No future for music? This kid is making 70 Pounds an hour playing guitar

For a feelgood story on this blog allow us to branch out to the BBC, who have covered the story of a 13-year-old busker showing how to make money just by playing some guitar...

Check it out here

Welcome on board Glass Shark

We love bands. Especially when they sound like Glass Shark. Now that they have their own STARtxt going, you will no doubt be hearing more, very soon indeed. Check them out here.

BBC Mobile TV trial, low take up - update

The NMA magazine (UK) has picked up on the recent "Mobile TV trial = poor results" news, coming in from the BBC, as per our blog entry further below.

Here's what they see as the reasons for the very low take-up:

The problem is three-fold. Consumers aren't used to walking around watching TV in the way that they are with listening to music, which is a much better match for mobile. Secondly we no longer live in a broadcast (simulcast) world and no-one less so than the early adopters and kids the operators are trying to attract to mobile TV services. Finally the quality of mobile TV over 3G is terrible.

Yep.

BBC's mobile TV trial peaks at 580 viewers a day

According to the BBC trust's report, the BBC's mobile TV trial reached a peak of just 580 viewers per day.

The broadcaster saw monthly content consumption of its BBC One, Three and News 24 channels reach a high of just 13 minutes per month during the 12 month trial which ended in April.

Radio figures were not revealed but were said to be significantly lower.

COMMENT: this is a serious reality check for everyone believing we will all be watching mobile TV by the end of this year - both tech, costs and usability are just no there yet, and if the omnipotent BBC can't pull it off, noone can. We recommend sticking with downloadable mobile video "snippets" for now.

Google most popular Mobile site according to Opera

As New Media Age reports, Google has jumped ahead of Yahoo! as the UK site most visited via a mobile, according to the latest figures from browser company Opera. Opera Mini, the company's mobile version which is embedded in mobile phones globally, was used by 14.5m consumers in June.

Google jumped from the second most visited site to take the top spot from Yahoo!. Rival MSN.com also entered the top ten for the first time. Other sites to climb included Facebook, Bebo and Wikipedia, BBC and YouTube fell in popularity. On average each user visited 233 pages during the month, a growth of 9.4% on the previous month.

Comment: the stats are somewhat misleading, as Opera is not a significant browser on handsets, however the trend for an increase in direct search away from destination sites such as BBC is likely to be correct.