The 11th Star Trek film - a prequel, chronicling the early days of one James T Kirk - is currently shooting. It's directed by JJ Abrams (Mission Impossible III, TV's Lost) and the cast includes unknown journeyman Chris Pine as Kirk (Kirk wannabe Matt Damon was apparently spurned by Abrams), deranged hottie Winona Ryder as Spock's human mother, Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz) as Scotty, and Leonard Nimoy who is co-billed as Spock (no doubt indicating one of Star Trek's patented time-travel scenarios or similar).

Also New Zealand's own carbon-based lifeform that makes its living from acting, Karl Urban, (Shorty Street) who plays a Tribble ... sorry, McCoy.

Who would you have cast? Leave a comment listing the actor you would have placed in any of the roles (check out the full line-up here) and you'll be in to win one of six copies of Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare 2.0.

You'll notice that while Leonard Nimoy gets a cameo, there's no William Shatner. It's one of the great regrets of my life that a photo taken of me with the Shat at an Intel IDF forum in San Jose never came out. This was before his ironic-mode comeback with Boston Legal, and although it was a morning book signing, he seemed to be several sheets to the wind, uncannily like Tim Allen's burnt-out Shatner-clone in the brilliant roman a clef Galaxy Quest.

After a brief speech and some Q&A (during which star-struck Intel and Dell developers actually asked him serious questions about future technology. Sample reply: "Biotech? It's just like ... now ... DON'T EAT THE CORN!), Shatner started his "book signing". This consisted of him walking down the line of people hopefully holding up his latest master work, holding out his pen so he drew a continuous scribbly line across each book as we went, wobbling but never stopping.

A PR materialised to say "Mr Shatner will not be signing at this time", and quickly started to lead him away by the elbow. At which point I grabbed him and he agreed to a photo, or at least came to a confused halt. I threw my disposable camera to a passerby who snapped a pick of me grinning like an idiot and the Shat sucking in his gut, but alas it never came out.

Anyhow, I will officially decide the winners when I return from holiday on Monday January 14 and resume this blog. Meantime I will be attempting to live a non-digital lifestyle. Happy new year, everybody.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

Wired has posted its 10 best galleries of the year, including the BSOD Through The Ages, and Star Trek's 10 Cheesiest Creatures. One of the many problems with all the later Star Trek series has been the lack of cheesy aliens; in fact, the lack of any alien with an alien feature beyond a couple of ridgy lines across their forehead. Anyhow, the original collection is well worth checking out.

Cybershopping - offshore
The NZ Herald has a rah-rah front page headline today: Online Shopping Booms. Apparently the amount spent online surged during November to $585 million, or equivalent to 32% of the amount spent via eftpos cards over the counter. That does sound astoundingly high, but the $585 million does include used goods as well (that is Trade Me) as well as well as conventional retail. Cattily, the story completely ignores Ferrit.

I've been doing a bit of online shopping myself. But I ended up buying the hardcover edition of The Dangerous Book for Boys from Amazon.com (for $US14.97; actually $US1.04 cheaper because I bought it in tandem with The Daring Book For Girls). Even including shipping, that still worked out far, far cheaper than picking up the same book, in the same size hard cover format at Borders for $NZ50.00. In fairness, I should point out that our own Fishpond.co.nz is now offering Dangerous for $33.64 (marked down at some point from $57.99; I've seen it in Queen Street stores for up to $70).

Don't pay the ferryman (online)
I was caught out in the other direction this morning, however, when booking a car ferry ticket to Waiheke. While on hold to Sealink, a voice prompt told me to checkout online booking options. Being in front of my computer, I duly did so, and in fact managed to close my transaction before anyone answered my call - well, almost; the final confirmation screen just went blank for about 10 minutes before I gave up.

Calling the main number again, I got a prompt reply and bought a ticket over the phone - return with a car and four people, for $120. That was something of a surprise, as the "special online price" flagged on the site had been $164 (which had in fact gone through).

The Sealink rep was very polite about it, and immediately reversed the $164 charge, and explained that the $120 deal was available online. That's good, but following what I thought were all the default prompts, I missed that special deal on the site.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

The latest NPD sales figures from the US show Sony's PlayStation3 surged during November as a price cut fed a quadrupling of sales to 466,000 units. However, it was a record-setting month for all platforms as game hardware sales rose 52% year-on-year to $US2.63 billion. According to Nintendo, the only reason it could sell more units of its Wii was that its manufacturing capacity was maxed out.

The positive spin for Sony: if you combine PS2 and PS3 sales, then PlayStation is the top selling console. The negative: PlayStation punters still prefer the cheaper, older PlayStation - albeit now by a shrinking margin. In the portable war, DS continues its wide lead over Sony's PlayStation Portable.

Those numbers in full:

CONSOLES
Platform: Nov sales (Oct sales)
Nintendo Wii: 981,000 (519,000)
Microsoft Xbox 360: 770,000 (366,000)
Sony PlayStation2 496,000 (184,000)
Sony PlayStation3: 466,000 (121,000)

Nintendo's president also moved to scotch the impression that Wii players are kids. The company's data shows the average Wii'er is 29 years old.

PORTABLES
Platform: Nov sales (Oct sales)
Nintendo DS: 1.5 million (458,000)
<Sony PSP: 567,000 (286,000)

In NZ, we're obviously dealing with much smaller numbers, but November figures from independent market tracker GfK show a relatively different makeup, with Sony taking the top three places for the month:
1. PlayStation2: 3,926 units
2. PlayStation Portable: 2,612
3.PlayStation3: 1,831

Again quoting GfK figures, Sony also claims that from its March 07 release to the end of November, PlayStation3 sold 15,172 units in NZ, eclipsing the Xbox 360.

Back Stateside, software sales are booming even more than hardware, leaping 63% to $1.3 billion. Here's NDP's top 10:

1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (X360) - 1,570,000
2. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) - 1,120,000
3. Assassin's Creed (X360) - 980,000
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) - 967,000
5. Wii Play (Wii) - 564,000
6. Mass Effect (X360) - 473,000
7. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3) - 444,000
8. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Wii) - 426,000
9. Halo 3 (X360) - 387,000
10. Assassin's Creed (PS3) - 377,000

Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, both expected to be megahits on the PC platform, Crysis sold 86,633 copies and Unreal Tournament 3 a mere 33,995.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Napier's 'The Rip Factory' has launched NZ's first street-legal service for ripping your CD collection to a hard drive. It works like this: you send The Rip Factory your music collection then, using a multidisc replicator, they copy your discs to the device of your choice (hard drive/NAS drive, MP3 player, DVD) and in the format(s) of your choice.

Naturally, it beats the tedium of copying CDs to your hard drive at home, but The Rip Factory also touts a couple-three other advantages: everything will be ripped to the same audio resolution for sonic consistency; you'll get high rez printouts of all album artwork, and digitally, all the track, artist and genre info properly catalogued. And - although admittedly our music copyright laws are routinely flaunted, even by people in the industry itself - it is technically illegal to copy your own discs to your own PC - The Rip Factory has reached a agreement with the PPNZ (Phonographic Performance New Zealand).

The cost (not including freight) is $1.69 per disc, dropping to $1.59 if you send more than 300 CDs, and to $1.50 for 500+.

That adds up. Even though my CD collection is not supermassive, at around 250 discs, I'd still be looking at the thick end of $400. And I don't want to rip every song on every disc. I'd probably consider it at $0.50 a disc.

I was mulling the cost aloud when Staff Writer Jan - mid-20s - offered that he has no CDs. I guess he never went to Sounds. Kids today.

The Rip Factory is based on a new idea - at least in this part of the world - but it's no flakey start-up, incidentally. Owner Jason Lake has been on the scene for years with two companies, Krome Technologies (selling IT and digital hi-fi gear) and Playblack Systems (which has bought the well-regarded Sonos wireless home music system to NZ).

A bit of iron
Good to see a certain secure data and document storage company sent one of its own trucks to our building yesterday, rather than a taxi, and the back remained locked. I'm here to help.

Posted by Chris Keall at 6:54 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Telstra will switch off its CDMA network on January 28. For owners of phones on Telecom's network, the immediate implication is that they won't be able to make calls when they travel to Australia. Telecom has put forward two workarounds:

1) You can upgrade to one of its soon-to-be-expanding range of WorldMode phones, which run on both CDMA (used by Telecom) and W-CDMA and Edge/GPRS/GSM networks (used by Vodafone, and most other telcos around the world). In the new year, Telecom will add BlackBerry's WorldMode model - breaking Vodafone's monopoly on Research in Motion's wildly popular smartphone - plus a model from Samsung that will be very close to the Samsung BlackJack released in the US, and run on Windows Mobile 6.

2) You can borrow a phone from Telecom. Incoming GM of Business Solutions Greg McAlister - who will helm all small and medium business products; that is, those too small-fry for Gen-i - says that over the past two years 100,000 of Telecom's 2.1 million customers have travelled to Oz. Obviously, not all are going to upgrade to WorldMode phones at once, and not all of those who don't are going to be thrilled at the no-roaming news. That's the bad news.
The good news is that Telecom has quadrupled its stock of loan phones and PDAs, and McAlister says these will be free for those who require voice or data roaming during a trip across the ditch.

The above news comes from lunch with McAlister, a refreshingly straight-talking career Telecomer, plus a new-comer to the company, David Craig, who was recently appointed GM of Consumer Marketing (having spent most of his career in the UK working for spirits conglomerate Diageo).

Both have steep hills to climb, but big plans.

McAlister is eyeing hosted unified comms and other services for small business next year.

Craig is talking up a free security suite coming for YahooXtra Bubble users. He didn't shirk from the fact that the launch was a fiasco, yet Craig is also right that Yahoo's new premium services (known as Bubble here) have earned rave reviews overseas (including from our US parent publication). So it is possible that Craig has entered public life as a Telecom GM at the right time. Eventually as anger fades about the transitional foul-ups (and personally I'll keep simmering for a little while, having had to counsel friends and relatives) people will realise that the recently launched Flickr Pro accounts - with unlimited online storage - and other frills are actually pretty niftily executed.

CDMA kill date
McAlister also elaborated on Telecom's plans to build a network to the SIM card-friendly W-CDMA standard, as used by Vodafone et al, for its 3G network. He said main centres would be turned on around November next year, with the whole country covered by Telecom using the step-down bandwidth on that side of the fence (Edge/GPRS).
By 2013, Telecom will switch off its CDMA network.

LG Grooves to your car radio
Jumping back to the consumer side of the fence, Craig showed off a new cellphone from LG called the Groove, which will be released for Telecom's network in the new year. It's kicker is a built-in FM transmitter that can beam songs from the phone to your car stereo. It's like having an iPod and a Griffin iTrip in one (though memory is MicroSD, so you're limited to 1GB).

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Is this secure document storage? After that blunder in the UK that saw two CDs with the records of 25 million people go missing, you'd think everybody would be a bit more careful about how they move documents around, whether in digital or hardcopy form.

Yet this always happens outside our building, and I'm glad I had my camera handy to snap it this time. Pictured above: an international company that specialises in ultra-secure off-site data and document storage has sent a Taxi Truck to pick up a consignment. The two guys doing the loading were not that hands-on. Neither were they particularly fussed about me circling the truck a couple of times in a suspicious manner. Luckily for them, it was just to take the photo above.

Calling Erin Brockovich
Keen readers will recall that a few months ago, after a torturous series of phone and email exchanges, I managed to secure a new coffee machine via Noel Lemming's website. Now it's broken down for a second time. When one of our staff called to complain, he was told it would keep breaking down, because it's not a heavy duty enough model for a company of 40 people.

Naturally, I was pretty annoyed, and put in a call to Erin Brokovich. As we know, Erin's retail investigations don't extend to actually visiting the Southern Hemisphere. However, using her advanced sonar powers, Erin was able to analyse the situation from afar, and she told me that no soil contamination or radioactivity involved. I can tell you that was a relief.

Nice one, Sony
Least you think I'm only full bile this Friday afternoon, I will point out that I did enjoy watching the Phoenix play the LA Galaxy Saturday night. It was an entertaining game, and an all excellent sweep of publicity for soccer - sorry, football - in this country all-round.

The instigator of the event was off course Phoenix white knight Terry Serepisos. But it was also good to see Sony get in behind not just the Beckham game, but use the publicity around it to announce at two-season Sony sponsorship of the Phoenix. I'm by no means the number one fan of advertising around games (die Monster Vision die!) but this one's a Cinderella story. While the business magazine Unlimited was still in our stable, we had a parade of Kingz then Knights owners trooping through, each time promising a new start. This time the team really has gained some long term stability. Nice.

Pictured below: Front - Martin McManus, Sony New Zealand Managing Director and Terry Serepisos, Phoenix Owner. Back: Matt Walton Smith, Sony New Zealand Division Manager Consumer Marketing and Tony Pignata, Phoenix CEO.

(I'm not sure if Matt's moustache was meant as a stayer after Movember. Nevertheless it seems tasteful, and not prone to the kind of out-of-context apocalyps that occurred when CNN International picked up Jan's TVNZ interview with about the Kiwi bot-herder, and his sister in Norway nearly fell off her exercise machine when she say it on a TV at the gym. Turns out not every country had men growing huge, hammy handlebars, so international viewers had to remain bemused).

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

There's been a ton of press about Vivendi's plan to gain a controlling stake in Activision, which should nicely marry the former's online gaming prowess (World of Warcraft) with the latter's mainly offline hits (Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, Spiderman, Call of Duty et al), creating a games giant that will push long-time market leader EA into second place (question: who's EA going to do a deal with? Microsoft? Watch this space.) Easily the best piece, however, is Fortune's interview with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. Here's a snip:

"I've been petrified for about two years now," he says ... even though it has been succeeding with games for the three new consoles that emerged recently - Xbox 360, Playstation3, and the Nintendo Wii - something important was going on elsewhere. "We started analyzing the online experience and realized that World of Warcraft was like nothing we'd ever seen," Kotick says. "It's not even just a business. It's a social network with this incredible entertainment component to it."

"People in our industry have tried and tried to build successful online games, with Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons and all kinds of things, but most of them failed," he continues. "We realized that to do something ourselves that would be big enough to affect our margins would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. But even if we tried, we'd probably get it wrong."

Read the full interview here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

MSN.co.nz has relaunched today, adding two new content partners: the NZ Herald and MetService. The Herald stories operate in the same vein as links to other partners like TV3 and NetGuide. That is, once you click on an MSN.co.nz news story headline, MSN.co.nz closes and you get taken to the Herald's website. For multimedia, you're carted off to TV3's website. That's been great news for TV3's traffic, but it seems pointless for MSN.co.nz. Compared to the full-blooded NineMSN.com.au, which hosts its own content - keeping readers on the site - it feels more like a collection of links than a real portal.

TVNZ.co.nz goes mobile
Meanwhile, TVNZ has launched a "portable" version of its site (tvnz.co.nz/portable). Optimised for viewing on cellphones and PDAs (though also handy if you're on a rubbish landline connection), it features content and clips from One News and One Sport, plus listings for all TV One, TV2 and the Freeview-only TV6. There's also weather info, including radar and satellite maps, designed for people on the go.

I've just surfed to the site using my Nokia N95 (that is, a 3G Broadband or HSDPA mobile on Vodafone's network) and text news stories, the weather and the TV listings all appeared reasonably quickly, and are simply displayed and easy to navigate. Just the ticket for mobile. I got a "Not supported" error message when I tried to click on video clips, however (which appear at the end of text versions of stories), though I can play them fine over my PC.
UPDATE: Deputy Editor Ted just tried to access the video over the Nokia E90 Communicator he's got in for review (for our Feb edition). It's also got the juice for video, being widescreen and 3G Broadband, but Ted's received the same error message.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )