TalkTalk launches line rental saver

TalkTalk have followed the lead of others - pioneered by BT - in launching a line rental saver product, allowing customers who pay for a full year's line rental up front to get the service for £9.50 per month, an effective saving of £4.30.

Whilst ISP Review focuses on the effective cost that users will then pay for their broadband package, the point is that few users who are looking for a 'value' (i.e. cheap) provider can afford to pay for a whole year up front and it's been implemented so that TalkTalk can make marketing claims in advertising of a lower priced bundle than most new customers will actually be able to come in on.

Sky tells users of closure of backup service

Sky have written to their customers to remind them of the pending closure of the company's backup & storage service Sky Store & Share - in fact given that they had not widely announced the closure when the decision was made this may actually be the first notification that the service's users have received.

In an e-mail sent to their customers today they say the following [click on the image for a larger version]:It's interesting that Sky didn't seem to see the need to apologise to their customers for any inconvenience that the December 1 closure of the service may cause to any of them.

Motorola to axe 800 jobs

Motorola Mobility, the handset manufacturing arm of Motorola that Google are proposing to spend a whopping USD$12.5bn on, have announced that they are to lay off 800 staff as part of a cost saving programme.

The cost saving programme will cost the company around USD$31m as they prepare for the Google takeover, which Motorola's shareholders will vote on on November 17.

The Google purchase still needs regulatory approval before it can complete, and the DoJ for one are looking for more information before they can give it the green light.

BT still talking with music labels on customer offering

Speaking of music!

After the telco confirmed that they were working on coming up with a music service for their customers way back in March this year, BT say that they are still "working with the music labels" on an offering that they intend to run as a not for profit operation - at least in the short term - in order to curb piracy. Hence their plans clearly have a very obvious Digital Economy Act (DEA) overlap.

Whilst competitors launch their own services - Orange in association with Deezer and Virgin Media alongside Spotify - BT seem to be taking their time more and are in deep conversations with rights holders according to a company spokeswoman:

"We are working with the music labels to develop a music service for BT's customers.

We've promised to launch the service without taking any margin ourselves and this should enable the labels to provide a really compelling offer."

Right holders conversations can take forever, as was shown by Spotify's negotiations with labels ahead of their launch in the US - but Spotify would point to their impressive subscriber growth in saying that they were worth persevering with ... and after all, it's not as if providers have much choice as they can't launch any credible mass market service without the labels on board.

BT declined to say when any service might launch.

Virgin launches Spotify deals

After what seems to have been an initial tactical launch of their relationship with music streaming service Spotify, Virgin Media this morning did a full press launch of their offers - which are available to both new and existing customers (when existing customers re-contract).

Virgin put out their news via the standard combination of press release and tweet and Spotify themselves backed it up with a tweet from their own account, which at time of writing has 193k followers:The tweet links to a story on the company blog.

New or re-contracting Virgin Media fixed line broadband customers get 6 months free of Spotify Premium (usually £9.99 per month) as a result of the tie-up between the two companies. New pay monthly mobile punters get a three month voucher and both will also be able to access Spotify via Virgin's connected TV platform TiVo when an app launches on that in the near future.

The two launched their 'perfect duet' proposition with the below YouTube video:
Virgin's executive director of digital entertainment Cindy Rose said of the launch:

"The launch of Spotify on Virgin Media marks a significant milestone for digital entertainment and the way it is enjoyed by consumers. Great digital services are no longer just about fast broadband or the latest TV technology, but increasingly about how people use their services to power and excite their daily lives. Bringing together Virgin Media services with brilliant entertainment such as Spotify is a core part of our ongoing strategy and we're excited to be able to lead the way with such a great partnership."

For their part Spotify's Global Head of Telecom Business Development Andreas Liffgarden added:

"We are thrilled to be partnering with Virgin Media to offer music fans access to one of the biggest music libraries in the world at their fingertips, through broadband, mobile and – for the first time - TiVo. Telcoms companies moving into the music space increases revenue streams to the music industry and provides benefits for fans and artists alike."

Virgin's going big with Spotify comes as Orange do the same with French-owned music streaming service Deezer and is a sign of a more mature paid for music market than the days of when Sky ran their Sky Songs platform, which the company closed earlier this year in the face of poor demand from subscribers.

The announcement has been generally well received by industry commentators.

Chris Cooke of the CMU music news service said:

"It helps the firms automatically boost their subscription numbers overnight.

One would assume that both [Spotify & Deezer] may be looking to sell out or float their stock at some point in the future, and this will build confidence."

Alice Enders of Enders Analysis believes that mobile is the bigger opportunity, however:

"We think the dynamic route to market is the mobile one, like Deezer's with Orange.

Selling music subscriptions to broadband households has the problem that the account holder isn't necessarily the one who listens to the most music.

Free offers often promote experimentation, but it can be hard to get people to dig into their pockets afterwards."

What Ms Enders seems to have not grasped, however, is Spotify's operating model - the service is individual based and hence can be used by any householder and not necessarily the bill payer.

Church reviews ISP investments unless providers curb porn access

The subject of access to pornographic material by UK ISP subscribers is a hot subject at the moment with the country's four biggest ISPs agreeing a code of conduct to keep consumers informed about such content being available online and providing them the tools to block access to such content from their children should parents wish to do so.

The Church of England (CoE) have now entered the debate by saying that they will reconsider the tens of millions that they have invested in the UK's Internet providers (no details have been revealed in to which providers they have a stake in), potentially withdrawing the funds if ISPs do not take further action against online pornography.

The CoE's ethical investment policy means that they are forbidden from investing in firms that fuel problems against which Christians campaign and will re-stoke the fires of the traditional argument from ISPs that they are just carriers (the Mere Conduit defence) of content in the same way that the Royal Mail is not responsible for anything that is sent using their service.

Their rules say that they only invest in media companies who have a "positive influence on society by educating, entertaining and uplifting individual experience" and a spokesman of theirs added:

"Work is already under way developing a new policy on pornography, which will take account of the increasing ease of access via electronic media, for recommendation to the National Investing Bodies."

With a number of high profile cases including the conviction of Vincent Tabak of the murder of Joanne Yeates - Tabak was a heavy user of extreme pornographic websites - expect plenty more rhetoric to come from the church on this one.

BT accelerates faster broadband rollout, creates 520 jobs

BT have announced that their project - being run by their Openreach access division - to make available faster broadband services to two thirds of the country will now be completed a year earlier than planned with the rollout to now complete by 2014 rather than 2015 as per the original plan.

BT will be employing an additional 520 engineers to accelerate the rollout, most of whom will be former armed services personnel - giving them quite a cute PR claim that they can make in parallel.

Company chief executive Ian Livingston said of the news:

"Our roll-out of fibre broadband is one of the fastest in the world and so it is great to be ahead of what was an already challenging schedule."

The mostly FTTC network is what BT's own Retail division run their 'Infinity' faster broadband service over and increasing availability from the current 6m homes (rising to 10m next year) that can get access to services using the network quicker than expected will enable them to further compete with Virgin Media in the faster broadband stakes, and alongside Openreach's plans to double the theoretical maximum speeds using the FTTC infrastructure to 80Mb next year competition really is hotting up.

With the company set to announce their quarterly financial results this Thursday, many will wonder whether the timing of the announcement is designed to draw attention away from any disappointing figures in the market update.

Spotify usage accelerates in the US

Spotify has now passed 2.4m monthly active users in the US as their celebrity endorsed and much advertised launch in the country has proven to be a success - and the scale of their growth can be shown in a Chart of the Day using latest data from measurement firm comScore:The US launch has helped the company's losses widen but with a large proportion of US users coming in on their paid for tiers of service and with gaps to competitor features such as the lack of a BlackBerry application now being closed they are in a good place to succeed in the longer term - but they still have plenty of a way to go to catchup with market leaders iTunes and Pandora in the US market:

iPhone voice recognition fails the Scots

Voice recognition software is notoriously problematic, with in many cases it only working well with West Coast USA accents - i.e. generally those in the area where the firms developing the software are based.

The eclectic mix of UK regional accents can be particularly troublesome, as has been shown by a BBC News item that tests the new Siri voice recognition software for the iPhone4S with the locals in Scotland.

Some of the results are hilarious in the video but it's interesting to see that the long arm of the law is still understood! Quite what Apple can do to fix this or if they even try to is another question.

Virgin to meet Ofcom over BT infrastructure access

Virgin Media's chief financial officer (CFO) has said that the company will meet with telecoms regulator Ofcom to discuss physical access to BT's duct and pole network after BT announced the pricing schedule that they propose that their Openreach access division will put in place for Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA).

Along with TalkTalk and Cisco, Virgin have been one of the partners working with Fujitsu on their plans to roll out a FTTH network using PIA across the Openreach network and Virgin CFO Eamonn O'Hare said alongside their latest financial results last week:

"BT's proposal is a nudge in the right direction. There will be an ongoing tussle back and forth to get economic access."

It is not yet known when the meeting will take place.

Fujitsu have made it clear that they would expect an improvement on the initially proposed PIA pricing before they will be able to economically roll out any network - which would heavily rely on getting a significant chunk of the government's funding for the rollout of faster broadband services where they would not otherwise be economical.

UK launch will put Netflix in the red

Online video on demand site Netflix recently announced that they will launch for UK users in early next year and the company said that they believe that doing so will put them in the red as a business - and hence unsurprisingly the markets reacted negatively to the guidance with their shares falling by more than a quarter on the back of the announcement.

The other factor impacting their shares was that they revised upwards their estimate for the number of customers that they will lose following their recent price rises, which resulted in them losing subscribers in a quarter for the very first time:Netflix have had a troubled quarter in which they announced plans to physically split their online streaming and DVDs by post business - and they subsequently backtracked on the plans given the strength of the reaction to their announcement.

Netflix is the largest streaming service in the US and uses up a massive proportion of North American ISP bandwidth.

Sky chief picked up £7.2m package

The Q3 financial results from Sky revealed that company chief executive Jeremy Darroch picked up a total package worth £7.2m in the last year, which included his full £1.7m bonus and a share package valued at £4.4m as well a 2.5% rise on his basic salary which now stands at £888,000 - or £74,000 per month before tax.

Darroch's package also included a one off £2.2m non cash (i.e. shares) retention bonus while they were the target of the (ultimately failed) proposed takeover by News Corporation as Sky apparently wanted (according to a source) "a continued focus on performance and continuity of management" whilst the takeover was still on the table.

Sky punters hit by massive outage

Sky customers outside the company's own network area - so those on BT's Wholesale Broadband Connect network - have been hit by a massive outage causing service disruption to them across a plethora of different STD code areas.

The outage was only of a short duration to the customers (around 30 minutes), who were affected in the following areas according to Sky's help forum:

01224 01236 01250 01289 01294 01307 01309 013122 013144 013145 013155 013166 013167 01324 01334 01343 01349 01355 01356 01357 01382 01383 01387 014122 014133 014134 014135 014155 014157 014177 014184 014188 014194 014195 01434 01436 01463 01465 01475 01496 01505 01506 01542 01546 01555 01557 01563 01573 01576 01592 01595 01620 01665 01671 01674 01698 01738 01764 01768 01770 01786 01796 01807 01821 01828 01835 01847 01851 01855 01856 01877 01887 01890 01896 019151 019158 01950 01988 0282073 0282563 0282564 0282565 0282588 0282766 0282826 0282827 0283754 0283887 0284273 0284484 0287083 0287128 0287129 0287130 0287136 0287188 0287776 0288556 0288676 0289048 0289074 0289083 0289084 0289188 0289074 0289083 0289084 0289188

19% of Sky's 3.485m broadband customers are still on the BT network, hence the overall base of Sky Broadband Connect is something in the region of 660k punters.

BT screws up cable theft repair

Consumers in Surrey have been getting calls from strangers after BT engineers screwed up the repair work after cable theft, connecting homes to the wrong landline numbers.

The work was undertaken after hundreds of metres of the company's copper cables were stolen in Wanborough Hill in the county (taking down phone lines and broadband access), and in one case someone trying to call a relative in the area was instead connected to a fax machine!

BT irked their customers even more by requiring them to report the issue online - which of course they couldn't do as their broadband was down.

A BT spokesman asked anyone still affected to get in touch with them and said:

"During complex repairs such as this there can be instances where individual lines can be connected incorrectly.

We are working on a handful of residual faults caused by this cable theft."

ISPs launch parental control code of practice

The UK's four biggest ISPs - TalkTalk, Sky, Virgin Media and BT - have announced their code of practice on parental control in response to the Bailey Review into the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of childhood.

Under the code, which the government unveiled to much fanfare and with a number of misleading statements earlier in the month, ISPs have signed up to better informing and educating parents about the problems of pornographic content online and providing them with the tools to better keep their children safe online.

The objectives of the code have been outlined in the joint press release announcing it:

• Increase awareness of the availability of parental controls.
• Present new customers with an enforced choice as to whether or not to use the tools (network or PC-based controls) provided by their ISP free of charge to filter access to the internet ("Active Choice") at the point of purchase or installation/activation of their internet service.
• Provide all customers with regular reminders (at least annually) linking to help or advice on using parental controls through a wide range of customer communications channels.
• Make it easier for NGOs, schools, child protection groups and others to educate parents on internet safety, by being clearer about tools available for free from each ISP.
• Promote clear, easily accessible channels for parents to report problems with parental controls to the associated ISPs.
• Work together to produce customer research that provides Government, Parliament and policy makers with a deeper insight into customer awareness and perception of the tools available to families to tailor their online experience.
• Work closely with the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) to promote clear, accessible channels for parents to report a suspected incident of abuse or inappropriate online behaviour.
• Assess emerging technologies and parental control solutions with wider stakeholders and provide regular updates to UKCCIS about the relative merits of these developments.
• Publish an annual update against the measures outlined in this Code, with the first report being made in October 2012.

Hailing the new code communications minister Ed Vaizey said:

"I am pleased to see industry is taking action to help parents protect their children online. The new code of conduct is a real, practical step to ensure households make a choice about parental controls when opening a new internet account. I look forward to continuing to work with the ISPs and the rest of the industry to help children enjoy the benefits of the internet safely."

Some of his colleagues are less in agreement with him, with one clueless Tory MP having called for users to be forced to opt in should they wish to access pornographic content online - despite that being technically impossible and prohibitively expensive to do.

Fraudsters ordered to repay Virgin £400k

Two men who were convicted of a scam selling fraudulent set top boxes have been ordered to repay Virgin Media £200,000 apiece - i.e. £400,000 in total - from the proceeds of their crime.

The two Blackburn residents were part of a gang of four who have been imprisoned for a total of just under 14 years for the illegal selling of set top boxes that had been ripped off so that buyers could access all channels and will face a further 30 months behind bars apiece if they do not cough up within 6 months.

Virgin Media group security head John White said:

"Purchasing unlawful equipment such as this only serves to fund organised crime and we will continue to investigate and prosecute individuals and groups connected with this type of fraud."

The other two members of the gang have already been ordered to pay the cable guys £170,000 from the proceeds of their crime.

Google planning European fibre network

Google are considering the deployment of a fibre network in Europe according to the company's senior vice president David Drummond.

The company have commenced the deployment of a FTTH network in the US near Stanford University, with the Californian consumers reporting speeds of 150Mb downstream / 92Mb upstream using the economy of scale of having the area close to their own corporate network connectivity and are working on doing the same in other areas such as in Kansas City.

Drummond did not reveal any further details on their plans or whether they would be trying to get hold of some of the European funding that Neelie Kroes is working on putting aside for faster broadband connectivity in Europe.

Actor in major Direct Message gaffe on Twitter

I'll have to admit that I had never heard of American actor Rainn Wilson, and it wasn't until I looked up Wikipedia that I saw he was in the US version of The Office - their local version of the programme that made Britain's unfunniest man Ricky Gervais famous.

Like many others I am now aware of him though thanks to his massive Twitter gaffe last week, when he mistakenly sent an intended Direct Message to his main Twitter feed rather than secretly to his assistant disparaging Mexican restaurant chain Del Taco ... which he then apparently went on to promote on his Twitter feed in exchange for a USD$12,000 payment:The backtracking Wilson is now claiming that it's a hoax, but if not it would have to be one of the biggest #fail examples of Direct Messaging on Twitter since cricketer Kevin Pietersen inadvertently posted one to his followers to reveal that he had been dropped from the England cricket team last year.

BT must block Newzbin2 by November 9

BT were last week given a fortnight to implement a block of Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 subsequent to the court case that the Motion Picture Association (MPA) won requiring the site to be blocked from being accessed by users of the UK's largest ISP (and presumably the block must also be applied against users of their Plusnet 'value' brand).

As you may recall the MPA were awarded the case they brought in July under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act subsequent to the order being passed on how the blocking mechanism will work and who will meet the costs. The blocking will use the same 'Cleanfeed' mechanism that BT has in place to prevent URLs on the Child Abuse Images (CAI) list of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) from being casually discovered by web users and the High Court ruled that BT must meet the costs of the blocking, rejecting their claim that rights holders requesting blocks should have to pay the price.

BT estimates that the initial cost of implementing the block is £5,000 and the clock runs out on November 9 for them to have implemented. Is anyone out there a BT customer and can confirm whether the site has been blocked yet?

Of course such blocking is only ever going to slow down the amount of piracy going on thanks to sites like this facilitating finding pirated content easier, and in the case of Newzbin2 they have already launched a client to circumvent the web blocking.

Register blunders in revealing 46k e-mail addresses

Technology news site The Register has blundered by revealing the names and e-mail addresses of 46,524 of their mailing list subscribers in an e-mail to 3,521 users of the site.

The site has apologised for Monday's error, which they have attributed to the e-mailing having been done in a hurried manner and not following normal process. They have already alerted the Information Commissioner.

Amazon profits dive, Kindle Fire ramping up

Amazon's profits in Q3 took a massive dip, dropping 73% (compared to the same quarter a year previous) to USD$63m despite revenues being up 44% to USD$10.9bn.

Much of the profit decline was down to the company heavily investing in the production of their new Kindle Fire tablets, which they will be at best initially covering their costs on as they seek to take on the Apple iPad fully head on in the tablet market.

Speaking alongside the results chief executive Jeff Bezos said:

"Based on what we're seeing with Kindle Fire pre-orders, we're increasing capacity and building millions more than we'd already planned."

Amazon expects in Q4 - which includes their busiest season of the year, the holiday season - to report somewhere between an operating loss of USD$200m and an operating profit of USD$250m as they continue to heavily invest in Fire production.

The company's shares dropped 12% on the back of the results announcement, with the figures coming in materially below analyst expectations.

Update 06/11: Here's a useful summary of the trend of the company's financial performance that shows just how much they are having to invest to maintain revenues:

Rugby League now promoting Plusnet

BT-owned Plusnet have made a song and dance about their Yorkshire roots and hence it made sense for them to link up with Rugby League as a sport, given the regional popularity of what is often colloquially known as 'the Northern game'.

The provider has previously offered new joiners tickets to games and now the shoe (rugby boot?) is on the other foot with the RFL having e-mailed their newsletter subscribers to promote Plusnet as a provider for their readers:
[Click on the image for a larger version]

The deal is the provider's current headline marketing offer with a draw for signed merchandise thrown in on top and anyone interested can sign up here on the Plusnet website. The offer applies until the end of November.

YouView sacks entire marketing team

The entire marketing, public relations and research teams at YouView have been sacked, which on the face of it seems an odd thing to do in the run up to the connected TV service's launch next year.

Of course Lord Sugar was brought in to 'kick the tyres' of the service before its launch and hence this story is a bit of a gift for headline writers, who naturally cannot resist the temptation to use an Apprentice-style You're Fired headline, but it does seem a curious move to bin what must have been a terribly performing marketing team.

In a statement about the firings YouView said that "do not reflect a change to our business strategy and we remain on track to launch early next year", and one source claims that the launch will be around the middle of next year:

"It will be launched before the Olympics but there are currently fears it will be really expensive. A second version is expected to be out before the end of 2012 and that is what many companies not already involved will be looking at, when the price has come down."

It has been suggested that YouView consortium members TalkTalk and BT will eventually look to sell boxes for less than £100 as they try to compete with Virgin Media's connected TV service TiVo and further offerings from Sky.

IHS Screen Digest analyst Dan Cryan commented on the development:

"It is an odd time to remove the marketing team in the run-up to launch."

He added though that "if they had not been getting results, maybe it is exactly the right time." Those leaving the business depart at the end of the month - in other words, Monday!

Virgin Media Q3 Results

With the financial results season in full swing, Virgin Media were the latest of the providers to post their Q3 Results this morning [PDF].

The headline story of the results is the performance of their TiVo connected TV product in terms of the number of customers taking it - Virgin confirmed that 220k of their customers were using the TiVo service as of yesterday, up from 54k in June. Around a third of TiVo net additions were from customers new to Virgin Media.

Virgin added 19.1k customers (net) to their broadband service in the quarter (24.3k additions in cable, 5.2k loss of DSL customers). The number is down from additions of 35.1k in the same quarter last year and their overall broadband base now stands at 4.3336 million customers (4.0729m on cable, 260.7k on DSL) as they maintain their position as the second largest provider in the market (in terms of subscriber numbers) behind BT.

54% of new subscribers in the quarter took a service of 30Mb or higher (what is defined as Next Generation Broadband by the government's Broadband Delivery UK faster broadband investment vehicle) - well up from 28% in the same quarter a year previous. Over a million Virgin Media customers are on speeds of 20Mb or faster (26% of the cable broadband base), over half a million are on 30Mb or faster and 187,000 are on 50Mb or 100Mb - approximately twice the volume compared to the same quarter in 2010.

They also believe that the recent guidance on how broadband must be advertised in the UK from April next year will help their business:

Recent guidance from the Committees of Advertising Practice (“CAP”) should bring greater clarity to consumers on speed claims in broadband marketing. Whilst the CAP ruling stipulates that 10% or more of customers need to receive an advertised speed, Virgin Media is committed to leading the industry and only advertises speeds that at least 90% of our customers actually receive. By contrast, DSL competitors will have to change the way they advertise their broadband services, and we think this will further differentiate our services and highlight the quality of our broadband to consumers.

Virgin also announced their intention to spend up to £250m of the approximately £348m they received from the sale of UKTV to Scripps on share buybacks before the end of 2012 - which should return financial gains back to current shareholders and increase the company's share price as they cancel the shares they buyback. On current stock price this would result in the purchase of around 12% of the company's equity. They did not reveal what the remainder of the proceeds of the UKTV sale will be spent on.

Quarterly revenue for the cable guys was up 2.2% to £1bn and in a statement company chief executive Neil Berkett said:

"Our results show that we're successfully serving what is a rapidly emerging market for better quality services. The demand for superior connectivity is accelerating as more people, regardless of their circumstances, recognise the best digital technology is worth paying more for.

Over a quarter of our entire base now subscribe to speeds of 20Mb or higher and a record number of customers joined us on superfast broadband speeds during the period with. In TV, we have quadrupled the number of households using our game-changing TiVo service and customer advocacy for this product is very strong.

We are increasing the value and mix of our customer base as people add or move to higher tier services and as new joiners increasingly take up higher value products. This, along with subscriber growth, has increased revenue and we have had further substantial increases in free cash flow and OCF. Our strong and sustained financial performance allows us to continue to invest in giving our customers more value and further differentiating our range of market leading products."

Initial reviews from analysts are positive, with much focus from them unsurprisingly on the TiVo performance.

Everything Everywhere boss admits company has "silly name", reports Q3 Results

Everything Everywhere (EE) new head honcho Olaf Swantee admitted that the company had a "silly name" in to The Telegraph this morning on the same day that the company announced their Q3 financial results.

Swantee, who axed 6 of the company's senior managers on his first day in the job, has initiated a review of the company's three brands - the other being the UK divisions of T-Mobile and Orange - but will not disclose the results of the review until the end of the month.

The company uses the Everything Everywhere brand in locations where both of their other products have a retail presence and Swantee said of their parent company:

"Everything Everywhere is not a brand, it's a silly name with a stopping effect."

He also emphasised his belief that the future of the company is in developing a customer service culture that sets their business out from the pack, and that the economic conditions are helping out their T-Mobile 'value' brand in terms of customer growth.

Everything Everywhere revealed announced their Q3 financial results today, and things are finally looking up a bit for their fixed line broadband service (that operates under the Orange brand), which has seen a quarterly decline in customer volumes for every reporting period since Q3 2007.

In the three months until the end of September the company reported a net loss in their fixed line broadband customer base of 3k customers (-10k in the previous quarter, -38k in Q3 2010), taking the overall subscriber base down to 713k - down from a one time high of well over a million customers.

However, it's not all bad for them as in September they actually saw their overall broadband customer base grow for the first time in a single month since their all time high in Q3 2007 as a result of the refresh of their packages to offer broadband for £5 per month for the company's own mobile customers - one of the lowest price points in the market.

EE also reported that 99.8% of their broadband customers have now been migrated over to the BT Wholesale network (details on the deal done to outsource their network operations to BT can be found here), which "paves the way for full decommissioning of legacy network by year end".

The 'legacy' network is the LLU one they built themselves before they decided to outsource their network to BT Wholesale, and they have already seen an improvement as a result of the outsourcing with significantly better results in customer satisfaction surveys.

The press release of EE's financial results can be found here and the investor presentation here.

Oracle to spend $1.5bn on RightNow

Oracle have announced their intention to purchase cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) software provider RightNow Technologies for USD$1.5bn, with the agreed price coming in at a 20% premium to the closing price of RightNow's shares on Friday.

The deal is the biggest one that Oracle have undertaken since their whopping USD$7.4bn purchase of Sun Microsystems last year and reinforces Oracle's own commitment to cloud computing, which they had previously marked by launching their own Oracle Public Cloud.

In a statement announcing the deal Oracle said:

"RightNow's leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle's Public Cloud."

Update 26/10: Oracle expects the transaction to close late this year or early 2012.

Spotify announces deal with Dutch provider

Spotify have announced a link up with Dutch ISP KPN, whose subscribers will get the Spotify Premium top tier of the music streaming service when they take one of KPN's 'all-in'one' packages (a term which relates to KPN's higher tier packages on either copper or fibre networks).

The deal is the latest ISP tie-up that Spotify have signed and follows one that they have agreed with Virgin Media in the UK.

More info can be found here on KPN's website if you speak Dutch - it so happens that I don't.

Phorm raises £30m more in funding

Controversial contextual advertising firm Phorm - which now portrays itself as a 'web personalisation' business - has successfully secured an additional £30m of funding to further expand their business globally.

You may recall that Phorm effectively fled to Brazil when their attempts to launch their advertising exchange in the UK were scuppered under the weight of privacy concerns following their stealth trials with BT and the funding will cover a forecasted monthly spend of £1.1m next year as they plan to launch in China and at least one southern European country in early 2012.

Phorm is also claiming that they are in talks with ISPs in other countries about launching with them, but given their spend and the money they have already attracted they're going to need to start generating some profits soon to stop them going belly up.

60% of Netflix views are for TV, site to launch in the UK

Living in the UK you can easily miss out on how big a deal Netflix is in the online video on demand (VoD) stakes - after all they are the biggest single consumer of bandwidth in North America, where the UK style model of TV channels having their own online players is less prevalent when compared to aggregated VoD hubs.

As the name of the firm suggests the site grew out of cinematic content but things are very much trending towards TV content being watched over the site as their content head honcho Ted Sarandos revealed at a conference in France.

Up to 60% of content views on Netflix is now TV programming which is leading to the company buying content directly from distributors and producers rather than the TV networks. Sarandos said:

"Maybe we will start to premiere multiple episodes so you can do the binge-watching from day one."

The most popular shows being streamed via sites such as Netflix and Hulu are drama series.

Netflix has also revealed that they will launch in the UK and Ireland early next year with the company saying in a statement:

"Further details about the service, including pricing, content and supported devices, will be announced closer to launch."

How the customer service industry is using social media

French-based customer service outsourcer Teleperformance held a conference last week in which the challenges of social media customer service were discussed in some great depth, with Huffington Post contributor Mark Hillary chairing a discussion about use of social channels for customer service.

He cites how the UK's two biggest telcos - BT and Virgin Media - are using social media channels to help out customers, citing his personal experience in deal with @BTCare on Twitter:

If you write a comment on Twitter complaining about your BT broadband speed, a few minutes later @btcare will get in touch and ask how they can help. Super agents with a wide variety of skills are out there monitoring the social networks and jumping in to help customers when they are seen or heard complaining about BT services.

And it works. I didn't find out about the BT customer service model from a textbook, I complained about my broadband online and received immediate service from a knowledgeable agent. Contrast this with the pain of calling a customer service centre and enduring the 'Interactive' Voice Response (IVR) system... press 1 to hold longer, press 2 if you are fed up of this music...

Hillary adds an example quoted by Virgin Media at the conference on how the online and offline worlds have been linked up by the company to create a great experience for a customer reporting problems:

The team at @virginmedia has a policy of responding to everyone who mentions the company online. Even if the messages are negative, Virgin Media sees it as important to counter their critics with sardonic replies. One regular online critic of their cable TV service was invited to come down to their office for a coffee - he declined the invitation, but stopped posting further criticism.

One mother posted a recent message on Twitter telling Virgin Media how her day was ruined because the TV service was not working and her two-year-old could not understand why she was not able to watch Peppa Pig. The Virgin team not only rushed out an engineer to help, they ensured he was carrying a cuddly Peppa Pig toy for the upset customer.

What a great thing to do - and all it takes is a bit of the human touch!

The likes of Comcast (with @ComcastCares) have long been the industry benchmarks and it's good to see UK companies now making a name for themselves with helping out customers on social media.

[One of the real gnarly issues in doing so though is how to ensure that you are not treating customers using social media channels with special treatment just because they are so visible, a subject that has also been covered in an interesting blog quoting We Are Social's Simon Collister.]

Teleperformance's head honcho Alistair Niederer (Twitter feed here) also explained to Hillary how social media is changing his own business:

"We recruit new people using Facebook and I have really started getting into Twitter this year. There is a community of people out there working in or advising my industry and I can just chat to them directly using Twitter. Why would I send out a newsletter to the industry analysts when I can tweet the people who are interested in my business directly? They probably wouldn't read the newsletter, but if I have a conversation with someone then it helps us both to understand each other."

Small businesses warned off Office 365

Microsoft have made quite a fuss about the launch of the cloud version of their Microsoft Office suite of applications (including the hosted version of their Exchange Server for e-mail) - Office 365 - as they seek to catchup in a market where Google have been operating for some time with Google Apps.

It's often said that the devil's in the detail, and boy does that seem to be the case for Office 365 going by the experience of one person who has been deploying Office 365 on behalf of a small business.

The consultant received a call from the company he was working with to be told that they had a rather major problem - all attempts to send e-mails were bouncing with the error message 'Message could not be sent—try again later' coming back to the sender.

Upon digging into why further, he came to a staggering conclusion in finding out about a restriction of the service:

Small business accounts are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. Office 365 technical support was unable to tell me when the limitation is reset ... They also said it is very difficult to upgrade from a small business to enterprise Office 365 account. I would need to create a whole new account and migrate the domain and users, so that is not an option.

Terrifyingly that's not a limit per message, it's a limit of recipients per day. If you e-mail me twice in a day that counts as two as he goes on to add:

If I send a message to you and Cc: Mary Jo Foley, that would take up two of my allotted recipients. If I later in the day sent another message to just you, it would take up another recipient, even though I'd already sent a message to you. Unfortunately, 500 recipients when viewed in this fashion really isn't that many.

That really is a staggeringly stupid way of implementing restrictions on a system, Microsoft. When queried they claim that it's an anti spam measure:

Every online service provider must limit and constrain its service based on limitations such as the amount of disk space currently in its datacenters or bandwidth currently available and also enforce behavioral thresholds which prevent inappropriate use of the service by malicious users or criminals. This is true for any form of web-based service.

In the world of email, one of the thresholds that must be enforced is the amount of email that is sent through the system by any one user or organization in order to combat spam, mass-mailing worms & viruses. To ensure that all users experience the level of performance, email delivery expediency and client connectivity behavior that they expect, we must determine what usage typifies behavior of a spammer, for example, and put controls in place to prevent such inappropriate use. We ask customers with legitimate needs for a service that exceeds these thresholds or must go beyond these limitations to contact support so that we can best meet their specific needs.

As ever with Microsoft, of course users can upgrade to a bundle that allows them to send to more recipients at additional cost - but with measures like this it's making decision making for those looking to deploy cloud solutions much easier ... they're just going to head to Google Apps.

Faster broadband delivery targets announced

Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), the vehicle that allocates funding for faster broadband rollouts within the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, has announced their delivery targets in order to be able to meet the government's targets for the UK having the best faster broadband infrastructure (defines as delivering speeds of >24Mb) in Europe and having plugged all so called 'not spots' where speeds of at least 2Mb cannot currently be achieved.

The announcement clarifies that it's May 2015 when the government wants these targets met and ThinkBroadband has handily summarised their delivery targets in a useful table:[Click on the image for a larger version]

BDUK allocates the government's £530m (which could extent to £830m with an additional £300m to potentially follow post 2015) of monies for the rollout of faster broadband services and plugging 'not spots' in areas where it would otherwise not be commercially viable to do so. Whilst they provide funding they do not run the projects themselves, that role being down to local authorities to pick up the baton on.

Saudi prince to invest in Twitter?

Having recently completed a funding round which company chief executive Dick Costolo confirmed valued them at "an even USD$8bn", Twitter are now seemingly set to attract further funding from the investment vehicle of Saudi Arabian prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

The prince's Kingdom Holding is said to have had talks with at least one of the micro blogging service's founders about investing something between USD$200m and USD$300m in Twitter, which would give them a stake of something in the region of 3% in the social media company.

Kingdom Holding already owns stakes in Apple, News Corporation and Time Warner. When queried Twitter did not comment on the rumour.

Google to buy Yahoo!?

Here's a rumour that I didn't expect to see in the ongoing saga of what will happen to Yahoo! as a result of the company's strategic review - the potential that they may be purchased by their arch rival Google.

It's reported that Google have spoken to at least two private equity firms about them helping them bankroll a deal for Yahoo!, but it is also difficult to see how any deal would be allowed to go ahead on competition grounds, particularly in the US where the pair are the top two search providers in the domestic market.

Of course nothing may come of it but it's a fascinating thought!

Based on current share price Yahoo! is worth something in the region of USD$20bn.

Software rights holders call for toucher European piracy sanctions

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), the US lobbying group that includes massive software firms such as Apple, Microsoft and Adobe as members, has called on European regulators to put in place tougher sanctions against software piracy.

They claim that about 35% of software deployed on computers across Europe has been pirated in every year since 2007 and that USD$13.5bn has been lost to the industry because of it in what is yet another example of that false assumption that rights holders state to over exaggerate piracy - that every single pirated item would have instead been purchased at the recommended retail price had the individual not pirated it. This is clearly complete and total tosh.

The BSA's legal affairs manager Warren Weertman said:

"Lump sum damages would act more as a deterrent than having two actuaries fight it out in a costly court case.

It's a vicious circle where the damages aren't deterrent enough."

Baker & McKenzie LLP partner Ben Allgrove emphasised the challenges to rights holders:

"Most EU countries do not have statutory damages and right holders are forced to prove actual loss.

There is a material difference between monetary awards in the U.S. and many other markets."

The European Union is currently considering changes to the continent's intellectual property rules, so expect plenty more lobbying both in the public eye and behind the scenes from rights holders.

Using social media for product development and collaboration

Here's an interesting blog about how Canadian e-commerce startup Shopify have used social media internally to break down departmental silos and improve product development by dishing out cash bonuses for great ideas that can be used to improve the business and their products.

The company developed their own internal platform dubbed 'UNICORN' - which is similar to Twitter - and all of their employees have seemingly adopted it now as an integral part of their day to day working life:

The UNICORN system is now capable of tracking every aspect of a typical performance review. Managers (or wizards) can communicate with their direct reports (apprentices) prior to the meeting, fill in goals (or quests) and incorporate other information that will be used in a more formal review. When employees finish tasks, they’re given "experience points," which they’ll soon be able to use to buy cool stuff for their avatars (such as a mustache), stealing a page from game theory to appeal to employees' competitive zeal.

All this resulted in a group of genuinely happy, incredibly loyal employees. Shopify has been around for just about seven years and they have almost no turnover. And although a lot of that has to do with their existing culture, employee reaction to UNICORN has been incredibly positive.

One of the biggest upsides of the system is the idea that accomplishments can be shared with everyone throughout the company, not just your direct supervisor.

With so many companies now investing significant amounts in external, customer facing social networks it shows the benefits that they can drive for internal communications, product development and employee engagement also. Fascinating case study.

Ofcom finding piracy code "particularly challenging"

Ofcom have reported at a Westminster eForum that they are finding it "particularly challenging" to finalise a code of practice to enforce the anti piracy measures within the Digital Economy Act (DEA) with the challenges apparently ranging from how they will define an ISP and a subscriber to which ISPs the code should cover - in other words, should it be them all or just the big ones that dominate the market in terms of subscriber volumes?

The telecoms regulator is also having difficulty in establishing what should be a good level of evidence given that the approach favoured by the rights holders of targeting the account holder paying for a service has been widely discredited given how easy it is to spoof an IP Address and how many unsecured wireless networks there are out there.

TalkTalk's strategy and regulation head honcho Andrew Heaney said of the approach that rights holders favour:

"The way the DEA works is it's an indiscriminate dragnet. In attempting to target and deter infringers, it will catch innocent subscribers ... and to add insult to injury, [the accused are] going to have to pay £20 to have an appeal. It's stacked against us."

At the same forum rights holders took the opportunity to have a go at BT and TalkTalk for their judicial review against the piracy measures in the DEA - which is back on following an appeal - and hailed Sky and Virgin Media for not taking legal measures against it.

Richard Mollet of the Publishers Association said that the latter two were "looking at ways in which we can develop voluntary solutions on things like site blocking".

Yahoo! swaps! links! for! positive! stories!

The shadier side of search has been shown up in an e-mail sent on behalf of Yahoo! by their digital marketing agency where they promised reporters links and improved SEO results if they posted positive articles about a news service that the search engine has launched in association with Facebook.

TechCrunch has posted a copy of the e-mail, which does show sharp marketing practices at their worst:

Dear Sarah,

My name is [redacted] and I work for Yahoo!'s digital marketing agency. We've been tasked with finding influencers to feature in a campaign around an announcement made at F8 a few weeks ago. We think you're writing on Tech Crunch is great and that you reach an audience with a natural tendency to share and discover new things with their friends.

The F8 announcement was about a new product from Yahoo and Facebook called Yahoo! News Activity. For the next couple of weeks we will be featuring prominent bloggers as a part of our new 'Featured Reader' campaign. We want to be able to show the feature in action by featuring one of your contributors!

Here’s how it works. As a 'Featured Reader' in the campaign, you would receive:

-Prominent placement on the Yahoo! News Facebook (1.3+ million fans) including a photo, description, and quote.
-A featured placement for your blog and one blog post in rotation on the Yahoo! News site – the #1 news site on the web – gaining you approximately 500,000 impressions
-Links back to your site

In exchange, we would ask that you:

-Try out our product, which enables Facebook friends to share and discover articles they read on Yahoo! News
-Talk about your participation as a post on your blog (could also be a badge or a link)
-Tweet and/or post to Facebook about your participation on the day you are a Featured Reader

You can check out the Facebook campaign we launched here: http://www.facebook.com/yahoonews?sk=app_137925272967648. It includes influencers like Andrew Gibbs of The Dieline and Matt Mullenweg who created WordPress.

You can learn more about the feature and read coverage about the announcement here:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/yahoo-news-teams-up-with-facebook-to-curate-content-from-your-friends/

Offering incentives to cover particular news stories is not new in the world of blogging - but for this to be sent to journalists in such a brazen way is asking for such practices to be exposed.

The man behind the social media giants

Wired has published a fascinating profile - that the man himself has co-operated with - of Yuri Milner, the founder of Digital Sky Technologies, and a serial investor in social media firms since the Russian stunned the world with his initial investment in Facebook in 2009.

At the time the world was stunned with a USD$200m investment that valued Facebook at USD$10m, but as the social network approaches their IPO next year it looks like a steal - particularly given that the initial investment gave him the right of first refusal, something that of course he took up when the opportunity came earlier this year.

Milner's Russian investment vehicle has since taken up stakes in other tech firms such as Zynga, Groupon and Twitter and Milner explains his particular attraction to social media as being due to the amount of content that is created by users for free that others then access, creating massive advertising opportunities.

The profile also reveals that Milner's firm have invested more than USD$1bn in Chinese firms in the last year, which isn't bad for a man who started out by selling recycled computers on street corners on the black market.