drug Administration, among others, “all have concurred that wireless devices are not a public health risk,” the CTIA statement says.

Houlihan acknowledges that “the verdict is still out” on whether cellphones can be linked directly to cancer.

“But there’s enough concern that the governments of six countries” — including France, Germany and Israel — “have issued limits of usage of cellphones, particularly for children.”

Houlihan says her group is “advising people to choose a phone that falls on the lower end of the (radiation) spectrum” to minimize potential health problems. The Samsung Impression has the lowest: 0.35 watts per kilogram, a measure of how much radiation is absorbed into the brain when the phone is held to the ear.

The highest: T-Mobile‘s MyTouch 3G, Motorola Moto VU204 and Kyocera Jax S1300, all at 1.55 W/kg.

The Apple iPhone, sold exclusively by AT&T in the USA, is in the middle of the pack at 1.19 W/kg.

The Federal Communications Commission, which sets standards for cellphone radiation, requires that all devices be rated at 1.6 W/kg or lower.

The Environmental Working Group says the FCC‘s standard is outmoded, noting that it was established 17 years ago, when cellphones and wireless usage patterns were much different. The group wants the government to take a “fresh look” at radiation standards.

The FCC currently doesn’t require handset makers to divulge radiation levels. As a result, radiation rankings for dozens of devices, including the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 and Motorola KRZR, aren’t on the group’s list.

Lowell Conn
Province

1. Competitors to curse TomTom: In 1981 when IBM introduced the PC, a minor decision to let little-known Microsoft retain operating system rights resulted in a technological shift that led the latter to dominance and the former to struggle to maintain relevance.

Lesson learned: Software trumps hardware. Clearly, TomTom understands this as it departs from its traditional role in manufacturing GPS hardware with the release of TomTom for iPhone.

For a fraction of the cost of traditional navigation, consumers purchase the software directly from iTunes and get North American map data, turn-by-turn directions, points of interest and a screen that swivels vertically or horizontally.

The features are similar to traditional GPS products, but what early adopters get is a taste of convergence, saving money and dashboard space to the collective benefit of TomTom and Apple (the one company that has managed to maintain both hardware and software control). But, as ubiquitous as the iPhone is, only when TomTom crosses all hardware platforms with this software will it be game over for the traditional GPS sector.

Price $99; visit tomtom.com.

2. Is Blu five times better? Unlike the switch from videotape to DVD, the adoption of Blu-ray has one fundamental problem — it’s still a disc. Thus, consumers intuit that the new technology is not a whole lot different from the old one.

As a result, we’ve seen a relatively slow rollout of non-traditional Blu-ray players. So, while Japanese buyers have in-car Blu-ray at their purchasing disposal, North American audiences are only now being introduced to portable devices.

Panasonic’s DMP-B15 is not a car-dedicated unit, but it is portable, and it will likely be a staple on long car rides for children and techno-geeks everywhere. Mounted in the vehicle, children will enjoy the same Dora the Explorer, but as the Blu-ray Disc has greater capacity, Swiper the Fox will stop swiping with more clarity than ever before.

The Dark Knight will look awesome on this device, but is it enough to make the DMP-B15 a legitimate market penetrator, considering the main difference mandating a price five times its DVD cousins is a not-always-tangibly-better-looking picture? The market will rule.

Price $1,000; visit panasonic.ca.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Promised measures light on details, analysts say

Jamie Sturgeon
Sun

Canada‘s wireless phone companies will allow customers to refuse changes made partway through their contract’s term or to get out of the contract at no additional cost.

The pledge is one in a litany of promises contained in a new “code of conduct” governing cellphones released Tuesday by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA).

CWTA says the three-page document “codifies” how the country’s carriers communicate with and treat the more than 23 million cellphone subscribers in Canada.

Yet beyond that, the new measures are light on details, analysts say.

The move also follows reports this week that a federal proposal to create an online tool to help consumers choose a wireless plan were derailed by the industry.

Included in the CWTA code is a stipulation that any material changes made to contracts partway through their terms, such as raising prices or limiting services, can be refused by subscribers, or they can terminate the contract without incurring hefty break fees, which are usually $20 for every month remaining.

Carriers “haven’t served their customers very well. Now they’re coming in with a political solution to what should be a customer solution,” said telecommunications analyst Eamon Hoey of Hoey Associates.

“There’s nothing impressive about a code of conduct.”

First recommended by the Conservative government more than two years ago when Ottawa moved to make the industry more competitive — including the opening of more wireless spectrum to new entrants — the code “will make it easier and simpler for consumers to know what they’re getting, how they’re getting it and how much its going to cost,” said Bernard Lord, president of the CWTA.

Details on monthly charges, including all fees and additional surcharges contained in any wireless plan, must be provided at the point of sale, the CWTA said. Also included in the document is a promise to “communicate with our customers in plain, simple language.”

Lord, the former premier of New Brunswick, said most carriers, including Rogers Communications Inc., Bell Canada Inc. and Telus Corp. — the country’s largest incumbent providers — are already giving customers relevant information, but the code has created an industry-wide benchmark to follow.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Non-profit joint venture helps small wireless companies get started

Derrick P
Sun

Until May, Aaron Hilton’s tiny wireless mapping firm, Cellmap, bartered with a wholesale florist for office space.

Cellmap and a partner firm, ConQuer Mobile, built the florist’s website, and in exchange they got a couple of desks to work from to make their own ideas fly.

Since May, Cellmap and ConQuer have got their feet in the door of Wavefront, a non-profit joint venture of industry and government designed as a testing centre and business incubator to help wireless developers get off the ground.

On Tuesday, Hilton was on hand as Wavefront officially opened its business centre in the Guinness Tower on West Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver.

“[Wavefront] is a huge deal,” Hilton said in an interview. “It’s enabled us to grow. We’ve had a team of six people in this office now, and we wouldn’t have been able to afford that.”

Hilton said the mentorship Wavefront president James Maynard has offered “has been invaluable.”

In an interview, Maynard added that providing mentorship to little firms like Hilton’s is a big part of the point of Wavefront, which was formed in 2007 based on a proposal from the Wireless Innovation Network of B.C. to the Premier’s Technology Council.

Based on the council’s recommendation, the province made a $5-million bet on Wavefront. Western Economic Diversification chipped in $1 million, and Wavefront has received financial support form industry sources including the mapping firm Navteq and Bell Canada.

Companies ranging from Ericsson to Nokia have helped provide technology for the centre to run with.

To date, Maynard said B.C.’s wireless technology sector boasts 250 companies employing some 6,000 people, and the hope is that Wavefront will help it expand on a wider scale.

“This is really the coming out of this phase of the expansion of the [wireless] business,” Maynard said in an interview.

One early success saw Wavefront connect seven wireless developers, three of them from Vancouver, with Sierra Wireless. Now they’re selling through the carrier AT& T in the United States.

“That’s the example of what we want to do,” Maynard said, “is to take small companies that are emerging in the wireless space, connect them with platform players like Sierra and then give them that market traction into the big [wireless] operators around the world.”

The centre will run on a fee-for-service basis to the firms that want access to its support. Maynard said the fee system, for services such as network testing, will be more cost-effective for smaller developers than if they had to do it all on their own.

Another unique feature of the Wavefront centre is its library of 300 smart-phone handsets from Apple iPhones and Research in Motion BlackBerrys to Nokia and Ericsson models.

Sue Marek, editor in chief of Fierce Wireless, a daily website devoted to covering the wireless industry, said Wavefront is unique in its combination of technical and business development support for wireless startups.

“I think it’s a really good model,” Marek said in an interview. “You can go and do the testing, as a developer, on your own. Those things exist, but not bringing all these [elements] together like this.”

Marek said she hasn’t toured all the wireless technology clusters in Asia or Europe to make a comprehensive comparison to Wavefront, but “I wish there was something like this in the United States.”

Iain Black, B.C.’s minister of small business, technology and economic development said the province views Wavefront as an opportunity to “not only facilitate but really accelerate the growth of new media and wireless industry in B.C.”

To date, one of Hilton’s successes with Cellmap has been to develop an interactive location application for Canpages.

For now, he views the collection of little startup firms that have gathered at the Wavefront centre as “an amazing brain-power hub that’s just going to knock the socks off of anywhere else in Vancouver.

“This is hot.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

 

EU launches safety probe of devices after series of reported fires and explosions

BRUNO WATERFIELD
Sun

BRUSSELS — Apple iPods and  iPhones which reportedly explode in the summer sun have prompted an investigation by the European Union’s safety watchdogs.

Officials have acted after a series of incidents in Britain, France, Holland and Sweden in which Apple’s digital music players and mobile phones have allegedly spontaneously combusted or detonated. In the latest incident, French teenager Romain Kolega was injured when his girlfriend’s iPhone exploded into shards after beginning to “crackle and pop like a deep-fryer.”

That report followed a British case earlier this month involving an iPod Touch music player belonging to Ellie Stanborough, 11, of Liverpool.

In July, a Dutch man, identified only as Pieter C., claimed he had left his iPhone in a car for 15 minutes only to return and find it had caught fire and severely damaged the passenger seat.

An iPod was also implicated in a Swedish fire this June when a stationary Saab was engulfed in flames, almost incinerating the owner’s dog.

“We have asked Apple to share with us any information they might have because of press reports of problems relating to iPhones and iPods,” said a European Commission official.

The commission has alerted the EU’s 27 member states requesting any details or further incidents involving iPods or iPhones.

“Apple have come back to us and said to us that these are isolated incidents. They don’t consider that there is a general problem,” said the commission official.

Said an Apple spokesman: “We are aware of these reports and we are waiting to receive the units from the customers. Until we have the full details, we don’t have anything further to add.”

Kolega, 18, claimed last week he received a minor eye injury after picking up his girlfriend’s crackling iPhone.

In the British case, Ken Stanborough threw his daughter’s iPod out of the back door of his house when it started hissing and overheating.

“Within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10 feet in the air,” he said.

He has claimed Apple offered to refund the $295 Cdn. cost of the device on condition that the family sign a confidentiality agreement.

In July it emerged that Apple had tried to block a freedom of information request on iPod “burn and fire-related incidences.”

The request came from an American journalist for 800 pages of documents from the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Fujifilm product is digital, requires no special glasses to view

Marke Andrews
Sun

I had barely settled into a chair when Greg Poole grabbed the camera, shot me in my best deer-in-the-headlights pose, then displayed my 3-D image on the digital camera’s screen.

My nose looked like an approaching torpedo. For a moment, I thought it was the boulder that chased Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Poole, vice-president of Fujifilm Canada‘s imaging products division, was showing off the FinePix W1 REAL 3D, the world’s first 3-D digital camera, which will arrive in Canadian stores on Oct. 1.

For a guy marketing a new product, Poole was not exactly in Tony Robbins mode. This camera is the first of its kind, and there are a few bugs to work out, Poole admits.

Its price ($699), and the price of its accessories ($499 for the FinePix REAL 3D V1, a larger viewer frame with an eight-inch screen) will give consumers pause. The fact that you cannot view your images in 3-D on your Mac, PC or television screen is also a negative. If you want 3-D prints of your photos, they have to be done at Fujifilm’s Japan headquarters, for about $10 per print.

“It’s not the world’s most perfect camera, yet,” said Poole, in Vancouver to demonstrate Fujifilm’s fall lineup of products, which includes two new models of the company’s popular EXR digital cameras.

“3-D is going to be very big,” said Poole, who said it was the buzzword at the annual Consumer Electronics Association trade show in Las Vegas in January. “What I’m really excited about is the second-, third- and fourth-generations of this device.”

So, if the best is yet to come, who will buy this first model? Poole expects consumers who want to be the first on their block with the latest toy will buy. So will professional photographers who use 3-D technology. Doctors, dentists and other professionals can use the photos for 3-D slide shows in their waiting rooms. He’s been contacted by a filmmaker who makes 3-D movies and wants to use the camera for location scouting.

3-D photography has been around for 100 years, but it always involved film and special 3-D glasses to view the results. The new Fujifilm 10-million-pixel camera is digital and requires no funny specs to view the results. The camera, which is the size of a large calculator, has two lenses that shoot the subject, in the words of Fujifilm’s press material, “as your eyes see it.” It can also shoot 3-D movies and 2-D images. It has a number of settings to capture 3-D landscapes and long-distance views.

Releasing the camera is really a branding exercise on the part of Fujifilm, which will be known as the company that led the 3-D charge into the digital camera breach. But like the VHS-vs-Beta video-cassette recorder battle of the 1980s, and the more recent Blu-Ray-vs-HD DVD debate, the 3-D technology will require agreement among major corporate players — Fujifilm, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Panasonic — to agree on a format so that you can take pictures with your FinePix W1 REAL 3D camera and get proper 3-D images from your computer or flat-screen TV.

“Unless you have some standardization, the world won’t bite,” Poole said.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

1. COOLPIX S1000pj, Nikon

The world’s first compact camera to boast a built-in projector, the S100pj brings new meaning to sharing your photos. Snap a shot and instantly project it on any flat surface, creating your own projector show with individual photos, slideshows and video clips. Instead of having your subjects peering over your shoulder to see what they look like in the tiny display screen on the camera, Nikon’s ground-breaking addition to the point-and-shoot world lets you project your photos up to 102 cm (40 inches) in size. It comes with a projector stand and a remote control that can be used to run the projector and release the shutter. The brightness is rated up to 10 lumens, with a throw distance of 26 cm to two metres for images 13 cm (five inches) to 102 cm. With 12.1 megapixels and five-times zoom, the camera has other features typical of the point-and-shoot lineup including Nikon image stabilization. www.nikon-coolpix.com.

2. Palm Pre, Palm, $200 with a three-year contract with Bell, $600 with no contract

Palm fans who have been waiting for the Pre to arrive in Canada can order one now through Bell or one of its resellers in anticipation of the smartphone’s release Aug. 27. Bell first announced last May that it would be the exclusive carrier of the new Palm Pre in Canada, and since then the company said tens of thousands of Canadians have already signed up on its website for more information about the new device. The Palm Pre, Palm’s new webOS operating system, a touch screen and slide-out QUERTY keyboard. Palm’s answer to the iPhone, most notable is the operating system that aggregates content to make it easy to juggle e-mail accounts, text, personal and business calendars, and social networking tools like Facebook and others. www.bellmobility.ca.

3. SmartSwipe personal credit card reader, NetSecure Technologies, $100

The SmartSwipe safeguards your credit card information even if your computer has been compromised by a virus or other data-stealing hack. This little device encrypts your information before it gets to your computer so even if there is some malicious program lurking in your computer ready to steal financial data, it won’t get any satisfaction with this. You swipe the card just like you’re at a merchant, also saving you the trouble of typing in all those numbers every time you buy something online. Check out a demo video at www.smartswipe.ca.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

 

Gillian Shaw
Sun

1. BlackBerry Tour 9630, Research in Motion, $230 with Telus on three-year contract,

$600 with no contract

A global smartphone that works with Telus international roaming for those who can’t imagine leaving home without a BlackBerry. I like everything about this little globetrotter except the roaming charges — but that’s not unique to Telus. Anytime you’re using your cellphone or smartphone on your travels, make sure you know what it will cost. The Tour 9630 has a QWERTY keyboard, a one-gig memory card included, plus it has a 16-GB expandable microSD slot if you need more storage for photos, videos, music or documents. The display is 480-by-360 pixel HVGA high-resolution, all the better to see Telus’s newly introduced video on demand. In collaboration with CTV, Telus customers can access news, TV shows like South Park, MTV’s The Hills and others. Pricing is by monthly subscription or a la carte.

2. Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 digital camera, Fujifilm, price to be announced

This is going to make your old point-and-shoot seem so yesterday. Fujifilm has announced a new imaging system that creates 3D images that don’t require 3D glasses to view them. It’s making waves in the world of digital photography even though it’s not expected to be available in Canada until this fall. Billed as the world’s first digital camera to capture 3D stills and video, Fuijifilm’s 3D system also comes with a 3D print service for the images. The new system includes the FinePix REAL 3D W1 camera, a 3D digital viewer FinePix REAL 3D V1, and the 3D prints. The viewer has an eight-inch LCD panel that lets you slide in a SD memory card to display 3D images — no special specs required.

3. Split Stick, Quirky Community, $20 US

Quirky indeed. A new take on crowd sourcing, quirky.com recently launched as a means of engaging a community of participants in the creation of new products. Quirky members submit ideas that are rated by the community, with popular consensus deciding which one is worthy of moving forward to product development. That product first becomes available for pre-sale at quirky’s online store, and once it reaches a pre-sale threshold, buyers’ credit cards are billed and the product goes to production and delivery. The Split Stick is a double-sided USB drive that lets users divvy up their USB storage according to work and personal or any other filing system they choose. It is two, two-gigabyte retractable USB drives built into one four-gig stick. If you’re a fan of social networks and you want to combine that with airing your ideas for great gadgets, check out www.quirky.com.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun