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The BBC has decided to abandon its Digital Media Initiative, after spending £98.4 million (roughly $148 million USD) to try to create a more integrated and digital workflow for its employees. The decision follows an operational review of the project, launched in October last year, which found that the project was failing to achieve its current targets. Tony Hall, Director-General for the BBC, said the Digital Media Initiative had wasted “a huge amount of Licence Fee payers money.” “I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it,” he said. “I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned. “Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure, it does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here.” What went wrong? The project was set up in 2008 to bring the BBC up to speed with modern technology and television production processes. The original work was contracted out to Siemens and would help move the BBC to an all-digital, tapeless system. The estimated cost was £81.7 million, although the BBC suggested it would save them roughly £18 million overall. The BBC terminated its contract with Siemens in 2009 following rising costs and was later criticized by the National Audit Office for the way that it handled the project. The Digital Media Initiative was then used to develop a new system called Fabric, which would give employees access to archived BBC footage through a “seamless digital chain.” The project will live on An email sent out by Hall to BBC employees, obtained by The Drum, sheds further light on what went wrong. “It’s struggled to keep pace with new developments and requirements both within the BBC and the wider broadcasting industry,” he said. “There are now standard off-the-shelf products that provide the kind of digital production tools that simply didn’t exist five years ago.” Hall added that the BBC’s need to produce content digitally “hasn’t gone away” and that the Fabric database would continue to be used throughout the company. “However, we will stop developing our own in-house production tools, and instead use the industry-standard production systems that are now available,” he said. Image Credit: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/GettyImages

Phew! Is this week over yet? Yahoo dominated the headlines with a $1.1 billion Tumblr purchase, a Flickr relaunch and a new New York office. But Microsoft made a doozy of an announcement with the unveiling of its new (and gigantic) Xbox One TV/game console. Given all this news, the departure of some high-level HTC execs was well timed for that company. This week’s GigaOM Show covers it all, and even features a guest appearance by AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka. (Download this episode) The GigaOM Show podcast feed iTunes Stitcher Radio SHOW NOTES: Hosts: Chris Albrecht, Tom Krazit Guests: Peter Kafka, Janko Roettgers and Kevin Tofel Yahoo buys Tumblr and what it all means! Microsoft’s TV dreams inside the Xbox One and what it all means! HTC’s size problem, Android, and what it all means! Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsCES 2012: a recap and analysisThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Michael Dell has been taunting HP lately by claiming his company is gaining server market share at HP's expense. Looks like he's right: In HP's second quarter, sales of industry standard servers—ones with x86 Intel and AMD processors—fell 12% compared to last year's Q2. But in HP's Q2 earnings call, Meg Whitman said the server sales drop, and the market share HP lost, was due to "very aggressive competitive pricing." That's fine with Whitman, who said HP decided not to do some server deals during the quarter because they weren't profitable enough. "We stepped away from a number of deals to protect our bottom line. And it's clear that we need to take another look at the low end of our product line to better match customer needs and price points," Whitman said on the call, according to Seeking Alpha's transcript of the event. HP also walked away from some PC deals for the same reasons, Whitman told AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl in a post-earnings call interview. HP's PC revenue dropped 20% compared to last year, with sales to businesses falling 14% and sales to consumers falling 29%. Dell is taking on debt by slashing server prices, but it wouldn't risk doing this it weren't trying to go private, Whitman told AllThingsD. Dell's first quarter earnings dropped 75% compared to last year. "We’ll see if they remain as aggressive as they have been," Whitman told AllThingsD. Earlier this month, Michael Dell got ahold of preliminary figures from IDC that showed its worldwide server market share grew 2.4% in the first quarter, while HP's dropped about 4%. Dell's worldwide server shipments grew 5.7% in Q1, while HP's dropped 15.4%. HP still leads Dell in the global server market, with about 31% share compared to Dell's roughly 28% share, according to IDC's figures. Michael Dell told CRN's Steve Burke earlier this month he likes where things are headed. "HP is losing share at a staggering rate, and they are losing it to Dell,” he said. Please follow SAI: Enterprise on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Haswell is coming out early next month, and it's everywhere in the news. Among other things, motherboard makers have been tripping over themselves to show off their upcoming Haswell-ready mobos. We've heard comparatively little about the mobile incarnations of the chip, but in a briefing yesterday, Intel gave the guys at PC World a few nuggets of info about upcoming Haswell laptops.According to the site, Intel said those notebooks will bring about a whopping 50% battery life increase over current, Ivy Bridge-based systems. ...Read more...

Jacob Bijani was an early Tumblr user. He'd often design theme templates for the platform's blogs, and one in particular caught David Karp's eye. "I made a weird side-scrolling theme for my blog, which made the rounds and eventually got David to follow me,” the designer told Daily Dot in October. "We emailed a bit and I started doing some freelance work making themes for VIPs on Tumblr. A months after I graduated college in San Diego, David happened to be in town for Webby Connect. We met up for the day, he offered me a job, and I moved to New York a few weeks later.” What was the email that got those conversations started? It was a simple inquiry about an outdated job listing on Davidville, the company Karp created which produced Tumblr. Bijani sent the initial email in May 2008. "A few months later I was living in the East Village as Tumblr’s fifth employee," Bijani writes on his blog. "So much has changed since then." Now he is Tumblr's Creative Director. Here's the effortless email that lead to the job. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Kim Dotcom, the Internet entrepreneur behind file-sharing service Megaupload and its successor, simply titled MEGA, has released a new single from his upcoming album today. Reports of a full-length studio record date back as far as January 2012, but details of the release have been pretty scarce since then. Dotcom released the first song from the album in August last year, called ‘Party Amplifier’, on SoundCloud and YouTube. In the video description for the latter, Dotcom said he loved the band Prodigy and that this had “inspired me to do this song.” Dotcom tweeted his latest effort, titled ‘Dance’, earlier today. As the name suggests, the track is clearly aimed at the dance floor and includes a number of electronic loops, beats and vocal samples. At the time of writing, the track has received almost 9,000 plays on SoundCloud and has been met with some pretty positive reviews in the comments section underneath. Dotcom first expressed his musical prowess in December 2011 with the ‘Megaupload Song’, which to date has surpassed 14 million plays on YouTube. It was also notable for featuring cameo performances by Kanye West, Alicia Keys and will.i.am. Musical endeavors aside, Dotcom is still involved in a legal dispute regarding his previous Internet company, Megaupload. The Internet entrepreneur published a white paper last month co-authored by two lawyers, Robert Amsterdam and Ira P. Rothken, criticizing the way the case was carried out by the United States government. Image Credit: Phil Walter/Getty Images

Good morning. Here's the overnight news: Google is considering outbidding Facebook for $1 billion social navigation app, Waze. Ride-sharing company Lyft has raised $60 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It's giving people 30,000 rides per week. Pandora's first quarter earnings were reported yesterday. It beat Wall Street expectations and revenue grew to $128.5 million. Yahoo acquired another startup yesterday, cross-gaming platform PlayerScale. PlayerScale has 150 million users. Tremor Video has filed to go public. It generated more than $105 million in 2012. Here's who really created the origins of Tumblr, Tumblelogs. Yahoo's Design Chief, Tim Parsey, is leaving. Android's marketshare is a joke. Khosla Ventures hires Ben Ling, who personally invested in startups such as Square and Palantir. He was also COO of Badoo. Check out 14 people who were Tumbler's earliest employees and got to build a hyper-growth startup from scratch. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

Commuting is tough. Working out of your car all day is tougher. From traveling salesmen to offsite service professionals to couriers, millions of people worldwide spend their nine-to-five hours behind the wheel. And they need to stay in touch—online, dialed in, and powered up—all day. That’s not easy to do when you’re constantly on the move. Allow us to show you how to remain a useful member of the information age even when your workdays can take you on trips of dozens or hundreds of miles. Power Few cell phones and far fewer laptops will get you through an entire day of serious work without being plugged in and recharged at some point along the way. Fortunately, your car is a mobile electricity generator. How best to get power out of your vehicle and into the gadgets that need it? Use your car’s battery to charge your smartphone or tablet with a simple adapter like this one. Many of today’s automobiles feature USB ports, which are fine for recharging your phone. But if you want to charge your notebook (or even most tablets) you’ll need something with more juice. Here are two options that give you a standard A/C adapter via your 12-volt cigarette lighter socket. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Like the tablet market, Google Glass may currently be viewed as a consumer product but it will soon be seen on the faces of IT and mobile employees. read more