It's divorce day tomorrow. Visitors to XtraMSN.co.nz will be presented with a holding page that gives them the choice to head to YahooXtra.co.nz or MSN.co.nz. Few details are available yet about MSN.co.nz (see my previous post).

And at YahooXtra's briefing this morning, they promised a lot for their portal over the next three or four months, including Yahoo's Answers social search engine service, a local iteration of Flickr, premium Yahoo services for subscribers to Xtra the ISP, lots of social networking stuff and possible content from a future TV partner (in Australia Yahoo's portal partner is Channel 7). But as of tomorrow, there won't be any Yahoo services on YahooXtra that you can't get directly from Yahoo.
The flash new bits will be added some time around June.

Telecom COO Consumer Kevin Kenrick agreed with YahooXtra interim CEO Ian Smith's analysis that Yahoo Mail is "infinitely better" than anything else, including Xtra's webmail service.
Xtra Mail users will be encouraged to migrate to Yahoo Mail, though will be also give the option, again from around June, to keep their Xtra address but access Yahoo premium services as the two platforms are merged.

Incidentally, new Nielsen NetRatings figures (for January 07) show that it's pcworld.co.nz that's New Zealand's highest rating technology destination, with more unique visitors than NineMSN.com.au, and in fact more impressions and visitors than any Ocker PC magazine's website (and I'm talking about traffic across both countries). So good choice, surfers, and don't you touch that dial.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Following the XtraMSN.co.nz divorce, the estranged Telecom and Microsoft are both announcing their new partners today. Telecom will detail its YahooXtra.co.nz site this morning.

Given all XtraMSN.co.nz content came from Xtra, and Micrsosoft's Hotmail etc can easily be substituted by Yahoo's equivalent services (already freely available), it's not clear whether YahooXtra will offer anything that's actually new ... but we'll see.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has jumped in 60 minutes ahead, with a few details of its pending MSN.co.nz site, which will be run in conjunction with Aussie media company ACP.

The two also colaborate on NineMSN.com.au say "MSN NZ will be run by a small team in New Zealand with support from ninemsn in Australia". Click below to read the full press release.

Microsoft, ACP Media and ninemsn launch MSN NZ
msn.co.nz to launch on 1 March 2007

Auckland, New Zealand, Wednesday 28 February, 2007: Kiwis will have a new way to access New Zealand’s favourite free email service - Hotmail - with the launch of msn.co.nz on 1 March 2007.

msn.co.nz is the new home of Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Live Search and a range of information and entertainment including breaking news, weather, sport, jobs, fashion, lifestyle, classifieds and personals.

msn.co.nz is backed by Microsoft New Zealand, ACP Media and ninemsn, Australia’s leading online media company, and will replace the now defunct xtramsn service. Both ACP Media and ninemsn are part of Australia's leading media company, PBL Media.

Local partners TV3, New Zealand's number one online job portal SEEK, online sports site Sportal and content from ACP magazines such as Metro, Cleo, NetGuide and Taste will provide a new way to experience the web through msn.co.nz.

"Given ninemsn's deep understanding of the online media industry, Microsoft New Zealand's local knowledge and ACP Media's New Zealand content we believe that we have the right ingredients for a successful business here in New Zealand", said Helen Robinson, Managing Director, Microsoft New Zealand.

"Research tells us that connecting with friends and family is the most important thing users of all age groups want to do online. That's why we're pleased to have the great Microsoft communication services Hotmail and MSN Messenger back in the MSN fold."

There are currently over one million Hotmail and 300,000 MSN Messenger users registered in New Zealand.

When customers log out of Hotmail they will find themselves redirected to msn.co.nz. Visitors to the old xtramsn.co.nz website will also have the choice to visit the new msn.co.nz site.

"Advertisers have told us that they love the audience reach we have through communication services like Hotmail and MSN Messenger. They also value our ability to target specific demographics and harness the global MSN network. This means New Zealand advertisers can take their messages to a global audience, an option that was not available previously", Ms Robinson said.

MSN NZ will be run by a small team in New Zealand with support from ninemsn in Australia. A General Manager and several operational personnel are expected to be appointed shortly.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Was just down at Vodafone checking out their latest TV, content and music happenings (see April PC World for more). One of their Live! techies had this as his wallpaper:

Of course, home taping did not kill music (technophobic campaigns have a long and deranged history, going right back to a fight against the introduction of - horrors - sheet music). And like every technology before it, digital downloads are bringing more people into the music market, not less.

Nevertheless, a determinedly wonky, old world attitude to digital music persists. Currently, our copyright law makes it illegal to format shift (unless you're a reviewer or researcher. Phew.)

Russell Brown has a great piece in this week's Listener explaining the upcoming Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill, a curious and disappointing piece of legislation. A snippet:

"Let's focus on one of the changes proposed in the original 2002 Ministry of Economic Development discussion paper - the permission to "format shift" legally purchased music to another device (say, an iPod) for personal use. In the 2002 paper, a crisp and straightforward case is made for format-shifting. In the 2007 bill, it's all hedged with conditions.

Some of these conditions run counter to the way households operate. If Mum buys a CD and want to copy it into iTunes on the family computer, Mum must do the copying. If Dad does it, the law is breached."

Read Russell's full column here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Thanks to everybody who left comments after my previous entry. For participating, you are all winners. Though in another, more real way there is only one winner: Terry Porrit, who picks up the copy of Flight Sim X.

To quickly summarise, the two most recurrent themes were: why is the account credit back-dated to December, not October (when those kooky Xtraordiaries first started pushing Go Large)? And since customers paid in cash, why can't they the refund in cash, rather than an account credit?

I guess a credit is far cheaper and easier for Telecom to implement ... but of course it means you can't pocket up to $160 and use it to fund a switch to another ISP.

Read more comments here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Telecom has suspended Go Large, and announced refunds of $130 to $160 per customer. Good on GM Consumer Marketing General Manager Kevin Bowler for fronting up on the issue -albeit in part to head off a complaint by Consumer to the Commerce Commission, echoed by our own Geoff Palmer, and many an angry Press F1 post on this site. Hopefully Telecom will continue along this path as it positions itself for life after the antagonistic, "I regret nothing" Theresa Gattung.

Kev for CEO?

And is $130 to $160 enough to compensate for false advertising and the grief you've suffered? Post a comment below, and go into my inflammatory prize draw to win a copy of Microsoft Flight Sim X.

Click below to read Telecom's press release.

Telecom advised today that it will credit customers on its Go Large broadband service following an internal technical review that identified an issue with how internet traffic is being managed on the plan.

The Go Large plan was introduced in October and was one of the first large-scale broadband services to feature no monthly cap on the amount of data customers can download or use when web surfing.

GM Consumer Marketing Kevin Bowler said Telecom will credit all Go Large customers for monthly plan charges incurred since 8 December 2006, when the issue arose, through to the end of February 2007.

Currently with around 60,000 customers on the Go Large service, the refunds are expected to total $7.5 - $8.5m (incl GST).

Credits will vary depending on how long a customer has been on Go Large. For a customer who has been using the plan since 8 December and is still on the plan the credit is expected to be between $130 - $160.

Following customer feedback, our own review has shown that the process involved in managing Go Large internet traffic since early December is not what was originally intended or communicated to customers

The issue is specific to the Go Large plan which accounts for less than 10% of the total number of customers using broadband services.

Go Large was promoted as having traffic management applied to certain applications, but since December the traffic management process has affected all forms of activity.

"Clearly it is not an ideal situation and therefore we are crediting Go Large customers for plan charges incurred during this period" Mr Bowler said.

Go Large customers will be contacted directly by Telecom in the next two weeks and automatically receive the credit. Customers do not need to apply or do anything to receive it. The credit will automatically be applied to the customers' Telecom bill during March or April.

Mr Bowler said Telecom has also decided to temporarily stop signing up new customers onto the Go Large plan until it has completed further reviews into the service.

When they are contacted by Telecom, all existing Go Large customers will have the option to stay on the plan with a revised traffic management policy, to change to other broadband plans provided by Telecom if they wish or cancel their service.

"In this instance with the Go Large plan our internal technical review showed we had made an error and we believe that we are doing the right thing by crediting customers.";

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 24 )

I'm continuing my travels on this side of the Tasman, where they already have ADSL2+. However, there's still lots of general moaning about broadband being "too thin" and, in a classic grass is greener scenario, most people think New Zealand is actually ahead in fast internet (despite the fact we're still stuck with the previous generation of DSL. The general perception is that we're ahead with local loop unbundling, and with 3G - and Vodafone and Telecom NZ's latest upgrades do put us on a very good footing; see Juha's coming Tech Guy column in PC World March).

I do like an ADSL2+ ad in the Sydney Morning Herald today, which after all our Xtraordinaries malarkey deserves a truth in advertising award. It says in big-ish type that ADSL2+'s 24MBit/s download speed is a theoretical maxium.

The full list of qualifiers listed in the ad is too long to include here, but includes: "Actual speeds may be lower due to a number of factors including distance from your local telephone exchange, network configuration and traffic, the quality of customer copper phone line, EMI, cabling and equipment."

Plus, there's a prominent line about some extreme shaping (speed caps of 64Kbit/sec - ouch - to 128Kbit/s) that kicks in once you reach your data plan's data cap. Lastly, middle of the road plans are $49.95, pretty much the same as here.

My friend with a cable modem does get excellent speed (up to 14Mbit/s ... reminding me, nostalgically, of my first model, a 14.4Kbit/bit dial-up job), but his 20GB data cap comes as part of a $100 monthly plan (he's thinking of downgrading to a 10GB/$70 month plan) ... and a move from a central city suburb to an inner suburb is about to see him forced back to DSL land anyway.

So our Aussie cousins are doing a few good broadband things, and I looking forward to ADSL2+'s impending arrival in NZ ... but it's also obvious that no-one should expect 24Mbit/s miracles.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

News is coming through that Google is extending its tentacles still further, this time by agreeing to buy Adscape Media (for $US23 million), a company that specialises in placing advertisements within PC and console games. Microsoft recently picked up Massive (for $US200 million), a company with similar technology.

The logic is that 20 and 30-something males don't watch TV anymore; they're either on the net or playing, so in-game ads (which Nielsen is now tracking in trial partnership with Activision) are a way to reach this lost generation.

At their most sophisticated, with online gaming, ads can be constantly changed and updated.

Mario Wynands, MD of New Zealand's largest game developer, Sidhe Interactive, says he's open to the idea of dynamic ads in upcoming titles (there are already static stadium ads in Sidhe's Rugby League and Melbourne Cup). "However, we would not include dynamic advertising where real world advertising was not appropriate."

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Flew into Sydney last night and so far things aren't looking too high tech. Holders of new-fangled e-Passports could scan them themselves, but then had to join a plain old manual queue. And my hotel has joke broadband rates that would make any greedy Auckland establishment proud: $4.95 for the first hour, then 1 cent per kilobyte, up to a daily maxium of $24.95 -- a day being defined as each time you download more than 100MB. Ho ho. So no pic today. Anyhow, I'm seeing a friend with a cable modem tomorrow, so maybe things will look better once I've seen how broadband's going on civvy street.

UPDATE: Just had a mid afternoon power cut in the CBD. Feels like home.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Market researcher IDC has totted up numbers of PCs sold for 2006:
The big news was HP continuing to zero in on long-time number one Dell. A recent well-publicised house fire in the US will not help Dell's case.

In brief, Dell launched an attack on HP's heartland by releasing a Dell printer range (although it's taken a while, Dell printers have finally landed in NZ, and in our test center - see the first review in our April issue).

HP figured the best form of defense was offense and, while sticking with its channel model, has re-envigorated its PC division, keeping Dell pinned down, relatively, on its on turf.

Last week, Dell's board decided the company had been in a slump too long, and fired CEO Kevin Rollins. Founder Michael Dell (still only 42) returned to the helm. It'll be interesting to see how he reacts to the new situation; he's certainly not a man who does things by halves.

Anyway, here's how IDC's global sales chart looked for the year:

PC maker: PC shipments*
Dell: 39.1
HP: 38.8
Lenovo: 16.6
Acer: 13.6
Toshiba: 9.2

* by dollar value, in $US billions

In New Zealand, where Dell launched some time after the US, it's never been at number one. Recent IDC figures have had HP top dog, with Dell and Acer alternating in the number two slot, followed by Lenovo and Toshiba.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Most people are aware that IBM's Deep Blue programme, running on a super computer, beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov back in 1997. But you're probably unaware how much the rot has set in since then. Today, reports The Economist (subscription required), computers are dominating humans on numerous fronts: "They are the undisputed champions in draughts and backgammon. They are steadily gaining ground in Scrabble, poker and bridge. And they're even doing pretty well at crossword puzzles."

So what hope for us feeble old carbon-based life-forms?

Plenty.

Computers' skill at chess and other games doesn't involve any strategic thinking. Rather it's a brute force probability calculation, whereby a computer looks at all the pieces on, say, a chess board, calculates all of black's possible moves, all of white's possible moves, and then combs through all the millions combinations for the move that will give its opponent the least chance of winning.

With the strategic Chinese board game Go, computers are still floundering, despite researchers' best efforts. The highest ranked Go programme so far - MoGo, developed by University of Paris boffins - ranks just 2,323rd in the world.

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

If I may depart from IT for a day (which is remarkably easy when your file sever is still dead; I'm trying really really hard not to type in ALL CAPS), a new movie has just been released by the vastly under-rated Simon Pegg, who for my money is the UK's funniest living comedian, combining laugh-out-loud physical humour with many a wry pop-culture in-joke. If you never saw his sitcom Spaced (which you probably didn't; it screen in the middle of the night on Prime), rent it immediately on DVD. If you're a PC World reader, chances are you love sci fi, which means you'll warmly chuckle at all the Star Wars references (see, I'm finding some relevance).

Check out the official website for cop spoof Hot Fuzz, here. It opened in the UK today, with NZ release pending.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Hi PC Worlders. Yes, we're back online after a couple of days of office-moving fun, including the sudden unexpected death of our file wall and our file server. But anyhow, you don't want to hear about my trouble, you want to hear about trouble coming soon to your mobile phone.

This is Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Helsinki-based F-Secure and advisor to Microsoft, IBM and the US Secret Service, interviewed in the latest Red Herring:

Q: Are mobile phones at risk from viruses?

A: "They are still relatively small, with only 323 mobile phone viruses reported, compared to some 200,000 PC viruses. Still, that's more viruses than those that attack Macs. We've also already seen the first for-profit malware on mobile phones -- a virus that caused phones to call a premium number in Russia, and charged up a huge bill that goes to the virus writer. It is much easier to make money with a mobile phone virus -- a PC doesn't have a built-in billing system."

Ouch. And don't forget it was only a short time ago that we saw the first iPod virus. How long before your smart phone, or your music player, starts spreading viruses to your silicon chip-festooned car. Not long, once they've all got IP addresses. Happy motoring.

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

We're moving office over the weekend, so our web server and your access to this site will be offline for a little of that. Sorry for the interruption. Normal transmission will be resumed as soon as possible.

For those updating their address books, we'll be moving a couple of blocks across Auckland's CBD to our considerably swisher new home in the DDB Needham building at level 1, 80 Greys Ave. All our other contact details will remain the same.

While sorting a decade's worth of back issues in preparation for our move, I came across this gem. It's Sam Morgan being interviewd for a Dec 1999 PC World feature called 'Taking care of eBusiness', written just 8 months after the fledging TradeMe first squeaked into life on an NT server. If you can't read the pull-out quote, Sammy's saying "Today, there's basically no money coming in." Some things are worth sticking at.

Actually, just quietly, I have to say most I chose to profile for that feature have gone on to success. Simon Barton's Gamezone has morphed into the highly successful GamePlanet, Woolworths.co.nz is still delivering, unlike many overseas counterparts founded at the same time, and Westie Ian Miller's tuff-as-nuts-com is still plying PDA cases in search engine savvy fashion. The only e-commerce strike out was Stefan Preston with FlyingPig.co.nz ("a key investor is Eric Watson"), though these days he's he seems to be doing OK for himself in the bricks and mortar world as Bendon CEO (yes, they have a website too. I got someone to check).

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

IE seems to have finally staunched the Firefox incursion, according to Nielsen's latest NetRatings for pcworld.co.nz. When we last checked in, during November, Mozilla Firefox was continuing its seemingly inexorable march, climbing to 30.72%, while Microsoft's IE dropped, again, from 65.94% mid 2006 to 62.8%.

But for the week ending 02 Feb 07, the browser breakdown shows IE actually rising slightly, while the Fox falls fractionally - a big contrast to its leaps and bounds last year.

Internet Explorer's comeback is built around IE 7, which has doubled in popularity to know account for 25.79% of this site's traffic.

Apple's Safari browser usually falls in the gaggle of cult browsers that register less than 1%, but the recent wild popularity of iPhone stories on pcworld.co.nz lately seems to have drawn a few Mac-heads.

Browser: - % of unique visitors to pcworld.co.nz
Microsoft Internet Explorer: 63.45%
Mozilla Firefox: 30.71%
Opera Software Opera: 2.25%
Apple Safari: 1.74%

Hit me baby one more time
As ever, Nielsen showed that most people who came to pcworld.co.nz via search engines come from Google. Its dominance is so extreme that the second-placed source is Yahoo, on a measly 2.55%.

The top 10 search phrases that landed people on pcworld.co.nz for the week ending 21 January 07 were:
1. iphone
2. irql not less or equal
3. zero g registry
4. britney spears
5. britney spears no underwear
6. britney-spears
7. sysdata.xml
8. comet mcnaught
9. pc world
10. apple iphone

This is quite a diffuse field, I should add, with no term bar 'iphone' accounting for more than 1% of traffic that landed on pcworld.co.nz from search engines overall.

I should add that salacious Britney seekers actually landed on a relatively benign blog entry.
Similarly, in the week ending 02 Feb a small army of Lindsay Lohan stalkers got to learn little about Intel's wireless strategy.
Yes, I am bad. Though not in the way some Google surfers would like.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

pcworld.co.nz's Nielsen NetRatings for the week ending Feb 02 are pretty tasty. We registered our highest ever number of impressions for a 7-day period (117,310) spread among a record 32,607 unique browsers.

Also of note: Vista made a modest but noticeable splash in our page stats. Here are the OS's used by visitors to this site last week:

OS: % of visitors to pcworld.co.nz
Windows XP: 85.16%
Mac OS X: 5.8%
Windows 2000: 4.7%
Windows Vista: 2.27%
Windows 98: 1.90%
Linux: 1.10%
Windows Server 2003: 0.98%
Windows ME: 0.46%

A number of vendors have added Vista support just this week, usually available via a free download.
For McAfee's security products, check out us.mcafee.com/vista
For Symantec, surf to symantec.co.nz
For Nuance (whose stable now includes Dragon Naturally Speaking) surf to australia.nuance.com or call Mistral Software on 09 271 4661.

Tomorrow: IE 7 vs Firefox 2 - which browser are pcworld.co.nz visitors choosing?
Plus: you filthy, filthy readers - the naughtiest search terms that landed people on pcworld.co.nz.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Could satellite-borne internet be the answer to our broadband slump? After all, there's no expensive fibre optic cable to lay, and no need to be within range of a wi-fi, WiMax or 3G transmitter.

No, say the gnomes at Wired. According to an issue from two years back (and you're going to be getting a few artifacts week as I clear out my office ahead of our move to 80 Greys Ave), a satellite has to fly 23,000km above the earth to achieve a geosynchronous orbit (that is, for the satellite to orbit at the same speed as the planet spins, effectively keeping the satellite, and its TV or GPS or broadband transmission, beaming over a fixed point.)

Now packets of broadband data can, of course, when not inhibited by glugged up exchanges or claggy servers, move at the speed of light. But the minimum signal delay for a signal sent via a geosynchronous satellite is 0.24 seconds. That's lightspeed up to 23,000km, then back down again.

And in an online gaming environment, a lot could happen in a quarter of a second.

You could die before you even know someone's shooting at you.

Anyhow, it now looks like land-lubbing fibre-optic cable will remain New Zealand's main broadband link to the outside world for some time.

Southern Cross Cables Ltd, part-owned by Telecom (but registered in Bermuda!), has just announced an upgrade of the Southern Cross Cable that links NZ and the US (see a map of it here). It won't take place until later this year, but it will boost throughput from 240 gigabits a second to a head-spinning 1.2 terabits per second.

Sadly, any internet connection is only as strong as its weakest link, so that whooshing data will have slowed to a trickle by the time it seeps through your local phone exchange. But it's nice to see big pipes being built somewhere. On a seabed. Deep under the Pacific Ocean.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

The easy part is counting Theresa's crimes. Among them badly misjudging Helen Clark and David Cunliffe's resolve; being so fast to push more people onto today's creaky broadband network (hello, Xtraordinaries!) but achingly slow to introduce ADSL2+; and throwing good money money after bad in Australia.

But now comes the harder, less fathomable part. Who will replace Theresa?

There is no heir apparant (and it is definitely curious, and very sudden-seeming, that she would resign before the hunt for a successor had even begun). What direction will the new CEO head? Will ADSL2+ finally get rolled out? Will they decide that it will be in investors' and customers' (as well as the Commerce Commission's) best interests to genuinely split the company into totally separate wholesale and retail entities? Will they slash mobile broadband pricing and roll out VoIP? What do you want to see, and who would you like to see as the new CEO?

Personally I'd like to see someone who eats their own dog food. If you love using broadband internet, then you wouldn't let things languish.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 8 )

Went to an Intel briefing this morning. Haven't been to one for a little while, and was expecting the usual guff about how the company's latest silicon will blast through PhotoShop or 3D games. And there was some of that. But, in a sign of the times, the first foil was about various Intel chips' abilities to handle video downloads from Google's YouTube.com.

By Intel's reckoning, a streaming YouTube vid utilises 80% of a Pentium M's processing power; just 40% of a Pentium 4's; and a crisp 20% or less of a Core 2 Duo.

Maybe the latest processor techs and specs do matter in this broadband age.

Most of the rest was under embargo until May, but as a number of websites noted in the wake of CES, Intel has adopted an aggressive advocacy stance on wireless broadband, and plans chipsets that support both 11n wi-fi and WiMax this calendar year. Intel ANZ technical manager Graham Tucker also confirmed that Intel is assisting Slingshot with its WiMax trials in Whangarei and Hamilton.

There was also a demo of Intel's vPro technology. While not new (check out Juha's November Tech Guy column), vPro still looks impressive in a live demo. Essentially it gives a network administrator greater powers of remote control. Even over a dial-up connection, a vPro-enabled PC can be shut down or rebooted over the internet (and via a web browser interface, if you take that option).

And, because it's firmware rather than OS-based, a network admin can also use vPro to audit PCs on her network, even if all of said PCs are switched off. Useful, say, if you want an after-hours snap shot of which of your computers are Vista capable (the catch is that they all your PCs would have to have the three vPro components: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, an Intel Q965 Express chipset and an Intel 82566DC Gigabit Ethernet network controller).

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )