Virgin to upgrade network in Brighton and Hove

Virgin Media have announced the upgrade of their network in the Brighton and Hove area to resolve some network capacity problems at peak times in the area.

Over the next four months they are adding additional capacity in the area to ensure all customers can get their fair share of bandwidth - and ahead of the company's speed doubling programme.

A company spokesman said that the issues were down to a small number of "incredibly heavy users" who are affecting the service of other customers as a result of their overly aggressive use of their broadband connections and added:

"To help address this, we're upgrading our network in Brighton.

Improvements are being rolled out at the moment and customers will start to see the benefits gradually over the coming weeks."

The company's speed doubling programme gets into full swing next month and will result in their top speeds increasing to 120Mb.

Google launches controversial search shakeup

Google have launched a controversial update to their search engine (more info on their blog here) which includes more personal information in search results, using a tight integration from Google+ within 'Search plus Your World' - but not any social media content from rivals such as Twitter (who they have of course worked with closely before) and Facebook.

Launching the new service with the customary YouTube video, it's clear that it's a major overhaul to their approach to social search:
It's of little surprise that the launch has generated much comment given their position of preferring their own social network in the results in a world where Facebook is becoming a search engine in its own right and Twitter is so popular for content sharing.

In a statement Twitter said:

"As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter. As a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users."

Microsoft TV on hold

Reports claim that Microsoft have put on hold their plans for an online subscription TV service, leaving the field free for a head on head fight between the offerings from great rivals Apple and Google.

Microsoft's plans for a smart TV service were said to have been shelved after they had conversations with rights holders about access to their content according to a one senior media executive who told Reuters:

"They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said 'ooh ah, that's expensive'.

It doesn't mean they won't be back in another iteration. We'll have to wait and see."

The service was said to include Kinect-style functionality that would allow voice and motion control to change channels so the more gimmicky out there will be disappointed at the news, on which Microsoft declined to comment.

Sky Q4 Results

Sky were the first of the broadband providers to announce their fourth quarter (of 2011) financial results this morning, and in a week where they announced their fibre plans, the expansion of Sky Anytime+ to non Sky broadband providers and the launch of their own rival to Netflix they also reported a strong increase in their broadband subscriber base thanks to the deep discounting and massive marketing spend to promote offers such as the £100 M&S vouchers they were offering new joiners towards the end of last year.

In the quarter they posted net additions of 166k customers (down 19% on the same quarter in 2010) to take their overall broadband customer base to 3.651m, 218k of which only take a broadband offering from the provider (up 60k in the quarter).

Key to the customer base growth is the expansion in their own network, opening up homes to be able to take their 'free' broadband offering for the first time. In the quarter they LLU unbundled a further 175 exchanges to take the coverage of their network to 82% of all UK households - and the number will increase to 88% by June 2013.

93% of their broadband users are now on Sky's own network rather than the more expensive BT Wholesale offering in areas where their network does not cover.

They also updated on the usage of their Sky Go multiscreen offering - it was used by 1.5m of their customers in December and 2.5m have used it across all platforms in the 5 months since it was launched.

Overall Sky reported a 16% growth in half year profits compared with the second half of 2010, the company posting an overall operating profit for the half year of £601m, with profits also continuing to be powered by reductions in operating costs as the company continues their efficiency drive - interestingly (given their marketing history) spending less on marketing in the second half of 2011 (£541m) than they did a year previous (£613m).

Operating costs were also improved as a result of Sky needing less installation and call centre staff as they improved services, giving them the headroom to bring more of those functions in house rather than outsourced and to invest in better training for their front line teams - as emphasised in their investor deck:The press release of the results can be found here and the investor presentation here [both PDFs].

TalkTalk and O2 increase prices

With the new year price rises from both TalkTalk and O2 have been announced as the industry looks to buck recessionary trends - the providers having backed up previous increases towards the end of last year from BT and others.

TalkTalk, who added £1.20 to line rental last October, increased both the cost of daytime calls and their call connection fee earlier this month and their price increase site has revealed that further price increases for calls to some 118 directory enquiry numbers will come from Valentine's Day (showing the love!).

With the increases affecting something in the region of 3 million customers on their 'Essentials' and 'Plus' bundles, the impact of the increases (both in terms of revenues and of any lost subscribers) will flow through to the company's first quarter financial results which we should expect to see in around three months time.

O2 for their part are from March 1 adding a staggering £3 per month - that's a 30% increase! - to the line rental cost for some of their customers, capitalising on the punters that they picked up when they launched the service at a discounted price in the first place two years ago.

Any customers taking a fixed line from the company before March 1 will get a £1.50 discount on line rental for a period of 12 months, but with the company having reported a fixed line telco base of 182k punters in their Q3 2011 results it's going to generate a heck of a lot of additional revenue for them - and doing nothing to address their waning customer base.

O2's business strategy is now focused around the cross selling of fixed line broadband and telephony services to their mobile customer base, a plan that will not be helped by price rises that make their bundle offerings more expensive (and considering their line rental will now be £13 per month compared to £12.25 for Sky for example).

Is it bye bye Bebo or is it just down?

There's oodles of confusion as to what's going on at youth focused social network Bebo, which is currently down but has been reported as being closed down for good.

Those attempting to access the site are currently just seeing a server not found error like the below:
The site, which was sold by AOL to Criterion Capital Partners at a massive USD$840m loss in 2010, was first reported as having died for good on Twitter by founder Michael Birch, who tweeted:

"Am super sad that Bebo has actually gone. Some very fun times with very cool people. #RIPbebo - keep sharing that luv!"

He added to the confusion by quickly posting another update though:

"Hold the press (too late for that). Bebo should be coming back in a matter of hours. #LongLiveBebo"

Unspecified technical problems have apparently resulted in the site - which has been massively eclipsed by Facebook despite attempted relaunches - being taken down for maintenance. Whether it comes back is the next question.

Sky Anytime+ expanding to all broadband providers

It's been a busy week in terms of broadband announcements from Sky, with their launch of a connected TV service to rival Netflix and Lovefilm and finally revealing their fibre hand.

Sky have also announced that their Sky Anytime+ video on demand service which has up until now only been available to their own broadband punters will be extended to their TV customers who have another broadband provider by this Easter as they seek to provide more and more services to their customers in a switcher's market - the company being under pressure on both the service customer retention front and in terms of their content business.

They are also adding ITV Player and BBC iPlayer content to the Anytime+ service, which will now be available to those amongst their 10m+ strong TV base who do not overlap with their broadband customer base in a move to increase the 1.2m of their customers who have used Anytime+, which uses the broadband connection to download titles and contributes to the usage cap of their current broadband services (for those customers who have a capped service) - something that is most likely to hit their 'free' broadband punters.

Anytime+ is tiered to a customer's TV holding so that they can only access content in parallel to what their TV tier allows them to see over satellite and at this point it's unclear as to whether there will be any changes to the status of the setup charges for the service, which is £40 for their customers connecting wired and £60 wirelessly.

Announcing the news Sky's chief executive Jeremy Darroch said:

"We want customers to get the best out of their Sky subscription and Anytime+ is a great way to give them more control and choice over how they enjoy TV. We already know how popular Sky+ is and how it puts customers back in charge of their TV viewing. Anytime+ builds on that control and it's no wonder we’ve seen such strong demand for it.

Sky Anytime+ will go from strength to strength in 2012 and we are delighted that the addition of the BBC iPlayer and ITV Player will allow customers to also enjoy the best of terrestrial TV, whenever they want. We're also delighted to be able to widen access to the service so that millions more Sky customers can enjoy the added flexibility it offers."

The press release of the news can be found here and Sky have also put up more information on their website here.

Netflix CEO hails UK launch

Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings has hailed the company's UK launch earlier this month, saying that it had "greatly exceeded expectations" in terms of signing up customers for the heavily marketed £6 per month service (which comes with the first month free).

Hastings - who was speaking alongside the company's financial results which revealed a Q4 profit slide from USD$47.1m a year ago to USD$40.7m - added about their UK debut:

"We're very excited by the initial response and we are continuing to improve the service."

The video streaming service reported a year-on-year 25% jump in their subscriber base - despite the impact of a price hike last year - and now has 21.6 million streaming customers in the US and 1.86 million overseas, but it is unclear how many of these have joined the service in the UK this month.

Hastings, who saw his company's shares jump by almost 16% to USD$110.12 on the back of the results, was also bullish about global competition from the likes of Amazon-owned Lovefilm and Hulu:

"Both Amazon and Hulu Plus's content is a fraction of our content, and we believe their respective total viewing hours are each less than 10% of ours."

Google overhauls privacy policies, erroneously e-mails Sky and Virgin Media punters

Google have announced an overhaul of their privacy policies which merges the policies across their suite of web services from March 1, but are red faced that the expected controversy that the move has generated has been added to by their mistakenly communicating the change in an e-mail to end customers of both Sky and Virgin Media, whose mailboxes are hosted on the Google Apps platform that is run by the search giant.

More than 60 different policies across services such as search, Gmail, YouTube and Google+ are being combined in the move - which Google said will enable better search results and targeted advertising, although they're very aware of the privacy implications given previous controversies in this space amongst web giants.

Explaining the change the company said:

"If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries, or tailor your search results, based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail and YouTube."

The updated policies are also being emphasised to users when they sign into their Google accounts, but they do not apply to the end customers of Google Apps at Virgin Media and Sky - where the ISPs own privacy policies apply instead.

Naturally there has been much confusion from customers of the 2 massive providers, which they have both made efforts to clarify.

A page on the Sky website has been published to clear up any confusion for their customers, in which they say:

"We'd like to apologise for any confusion this email may have caused. It was sent in error and should be ignored.

Google's technology supports the Sky email service, and hence supports your @sky.com address. However, as a @sky.com email subscriber, your only relationship is with Sky. Sky's Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notice apply and not Google's.

To reiterate, please ignore the earlier email you were mistakenly sent. To be clear, Google's privacy changes do not apply to your @sky.com email account.

Please be assured that we are taking this matter very seriously and are working with Google to understand how this error occurred."

A Virgin spokesperson also backed up a statement from Sky that all that Google know about their customers is an e-mail address which has been provisioned to the Google Apps platform:

"All Google literally has is an email address that they provision to us."

Virgin's forums were also busy with some confused customers.

Google explained the mistake in a statement:

"If an enterprise organisation uses Google Apps to provide email to its own employees or customers, Google is contacting only the administrator at that organisation because it has a contract that defines how we handle and store their data.

Due to a glitch in our system, we misclassified some Google Apps email accounts as consumer Gmail accounts and mistakenly sent these users email notifications about the Privacy Policy. While Google provides the backend service that powers these users’ email accounts, we do not have any direct relationship with these users and contacted them in error."

Google apologised for any confusion caused by the communication.

Update @1738: Google have posted an update about the changes to add more information after an enquiry from Congress.

YouTube now streaming 4bn videos daily

Google-owned video streaming behemoth YouTube now streams around 4 billion (yes, that's billion) videos per day according to latest data revealed by the company.

The numbers show a 25% jump over the last 8 months as both the web grows and the amount of video shown on it does (and remembering that video is expected to make up 90% of web traffic by the end of this decade - so don't expect the growth to slow down any time soon) and Google say that around 3 billion videos per week are now monetised by YouTube's advertising features, which generate around USD$5bn in annualised revenue.

60 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from 48 hours last May.

O2 apologises after mobile web gaffe

Mobile operator O2 have apologised to their customers after a vulnerability was highlighted - the impact of which was that mobile numbers of their customers were passed to websites as HTTP environment variables when users were on various sites via their mobile handsets.

The problem affected their customers on certain sites from January 10 to the 25th, and in a commendably frank blog about the problem they said that they have informed the Information Commissioner about the flaw as well as having patched it in double quick time. Naturally they have also apologised about the problem.

Explaining how the problem happened in the first place they said:

"Technical changes we implemented as part of routine maintenance had the unintended effect of making it possible in certain circumstances for website owners to see the mobile numbers of those browsing their site."

They also clarified when they do share numbers with websites and why:

"Only where absolutely required by trusted partners who work with us on age verification, premium content billing, such as for downloads, and O2's own services, have access to these mobile numbers."

If nothing else the case is a textbook example in how to respond to a crisis on social media as the company also searched all tweets talking about the issue (not necessarily to them but about them) and made sure to reach out with the facts - well done O2!

Yahoo! chief: Advertising our "highest priority"

Announcing the company's fourth quarter financial results - which didn't include the expected job cuts, although they have restructured their European marketing operations with the loss of a pair of high profile marketeers - Yahoo!'s relatively new chief executive Scott Thompson said that turning around their advertising business was his "highest priority" in his role at the top of the struggling search giant.

Posting a quarterly net profit down 5% year-on-year (to USD$296m) on revenues having dropped 3% (to USD$1.17bn), Thompson declined to give more details on how he plans to turn the company around other than make the advertising operations his key focus but did say that "there's no question that we need to do better" generally.

Thompson believes that data is the future of the company's future strategy, but added little more than saying cryptically:

"If you believe data and great technology and great technologists can begin to predict what is in a user's mind and what they want to do next, having that base of data to start from is a big, big advantage."

His call for more innovation from the struggling web giant at least went down well with analysts, who believe that Thompson is showing more signs of urgency than his predecessors.

Zynga probing online gambling

Recent relaxation of online gambling laws in the US have led to social gaming company Zynga investigating opportunities to "better understand and explore" the online gambling industry with potential partners according to the company.

The FarmVille publisher - which is fresh off the back of their IPO (and a resultant dip in their share price) of course - has had much success with their own poker offering and is set to combine this with a bingo game in their Zynga Casino offering according to a report in well sourced technology blog AllThingsDigital, which quoted a company spokesman as saying:

"We build games and experiences that our players want and love. Zynga Poker is the world’s largest online poker game with more than 7 million people playing every day and over 30 million each month.

We know from listening to our players that there’s an interest in the real money gambling market. We’re in active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity."

The big challenge for Zynga is to of course reduce their reliance on Facebook, and it's looking less than likely that such a move would help them on that front as they would need Facebook's massive user base to grow an online gambling business significantly.

Openreach to extend FTTH pilot to apartments

The Openreach access division of BT have announced that they are to extend their pilot of the fastest FTTH speeds that their network can deliver to apartments in its limited (in fact, very limited) network availability area which is largely centred around new developments.

Their announcement has called on interested residents and landlords to sign up for the service in the limited availability areas and highlights some of the logistical difficulties that there are in taking such a signup approach, but could yet delivery much larger signup numbers at a relatively limited cost to Openreach:

Identifying the appropriate individuals and companies with the authority to formally grant permission for the apartment blocks can be challenging. By allowing both landlords and residents to register interest, Openreach aims to allow the latter to demonstrate demand for the service and the former to make their building more attractive to future potential residents.

They are looking for around 1,000 buildings to take part in the pilot, with residents able to receive 'up to' 100Mb speeds - and they have for the first time given more details on when speeds are likely to be extended even further to 'up to' 300Mb:

End users will initially have access to downstream speeds of up to 100Mb/s but these will rise to give users the option of up to 300Mb/s in the spring of this year, the fastest commercially available speeds in the UK for a residential connection. Upstream speeds will also be the fastest in the UK.

Openreach's Managing Director for Next Generation Access said of the pilot expansion:

"We are keen to extend the benefits of our fastest broadband services to those living in apartments. Through our registration scheme customers are clearly showing us they now seek these higher speeds and see the provision of super-fast broadband as a significant benefit. We are factoring customer demand into our future deployment plans but are also keen to partner with landlords and involve them in our plans."

The availability is part of Openreach's overall £2.5bn network upgrade programme to deliver faster speeds to two thirds of the UK by the end of 2014, although almost all connections are the slower 'up to' 40Mb connections (to rise to 'up to' 80Mb this year) delivered by FTTC technology instead - something that is not clear in the company's carefully worded press release. Openreach will not be revisiting areas where they roll out FTTC speeds to deliver faster FTTH speeds.

Interested residents can sign up here and landlords here.

Facebook responsible for 35k UK jobs

A report commissioned by social networking behemoth Facebook claims that the site supports in excess of 35,000 jobs in the UK and contributes more than £2.2bn to the country's economy annually.

The Deloitte report highlights the "App economy" that has sprung up around the site with company own presences on the social networking site generating significant revenues and much employment also.

Speaking at a conference where she revealed the report the company's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said:

"Today's report shows that Facebook is about a lot more than sharing pictures or keeping up with friends. Increasingly, social media means growth and jobs. Social media is proving particularly valuable for small- and medium-sized businesses, which form the backbone of the European economy."

Openreach replaces overheating modems

The Openreach access division of BT is undertaking a programme of upgrading modems that they issued for FTTC-based faster broadband services before August 2011 due to the modems overheating in a way that results in a loss of service for users - but apparently not causing a fire or health and safety risk.

The replacements are all being undertaken by Openreach outsource partner Kelly Communications who need to visit the homes of all users with the affected modems across multiple ISPs (although mainly those of BT Infinity) as confirmed in a BT via a spokesman:

"We can confirm that Openreach has been replacing some of its modems with more reliable updated versions. This is because the connection could sometimes drop with some of the early modems that we deployed.

There has been no health or safety risk whatsoever associated with this issue but it is obviously important that the connection doesn't drop if the customer is to enjoy their service.

As a result, we are offering to visit any affected customers to provide them with an updated modem. In the meantime they can continue to use their old modem without any safety concerns."

The problems were caused by a malfunctioning chip within the modem.

Sky announces fibre plans

In another announcement alongside the company's financial results this morning Sky have revealed their hand - having previously been very tentative - in terms of their offering of faster broadband services over the Openreach (largely) FTTC network which is currently being rolled out by BT's access division.

The company's 'up to' 40Mb (so FTTC based) offering will launch in April and be priced at £20 per month (£12.50 more than their 'up to' 20Mb current fastest offering) and comes with unlimited usage - although, given that it will only be available to customers who also take line rental, Sky Talk and a TV product from the satellite provider the minimum bundle price will actually be £52.25.

A £50 setup fee applies to customers signing up for the company's faster broadband and initial coverage will be for around 30% of UK homes from April.

The launch will compliment the WiFi Hotspots that all Sky customers on their faster tiers of service will soon be able to access and Sky also announced that they are expanding their own LLU network coverage to have 88% of homes able to get access to their network by June 2013, meaning that an additional million homes will be able to get access to faster speeds in areas where network economics also stack up for Sky.

Speaking of the launch, Sky's sales and marketing Managing Director Stephen van Rooyen said:

"This year sees a number of enhancements that will ensure we create even more choice. Whether it's the launch of free public WiFi, extending our network into more parts of the UK, or adding fibre to our product mix, we are focused on meeting the demands of customers and on being their number one choice for home communications."

The new faster broadband offering will be called 'Sky Broadband Unlimited Fibre', and means that the company are taking on BT and Virgin Media head on in the faster broadband stakes. Virgin recently announced plans to double their customers' broadband speeds and take the UK's fastest broadband offering to 120Mb.

Mail becomes world's most read online paper

Mail Online - the digital version of The Daily Mail - has ridden on the success of its celebrity and sensationalist focused stores to become the world's most read online newspaper, eclipsing the New York Times to take the top spot.

In December Mail Online attracted 45.3 million unique users (New York Times 44.8 million) in the figures compiled by comScore, although the New York Times is disputing the figures by saying that the data is in effect a combination of the traffic to multiple Mail online properties.

In the case of the New York Times a good chunk of their content is behind a paywall, which would suggest that their online edition is more profitable than the largely advertising focused approach of the new world leader, which employs 29 dedicated staff.

Glitter Twitter account a fake

A man claims he set up a Gary Glitter mock Twitter account at the handle @OfficialGlitter (which is still up and running) as a "social experiment" to highlight the dangers of the Internet, which is something that was guaranteed to gain attention given the choice of the convicted paedophile Glitter as the subject of his experiment.The man, who only calls himself Ben, blogged about his experiment (the blog posting of which has since been removed - if it was at the behest of Glitter's lawyers surely the twitter account would have gone as well?), in which he said:

"Let me say that this account does not belong to convicted paedophile Gary Glitter. I am deeply disgusted by what Gary Glitter has done in his life and am not condoning, making light of or glorifying child abuse. His crimes are unforgivable and chilling.

I set this twitter account up as a social experiment to highlight the dangers and safety of children using the social networking sites and to discover and question public morality. It's been an interesting and eye-opening experience for me."

Amongst tweets he received were many from fans (many of whom seemed to be based in the US) of the disgraced musician - isn't it amazing to think that there still are fans of him? - who were calling for him to tour again and to release new material.

What the hoax has revealed though is that there is nothing to stop the convicted paedophile from creating his own account (and surely not even he would think that's a good idea?) on Twitter whereas Facebook's rules would explicitly prevent Glitter from being on their social network.

Sky targets Netflix and Lovefilm with new TV service

Sky announced their financial results this morning (more on that later), and alongside them comes the news that they are to target Netflix and Lovefilm by launching their own Internet TV service for non customers that will compliment the Sky Go offering which is targeted at their own TV customers on the go.

Given the boom that has been seen in Netflix demand since their £6 per month UK service was launched earlier this month, the Sky offering is of little surprise and will initially be focused on movies when it launches in the first half of this year - although will be expanded to cover entertainment and sport at a later date going by the wording in their press release.

Sky chief executive Jeremy Darroch said of the new service:

"This exciting new service will offer some of Sky's most popular content through a wide range of broadband connected devices. Alongside the continued growth of our satellite platform, this will be a new way for us to reach out to consumers who love great content, but may not want the full Sky service. Bringing a distinctive, new choice to the marketplace will help us meet the needs and demands of an ever wider range of consumers.

This new product launch will build on our early leadership in multi-platform distribution. It will allow us to make our expertise and investment in content and technology work even harder, extending our options for continued growth."

Consumers will be able to either pay for a monthly subscription or rent standalone content (pricing is yet to be revealed) and it's a move that makes sense as Netflix and Lovefilm become increased threats to their own content business.

The connected TV service will be available on a range of different platforms and devices in the same way that they are driving their Sky Go platform strategy.

Digital music sales continue to boom

The latest data from the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) reveals that sales of digital music continued to soar in 2011 despite the problem of piracy - and of course they took the opportunity of taking a dig at the government about their piracy record as they released the figures. At least they're predictable.

Reporting a fourth successive year of growth in digital sales, the BPI's data shows that a full 98% of all singles sales (175.1m of 177.9m) were in digital formats with the proportion of album sales coming in at a lower 23.5% (26.6m of 113.2m) - with CD sales still making up 76.1% of the albums market.

Overall singles sales were up 10% for the year and albums down 5.6%, which is just as likely to be representative of a change in consumer buying behaviour so that they purchase tracks rather than albums nowadays (personally I listen to tracks and not albums on Spotify myself so I can see this is very likely as an explanation), not that BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor made this point though of course:

"It has been another record year for digital singles, but the most encouraging news of the year is the strong backing consumers are giving to the digital album format. British music fans understand that the album remains the richest way to connect with an artist's work. Digital developments grab the headlines, but the CD remains hugely popular with consumers, accounting for three-quarters of album sales. Physical ownership is important to many fans and the CD will be a key element of the market for years to come.

British artists continue to produce incredible music that resonates at home and around the world. But while other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our Government is taking too long to act on piracy, while weakening copyright to the benefit of US tech giants. The UK has already fallen behind Germany as a music market. Unless decisive action is taken in 2012, investment in music could fall again – a creative crunch that will destroy jobs and mean the next Adele may not get her chance to shine on the world stage."

What is unclear from the BPI's data is how streaming services such as Spotify are represented - as I pay for a monthly subscription but don't actually buy tracks from it (or in fact have purchased any music since I took out my Spotify subscription), so for me the data raises more questions than answers overall.

Virgin pays police overtime bill in fraud case

In what seem to be an unprecedented step, it has been revealed that Virgin Media paid the Metropolitan Police's £5,060 overtime bill in an investigation that resulted in the smashing of a global set top box fraud ring that had been costing the company an estimated £144m per year.

The deal, which is similar to football clubs paying for the policing of their matches, also controversially committed the company to a 25% cash donation to the Met from any compensation that they received as a result of the case, which resulted in the jailing for 8 years of the ring leader of the gang in the summer.

Munaf Ahmed Zinga is appealing his conviction over the importation of 400,000 modified set top boxes that enabled his customers to watch Virgin's channels for free on the basis of the "incentivisation scheme", which was ruled legal and above board by the judge in the case.

A Virgin company spokesman said:

"Following a joint operation between Virgin Media and the Metropolitan Police at Redbridge and New Scotland Yard, three men were successfully prosecuted for a large-scale commercial fraud.

The defendants were found guilty of manufacturing, importing and supplying over 400,000 set-top boxes used to unlawfully access cable TV to dealers across the UK.

In accordance with the Police Act 1996, we supported an additional overtime cost incurred by the Metropolitan Police.

Pending the conclusion of confiscation proceedings, we will explore a compensation application against the defendants and we've offered a proportion of any compensation awarded to the Metropolitan Police Authority to support their ongoing work."

Around 30 officers worked alongside 18 of Virgin Media's own investigators on the case.

Hunt threatens to pull Next Gen funding

Procurement processes at local councils moving at a snail's pace have led to the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt threatening to do a U-turn on the £530m (to potentially rise to £830m) that the government has put aside for rural broadband rollouts in areas where they would not otherwise be financially viable.

Laying down the law to a commons committee the minister said:

"There is £530m on the table to help deliver this, but I have to say that if broadband contracts aren't actually signed by the end of this year I will consider taking this back.

I do not want this to get bogged down in paper procurement."

Hunt went on to emphasise the importance that the government sees in the rollout of Next Generation Broadband services, suggesting that the statements were little more than a shot across the bow of local government - and of course BT has the 'ideal' solution to the problem ... give them every penny of it.

Tumblr passes 15bn page views monthly

Microblogging and content sharing platform Tumblr has hit 15 billion page views from more than 120 million unique users each month.

The privately held company has focused on usability in making it simple to post updates, a strategy that has clearly worked with nearly 42 million blogs now hosted on the platform, which is bigger in the US than it is here.

Company chief executive David Karp (yes, I double checked the spelling of his surname) said:

"The early growth that we saw was around creators ... our first community was those creators

We didn't set out to build network .. all we wanted to do was make novel tools. But in building explicitly for creators, a widespread network of creators, curators and content consumers was born."

Google kills off more services

Google have announced yet another round of them killing off services that are not crucial to their growth strategy, much of which is focused around the integration of Google+ into their strategic web assets in the future.

This time the applications are generally lesser known ones, including online photo editor Picnik, Google Message Continuity and data management platform Needlebase. Picnik is the best known of the lot and was picked up in 2010, Google at the time having plans to integrate it into their Picasa photo sharing service - which is being renamed as Google Photos.

The announcement was made on their blog here.

Akamai to open chequebook

Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider Akamai are one of a small niche (in terms of the number of them) of firms who carry a massive proportion of the Internet's traffic - along with the likes of Limelight - and they are set to make acquisitions this year to increase their revenues all the more according to the company's chief executive Paul Sagan.

Despite their being an economic downturn there is ever growing demand for Internet traffic to be delivered reliably to end users by the likes of Netflix, and Sagan says they will "opportunistically fill holes" in their portfolio in order to achieve a forecasted 11% jump in revenues to USD$1.28bn in 2012.

Akamai's shares have been down - and they had even been the subject of a rumoured takeover bid from Google - on the back of a predicted slowdown in global growth, a key area of future development as Akamai is keen to make revenues outside of North America half of the earnings at some point in the future.

Megaupload closes ... and related news!

File sharing site Megaupload has been closed down by US authorities who believed that the site was being used as a conduit far copyright infringement on a massive scale as well as racketeering and money laundering, with the FBI initiating the closing down of the Hong Kong hosted site after an indictment was granted.

A US grand jury granted the indictment against seven people connected with the site - with the site's leader, a Hong Kong and New Zealand resident called 'Kim Dotcom' (he changed his surname from Schultz) being arrested after being found in a panic room in his New Zealand home by local police. He has been denied bail whilst US authorities request his extradition.

The FBI and the US Justice Department (DoJ) announced that the site had caused more than half a million dollars of damage to copyright holders, with the DoJ saying:

"This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the US and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime."

The announcement that got the ire of the hacktivists at Anonymous who then took down both their websites and those of rights holders in a revenge attack.

There have been other repercussions as a result of the case too.

Digital locker provider FileSonic has heeded the arrest of the Megaupload founders by turning off the file sharing features of their service, deploying the following prominent message on their homepage:

"All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally."

There could also be a further knock-on effect on other file sharing and digital locker websites like RapidShare and Dropbox, who will at the very least be reviewing their own content hosting policies in the wake of the ruling - which authorities have hailed as a massive anti piracy success.

Megaupload's closure has overshadowed the controversial ruling by a Westminster Magistrates Court judge that 23-year-old computing student Richard O'Dwyer can be extradited to the US over his TVShack website - which hosted links to copyrighted material but not the material itself before it was closed down.

A similar UK prosecution was thrown out last year, but his defence were unable to convince a judge that this was sufficient grounds to prevent an extradition - the ruling for which his legal team will appeal.

EC sets date for ruling on Google / Motorola deal

The European Commission (EC) will rule on Google's proposed USD$12.5bn takeover of Motorola Mobility on February 13, after they initially pushed back the deadline for making their judgment on the deal as they sought more information on the deal from the search giant.

The deadline had been pushed back from January 10 whilst additional documentation was handed over by the search giant - and US regulators are also considering Google's approach for Motorola's handset division, the acquisition of which would also give them a mass of patents - 17,000 of them - in the ongoing tech patent wars, which many believe is the actual reason for the deal.

Apple shares climb on bumper earnings

Apple shares are up 10% in after hours trading after the company issued a bumper earnings update in their first quarter (of the financial year) results today.

The quarter - which covered the three months until the end of December - marked the company's highest quarterly revenue and earnings ever as sales of gadgets in the lead up to Christmas served the company particularly well.

In the quarter they sold a whopping 37 million iPhones and a rundown of their revenues by product shows just how they have become an iPhone company with 53% of sales coming from the smartphones:All of the metrics exceeded general analyst expectations in the lead up to the end of the calendar year, with quarterly revenues hitting a whopping USD$46.33 billion, and new chief executive Tom Cook was understandably bullish on the back of them:

"We're thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Apple's momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline."

The press release of the results can be found here on the Apple website.

McDonald's social campaign backfires

McDonald's are one of those companies who are always accused of some of the worst practice - much of it as being a result of them being the highest profile brand in the fast food industry - and a campaign they have run on Twitter has suggested that they need to develop more of a clue stick in dealing with social media if nothing else.

The Golden Arches tried to launch a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag #McDStories which they supported with plenty of their own launch content, but it was of little surprise to seasoned social media watchers that it was soon hijacked by pranksters, healthy eating advocates and anti corporate America users on the site.

One Twitterer made the point better than most:Another one to add to the annals of social media messups by large brands.

Plusnet updates on fibre plans

BT-owned 'value' (i.e. cheap) provider Plusnet have revealed more on their trials of faster broadband services running over the FTTC and FTTH deployments that BT's Openreach access division are rolling out (mainly FTTC) - the same network that BT's own 'Infinity' faster broadband service runs over.

Of course the advantage of having multiple brands is that different service propositions can be tested out, which is unsurprisingly something that the commercial bods at BT (Plusnet being part of BT's commercial division within their BT Retail business) have taken advantage of to see how different product offerings map out.

Plusnet launched their FTTC offering in April last year and have invited their initial trialists of the service to sign up to trials of the speed increases that Openreach are planning to roll out to their FTTC network later this year, which will deliver download speeds of 'up to' 80Mb and upload speeds of 'up to' 20Mb - although, like all other DSL technologies, the speed consumers actually receive will be affected by their line length.

Trials are underway of the faster speeds and Plusnet plans to launch them commercially from May 1 - although it's not clear whether they will upgrade their existing customers or offer them as a separate product like TalkTalk's will be. Interestingly they are offering an upstream boost to 'up to' 10Mb for their existing 'up to' 40Mb FTTC based customers (who currently get 'up to' 2Mb upstream speeds) for an incremental £10 per month - an offering that differs from what their parent brand has available.

Those on the trials are apparently currently seeing an average throughput speed of 68Mb, which they will clearly be hoping continue as it will enable them to advertise them heavily presumably - and interestingly Andrews & Arnold have experienced sync speeds on their trial of something even closer to the theoretical headline speeds of the technology within the Openreach trial.

Plusnet will be offering their FTTH offering (100Mb downstream, 15Mb upstream) in the few locations where Openreach have it available for £34.49 per month (excluding line rental) from February 1 (BT's similar offering costing £35 per month) - but have interestingly also suggested that there might be a delay to Openreach's FTTH speed increase plans in saying that the 'up to' 330Mb speeds in its limited network availability areas will happen "later this year" rather than the originally announced "Spring 2012".

The update from Product manager Dave Tomlinson can be found here on the Plusnet site.

China to expand microblogging registration programme

China's government plans to expand their tests of having users of microblogging services in major cities register their real identities to all users of the sites - in a country where Twitter is blocked and services like Tencent and Sina dominate the sector.

In a move that will apparently control the spread of "harmful information", State Council Information Office minister Wang Chen said:

"Currently, this type of registration is being tested in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We will extend it to other areas once the pilot programmes prove successful. We will focus on newly registering users and then extend it to existing microbloggers. Microblogging is a new medium that can spread information rapidly and have a big influence. It covers a wide population and can mobilise people."

Naturally a scheme such as this in a country with a history of cracking down on dissidents raises serious concern about censorship regimes and harsh action being taken against those not toeing the official line on political matters - and the moves come after previous attempts to force mobile phone users and online gamers to register their identities failed.

Twitter picks up malware specialists

Hot on the heels of buying social news service Summify, Twitter have opened their chequebook yet again to pick up web based spam and malware protection company Dasient for undisclosed terms.

While the news is a great portent of things to come for us who keep getting spam on the service despite it seemingly following the same form all the time, in the main it's to support their upcoming self serve advertising launch and Dasient will form part of Twitter's "revenue engineering team".

Dasient was founded by former Google staffers who now join the Twitter team.

Sky opens up free WiFi to Unlimited punters

Sky have started to e-mail customers on their 'Unlimited' (top tier DSL service on their own LLU network) and 'Connect' (their offnet 'up to' 8Mb service which runs off BT Wholesale's network) to invite them to register for free unlimited access to The Cloud, their WiFI Hotspot service.
The move is clearly a 2-pronged one:

1. To have as many customers as possible on their 'free' service to upgrade to the £7.50 per month 'Unlimited' offering (which is clearly in their interest as they are paying BT Openreach for the rental of the lines while getting limited additional income from the customers - not to mention the usage cap on the 'free' offering being 2GB per month, compared to the 17GB per month that the average UK broadband user consumes)
2. A defensive measure against BT, who heavily promote the free WiFi Hotspot access that their customers have access to - mainly as a result of the FON community they have built which makes available 0.5Mb of dedicated bandwidth from each of their customers' Home Hubs (unless they opt out of it)

The offering should fully launch shortly across the 8,000 hotspots that Sky have deployed (which is to grow to 10,000) in places like coffee shops, restaurants and in the Square Mile of the City of London.

As with Sky Go, you can expect that an advertising campaign will follow which showcases their content assets and focuses on live sports viewing in particular - with remote access to their significant content library being a massive factor in them buying The Cloud in the first place.

Customers can use their Sky username and password to access the service and the info page they have linked to from their e-mail campaign can be found here. Interestingly customers can register up to 6 devices for The Cloud - but only two for Sky Go.

Deezer launches free offer

I haven't heard much from music streaming service Deezer since it launched in the autumn, with the company having done a deal with Orange to promote the service to their subscribers in direct competition with the tie-up that competitor Virgin Media have done with Spotify.

A targeted advertisement to users of social media influence tracking service PeerIndex last week changed that, with me receiving the following e-mail offering me the first month of a subscription for free (saving £10):
It's interesting to see how highly targeted they are being in their offer, suggesting a limited marketing spend and wanting to get the most engaged social media advocates talking virally about them.

The offer links through to here for anyone who is interested - I'm sticking with my Spotify Premium subscription myself.

Yahoo! to! cut! jobs!

Yahoo!'s new chief executive Scott Thompson is set to mark his debut on the big time by announcing a round of job cuts with the company's Q4 financial results, which are set to come out tomorrow.

The report of the losses was cited by influential and well sourced technology blog AllThingsD, which claims that Thompson is following a strategy of making the business lean in his attempts to turn it around ... a heck of a challenge for anyone to try and tackle with Google and Facebook having hugely eclipsed them over recent years.

Thompson is also set to sell off the company's Asian assets now that co-founder Jerry Yang has left the business, a move that Yang was said to be reticent to have executed while he remained at the firm.

Facebook lobbying bill passes million

Social network behemoth Facebook spent more than USD$1m on lobbying for the first time last year, racking up a total spend of USD$1.35m in pushing their interests over causes such as censorship by foreign governments and international software company regulation.

In the last quarter of the year their bill almost doubled to USD$440,000 but they are still dwarfed by Google who are the biggest lobbying spender in the tech industry in spending USD$9.98 million in 2011.

Microsoft spend USD$7.34 million in an attempt to carry favour with politicians.

Google softens China approach

After the company's China Crisis in which they effectively pulled out of operations there as a result of alleged government sponsored hacking of the Gmail accounts of dissidents, Google have toyed with how they operate in China since but a recent statement from the company's regional senior executive suggests that they have softened their approach to be more "pragmatic" about operations in the country.

Daniel Alegre runs their Asian operations and said that they are now actively recruiting in the country so that they can take advantage of the popularity of Android in the Chinese market - saying that company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page see that "there is a very large business opportunity in China, and they recognise it".

While they effectively shut down their local operations two years ago, Google emphasise that they have never abandoned the world's fastest growing Internet market, where search is dominated by local operator Baidu.

Google+ hits 90m users

The user base of Google+ has more than doubled over the last 3 months according to Google chief executive Larry Page, who said that the social network now has 90 million users as a result of their massive advertising push, tight integration with other Google web properties and less than subtle push from the front page of Google itself.

Speaking on the company's earnings call Page said:

"I'm also pleased to announce that there are over 90 million Google+ users - well over double what I announced just a quarter ago on our earnings call. Engagement on Google+ is also growing tremendously. I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: Google+ users are very engaged with our products - over 60per cent of them engage daily, and over 80 per cent weekly."

It's telling though that Page has not revealed what proportion of the 90 million are active users, with many (including me) having tried it out and then stopped using the site as friends tend to be on Facebook and the site's unique features have yet to grab them and keep a hold of them so that they come back on a regular basis.

One prediction has suggested that Google+ is on track to have 400 million users by the end of the year, a figure that would mark impressive growth as they compete with Facebook's 800 million plus user base that is set to pass a billion active users later this year.

Scots fine Virgin and BT over slow road works

Delays in the completion to schedule of road works have resulted in both BT and Virgin Media being hit by fines by the Scottish Road Works Commissioner.

BT's Openreach access division have been slapped with a £38,500 penalty for failing to reopen roads on schedule after their work, while the cable guys at Virgin Media have been fined the lesser sum of £14,000.

Other utilities have also been fined under the rules that mean that they are liable to cough up if they fail to open 80% of roads on time after the completion of their upgrade works, which will continue to be on a large scale for Openreach as they roll out their faster broadband network.