Why PlayStation 2 still matters
- 31 Mar 09, 15:30 GMT
Sony has cut the price of its PlayStation 2 console to under $99 in the US and 99 euros across mainland Europe, while it remains at £94 in the UK.
While rumours of a global Sony PlayStation announcement had circulated for days many observers were expecting the firm to announce a price cut for the PlayStation 3.
There is a continued belief that the high price of the PlayStation 3, relative to the Xbox 360 and Wii, coupled with the global downturn is causing ongoing problems for Sony as it battles to compete with Microsoft and Nintendo.
Sony, however, continues to point to its 10-year strategy for the PlayStation 3, and remains steadfast in its belief the platform will not only "come good" but will eventually triumph over the Xbox 360 in terms of global sales.
A look at how the PlayStation 2 has developed and evolved over the last nine years presents some clues as to why they believe this is the right strategy.
According to the last financials from Sony, the PS2 had sold 140.2 million worldwide (50.3 million of those in Europe and related territories like the Middle East and Australia) and 1,507.7million units of software.
And it continues to sell well across the world.
More than 5,000 PlayStation 2 consoles are sold each week in Japan, and last month 131,000 PS2s were sold in the US.
If you look at the software sales charts in the US it's clear the big developers are continuing to support the platform.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2009, Fifa 2009, Call of Duty: World at War, Need for Speed and Lego Batman are all riding high in the PS2 charts.
The top-selling game for PS2 at the moment does, however, give a sense of the target demographic for the console: Ben 10: Alien Force, a superhero game for young children.
So why is Sony cutting the cost of a PS2 and not PS3? Simple economics.
While sales of the PS2 are dwindling it continues to be a big money spinner for Sony, which is making money of each and every unit sold.
If Sony cuts the price of the PS3, on which it makes a loss on every console sold, it is likely to lose even more money in the short term.
, a senior analyst at Screen Digest, told me: "Sony is looking to extend the life of the PS2 as long as possible to make up for the relatively slow adoption of the PS3.
"Indeed the PS2 remains a substantial source of income for Sony and will become increasingly relevant to emerging markets at this new price point."
This then is the reasoning behind David Reeves, boss of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, when he comments: "We are very excited about the future of PlayStation 2 and will continue to grow the game library this year, meaning that new and existing owners have plenty to be excited about."
The PS2 is also "massive in emerging territories like India", according to a Sony representative.
More than 450,000 PS2 consoles have been in India since its launch.
"Worldwide PS2 software sales contributed €2bn of total value or 10% of the market in 2008 although it lost €1.5bn in value year-on-year as the platform hit the end years of its lifecycle," explained Mr Harding-Rolls.
It is by no means a device that has been consigned to the dustbin and if Sony is ever going to turn PlayStation 3 into a genuinely profitable enterprise it will to continue to squeeze all the revenue out of the PS2 that it can.
But as Mr Harding-Rolls warned: "Since the domination of the PS2 during the last console cycle, the market has been turned on its head by the incredible performance of Nintendo's Wii and the solid performance of Microsoft's Xbox 360 - it is clear that Sony's dominance will not be repeated this time round."
G20: The social media battle
- 31 Mar 09, 15:01 GMT
Members of the police, it seems, are bracing themselves for trouble on the streets of London as the G20 summit gets underway. But there's also a battle going on in cyberspace, as the various protest movements use all the latest tools to organise.
We've become accustomed to seeing Facebook, Twitter and other social networks used to bring together protesters or to run campaigns. What's different this time is that it's not just opponents and critics of the global get-together who are using these tools - it's also the organisers themselves.
Let's have a look across the online G20 landscape.
First of all, you've got the usual websites where protesters gather - not very different from what was around in 2003 when major protests against the Iraq war took place in cities around the world.
So, for instance, there's , which says it has these three goals:
1. Participate in a carnival party at the Bank of England
2. Support all events demonstrating against the G20 during the meltdown period (from March 28th onwards)
3. Overthrow Capitalism
There is no timetable, I notice, for that last goal. But protesters are also using new tools that weren't widely available in 2003. All sorts of Facebook groups are organising all sorts of events around the G20 summit.
And "G20 meltdown" has with more than 3,000 members. I see that there's a lively discussion on the topic: "Is G20 Meltdown an MI5-backed infowar, propaganda exercise?"
Then, of course there is Twitter - but while this may well be a good way of exchanging information, I doubt that it's a major force in organising demonstrations - one social media expert told me he reckoned Twitter was "an older person's tool" and that young anarchists were unlikely to be tweeting their exploits.
On the other side of the fence, it's not hard to find official G20 material online - , and so on.
But more interestingly, there's what you might call a "third way" - a swathe of social media activity which is sponsored, or encouraged by the government.
One of these projects is , run by a business which is attempting to provide a debating forum where the public can engage directly with politicians. Yoosk says this particular venture allows anyone to put questions direct to "an impressive line-up of ministers, business and civil society leaders" about the financial crisis. I notice that today, for instance, "SadBog74" is asking Gordon Brown:"Should G20 nations agree to tax bailed-out-bank bonuses at a minimum rate of 90%, as Barack Obama has done so in the USA?"
Yoosk is an independent business, but this project has government money behind it - so how independent can it be? Tim Hood of Yoosk told me, "We're walking a fine line - we have a level of access that we wouldn't get otherwise. It's not as independent as we'd like - but we're getting there."
Then there is - a group of 50 bloggers who are going to be given access to the summit, in an exercise organised by Oxfam but sponsored by the Foreign Office. They range from , a writer on corruption and financial crises to , a blogger and financial news presenter for Chinese TV.
Also among them is Lloyd Davis, a British social media consultant who told me that 25 years ago he'd stood on picket lines during the miners' strike but was now a little old for that kind of thing. "They might say we've all been 'captured'," he told me, "but I'm interested in the issues here, and how we can organise our way through this recession or depression."
Mr Davis and his fellow bloggers have had security clearance so that they can get into the Excel centre and attend the press conferences, which means there could be an alternative view of events from that provided by the mainstream media.
So new social media tools can provide ways for demonstrators to wreak havoc on the streets, though they are very public places if you're planning anything you don't want the police to read about. They can be used by governments to parrot an official line about the G20. Or they can provide a forum for a genuinely open-minded debate about a crisis which affects us all. Then again, the Twittering, blogging and Facebooking about the G20 could turn out to be a minority interest. Maybe we're about to find out just how interested young social networkers are in world events rather than in celebrity gossip?
Is Skype on the iPhone a big deal?
- 30 Mar 09, 14:08 GMT
So, after plenty of rumours, and even more leaks, the "free" internet calls service Skype will . Is this the moment that Voip - to use the ugly jargon - finally makes the leap from the laptop to the mobile? After a quick play with the new application, I must say I'm sceptical.
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It works fine - just install the app, tap on the icon and Skype launches with the familiar start-up sound you get on your computer. Your contacts list then tells you who is online - and you can either send them an instant message or make a call. When I tried it, the sound quality was about the same as on any mobile call - and as it was to a Skype contact it was free.
But here's the catch - I could only make the call because I was on a wi-fi network. Apple's restrictions on the use of its software development kit mean that Voip applications cannot use the 3G network. The other issue is that the iPhone doesn't allow you to have more than one application open at the same time - so your Skype buddies probably won't be able to get you on the phone unless you happen to be in the app when they call.
Most iPhone users will be on a contract giving them a lot of call minutes - so it's unlikely they'd want to use Skype unless they were abroad - or calling abroad. And wi-fi, as we know, is a lot less widespread and efficient than we might have thought it would be by now - whereas fast mobile networks are now widely available.
You can already use Skype on a dedicated phone from the 3 network, and Nokia is building the application into its N series of phones. In both cases you can make free calls to other Skype users over 3G as well as via wi-fi - so why would you choose an iPhone for its Skype capabilities?
What might make it into a killer app is free video calls - which aren't available on any mobile right now. but for that to happen on an iPhone, it would need a new camera on the front of the phone.
Skype is obviously very happy to be on the iPhone. But unless Apple takes a radically different approach to integrating the free calls service into its phone, it's unlikley to make a huge impact. And like many businesses, Apple is probably wondering whether "free" is such a great idea anyway.
N is for networking
- 30 Mar 09, 08:28 GMT
When did you first try to set up a wi-fi network? As far as I can remember, my first was back in 2003, and involved about a fortnight of grovelling on the floor under the computer, reading three sets of instructions seemingly written in Japanese, hours on the phone to helplines, and the odd bit of swearing and weeping.
The whole process has got a lot more "plug-and-play" since then - after all it's a mass market product now in millions of homes. But trying to set up a new network this week to send a fast internet connection around my home proved that wi-fi can still be pretty challenging. It's also clear that getting fast connections into homes is one thing - sending the signal wirelessly around them is another matter.
This was my first experience of using the router which is supposed to deliver far faster speeds - one on the 802.11n standard. Yes, I know - why should we as consumers need to know about this gobbledegook - and I'm sure I wasn't really aware that previous routers were 802.11b, g, q, a or z. But I've found that this time there's stuff you need to know.
So here's how it went. First I put the set-up disc in the computer which took me to a PDF file with some pretty simple set-up instructions. When it said "now switch off your computer" I did so - and realised that I no longer had the instructions. Duuuuuuuh, as my youngest son is prone to say. Turn on again, print out the PDF - not all 60 pages, just the relevant ones, and start again.
Having wired everything correctly, I was then directed to a website which would allow me to configure the router, by entering "admin" and "password". It took me instead to the router maker's homepage. I kept on re-entering the web address - and kept coming back to the same place, rather than the secret door into the router. Time to call on expert advice - my teenage son, who doubles as our director of IT when he can be called away from World of Warcraft duties.
After a quick search he found that entering the same string of numbers which we'd used to access other routers allowed us to open this one too. Then it was easy - upgrade to the latest firmware, choose our wireless security option - WEP -and, hey presto, we were up and running.
The only trouble was that over the next 24 hours it became clear that the network was limping rather than running. For one thing my son's computer kept dropping off it. For another, it was only delivering speeds of as low as 5Mbps - on our new fast cable connection of "up to 50Mbps" which was achieving 48Mbps on a wired computer.
I mentioned this to a colleague at work who is far more learned than me about networking. "802.11n isn't actually an agreed standard yet," he opined wisely. "what's more in a busy street like yours you'll get all sorts of other networks crowding out your signal."
I also sought out, as I'm prone to do these days, some advice from the Twitter community. People were very helpful - but not all that clear. Here's one example: "If you have huge packetloss (try sudo ping -c1000 -f 209.85.171.100 in Terminal) try reinstalling latest combo update on all Macs."
Hmmm - maybe Wikipedia could help? Well the entry on the has this message right at the top:"This article may be confusing or unclear to readers". Which isn't exactly encouraging.
So then I got in touch with a real expert - a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem - I'd put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn't work with "n" routers - or rather it does but it throttles them back to "g" speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.
So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they'd originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there's the possibility that some bits of kit won't work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.
I went home that evening and followed my expert's instructions, and immediately achieved some pretty impressive speeds - though so far we haven't got above 30Mbps on the wireless network.
My expert had said you could get wireless of up to 47Mbps on a 50Mbps line - but warned that all sorts of factors could bring that down. Other people's networks, the microwave and cordless phone in our house, the design of the computers we use, mobiles using bluetooth in the home could all cut those speeds.
But most members of the household seem pretty happy with what we've achieved. Except for my younger son. He has our oldest computer - handed down the family. It's seven years old - and doesn't talk WPA which means he can't enter the password to join the network. We''ll need to find a way sort him out.
All in all, setting up a new network has been an awful lot less of a headache than it was back in 2003. But there's still a language to be learned, from 802.11n to WPA2PSK with AES encryption. And if you don't speak fluent wireless, you may need to find a decent interpreter.
A walk on the fun side of GDC
- 27 Mar 09, 12:14 GMT
At every conference I go to, I like to take a wander around the expo floor to soak up the atmosphere and to see what's bubbling away.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the busiest booth by far was . Their newly-unveiled service, which promises to deliver on-demand video games in quality on your PC, Mac or TV via the cloud, has been the buzz of the week. They had 16 screens up and running to let attendees at the put the system through its paces. Anyone really interested in testing it to its limits can sign up for the open beta which will take place over the summer.
While OnLIve seemed to grab the lion's share of attention, there was plenty of action throughout the rest of the expo.
As always there was the obligatory Guitar Hero/Rock Band rock-off with a line of attendees waiting to show that they can throw it down with the best of them. The PlayStation lounge was chock-a-block with gamers doing what they do best - playing games. And the Wii crowd was jiggling like crazy.
One expo attendee was something of a novelty at a show like this - the US army.
Captain Darrell Melton from the army's video unit at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas told me that they were here to let the gaming world know they want developers to work for Uncle Sam.
He was showing off a game called which was made for them by an Australian company called Bohemia Interactive. The army uses the game to try to help improve the cognitive skills of soldiers in the field.
"We just didn't have the skills to build this kind of game in-house, and we can't keep up with what's going on in the commercial sector.
"Our next step is to reach out to developers and let them know that we are looking at buying commercial products especially designed for the army and its needs."
Captain Melton said that Virtual Battlespace 2 has been used to train men and women who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I like the game," said Captain Melton, "because it helps build unit cohesion and improves concentration and lets you learn what to do in life threatening situations without the consequences.
"It sure beats being shot at for real," stressed Captain Melton.
Anyone looking to experience a bit of "fast and furious" realism should head to the Canada Lounge. In its efforts to promote all things Canadian, the organisers have gone for the "big is better" approach with the largest screen that Panasonic produces:103 inches.
Also on show was Electronic Arts' Need for Speed along with a feedback chair by Montreal company .
"This chair is about boosting the gaming experience by letting the player feel every jolt, pitch and roll," said Ron Martin.
Peter Yee, who was in the hot seat, declared it "awesome" and said "it makes the whole thing feel intense.
"I really feel the need for speed," he quipped.
Over at the Nokia booth, Aziza Washington was trying to ignore her need for a seat. She had after all been standing around in white plastic five inch platform heels.
As a regular trade show hostess, Aziza gave praise to the gamers at GDC as among the "most fun and creative".
Sure beats trying to promote car tyres.
Someone else battling physical fatigue was Nik Rubyn who has been demonstrating the wonders of facial recognition technology this week.
The guys at stuck a series of sensors on Nik's facial muscles to record her movements and transfer that information to screens behind her on a series of different faces. Clearly, this is not a job for anyone who has had botox!
The technology has been used in a series of games, but the only company they could tell me about publicly was EA. In fact, Natural Point was one of several similar companies punting this kind of technology.
I caught up with Nik at four in the afternoon and she had been working her face in a series of different contortions from nine in the morning.
"It is tiring and my face is sore by the end of the day," admitted Nik. "The big challenge is doing mean faces. I can't do that because I am having such fun.
"My friends and family think I'm pretty crazy doing this, but they know if I get to be a big dork all day, I'm pretty happy."
One person who was very happy at this expo was Philip Bolus - and that's because he managed to get a shave with a new fancy razor that has a microchip in it.
"I have travelled a long way from home and I forgot my razor and I am very scruffy at the moment," he told me.
Bizarrely enough, Gillette has a booth here because it has released a razor aimed at gamers called Fusion Gamer. You might have seen the "game-vert" featuring Roger Federer and Tiger Woods on the TV.
Whether or not you think gamers need their very own razor, Nattie Nitfal thought many of them needed sprucing up.
On one day alone, she had 40 guys come and have a shave - proving, she said, "that gamers are kinda hairy and scruffy."
Eurogamer asks: Can OnLive work?
- 26 Mar 09, 17:45 GMT
Launched at the Game Developers Conference, OnLive is making about its online streamed gaming service.
Our report on the launch of the service proved incredibly popular with readers, perhaps reflecting the level of interest in this online games delivery system.
has commissioned an article by , who runs games digital video firm Digital Foundry.
It is a great read. In it, Leadbetter questions the technological background to this project, and while hoping it will be a success, he points out many of the obstacles in its path.
Read it .
Obama and the online Town Hall
- 26 Mar 09, 15:59 GMT
As I write, President Barack Obama is engaged in an
He's speaking in front of a live audience, while the meeting is also broadcast on the net, and on some TV channels.
He's answering questions from the invited audience, and also responding to questions put to him online.
As I look now, 92,000 people have left more than 100,000 questions on the subject of the economy alone.
It goes without saying that there will not be 100,000 answers to those questions. So is there any point at all in this exercise at all?
The use of questions is being powered by an online tool called Google Moderator. It lets people suggest questions, and then vote on which questions are the most valuable in order to find trends and consensus.
More than 3.6 million votes have been cast.
So is this an example of democracy in action in the networked world?
Like any democracy it depends on the quality of those who engage, and the quality of the majority.
It also depends on how and when this exercise in democracy is used and to what extent those in a position to be influenced by democracy in action actually listen to the voice of the majority.
One of the most popular questions from the online audience, and most voted upon questions, was around legalising marijuana in the US and whether this would improve the economy and job creation.
I wondered if President Obama would choose to respond to this example of democracy in action. And he did.
"This was a fairly popular question and I want to make sure it is answered," he said.
He added: "The answer is no. I don't think it is good answer to grow our economy."
So an open and shut demonstration of democracy in action? Not quite.
He also said - somewhat tongue in cheek - in reference to the popularity of the marijuana question: "I dont know what this says about the online audience."
So while he responded, he also slightly dismissed the nature of the very audience he claimed to be answerable to.
Again I ask: Is this a model of enlightened democracy in action in the networked world?
The Digital Diplomats
- 26 Mar 09, 12:07 GMT
It was like any other new media get-together where a bunch of bloggers and social networkers gather to compare notes and work out what happens next. Except for a few things. Nobody was tapping away on a laptop or a mobile phone, nearly everyone was wearing a suit and tie, and the small room held at least eight British ambassadors.
For this was a session inside the Foreign Office on digital diplomacy, moderated by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s technology correspondent - that's me. Having had my phones and laptop confiscated at the entrance to the Foreign Office, I felt digitally disempowered. But the diplomatic service appears to have barged into the blogosphere with alacrity. There are now listed on the Foreign Office blogroll - from the Foreign Secretary to a Second Secretary in Zimbabwe - and there is a rush to embrace other social media tools like Twitter and YouTube.
Our hour-long session was supposed to put this whole digital diplomacy venture under the microscope and to work out whether it was paying off. Apart from me, there were other outsiders from organisations like Reuters and the Oxford Internet Institute. But the majority were senior diplomats, eager to share their experiences with each other - and still somewhat uncertain whether they were doing it right.
The Ambassador to Vietnam blogs in Vietnamese and also on an English-language site. But why? "Part of the purpose is just to show that using the internet is a good thing. It gives a little bit of support to the blogging community out there."
His blog - my Vietnamese is poor, so I'll take his word for it - is more about throwing a light on the daily life of an ambassador than heavyweight policy issues. That's also reflected in his , where he takes us out onto the streets of Hanoi.
For the Tet festival, he got to wish the Vietnamese a Happy New Year - and won a lot of YouTube hits and seventy comments on his blog. "If I just blogged on very technical issues," he says, "people would think it was devoid of personality. People want to know about you."
But right at the other end of the spectrum is , British Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. He definitely broaches very technical arms control issues in his blog, and even uses it to comment on UN negotiations, almost in real time. But who's reading it?
"There aren't a lot of comments," he confessed," I'm not sure why. But journalists around the world use my blog to get quotes from the British ambassador." Of course, comments are not the only index of a blog's success. And Duncan notes that his site is also about connecting with very well-organised campaigners, who make full use of blogs: "In order to engage in that dialogue we had to have something similar."
I felt we were still searching for one solid reason why it's valuable for busy diplomats to clatter away at the keyboard - because as far as I can see, they all do it themselves, unlike some corporate bloggers."I blog to change the brand," said Alex Ellis, our bicycling, open-shirted and youthful man in Lisbon. (I'm afraid I've reached the age when even ambassadors can look unfeasibly young). He blogs and, as well as seeking to transform the ambassadorial image, he says he wants "to reach a new audience, to learn myself, and to make people laugh".
I wondered whether they all felt they were part of the blogosphere, engaging with other bloggers, wading into the online debate. They seemed slightly unclear about that - and the questioners from the floor probed the overall motivation for the digital diplomacy project.
Ian Brown of the wondered how authentic Foreign Office bloggers could be, pointing out that Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, had been very authentic - and had lost his job as a result. He also wanted to know whether it was really a diplomat's job to be a journalist. Philip Barclay admitted his , which has chronicled events in Zimbabwe, was akin to journalism but said that it worked as a way of getting the British government's message out.
Tony Curzon-Price of felt that the bloggers could be authentic as long as they were transparent about their mission. He said the Foreign Office needed to proclaim: "We are representing the interests of Britain here and this is how we do it."
What seemed to unite the meeting was a conviction that the world - campaigners, journalists, politicians - was using this new technology, so the Foreign Office had no choice but to be part of the conversation. The ambassadors left saying that they'd learned some new tricks from each other's blogging experiences and that they would redouble their efforts.
I returned to my office where a colleague - a very experienced correspondent who doesn't yet blog - asked me where I'd been. When I told him he said "Ambassadors blogging? What a waste of time. They should be handing out the chocolates." It seems the Foreign Office still has some work to do on selling the idea of digital diplomacy - and modernising the ambassadorial brand.
Nintendo's secret sauce
- 26 Mar 09, 09:09 GMT
Nintendo's president Surato Iwata was the sell-out gig of the week here at GDC. Just minutes before he took to the stage, the line of people snaked outside for more than a block.
Preceding his appearance, there was a lot of talk and hope that he would pull a rabbit out of the hat and excite the audience with a new product like a said PC World.
Alas none of this came to pass and a few of the gamers I spoke to afterwards were disappointed that what he did announce didn't amount to much. Oh apart from a free copy of Rhythm Heaven which everyone got.
At every turn it seemed Mr Iwata covered up the lack of real product news with some knockout sales figure. Fifty million Wii's, 100m DS units, 14m Wii fit sales, 1.4 m pre-orders for the DSi and so on.
Mr Iwata did however make up for this by giving an entertaining talk about what makes Nintendo tick and revealing the methods video games guru Shigeru Miyamoto has deployed in developing products. Nintentdo's hit maker is responsible for things like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Mario and Donkey Kong.
For Mr Miyamoto, "he sees game development opportunities where other people don't. Ideas are everywhere" said Mr Iwata.
His love of gardening inspired the game Pimkin, a GameCube title that was relaunched on the Wii. The idea for the Wii Fit was sparked when Mr Miyamoto weighed himself on the bathroom scales. And buying a puppy led to the creation of Nintendogs, one of the company's big sellers for the DS hand-held console.
Mr Iwata said when his mentor is developing a game, he as president stays well away until Mr Miyamoto has something worth showing.
Sometimes the prototype period can last as much as two years. Mr Iwata said he makes a point of not asking questions in case it "forces the team to cut corners or settle for less than their desired outcome".
Mr Iwata however admitted that this approach "is not good for my mental health".
When Mr Miyamoto is ready to show Mr Iwata something worth seeing then the Nintendo machine gears up and designers, marketers, strategists, advertisers and the like swing into action.
Mr Iwata said he hoped this sneak peak would inspire developers across the gaming community.
Remi Lavoie a programmer with DTI software said most of this was not "not revolutionary stuff. Most people who work in the industry know that kind of stuff though it is interesting to hear what makes such a successful company tick".
But the real secret to Mr Miyamoto's success lies in his tactic to "kidnap" random employees and watch them playing a game.
Mr Iwata joked "the victim is handed a console and told to start enjoying him or herself. There is no discussion, no lists of questions, no need for the player to talk."
All Mr Miyamoto wants to see is how someone plays the game and how and when they react. The development team are not allowed to even walk the "player" through the game because Mr Miyamoto believes that "we cannot send a developer to every home, so the kidnapped victim must figure it out for himself."
Michael Hershberg from Blizzard said "I think Nintendo has some fascinating insights into what makes people enjoy games and it will help me think more about what it is that we want players to actually experience."
Mr Iwata said "when the kidnapped victim is happy the team has succeeded. As a game developer we create entertainment, entertainment is supposed to be enjoyable.
" If it can't be enjoyed the fault belongs to us," stated Mr Iwata.
Gaming luminaries chew the cud
- 26 Mar 09, 08:30 GMT
Microsoft is apparently working on the next version of the Xbox.
No surprise perhaps, but that little nugget of information emerged from the "luminaries lunch" held at the .
For the second year in a row, a select number of journalists were allowed to come and eavesdrop on half a dozen industry players over sandwiches and wraps at the W Hotel in San Francisco, which has become a sort of semi-official hang out during the week long event.
News of the successor to the Xbox 360 was dropped by Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft and Diablo. He said that he had been in talks with Microsoft and seems to be the only developer that has so far been approached.
The issue came up when David Perry, a 25-year-old veteran who started in the industry aged 15, posed the question "What direction would you take Microsoft or Sony to ensure they lead and not follow in the console business?"
At first pass, the creator of the Sims and Spore, said he would like to "decline the job" while Warren Spector of Deus Ex fame and boss of Disney's Junction Point Studios, indulged in a little mischief.
"I want to see what you guys are going to do with the Wii," he quipped to Mr Pardo.
The Blizzard boss merely raised his eyebrows and kept his own counsel on that one.
To spice things up Mr Perry announced that "on the record the PSP is going to be a digital device. I know that for a fact."
The discussion for a while rotated around content with Mr Spector saying too much of it is knuckle-headed.
"What we need to do is change the content. Am I going to get an axe in the head, or is it going to be a club? Which car or truck is going to be rolling down the street?" he asked.
"We don't need another game about space marines saving the world, we don't need another game about elves and orcs," he concluded.
The discussion then took a decidedly weird turn when Mr Wright said "I'm sure half the people in this room have played the urinal game."
As the room erupted into laughter, he tried to explain the premise of the game and went on to say "we need to make games about the world that are interesting, surprising and illuminating.
"We can make games much more relevant even across cultures and demographics."
That comment came amid a conversation about social gaming which was sparked by a remark made at the recent BAFTA awards by Nolan Bushnell, who is considered the father of electronic gaming and is the inventor of Pong and founder of Atari.
He said that going to a bar is social, but that sitting in a darkened room communicating with thousands of people virtually, isn't social.
A 40-minute discussion among these luminaries ensued.
"Social gaming is becoming cool," said Mr Pardo who also paid reference to the World of Warcraft community and pointed out that "many of them have jobs, and kids".
But Mr Perry questioned whether hanging out online playing games constituted a "real relationship".
"Is it the same as having a beer," he pondered.
"Who cares," replied Mr Wright "If it's real. If it has value that's all that matters."
Brian Fargo, who founded , said that all this "socialising online" has had a negative effect on his behaviour.
"I've become more antisocial as time goes on. I have a Blackberry and I have all these friends.I can't tell you how many times I think I wish they would just e-mail me.
"This is a great philosophical issue. Are we becoming more antisocial? I probably spend more time e-mailing, text messaging than talking," he said.
Neil Young the founder of , which makes games for the iPhone, noted that this "august" group of people were beginning to sound old.
"People who instinticlvely understand multi-tasking as a way of life and grew up with our medium are more willing to fully explore it.
"I would argue next year none of us should be here (at the luminaries lunch). We should figure out who the top six freshest game makers are. I bet you will have different talk and they won't talk about fantasy games or sci-fi."
The inspiration of Ada Lovelace
- 24 Mar 09, 19:59 GMT
It's Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate the successes of women in technology, in honour of the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of Lord Byron, her work with Charles Babbage on a steam-driven calculating machine, helped drive understanding of what a computer might truly be.
It's been organised by who has called upon the blogosphere "to write about a woman in technology whom I admire".
Well, over the last few months our San Francisco-based technology reporter Maggie Shiels has been interviewing some of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley.
You can find her interview with Esther Dyson, the First Lady of the internet, , along with links to other features on Mitchell Baker, Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, Nancy Smith, Xochi Birch
and Padma Warrior.
My colleague Dave Lee has done a round-up of some of the blog posts written in honour of Ada Lovelace day.
Who owns the train times - or the news?
- 24 Mar 09, 15:53 GMT
Planning for a train journey, I turned to my phone and an incredibly useful application called MyRail Lite. It is "location-aware" so knows my local station - and can tell me when the next train leaves and whether it is on time. But as I was scrolling through the timetable, I came across a message. "We regret that this service will be discontinued from 31st March 2009 as our license to distribute real-time train information from National Rail Enquiries for live departure boards is not being renewed."
What a pity, I thought, and then I remembered that a few days ago I'd received a press release promoting another train time iPhone application from - guess who - . At the time I'd asked the press officer how the app compared to MyRail Lite - and been promised that it was far superior.
So last night I installed it and tried it out - and it was indeed very good, enabling you not just to check departure times but to plan a whole journey. But there's one catch - it costs £4.99, whereas MyRail Lite was free.
I got back in touch with National Rail Enquiries and was informed that there'd never been a licensing agreement and it "had not been possible to reach a mutually agreeable solution."
So it seems that NRE has moved to protect its intellectual property in the form of real-time train information, in order to "monetise" that data.
From a business point of view, it makes perfect sense - but surely it is entirely against the spirit of openness, the idea that "information is free"? What's more, the move harms rail passengers who now have to pay more for information which will help them choose the train over the car.
But just as I'd come to the conclusion that data really should be free, and that any attempt to lock it up inside your own walled garden and make money from it was both foolish and misguided, I read something which made me wonder.
of the death spiral of American newspapers, James DeLong ends up nudging towards an interesting conclusion - that journalists have sealed their own death warrant by their insistence that "information should be free."
The result, he argues, is that newspaper content, once fiercely guarded and the source of huge profits, is a pond that anyone - from a thousand bloggers to Google News - can dip into and profit from. But that means there's a lot less revenue to support the organisations that still create most of the online news content.
The most frightening figures in the article are those relating to the Washington Post's advertising revenues - $573m for the newspaper with around three quarters of a million subscribers, just $103m for the website which has eight million unique visitors a month. So if all those analogue readers migrate online who'll pay for the journalism?
Some journalists are already reaching the conclusion that information should not be free. Here's the editor of the New York Times:"Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized, and explained - that stuff wants to be paid for."
We journalists mocked the music industry for its doomed attempt to protect its content from the file-sharers - and now organisations like National Rail Enquiries can expect brickbats for putting their data behind bars. But maybe they've looked at what's happening to newspapers which decided to let their content roam free - and learned some lessons.
UPDATE
The company behind MyRail Lite, Kizoom, has been in touch to clarify matters. It says it DID have a long-running licensing arrangement to use National Rail Enquiries data in applications for various mobile phones. But the two sides seem to have fallen out over the issue of an application for the iPhone - Kizoom believed their existing agreement covered that phone, NRE did not.
Hard times and gaming
- 23 Mar 09, 11:50 GMT
This week sees the start of the in San Francisco, the world's largest gathering of professional video game developers. Even though slightly fewer than 18,000 people are expected to attend, they will have one thing on their mind: the economy.
There is no escaping the recession and the world of gaming has felt the effects as sharply as any other sector with layoffs and cutbacks. This year the conference is devoting several tracks to surviving in these tough economic times with titles like "Business in a Red Ocean," "Surviving the Squeeze" and "Raising Capital in a Recession."
Despite the doom and gloom background music, there will be a career pavilion where big names like Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft and THQ will be setting up shop and recruiting. Those who can't make the conference can look on the to see what's on offer.
So what about the highlights at this years GDC? Well Nintendo's President Satoru Iwata will be giving the keynote speech on Wednesday, when the show and expo really gets under way.
There is lots of chatter that he will use the stage to make a big announcement and also talk about the DSi, the latest version of the company's successful Wii handheld DS, which has had phenomenal success.
I will be trying to speak to him one on one, so fingers crossed.
I will be schmoozing at the Independent Games Festival Awards, the Choice Awards and the Mobile Awards. Phew!
Among the industry people I will be talking to this week are Hal Haplin the founder of the video game industry's retail trade association the Entertainment Merchants Association. He will be talking to me about gamers rights and the issues that matter to gamers. If there is anything you would like me to put to him, just ask.
Joseph Olin, the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and I will chat about some of the industry trends and gaming sales figures.
Randy Stude of the PC Gaming Alliance will be talking about a new report on the state of the industry.
Let's not forget the games and the innovation. I will be looking at some games I can't talk about because of embargo rules, catching up with the guys behind Dragon Age, looking at facial animation, stereoscopic 3D and all things mobile.
I welcome any input and any insights and am more than happy to check out any particular favourites or wants. Just let me know.
I will also be twittering live from San Francisco and if you are interested you can find me at twitter.com/maggieshiels
Time for an audio revolution
- 23 Mar 09, 09:30 GMT
Here's a funny thing about working with digital media - it's an awful lot easier to play around with video than with audio.
If you're an amateur film-maker you'll almost certainly have a free video editing package on your computer - and once your masterpiece is complete, then YouTube and plenty of imitators make it very easy to get it hosted, and shared with the world.
And if you want to grab other people's video and embed it in your own blog, then the sharing sites usually offer you the code to copy and paste - and even we at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ are now allowing users to embed our video.
But if you want to make a podcast or simply put some audio online, that seems altogether harder. There is a free open source editing programme called - though it is pretty basic. And there are places where you can upload and share your music, your podcasts, or, in my case, your radio work with others. But it's fiddly and time-consuming, in complete contrast to the very user-friendly business of sharing video.
Now though a whole range of applications are suddenly arriving on the scene - so perhaps 2009 could be the year of audio?
I've started using a couple of audio hosting sites, and , the latter after it was recently.
Right now, Mixcloud seems a bit less user-friendly - it won't for instance let you upload a single track (or radio package in my case), insisting that you have at least five tracks per upload. Its creators tell me they have plans to make it more useful for speech radio, but right now it seems to be aimed at aspiring DJ's, wanting to create their own radio shows.
Soundcloud is more intuitive, with an interface rather like YouTube's. As far as I can see, it's aimed mainly at the music industry, boasting that it "takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending and distributing music for artists, record labels and other music professionals."
As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my old radio reports. Here, for instance, is a from May 2007, where one of the presenters mentions "Faceback".
What was still missing was an application to broadcast live - or at least almost live - audio. Something like , and , which allow mobile phone users to stream live video to the internet.
may be the answer. It's an application developed by a small company in London for Apple's iPhone. The idea is that you record anything you fancy on the phone, then press "publish" and it's uploaded into the "cloud", that is to AudioBoo's website.
I used it at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday to record and share the crowd singing the before the Wales v Ireland clash. If you link your AudioBoo account to Twitter or Facebook, your friends get a notification and can click and play your "boo" - as the fragments of audio are called.
It's quite crude right now - you can't edit the audio or store it locally on the phone. And you can't upload other audio material you may have stored on your computer. But when I got in touch with Mark Rock, the man behind AudioBoo, he explained that it was very much a work in progress. "The plan is to make it available on any device that can record audio and connect to the internet." So it should appear on other phones.
You may eventually be able to upload existing audio files - though that will mean a lot of wrestling with copyright issues of the kind that have dogged YouTube.
What is less clear is quite what AudioBoo is for. Mr Rock thinks it may be used by podcasters and ultra local journalists - he said one citizen journalist had used it to report from outside council meetings - but saw a whole new category of web activity being created: "It's what I call 'social audio' - capturing the sound of your world and then sharing it with the world."
But he freely admits that he isn't really sure what it is all about. There again, the founders of YouTube didn't have big plans - they just wanted an easy way to share videos amongst their friends.
So SoundCloud and AudioBoo may herald a new audio revolution online, with a wave of new applications following in their wake. Or we may find that the reason that video, not audio, has been faster to take off online is that a picture is worth a thousand sounds.
Flipping burgers or writing code?
- 23 Mar 09, 08:29 GMT
For students the world over, summertime marks the end of exams and a few months away from the books, tutorials, and professors. Harsh reality though soon comes knocking in the shape of economic reality and it also usually means, for most, the need to find a summer job.
Instead of flipping burgers or washing dishes, Google is offering an alternative to the student geek by way of a programme called . Yes it does seem to revive memories of Summer of Love but by the sounds of it , it couldn't be further removed from such a scenario. For one thing, Google's Summer of Code involves work, dedication and commitment. Their words, not mine.
This year the programme, which is now in its fifth year, will match 1,000 students from 98 countries to 150 open source projects. The projects include lots of familiar names like Blender, MySQL, Apache, the Berkman Centre at Harvard, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, OpenMRS, Sahana and even Google. Well they are ponying up the $5m to fund this programme.
Each of these companies or projects will mentor the students throughout the whole of the summer giving them the chance to be exposed to real world problems.
"In a typical university project, students are likely working with a team of three or four in a lab on a project which they turn in and get a grade for," said Leslie Hawthorn who is the programme manager for open source at Google.
"What this programme offers is real world experience working with a team of developers who might be in say San Francisco and London and Beijing and Sydney all at the same time.
"They will be working on a project that doesn't just end in three months time because the software has to be maintained for years and years. Considerations of how to build it are very different from university and their exposure to the tools and the expertise represents a great opportunity to those taking part," said Ms Hawthorn.
She told me that the reason Google started the project was because co-founder Larry Page wanted to help students hone their skills and boost the open source community.
"He was worried about the age-old problem of students leaving on their summer holidays and more often than not finding it hard to get a job in their particular technical area of computer science.
"Some might go and wash dishes or flip burgers and Larry thought that overall computer discipline would backslide because these students weren't getting continuous reinforcement to perfect their skills during the holidays," explained Ms Hawthorn.
She said he hit on the idea of open source projects as an ideal way to corral students because it doesn't matter where they live as most of the work takes place online and it would be an "awesome" way for students to get real software development experience.
The Summer of Code is more or less full time work, though Ms Hawthorn stressed that it wasn't about the number of hours someones clocks up but about getting the work done.
The tasks will be set by the mentors who will monitor progress. Everyone will get an initial payment of $500 and halfway through another $2000 if they come up to scratch with a final installment of $2000 at the end if they complete the work satisfactorily.
"And don't forget the all important t-shirt", quipped Ms Hawthorn.
Michael Tieman who is the president of the told me he thinks the programme is a "fantastic idea" not least because his open source company benefits through a project they run called the .
"It's a 3D animation and modeling programme and we have benefitted tremendously over the years through Summer of Code which has given us people, resources and have helped keep Blender at the cutting edge."
Mr Tieman also said "I used to be one of those kids doing irrelevant summer jobs because I needed the money so the amount of money Google is giving is not some token amount. This is a serious bounty for serious work which will look great on any resume."
So what's in it for Google? Ms Hawthorn said "Google gets the same benefit as the rest of the world. All this great open source code is being produced and anyone can make use of it.
"There is also the beauty of the social ties that are formed during this project and that benefits Google and the world over if all these people are talking to one another and exchanging ideas and pushing forward the world of computer science and open source.
"Ultimately with Google being such a big user of open source, what's good for open source and for the web is good for Google and everyone else," stated Ms Hawthorne.
Application details are , and Michael Sparks blogs about ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research's involvement in Summer Of Code here.
My Street View of shame...
- 19 Mar 09, 14:04 GMT
I'm at a conference today on the future of the media as we navigate the deepest recession any of us in this industry can remember - so as you can imagine the room is full of some very worried looking people. The most cheerful among them is the brand new boss of Google UK, .
He's plenty of reasons to be happy. After all he has just taken over at what must be Britain's most powerful - or at least richest - media business, which overtook ITV as the biggest advertising earner last year. And despite the various concerns about Google's growing power which I outlined on this blog earlier this week, the business continues to churn out new products which draw an even bigger audience to its site.
Today's effort is , the Google Maps add-on service which started in the US and now gives a street level view of 25 major cities in the UK.
It's one of those ideas that goes "viral" very quickly - I've been getting messages all morning from people who've been checking out what their house or street looks like - or at least how it appeared when Google's Street View cars combed their area last year.
Finally, I couldn't resist having a go myself - and was somewhat dismayed to find that the folks from Google had dropped by on the very day I'd put the rubbish and recycling out, and just a couple of days before my herculean efforts to tidy the front garden.
Now this is all good fun but it also raises a couple of questions. Such as what does this mean for our privacy - and what does Google hope to achieve with street View?
Matt Brittin told the that the whole privacy issue had been sorted, with the Information Commissioner giving his blessing to the project, and a big effort by Google to "blob" any faces or car number-plates caught by its cameras.
He also promised that anyone who is unhappy to have their home featured in Street View will be able to get in touch and have it removed.
Mind you, that raises the prospect of streets pockmarked with blurry gaps where homeowners have objected - surely that will only make them even more conspicuous?
I think the privacy row will die down - after all Street View has been introduced elsewhere without much bother - but then there'll be more questions about what exactly the product is for.
After the initial interest when we all check out our streets, the traffic will probably die down - have you used Google Earth much lately? But Google is hoping that its new product may be particularly attractive on mobile phones as a navigational tool.
And let's not forget that the whole search business is all about generating advertising revenue - so presumably the hunt will be on for ways to monetise Street View.
Location-based services - in other words advertising for products based on knowledge of where you are - are all the rage now.
Does that mean adverts will start appearing for my local garden centre next to the picture of my shabby front garden? I'd better have given it a trim by the time the cameras return.
Microsoft hopes to turbo charge IE
- 19 Mar 09, 08:39 GMT
A new version of Internet Explorer is always a major event in the browser wars.
With each iteration Microsoft is striving to hold market share, play catch-up in the technical stakes, convince the doubters that IE is now safe and find something innovative to add to the mix.
While the Internet Explorer range of browsers dominate the market, the arrival of IE8 and the likely shift of many IE7 users to the new version, it will leave the landscape in a state of near equilibrium.
Arun Ranganathan, from Mozilla, said this week: "There is no real single majority browsing engine now."
We've certainly come a long way since the days when the browser wars was a struggle between Netscape and Internet Explorer; a fight that was always going to go Microsoft's way once IE was bundled with Windows.
That relationship between IE and Windows is called anti-competitive by some (Opera and Google), and essential by others, well, one other (Microsoft).
According to Net Applications, a company that monitors the browser types users are running when they are online, the IE family fell to 67.4% of the market lat month from 74.9% a year earlier.
Mozilla's Firefox jumped to 21.8% from 17.27%, and Apple's Safari rose to 8% from 5.7%.
Add into that mix Opera and Chrome and a number of specialised user browsers, such as Flock, and the landscape looks quite healthy in terms of users' choice.
But choice and choosing are not always the same thing: Opera and Google remain very unhappy that Microsoft is able to pipe new versions of IE to Windows users directly and have complained to the European Union.
Whenever a new version of IE comes out many people immediately compare it to Firefox, the second most popular browser in the online space.
Chris Wilson, Microsoft's chief architect for all things IE, told me this week that Internet Explorer remained the browser for the mainstream.
IE8 will not adopt the the deep configurability of Firefox, but it will start to add features related to what the mainstream user does when online.
Chief among them is the accelerator, which lets users highlight text on a page and automatically search for those terms on sites such as Facebook and eBay, or blog directly on Microsoft's services.
Microsoft is also putting an emphasis on speed, not least because Google Chrome and Safari 4 are much faster at rendering pages than IE7.
Chris Wilson told me: "One of the big focuses in IE8 is performance."
"We looked at pages people were looking at on the web, standard apps like Gmail, MSN and Live and did profiles.
"The experience we have is super fast. It's amazing how smooth and natural it feels when browsing with IE8."
Wilson wouldn't say directly that IE8 is faster than Chrome or Safari 4, but he did say that out of the top 25 websites in the world, IE8 was noticably faster at displaying about half of the sites.
For the other 12 or 13 there was little difference between the browsers, he said.
IE8 will need to be fast: the beta of Google Chrome 2 is as the previous iteration.
Microsoft will hope that IE8 will halt the slide in its browser market share, and more crucially will give businesses an incentive to upgrade; enterprise is much slower than consumers in moving to new browser versions.
Bletchley Park's social media war
- 18 Mar 09, 16:23 GMT
It's a collection of ramshackle buildings on the fringes of Milton Keynes.
A bizarre choice then, you might think, for an architectural award. But has just won the top prize in the Building With Pride awards, beating rivals such as Cardiff's Millennium Stadium and Liverpool's Cavern club in a poll to choose the building which inspires most pride in the British public.
That the World War II coding centre - and now - has been recognised in this way is largely due to the work of a few individuals who've been determined that this historic site should have a secure future.
I visited Bletchley Park last July to meet Dr Sue Black, a computer scientist who'd organised a letter to the Times appealing for a concerted effort to save the site.
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It was clear then that a lot needed doing. The main building, an undistinguished 19th Century house from which the wartime decoding operation was run, needed a new roof.
But what was really shocking was the state of the huts - prefab buildings where Alan Turing and thousands of others had gone about the business of decoding the messages produced by Germany's Enigma machine.
Many looked ready for nothing better than demolition, with tarpaulin covering the roof and holes in the walls. Even one hut that had been restored looked a makeshift effort, not really conveying its wartime character.
What's more, the exhibition dedicated to the history of British computing - including the which cracked wartime codes at the Park - was not displayed in any coherent fashion, despite the heroic efforts of the volunteers who've assembled the collection.
But Dr Black - and the small team that runs the Bletchley Park Trust - have made progress with their fundraising efforts. So far just under a million pounds has been donated to restoration work by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
A vital component in this campaign has been what you might call the propaganda war - although one which has employed the most modern of weapons. Dr Black has assembled a significant crowd of supporters for Bletchley Park - geeks, history buffs, technologically literate celebrities - using all the modern social media tools.
There's a "" on Facebook, a group on the photo-sharing site where images of the site can be viewed, and there's a lot of activity on Twitter.
Dr Black told me she realised in December that a critical mass of people she knew in the computing world were now on the micro-blogging site, and decided to set up an account (@bletchleypark) for Bletchley Park. It's acquired over 1,000 followers, but its influence has spread far wider, informing a tech-savvy crowd about developments at the site and used as a way of organising visits.
45% of the votes in the Building With Prides awards went to Bletchley Park, and it seems likely that many of them were mobilised by the various social media sites.
"We wouldn't have won without social media," Dr Black told me, "this kind of campaign wouldn't have been possible a few years back. It's power to the people."
Mind you, there's a long way to go before Bletchley Park looks like a fitting monument to the brilliant codebreakers who helped shorten the war - and to computing pioneers like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, the Post Office engineer who built Colossus. Let's see whether social media can continue to prove a potent weapon in the fundraising battle.
Does Dell covet Apple's design status?
- 18 Mar 09, 10:37 GMT
For many years Dell was regarded by some people as the anti-Apple firm.
The company was founded on the ethos of selling computers to as many companies and individuals as they could.
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Dell computers were grey, drab boxes that lacked soul, in as far as a computer can have a soul.
They served a highly utilitarian purpose: they delivered cheap computers to the masses and have helped drive down the cost of computing power, putting it into the hands of many millions of people.
But Dell became synonymous with dull.
Almost two years ago Dell endeavoured to turn that perception around - first by offering colours for many of its laptops and then partnering with artists to add designs to machines.
Its latest step is to launch a laptop, called the Adamo, whose sole purpose is to make people re-think their perceptions of Dell.
I spent an hour with the Adamo at South by SouthWest trying to find out if Dell indeed had managed to turn heads and shift expectations.
At first glance, the silver, or Pearl, Adamo looks not to dissimilar to the aluminium Macbook and MacBook Pro range of computers. Indeed both Dell and Apple are using a unibody design to make the machines out a single metal sheet.
The clean lines of the Macbook range, however, have given way to more stylised details.
A Dell staffer told me that the company had wanted to invoke that sense of personal ownership people have with special pieces of technology.
Everywhere you look on the machine there is detail, detail and more detail.
The ventilation grill at the back of the machine is not just a drilled piece of metal - it is a curved sheet in which the holes fade away.
The top of the machine is part glass and part metal that has been etched by laser to produce a geometric design.
The little support legs under the machine have been designed to within an inch of their lives.
There are none of the usual Windows and Intel stickers - a fact the Dell staffer was only to happy to point out. Instead they too are etched into the underside of the machine.
Some of the legal notices will be hidden under a removable panel, which was created purely so the legal notices could be hidden from view.
The laptop is described by Dell as the world's thinnest - but if you were to look at the MacBook Air and Adamo in profile, Apple's machine looks a lot thinner.
But that is largely to do with the stylised tapering of the MacBook Air, and in fact, the Dell staffer points out, the Adamo is thinner at its thickest point than the Air at its thickest point.
Certainly, the Air is lighter than the Adamo, no matter how you measure it. Although the Adamo feels a lot more durable than the Air.
It is hard not to think that Dell have tried to out-Apple, Apple. And in some regards they have succeeded.
But why is Dell releasing a $2,000 laptop at a time of recession?
I was told it was because people will always want fine cars and fine watches and that Adamo is no different.
It is a luxury laptop for the fashion conscious - as evidenced by the magazine photo shoot images that accompany the launch.
But what about its performance? Does that matter? After all a fine watch tells the time no better than a cheap quartz wristwatch.
The specs of the Adamo are probably the most underwhelming aspect of the machine.
It has a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD hard drive. You won't be editing much video on this machine, and some might question the value the laptop offers under the hood.
People have made the same point about the MacBook Air - although it does have a faster processor and better integrated graphics and, crucially for road warriors, is a one pound lighter at three pounds.
My colleague, business editor Tim Weber, pointed out in Twitter: "Are the people dissing Dell's Adamo the same people who are drooling over Apple's similarly priced and under-specced Air?"
It's a fair point.
But the biggest question about the Adamo is not about its size, weight or performance. It is about why Dell is launching a $2,000 luxury machine at a time when the market is crying out for innovation in the netbook market.
Dell has a number of netbooks and the market is growing rapidly. I have not seen the latest figures on premium laptops but I suspect the growth is either slow, steady or stagnant.
Dell told me that they had "modest expectations" for sale of the Adamo.
I suspect that Dell don't really care about sales of the Adamo. This isn't a balance sheet exercise this is part of a long and careful campaign to re-educate people about Dell and to shift pre-conceptions.
Given the interest surrounding the Adamo launch, sneers of Macbook Air owners aide, I think Dell is making progress.
SXSW: That's all folks
- 18 Mar 09, 10:13 GMT
As the web developers move out and the musicians move in to Austin, sporting more facial hair, tattoos and piercing, South by SouthWest Interactive closes for another year.
Highlights
The small British firms at SXSW proved once again that innovation in the web does not start in San Francisco and end in Palo Alto.
The success of SixToStart in winning the Best in Show prize for We Tell Stories, beating the likes of Hulu, was the crowning moment for UK web success.
Co-founder Dan Hon told me how surprised they had been: "Someone was doing a video interview with us outside the ballroom and we were told to come back in by the ushers.
"We were standing right at the back of the room thinking of getting our bags or sitting back down. Suddenly they were announcing we were Best in Show and we were running up to the stage."
Quotes of SXSW
Anonymous web developer in the toilet: "I don't want Microsoft to embrace browser standards and work with the other browser firms. I want hackers to keep targeting Internet Explorer so I know I'll be safe on Firefox."
Opera chief technology officer Hakon Wium Lie: "Why does Internet Explorer have so many users when in the past it has been such a terrible browser. There are so many better options out there."
Lawrence Lessig: "We would never think of democracy as a tool to solve public problems.
We have that view because we have lost faith in our institutions."
Anonymous delegate: "You can tell which hotels people are staying at here by the smell of their body lotion."
Chris Wilson, head of the Internet Explorer platform: "Even my wife's computer got hacked earlier this year."
Spotted at SXSW
A senior Microsoft executive playing with his iPhone.
The Press Room was a picture of rolling tumbleweed and silent journalists, the blogger's lounge was the pre-party party.
In a straw poll about one in three phones on show were iPhones. Blackberry was the second most popular mobile phone.
Apple playing catch up?
- 18 Mar 09, 09:22 GMT
Without too much fanfare, Apple took the wraps off its next generation software for the iPhone and the iPod Touch at a fairly low key event at their campus in Cupertino.
There was none of the mad jostling that has gone on at some of the company's other product launches. Though I do hate it when they make everyone wait outside like second class citizens. Still at least it was sunny and they did provide muffins and coffee.
At the end of the day there was no need to stop the presses and hold the front page with this announcement. I am not alone in thinking that. Ernest Doku of mobile phone news site Omio.com, e-mailed to say: "After the excitement surrounding Apple's last software update that brought us the groundbreaking App Store, this latest version seems to have a little less to set pulses racing."
Indeed it seemed to some degree like Apple playing catch up with the rest of the smartphone brigade by giving a lot of iPhone users functionality that is pretty standard on a lot of other smartphones.
The big headline is the ability to copy, cut and paste from one application to another. The other is multimedia messaging.
One missing piece from the puzzle for many users is the ability to record video or play video made using Adobe's Flash software.
At a question and answer session after the invitation only launch, Apple execs gave a "no comment" when pushed on the issue.
They were equally mum when I asked a question about a new iPhone. "Nothing to announce today", Apple's Phil Shiller told me.
I know I should know better because Apple never pre-announces anything, but I felt it would have been remiss to simply not ask the question. Afterwards Gartner Analyst Van Baker, who follows Apple, told me he reckons it will happen and it will happen in the summer around the same time as the software release.
Note of course that is when co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is supposed to be back at the helm. And note also that since he went on sick leave, announcements out of Apple have so far been damp squibs. So they are going to need something that will wow when he gets back on deck.
A host of developers also attended the launch to see what was in the SDK or software developers kit for them to help build their applications. In all Apple said there were some 1000 api's or software hooks for developers to use.
A few of the developers demonstrated some apps that they had produced after just two weeks of using the SDK Beta. ESPN showed how it can update games with scores while LifeScan, a Johnson & Johnson company, demonstrated how someone with diabetes could regulate their condition and track peaks and troughs.
Game developer Ngmoco demonstrated a virtual pet game where you can buy virtual clothes or toys and then veered to the other end of the spectrum with a first person shooter game where users could pay small sums of money to upgrade their gun. From hanging with fido to fragging it was one heck of a leap!
The most entertaining demo was from the Smule guys who create sonic media and are behind the phenomenally successful Ocarina app that has turned the iPhone into a musical instrument by blowing into it.
The app that company co-founder Ge Wang developed for this gig was called Leaf Trombone which allows users to play the iPhone like a trombone.
Their rendition of Phantom of the Opera rocked the event and got the loudest cheer of the day.
Google, Microsoft and calls of 'web bully'
- 17 Mar 09, 12:07 GMT
Is Google bad for the web? A question which would have been unthinkable a year or so back. But, in some people's views, the search giant is heading down the path from cheeky and popular internet upstart to over-bearing bully.
For those who advance this case, the charge sheet is getting longer by the day - Google is not only too dominant in both search and online advertising, it is moving into all sorts of other areas too. Last week alone, three announcements stirred the wrath of critics who seem to be growing in confidence.
First, there was , with Google raising the stakes by blocking access to all professional music videos on YouTube.
Sure, there were many who thought the songwriters were in the wrong, trying to extract a hefty fee rather than just seeing YouTube as a useful platform. But there was also a vocal(?!) group who saw this as the latest example of bullying by a giant firm eager to profit from other people's content without paying them a fair share.
Then there was the plan to - or rather what the firm described as an "interest-based advertising beta". The scheme to give users adverts that reflected their interests, based on data Google collects about our web habits, caused plenty of disquiet amongst privacy campaigners. EU regulators, who've already been asking questions about Google's data retention policy, may take a close look at this scheme.
Finally, there was , which sounds like a useful service giving you one central phone number, and translating voicemail messages into text. But that could wipe out a number of promising start-ups - and is seen by critics as more evidence that Google is just getting too powerful, and hence is now damaging the web and web users.
Among those pressing this case most vigorously is an organisation called . I called them yesterday while researching a story about over the auctioning of terms like "Louis Vuitton" for advertising purposes. David Wood, a Brussels-based lawyer who speaks for ICOMP, told me:
"The concern is that as Google's market power grows, brand owners will have nobody else to deal with. It will also install bad practices in the market - so anybody else coming in will find it difficult to compete against the market leader and its bad practices."
But no sooner had I got off the phone to Mr Wood than a call came in from someone who had some interesting information about ICOMP and who described it as "a Microsoft front". The lobby group's website says it was founded by a number of firms who "have come together to express a shared commitment to a Transparent and Competitive Internet that is responsive to consumer interests and law-abiding".
The site isn't exactly transparent about ICOMP's funding, though it does list Microsoft as a member. But when I got back to Mr Wood, he confirmed that the organisation was "largely" funded by the software giant - Google's biggest rival.
That doesn't mean that the regulators will ignore the ever-louder grumbles about Google from web rivals and privacy campaigners, but there's a delicious irony in the charge being led by Microsoft, the company which has itself been in the sights of EU competition officials for at least a decade.
Google's millions of users probably aren't too worried by any of this - after all, they are getting more and more from the business for nothing more than their willingness to see some advertising. Then again, Windows users had precious few complaints about the power of Microsoft - but the regulators took the view that it was in everyone's long-term interest to clip the wings of Bill Gates' business.
Will history repeat itself?
iPhone wish list and tablet talk
- 17 Mar 09, 08:22 GMT
Later today (Tuesday) will hold a press conference to unveil its upcoming iPhone 3.0 operating system and a new SDK ,or software developer kit, for the phone that is aimed at helping engineers and third parties write applications for the device.
Naturally enough, speculation on the blogosphere is rife about what will be on offer. Apple notoriously stays mum on what will be coming out but here is a selection of what some people are taking guesses on what might be included and what they would like to see.
, the founder of Digg, says he expects a cut and copy and paste function. A feature that has arguably been one of the most requested.
is looking for quite a few improvements to the iPhone so I will just note a couple of them. The blog wants a new improved mail programme with a single unified inbox. Great for those with more than one e-mail account. It also wants to be able to synch notes and to-do applications and would like to see better app organisation.
The site says back in the day "when the iPhone had only 20 apps - all from Apple - its one-panel home screen was a simple and easy-to-use way to launch those apps." No more of course because there are more than 15,000 to choose from and most people have a host of apps that end up running over several pages.
Macworld suggests being able to group apps into useful categories like games on one screen, productivity apps on another and so on. Another way would be to manage apps from within iTunes.
says it thinks a copy and paste function is "weak" and is calling on readers to vote for what should come in the update.
The list includes proper Bluetooth support, video recording, Flash, or "ridiculous proprietary headphones." A jibe obviously at the fact that the headphones that come with the new iPod shuffle have a proprietary control chip that wannabe headphone makers would have to pay to use so their product will work with the shuffle.
thinks the announcement will include being able to tether the iPhone 3G so it can be used as a wireless modem for a laptop even though it hasn't had a rush of readers asking for it.
It lists a series of capabilities that many other smartphones and cell phones have that the iPhone lacks and should include like video recording, more camera options, voice dialing, speed dialing, text forwarding, and multi media messaging.
It almost makes you wonder why the iPhone is such a megastar in the smartphone category without all this built in.
. That's where apps get information from Apple servers even when they are not running. It is also looking for a horizontal keyboard as a standard function rather than users having to pay for it via an application from the AppStore.
While the invitation I got only refers to giving us a "sneak peak" at the new software and the SDK, it's unlikely there will be any mention of new hardware. However using my finely honed Sherlock Holmes skills, I would deduce that if Apple provides a date for the new OS then it's an obvious leap to make that a new iPhone would follow shortly thereafter. The big betting is on June or July.
As always there is plenty of hype and speculation around the Tuesday press announcement and a flurry of gossip that Apple will also talk about a 10-inch tablet computer.
is not alone in raising the flag on this one, but perhaps he goes a bit further than most. He notes that Apple is "developing a touchscreen in the 9.5-10 inch area for release in Q3."
His reasoning is that while Apple won't compete directly with the Netbook market, it will try to release a similar type product. Mr Weintraub says if Apple is aiming for a summer release it needs to start talking about such a device now so that developers can get to work to make their apps function on this smaller device.
is of the same mind on this and writes "given that this is an "advance preview" of the new OS, it seems Apple wants to give developers some time to prepare for some big changes."
As always with Apple product announcements, lots of unanswered questions ahead of the launch. Take thanks in knowing that this time tomorrow the fuss will all be over.
Making the pipes faster
- 16 Mar 09, 18:12 GMT
One of the most common complaints echoing around SXSW this year is regarding iPhone use.
Unsurprisingly, given the background of many of the attendees there are a lot of iPhone users at the festival and many people have been complaining of poor reception and very slow 3G speeds.
I've heard from two sources who have now told me that AT&T hurriedly despatched two engineers to Austin after it was discovered iPhone data usage was accounting for 90% of network capacity in the area.
Apparantly, AT&T were in the midst of upgrading the network here anywhere and we caught on the hop by the sudden surge in data usage.
Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOm got the of the problem yesterday.
A statement from AT&T to GigaOm said: "To accommodate unprecedented demand for mobile data and voice applications at SXSW, we are actively working this afternoon to add capacity to our cell sites serving downtown Austin."
Unprecendented demand? It might be unprecendented but did AT&T not think that 10,000 geeks in one space at the same time might have some impact on its network?
As SF author William Gibson : "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."
SXSW news round-up
- 15 Mar 09, 15:11 GMT
Here are some of the product announcements and trends emerging at SXSW09:
Facebook launches Connect for iPhone
The giant social network has been working hard to leverage the power of its 175 million strong user base outside of its walled garden.
Facebook Connect allows third party websites to bake in the profile and friend lists of Facebook users and now it has been extended to the iPhone.
At launch 9 applications are currently live in the iTunes app store,which leverage Facebook Connect.
One of the first frms to take advantage is a British company, called Playfish. They have found enormous success releasing games on the Facebook platform.
I spoke to them at SXSW and they explained that the size of the Facebook community and the simplicity of distribution made the social network really attractive to them.
They now have more than 50 million registered players on Facebook and passed the four million daily active players mark quite recently.
No wonder then that they are keen to now extend the gaming experience from the browser to the mobile space, with the iPhone.
Other applications to take use Facebook Connect for iPhone include:
* Who has the Biggest Brain by Playfish
* Movies by Flixster
* iBowl and Agency Wars by SGN
* Urbanspoon
* Tap Tap Revenge 2 by Tapulous
* Whrrl by Pelago
* Live Poker by Zynga
* Binary Game by SayEight
Cnet's report on the launch, and the mobile social networking aspect, is .
Twitter made simpler with WeFollow
While Twitter has been the communications medium of choice at this year's SXSW it has been difficult to sort the signal from the noise because almost everybody here is using the service and there has been a flood of "sxsw" hastags.
is a Twitter directory from Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, wihich aims to make finding people, trends, categories a lot simpler on Twitter.
It is completely user-powered, with filters dictated by the number of people who use a particular hash tag.
You can add the tags which relate to you by sending a Tweet to @wefollow with three different hashtags - and that will insert yourself in the directory.
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand has .
Friends on Fire
Yahoo is extending the usefulness of Fire Eagle, its location awareness tool, by building an application for Facebook that allows friends to share their location.
"There are services that are more immediate than Fire Eagle, but as we get more apps, the value of updating once and having it shared across all your services is more important," Fire Eagle creator Tom Coates told .
Of course, Friends on Fire uses Yahoo Maps technology to plot locations of friends. That's fine if you are in the US, but their UK mapping data is a long way behind Google's.
All the fun of the Dorkbot fair
- 15 Mar 09, 06:13 GMT
Stumbling into the Dorkbot expo at South by SouthWest is a little like that scene in Blade Runner at the home of the toy maker J.F. Sebastian.
A jumble of technology, from robots to sculpture, children's musical instruments to 1970s synthesisers it had the air of unearthed future aracana to it.
is a global phenomenon - it is a loose gathering of artists, engineers, musicians and hackers.
Their collective tagline is "People doing strange things with electricity."
In a small tent outside the main conference centre at Austin, perhaps the strangest thing with electricity was local music experimenters .
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The group uses Tesla Coils, which generate flashes of electrical lightning bolts which also produce a square sound wave. That soundwave is fed by fibre optic cable into a midi controller, producing a sound not unlike the analogue synthesisers of the 1970s.
The group played the Doctor Who and Star Wars themes using the Tesla Coils, with percussion delivered by a series of robotic drums.
It was the undoubted highlighting of Dorkbot 2009 at SXSW, which also featured handbuilt synthesisers, and a band called which uses a Nintedo Wiimote controller to play music.
After a day spent in panels musing the future of social networks and the rise of e-mail 2.0 a little light music powered by lightning bolts was very much needed.
Twitchhiker heads for celebrity status
- 15 Mar 09, 05:15 GMT
Twitter might not be everyone's cup of tea - indeed there are complaints that it is going intohere at SXSW - but one journalist has used it to help him travel thousands of miles in just 14 days.
Paul Smith is the and has used Twitter to travel from his home to Newcastle to Austin, Texas, only by connecting to people on the messaging service and using it to leverage people's generosity and good will.
At the start of March Smith left Newcastle with only a ferry ticket to Amsterdam in his hand - and that was arranged through Twitter.
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He cannot plan more than three days in advance and has to leave each location within 48 hours of arriving.
His plan is to try and make it to the opposite point on the globe from his home. As his website says: "New Zealand is the place closest to the opposite point on the planet to my house, so that should be my intended destination.
"Actually, the closest landmass is at 52.546° S 169.173° E, an island barely five miles wide that's so insignificant that Google can't be bothered to name it."
After a few days zig-zagging around the low countries he managed to get a flight to New York and has since endured a number of road trips through the American mid west before making it to South by SouthWest in Austin, Texas.
He is raising money for as he goes, but he told me this was as much about 'the experience' as it was anything else.
When I tracked him down - which isn't hard as he is tagged with GPS and you can follow him on - he had just heard that he was going to be interviewed by Good Morning America on ABC TV in the US and that he had secured a flight to San Francisco.
"I'll probably hang around the West Coast for a while before I can get a flight to New Zealand," he said.
For a man who has lived and breathed planes, trains and automobiles for the last 14 days he is in fine fettle and enormously good spirits.
After the Good Morning America interview is screened tomorrow he will probably be a celebrity in the US and I wouldn't bet against him reaching that small island off New Zealand ahead of the 30 day limit.
Hunting the bowler hat at SXSW
- 14 Mar 09, 01:26 GMT
is a celebration of web culture and is a great way to showcase the way online and offline worlds are merging in practical and exciting ways.
A number of companies have launched location-aware tools at SXSW. From , a location-based nightlife game, to , a new social network infused with GPS.
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One of the more intriguing and fun examples at this year's festival is something called .
The premise of the game is simple: someone, somewhere in Austin is weating a bowler hat and you have to track him or her down and then say: "Excuse me, I do believe you have my hat!"
You then become the hat wearer and the person who manages to keep the hat for the longest period wins a prize.
So what has this got to do with the web and interactivity? Well, inside the hat is a concealed GPS device and the position of the person wearing the hat is plotted in real time on a Google Map.
People who spot the hat can also update its location by Twittering using the hashtag #hatgame.
The game starts on Saturday and runs for three days between the hours of 1pm and 9pm.
The Hat Game has been organised by the Arts Council of Wales and digital agencies , locative games firm, the representing different UK firms and individuals at SXSWi and web design company .
It's not a new business or service but is being used as a calling card for the digital creativity of developers in the South West of England.
Happy Hat Hunting.
This is a viral blog
- 13 Mar 09, 09:16 GMT
"Well of course it isn't, you blithering idiot, you're abusing the language. You've completely misunderstood the term "viral" - and anyway this isn't even a blog."
That will, I'm sure, be the reaction of many of the weberati to my provocative headline. But I've been pondering over who decides what various web terms actually mean - and whether the increasing professionalisation of Web 2.0 and the social media (what on earth are they, you may ask) is diluting their original purity.
It's the Today programme that's got me thinking, of course. The project has been very well explained by Evan Davis, but the idea was to place a video on the web, and then sit back and watch it take off. Last time I looked, it had got nearly 18,000 views in two days - not so much a viral as a blockbuster - but then of course, Today has been cheating, hasn't it? Here are a few of the comments by those who've viewed the YouTube video:
"The idea of a Viral is that it spreads under its own "steam", not plugged by the author on a National Mainstream radio show."
"Well, I loved it, but it's not really a viral per se and it does not really stand on its own"
"This is very poor show indeed. Smacks of being forced and fake"
"Evan Davis rocks. I never thought I'd say that."
Well obviously the last point is true - but just how genuinely viral is this video? It has indeed been ruthlessly promoted, both on air on Wednesday morning - and by ´óÏó´«Ã½ people like me, Twittering and Facebooking about it. I've even stolen it to place on my - my own attempt to make my page go viral along with the Today clip.
So what is a viral video? Here's verdict:
"A viral video is a video clip that gains widespread popularity through the process of internet sharing, typically through email or instant messaging, blogs and other media sharing websites." And here is the verdict of the - whatever that is:
"A video that spreads quickly via the internet. It is often a short clip on a video sharing site such as YouTube that people reference in blogs, e-mails and instant messages."
Well, by those definitions, I think "Inside Today" hacks it. But the purists would say the essence of a "viral" is that it spreads in a slow, undercover manner, and that viral status can only be conferred by the democratic will of the people - in other words, the web community - and not by some media behemoth or shadowy marketing agency.
Too late, folks, I'm afraid - the marketing folks have seized on the "viral" idea like drowning men spotting a lifeboat. Just do a quick Google search for the word viral and on the front page you'll find nothing about infections, plenty about marketing - and the sponsored link is for what appears to be a professional viral video production company. The web purists have lost the battle - "viral" now just means another way to spend your advertising dollars.
So what about "blog"? Surely the whole idea was that blogging was a platform which gave a voice to millions of "ordinary" web users, the unheard who had no access to the mainstream media, and wanted to share their ideas, their prejudices, their jokes, with the world. But now those tired old voices we've all heard for too long - newspaper columnists, politicians, chief executives, and yes, ´óÏó´«Ã½ broadcasters - have all decided it's hip to blog. They're fooling themselves, of course, say the purists - they don't know what a blog is.
Back to that incredibly authoritative Computer Encyclopedia:
"Blog: A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings."
Well I think dot life ticks all of those boxes. But the purists are right to say that what we originally understood by the term "blog" - or "weblog" - was something extremely personal. That is now being diluted by the arrival of a new wave of bloggers with something to sell - whether it be a newspaper, a software company, or a broadcast news outfit.
So who is to decide what a blog is, or what viral means? Perhaps we need a National Institute of Web Terminology, appointed by the government to rule on these matters. Then again, perhaps not. Much better simply to let the people decide - go on, have a row about it on this blog. Or whatever you'd like to call it.
Revolutionising sport on the telly
- 13 Mar 09, 09:02 GMT
The company behind all the weird and wonderful TV tricks on on the night of the American election wants to transform the way we watch sport on TV.
The highlight was the ability to "beam" a reporter who was actually on location into the studio in front of anchor Wolf Blitzer. Everyone was talking about the hologram effect for days on end here but it was just a bank of cameras, computers, sensors and some smart software that performed the magic.
The company behind that technology is called from Israel. It has since been bought over by which is the big beast in providing statistics that "track every pitch, snap and goal in detail."
Stats.com, which is owned by and the , covers every major sport the world over - boxing, cycling, racing, netball, basketball, horse racing, the Olympics, football, soccer, American football, baseball, poker, rugby, skiing swimming and tennis. You get the idea.
Hells bells they even do , a Celtic game played with a stick and a ball not unlike hurling
For years there has been plenty of talk about being able to watch say a football match, or soccer game, from any point of view. The delivery has never really lived up to the promise.
At the in San Francisco, Stats.com's executive vice president Steve Byrd told me that will change.
"With the SportVu technology we are able to track all the players, the referee, the ball on the pitch and all in real time.
"The algorithms allow us to measure speed, distance, location on the field, the number of times a player has the ball, how long the passing takes, how accurate the pass is.
"From that you can create really interesting graphics for the broadcast and also run the data stream, if you will, of the players through a graphics rendering engine and from that you can look at the match from any perspective."
Mr Byrd said from a hardware point of view, nothing would change. It's all about the software.
"We are tracking the players in real time, in three dimensions if you will with object tracking technology.
"The sensors are standard, so are the cameras and the computers that process the information. It's all down to the software algorithm that takes what the cameras and sensors see on the pitch and translate it into useful data.
"The trick is going to be for stats to partner with the graphics rendering companies so that we can merge our data stream into good enough looking animation that the public will want to watch. We are there and it's just a matter of getting into the venues."
To that end Mr Byrd said the company is in talks with the , the and the .
From next week however the technology will be used during matches in the States.
"I would be very surprised if in two or three years at the most you don't see something in the broadcast that gives you the ability to watch a game from any point of view, or to do it online," said Mr Byrd.
He admitted that while there is a lot of interest in the technology, at the end of the day it will really be about dollars and cents and who gets what slice of the pie.
"It always comes down to the money," he said.
Countdown to SXSW Interactive Festival
- 13 Mar 09, 08:34 GMT
The streets of Austin, Texas, are quiet and the city feels like it is waiting for something.
It had been waiting for rain: after a 17-month long drought the downpour finally arrived this week and the whole city is breathing a sigh of relief, not least because the area surrounding Austin is farmland and there had been talk of ranchers going out of business.
No, the city is waiting for the first wave of visitors. More than 10,000 web professionals arrive for the , followed by thousands more for the and festivals which take place later this month.
Apparently the only way to tell the web geeks from the music heads is that the T-shirts on the latter group are slightly cooler.
The first of the festival goers are already here. In the corridor outside my hotel room I've heard a handful of people walk past discussing their record labels and music deals.
"I have a very diverse audience. If you like hip hop I can give it to you; If you like rock I can give it to you," said one man, giving himself the hard sell on the phone to someone who I assume is in the music business.
Austin is now used to the wave upon wave of visitors, not least because the city itself has been growing at an exponential rate over the last few decades.
Everywhere you look you can see buildings been thrown up. The standing joke about Austin is that the state bird is the crane because of all the construction work going on.
Before the madness begins I sat down with science fiction author and Austin-ite Bruce Sterling, who has been part of the SXSW festival since the early days and is giving a State of the Cybersphere talk next week.
He used to give the closing talk at the festival but is now one of more than 350 different sessions.
"I am a relic of the early days of this particular enterprise. I think they keep me around for sentimental reasons really," he tells me over lunch in one of Austin's dining institutions, Hut's Burgers.
Sterling's annual party at SXSW became a legendary event. Held at his house, the open invitation grew from a handful of people, to 100, 300 and eventually to 800 people four years ago.
"I wasn't doing an exact headcount but the cops did show up. It got out of control."
For reasons of safety and sanity, Sterling had to end the annual shindig.
The party became famous not just as a place for great conversation but also as a way for geeks to meet the opposite sex.
"A number of romances started at my house. Lots of women come to SXSW and it's known as a Web 2.0 cruising site," he laughs.
While Sterling is no longer the finale to SXSW Interactive, he does still promise some surprises.
"My ability to go in and give a blessing to these geeks has faded with time. The speeches tend to toward emotionally unloading on people. I could do some futurist punditry but people like the literary and poetic aspects.
"I try to do things 'left brain' for a crowd that is quite geeky; something intuitive and sentimental."
Making apps for Android
- 12 Mar 09, 09:15 GMT
Is (Google's open operating system for mobile phones) finally stirring from its torpor and becoming a force to challenge Apple's App Store in the world of mobile applications?
I ask after spending a morning with a group of keen Android developers, who were enthusiastic about the potential of Google's open source operating system. No wonder, really, as they'd been invited along by T-Mobile, which has been heavily promoting the only Android phone on sale so far, the G1.
But they had some impressive stuff to show off. Most eye-catching was , described by its creators as the first "augmented-reality" application.
It uses an Android phone's GPS and compass capabilities to map information about places of interest. The clever thing, though, is that as well as seeing the information plotted on a map you can turn on the phone's camera, point it at a building and see information on the screen.
Mobilizy, the firm behind Wikitude, is now launching another app called Zenith, which takes the same idea into the skies. You point your camera at the night sky - and get a star map.
Two other applications were more mundane. A company called Skycoders has developed Cabs4Me - again, it's a location-based service, enabling you to find a local cab service in a hurry. It has apparently been downloaded 56,000 times.
Then there is the Telegraph's mobile news service, developed by Mike Jennings - poached from Google where he was an Android developer. It apparently has 36,000 active Android users, checking out much of the paper's content - and it has also put the same app on the iPhone.
What all the developers had in common was enthusiasm about the process of producing Android applications in comparison with working on something for Apple's App Store. "Apple has an approval process which can take days or weeks - with Android you decide when it goes live," explained one. "It took us four times as long to get the app onto iTunes as to get it onto Android," said another.
With Microsoft and Nokia also now opening application stores, Apple may find it needs to streamline its process to keep developers on board. I notice that Microsoft is boasting that its Windows Marketplace will offer a "simple and transparent publishing policy."
But what the developers at the T-Mobile forum also shared, as far as I could see, was uncertainty about whether the whole game was worth the candle - in other words, is there any money in it?
From today, Android's Market will feature paid apps - so alongside the free stuff will be games like Guitar Hero. But these will generally be the work of big developers, who may in any case see this sort of work as a marketing tool rather than a profit centre.
When I asked about revenue, the Telegraph team told me that their app is sponsored - and leads users to videos with pre-roll ads. But sponsorship can come and go, and I wonder how much revenue those adverts generate?
Still, for a business like the Telegraph, it can't be too expensive to reprocess all that content and make it available to a growing crowd of mobile readers.
The Cabs4me firm hoped to make revenue from mini-cab firms, and the Wikitude people were looking at the possibility of selling location-based advertising - which conjures up the terrifying prospect of burger chain ads posted on a virtual Taj Mahal. But everyone at the forum admitted these were early days - and that many small developers may struggle to get their applications heard above all the noise. "It's like the early days of the dot com boom all over again." said one. "Everyone's trying stuff out, but nobody is quite sure what will work."
But the clear winners from the battle between Android and Apple, Nokia and Windows, are the consumers. If, that is, you have a hunger to do anything with your phone but make a simple call.
Silicon Valley decamps to Austin, Texas
- 12 Mar 09, 08:55 GMT
Over the next seven days the streets of San Francisco, of Palo Alto, of Mountain View and any number of other Silicon Valley towns will be much quieter than usual.
The cream of the web and mobile web industry has decamped to Austin, a small, unassuming outpost in Texas for the South by (SXSWi).
More than 10,000 web developers, bloggers, digital gurus and self-confessed geeks will descend on the small town to talk, listen and learn.
It's one of the defining characteristics of the digital space: communication.
"It's all about meeting people, sharing ideas and making connections," Hugh Forrest, director of SXSWi told me.
"We are lucky enough to be this place that has attracted all these innovators in this industry. We are the beneficiary of a very vibrant, innovative and creative community."
Forrest's mantra, and one that holds true for many people who attend SXSWi is: "The more we listen and communicate the stronger we become."
People come for the panels but they return for the conversations between the sessions.
This year the range of talks, keynotes and panels is as diverse as ever.
I've picked out a .
They include a look at the next round of browser wars, the growth in micro-blogging, the rise and rise of casual gaming online, the future of user experiences and user interfaces, as well as focussing on the UK talent on display, and the hotly tipped web products just waiting to break through.
I'll be reporting on the festival here on Dot.Life, as well as on the main news pages of the technology section. You can also follow my more granular updates on .
For first-timers like myself there is plenty of advice out there:
to the festival and the key events it is looking at.
CNet has a series about .
Here's a rather from Jeremy Wright.
And after the surrounding Sarah Lacey's interview with Mark Zuckerberg last year, there is even on how to be a panellist or moderator.
For those really wanting the up-to-the-minute updates on EVERYTHING SXSWi, then check out .
Causing offence by accident
- 11 Mar 09, 14:26 GMT
I had one of the biggest shocks of my journalistic career the other evening - though I speak as someone who has led an unusually sheltered life - and my experience raises a few issues about the trust we put in new web services. I'd been touring various ´óÏó´«Ã½ studios, talking about a breaking story, the YouTube row with songwriters which led to the blocking of music videos. In each studio, I took a picture on my phone - and then uploaded it to Twitter using a service called Twitpic. An activity that some of you, no doubt, will regard as fatuous - but part of the way I keep a record of my daily activities and share it with anyone who is interested.
All went well, until I uploaded a third picture - of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ news channel set - and returned to my desk to find various startled messages on Twitter:
"Think that might be a wrong picture Rory and you might want to look at it ASAP." "Are you really sure about that photo?" "Please tell me twitpic has confused your photo with someone else's?" "You might want to check that last link!"
So I did check that last link - and instead of an inoffensive picture of a ´óÏó´«Ã½ studio, it was a shot of a young woman wearing nothing but a smile, in a pose that can only be described as extremely post-watershed. I let out a startled yelp, and went into a flurry of action, deleting the "Tweet", and the offending "Twitpic", and changing my passwords, assuming I'd been hacked. Then I set off to find out what had happened.
A number of other people contacted me to say they too had uploaded pictures to Twitpic, only to find that someone's else's shot had appeared - though they had all been innocuous images. Twitpic, it turns out, is nothing to do with Twitter - it's a third party application which has latched onto the expanding population of Twitterers, giving them a quick and easy way to link to photos. It's integrated into various "tweeting" applications, like Tweetie and Twhirl, which makes it all the more popular. It was used to upload the most famous Twitter picture to date, the shot taken by Janis Krums of the plane which landed on the Hudson.
I managed to track down the man behind Twitpic, Noah Everett. He was, as you'd expect, extremely apologetic. He explained that I hadn't, as I'd feared, been hacked - but instead had been the victim of what he described as "a random bug" that sometimes gets a user's photo mixed up with someone else's.
I hope the bugs get sorted out. I had been planning to use it to raise money in the Red Nose Day appeal, taking shaky phone pictures of various ´óÏó´«Ã½ personalities, and getting Twitter and Facebook users to guess who they are. In the circumstances I'm using another application - mobypicture - to upload the pictures. ().
But yet again I'm putting my trust in a social web application, which is obviously a risky thing to do. I've long realised that social networking is a public activity and you can't put anything online - thoughts, images, jokes - without assuming that you are giving that data to the entire world. What I hadn't realised is that you could be at risk of showing someone else's data, however offensive, on the web in your name. And that is really very frightening.
A Little Big Business
- 10 Mar 09, 16:20 GMT
In 20 years as a business reporter for the ´óÏó´«Ã½, I always found that small firms had more interesting stories to tell - and livelier people telling those stories - than giant corporations. And the same goes for the games business, if my visit this morning to the six-times BAFTA-nominated Media Molecule is anything to go by.
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The developer behind "LittleBigPlanet" is housed above a shop in a very unglamorous warehouse unit in Guildford. But when I met one of the co-founders Mark Healey, he had a great Hollywood style rags-to-riches story to tell.
Mark is Creative Director of LittleBigPlanet, the build-it-yourself Sony PS3 game which has received rave reviews for its inventiveness and the way it hands over the controls to the gaming community to go away and take the game on to new levels. It's just three years since Mark and his four co-founders gave up secure jobs in the games industry to try to pitch an idea to Sony: "Through a friend of a friend," he explains, "we managed to get an audience with Phil Harrison, who was then the big man at Sony. The downside was that it was in a week's time and we didn't have anything to pitch. So we spent a week putting together a demo - and then luckily impressed him enough to get six months' funding."
But at the end of that six months there was a bigger hurdle to clear - what Mark describes as the "green light" stage. "It's a very Dragons Den style scenario - we had to go in and show them our wares and convince them it was going to sell lots of copies." They obviously convinced the dragons - and walked away with a valuable deal to develop Little Big Planet for PlayStation 3. What Sony got was exclusivity - and the ownership of the intellectual property.
None of the founders had any management experience - but they had to go away and recruit and motivate a team to build the game. What I found really fascinating from my chat with Mark Healey was the way they went about the recruitment process. "We've really tried to handpick the most talented people," he says, "and while most of the people here had a lot of experience in the games industry, some had none at all." He pointed out one in particular : "Danny was an estate agent - he'd spent a lot of time "modding" first person-shooter games as a hobby - he just impressed us with his enthusiasm."
But everyone who came in for a job interview also had to do a test. Those recruited to design levels of the game, for instance, were asked to watch a video of a Japanese TV programme involving an obstacle course, and then design a new set for the show. "From that we could judge their creative skills - but also how well they could sell their ideas, because that's a big part of this job." Aspiring games programmers were asked to look at a broken version of Space Invaders, fix it, and suggest improvements.
Media Molecule ended up with a workforce of 30 - still tiny by the standards of the teams assembled to build many of the blockbuster games of today. But small has turned out to be beautiful, with nearly two million people across Europe now playing the game invented in an unprepossessing shed in Guildford.
Mark Healey and his hand-picked team are still working away on developing the game - and trying to learn from what the community of LittleBigPlanet players have created on their own. But this is still a one product, one customer company and I put it to Mark that Media Molecule's next challenge is that "difficult second album". He smiled - and nodded, but seemed pretty relaxed. Then again, if you've spent the last three years creating a best-selling award-winning game (even before the BAFTAs it had picked up plenty of little statues) and a thriving small business out of nothing, you've got a right to look pleased with yourself.
Woz - Mr Twinkle Toes or Tellytubby gone mad?
- 10 Mar 09, 09:10 GMT
It's not an obvious leap to make - the co-founder of and someone who helped revolutionise the world of personal computers doing the cha cha cha on national television.
Well that is just what Steve Wozniack did last night here in the States on . Incongrous and so wrong on so many levels. But at the same time a lot of fun.
I have interviewed Woz on a number of ocassions and he is always a joy to speak to because he is forthright, frank, fun and full of energy. And you know what, he simply likes to live life large. I sure can't imagine Steve Jobs doing this kind of thing.
applied the same gusto and sense of fun so often on display to his cha cha cha with fellow dancer Karina Smirnoff, five times US latin champion.
Even though Karina said during rehearsal that "when Steve took his first step, I thought Oh! Oh! we've got a lotta work to do," he approached it like a true engineer would.
"All the numbers and the beats are very mathematical," he told Karina as the sweat was pouring off him. He sat for a while in his enormous beige t-shirt, short shorts, black socks and black trainers with his eyes closed visualising the dance.
"I know his mind can remember the steps. I hope his body can pull it off," Karina intoned into the camera.
Woz declared before he took to the stage "I am going to prove nerds can dance." It was a big promise to make and according to the judges one that he didn't quite pull off.
Len Goodman said "It held my attention throughout. I was fascinated." So far so good? Not for long.
"I enjoyed it but it was a disaster."
Bruno Tonioli said "I didn't know if it was hilarious or delirious. It was like watching a Tellytubby go mad."
Bruno got well booed for that barb.
The host, smooth as silk Tom Bergeron quipped "Let's see Bruno get an appointment at the genius bar anytime soon" for his comments.
Carrie Ann Inaba was much more generous spirited and told Woz "You are what this competition is all about. You are going out on a limb and you went for it."
Woz acknowledged that it was the most fun he had ever had, so much fun in fact that "they are testing me for drugs tomorrow!"
Woz's rivals for dancing supremacy include singers Lil' Kim and Belinda Carlisle, Tony nominated actor David Alan Grier and reality star Holly Madison, Olympian Shawn Johnson and rodeo athlete Ty Murray.
At the end of the night, the judges had the final say and voted Woz the bottom of the heap with just 13 out of 30 points for his performance on the dance floor.
Woz's song this week was "You Ain't Seen Nothin Yet." Next week will be his chance to prove that title has real meaning.
Just one piece of advice from moi. Leave the feather boa at home!
YouTube row reflects online minefield
- 9 Mar 09, 16:34 GMT
You might have thought that the sounds of brakes being slammed on in the 100% legal, 24/7 digital content world had long since faded into the distance.
But try and watch a video of Leona Lewis singing on YouTube UK in the next few days and you will quickly realise that the digital world is not so switched on and simple as you might have previously thought.
YouTube in the UK is blocking access to all premium music videos because of a failure to reach agreement with the over a new license to stream content. It is a reflection of the byzantine world of music rights online.
Despite the fact that has deals in place with three of the four major record labels in the world it still has to seek a separate deal with music publishers, many of whom use the PRS, in order to get rights to the music and lyrics in each music video.
YouTube UK is saying that the fees charged by the PRS in the UK are "prohibitive" and would mean it would lose money on each click of a video.
It begs the question: If true, who can make a business in the online music streaming world if Google cannot?
There may be an element of "brinkmanship" by YouTube in all of this. There's no suggestion that the PRS was seeking a block to all music video content while discussions continued.
Indeed, when I spoke to the PRS today they seemed taken aback by this move by YouTube. Later they made clear that the first they had heard about this move was when I had telephoned to tell them.
As their boss Steve Porter said: "We were shocked and disappointed to receive a call late this afternoon informing us of Google's drastic action which we believe only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent."
Pointedly, in the statement released to the press by the PRS the final line reads: Google had revenues of $5.7bn in the last quarter of 2008.
But regardless of the motives of YouTube's tactics and the PRS' response this is a much wider issue.
Last year, popular US online streaming service Pandora had to close its doors to listeners outside of the US because it said it could not afford a licence with the PRS and the labels.
Pandora boss Tim Westergren said in an e-mail to users in the UK that the rases were "far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US."
Pandora is not alone: Real Networks, MySpace UK and Imeem have all had problems getting a music video or music streaming business of the ground because of this issue.
You can hear the frustration clearly when Tim Westergren wrote: "It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music.
"I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent -- and by that I mean both well known and indie artists."
YouTube is a little more sanguine: "We value the creativity of musicians and song writers and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright.
"But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before."
Other UK companies too have complained loudly about the issue.
Martin Stiksel, from successful UK-based firm Last.FM, "We need a total overhaul of how digital content is licensed and distributed on the web. I'd like to see one single compulsory licence for digital content holders: for music, royalties could be distributed according to how often it is played."
Of course, while parts of the the music industry and firms like YouTube struggle to reach deals consumers must be scratching their heads in amazement at such obstacles to delivering legal content in a timely and straightforward fashion.
Broadband: Are you being served?
- 9 Mar 09, 13:26 GMT
Reading , a couple of things strike me.
Firstly, it's clear that super-fast broadband - and how to get it to everyone who might want or need it - is arguably the most important issue now for the regulator.
But what also seems clear is that, for many broadband users, it's not the future that's the issue - it's the poor service that they're currently getting from their providers. And it's not at all clear that customers are being effectively served - either by the industry or by the regulator.
When we did our Broadband Britain series last year, we broke all records in terms of audience response - in 48 hours, around 60,000 people and, in many cases, vented their frustration that they were not getting what they thought they'd been promised.
And, when we asked for questions for Ed Richards, the recurrent themes were frustrations about current speeds, the poor state of your local network and dodgy dealings by the providers.
The problem is that Ofcom is in some ways a victim of its own success - having delivered the competitive broadband market that was its aim, that market is so competitive that telecom companies seem to be cutting corners in a desperate attempt to win customers.
Mr Richards was very eager to mention Ofcom's on the advertising of broadband speed (we have no information yet on whether that is having an impact), but also keen to stress that deciding whether claims about speed were accurate was up the . And it turns out that customer complaints are nothing to do with him anyway.
I didn't realise that until I took a look at Ofcom's website. At the top of a list of comes "disputes between you and your telecoms provider". That turns out to be the job of the Telecommunications Ombudsman - or . Feeling embarrassed that I'd never even heard of this body (how many of you have?), I headed for its most recent annual report. There I found that it had investigated nearly 5,000 complaints in the last year (2007/8), with a large proportion from one company - unnamed in the report.
There are high hurdles for getting your complaint heard by Otelo - your telecom supplier must have signed up to the scheme and has 12 weeks to resolve the issue before it can be passed to the ombudsman, although that period is being reduced to eight weeks.
And what were the big issues for those complaining? The annual report says that the common theme is poor service. That includes "erroneous transfer from another supplier" - known as - and "loss of broadband or substantially reduced speed". And there is this paragraph about complaints over speed:
"...customers were promised high-speed broadband but the service failed to match either their resulting expectations or the company's claims. Claims were phrased in the terms of 'speeds up to 8Mb per second', which, while not inaccurate, were potentially misleading because the text of the advert failed to inform customers that only a relatively small percentage of subscribers could receive more than about 6Mbps and 50% would be able to receive less than 5Mbps."
So how many of those complaints about speed claims were ever resolved in the customer's favour - and were any sanctions imposed on companies? Otelo tell me it is not its role to impose general sanctions - that is Ofcom's job.
But in another area - slamming - it seems clear that just about every miscreant gets away with it. A document I've seen from Ofcom shows that in 2007, the regulator received 16,013 complaints about this practice - and presumably passed many of them on to Otelo. But over the same period, just one fine was imposed on a telecom company.
And I've just learned that the whole business is even more complicated than I thought. There is another body you can complain to - , the Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme. So my conclusion? If you feel that you have been mistreated or ripped off by your broadband, prepare for a long and complex journey through the regulatory maze.
´óÏó´«Ã½ News, Twitter and suits
- 5 Mar 09, 15:15 GMT
I'm taking part in a panel discussion on the role of Twitter in journalism at the .
I'm apprehensive, not least because of two tweets I stumbled across when searching for coverage of day one of the conference:
"next year there should be more young people - less suits" while : "If we didn't have Twitter, we would be bored to death."
So here I am dressed in a suit, decidedly middle-aged, and hoping I have something interesting to say about Twitter and journalism; at a time when many people are sick of hearing about Twitter on the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
I'm also apprehensive because talking and thinking about how my colleagues and I do our jobs most often takes a back seat to just getting on with doing it. But in an effort to have something meaningful to say I have been ruminating on our use of Twitter.
A good place to start is my colleague Rory Cellan-Jones' excellent series of blog posts on the use of Twitter.
What I hope to add to that is a sense of how an organisation like the ´óÏó´«Ã½ begins to formulate the use of these technologies once take-up has started and generated a critical mass among staff.
It's clear that the adoption of Twitter inside the ´óÏó´«Ã½ began, much as it did with blogging, on the fringes.
If you think of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ as a circle, those of us who began using Twitter a few years ago were sat on the rim and as its popularity increased lines were drawn inevitably toward the centre.
made the rules up as we went along - for and I Twitter has long been a personal technology that has overlapped with our professional lives.
by some when it was pointed out that he talks a lot about walking his dog. I talk a lot about rugby and my family.
But in the past 24 months it is clear that Twitter has become another tool or conduit in our reporting.
So how do we use it?
1.Talking to and responding to queries from readers, fellow professionals and colleagues.
2.Asking the audience questions and using the crowd as a source of information
3.Reporting updates, breaking news, and giving colour and texture
4.Pushing out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com
5.Getting a very fast and very global sense of events
6.Using hashtags to find viewpoints around breaking news as well as a source of user generated content
7.Unifying different threads of reporting - news website, blog, Flickr etc
This has been an evolving process and one that is a long way removed from the first time that empty box on Twitter asked me: What are you doing right now?
With any large organisation there is always a lag between take up of a new technology by staff in their own time and its adoption formally across all staff and structures.
The trick is, I think, to help the organisation understand the technology as those lines move to the centre so that when formal adoption is then pushed back out there is at least some connection between original use and 'sanctioned', structural use - for want of a better term.
So what else has the ´óÏó´«Ã½ learned about Twitter as it moved from the fringe to the centre?
One of the most popular engagements between Twitter and the ´óÏó´«Ã½ actually has little to do with us at all. is a web developer who has worked with the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Backstage project, which aims to foster innovation using ´óÏó´«Ã½ content among external devs.
He built one of the first Twitter bots that pumps out headlines from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website's front page and many of our sub-sections, including Technology.
These are incredibly popular and showed the ´óÏó´«Ã½ more broadly how it could make use of the mountains of data within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and connect it to Twitter.
One of my favourite more recent hook-ups is a which outputs the next programme to be aired on Radio 4.
In recent months there has been an explosion of Twitter activity from inside the ´óÏó´«Ã½, and ´óÏó´«Ã½ News, although if I am honest, much of it remains uncoordinated.
We do not have a 'Twitter strategy' yet, which may not be a bad thing. Although we do have excellent people like , who helps us all to understand how to engage with social media.
A number of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio programmes now use Twitter as another channel of communication with the audience, alongside e-mails and text messages.
At the recent Davos economic conference a number of our journalists were Twittering alongside their other reporting and these Tweets were fed into a central .
has started Twittering recently - adopting a more irreverent, side-on tone which hopefully resonates with their audience.
During breaking news events, ´óÏó´«Ã½ News is now incorporating viewpoints, eyewitness accounts and user generated content from users on Twitter into our developing coverage.
One of the biggest lessons I think we are beginning to learn from Twitter is in understanding the value of having a simple technology both to deliver and publish breaking news updates.
Twitter excels in its ubiquity and simplicity across different platforms and reveals the value in delivering real-time, sequential updates around breaking news.
For the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website, it has given us much food for thought in the areas of reporting and publishing, particularly in terms of speed and scale.
There are technical and editorial challenges for us - ´óÏó´«Ã½ News does not allow direct publishing of news content by the source journalist without a second pair of eyes to check it over. We do this to ensure editorial standards.
So what does the future hold for ´óÏó´«Ã½ News and Twitter? That's not my decision but given the speed at which Twitter is growing it is clear that this is a mode of reporting and broadcasting that is here to stay. Facebook's recent announcement of real time updates also hints that there may be other similar dynamic platforms for us to engage with in the future.
For individual journalists who are grappling with issues such as workload, writing blogs, news stories, recording audio, shooting video and Twittering is a real juggling exercise.
Thankfully, at DNA today I will be "merely" blogging and Twittering. You can follow the event on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #dna09 and there are excellent updates on .
As always, I'd appreciate your thoughts about Twitter, social media, the future of journalism, or of course suits!
´óÏó´«Ã½ launches Virtual College of Journalism
- 5 Mar 09, 13:55 GMT
The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is to open up its 'Virtual' College of Journalism to the public.
Thousands of pages of skills advice, video and guides to almost every aspect of journalism - from interview techniques to in-the-field reporting and even sports commentary - will be made available.
"One of the most important things that we need to think about and do is teach journalism to the next generation and to the new leaders within journalism," said the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Kevin Marsh, at the in Brussels.
Every aspect of online training that is currently available to 7,500 ´óÏó´«Ã½ journalists will be open to the public.
, and .
Journalism learning is also available across ´óÏó´«Ã½ language sites.
"I'm quietly proud of this stuff," said Mr Marsh.
Meet the bionic reporter
- 5 Mar 09, 11:12 GMT
The idea of lifecasting is not new: was an interesting project which saw a San Franciscan wear a webcam 24/7 and broadcast direct to the net.
It was arguably inspired by MIT's who pioneered , using recording technology worn on the body to reflect the viewpoint of one of the people engaged in surveillance.
But . He is planning to have a camera embedded in his eye socket in order to become a 'bionic reporter'.
Speaking at , he explained he had lost an eye when young and had long thought about camera technology to replace his lost vision.
The camera eye will move in sync with the healthy eye, it will blink and it will be able to transmit footage live.
He explains: "One of the obvious applications is to be a reporter that has access to places other reporters don't - or access to conversations that normal people don't."
He says having direct eye contact will lead to a unique point of view and potentially a new grammar of film-making.
He has developed a prototype and is looking for further funding of $50,000 to complete the technical aspects of the eye. He is currently filming a documentary about the project.
He admits it raises wider issues of privacy.
"The more I tell journalists I am getting a camera in my head, the more journalists ask if it is worse than surveillance society.
"We are sleep walking into a surveillance society and nobody cares. But if I say I am getting an eye camera people say it is ethically tricky."
But he says: "I wouldn't release any footage without a release form."
His project points to a time when people may replace healthy, working eyes with cameras.
"It seems shocking now, but it will become and more normal."
He says he expects to have a working prototype in the next month.
"Stay tuned: eyeborg is coming."
Spotify's security bloomer
- 5 Mar 09, 09:05 GMT
Well now we know that the streaming music service Spotify is a grown-up web company - it's just had its first security disaster. Last night I was among those subscribers who got a rather worrying email. It warned that a group had managed to "compromise our protocols" and had gained access to information. In other words, hackers had found a back door open to Spotify and had got their sticky fingers all over its filing system.
The data at risk included our passwords, plus "your email address, birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt details." Fortunately, credit card details are not stored by Spotify so were not at risk. But the company strongly advised its users to change their passwords for Spotify - and for anything else where they use the same password. For some people who can never think of anything other than their dog's name when signing up to a new web service that is going to mean a lot of work.
By coincidence, I was involved yesterday afternoon in a long discussion about Spotify on Radio 5 Live's Simon Mayo show, which included Daniel Ek, the company's founder, on the line from Stockholm. Amongst other things, we learned that Bono hadn't heard of Spotify - where U2's new album was previewed - until told about it by Simon on last Friday's show, and that Daniel Ek still buys vinyl from time to time because it offers better quality than his online music.
What Mr Ek never breathed a word about was the security breach - but I notice that the blog post about the issue went up on the Spotify site at 16.31 on Wednesday, just half an hour after we came off air. Surely Daniel Ek knew about the issue before he went on 5 Live - and could have taken the opportunity to reassure subscribers?
Late on Wednesday, Spotify put up a in which it says only a small number of people could actually be at risk of having their passwords stolen. While some subscribers praised the company for its openness, others were not impressed, like this one :"Your server's been overloaded when you could have given that detail and calmed everyone down. Very not clever."
Spotify will survive this crisis - and hopefully learn from it - because it is already proving a hugely useful service to more than a million music lovers. But, remember, most of its users are getting their music for free on the ad-supported service. Despite the reassurance that no credit card details were at risk, this is going to make it all the harder for Spotify to persuade people to upgrade to the premium service - and start making serious money. And that really would be "very not clever."
Ask Ofcom
- 4 Mar 09, 14:56 GMT
After yesterday's big announcement about the regulation of super-fast broadband, we asked the regulator's Chief Executive Ed Richards whether he would like to answer questions on the subject from readers of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ website.
He has kindly agreed, and you can submit your questions by following - or commenting on this blog post. I will then put a selection to him some time in the next week.
A few suggestions of areas you might like to pursue - what does he consider "fast"? Who besides BT and Virgin is going to build a fast network? How much of this job will be done by the market, how much public money will be needed to fill in the gaps, and how is he going to stop consumers being over-charged for a vital service? But I'm sure you have much better ideas...
Phorm - one year on
- 4 Mar 09, 10:16 GMT
The controversial targeted advertising firm is to hold a second open Town Hall meeting, a year after it first met with the public to discuss plans to roll the technology out to Internet Service Providers.
Phorm works by doing deals with ISPs which allow it to scan and categorise certain web pages a user visits and then to allocate targeted adverts to users when they visit websites that have signed up to the technology and which align with those categories.
So far BT has committed to rolling out the technology, known as Webwise to consumers.
Phorm is controversial because some feel that monitoring users' web surfing habits is an invasion of privacy, while that the way Phorm works breaks the law.
The company itself believes that targeted advertising can benefit the web industry as a whole and wrestle some power back from ad firms like Google and put it into the hands of smaller enterprises. For ISPS, Phorm believes it represents a potentially powerful new revenue stream.
The firm says the new meeting "follows on from last year where we engaged with the concerned, the curious and the enthusiasts".
I was at that meeting and while there were plenty of the first and some of the second, I certainly don't recall any of the third group.
The second meeting will take place at the London School of Economics on 7 April at 6.30pm.
So what has happened to Phorm over the last 12 months?
After controversy erupted over BT's trialling of the technology without informing customers, quite a lot has happened:
March
And two privacy professionals give their first assessment of the technology.
The creator of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says he .
April
of conducting illegal trials of Phorm on its users.
The Information Commissioner in the UK says .
Phorm bosses meet with the public to and foster discussion.
BT says it will start further trials of Phorm 'very soon'. But nothing happens for a further five months.
June
Dr Richard Clayton, a respected computer expert, says BT for carrying out its first trials of Phorm without user consent.
July
Users hand a dossier of evidence to City of London police saying Phorm carried out 'illegal' trials with BT.
August
and asks the UK government to clarify if the technology breaches European data laws.
September
a small trial of Phorm. This time it informs customers and asks them to take part in the trial.
Phorm can be rolled out in the UK, following questions from the EU. But any future deployments of the system must be done with consent and made easy for people to opt out.
The City of London police , saying no criminal offence had been committed.
December
Four of the directors stepped down from the firm, following a disagreement over the direction of the business.
The UK chief executive of Phorm, reports The Guardian.
Apple's "brave" price rise
- 3 Mar 09, 17:10 GMT
Without the usual fanfare, Apple unveiled an upgrade to its entire range of desktop computers this afternoon. But UK customers were quick to notice one thing - they were expected to pay higher prices. At a time when world computer sales are expected to see their fastest drop in history, this is what a senior civil servant would describe in conversation with a reckless minister as a "brave" move.
From now on, Apple's entry-level computer, the Mac Mini, which comes without a screen or a keyboard, starts at £499 - as compared to £391 before today. The 20in iMac now costs £949 - the old price was £782. Right at the top of the range, the brand new 8-core Mac Pro costs £2499, but the quad-core costs £1899, up from £1712. Apple told me that buyers were getting a lot more in terms of specifications than the previous models offered - but I pointed out that my first desktop cost me £1500 in 1995 for a computer which had marginally less memory than me on a bad day. We all know the rules - wait six months to buy a computer, and you get something with a higher spec for less cash.
So what's Apple's reasoning? In a word, the pound. The company says it has fallen 25% against the dollar over the last six months, and that's why UK customers are facing price rises where others are not. It's true that Japanese electronics firms - notably Nikon and Canon - have also raised prices in the UK because a strong yen and a weak pound was making it impossible to make money. But UK consumers will point out that Mac prices didn't fall when you could get $2 to the pound last summer.
Apple has once again proved that anyone who thinks they're going to follow the rest of the computer industry down the low-margin netbook road is living in a fantasy world. But I'm not convinced that eager customers will be storming the UK's Apple Stores to buy the new desktops. After all, you could get two netbooks for the price of a Mac Mini and still have change. So, as I said, a brave move - let's see what the sales figures say about its wisdom a few months from now.
Historic day for Broadband Britain?
- 3 Mar 09, 15:40 GMT
"This is a very significant day in the deployment and history of Britain's communications," said Ofcom's chief executive, trying to gee up a roomful of sleepy hacks in a conference room this morning. , the impossibly youthful looking boss of a very powerful regulator, was obviously excited about an announcement which he says will "clear the way" for . But should the rest of us care? Well yes. This news is significant for three groups - BT, Virgin Media and anyone who's interested in getting a faster broadband connection.
BT was cock-a-hoop, rushing out a happy statement just minutes after. The telecoms giant had warned it wasn't going to spend billions on a new fibre network if the regulator wouldn't allow it to make a decent return. It had two worries - the price it could charge other firms to use its network and the fact that existing regulation meant it would have to send two sets of engineers to 8000 fibre cabinets across the country, vastly increasing the cost. Openreach - the BT local network division - is run at arm's length, treating the firm's own retail broadband business as just another customer, so when anything happens at exchanges two sets of engineers are involved. Now Ofcom has, in its own words "varied BT's undertakings", so that Openreach can do the whole job. More significantly, BT can charge its rivals whatever it likes for access to its new network. So now it's promised to press ahead with its investment in fibre-to-the-cabinet, with the rollout of 40Mbps broadband starting early next year.
Virgin Media got two things today - it was left alone by Ofcom and also got a glowing endorsement from the chief executive. The regulator was in no hurry to order Virgin to open up its network - and Ed Richards was keen to point out that the cable operator was already way ahead of BT: "People say nothing is happening in the UK when it comes to super fast broadband. That just isn't the case- it's unfair to what Virgin have done. By the end of this year 50% of the UK will be covered with superfast broadband before BT have started."
So it sounds like there was good news for consumers too. By 2012, 40% of the UK will have BT's 40Mbps service, and 50% will have 50Mbps Virgin cable broadband - and although the two firms will overlap a lot, that means well over half of the UK should be in the fast lane. But two problems remain - how much are we going to pay, and what will happen to the large numbers of people who still won't get access? Ed Richards said he'd be surprised if consumers weren't willing to pay a premium for a fast product - but the market would limit the cost :"You're not going to be able to charge £300 a month, when customers can still get 10-20Mbps for just a few pounds." And he pointed out that the take-off of mobile broadband would also mean there was plenty of competition.
But what we haven't learned today is how we can stop a new digital divide opening up. "We don't know how far the market will take us," said Ed Richards, "but the market is not going to provide super-fast broadband for 100% of homes." That will be the subject of phase two of Ofcom's deliberations - but may be more of a question for Lord Carter's Digital Britain report. We still have no idea of the cost of bringing in a "Universal Service Obligation" to make sure every home can get at least 2Mbps, so working out how to give 50 or 100Mbps to every home in the UK is going to involve an awful lot of head-scratching.
The debate has already started - the Country Landowners Association said Ofcom had failed to understand the needs of rural communities, and the effect of deregulating broadband would be to create such a gulf between town and country that "the rural economy could find itself on its knees".
As we found on our Broadband Britain tour last year, speed is an issue which really gets people worked up. And nothing gets them more agitated than the fact that everyone else seems to be accelerating away into the distance. So prepare for a long and bloody broadband battle.
Microsoft still searching for solutions
- 3 Mar 09, 14:34 GMT
Anyone who thinks that search is a 'done deal' ought to remember that half of all Google's engineers work in the field of search. The future of search is the line on the horizon that is forever beyond our grasp.
For some, that horizon is further away than for others. Take Microsoft, for example: it is expending an enormous amount of effort in trying to close the gap between itself and Google because there is a lot of money to be made from search.
But Microsoft remains a very distant competitor in the race. In the for search in the US, Microsoft claims 8% of the market, while Google has 63%.
In the past it has tried who use its search engine to look for and buy products online.
Its latest effort - albeit an internal search engine right now - is called Kumo. Kara Swisher, over at , has some screenshots and analysis.
She's not alone: an internal memo about Kumo has managed to fall into the hands of, which might suggest Microsoft is putting out feelers in terms of audience response.
Kumo is the planned successor for Live Search, Microsoft's current search engine and the one failing so obviously to put a dent in Google.
The biggest changes would appear to be grouped searches around topics, and the ability to drill down and refine searches in a left hand pane.
Over at Danny Sullivan notes:
"This type of classification or "drill down" into results isn't new. It's years old, tried by players such as Clusty, not to mention Google offer types of refinement right now plus Yahoo talked about this type of task-based refinement being in the works."
He concludes: "I don't mean to downplay the features shown. This is a testing site, and we're only dealing with screenshots, rather than playing with how the refinement actually works. Perhaps it will be killer.
"Certainly, Microsoft should be experimenting with both new and old ideas and is in a good position to do so, since unlike Google, it doesn't run the risk of potentially scaring off users with something they might find weird or scary (since it has so fewer seachers than Google)."
Rewriting Digital Britain
- 2 Mar 09, 16:40 GMT
The - or rather - came out in late January and it is fair to say that the reactions were not exactly ecstatic. Some bloggers saw the report as unambitious - setting a target of just "up to 2Mbps" for universal access broadband, and failing to promise large sums of money to build a next generation network. Others were concerned that too much had been conceded to the copyright lobby in a report which should have said more about giving consumers free access to more content - and to the governement's own data. And just about everyone thought the whole thing was both too vague and too full of dodgy jargon.
To be fair to Lord Carter, he's been stressing the interim nature of his report - and making clear that the final version will have a lot more answers, as well as taking onboard suggestions from the consultation.
But two technology-minded academics may have done him a favour with a couple of ideas to make that consultation work better. First, Tony Hirst and Joss Winn created an version of the Digital Britain report, a place where anyone could come and give their take on every paragraph of the report. So far, the most "commented" section is the chapter on the economics of digital content. One typical contribution: "There is no justification - economic or otherwise - for the taxpayer to foot the bill for enforcement of the entertainment industry's IP rights."
But now Hirst and Winn have gone further. Having seen that there is plenty of criticism but not much coherent thinking about what a better "Digital Britain" report might look like, they have created . This is a wiki, which can be edited by anyone, with the aim of producing something similar to Lord Carter's effort by the time the consultation period ends on March 12th.
There is a lot of work to be done - so far little of the report has been filled in, and what is there is rather predictably utopian. The section on next generation networks says:
"We propose that a huge infrastructure programme is unleashed guaranteeing ultra-high-speed access to literally every home and business in the country. So that's fibre to the home for everyone. No quibbles, no "but it's too expensive", no messing around assessing demand from end-users. Just do it."
Yes, well I'm sure ministers will read that with interest and proceed to approve a £27bn programme of investment in fibre-to-the home. Possibly.
But Tony Hirst and Joss Winn aren't putting forward any particular views of their own - just doing their best to enable everyone else to have their say on some of the most important issues for our technology future. Joss explained that it was more about showing how it was possible to use very simple web tools to draw the public in to the discussion: "We're showing the government that myself and Tony - on zero budget -can make something much more accessible than they've done themselves. The tools are entirely available to government but they're just not using them."
In fact, the government has now started its own , which is taking some of the comments from Hirst and Winn's Write To Reply site. The final report will have little chance of pleasing everyone - but it may still end up as a good example of digital democracy, thanks to the efforts of two imaginative people.
The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
This is dot.life - a blog about technology from ´óÏó´«Ã½ News.
Rory Cellan-Jones is the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s technology correspondent.
Maggie Shiels is the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s tech reporter based in Silicon Valley.
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