News written by Petteri Pyyny (February, 2005)

During the last three months, our servers have been constantly crashing, due to various reasons -- most notably due to the enormous growth of our forum database that now contains almost one million posts (including Finnish and English forums) and due to healthy growth in terms of daily users. This has resulted to "bad user experience", servers not responding during the peak hours, etc.

We've spent the last two months planning for a new server setup and now the first steps towards this goal have been taken. We switched all of our sites yesterday to use the new database server which has already proven to stabilize the system quite a lot. Today, our forums were transferred over to the new server cluster and we continue to monitor them for the next couple of days to see if any unexpected (well, more likely "expected" :-) problems occur because of the switch.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope that you report back to us if you find anything weird during the transition phase. Our main site will get transferred to the new server cluster shortly, most likely on next week or so.

Jazz composer Maria Schneider probably sent some shockwaves through the recording industry last weekend when she won a Grammy for her album "Concert in the Garden" without having a deal with a record label or distributor and without selling a single copy of her album in traditional record stores.

Her album was financed through a service called ArtistShare that allows fans to help finance the whole production. The album cost $87,000 to make and by selling 9,000 copies to people who pre-ordered it via the website and an additional 1,000 via a Net auction. She says that several other artists have contacted her to know more about her approach to the record financing and Net distribution.

Now, we're just waiting for the first-ever album to win a Grammy that will only get released in digital format (and without a DRM, that would be something..)..

Source: Reuters

Hell just froze over: the long-time rivals, world's largest mobile phone company, Finnish Nokia and the software giant Microsoft have teamed up in order to deliver Microsoft's Windows Media platform to Nokia's upcoming phones.

This means that future Nokia handsets will be able to play music and videos wrapped in Microsoft's WMA and WMV formats -- with and without DRM restrictions. The obvious aim is to deliver a "universal" platform that would allow users of WMA-enabled online music stores, such as Napster, to transfer the tracks they've purchased to their mobile phones.

The deal also puts Microsoft's earlier ambitions to put its own Windows Mobile operating system to major manufacturers' handsets in a new light, as the WMA support is planned to implement over Nokia's preferred operating system, Symbian.

The biggest loser in this game is obviously RealNetworks, which has enjoyed a pre-installed monopoly on most Symbian-based phones, providing the only near-universal a/v platform available on phones. Now that is about to change and it is unclear whether Real's applications will be bundled with future Nokia handsets at all. In 2004, Nokia shipped over 10 million phones with an integrated a/v capabilities and that figure is about to rise dramatically over the next few years as the a/v features get common on even very basic phones.

Sony announced today that it plans to launch four movie titles in UMD format, used by the Sony's hand-held PSP console and one additional movie to be bundled with the PSP console once it will be released in the United States.

The movie line-up includes titles produced by Sony's movie unit, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Movies that are about to be released on 19th of April are Hellboy, XXX, Resident Evil 2 and Once Upon A Time in Mexico. The movie that will ship bundled with the American version of the PSP will be Spider-Man 2.

Sony will use AVC as its video encoding format for the movies and all movies will use 16:9 aspect ratio. Unfortunately the movies will use "advanced copy protection mechanism" in order to block unauthorized copying of the movies. Pricing of the movies remains a mystery, but Sony has promised to start selling UMD movies also in Japan in April with Europe to follow later.