Weekly wrapup, 11 – 15 June 2007

by Steve O'Hear

June 15th, 2007 | Posted in last100 weekly wrapup | One Comment

Here’s a summary of the week’s digital lifestyle action on last100. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special weekly wrapup RSS feed or by email.

Top digital lifestyle news

We kicked off the start of the week with rumors that Apple is planning its own online film rental service, noting that this is key if the company is to achieve its aim of making the AppleTV a DVD player for the Internet age.

We also reported on a second rumor that UK television networks (ITV, Channel4, and the BBC) are in talks to setup their own joint on-demand download service which could rival cable and satellite television, as well as Internet TV startups such as Joost and Babelgum.

(Talking of the later, we still have thousands of Babelgum invites to give away.)

This week was also Apple’s World Wide Developer conference where CEO Steve Jobs talked about the company’s policy on third-party development for the iPhone. While developers won’t be given full access to the iPhone platform, Jobs said Apple will provide some hooks to enable web-based applications to trigger calls, access the built-in address book, and the device’s rich-client version of Google Maps.

More digital lifestyle news:

Features

Our first feature of the week was a full review of RealPlayer 11, which is currently only available to Beta testers. We were impressed by the new version, concluding that while it will be hard for RealPlayer to shake off its poor reputation, there’s much to like about version 11. The new interface and jukebox functionality has been appropriately borrowed from iTunes, and the ability to download and save videos from the web, not only works well, but should prove popular with users who want to build their own personal video collection.

Guest writer, Sean Ammirati wrote a great post introducing us to the concept of advertising in video games.

Delivering ads to them or even creating games specifically with the goal of improving your brand awareness is a compelling way to reach difficult audiences. While the market is still small, the growth projections look promising.

That’s a wrap for the week! Enjoy the weekend.

last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.