July 2002

Fri 26th July, 2002

Phone groups write off €8.4bn 3G investment

"The viability of third-generation mobile phone services was thrown into further doubt on Thursday when Telefonica of Spain and Sonera of Finland abandoned plans for 3G operations in Germany and wrote off the €8.4bn (£5.3bn) they paid for a licence two years ago..." the FT comments in an article on the front page of the Companies & Markets section today.

Thu 25th July, 2002

Forbidden Technologies recruiting

Forbidden Technologies is currently interviewing candidates for an additional position in our software development team. Candidates are of exceptional intellectual capability - with at least a first class degree in mathematics or computer science from a top university and with both an enthusiasm for computing and broad experience ideally including Java, C++, Linux and real-time programming. Candidates for this post should contact us.

Thu 18th July, 2002

MPEG-4 licence terms

The EETimes reports "A deal is finally to be done on a workable licensing and royalty regime for MPEG-4 video compression, after a two-year delay". Rob Koenen, president of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum, said: "It's make or break for MPEG-4. The standard was frozen three-and-a-half years ago, and licences should already have been available." EETimes adds "The licence features a royalty for each decoder and encoder sold, plus a fee for each minute decoded, currently $0.02/hour" and The Register chips in that "Fees are capped at a million dollars a year". However, as EETimes says, "it may all be 'too little, too late' as the standard is leapfrogged by other technologies".

Fri 12th July, 2002

Industry press

New Media Age has a feature about Forbidden Technologies and Unanimis in this week's edition. "Unanimis, whose clients include Lastminute.com and eBay, made a deal with video compression firm Forbidden Technologies in May to develop innovative ad formats."

Thu 4th July, 2002

PDA streaming available

The first public version of our player for ARM PocketPC PDAs is available here. You can now stream video over GPRS to PDAs such as the O₂ xda and Compaq iPAQ. Please mail us with your feedback, such as download datarates and experiences with other PocketPC PDAs. Many companies have attempted and failed to stream full screen, high frame rate video to mobile devices at low datarates. Our player works on today's PDAs over today's 2.5G networks at full screen and up to 25 frames per second, leaving MPEG-04 far behind and 3G still far off. Robert Smithson of Arete Research downloaded our player to his xda and e-mailed back: "Wow! It's awesome".

Mon 1st July, 2002

Qualcomm press room

Qualcomm, who own key patents on 3G, have added a link to our recent press release to their website.