You’re Surround Sounded

There’s more news coming in all the time, we’re just busy flitting from briefing to briefing and then writing them up, but we’ll get through it all in due course. I’ve just had a brief catch-up with Rapid Mobile Media CEO Jeremy Copp, in which he told me about the company’s new Ad2txt solution. According to Copp, when companies send out text messages with a WAP link, they can’t count the number of people that end up on the WAP site by clicking on that link. I found this hard to believe, but he generally knows what he’s talking about, so I’ll take his word for it. In any event, Ad2txt, which is currently being tested with some of Rapid’s clients, solves the problem. After that, it was off to see Dolby Labs, who I used to write about in a previous life, when I spent far too long reviewing home cinema systems being played far too loud. Last year at MWC, Dolby announced Dolby Mobile, its surround sound solution for mobile phones. This year, it can tell the world that the solution is deployed on two handsets, both from LG, (plus some in Japan from Sharp). The Renoir launched last year and the Arena has just been announced. Surround sound on a phone is a great idea, especially if you’re going to use it for listening to music and watching movies, as people increasingly are. On theway out to Barcelona, I had a call from a hi-fi PR, who was going out representing hisclient Sennheiser at the show. Clearly, the hi-fi companies have started looking at the phone and taking it seriously ads a music device. The audio processor on the Renoir was music-focused, with bass and high frequency enhancers, and SoundSpace, which widens the soundstage when listening through headphones. The processor on the Arena is more focused on movie sound reproduction. The other development from Dolby is called Dolby Media Generator. This is a software solution that encodes content prior to being sent down to phones. Dolby is targeting the solution at content owners and aggregators, basically anyone selling music and/or video content. “The benefit for the operator or content owner is that customers will be more satisfied with the content and more likely to download more,” Dolby Account Manager Simon Arnold told me. “Heavily compressed video and sound and video can look and sound awful, but this will be fantastic.”On that point, it’s hard to argue. Dolby has long been synonymous with high quality audio processing, and the lengths it goes to in order to police its royalties and ensure that anything with a Dolby badge on meets its exacting standards, which were explained to me on a trip to the company’s San Francisco head office many years, ago, have to be seen to be believed. An additional benefit is that the solution can include metadata to help the ocntent owner sell more content. So when someone downloads one Oasis track, for example, they could get a link to sample another, or to a band that sound a bit like Oasis.The only slight caveat is that the MPEG4 files that will come out of the Dolby Media generator will only work on around 40% of the handsets on the market, though as Arnold pointed out, the sort of mobile user who downloads lots of music and video files is more likely than not to have an MPEG-4-equipped handset.

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