Needless to say, having read scanned the biog, I didn’t read the rest of the post, mainly due to a desire to leave the contents of my stomach exactly where they are.

Now, I like DIY Planner, I really do. I’ve been using a variation of the Hipster PDA for the last year or so and DIY Planner’s templates are second to none. But that sort of post could push a person to the Unsubscribe button.

If you can beat Whole Person Design Coach as a ridiculous job title, I’d love to hear it. Let me know in Comments.

This issue first arose when the iMacs shipped last summer, but the lawsuit was launched only on Monday. Why? Because Apple recently settled out of court with MacBook Pro owners for whom, as professional photographers, the distinction is critical. One of the reasons, according to reports, that a settlement was reached in that case is that the plaintiffs’ legal representative had trouble finding other disgruntled MacBook Pro owners to join a class action suit.

As I made clear in this post, this isn’t an Apple issue. It arises from the fact that the company, like every other manufacturer of consumer TFT dislays uses panels which are only capable of displaying 6-bits per channel, rather than the 8-bits needed for true millions of colours. And I defy any iMac owner to tell the different between an image on a 6-bit display and one on an 8-bit display.

The only logical conclusion is that this iMac lawsuit is a crude attempt to cash in on the settlement of the MacBook Pro dispute. The key difference is that the MacBook Pro is a professional machine aimed at people who might reasonably be expected to do colour critical work on it. The iMac is a consumer machine designed for watching movies and surfing the web. Can any iMac owner really claim to have suffered because their display only pretends to show millions of colours?

What next? Can I sue the maker of my inkjet printer because it only prints three pages a minute rather than their claimed 20? And if I did, would the story make it onto the front page of The Guardian website as the iMac story did this morning.

The editing features are beautifully implemented. In addition to basic features like cropping, rotating and changing the exposure there are a number of other options ranging from the genuinely useful to what can best be described as novelty. Among the novelty group are PopColor which allows you to isolate a colour in an image and convert the rest of the image to monochrome, and Sketch which converts a photograph into, you guessed it, a sketch. Results from both tools are very good, however. Exposure correction and black and white conversion are also very good.

In all the tools, you click the tool to select it and are presented with a number of options, represented as thumbnails of the image, which have the effect or adjustment applied to varying degrees. Hover over a thumbnail to view the effect in the main image and then click the one you want. You can then apply other effects and adjustments. To remove an effect, you just untick the checkbox next to its name.

Effects and adjusments can be undone, even after saving the image by clicking on the drop down menu in album view and selecting Revert.

Here are a few more of my first impressions:

As you would expect from Adobe, the flash-based interface looks very slick. It is a little sluggish however.

The Upload feature which allows you to to upload JPEG images to your Photoshop Express account is well-implemented. It’s reasonably speedy – it took me a little over ten minutes to upload a 25MB folder of images over a cable modem connection and the progress indicators show how much of each file has uploaded.

There are links on the main interface to Photobucket, FaceBook, and Picasa to allow you to log into your accounts on those sites from Express, but no support for Flickr.

Albums are private by default but can be shared publicly at the press of a button.

All in all, it’s looking very promising.

You can tell this by the fact that there’s not a single quote from anyone in the story and the fact that the closest it has to a named source is ‘executives familiar with the negotiations’. In other words, the cleaner who happened to be listening at the door when someone floated the idea.

The FT doesn’t even say whether the executives are employed by Apple, the music companies, the analysts it refers to, or some other third party which has a vague interest.

Nevertheless, if there’s even a shred of truth in the story it raises some interesting questions. So lets assume for a moment that it is true.

Here’s the guts of it:

‘One executive said the research had shown that consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of the device, or a monthly fee of $7-$8 for a subscription model.’

Would you pay £50 for an iPod if it meant you could download as much music as you want from iTunes at no extra cost? On the face of it, of course you would, so would I. Which is why the market research apparently returned such positive results. But there’s an important phrase in the story which could be crucial — ‘for the lifetime of the device.’

That means that when your iPod dies, so does the music. It also means that, presumably, you won’t be able to sync those tracks with a Mac or PC or burn them to CD. And, of course, it means the return of that nasty ogre we thought was slowly shuffling out of the room, DRM. In order to ensure that tracks or only available for the ‘lifetime of the device’ Apple will have to ensure that they can only be played on that device, which means DRM.

Now, would you pay an extra £50 in order to be able to download as many tracks as you want, over Wifi, directly to your iPhone or iPod touch if you could only listen to them on that device and with the knowledge that the music is locked to that iPhone/iPod? Suddenly it’s not so clear cut.

No real surprise there, particularly if you read my post a couple of weeks ago.

Microsoft or News Corp? Talk about a rock and a hard place.

At the same time as announcing the two closures, GCap, owner of Classic FM and Capital Radio, unveiled a version of its musicradio.com website that works on the iPhone. The site allows listeners to stream the output of any one of Gcap’s stations to their iPhone, look up the last five songs played, buy one of those songs from iTunes or a whole album from Amazon, and listen to the station’s podcasts.

The service will also work on the iPod touch, but as it requires an Internet connection, will only work when the iPod is in range of a wifi hotspot. This makes listening while on the move more difficult on the touch than on the iPhone where the service can be accessed over the Edge mobile phone network.

More from The Guardian.

The trouble with DAB radio

Digital Spy reports that a Rajar announcement at the end of last week puts DAB’s share of the radio listening audience in the UK at 10%, up from 8.5% in the previous quarter.

That’s a significant leap and when put next to the sales figures for DAB radio in the run up to Christmas – 500K, compared to total DAB sales so far of 6.5 million – would seem to indicate that enthusiasm is growing nicely.

But those figures mask significant problems for DAB. Two days before the Rajar figures were announced, media and telecoms analyst, Enders Analysis reported that “slow growth in revenue had combined to undermine confidence in the new medium and led to the closure of a string of national digital stations.” Two of those stations, GCap’s Core and UBC’s OneWord closed this year. Virgin’s Radio Groove has also closed while the company has scaled back plans for new station Radio Viva. All this just months before the second national multiplex, headed by Channel 4, is launched.

Comparisons have been made with the demises of Betamax, AM radio, and ITV Digital, and while these maye be overly dramatic, there’s undoubtedly reason for concern.

A rise in the share of the listening audience of nearly 18% sounds impressive, as does a rise in sales of 17% but look at the figures more closely. 6.5 million radios sold means that one in every four household in the UK has a DAB radio (assuming one per household), and 15 million people have access to one. If DAB has only 10% share of the radio listening audience, that means that an awful lot of DAB radios are lying unused.

So, where did it all go wrong? Ten years ago DAB promised CD-like quality, LCD screens carrying detailed data on the program being listened to, and an end to mushy AM transmission and crackly FM broadcasts. The BBC and Ofcom threw their collective weight behind the platform, with the BBC launching several new stations only available digitally and providing digital versions of its entire radio network.

Had the promises been fulfilled, DAB would be in a much healthier position than it is today. Instead, listeners complain of poor reception and disappointing sound quality and DAB radios remain prohibitively expensive for many would be listeners.

All of these problems are soluble, but require commitment and investment from commercial broadcasters and radio manufacturers as well as Ofcom and the BBC. And at the moment, committing to DAB is about the last thing most commercial radio companies want to do.

There would seem to be little reason for maintaining the relatively high price of DAB radios. For consumers who can buy a Freeview box or DVD player for £20, paying £40 for a radio seems ridiculous. Improving sound quality wouldn’t be that difficult either. Many DAB stations are broadcast at as little as 80kbps, well below the quality of MP3 downloads and far, far away from the promised CD quality. That may mean a reduction in the number of stations that can be broadcast on each multiplex, but with so many stations closing, that wouldn’t seem to be an issue. Reception too could be improved, by boosting the power output of transmitters.

All is not lost yet for DAB, but with competition from Freeview, Internet radio and podcasts it’s future is far from assured.

The Wall Street Journal reports that FaceBook’s Mark Zuckerberg held an open conference call yesterday to discuss the company’s 2007 financials – highly unusual for a private company.

Among the highlights:

Revenue for 2007 $150m

Projected revenue for 2008 $300 – $350m

Projected pre-tax earnings for 2008 $50m

Pretty good for a four-year old start-up.

The jaw-dropping figure is right at the bottom of the WSJ story, however.

“Facebook collected $300 million in investments recently from Microsoft and other investors, which pegged the valuation of the company at $15 billion.”

$15bn? On pre-tax earnings of $50m that’s a PE ratio of 300. In other words, nuts. A PE of 300 is ridiculous for any company, just ask anyone who got burned in 1999/2000, but for a company which only expects to grow revenue by 2x next year, which has had the bad publicity FaceBook has this year, it’s insane.

What’s more interesting than the valuation, however, is the distinct possibility of an IPO in 2008. As Danny Sullivan points out in a comment on the WSJ story, his site, SearchEngineLand, predicted back in October that FaceBook may have to IPO in 2008.

This is because FaceBook’s employee headcount will hit 1,000 this year and it has a great wad of cash in the bank. If we assume most, if not all, FaceBook employees have stock options, then the company will trigger a provision in the 1934 Securities Exchange Act which says that companies with at least $10m in assets and more than 500 employees must report as if they were a publicly listed company.

It was this provision that accelerated Google’s IPO and it may well do the same to FaceBook.

In a move that lots of people did see coming, the BBC reports today that Microsoft has offered $45bn to buy Yahoo. The price represents a 64% mark-up on Yahoo’s current share price and comes at a time when the company is seriously struggling. Profits for the Oct-Dec 2007 quarter were down 23%, former chief executive Terry Semel, has now quit as non-exec chairman, and the company this week announced plans to lay-off 1,000 staff in a bid to bet back to profitability.

It seems pretty certain that Yahoo’s co-founder and chief-executive, Jerry Yang, would be against any sale, but as directors of a publicly listed company, they have a legal obligation to act in the best interests of stock holders, even if that means selling to their second biggest competitor.

It’s unlikely that Microsoft will be the only bidder, however. Expect News Corp, AOL Time Warner and one or two others to throw their hat in the ring.

Update: The Guardian has published Microsoft’s letter to the Yahoo board in full. Microsoft seems to be indicating that it was interested in a merger last year and Yahoo’s board indicated that it saw the benefits too, but that MS is tired of waiting and so has made a bid for the company instead.