Music phones pass half a billion

A research company says the figure beats the iPod and other personal media players by 300 million units, making phone the most popular portable music device. MultiMedia Intelligence says it expects music phone shipments to reach 941 million units in 2011 - accounting for half of all handsets sold.

The reports also states that the global mobile music content market ringtones, ringback tones, streaming audio and full-track downloads) will hit $6 billion this year. MultiMedia Intelligence defines a music phone as a device with audio codec functionality (MP3, AAC, etc) and an expandable memory card slot.

Motorola is to split into two companies - one selling infrastructure and networking equipment, the other left to try and sell handsets against increasing competition. The split comes as no great surprise. Motorola has been seeking a buyer for its handset unit for months, and the company's news has long been split between optimistic stories about infrastructure wins and downbeat stories about declining handset sales attributed to an inability to compete with Eastern manufacturers. Motorola's handsets are reasonable devices, but the firm's insistence on supporting every software platform has left it with a confused strategy, and lacking the consistency of user experience that has made its competitors successful.

It is possible that with the right CEO a separated handset division could shake itself down, agree on a single software platform and create some spectacular devices. But it's more likely the company will limp around looking for a buyer and trading on previous successes until it's put out of its misery. The split should be completed during 2009, with shares in the mobile division being issued to existing shareholders. How long the mobile division survives after that depends on how radically it can be changed and who ends up making those changes.

Two Dutch companies must return thousands of numeric domain names they got on a first-come-first-served basis from SIDN, the Dutch .nl registry. Numeric domain names are names made up entirely of numbers (eg 1234.nl), or numbers separated by hyphens (eg 12-34.nl). SIDN expected a landrush when it made these domains available late February, but wasn't prepared for domain hijackers, who initially claimed that "we were just being smart".

During the landrush 14,409 unique numeric domains were registered by 298 companies. The most requested domain was 007.nl. Photo sharing company MyAlbum.nl registered 2,579 numeric domains by setting up 35 different mailservers. It got one sixth of the numbers available after two months of preparation and an investment of

Domain On March 14, Bell Canada began throttling peer-to-peer traffic on pipes it rents to third-party ISPs. And it neglected to tell the third-party ISPs. The mega-Canadian telco has been throttling P2P traffic on its own network since October, but this is different matter. One of those third-party ISPs is TekSavvy, a small family-owned company that prides itself on providing customers with internet service that's never throttled. When Bell Canada started throttling TekSavvy traffic, an astute TekSavvy customer realized his BitTorrent client was acting funny and alerted the rest of the world with a post to DSLReports.

This TekSavvy customer had once received internet access straight from Bell Canada. He switched to TekSavvy because he didn't like Bell toying with his P2P traffic. But then he noticed Bell was still toying with his P2P traffic. Recently, my BT download is limited to 30k," he wrote. "No matter if I am opening 1 torrent or 10 torrents at a time, the total download had [sic] never go [sic] over 30k. Before I decided to change to Teksavvy from Bell, I was able to do 50k with Bell's throttle. I [heard] everybody saying how Teksavvy won't throttle your P2P bandwidth and stuff. It work [sic] great for me at the beginning, but I think that is all history now."

It is history. At least for the moment. After several other customers complained about the throttling, TekSavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault confronted Bell, and Bell fessed up. Gradually. "Last Thursday [March 20], we first had discussions with Bell management, and unofficially, they said some load balancing might be going on," Rocky told El Reg. "Then on Tuesday afternoon, they officially told us they were throttling our client base. "They're taking traffic and instead of passing it directly to us, they're moving it to some sort of aggregation point where it gets throttled." Except that Bell Canada doesn't like the word throttling. It prefers "optimizing." "We recently extended our policies of optimizing our network by balancing the load to include our wholesale networks as well," Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo told us.

New UK service Voixio is to offer free national or international phone and video calls to internet users. The catch? For every call you first have to watch an ad or commercial. Voixio was set up by London-based Requestec, which specialises in web 2.0 communication applications, including high definition video calling from within a Flash client. Its team has worked for Nokia, Demon Internet, JP Morgan, and Symbian. The new service is simple to use. There is no need to install software, and the interface - called Zenon - is fully Flash-based and will detect the webcams and microphones available on your computer. Users can make calls to domestic and international landline and mobile telephone numbers, to other Voixio users, or any SIP address. Conference calls between Voixio users are free. Video calling to 3G mobile networks is also possible, and phone calls can be made to standard email addresses.

The service was announced last November at World Telemidia in Prague, but will officially launch on 1 April. The service has been available for internet users to try out, but Voixio has temporally disabled it. "Many people abused the service by getting as many accounts as possible," a spokesman told The Register. "We need to sort that out first." Depending on advertising and destination, a free call lasts at least 15 minutes, though 3G videocalls will be limited to 60 seconds. Extra time can be bought through PayPal. Users will have to submit their sex, age, and interests, while "built-in" geo-location enables advertising to be targeted even further, the company promises. "

Although most ad funded free call projects so far have failed, Voixio believes there is enough interest to attract advertisers.

Indian telecoms secretary Siddhartha Behura has confirmed the country is not seeking a ban on the use of BlackBerrys, as the government continues talks with operators about lawful interception. The suggestion that RIM's emailing handheld might be banned from the subcontinent surfaced last Friday when Tata Teleservices was refused a license to run a BlackBerry service on the grounds that communications were encrypted so couldn't be intercepted.

Tata responded that other operators were already offering the service, so a confused Department of Telecoms fired off letters to the other operators asking them to explain themselves, and set up a meeting to discuss the matter today. There are about 400,000 BlackBerry users in India, and under Indian law the network operator is responsible for letting the security services intercept any communications. But with the BlackBerry services located outside India, that's technically impossible.

Intercepting messages can only be done with RIM's agreement, and so far the Canadian company isn't playing ball. This is part of a wider crackdown on encrypted communications in India which includes asking ISPs to restrict themselves to 40-bit keys for web-based applications, something they are still fighting.The availability of strong encryption has phased most governments at some point, and even in Europe there were attempts to ban its use on security grounds. Eventually the authorities realised a better strategy was to change the law to make forgetting an encryption key illegal, while simultaneously hinting that they could break any encryption if they wanted to anyway.

Generally there are easier ways of accessing secured communications, but putting the service in a different country, as RIM does, makes that a great deal more difficult.

HTC has filed a patent application for a handheld electronic device that combines a multi-directional slider design with a keypad stretched beyond the dimensions of the gadget

Skype has admitted that eBay put a cramp in its style. But it also wants you to know that those days are over. Today at eComm2008, a Silicon Valley geek gathering dedicated to "emerging communications," one geek made the point that Skype hasn't exactly set the world on fire since it was swallowed by eBay back in the fall of 2005. "Skype was the future, the leading edge - and then it went into eBay," said David Isenberg, a former AT&T Labs researcher semi-famous for his paper on "The Rise of the Stupid Network." Then he asked Skype if it had plans for going back to the future. Jonathan Christensen, Skype's general manager for audio and video, was slow to answer. But eventually, he did. "I think that in some ways we stalled [after the eBay acquisition]," he said. "We got wrapped up in the M and A. There's almost always a period of integration where a lot of weird things are tried and some work and some don't, and then there's a re-focus.

"Now, I can say that this is the most exciting period for Skype going forward. The projects that I'm leading, that we're working on for the next two to three years, are ground breaking projects. And that sense of innovation and hard work and startupness is very much alive in the company." As you probably guessed from Christensen's use of business speak like "going forward" and "startupness," he didn't actually tell anyone what these ground breaking projects involve. But thankfully, it looks like they won't involve eBay. "There is less focus at eBay today on finding the place where eBay and Skype intersect on the web, on using mashups to create a new communications paradigm for eBay, and more focus on Skype growing its business and ebay growing its business." It also looks like Skype's "re-focus" will involve some sort of attack on mobile devices. Now that the US airwaves are beginning to open up and the big US carriers are rolling out flat-rate pricing, Christensen believes, the likes of Skype will soon clean up the country's "mobile mess."

"We're seeing a paradigm shift where the smart platforms on the edge end point of the network are what

The Beeb has bagged the rights to broadcast Formula One (F1), having signed an exclusive five-year deal. F1 will return to the Corporation