With technology such as MP3 players and mobile phones becoming more and more widespread and affordable, teenagers throughout the country tend to have some form of gadgetry on them when they are out in the street.

Be that their latest Sony Eriksson mobile, an iPhone or an iPod. The vast majority of teenagers have more than a hundred pounds worth of technology about their person when they go out. This makes them obvious targets for criminals. The days of targeting pensioners for their pension money have gone, as they don’t tend to carry that much cash with them anymore, whereas teenagers are always kitted up with the latest gadgetry and are easy targets.

This week 40 leading designers in the technology industry met Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, so they can devise new ways of combating the theft of MP3 players and mobile phones.

The Design Council hosted event sees senior designers from companies such as Nokkia and Sony speaking with teenagers and the police department to work on devising new products that are less likely to be stolen.

They’re hoping to create a clear design brief for the designers going forward that will allow them to come up with ‘crime-safe’ gadgets.

Wearing an MP3 player while you go running or workout at the gym can prove a big help to your concentration. Music can keep you motivated and take your mind off the monotony of the task in hand. For swimmers however, it’s not really been possible to wear an MP3 player so that you can listen to music while in the pool.

Yes, there have been waterproof MP3 players in the past, but they haven’t really been designed with swimmers in mind. When you’re swimming lengths in the pool it’s not ideal to have a bulky MP3 player strapped to your waist, or worse still, strapped to your head. It’s uncomfortable, awkward and would get in the way of a swimmer’s movement.

However a new MP3 player specifically aimed at swimmers has been released by Ubana. Their new MP3 player, the Ubana uCan is a waterproof MP3 player that resembles a par of opera glasses and straps around the back of your head, so there are no wires to interfere with your movements.

Ubana claim that the uCan is the world’s smallest waterproof MP3 player and comes with 1GB of memory and 15 hours of playback time, more than enough for even the most serious of swimmers.

The MP3 player even floats, should it fall off your head in the pool.

It is no surprise that a country which gave the world Audi, Siemens and Adidas is the same country that invented the MP3 player technology. Yes that’s right, it was the German company ‘Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’ which developed the MP3 Player that we all rely upon today.

The project began rather modestly; funded by the German government in order to research the sending of music down telephone lines. The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

The inventors were helped considerably by Professor Dieter Seitzer from the renowned University of Erlangen. He assisted in the audio coding of the MP3 device, since for some time he had been researching the transfer of music across an ordinary telephone line. Born in 1933, he was educated at the University of Stuttgart, before going on to work for IBM in Zurich, Switzerland.

Another big name in the development of the technology is Karlheinz Brandenburg whose main research interests since 1977 had been in the field of compressing music. However the MP3 dream almost did not come true. The team continued to fail to produce an effective end product and the project nearly came to an end in 1991. Luckily the error was spotted and resolved just two days before they were about to give up.

In 1998 the group decided to patent the product, and as a result any manufacturer which uses the MP3 technology is legally bound to pay a fee to the ‘Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’, so I imagine this group of German men have become rather rich indeed, but according to a quote from the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’, they have remained a rather modest bunch.

Karlheinz Brandenburg states:

I don’t care what the numbers are in my bank account, but I am satisfied with my work, the people I work with, and what it has brought about.

Wii Sports, the games package that comes bundled with the Nintendo Wii, features a variety of games for one or multiple players. One of the more realistic and competitive games is the ten pin bowling game.

Wii bowling is a faithful recreation of the popular US sport of ten-pin bowling, and allows players to bowl in their own homes, using all of the same actions and movements that they would use in a bowling alley.

Wii’s interpretation of ten-pin bowling is very realistic in the sense that your own bowling style comes across in the game. For example, if when you play the real thing you find that your bowling style means your shots lilt from left to right, you’ll see that happen in the game. Some people will be able to bowl the ball straight and true, just as in real life.

One big advantage over the real game is that those who struggle to play bowling in a bowling alley due to conditions such as arthritis can play Wii Sports without any problems. Your fingers don’t come under the same sort of stress they would when holding a real bowling ball, so you can play Wii Sports bowling without any problems.

The problem with Wii bowling, and indeed with all of the Wii Sports games, is that by hyper extending your arm to go through the actions and without any of the resistance you would feel from holding a real ball, you can put your arm under some real strain. Of course, the more competitive you are, the more likely this is to happen.

Raves have been occurring for many years across the world. They usually happen in large warehouses, miles away from civilisation and have an engrained drug culture. One thing they are famous for however is the noise, ear shattering, high decible noise that makes the whole venue shake.

However a new craze that started in Europe and has now made it to the States is the silent rave. That’s right, a rave where not a sound can be heard. The idea is that everyone who attends the rave brings their iPod or MP3 player, and dances along to their own music.

As weird as it sounds, it’s a concept that has really caught on. Last month a silent rave took place in New York’s union square, where more than a thousand ‘silent ravers’ showed up and raved the night away until 1 am, on the street, in full view of passers by.

Mr. Wesson is an exchange student from London, and he organised the New York silent rave:

It sounds sort of phony, but it really is a liberating experience. You wouldn’t just dance on the street on your own at any time, so the fact that you do it at this event, it’s just really fun.

One thing that always been the scourge of the raver however is the authorities. Gaining approval from the authorities for a silent rave is something that remains a grey area.

He said he didn’t get approval from police for the New York event because he hadn’t anticipated such a massive turnout, but police did show up anyway.

Police only turned up two hours into it, and as far as I know no arrests were made. People were just dancing. They weren’t doing anything wrong. The police stood by and some of them even started dancing themselves.

If late return fees have always put you off getting books from the library, the Central Pennsylvania Library District have found the answer. Members of their library need not worry about returning any books late, or losing them, or even having to make up an excuse such as their dog has eaten them. The reason is that Pennsylvania’s library is offering books on MP3 for patrons to take away with them on their MP3 players.

The audio books are downloadable from their website, and are completely free. The free MP3 books come in both fiction and non fiction titles, and are available from http://digitallibrary.centralpalibraries.org.

This means that the books can be listened to on computers, MP3 players or even burnt onto CDs.

The director of the Schlow Centre Region library, Betsy Allen, said:

We’re very excited about this service. We think this is a wonderfully modern and helpful service that people will embrace.

Members need to download the OverDrive Media Console program that allows them to access the audio books from the website, and they do also need to have a valid library card.

There are currently 200 titles available for download, including fiction titles in the thriller and romance genres.

The MP3 player has been with us for ten years now, and it’s become an integral part of our pop culture. We use it when we ride our bike, go to the gym, sit on the bus, type on the computer and whenever we want to drown out the world around us. It’s as if we’ve never been without the little box that single handedly killed off personal stereos, personal CD players and mini-disc players.

It almost never happened though. The MP3 player was very nearly stopped in its tracks before it even got started, and it was the player’s versatility that almost proved its downfall.

California based company Diamond released the Rio PMP300 in 1998. It featured 32MB of storage and was the first MP3 player released in the United States that was manufactured by a company with a US office.

This is where it all so very nearly went wrong.

The Recording Industry Association of America saw the device as a direct threat to the whole music industry. They applied for a restraining order barring sale of the device in the US, claiming that it contravened the Home Recording Act from 1992, because owners of the device would be able to copy music from one format to another. Incredibly a US court granted a temporary order, blocking the sale of the Rio.

They did however retract the order after they had decided that Diamond could not be held responsible for the actions of consumers who bought their MP3 player.

Once this ruling had been made, the MP3 player market exploded in the US. Accompanied by the fact that people were going online very quickly in America, file sharing sites sprang up to feed the MP3 player owner’s market.

Music sharing on a grand scale was born.

Then came Apple, and in 2001 the iPod took the market on to the next level.

Japan may be the home of technology and the source of all of the best inventions of recent years, but the Japanese government is looking to introduce a tax on MP3 players. This tax, if successfully imposed, would see MP3 players and the newly released DVRs increase in price for the gadget hungry nation.

The report was published in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper. It claims that the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan is looking to introduce a tax system whereby MP3 player manufacturers would have to pay a fee, or royalty charge, to the music copyright holders to make up for the deemed loss of profits they would incur as a result of the digital download format.

Although no figures have been decided upon, it is expected that the tax may be as high as several hundred Japanese Yen per MP3 player. This cost would then of course be passed on to the customer.

Japan has taxed other digital recording devices in the past, with cassette players and mini-disc players carrying a tax of several percent since 1993.

The government in Japan attempted to extend the law to cover digital media devices in 2005, but failed.

The Music Business Group in the UK is attempting to do the same thing in the UK by persuading the British government. If Japan is successful, the MBG will gain encouragement for their proposals.

Apple’s iPod has long since been THE MP3 player to have. The name has become synonymous with digital music and everyone interested in music on the go either owns, or has at least considered owning one.

However Apple recently skipped on a few paces with the release of the iPhone, a touch pad iPod mixed with a mobile phone. The iPhone is more of a personal computer than an iPod, capable of browsing the web, sending emails, taking photos, making phone calls and yes, even playing digital music.

But will the iPhone spark an end to the common MP3 player? The type of technology that plays music, and only plays music?

Hailed by many, including ‘The Gadget Show’, and the best piece of technology of the year the iPhone was released to great praise and huge public demand, yet its saturation hasn’t quite reached the levels of the iPod. Nor in fact has it proved as popular as other mobile handsets such as the Sony Walkman range, or Nokia’s impressive N-95.

No, what is really holding the iPhone back, despite the hefty price tag of course, is the fact that the handset itself is tied in to O2, when a great many potential customers are already involved in contracts with other network providers such as Vodafone and Orange.

Remarkable piece of kit that the iPhone is, for it to truly be successful in the UK and to reach the kind of saturation levels that the iPod has enjoyed, it surely must be opened up to be cross network compatible.

One of the best things about digital music is the fact that there are countless websites offering free music downloads. The biggest problem with that is that the majority of those websites are illegal, meaning downloading the music and ripping it to your MP3 Player could land you in some very hot water.

However, not all of those websites are illegal, a great many offer you legitimate music for download, free of any rights complications and available for you to copy, listen to and share as you wish.

This past Monday, the Nine Inch Nails offered their latest album for download, in its entirety, completely free of charge from their official website NIN.com. The album is called ‘The Slip’ and features ten tracks. The download was accompanied on the website by a message from the Nine Inch Nails’ lead singer Trent Reznor:

Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.

The band plan to release a hard copy of the album in stores this Summer, in July.

Their manager, Jim Guerino, said in an interview with Billboard.com:

Reznor has been in a prolific phase and we didn’t want ‘business’ to get in the way of getting the art in the hands of the fans.

You can download the album free of charge from the Nine Inch Nails website, complete with a PDF of lyrics.