Dell Becomes Number 1 PC Manufacturer

Fri, 18/04/2003 - 10:57pm — Pete

The PC giant Dell has regained its number one spot in the PC market against HP according to the research firm Gartner. Dell produced 450,000 more desktops, notebooks and servers worldwide than its main rival HP.

Dell accounted for about 16% of worldwide sales while HP only by about 15%. This is a massive 24% growth in the first quarter of this year for Dell. Many other manufactures have seen loses so far this year and the overall PC market has grown by 2.1% which was above the predicted rate of 2%.

HP have also seen loses of sales in Europe however this could be due to the problems caused between the merger of HP and Compaq. The electronics giant Toshiba has also made good sales and has become one of the top 5 pc manufacturers in the world showing the increasing market for laptop computers.

The battle between HP and Dell is very choppy with both sides doing better one quarter than another. An HP executive characterized the battle with Dell as an up-and-down one, noting that HP benefits during the holidays, when consumer sales are strongest.

"It's a two horse race," said Jim McDonnell, vice president of marketing for HP's PC unit. "It's close and it's going to continue to be close."

What ever happens in the computer market it can only mean good things for the consumer, with better technology and increasing competition the PC market could get tough for some manufacturers.

Con Music?

Wed, 09/04/2003 - 5:57pm — Pete

In an attempt to try to get people to download music legitimately a range of companies and organisations to do with the music industry have come up with ?Digital Download Day?. The European day starts today and allows users to sign up until the 15th of April. Once signed up the user can access ?3 worth of music in 3 different ways:

1. Download up to 30 tracks. (store able for 1 month)
2. Stream 300 tracks.
3. Burn 3 tracks to CD.

A choice of 170,000 tracks from over 7,500 artists is on offer. Bands and artists include Christina Aguilera, Linkin? Park, Norah Jones, Eminem, Coldplay, Miss Dynamite, Robbie Williams, Jennifer Lopez, The Streets, The Coral, Michael Jackson, The Raveonettes and Gareth Gates.

The idea of the day is to try to promote awareness of legitimate music subscription services however how effective do they expect it to be? With free services such as Kazaa becoming increasingly popular how do they expect people to stop downloading music when they can get it easily and free.

As soon as restrictions such as a making the tracks available on your PC for 1 month only are put onto music people would much rather download the MP3 rather then some strange format.

?Currently an estimated 4.5 million people are accessing a total of almost 1 billion pirated tracks at any one time. But the tracks are often of dubious quality and contain viruses. ?

From the organisers press release. I would just like to point out the point about viruses and how this is not true, the MP3 is made so it cannot contain viruses. I'm not too sure what they are trying to say with this point. As for the tracks being pirated is another point not proved either.

The fact is that the music industry is in a mess and in my view digital download day does not give the end user any real reason to stop using free sharing programs and use subscription services. Until people have a good enough reason to need to change to legitimate services why should they?

Students become next target of RIAA

Sat, 05/04/2003 - 10:27am — Pete

US students are being taken to court by the Record Industry association of America (RIAA) for using file swapping services within the University network. The RIAA has taken legal action against 4 students who have used programs to swap files within the college network but not into the wider Internet.

The RIAA has long claimed that students are among the keenest swappers of pirated music. The industry group called the local peer to peer systems "'local area Napster networks," comparing them to the original peer-to-peer network that made it easy for people to swap music tracks.

Connections to cross-campus computer networks are likely to run much faster than those most people have to the wider Internet because of the shorter distances. The networks the RIAA is targeting are thought to be based around three software programs called Flatlan, Phynd and Direct Connect.

It seems very much that the RIAA is loosing battles with big companies such as Kazaa who can afford lengthy court battles but poor students are easy targets as they clearly cannot afford lengthy battles. Music is also not the only type of entertainment being transfered across the net, programs such as BitTorrent are getting very popular for transferring films and TV episodes.

While this may bring up even more legal problems the fundamental idea of ?sharing? is causing havoc for the various industry's and doesn't look to have a clear end in sight.

Hotmail Fights Spam

Mon, 24/03/2003 - 3:55pm — Pete

Microsoft's Hotmail receives and sends some of the largest amount of spam by email on the web. In a fight back against this Microsoft is setting a limit of sending 100 emails a day. For many users it says this wont matter as most users only send a few emails a day but this will stop the big spammers from using Hotmail.

Many ISP's already have similar limits to stop people from flooding their networks with emails. Experts think that spam has risen by 500% in the past 18 months and for a company with over 120million users this has been many more emails.

MSN is having an overall clamp down over spam. In the past month, it sued in federal court to learn the identities of some spammers, and it has promised to pursue similar lawsuits. Both AOL and EarthLink have won monetary damages in suits against spammers.

Many Hotmail users welcome any moves to try to stop the amount of spam coming into their inbox's however Microsoft is still not tackling the bigger problems of spam coming in from outside its network. This for many people is a bigger problem then from emails coming from other hotmail users.

One thing is for sure is that we will be seeing more and more email providers taking up law suits against spammers to try to cut down the amount of unwanted emails on the net.

Wireless Use on the Rise

Tue, 11/03/2003 - 8:56am — Pete

Wireless use throughout Europe and the US is on a constant rise according to some major companies. Wireless use includes a range of activities, from corporate use in linking two sites together to providing wireless gateways to the net in public places.

Companies are also looking into mobile phone technology for providing a better service to their customers. For instance Avis, the car rental company this month started selling a service called Avis Assist that lets lost customers learn where they are and then get back on track with turn-by-turn directions read to them over a mobile phone.

However the problem is at the moment that most customers do not have the right sort of phones so use the new Avis Assist services, Avis are getting around this problem by renting out certain Motorola phones to interested customers.

Many telecoms companies are also looking at the new technology in order to provide new services. One of these companies is Nextel communications who are using mobile phones to pin point where people are and have been in the last couple of hours. While this brings up certain human rights issues the company is sure that it has a legitimate service to offer businesses and consumers. ?Users can simply turn off their mobile phone if they do not want to be found, however this does mean that they will not be able to accept calls? said one analyst.

Wireless LAN gateways are being fitted in many public places throughout the world, such as airports, hotels, restaurants and rail stations so that anyone with a wireless card in their laptop will be able to get online with a small fee.

According to a report from telecoms consultancy Analysts public wireless net access throughout Europe and the US will grow from a $33million industry to around $5.5billion in 2007. This is certainly one big growth market that many businesses are getting involved in.