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Which way to the mobile web?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 30 Sep 08, 08:50 GMT

How do you get the mobile internet? Via wi-fi - or perhaps through one of those dongles that you plug into a laptop?

Wi-fi and 3G have been battling it out for the last few years to be the technology that keeps you connected on the move. But today 3G gets a big boost, with the unveiling of an alliance between leading computer manufacturers and mobile operators to promote devices with .

It must be around five years ago that laptops started featuring wireless cards as standard. That seemed to be a signal that wi-fi was going to be the winner. Soon wi-fi hotspots were spreading beyond coffee-shops to cover airports, stations and other public places. Then whole cities began to unveil ambitious plans to provide coverage for everyone - often for nothing.

It suddenly seemed that all of those mobile operators who had spent fortunes buying 3G licences and rolling out networks had wasted their money. Not only did wi-fi provide a faster and better connection, but it offered users the ability to make Voip calls, which could really make a mess of the mobile industry's business model.

But somehow it hasn't quite worked out like that. The municipal wi-fi movement appears to have stalled, and getting online - in a city park, in a hotel or in an airport - can still be a frustrating affair. You type in your credit card details, then a long password - only to find that you're crawling, rather than speeding, over the web.

Meanwhile, the mobile firms have invested to speed up their 3G networks. Then last year, perhaps emboldened by wi-fi's slow progress, they started an aggressive marketing campaign for their mobile broadband products. At a surprising speed, the dongles have taken off - a recent survey from Point Topic claimed that they were already a more popular way of getting online than wi-fi.

Now it looks as though "embedded" 3G will soon become standard for laptops - and a range of other web-connected devices. So does that mean game, set and match to 3G? Not according to Steve Andrews, who, as BT's MD for Mobility and Convergence, is something of an evangelist for wi-fi. Mr Andrews told me that BT's wi-fi business was growing at 100% per annum, and that we were looking at a future where customers used both technologies in tandem.

"If you're in Heathrow Airport, where you can be guaranteed fast wi-fi, you'll use that - if you're out in the country you may use 3G." Vodafone, which is part of today's embedded 3G plan, was also cautious about writing off wi-fi, pointing out that its business users are already offered the chance to switch between the two systems.

The trouble is that, for most users, dealing with two rival connection methods is a lot of hassle and can prove expensive - especially if you go abroad. We need to know that we can move effortlessly between different wi-fi zones and providers and then onto the 3G network when appropriate. Steve Andrews of BT says providers around the world are working to make that happen: "Our mission is to make it seamless," he says.

At long last, the mobile internet is really beginning to take off, and most users don't really care whether it's 3G or HSPA, wi-fi or WiMax which takes them there. What they're looking for is an experience they don't even have to think about. So who's going to provide that?

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Technology - is the party over?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Sep 08, 08:52 GMT

My job for the last couple of years has been to cover technology stories for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on TV, on radio and on this blog. But before that I spent many years as a business correspondent, covering stories from the late 80s housing crash through to the battle over the ownership of Marks and Spencer. In recent weeks, as the financial crisis deepens, I've been called back to my old job from time to time.

And what I've found is that the contrast between the mood music in the City and that in the web 2.0 world could not be more pronounced. In the former, the frenzied festival of lending and borrowing is over, the band has gone home, and many of the guests are being sick in the bushes.

In the technology world, however, shiny new business models are unveiled by the day, companies boast of raising millions in new capital despite still being "pre-revenue", let alone pre-profit, and you can find a new networking event every night of the week where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists circle each other in an intricate mating dance.

But perhaps, just in recent days, the music has been slowing down. Over the weekend, the tech community was circulating an e-mail from Jason Calacanis, a noted web entrepreneur and blogger, who is that the collapsing US economy will kill between 50 and 80% of start-ups over the next 18 months. This unsurprising verdict - after all most start-ups do fail - nevertheless resulted in heaps of ordure being poured upon his head by those who take a more optimistic view.

But what worries me more are the echoes I'm hearing from the last dotcom boom and bust. Back in the summer of 2000, as technology shares started heading south, everyone I met in that world thought this was a very healthy phenomenon. The entrepreneurs told me that there had been far too many crazy ideas around, and that they would now find it easier to get a hearing for their eminently sensible business plans. The venture capitalists said they still had a pile of cash from investors, and as valuations were now looking more sensible they would be able to deliver better returns. And the investment analysts said that, now some of the froth had been blown off tech share prices, the market would settle down. They were all misguided of course - shares continued to plummet, dotcoms died by the dozen, and we had two or three years of nuclear winter for technology entrepreneurs and investors.

The same kind of wishful thinking has been apparent in the last few weeks, from the new media headhunter who told me that clients were still desperate to recruit the right people, to the technology start-ups who insisted that events on Wall Street or at Canary Wharf would not affect their ability to raise cash. Similarly, major technology businesses like Intel and Dell started the year telling the world that they were well placed to weather any general economic downturn.

But over the last month the stockmarket has begun to question that rosy view. Shares in Apple are down by more than 25% in September, Nokia has tumbled by a similar amount, and the FTSE Techmark index - measuring leading UK technology shares - is down more than 10% in the last four weeks.

Ah, but things are very different from 2000, according to the optimists. This time around we are talking about companies that have got a proven business model, with surging online advertising now providing a solid foundation for the web economy. That may be true for the likes of Google, but are we quite so sure that hard-pressed advertisers will provide enough dollars to fund all of those web 2.0 companies that have no other visible means of support? And wouldn't it be better if a business like, say, Facebook was going into this downturn having proved that it could generate soaring revenues as well as plenty of traffic?

It does seems unlikely that the bubble will burst in quite the same way as it did last time. After all, the hot money that went into dotcoms in the late 90s went into the housing market rather than technology this time around.

But harder times are definitely coming, and I'm a bit worried about one possible casualty of any deep downturn in the technology industry. Early in 2000, my ´óÏó´«Ã½ bosses briefly made me internet correspondent, just as the dotcom madness neared its peak. By the end of the year they had decided that the internet was "over" - as a story at least - and sent me back to the business beat. Let's hope that history does not repeat itself too exactly - and that my bosses aren't reading this.

UPDATE

I wrote this over the weekend, with the markets closed. Now, after another very scary day. for the world economy, it is 2130 on Monday. The FTSE and the Dow have both seen very sharp falls. But look at the NASDAQ - which measures technology stocks. Down even more sharply - over 9% on the day. Apple's shares fell by 17%. Far from bucking the gloomy trend, technology shares have performed even worse than the rest of the market.
And no, I'm not saying that innovation will stop or that good new technology firms won't still break through - in Web 2.0 and other areas. But it's hard not to think that the climate for start-ups is going to be pretty tough for a while.

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How "free" can our data be?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 26 Sep 08, 19:47 GMT

Please forgive me, but I'm going to use dot.life for a bit of product placement. This week I've had the inestimable pleasure of being Eddie Mair. Okay, nobody could really fill the shoes of PM and iPM's inimitable presenter - but I've had a go at one edition of iPM while Eddie was otherwise engaged.

Amongst the subjects we cover in this week's programme is a plan by the Justice Secretary Jack Straw to put court records online. This has caused a great deal of disquiet - even anger - amongst lawyers. "What happens," they cry,"if a juror in future can simply go to courtsonline.co.uk and look up the previous convictions of the man in the dock?" Then there is the question of accuracy and understanding. If a Mr Jones is listed as having being convicted of a sex offence twenty years go, could you end up with a different Mr Jones being harassed by vigilantes?

We hear from the Law Society, the Criminal Bar Association and the Justice Minister Maria Eagle. We also get the views of Charles Arthur, who's been running the Guardian's "" campaign which seeks to persuade all sorts of public bodies to make their data available for all of us to use as we see fit.

At a time when online newspaper archives already give jurors access to a defendant's previous convictions, should we simply give up on the idea that some information should be restricted in the interests of justice? Or perhaps we need to sequester juries to keep them away from the internet as happens in the United States?

Listen in for a vigorous, though never heated debate of these issues. Oh, and there's also the story of YouTube, Cat Stevens and my dog, Cabbage. Patrick Walker from Google explains just how they tracked down my video of Cabbage frolicking to "I Love My Dog..." and why I shoud be happy that I'm now helping Cat and YouTube earn a bit of cash from adverts.

So do listen in at 1730 on Radio 4 on Saturday. Or catch the , which has a bit more, including some incoherent blatherings from the debutante presenter. Come back Eddie, this radio lark is harder than it sounds.

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MySpace Music - show me the money

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 25 Sep 08, 12:21 GMT

The man on the phone was very enthusiastic: "It's a landmark product." Really? "It's very, very exciting." I'm sure. "It's the biggest new launch we've done since we started..." Wow. "It's about empowering people. It's going to be a massive, massive success from day one..."

So what was getting the MySpace executive quite so animated? Yes, you guessed it, another music service. Forgive me if I'm not quite as overwhelmed as the social network appears to be, but hardly a day seems to go past without the launch of another offering that is going to revolutionise the fusty old music business.

Still, , which is launching in the United States now and Europe later this year, does have one thing that some other newcomers lack, a ready-made audience of eager music fans. Just about every band, signed or unsigned, has a MySpace page, and its 120 million users are right smack in the middle of the keenest music-loving demographic.

From now on, as well as being able to befriend their favourite bands, MySpace users will be able to stream their entire catalogue, create ring tones from songs, make play lists to suit any mood, and share it all with friends.

But, to coin a phrase, show me the money - where's the payback for MySpace and the music industry? Advertising is the answer for the streaming service, with businesses like McDonalds and Toyota piling in. But there will also be a revenue stream from downloads, provided in the US by Amazon's MP3 store. (Bizarrely, MySpace couldn't tell me what those downloads would cost, insisting that was up to Amazon).

It's what you might call a "free first, pay later" strategy. In that, it's similar to the service launched by last.fm earlier this year. A spokesman for that "social" music service, now owned by CBS, called me this morning to gently suggest that MySpace's offering was a rather tired imitation. "They don't have a core of passionate music fans like we do," he said. "And they're not providing a way to navigate and filter all this content in the way that we do."

I think MySpace has a different problem. Surely its users are the very people who have grown up with the idea that you "share" music, rather than pay for it? It's the MySpace generation which has ushered the music industry into the digital era with this depressing sum: Falling CD sales + paid downloads - filesharing = plunging profits.

MySpace is taking the optimistic view that people would love to pay for music if only it were not so difficult: "Most people don't want to steal from their artists," the over-excited executive told me. "But they do want it to be easy and simple to purchase." I'm not convinced that it's so hard to pay for music downloads right now - after all, as I pointed out to Mr MySpace, even a crumbly old has-been like me can just about manage to type in a credit card number and press download when buying that Cat Stevens or Bruce Springsteen album.

Maybe MySpace Music will prove a great marketing tool for the four record labels who've signed up and maybe it will make MySpace a more "sticky" place as the social network competes with Facebook. But will it really convince young music fans that it's worth paying for tracks that they can get elsewhere for nothing? Don't hold your breath.

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Mobile Music - how unlimited, how free?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 24 Sep 08, 12:25 GMT

Yet another digital music offering has been unveiled this morning. This time it's from , in conjunction with Britain's , and it seems designed to steal the thunder from 's "Comes With Music" service which arrives next month.

Sony Ericsson will launch a number of Walkman phones with a service called PlayNow Plus, allowing users "unlimited" downloads of tracks onto the phone or to a computer if they sign up to a contract.

The PR man from Omnifone who rang me about the story seemed surprised that I didn't realise just how huge this was: "This is the biggest deal announced so far in mobile music," he told me excitedly. Yes, I thought, the biggest since the last one... What it does highlight is the move to a new subscription model for digital music, where you get unlimited music for an annual fee. The big question here is what is meant by "unlimited" - and how much it will cost consumers.

What has made these subscription deals less than attractive up until now is that once you stop paying, you lose access to your music but the impression given by Sony and Omnifone is that you buy the phone - and then you get access to millions of tracks that are yours to keep and use how you like. That sounds like a plan to give the entire music industry away to anyone who shells out for a phone contract, so I couldn't quite believe it.

But it turns out that the Sony deal is a bit more complex than it first appears. Yes, you can download as much as you like - to your phone or your computer - for the duration of the contract. But the music does come wrapped in DRM - Digital Rights Management software which controls and monitors the way you use it. At the end of your contract, you do get to keep up to 300 tracks DRM free, but not the rest.

My combative PR friend insisted this was a much better deal than Nokia was promising. So I rang Nokia - who said, "no, no, no - our "Comes With Music" allows you to keep all the music you've downloaded forever." "Ah," responded the Omnifone man, "but you can only play it on your computer or a Nokia device, because it is wrapped up in DRM."

Both services have their selling points - but what neither is making clear yet is just how much consumers will pay.

Omnfone boasts that the technology it's offering to Sony Ericsson "supports operator's need to monetize their data networks and increase revenue from mobile music services." But, in the words of the PR man, "it can be presented as free to users who are not used to paying for music."

In other words - they think they've finally worked the trick of extracting large amounts of cash from users of digital music without them noticing. If they're right, then Omnifone and Sony Ericsson will be the toast of the music and mobile industries.

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Impressions of Android

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 23 Sep 08, 19:03 GMT

I don't know about you, but getting to grips with a new mobile phone takes me some time. I have to load up thousands of contacts, set up my e-mail, surf a few websites and even make the odd call before I know what I think. So half an hour spent playing with the T-Mobile/HTC/Google G1 - the - this afternoon wasn't really enough to reach any firm conclusions. But here are my first impressions.

The G1 looks much like HTC's recent efforts for the Windows Mobile platform. The slide-out keyboard gives a bit of added bulk, but it's a reasonably compact device. The touch screen seems to respond quite rapidly, and there's a jog-wheel too for faster navigation.

But what quickly becomes clear is that you'll be sliding out that keyboard much of the time. If, as I suggested earlier, there is now a schism between the touchers and the typists then this is a phone for the typing tribe. Even sending a text means using that keyboard rather than the screen. There are also several buttons to press to take you to a home screen, to bring up a range of applications, or to make a phone call.

The Android platform seems to be operating pretty smoothly, with Google applications - Mail, Talk, Maps - prominent on that home screen and launching quickly. The web surfing, which is such an attractive feature of the iPhone, is pretty intuitive on the G1 too, although you have to zoom in and out by tapping on the screen, rather than pinching and dragging on a multi-touch screen.

Other features include a barcode scanner, which captures an image of the code on the product, then searches the web for price comparisons, and an Amazon mp3 store which will apparently be available only in the US.

Most important, to my mind, is the Android Market, which allows users to install a whole range of applications from independent developers. I didn't get a chance to try any of the apps, but presumably they will be similar in range to those in Apple's App Store, allowing users to customise their phones with games, social networks and the like.

I didn't have a chance to try the 3 mp camera - but with no video capture it looks as though this phone isn't really aimed at keen snappers or instant movie-makers.

As you can see, I've made frequent reference to the iPhone and the G1 will inevitably be compared with Apple's product. For those who don't like the idea of a phone totally dependent on a touchscreen, the first Android will prove an attractive alternative.

What it lacks is the wow factor. I can't imagine there will be an awful lot of "oohs" and "aahs" when the G1 hits the shelves in November. But Google's first entry into the mobile phone world is a lot more impressive than many had predicted, and should hasten the development of the mobile internet.

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Mobiles - are you a toucher or a typist?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 23 Sep 08, 10:19 GMT

Later today I'm hoping to give the G1 a spin. What's that, I hear you cry, some new high-performance sports car? Well no it's the latest gadget to get the tech blogs hyper-ventilating, the first mobile phone to use Google's Android platform. It's obviously a big day both for Google and for a mobile phone industry which is now becoming a battleground for rival operating systems.

But it could also prove a decisive moment in the new schism which has opened up between two tribes - the touchers and the typists. The first smartphones all offered traditional keyboards as the means of text input, though a few mavericks chucked in a stylus and let you tap on the screen - in my experience that always ended with a lost stylus, a scratched screen and a bad temper. But the best of these keyboards, notably on the Blackberry, allowed users to become rapid typists, albeit with a couple of thumbs. As I still type on a computer with a couple of fingers, the difference in speed was not that great.

Then came the iPhone - and touch. Now I know there had been other touch devices before Apple's device, but it was the iPhone which made a touch-interface the new, new thing for mobile phone makers. Others rushed to follow suit - and at long last there's even a Nokia touchscreen phone around the corner.

I love the swift access that touch gives you to websites, to your music, and to the manipulation of images, but it has one major drawback. When it comes to text, I find myself reduced from two thumbs to one finger - and that's a pretty slow way of writing anything, from a text message to an e-mail. So for the last year I've been a member of both tribes. I'm still carrying two devices with me, one with a touchscreen for web surfing and calls, the other with a keyboard for e-mail.

From the look of , the new HTC G1 hedges its bets with a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard. That may prove to make the handset both clunky and ugly - and while smartphones used to be aimed solely at business types who valued function above form, they're now trying to capture a wider market, where looks matter.

So which tribe are you in - the touchers or the typists? And will the physical attributes of a handset prove a more decisive factor in choosing a new phone than the fact that it boasts a brand new open-source operating system? We'll hope to bring you pictures and information about the first Android phone later this afternoon.

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Freeserve and ten years of boom and bust

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 22 Sep 08, 10:50 GMT

In Bradford today the is holding a little party to celebrate the tenth birthday of an Internet Service Provider. Why is that interesting? Well this particular ISP can lay claim to have brought the web to the mass market in Britain. What's more, in its rapid rise to fame and then back to obscurity, you can read much of the history of boom, bust and technological change in Britain.

It was on that the high street electrical chain Dixons announced that it was launching a free internet provider called Freeserve. The existing players - Virgin, AOL, Compuserve and so on - scoffed at the idea that you could run an ISP without a subscription fee. But the people behind Freeserve reckoned they could build a profitable business if they could grab a share of the telephone charges.

Success has many fathers - but three people have substantial claims to have come up with the idea. Ajaz Ahmed, a PC World store manager in Leeds who lobbied his Dixons bosses for years to start an ISP, John Pluthero, a bright young Dixons executive who was put in charge of the project, and the Yorkshire-based entrepreneur Peter Wilkinson, whose Planet Online business was a partner in the project, and who scribbled on a paper napkin the sums which showed that Freeserve could make money from those dial-up charges.

Within six months, Freeserve had a million subscribers, and the other ISPs were scrambling to replicate its model. By the summer of 1999 it had become Britain's first dot com to float on the stock market. In the spring of 2000 it had two million subscribers - compared to BT's 400,000 - and it entered the FTSE 100. At that stage Freeserve was still making big losses but its value climbed to an extraordinary £9bn - more than its parent company Dixons. More even than the Bank of Scotland, which in the year before it joined Halifax to form HBOS, made a profit of more than a billion pounds.

The world appeared to have gone mad but Freeserve's executives and its stock market followers insisted that "a new paradigm" had been created, where "eyeballs" on your home page were a more important measure of success than profits in the bank. "Beg, steal or borrow - but get your hands on some of those dot com shares" seemed to be the message from the stock market analysts.

The year 2000 also brought even more frenzied competition between ISPs offering customers even more for even less. In March that year I took a call from a PR man explaining that Alta Vista was about to unveil a deal which promised unmetered internet access for an annual charge of just £20. I was sceptical but we covered the story on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and it ended up on the front of the Sun, under the headline "Free Internet".

It never happened. Alta Vista's service - immediately copied by others including Freeserve - was never launched. The whole dot com bubble began to deflate. By December, Freeserve's shares which had reached £10, had fallen below the £1.50 issue price. Then Dixons sold the business to France Telecom for £1.25bn. In retrospect that looks a fantastic deal - because in 2008 what is left of Freeserve? The brand has now disappeared under the Orange banner, which, I notice, is plugging "free broadband" on its site.

And what of Freeserve's founders? Ajaz Ahmed still lives in Huddersfield where he grew up, and has started a number of internet businesses, including Browzar, which claims to allow users to surf the web without leaving traces of their activities. It's he who's organised today's party in Bradford. John Pluthero runs Cable and Wireless in the UK, where he has built a reputation as a frank-speaking boss who doesn't suffer fools gladly as he tries to invigorate a lumbering telecoms giant. And the equally blunt Peter Wilkinson - one of the very few to make serious money out of the dot com bubble - is still running technology businesses from his Yorkshire base.

What is amazing, looking back ten years, is how much has changed - and how little. Back in 1998, one million UK households had internet access, for which they paid around £10 a month for a 56k dial-up connection. Those households spent around £10m a year on online shopping. Now around 17 million homes have a broadband connection, often paying not much more than £10 for up to 8Mbps, and it's forecast that internet retailing will take revenues of £60bn this year.

But in the space of ten years we have also been through two bouts of speculative madness - the dot com boom followed by the credit and housing bubble. Each time, clever people in businesses and investment banks have told us that they have invented brilliant new products that can defy the old rules of financial gravity, from "free" internet providers to complex ways of repackaging mortgage debt. So next time someone comes along promising you a free lunch, remember that someone is going to end up paying the bill. And it could just be you.

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YouTube, Cat Stevens and me

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 19 Sep 08, 09:34 GMT

Have you ever worried about whether the videos you upload onto YouTube or other video-sharing sites could be infringing someone's copyright? No? Me neither. After all, the pictures I use are mine, shot by me. Plus, there's the fact that my video has been dropped into a vast pool of content and surely nobody is going to comb through all of that?

But then this week I got an e-mail with the heading "Copyrighted Content Identified in one of your YouTube videos". It was from YouTube's Content Identification Programme and it referred to one of my videos called "". As this featured footage of my family and our dog playing around with a kite in the park I couldn't quite work out what the issue was. Then I remembered that I had cut the pictures to that classic Cat Stevens track "I Love My Dog".

YouTube's assiduous team pointed out that that this was copyrighted material belonging to UMG - Universal Music. It turns out that the site allows what it describes as "partners" to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights.

Luckily, the message continued, Universal Music "does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time." However, Universal will now receive statistics revealing how many people have viewed my video - 59 last time I looked. But, wait for it, they will also have the right to place adverts on my video's page. And when I went to the page there was a box with adverts for, believe it or not, kites.

Which raises a few questions. I'd already paid for that Cat Stevens track - yes I'm proud of my taste in 70s classics - so how come Universal is on my case at all? And my video was public - would they have spotted my use of their content if I'd set it to "private"? Oh, and do I get a share of that advertising revenue?

A phone-call to YouTube's owners Google provided some answers. I was fortunate, the PR man suggested, that under new arrangements content owners like Universal were more likely to choose to put adverts next to my video rather than demand it was taken down. Making it private rather than public would make no difference. And no, I won't get a share of the advertising revenue - it will be split between Universal and YouTube. Which seems a little unfair, considering that it's my excellent pictures, rather than the Cat Stevens soundtrack, which are at the creative heart of my video.

It all brings home just what a public place YouTube is. When Viacom won a court order giving it access to YouTube's logs of every video every user had ever watched, it was suggested there was no real danger of them sniffing through our individual videos and viewing habits. But it now appears that every content owner is crawling over every single YouTube video and examining it for the merest hint of copyright infringement.

Still, at least, I'm now in a business relationship with Cat Stevens. But what's worrying me now is another guilty secret in my YouTube closet. It's a video of the kids playing with a toy rocket launcher, and it's called "Rocket Men." i'm just hoping that Elton John doesn't listen to the soundtrack.

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Cambridge's tiger economy

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 17 Sep 08, 15:15 GMT

In a Cambridge college today, a clutch of hopeful high-tech start-ups are entering the Dragons' Den. Or rather they're telling a bunch of venture capitalists and business angels why they will become the Tigers of Tomorrow.

It's a mark of how much British attitudes to entrepreneurship have changed that we now use such colourful metaphors to describe the mundane and painful task of growing a business from bright idea to blockbuster. But at the Cambridge Enterprise conference at Churchill College - with the title "Tigers of Tomorrow" - there are plenty of kittens hoping to grow into big beasts.

A decade ago, to compare Cambridge with Silicon Valley would have been laughable but now there is a real sense that this is the best place, at least in Europe, to start a technology company.

What's it got that makes it work?

Well it has long had a world-class university, with Nobel prize-winning science emerging from its labs, but until recently that produced little in the way of commercial spin-offs.

I came here in the early 90s to make a programme about the so-called "Cambridge Phenomenon" and struggled to find it. But in the late 90s a clutch of big businesses did emerge - the chip designer ARM and the search firm Autonomy to name but two - and the virtuous circle that you get in places like Silicon Valley began to operate.

The people who made money here in that late 20th Century tech boom started to look for new opportunities, some starting new ventures, others becoming business angels. Venture capital firms, mostly based in London, started making regular trips to Cambridge to scope out the start-up scene.

But the key thing is confidence. I spent time with three companies here yesterday, and all seemed to have two things in common - bags of self-belief and a genuine technological edge.

Sure Flap, started by a Cambridge physicist Dr Nick Hill, sounds like a bit of a joke product - a cat flap which opens on recognising the chip implanted in your pet. But Dr Hill says he's done ground-breaking work in developing RFID technology which could be applied in all sorts of areas.

Short Fuze, based in a Cambridge loft, has spent the last three years developing its Movie Storm software, which allows users to make their own animated films. It appears to be a long way from making a profit - or even substantial revenues - but has raised a good dollop of cash and is relentlessly cheerful. "It would be easier in California," admitted the founder Matt Kelland, "but Cambridge is still a great place to start a company."

But most audacious and optimistic of all was a company called True Knowledge, which aims to bring the world another search engine. Taking on the mighty Google with a dozen people in a small office at a Cambridge incubator might seem almost suicidal.

But True Knowledge is confident that its technology, which it describes it as an "answer" engine, gives it an edge by delivering more intelligent answers than conventional search.

They demonstrated this to me by typing in to their box the question "who was US president when Barack Obama was a teenager?" and True Knowledge delivered relevant results, unlike Google which simply supplied a lot of pages featuring the words "Obama" and "teenager".

They've certainly convinced investors, winning another £2m in backing just a couple of months back, in what the firm described as one of Europe's biggest "pre-revenue" fund-raising rounds.

Now for all of these firms the move from "pre-revenue" to profit is going to be a challenge. With the credit crunch making venture capital firms cautious and government grants being trimmed, mere survival could be a struggle. But I have a hunch that the Cambridge habitat will be a happy hunting ground for more technology tigers in the years to come.

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Digital music - who can beat iTunes?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 16 Sep 08, 15:12 GMT

Every day seems to bring a new announcement from the world of digital music. Yesterday it was the ailing (sorry, too much alliteration).

Today it's the UK's 7digital trumpeting deals with the record labels which it says make it Europe's biggest purveyor of DRM-free music. And next month sees the arrival of "Comes With Music", Nokia's new service promising free music downloads with a handset contract. What they are all attempting to do is loosen the extraordinary stranglehold that Apple's iTunes has over the market.

It's going to be tough. The subscription model favoured by the likes of Napster and eMusic was one strategy, which now seems to be fading, just as the talk of an iTunes subscription service gets louder. Napster gathered around 700,000 subscribers but still ended up making a big loss. I've recently tried out another service eMusic, and am wondering why - it is hard to navigate, and appears to have a limited library for a £10 a month subscription.

appears to offer a more compelling proposition - a straightforward download store with a wide range of music from the four big labels, and at prices that look very competitive. But having tried it once a few months ago, I haven't returned. Why - the i word. No not iTunes, but inertia. What Apple has achieved is to make millions of computer users extremely comfortable with the whole concept of downloading and paying for music. That is a big - and lazy - crowd and having got into the habit of using iTunes, many will take a lot of persuading to move elsewhere.

But it's the mobile market that could prove the chink in Apple's armour. There are far more people using Nokia mobile phones than iPods, and in the coming months they're going to be asked a simple question. Do you want to get "free" music with your mobile - or would you prefer to pay for every track from iTunes? Now of course there are plenty of other questions to be answered about the nature of "free" (just how much more am I going to pay for this handset than one without music?) but you can see the appeal of Nokia's proposition.

And it won't be alone. Best Buy didn't snaffle up Napster for its subscription service, but for its mobile platform, which could end up on phones sold in stores across the US and the UK. So the battle for the digital music market is about to get a whole lot hotter.

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TV - looking forward and back

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 16 Sep 08, 08:01 GMT

I'd come to the in Amsterdam to film a story about the future of television. If what's on display at the broadcasting industry's annual shindig provides a true picture, we'll all eventually be watching in Super Hi-Vision (yes, there's something else after HD), and in 3-D, and we will be getting more and more of our TV via the internet and on our mobile phones.

But our incredibly compact ´óÏó´«Ã½ team ended up talking more about the past than the future.

That team consisted of me and a cameraman, Dave Skerry, and between us we had over 60 years in the industry. Dave started in television in 1968, at a time when it was all still in black and white, and his training was heavy on the engineering: "I almost got chucked out because I couldn't get the hang of valves," he remembered.

Those were the days of film, when videotape - even as a recording medium - was still in its infancy. Even by 1981, the regional newsroom where I began my TV career was still shooting news stories on film. You had to wait for 45 minutes while it went through "the bath", and then it was rapidly chopped up and assembled by an editor.

When I came to London a couple of years later, the TV newsroom was getting to grips with ENG - Electronic News Gathering. A news crew consisted of a cameraman, wielding a very heavy video camera delivering poor quality pictures, linked by an umbilical cord to a sound recordist. They carried an even heavier unit which recorded sound and pictures onto a chunky 3/4 inch U-Matic tape cassette.

Then there was the lighting man who turned up with a heavy bag full of "redheads" and "blondes". The whole kit cost about £30,000. Back at the office, former film editors were now involved in the expensive process of video tape editing, and complaining, with some justification, that it was a step backward, as they laboriously copied shots from the rushes tape to the final version.

Over the next couple of decades, the cameras got lighter and cheaper, with the recorder soon incorporated into the main unit, the tapes got smaller and smaller, and the cameramen - and women - eventually found they were on their own, doing pictures, sound and lights. And then they had to learn to edit too, now assembling stories with a digital editing package, much closer to the original non-linear film method.

Oh, and instead of using a satellite truck to send the pictures back, the modern camera operator has to send it over the internet, perhaps from a hotel's dodgy wi-fi network, as we did in Amsterdam at 0230 the other morning.

As the process of gathering television pictures has got cheaper, it has been democratised. The kind of camera Dave Skerry was using in Amsterdam costs about £3,000 - chuck in a laptop with an editing package, and for under £5,000 you have the kind of production set-up that would have cost close to £100,000 20 years ago.

What's more, the modern kit delivers a better product - HD if you want it. The result - as we see every time we look at YouTube - is that just about anyone who wants to have a go can make television.

Which makes it somewhat surprising to wander around the vast halls at IBC, finding an apparently thriving professional broadcast industry examining the latest kit, pushed at visitors by the likes of Sony, Panasonic and Philips. The industry seems to have decided that in the future there will be two kinds of television - the cheap and democratic stuff, and the ultra high-quality version which only the professionals can afford to make.

Hence Super Hi-Vision. This is a futuristic project, collaboration between Japan's NHK, Italy's RAI and the ´óÏó´«Ã½, which promises 16 times the resolution of HDTV and 80 times what standard definition offers. We sat in an auditorium watching a live feed in Super Hi-Vision from the roof of London's City Hall, with the sound of the city swirling around us.

As well as extraordinary pictures, the new standard offers "22.2 channel immersive audio", though as one sceptical journalist pointed out, who's going to install 22 speakers in the front room - and then find room for another .2? All of this is a long way from reaching our homes. There's talk of huge open-air screens using the technology at the London 2012 Olympics, but I got the impression that even that was optimistic. Right now, there are only a couple of giant Super Hi-Vision cameras in existence.

So my career in television - which began with film - may well be over before Super Hi-Vision becomes a reality. And do you know what, I'm not really sorry. I've always considered myself an enthusiastic early adopter, but I think I may have had just about as much change as I can handle.

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Fibre from Amsterdam

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 12 Sep 08, 07:58 GMT

When I messaged friends to say I was "in an cafe sampling some great fibre", I got a lot of outrageous replies suggesting that I might be smoking something I shouldn't be. But this is a city which wants to be known from now on as a leader in fibre-to-the-home rather than Europe's capital of soft drugs.

Amsterdam is completing the first phase of , an ambitious and expensive plan to bring fibre to all of its 450,000 homes. The cafe where I sampled some free fibre was in Zeeburg - a docklands area which is the first to be linked to the new network.

The city council has invested heavily in the scheme, putting up a third of the cash needed so far. At €800 - around £600 - for every home passed, it's not cheap, and there've been accusations from some telecom firms not involved in the scheme that the council's cash amounts to state aid. So far, Brussels has rejected their arguments.

But what's Amsterdam getting for its money? Supposedly a state-of-the art fibre network, offering up to 100Mbps now and more in the future. I saw it in use in a number of places - in some architects' offices lodged with others in a brand new docklands building, in a canalside family home, and even on a boat. Yes, fibre-to-the-barge has come to Amsterdam.

But I didn't yet find any great clamour for the kind of services a lightning fast service might offer. On the boat for instance, the owner Oliver Ax was enthusiastic that the fibre cable draped over the quayside would now replace three wires bringing him internet, television and telephone. But he was only paying for an up to 20Mbps service, and his ISP wasn't yet providing digital television.

Similarly, in the family home I visited, they were not yet downloading HD movies or playing games online. They too had only signed up to a 20Mbps service, and felt they did not yet need to pay for something faster.

Amsterdam is really paying for future-proofing before the demand for fibre - and the services it promises - arrives. So what can the UK learn from the experience in the Netherlands, as the government publishes its Caio review into the prospects for next-generation networks? The kind of speeds I saw in use in the Zeeburg area are around the same as those offered by new souped-up copper network, and the British firm is now planning to build plenty of fibre-to-the-cabinet to supplement that. So why does the UK need to rush into fibre to the home, at a potential cost of £29 billion?

Herman Wagter of Amsterdam Fibre - one of the commercial partners in the Citynet project - is clear: "Five years ago you could have asked whether fibre was necessary - now the debate is over . It's become clear that "fibre-to-the-cabinet" is just a stopgap. Full fibre-to-the-home is the answer". Well, of course, he would say that - his business is fibre.

But this city is betting that it will be cheaper to get into the fast lane now, rather than wait and see the costs of the labour to dig up all those roads - and canals - rise later.

believes that the recent moves by both BT and to promise parts of the country higher speeds are encouraging signs that Britain is heading along the right path. He's also clear that chucking governement money at the problem isn't the answer. But he's said to be impressed by the kind of public-private partnership that's taking place in Amsterdam. So will British cities now follow the Dutch example?

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Twitter, Qik, Flip - how to cover news?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 10 Sep 08, 12:30 GMT

What's the best way of using new media tools to cover a news event? An issue close to my heart, as I now travel round with a whole lot of clobber designed to enable instant communication, in text and video. I decided to try out various options at Apple's music event on Tuesday evening - not a major story, so a good venue for a bit of experimentation.

I set off for the Islington Business Design Centre - where the keynote from San Francisco was being relayed to a huge crowd of expectant hacks from across Europe - with a very overpacked kitbag. I took a laptop with a 3g dongle for instant net access, three phones - one with a video camera and the Qik streaming video application enabled - and a Flip video camera, a very cheap and simple device that produces reasonable pictures. Plus an invaluable gadget called Dan Simmons, my multimedia colleague from Click, who brought along his much more professional video camera.

My aim was to , and my way through the event - and work out which method was best. I had previously asked on Twitter which option people favoured - and, surprise, surprise they favoured a constant stream of Tweets.

So that's what I supplied. From the moment Apple's very Gallic European boss talked of a "great lunch" - it turned out he meant the launch of iPhone 3g - through a rather subdued "Stevenote", to the Jack Johnson performance at the end I attempted to provide some instant headlines. Now I'm not sure if it was "broadcasting" - after all Twitter is a pretty narrow community - but it was an enjoyable way of covering the event, with plenty of interaction coming back to me from other Twitterers.

As I left the hall, I came across other journalists who'd been trying the same trick, and one who'd been following my own Tweets while watching the keynote, which must have been a strange experience. I'd also been reading messages posted by colleagues at the San Francisco event, so what Twitter succeeded in doing was creating a temporary micro-community, which built up a mosaic of news and comment about Apple.

But, along with the micro-blogging, I managed a bit of instant video, using . The quality is pretty poor - it's being streamed over a 3g network which seemed to struggle to get into the hall - but immediacy is the thing here. Apple is very controlling and bans live video relays of these events, so there is a kind of "pirate" appeal to getting the pictures out ahead of time. We now have a new ´óÏó´«Ã½ application which takes video straight from a mobile phone and feeds its straight to our broadcast server - but I judged these pictures did not merit that treatment.

Then there was my Flip video, which has the advantage over a mobile phone of shooting an hour of material wthout needing a charge - it uses a couple of AA batteries - and the disadvantage of a lack of instant connectivity. Still, I loaded it straight onto my laptop, cut it together with a simple editing programme and produced this behind-the-scenes video.

But of course it was Dan Simmons with his small, but semi-professional, video camera who made the most important contribution - after all were of far greater quality than mine, and reached a far bigger audience.

So what's the conclusion about the modern reporter's toolkit? Well, a laptop with a wi-fi or 3g connection seems pretty essential, whether to send reams of text or the odd 140 character Tweet. A mobile phone with an instant video application can get you out of a hole when there's no alternative. But I'd be reluctant to go anywhere without the services of a professional, wielding a decent video camera. As I think you'll agree if you look at my pictures.

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Broadband Britain - how fast, how far?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 8 Sep 08, 10:09 GMT

How much is it going to cost to bring ultra-fast broadband to Britain? Well, BT and Virgin say they're both doing just that over the next couple of years, for an investment of a couple of billion pounds between them. But, according to from the , the final bill could mount as high as £29bn.

So why do the two companies most likely to build a next-generation network think it can be done for so much less than the government's advisory group has calculated? Well, it all depends on what you mean by "ultra-fast broadband" - and by "Britain". BT's recent announcement was a step-change in its policy towards fast broadband - previously it had been highly sceptical - but it was still only talking of covering 40% of the country, and relying mainly on "fibre-to-the-cabinet" not "fibre-to-the-home." Similarly, Virgin's plans involve building on its existing infrastructure rather than digging up half the country.

What the Broadband Stakeholders Group does in today's report is look at both ends of the fast broadband spectrum. The £29bn bill is for a full fibre-to-the-home option for the whole of Britain. It puts the bill for fibre-to-the-cabinet - the cabinet being that box you see on the corner of your street with the trailing wires and a BT engineer pulling his hair out - at a far more manageable £5bn.

So which are we going to get? Well the BSG doesn't really have any answers to that but it does warn that we are staring at a new digital divide of enormous proportions whichever route we take - and the faster the broadband we choose, the bigger the gap between town and country is likely to be.

To illustrate that, it's produced two maps showing which areas of Britain will get fast broadband quickly and which face a very long wait. One map involves the fibre-to-the-home option, the other fibre-to-the-cabinet. The BSG, unusually for a rather staid government advisory group, is also issuing a rallying cry. It's telling people in far-flung parts of Britain, where the bill for extending a fast broadband network will be eye-wateringly expensive, that they need to start making a noise now. The message seems to be "make enough fuss and you can make sure policy-makers don't leave you out when it comes to building the future of Broadband Britain."

So have a look at the maps - and work out which side of the digital divide you will fall in.

PS. (in pdf format).

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Google - is the love fading?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 5 Sep 08, 09:24 GMT

What is it about some technology companies that inspires enthusiasm, even love, amongst millions of consumers? People who would never dream of becoming fans of their bank ( Woooooo...let's hear it for !!!) or an oil company (I love you !!!), develop an emotional attachment to the products and personalities which emerge from firms like , , and, yes, even .

Over the last decade has been one of the big beneficiaries of this cult of fandom. First, because out of nowhere it emerged with a product that did the job so much better than anything else. Then because it was seen as the smart, scrappy kid taking on the big boys of the internet - or rather one very big Seattle-based bruiser.

And when it arrived on the stockmarket with 2004's IPO, it reinforced that edgy, radical image. The first line of its so-called read: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." There was much talk from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of giving the world access to information and great play was made of the company's ethical stance, summed up with the motto "Don't be evil."

Over the last four years, it has sought to retain the affection of its many fans, by offering them more and more for nothing - from , to , to . But somehow I feel the love is beginning to fade. Why?

Well the scrappy kid has grown up into a muscle-bound giant which, in the eyes of some web developer pygmies, is the new playground bully. It may claim that it is just a technology start-up, constantly looking for cool new tools to make us all more productive - but it is rapidly becoming an advertising and media giant, with as much domination of some sectors of the online market as has over operating systems.

It may , with some justification, paint itself as a champion of open-source - but users of its new Chrome browser were quick to ask questions about some pretty scary terms and conditions, since amended by Google. And it may claim to be a champion of liberty - but and others will respond with one word - China.

But the main bone of contention in the relationship between Google and its users is privacy. Google loves us so much it wants to know everything about us - so that it can help us live better lives. But users are beginning to suspect that we're being, well, used - that Google just wants to know us better so that it can send us more adverts and sell us to its trading partners. When Eric Schmidt said earlier this year that he wanted the search engine to be able to answer questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?" or "What job shall I take?", did you think "cool" or "creepy"?

So a decade of extraordinary innovation is worth celebrating, and Google is continuing to surprise and delight with new products. But it is also becoming just what Page and Brin said it would not become - a conventional company. Hardly surprising - like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia or Nintendo - its first duty is to its shareholders, and their returns depend on Google grabbing an ever larger slice of the online advertising market.

However, all of those happy, shiny, Googlers in their multi-coloured offices with the free muffins had better get used to one thing. The early passion of your users is fading. We're now in a conventional, commercial relationship - and if someone else comes along offering something better, we're off.

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Chrome - first impressions

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Sep 08, 20:00 GMT

I spent an hour this afternoon at Google's London HQ getting a first look at its new browser, Chrome. So here are a few hurried first impressions...

The first thing you see when you open the browser is a clutch of snapshots of some of your favourite websites, garnered from your search history. Click and you go straight to them. There's also a box enabling you to search your web history.

But it's the address bar which is intended to do much of the heavy lifting. Start typing in the box- and it begins to offer suggested URLs or offer web searches. Google seems pretty excited about this - but to my eyes it looked much like Firefox's "Awesome Bar".

As with all new browsers, tabs are an important feature, though Google is claiming its tabs are extra special. They each feature the address bar, and they're designed so that if a site crashes in one tab, it doesn't bring down the whole browser, a policy Google calls "kill the tab, not the browser".

Privacy is now a growing concern for many web users, and Chrome has an "Incognito" mode, which means that if your partner comes to the computer after you've been using it, they will not see which sites you have visited.

Used on Google's network, Chrome did appear to load pages very quickly and efficiently - and if those who install the beta (only for Windows right now) experience similar speeds, then it could gain quite a following.

Overall, the browser does not feature anything that will blow the socks off a Firefox user - and persuading the mass of web users, many of whom will be unaware of which browser they use, to go and download Chrome will not be easy.

So Chrome borrows many of its ideas - and its technology - from other browsers. But more choice can only be a good thing, and help spark further innovation.

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A question of Netiquette...

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 1 Sep 08, 16:42 GMT

What's public and what's private on the web? And, with that in mind, how careful should we be about the way we express ourselves and how much we give away? Two questions on my mind lately..

The other day, for instance, I wrote a light-hearted piece on this blog about the Scrabulous affair, the main point of which was to offer readers a simple, and hopefully amusing, puzzle, while throwing in a couple of observations about the dispute which has seen the Agarwalla brothers pitted against the might of Hasbro and Mattel.

Soon after the piece was published, I received a message from a Twitter "friend"- the slightly disconcerting thing about Twitter is that anybody can be your friend or "follower", as they're known, unless you actively block them. The message read "Why did you not mention Wordscraper?", referring to a new game the Agarwallas had invented which was intended to avoid charges of infringing copyright.

I was a little irritated by this, as my piece was intended as a bit of fun rather than an exhaustive inquiry into the Scrabulous affair - which, after all, is hardly Watergate. So I Tweeted back: "cos I couldn't be bothered", and thought no more about it. Now Twitter is a social network, which I use quite extensively as a kind of instant messaging service with friends, and that dictates the nature of the "tweets" - casual, throwaway remarks, not meant for posterity. I am smart enough to know that Twitter is not a private place - but still like to express myself there as freely as possible.

Anyway, I head nothing more after that reply, until this turned up on something called "": "When I twittered Rory Cellan-Jones to ask why he didn't mention Wordscraper in his blog post about Scrabulous, he replied 'cos i couldn't be bothered!' Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone."

Wow, so my throwaway remark has been turned into the basis for an indictment of the whole of British journalism.

A couple of days later the shoe was on the other foot. I reacted to a press release by describing it on Twitter as "new leader in rubbish PR stunt of 08". The PR man in question e-mailed me a couple of days later to say "Got your feedback via Twitter. You cut me deep!!!". I had forgotten that he too might be watching my "Tweets", but luckily he took it reasonably well.

So a useful reminder that Twitter - like so many other online forums - is a public place, and what you say there may be used in evidence against you. Now I write in a number of voices online - very straight and ´óÏó´«Ã½ in news pieces for the website, a rather more relaxed tone for this blog, and a downright shoddy, ungrammatical, and sometimes incoherent voice in places like Twitter. But perhaps I can no longer afford to be quite so careless. There is the option on Twitter to "protect" your updates - in other words to control who can see what you are saying. I haven't yet done that - it seems to go against the spirit of openness - but may need to consider it.

The other lesson we all need to learn is that giving too much away online leaves you open to identity theft. I got a message from Facebook the other day warning "we have detected suspicious activity on your Facebook account". The suggestion was that someone might be trying to steal my password or install malicious software onto my computer.

So, even if you're happy enough to take the risk of broadcasting your private jokes, thoughts, and opinions on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, try not to give away your date of birth or your home address. Not everyone out there has the best of intentions...

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