Wotif takes off, despite downturn

ONLINE accommodation company Wotif has bucked the deepening financial downturn with a profit upgrade.

Chief executive Robbie Cooke said the company now expected to improve its interim after-tax profit by a significant 20 per cent to $20.5 million for the six months to December 31 — up from $17.06 million in 2007.

Wotif’s share price rose 4c to $3.15 yesterday.

Mr Cooke said: "In the last six months, we found that people are still taking breaks but they are focused on getting the best deals online.

"The majority of travellers are taking domestic holidays in Australia and New Zealand.

"About 80 per cent of travellers are booking accommodation within a three-hour range away. They have also cut back on overseas travel, especially to the US and Europe, because of the falling Australian dollar against the US dollar and European currency."

The company’s decision to extend the booking window from 28 days to three months had generated greater interest from bargain hunters, he said.

"We received about 3.5 million hits on our site every month. The fact that travellers can now book three months ahead has been a big plus," he said.

He also said the company had seen an increase in the number of corporate bookings.

Many small and medium-sized companies hit by the financial downturn are looking to trim costs.

"More business travellers and government department officers are turning to online hotel bookings because of cheaper rates," Mr Cooke said.

Global digital music sales up 25 percent

By Kate Holton

London (Reuters) – Legitimate digital music sales grew strongly in 2008 but were still dwarfed by the scale of illegal downloads, despite industry efforts to adapt to the Internet and offer more choice to customers.

A report by the trade body IFPI showed legal digital global sales grew by an estimated 25 percent to $3.7 billion in trade value, to account for about 20 percent of the industry’s global recorded music sales, up from 15 percent in 2007.

However, the rapid rate of growth has inevitably slowed — digital sales grew by more than 30 percent in 2007 — and the scale of the piracy has eaten into traditional revenues, meaning the overall music market for 2008 is expected to be down about 7 percent. It fell by 8 percent in 2007.

The report showed about 95 percent of the music downloaded in 2008, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal and not paid for.

As part of its response, the music industry has launched a host of alternative ways to sell music, such as through subscription models on mobile phones and Internet service providers (ISPs), and on advertising-supported models.

It has also pushed ISPs to help curb mass copyright infringement on their networks and believes it has reached a “tipping point” in persuading governments that doing nothing is not an option.

“The recorded music industry is reinventing itself and its business models,” IFPI Chairman and Chief Executive John Kennedy said in the report.

“Music companies have changed their whole approach to doing business, reshaped their operations and responded to the dramatic transformation in the way music is distributed and consumed.”

Mobile companies and operators have shown an interest in packaging music with their core services in the last couple of years, as a way of growing loyalty and reducing the number of users who churn off the service.

According to the report, Denmark’s telephone operator TDC has seen churn drop significantly since it bundled music with its mobile and broadband services.

Churn among its mobile customers dropped by between 30 percent and 40 percent and in broadband customers by some 60 percent — both highly attractive improvements for any company focussed on keeping its customers during the economic downturn.

Nokia, the world’s top mobile phone maker, launched a phone model with an unlimited music bundle in Britain in 2008, in a bid to challenge the dominance of Apple and its popular iPhone.

Advertising-supported services are also taking off, with a joint venture between social network MySpace and the four major music labels known as MySpace Music one of the most exciting propositions to hit the market.

The development of new services and the apparent interest from some governments in helping to curb piracy has, Kennedy said, resulted in the industry feeling more confident about its future than in recent years.

Single track downloads were up 24 percent in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally while digital albums were up 36 percent. 

Vatican to get own YouTube channel

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican will soon have its own channel on the video sharing site YouTube where the Catholic faithful or the curious will be able to see Pope Benedict or Church events, a Vatican source said on Saturday.

The details of the accord are due to be presented on Friday at a news conference attended by Vatican officials as well as Henrique de Castro, managing director of media solutions for Google, which owns YouTube.

The initiative will involve Google, the Vatican Television Center and Vatican Radio.

It will mark the Vatican’s deepest plunge into new media. The Vatican opened up its website, www.vatican.va, in 1995.

U.S. wireless group opposes net openness in stimulus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group representing U.S. wireless companies is seeking changes to $6 billion in grants aimed at promoting expanded Internet and wireless services as part of an economic stimulus bill proposed by Democrats.

The CTIA industry group said a requirement that providers who get grant money abide by so-called “open access” principles will impede investment in wireless and Internet access for the rural and hard-to-serve areas targeted by the measure.

“The utility of the program will be compromised if carriers are hesitant to participate because of uncertainty about the vague, undefined and unnecessary ‘open access’ obligation,” CTIA President Steve Largent said in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, and ranking Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas.

The committee will hold a hearing Thursday on parts of the $825 billion stimulus proposal.

Free Press and other public interest groups want “openness” to be mandated to get government funds. The groups say the program could turn into a giveaway to private companies with no accountability and reinforce big companies’ dominance of the Internet.

Free Press defines openness as to “prohibit discrimination against any lawful content on the networks and empower consumers with freedom of choice among Internet providers.”

CTIA also asked the lawmakers for an expedited process to site cell phone towers, asking that grant recipients have their applications for tower locations acted on within 75 days.

(Reporting by Kim Dixon; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Mobile carriers answer call for new services

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) – Wireless carriers appear poised to deliver on what the mobile industry has long seen as its holy grail — location-based services.

Today’s mobile phones can provide remarkably specific location data to their users through a combination of embedded GPS chips and network-based cell-tower data. It’s a feature that holds great promise for commercial applications by providing the ability to deliver to mobile phone users information, entertainment and advertising tailored to their location.

Potential applications could be as simple as alerting fans when artists listed as their favorite on Facebook are appearing in their area, or offering them a discount on the album if they walk by a participating record store. Others can be more complicated, such as using music as a filter on mobile location-based dating services, or enabling members of a text-message fan club to find each other at concerts.

There are opportunities for the touring business as well, such as providing directions to a venue where an artist might be playing a surprise show, or less aggressive applications such as listing all the gigs scheduled in a user’s immediate area.

Few location-sensitive services have made it to the mass market due to the lack of a common location technology among U.S. wireless carriers and concerns that sharing their customers’ location data with a service provider could trigger privacy complaints.

But in the closing months of 2008, two leading carriers made decisive moves to provide location-based services, otherwise known as LBS, to developers in an effort to jump-start the market.

SURGE EXPECTED

Verizon Wireless, which first promised to cooperate with application developers a year ago, said it would provide developers GPS data from three of its Windows Mobile smart phones — Samsung’s Omnia and Saga and HTC’s Touch Pro.

Sprint is providing its location data to the aggregators WaveMarket and uLocate, which will then offer it to developers interested in creating applications for their respective platforms. The aggregators say they’ll meet Sprint’s security and privacy requirements.

Thanks to these moves, industry experts expect to see the number of new LBS applications entering the market each year to surge from a handful to the hundreds.

“If you wanted to launch a location-aware app before, you had to strike a deal with the carrier, which is a brutal process,” said Joel Grossman, vice president of marketing and product management for WaveMarket. “That’s a hassle not only for developers, but for carriers, because it’s not scalable for them. I think you’ll see the business pressures on other carriers will lead them to adopt a more open solution as well.”

AT&T plans to launch an LBS infrastructure in early 2009, although it has provided no details yet. T-Mobile’s plans remain unknown.

What does this mean for the music industry? Grossman said WaveMarket is already working with several labels he declined to identify to develop LBS applications for new album releases and marketing plans.

Label sources admitted that they are only now starting to scratch the surface of any potential LBS applications, which to date revolve mainly around coupons and contests. Jive/Zomba said it is exploring using the technology in an upcoming David Archuleta campaign.

Island Def Jam created an iPhone app for Fall Out Boy that lets members find each other if they want to, something senior vice president of new media and commerce Christian Jorg said could become more common in the year ahead. 

South Korea’s “prophet of doom” blogger indicted

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean prosecutors indicted a blogger on Thursday who had warned of financial doom for the country with critics saying he was targeted because his gloomy forecasts upset the government battling an economic downturn.

The blogger, writing under the pseudonym Minerva, became a household name for his predictions of sharp falls in the won and the local stock market and the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers. Prosecutors said he hurt the local currency by posting incorrect information online.

“The suspect in this case was indicted on charges of false information on two occasions,” an official at the prosecutors’ office said by telephone.

As South Korean markets tumbled late last year amid the global downturn, the main financial regulator warned it would crack down on what it considered malicious rumors and some economic analysts say they have come under pressure from authorities not to voice negative views on the economy.

“The prosecution hurriedly went ahead with its investigation and a court readily gave prosecutors a permit to conduct a witch hunt,” the liberal Hankyoreh daily said in a recent editorial, calling the case an infringement of freedom of speech.

Prosecutors identified the blogger as Park Dae-sung, an unemployed 30-year-old man who faces up to five years in prison if he is found guilty of violating communications laws.

Since his detention earlier this month, legal experts have questioned whether authorities had legal grounds to prosecute individuals. Meanwhile the conservative ruling party of President Lee Myung-bak is pushing for a tough new law on cyber slander.

“The Minerva case shows that the tradition of rule of law has yet to set root firmly in our society,” said Dankook University law professor Ji Seong-woo.

Since Park’s detention, reports have flooded local mainstream media saying he was a quiet man with a humble educational background. Experts said this may be an attempt to discredit Park in a society that places high value on an elite education and employment at prestigious firms such as brokerages.

“Should Park be punished, it should be for his conduct and not because he is some thirty-some year old unemployed two-year technical college graduate,” Ji said.

The South Korean currency fell 28 percent last year and the main share index slumped 40 percent.

President Lee reshuffled his top economic officials on Monday, replacing his widely criticized finance minister, to speed up measures to stop Asia’s fourth largest economy from sliding into its deepest recession in 11 years.

(Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Sugita Katyal)

Facebook protest over breastfeeding removal

FACEBOOK is facing an online protest after removing pictures of breastfeeding mothers found to be overly revealing from the pages of members of the social network.

A Facebook group entitled "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!" has attracted nearly 85,000 members as of Tuesday and a handful of activists held a rally outside its California headquarters over the weekend.

The organisers of the page, which is hosting a lively debate, receiving more than 10,000 comments, said they launched their "Official Petition to Facebook" after Facebook pulled profile pictures showing women nursing their babies.

"The pictures have been reported as ‘obscene’ and have been removed — their posters warned not to repost or fear being kicked off of Facebook," the group’s organisers said.

"We’re wondering: what about a baby breastfeeding is obscene? Especially in comparison to MANY other pictures posted all over Facebook that really are obscene."

Facebook, which has more than 120 million members, said there was no ban on breastfeeding pictures but it did have a policy on how much of a woman’s breast can be revealed similar to that of newspapers and other media outlets.

"We agree that breastfeeding is natural and beautiful and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook," said Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman.

"We take no action on the vast majority of breastfeeding photos because they follow the site’s Terms of Use," Mr Schnitt said in a statement.

"Photos containing a fully exposed breast (as defined by showing the nipple or areola) do violate those Terms and may be removed," he said.

"These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children (over the age of 13) who use the site," Mr Schnitt said.

"The photos we act upon are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain," he added.

Saturday, the Facebook breastfeeding group staged a virtual protest online, called the Mothers International Lactation Campaign, which attracted more than 11,000 followers.

Real-life mothers also held a "nurse-in" outside Facebook’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters the same day, the Palo Alto Daily News reported.

The local newspaper said a handful of activists attended the protest, signing songs, displaying signs and breastfeeding their children outside Facebook headquarters.

AFP

New game genre taps into players’ creativity

By John Gaudiosi

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – Enabling videogame players to help make games as well as play them is becoming more than just a fad due to Electronic Arts’ “Spore” and Sony Computer Entertainment’s “LittleBigPlanet.”

New expansions of “Spore” from Electronic Arts’ Maxis studio continue to put creativity in the hands of gamers, and a sequel is in the works for “LittleBigPlanet,” both of which stand out with their user-generated content.

“Spore” is essentially a collection of editing tools that allows players to create creatures and then guide them through evolution with over 65 million player-made creatures, spaceships, and buildings so far posted on Spore.com.

After unleashing “Spore” on the PC, “Spore Creatures” on Nintendo DS and “Spore Origins” on mobile phones last September, EA has a quartet of new games planned for this year.

“Spore Galactic Creatures,” the first expansion pack for the PC game, will ship this spring while “Spore Creature Keeper,” a stand-alone PC game aimed at younger gamers, is set for summer.

Nintendo gamers will get a pair of more action-oriented titles this fall, including “Spore Hero” for Wii and “Spore Hero Arena” for Nintendo DS.

While the popular franchise “The Sims” and its many expansion packs and cross-platform extensions have sold over 100 million units worldwide, Lucy Bradshaw, vice president in charge of production at EA Maxis, said “Spore” is EA’s number one new game launch in history and the fastest-selling EA game ever.

Bradshaw said global sales of all “Spore” games have topped 3 million units with an additional 6 million free downloads of the basic “Creature Creator” editing tool.

CREATIVITY ATTRACTS NEW PLAYERS

Michael Pachter, videogame analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, estimates that EA has sold about 2.2 million copies of the PC game alone globally. He believes these new “Spore” titles will help offset the $50 million in development costs EA accrued over the past five years.

But even with these new expansions, “Spore” still has a very long way to go to become a mainstream consumer sensation like “The Sims.” Part of the problem was the five years of hype from EA that set a very high bar.

“”Spore” did not live up to the wildest expectations,” said Dean Takahashi, videogame editor, VentureBeat.com. “So far, its sales in the low millions show that it hasn’t yet lived up to the hope that it would be a franchise like “The Sims.”"

But while players are hard at work on user-generated content, EA has focused on new game creations it hopes will sell.

“Spore Galactic Adventures” ups the ante by giving players the same technology EA Maxis used to create the original game so that in addition to sculpting worlds, gamers will be able to craft their own gaming adventures and share them with others.

“It’s really easy to make level-jumping puzzle games or to send players through a maze to save the princess or set up multiple-act adventures,” said Bradshaw. 

Mafia has friends on Facebook

TO the fury and dismay of relatives of mafia victims, pages posted on the social networking website Facebook idolising Cosa Nostra godfathers have generated thousands of supporters in Italy.

Maria Falcone, sister of Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mafia judge murdered in 1992, said she was outraged. "Unfortunately, evil still fascinates our young people," Ms Falcone said.

The fan sites offer tributes not only to Salvatore (Toto) Riina, jailed in 1993, and Bernardo Provenzano, his successor, arrested two years ago, but also toMatteo Messina Denaro, the mafia boss from Trapani in Sicily who is said to be the current capo dei capi (boss of bosses).

Messina Denaro, 46, has a reputation as a mafia playboy with a love of computer gadgetry, designer sunglasses, glamorous women and fast cars. He has been on the run since 1993 after murdering a rival Trapani boss and strangling his girlfriend, who was three months pregnant.

Some of the Facebook sites are in the name of people purporting to be the Cosa Nostra bosses. Users accepted as "friends" by people posing as Messina Denaro post messages saying they are "honoured by his friendship".

One fan site dedicated to Riina, 78, who is serving 12 life sentences for murder, has more than 2000 subscribers, who left him messages wishing him a happy Christmas, told him he was "great" and even posted videos praising him.

A site dedicated to Provenzano, 75, who was captured at a dilapidated farmhouse near Corleone after more than four decades on the run, has 200 subscribers calling him "No1" and claiming to "honour someone who tricked the state for 40 years". The site is running a competition to find "Provenzano lookalikes".

Supporters also claim to communicate with each other by using pizzini — folded notes, often in code — that were sent by Provenzano to his mafia lieutenants with instructions relating to murder, extortion rackets and other crimes.

A hundred and fifty of Provenzano’s Facebook admirers have signed up to a call for him to be made a saint immediately, an echo of demands for the swift canonisation of Pope John Paul II on his death in 2005.

Giovanna Maggiani Chelli, of the Victims of Via Georgofili Association, named after the site of a mafia bombing in Florence in 1993, said: "Subscribers to these groups are going crazy over the mafia bosses and laughing at extremely serious crimes."

The phenomenon reflected a lack of public and state support for the victims of mafia crimes, she said, and a glamourisation of the perpetrators.

The Times

House panel backs $3 billion Internet stimulus

By Kim Dixon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The House Energy and Commerce Committee backed including about $3 billion in grants to expand Internet service as part of a larger economic stimulus bill, including a provision requiring “open access” in wireless service and on the Internet.

The Democratically-controlled committee on Thursday cleared the provisions aimed at expanding high-speed Internet and wireless service in rural and hard-to-serve areas over objections from several Republican members.

Another $3 billion sought for broadband expansion in rural areas will be considered by the House Agriculture Committee.

The Democrats’ overall $825-billion stimulus plan is expected to go before the full House next week for a vote. The massive package includes tax cuts plus funding for roads, mass transit, healthcare and other projects.

Some Republicans on the commerce panel tried to block the $3 billion Internet provision, saying it would not stimulate the economy.

“This is not an economic stimulus, it’s a massive spending bill,” said Joseph Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

A provision opposed by mobile phone companies would require Internet service providers that receive grant money to abide by so-called “open access” principles, which bar providers from discriminating against applications and content requiring more bandwidth.

“These are public dollars and networks built with this funding should be open,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat with many technology companies in her district.

The public interest group Free Press defines openness as prohibiting “discrimination against any lawful content” and giving consumers freedom of choice among Internet providers.

Lawmakers who support the funding say it will create jobs to help jumpstart the ailing economy. A Brookings Institution study found that every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration per year could yield 300,000 jobs.

Potential recipients of the grant money include Internet service providers AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications and Comcast Corp.

Rural telephone companies could also apply, such as CenturyTel Inc, Windstream Corp and Frontier Communications Corp.

Despite start-up costs funded by the government, “you still have operational costs. It will be a tough decision (for the companies) given the economics of serving these areas,” said Paul Glenchur, an analyst at Stanford Washington Group.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the House panel, said the $3 billion in grants was aimed at “service providers, infrastructure companies, or a state or unit of local government.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over most Internet and telecommunications issues, is also reviewing $20 billion in healthcare information technology for the stimulus bill.

(Editing by Tim Dobbyn)