Girls get geekier
- 29 Feb 08, 17:41 GMT
Any time I come across software developers or visit an IT business, one thing immediately strikes me 鈥 where are the women? For all the talk of girl geeks, computing - and technology more generally - is still a very male-dominated business. Even a few months back at a meeting of would-be Facebook application developers 鈥 a very young crowd - there must have been ten men for every woman.
But that could be about to change. A new survey out today from a major supermarket (no, I鈥檓 not going to name them 鈥 but the research looks reasonably sound) suggests that girls may now be better at some computing tasks than boys. The survey of more than a thousand 7-16 year olds found that girls were more likely to know how to create a word document, put a profile on a social network or upload a video onto YouTube. And whereas 10% of the boys said they were not confident with computers, the figure for the girls was just 6%.
I visited Brentside High School in West London today to film a report on this subject 鈥 and found an ICT class where the girls seemed at least as clued-up as the boys. They were 13 and 14 year olds who seemed confident about everything from using a spreadsheet to building their own websites.
The teacher herself, Varinder Randhawa, said much had changed since she left university a couple of years ago. 鈥淚 remember I was one of five girls out of a class of 160,鈥 she told me. 鈥淎nd in the programming classes I was the only one there鈥. Now, though, she is finding that her female pupils are just as keen on asking questions in class as the boys, and more and more of them are opting to study ICT.
What appears to be happening is that Web 2.0 鈥 the social internet 鈥 is breaking down the gender barriers. Girls are more keen on using computers as communication tools, rather than bashing orcs and stealing virtual cars in the games which occupy the boys for so many hours. But in ten years鈥 time will the girls from Brentside High be competing for jobs as software developers? Let鈥檚 hope so.
UPDATE:
Some of you have suggested 鈥 with some justification 鈥 that a survey carried out for a supermarket may not provide rock-solid evidence for my theory that gender barriers are coming down in computing. Well here鈥檚 something rather better 鈥 a report from the respected which found that teenage girls were far more likely to create content on the internet than boys 鈥 though in this report boys were more prolific when it came to posting videos. This is about American teenagers, but I would be surprised if the same pattern is not repeated in the UK.
And some of you have dismissed this kind of activity as trivial compared with the hard grind of writing code. I suppose it comes down to where you think the whole technology industry is heading over the next few years 鈥 and whether the sort of skills that girls are now developing will be in demand. I think they will be.
Under the bonnet of Android
- 28 Feb 08, 08:35 GMT
I had the chance this week to meet Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms.
He's the man behind , the open source operating system that is at the heart of the .
He was kind enough to give me a demo of Android running on a handset and the video is here. I've written up my and you can read it on the 麻豆官网首页入口 News website.
The software stack, I was told, was Alpha, so not even Beta; but what I was shown gave a good indication that Android should be taken seriously by competitors like and .
Google says they are driving the Android initiative because they want to see internet-style development on mobile platforms in the way that the openness of the web has given rise to Facebook and the Web 2.0 movement which should be able to migrate to the mobile phone.
Of course, coming in at the ground level of Android will give Google plenty of opportunity to tailor its own applications.
No-one company dominates the mobile web as yet - perhaps this is Google's chance.
Google has committed to being a multi-operating system company and they will continue to produce services for all phones on all platforms.
It will be interesting to see how the firm differentiates the same services across different platforms - just how much better will they be on Android as opposed to Windows Mobile or Symbian?
Bill v Brussels (round 47)
- 27 Feb 08, 17:03 GMT
It鈥檚 an eye-watering sum of money. 899 million euros 鈥 that鈥檚 $1.35bn or 拢675m. The latest fine imposed by the looks like a record-breaker 鈥 I certainly cannot find an example anywhere around the world of a bigger penalty imposed on one business. By comparison, the biggest fine in Britain was the 拢121.5m the Office of Fair Trading ordered British Airways to pay for its role in fixing fuel surcharges.
The European Commission says that Microsoft is the only company in fifty years of regulation to have refused to comply with an anti-trust ruling 鈥 and that is why the fine is so high. But many people have contacted the 麻豆官网首页入口 鈥 in particular from North America - to complain that Brussels is now involved in a vendetta against Bill Gates鈥 company and is simply punishing a successful American business.
鈥淎nother example of the inflated and out of control ego of the EU!鈥 says one Canadian e-mailer. 鈥淢icrosoft should get out of Europe and take all their software and support with them. I really don't think that Bill needs their business that badly.鈥
But you could argue that the EU has simply taken the baton from the US Department of Justice 鈥 which under the Clinton administration wanted to break up Microsoft 鈥 and proved more successful in curbing the software giant鈥檚 monopolistic tendencies.
That is certainly how they see it in Brussels. Someone close to the case put it to me like this: 鈥淲hen the Bush administration came in, the Department of Justice chickened out, and let Microsoft off the hook.鈥 By contrast, he explained, Brussels had actually forced Microsoft to change its behaviour, pointing to last October鈥檚 statement making it clear that the company would now comply with .
And indeed Microsoft does not seem inclined to take its ball home in the way the Canadian correspondent suggests. This very afternoon it is holding a major event in London to launch its Windows 2008 server software, and its reaction to today鈥檚 fine makes it clear it now wants to make peace. No angry denunciations from Microsoft executives 鈥 just a statement which included this line: 鈥淎s we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are focusing on steps that will improve things for the future.鈥
So whatever you think of that eye-watering fine, you cannot deny that Brussels has landed some effective blows on Bill Gates鈥 company and 鈥 by Microsoft鈥檚 own admission - forced it to change the way it does business.
Mobiles bridge physical and digital worlds
- 27 Feb 08, 00:41 GMT
What sort of company is Nokia? What do you think of first when you hear the name?
Mobile phones? Handsets? Devices? Hardware?
Does it surprise you to learn that ? That with 17 phones sold every second the Finnish firm is bigger than Microsoft, bigger than Linux and arguably more influential than Google.
I visited Nokia's scientists and researchers at their lab in Palo Alto to talk about the future of mobile phones in three, five and eight years, and also beyond that.
The first thing to highlight is the fact no-one at Nokia calls the devices phones anymore; they are multimedia computers.
I was shown three projects being developed at Nokia's labs around the world, two of them in Palo Alto.
Morph
The first project I was shown has been widely written about already in the last few days. But here you can see the video that Nokia produced to explain the concept - which I don't think is publicly available.
And I've also spoken to Nokia's head of Cambridge labs, Dr. Tapani Ryhanen, who is working with Cambridge Uni on the technology. You can watch a short video interview .
So what is Morph? Morph is a concept looking at the potential applications of nanosciences in future handsets.
From nanowires that can sense the chemical properties of compounds in the air to nanowire grass that can turn the sun's rays into electrical power, and nanoelectronics with greater computing power than today's fastest computers, Morph is a beguiling vision.
But how far off is this vision?
Dr Rhyanen: "My rule of thumb is that if something is still at the level of idea it takes a minimum of 11 year, but if something is already tangible and we already have done demonstrations in the lab, then it's a minimum of seven years.
"Many of these technologies are already concrete."
Dr Rhyanen predicted that materials needed to build Morph - functional materials that can be used for different types of surfaces, both flexible and tough, and able to change its outward appearance - would emerge first from the range of nanosciences currently in development.
"Nanoelectronics is further in the future," he said.
Augmented reality
Mobile phones offer a bridge between the physical and the digital world. I was shown technology that is able to understand the decipher the real world and augment it with data from the digital world.
What a decade ago required a backpack full of equipment can be done today using just a phone.
Dr Kari Pulli and his team at Palo Alto demonstrated software which can pull information from the web about a location, such as a building, just by taking a photograph of it.
It works by utilising the GPS in a phone so the software knows where the picture was taken and can then fetch relevant information about that location, rather then having to trawl through the entire web.
The software s the photograph's properties and then matches it to likely subjects in the database.
In the example I was shown, a photograph taken of a local church in Stanford pulled up historical information for the user.
The applications for this sort of augmented reality are huge - from mapping and tourist information, to being able to give directions based on landmarks rather than road names and numbers.
You could use your phone to get information on almost any kind of consumer product - from CD covers, to movie posters and even wine in a local shop; simply snap a picture of the wine label and your phone could pull up reviews and sampling information.
There's a short video I shot on my mobile .
Traffic analysis
Nokia's research centre in Palo Alto has been working with Berkeley University and state authorities to use mobile phones to better understand the flow of traffic. There's a short video I shot .
Dr Quinn Jacobson said: "Every year in the US there are 4.2 billion hours of lost productivity due to traffic problems and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel lost due to congestion.
"We can improve our lives if we have more accurate traffic information and there is a shortage of good traffic data.
"Today we are mostly using conductive coil loops buried in the highway - they cost a lot to put in and maintain.
"They only cover main highways and main metropolitan areas."
Nokia's solution is to make use of the GPS that is being shipped in increasing numbers in mobile phones.
"A phone knows where it is, how fast it's going and of course it is programmable so we can instruct it to do things," said Dr Jacobson.
"As the devices travel through the world they are not randomly beeping your position. That would be costly. So we make the device spatially aware."
By creating a series of virtual triplines on maps - markers placed in virtual space - the flow of traffic can be mapped by instructing phones to send data about their location and speed as they pass these points.
"It means the data we are getting is useful. We're not getting data about the parking, the driveway. We're only getting the major roads."
Nokia has been keen to preserve the privacy of people who are using their phones in this way, while at the same time ensuring that enough data is being sent to make it valuable for analysis.
"It's all anonymous, but we also have to ensure that no-one can reconstruct identity through looking at the data."
In a recent field test with 100 cars, the researchers were trying to discover how much data they needed in order for it to become useful.
"The amount of data that is sent over the phone to the servers for analysis is tiny - a few packets of a few bytes."
The technology is still in the embryonic stage but Dr Jacobson believes that it could find its way into handsets within five years.
"There's no reason why a phone with GPS that is stuck in traffic cannot use that information to better inform other drivers about what lies ahead along the road."
Dr Quinn Jacobson's team has made a short video about the about the project. You can watch it .
Calling from a console
- 26 Feb 08, 21:30 GMT
What do we want from a mobile device? Will video calls ever take off? And who will win the battle to bring cheap mobile communications to a young audience? Three questions I鈥檝e been puzzling over since I made my way to the top of the BT Tower for a demo of a new service being launched by BT and Sony鈥檚 games division.
It鈥檚 called Go! Messenger, and it brings wireless video, voice and instant messaging to Sony鈥檚 PSP portable games console. The service will be free to the PSP鈥檚 11 million users across Europe 鈥 though they need to shell out around 拢35 for the mini camera that clips onto the console, and they need a broadband connection. In essence it is no different from the Skype video messaging service or Apple鈥檚 iChat, but the two partners say they are pushing new boundaries by bringing this kind of communication to a mobile device.
So far, though, video calls have been the great white elephant of the telecoms industry. In 1970 AT&T launched its Picturephone service in the United States. Nobody wanted it. In 1993 BT launched its Relate Videophone - 拢500 each or 拢900 for two so Mum could see you. Guess what? It was another flop. Then, in this decade, the whole promise of 3G phones was that we would all be making video calls on them. Are you? Thought not.
So it鈥檚 not clear that video calls will bring hordes of new customers to the PSP. It鈥檚 also not entirely evident what is in it for either BT or Sony. Of course, the telecoms company has struggled to connect with a young audience since splitting off its mobile division Cellnet (now O2) in 2001. Warren Buckley of BT鈥檚 Mobility & Convergence division told me the service promised his company 鈥渧ery significant brand exposure to users who may not be familiar with BT.鈥 Err, right.
Sony鈥檚 Nainan Shah said that, while there were no revenues in the short-term, 鈥渢his will help us do the research. It鈥檚 laying the foundations for something we think could be very healthy from a profit point of view.鈥 Of course, Sony needs something to breathe new life into the PSP, which has sold fewer than half as many units worldwide as the rival Nintendo DS.
But there is a prize that both the entertainment and the telecoms company are seeking. Whoever can convince a young audience that they have got the device which can entertain them and help them communicate all in one simple package can end up making a lot of money. At the moment, the mobile phone firms believe that text and music are the two killer applications that this audience wants. Now Sony and BT are betting that a combination of games and video messages will provide the recipe for success, But I鈥檓 not convinced that gamers are really that keen on looking at each other.
YouTube back in Pakistan
- 26 Feb 08, 15:23 GMT
A couple of hours ago 麻豆官网首页入口 colleagues in Islamabad told me they were able to get onto YouTube without problems, and now Google has been in touch to confirm that the blocking of the site by the Pakistani government appears to be over.
Separately, a software company that makes it possible for users in countries like China to get access to blocked sites told me they鈥檇 seen a big spike in traffic from Pakistan over the last two days, so it looks as though many people were already getting round the ban.
It still isn鈥檛 entirely clear why the campaign to prevent Pakistani users getting access to YouTube ended up causing a worldwide outage on Sunday. But network engineers seem pretty sure that it was a mistake. The most detailed account I鈥檝e seen is in this of Arbor Networks.
After including a helpful (pdf link) from the telling ISPs to block YouTube, Mr McPherson goes on to outline in painstaking detail just how they might have set about that task. He concludes that it was unlikely that the impact beyond Pakistan鈥檚 borders was intentional 鈥 but expresses concerns about what the whole incident says about the security of what he describes as 鈥渢his extremely fragile and vulnerable piece of infrastructure.鈥
Still, the fact that YouTube is now back in action in Pakistan makes me revise my thoughts on the clash between governments and the freedom of speech and thought which the internet promises. Yesterday I thought it was a case of Government 1, Internet 0. Now it looks as though, the internet has struck back with a couple of late goals.
UPDATE 16:57:
The plot thickens. Pakistan's Telecoms Authority now says it has unblocked YouTube because the offending clip - a trailer for a supposedly anti-Islamic film by a Dutch politician - has been removed. "I've been told that this video has been taken out and we have issued instructions to unblock this website," PTA chairman Shahzada Alam Malik told APTV.
Google says it never comments on individual YouTube videos. All a spokesman would tell me is this: "When we receive complaints about videos we review them against our terms of use - which include things like pornography or gratuitous violence or hate speech - and where videos break those rules we remove them."
He wasn't happy at my suggestion that YouTube had blinked. But I'm putting that down as another goal for the government - making it Government 2, Internet 2.
Phil Harrison's surprise goodbye
- 26 Feb 08, 03:22 GMT
Phil Harrison has from Sony as president of their worldwide studios.
So that's why he wasn't doing any interviews at GDC this year!!
I had a chance to grab a few words with Phil Harrison last week at an event organised by developer Dave Perry. Before going to San Francisco I had asked to speak with him but had been told by Sony's PR team that Phil was stepping away somewhat from being seen as the face/voice of Sony games development.
Of course, all the pieces fit now. It's clear this was not a dramatic departure but one Sony had been aware of for sometime.
Quite how long is unclear - as is Mr Harrison's reasons for leaving the firm, especially now that many of the PlayStation 3's launch problems are dissolving.
I have no insider knowledge on why he's left. All I can say is that he was very relaxed and pointedly frank last week during a roundtable discussion on the future of gaming.
Within a few minutes of conversation he had criticised Sony in Japan for not seeing the value in social gaming early enough and predicted the death of consoles by declaring that public utility computing - ie gaming over the network - was the industry's future.
His frankness is also more easily understood now.
So where will he go? The bigger publishers have lots of developer studios all around the world these days so Phil Harrison's skills would be welcome at someone like EA or Ubisoft, I'm sure. There are rumours of a move to Atari, although the source on this is cloudy and I wonder if they are high profile enough.
But I'm often wrong...
One final point - when I finished chatting to Phil I suggested we catch up on my return to London and he agreed.
So Phil, if you're still interested in meeting up, I'd love to hear what's on the horizon.
Drop me an e-mail: darrenDOTwatersATbbcDOTcoDOTuk
Going live from a mobile
- 25 Feb 08, 19:35 GMT
Mobile phones are transforming into multimedia devices. From photos to GPS and video phones are being put to extreme challenges.
One Silicon Valley based firm, Qik.com, has developed a tool which turns your phone into a live broadcasting system.
I'm meeting the CEO of Qik later today and will be broadcasting the interview live on my phone - a first for the Dot.Life blog, and probably a first for 麻豆官网首页入口 News.
You can watch the interview here live from about 00.30 GMT (Tuesday) or 1630 PST (Monday).
UPDATE: So I "went live" from my mobile phone for the first time today. I did a quick interview with the CEO of Qik.com Ramu Sunkara and then sat down with some of the firm's staff to discuss life as a start-up and to get a measure of their ambitions.
The first thing to note is that the technology works as advertised. Qik is a piece of software you download to your phone that both buffers and sends footage back in real time to the Qik servers, which transcode the video into flash.
You can embed your Qik "channel" on pretty much any website and people can watch your exploits live, leave comments, or watch the video back later as it sits on Qik's servers.
Qik is a great example of how mobile phones are taking full advantage of technologies which are collapsing into one device - multimedia capabilities, messaging, always on connections and the robustness of the phone's operating system.
But for Qik to ultimately succeed it requires the coalescence of a number of things - first the continued evolution of network capability, which is a bit of a given.
Then the removal of costs barriers around data charges, which appears to happening.
Finally, it needs a paradigm shift in how people approach mobile video because the "live" element changes everything.
The great strength of mobile handsets is that they transcend space and time. Video can be recorded and then played back on the net, via sites like YouTube, whenever we want.
Do we want our lives to be actually "live"?
Ramu Sunkara believes we do.
I think Qik offers great potential for bloggers, citizen journalists and potentially professional broadcasters.
As Flash codecs improve and bandwidth on cell networks develop there is terrific scope to do some of our reporting live via a phone.
The big question for Qik is how can they make money?
Bhaskar Roy from the firm told me that Qik is currently focused on its community, growing its users and improving the experience.
The firm also sees itself as a potential mobile video partner for third parties - and I was told of one such arrangement the firm will announce in a few weeks time.
My one question that keeps nagging at the back of mind though is - does the mainstream want to broadcast live from a phone? What do you think?
YouTube and Pakistan - how did it happen?
- 25 Feb 08, 14:30 GMT
Just before Darren Waters broke the story about YouTube's outage last night, I was fielding calls from friends questioning my technical competence. I had posted a video of a recent ski-ing holiday on YouTube, and emailed the link to my fellow skiers - only to hear from them that the video just wouldn't play.
So I was rather relieved to discover that it was a global outage - rather than my incompetence - which was frustrating my friends and millions of other YouTube users. At first Google told me it was unlikely to have anything to do with Pakistan, or the row over alleged anti-Islamic material on the site.
But by this morning YouTube's owners had decided otherwise - and released this statement:
"For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the internet community to prevent this from happening again."
Hmmmm - well I'm not sure that makes it a lot clearer. But here is how a spokesman from the - which handles huge amounts of internet traffic - explained it to me, with great patience.
So the Pakistani authorities order the country's ISPs to block access to YouTube. That is done by the country's telecoms provider sending out what is, in effect, a new - and false - route to get to YouTube. The result is that any traffic from Pakistani users to YouTube gets directed into a cul-de-sac. So far, so normal, for any country - China, Turkey, Iran - which decides to control its population's access to certain websites.
But what appears to have happened in this case is that the dodgy route map somehow leaked beyond Pakistan's borders, and was adopted by the giant Asian telecoms business . Once it started broadcasting this new way to find YouTube, the rest of the world's ISPs altered their maps, sending everyone up the wrong road.
Which all raises some interesting issues. The internet is an open self-correcting mechanism which runs on trust - if someone announces a new route to YouTube, others will take it as read that they are acting in good faith.
What we need to know now is whether this was a mistake or a deliberate attempt by Pakistan to disrupt YouTube beyond its own borders. Google still isn't sure - but it must now be aware that it and other global businesses are vulnerable to attacks from hostile governments.
A decade ago it was widely assumed that the internet would defeat attempts by governments to control freedom of speech and thought. But in this latest encounter the score looks like Government 1 - Internet 0.
PlayStation bounces back
- 24 Feb 08, 23:30 GMT
It was hard not to spot the optimism beaming from both Sony execs and developers about the future at the Game Developers Conference last week.
The concerns and hushed whispers at last year's GDC about whether Sony had made fatal errors with the platform's launch have given way to positivity.
Sony's Phil Harrison, head of worldwide studios, looked relaxed when I spoke with him on Thursday, although that may have been more to do with the fact he was not giving a keynote this year and was able to enjoy some of the sessions.
I had spoken to Mark Rein, of Epic, earlier in the week and he told me he had never doubted that PlayStation 3 would be anything other than a success. Of course Epic did release on PS3 this week so his comments have to be seen in that light.
UT is the kind of franchise PlayStation has been crying out for - a hard core first person shooter with credibility. The Xbox has long been seen as the platform of choice for FPS fans who don't play on PC.
The 360 of course has Halo 3 and many feel that game set the benchmark for online FPS play.
Mark Rein told me: "We've surpassed what Halo 3 offered."
I'll let you - the readers - argue over that one.
Epic are one of the finest exponents of hard core action titles and UT's availability on the PS3 before the Xbox 360 will delight Sony.
In term of what's to come for the PS3 I was given a sneak peek at titles in the works in London two weeks ago.
Unsurprisingly, sequels for the platform's biggest launch titles are in the works. Cynics will say that studios are merely fixing problems in the original versions, the result perhaps of having to rush the titles out in time for launch.
Here's what I was shown:
Motorstorm 2 is due out in time for Christmas and moves the action away from the desert locale of the original. Gamers will be able to race around a lush island environment, full of interactive vegetation.
The game will feature four-player split-screen action, righting one of the obvious failings of the first game.
The title is some months away from completion but the game's engine looked rock solid and the graphics were as impressive as one would expect from one of the best-looking racing franchises.
Resistance Fall of Man was a bit of a disappointment when it was released. The game promised much but suffered from a lack of originality and flat game design. The world the designers had created was interesting but playing in it felt dull.
So what will Resistance 2 offer? I was shown only a trailer but it's clear developers Insomniac want to make a statement. Online the game will host 60 players simultaneously. It screams epic and tellingly it concludes with the line: "You haven't seen what we are truly capable of."
So what else was I shown? Well, I was shown a trailer for a game not due out till 2009 but was sworn to absolute secrecy. Apparently, Sony just wanted to give a glimpse of what the console will be capable of.
In fact, the game is such a secret that when I mentioned the game to Phil Harrison last week he was unsure at first whether even to admit the title existed. When I explained I had been shown it under strict Non Disclosure Agreement terms he looked relieved.
I don't mean to be a tease - all I can say is that I was left speechless. If the footage I was shown truly is "in game", as told to me by the Sony PR people, then we could be on the brink of a step change in what games consoles are capable of in terms of story-telling and immersion.
And there I'll leave it. Feel free to speculate on what I was shown. I cannot, of course, confirm or deny what it was....
Learning more mobile lessons
- 24 Feb 08, 20:51 GMT
I've just spent a week using my mobile phone - a Nokia N95 - almost exclusively to blog text and video back to the Dot.Life blog.
It's been a steep learning curve but I thought I'd share what has worked and what hasn't.
The original aim was to use the phone to test the limits of what was possible with these devices and examine how the web can be used as a vehicle for delivering content more quickly to the blog.
The positives:
I've been impressed with the video quality of the N95. It tends to drop out when moving the device around but if you can keep it steady then you'll get decent footage, in decent light.
I've used a tripod for some of the filming, but given that the phone wasn't designed to work with a tripod I've had to strap it on in the most clumsy manner.
Most of the stuff I've done handheld and this gives more freedom to move around the subject matter. I could have then edited footage together to make a more polished package but that was never the aim.
I've been using an application called to do the heavy lifting of filing my video. Shozu is a free application and you can set it to send content to a number of different places, including YouTube, Blip.TV, blogs and even FTP.
I have it set to send to the 麻豆官网首页入口's FTP servers, for example. The application will also send photos to places like Flickr, and can move between using your cell network or an available wi-fi hotspot.
The ability to file to a third party website, like Blip.TV, means we can get video from the phone and on the blog often within 30 minutes. It's not always the case that we will need that sort of speed but having the option gives us more flexibility.
I can also envisage a time when for breaking news purposes the ability to shoot video and deliver it back to the 麻豆官网首页入口 quickly and in reasonable quality - without the use of a satellite connection - is very useful indeed. I have resolved to always have this equipment with me.
I've been very impressed with people's attitudes to pulling out a mobile phone and suggesting we shoot some video. I had expected people to be horrified but in fact most people were extremely receptive and many were impressed by the novelty.
The negatives:
The N95's internal microphone was designed to deliver phone conversations and not audio from filming. We tried unsuccessfully to get a broadcast mic into the phone and attempts to have Nokia loan us an adaptor they have made for such a purpose failed. To be fair to Nokia the adaptor is not commercially available and they couldn't build one for us in the timeframe we presented them.
I've effectively had to do interviews twice to get the material I need for both the website, for radio and on the mobile phone. Shooting two minutes of video is fun but I was not getting the quotes, background info etc I needed for a fuller written piece. So my working methodology was to do the interview for radio or online first and then shoot a bit of video.
The Bluetooth keyboard I have been using works well enough but it is rather fiddly to type on.
Unsurprisingly, shooting video and sending it back to websites using wi-fi or the cell network drains the battery very quickly. Luckily I had spares to hand.
Follow up:
I'm testing out later in the week for live video broadcasting from the phone. I'm excited about the potential.
YouTube goes down
- 24 Feb 08, 19:54 GMT
A few friends have alerted me to a possible outage at YouTube. I certainly can't get on to the service.
According to some, YouTube has been down for more than an hour....
I'll be keeping an eye on it from my Twitter account. Follow me .
I've been using to look for people's comments about YouTube on Twitter. A very cool web app. Look .
Lots of people on Twitter are linking to block YouTube with the current - seemingly global - outage. I'd be surprised if there was a link as the net doesn't work that way...
UPDATE: I've contacted a Google PR in London who says the service is working for him but is checking on the issue. There are mixed reports - some are saying it is back, others not.
UPDATE TWO: David Ulevitch of OpenDNS that "Pakistan Telecom has decided to (accidentally probably) hijack their IP address space".
UPDATE THREE: I'm just writing a news story on this. Looks like Pakistan's attempts to hijack the YouTube IP addresses internally led to ISPs blocking the site globally.
UPDATE FOUR: There will definitely be some fall out from this. It would seem that all it takes to hijack a website globally is for a telecoms firm to instruct its ISPs that they now run a domain, and for one of those ISPs to announce that globally. So that other ISPs follow suit in a piggyback chain of confusion.
As one net engineer told me:
It is exactly like the "game of telephone" that kids play. For example, Pakistan Telecom says "I am responsible for 1.2.3.4 (some IP address)" and then they tell PCCW. PCCW tells Verizon Business and NTT and others. NTT tells us and so when my customers ask "Where is Youtube, we're just answering based on what we've heard..." But all we know is that we heard it from NTT who heard it from PCCW who heard it from Pakistan Telecom. If Pakistan Telecom was lying (or made a mistake), we'd have no way to verify it.
Just shoot me
- 22 Feb 08, 23:43 GMT
Gaming's obsession with immersion is never ending. We've had HD, 3D, brain control and now you can strap on a jacket and helmet and feel the force of shots on your body and to your head.
FPS jacket and headset is a peripheral designed to get you closer to the action.
The vest was developed by a US surgeon, Dr Mark Ombrellaro, originally as a medical diagnostic tool for tele-health, to do heath checks remotely.
There are eight air pressure units in the jacket and four in the helmet. Each time you are shot, or damaged in the game, you feel it on the jacket.
It's most dramatic when you are hit in the head.
The jacket and headset works with a limited range of titles, including Half Life 2 and Doom 3, but there is an API for developers to adapt their games.
So... can you imagine strapping this on and playing?
Facebook - back to the kids?
- 22 Feb 08, 11:20 GMT
Facebook - it's so over. That's been the tenor of most of the commentary since showing a slight dip in Facebook's UK users. The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true - that Facebook's new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.
Facebook was already well established on every student campus in Spring 2007, when it grabbed the attention of the London media. Suddenly every national newspaper and broadcaster was desperate to write about it - and I was one of the worst offenders. Stories I did for the Radio 4 Today programme and for asked whether people like me were too old for social networking. They got than just about anything I have ever written, with over a thousand people getting in touch to assure me that socialising online was not just for students. I soon found myself connecting with hundreds of people on Facebook - many of whom I did not know from Adam - and rather enjoyed this new virtual social life.
I suspect the same thing was happening in newsrooms - and other workplaces - across Britain, as an older generation decided that if the kids were finding it impossible to run their lives without Facebook, it must be worth trying. That all helped propel Mark Zuckerberg's company to the top of the social networking league in the UK, with 8.9 million users by the end of 2007. But by then I was already finding that many of my wrinklier Facebook friends had tired of the ceaseless vampire-biting, hugging, poking and other daft aspects of the increasingly cluttered and annoying site. Their status updates started to say "...falling out of love with Facebook" and then they disappeared altogether.
But I see no signs that on the campuses where it all started Facebook fatigue has set in. A few weeks ago I did a story with a student who was having trouble deleting - but when I suggested that he delete his Facebook profile too, he was not keen. For him, and hundreds of thousands like him, a student social life was still dependent on Facebook.
I'm still using Facebook - though less compulsively than before - but I suspect that most of the over-25 age group will now find they can live without it. That still leaves a large core audience, but one that Facebook may find slightly harder to sell to the advertisers on whom its future depends. And that means that $15bn valuation that Microsoft put on the business when it bought a small stake last year looks more fanciful than ever.
The next 3D revolution?
- 22 Feb 08, 04:30 GMT
This year's Consumer Electronics Show had a number of 3D TV technologies on show. And now similar technology has turned up at GDC.
Graphics giant Nvidia has developed technology than can give games a true 3D perspective using polarising glasses and stereoscopic display systems.
Nvidia's system uses software drivers which split the video output into two views, which are slightly out of alignment.
The demo system I was shown had a 46inch television, which had a passive polarising filter over the screen. It takes each scan line from the images and selects it either for the left or right eye.
The glasses map those views to the appropriate eye. Without the glasses you see the two views.
Nvidia say developers don't have to do any extra work for their games to work with the system - but do have to follow some rules.
About 80 games will work with the system at launch, which comes in a few weeks.
So how effective is it? From the demo I was shown, very.
But what I was shown was pretty limited - a menu screen for Age of Empires III, which rendered a townscape into an impressive diorama which felt like you could reach in and touch roof tops and people at the back of the view.
The other demo was a flight simulator and that proved very effective. A sense of depth when flying is very valuable and it definitely aided the experience.
The TV it was being demonstrated on cost more than $6,000 but I'm told there are compatible displays for under $1,000.
Quite who is willing to pay out for such an embryonic technology remains to be seen.
Lunch with Luminaries
- 22 Feb 08, 02:31 GMT
What happens when you gather some of the games industry's and get them to tackle some of the biggest issues facing their business?
You get one hell of a conversation.
I was lucky enough today to sit in on the Lunch with Luminaries, an event pulled together by stellar developer Dave Perry and involving veteran designer Peter Molyneux, one of the pioneers of online gaming Raph Koster, the head of EA's LA studio, Neil Young, Sony's head of worldwide studios Phil Harrison and Chris Taylor, the creator of Dungeon Siege.
About 10 journalists were invited to the lunch and we sat there mostly silent as the proceedings unfolded. We had been invited to chip in with questions but we all sat there just listening, furiously scribbling notes.
At times it felt like listening in on a private conversation because the participants were by and large frank and open:
Phil Harrison was complaining how Sony in Japan had dismissed social gaming, something the company in Europe had been pioneering with Buzz and Singstar.
He said: "And our Japanese colleagues said that there is no such thing as social gaming in Japan 鈥 people do not play games on the same sofa together in each other's homes. It will never happen. And then out comes the Wii."
Harrison also lauded Apple for their iPhone user interface, and then pondered if they would license their patents....
Peter Molyneux got so excited about a new feature in his upcoming game Fable 2 but wasn't able to discuss it publicly so we all went "off the record" to hear it.
I can't divulge it obviously - but believe me when I say it's very very exciting.
Almost everyone agreed that the Wii had broken great new ground and was seen by many consumers as the true "next generation" console.
Neil Young of EA predicted a future where all game content was piped from a server owned by Google.
Raph Koster said the web was "kicking the ass" of consoles when it comes to game creativity
The rise of Facebook was much discussed, as was the need for the industry to learn from social networks and the web in iterating and learning from its customers more quickly.
And on it went.
I've written up a with one of the key points of the lunch. And I'll put down more here as I transcribe the encounter.
Pushing on all Frontiers
- 21 Feb 08, 16:41 GMT
You would think that that the promise of a next generation game that will change the way people play and perceive gaming would be enough to keep David Braben and his team at Frontier busy.
But the company continues to work along several fronts - on six projects in total - and alongside continuing development of , the firm has produced a Nintendo Wii game, called , which is part of the console's WiiWare online offerings.
I sat down with Braben and fellow Frontier exec David Walsh, to talk about the game, and get their thoughts on a number of issues in the industry.
LostWinds is a classic platform title but has a novel control system: it uses the Wii's Wiimote and Nunchuck in tandem to control the main character and your sidekick, a wind spirit.
"It's an intuitive control mechanism. No one's really tried this before," says Walsh.
"The game came out of a process we have at Frontier called Game of the Week, a forum we have to discuss game ideas."
I make the mistake of calling the game a "casual" title and Braben visibly winces.
"This compartmentalisation (of games) is risky because it brings assumptions. Is it because of the subject matter? Is it the difficulty? Is Bioshock a casual game?
"People would shout from the rooftops if you say it is a casual game. The term can be interpreted as 'casual development' - and that is the wring mindset. You still have to do a good game and just because it's aimed at a different audience doesn't mean you can't do a good game.
"It doesn't mean they are lesser games and my worry is that people who use the term don't respect the fact that the audience still need to be given a quality game."
So how can Frontier afford to devote resources to games like LostWinds when there is so much riding on The Outsider?
"The process we use is common across all projects, so it's easy to plug and play," explains Walsh. "12 people worked on this game in all. Teams ramp up and ramp down at various stages of projects."
Frontier has expanded to 160 people and the firm is continuing its trawl for high quality staff.
Braben and Walsh aren't in San Francisco to talk about The Outsider but Braben will say that "development is coming along nicely".
A publisher deal has been made, he says, but he is not in a position to divulge details.
With such a high profile, and presumably expensive, game in development I ask Braben if he would sell the studio to Microsoft if they came knocking. Would he do as Peter Molyneux did at Lionhead.
His answer is revealing.
"On the face of it no; there may be things we could do together... and in some cases clearly the answer has to be yes.
"Retaining the freedom is the key thing. I would not want to be bought by a company and go in with good intentions and feel after the event things were not right."
He adds: "To give more meat to the answer: 'not now' because now our value is not appreciated.
"In two years time our value will be very very apparent."
He says the company is under appreciated because "there are things we can't talk about" .
"I think The Outsider will make a very big difference to how people perceive games; there will be other games as well which do this.
"We are being valued based on where we were two years ago because that is what is being shown publicly."
Roll on December 2009 when The Outsider is expected to be released.
Sid Meier gets Civilized
- 21 Feb 08, 02:55 GMT
is one of the games industry's true giants - so when he speaks about games people tend to listen.
The queue outside the Q&A session told its own story, wanting to hear from the man who co-founded Microprose, developed Railway Tycoon and, of course, .
He is this year's recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Conference and still highly active, currently at work on a new Civilization sequel, called Revolution.
"We're starting with a blank slate on Revolution. But I also want to do the things I wish I'd been able to do the first time," he said.
"Designers dream of being able to go back in time and repair the past."
Meier, together with Bill Stealey, pioneered simulation games on home computers.
His biggest success, Civilization, is one of the most popular strategy games of all time.
"We went into it with the philosophy of making it as fun as it could be," he said.
"I did not expect the game to be as addictive as it was. It was quite scary.
"We had broken through to a new level of seeing the future of games. We were struggling at that point with being seen as geeky people.
"It was a kind of portent of how games could be something people want to spend a lot of time playing."
His insight into why people play games was fascinating.
"People actively enjoy learning as part of playing games. People don't like to be educated but they do like to learn."
He also explained why he still created games.
"I write games to play a game that hasn't been written yet. I do feel the games I create are games that haven鈥檛 been written yet but fill a void."
But most pertinently when asked why his games were addictive, he turned the question on its head.
"I鈥檓 more intrigued why people don鈥檛 play games: I think they are tonnes of fun and a great way to exercise your mind and do cool things you could never do in real life."
More Gears for the Xbox 360
- 20 Feb 08, 20:24 GMT
Microsoft has faced some criticism in the last few months that its 2008 line-up was looking thin and that a resurgent Sony PlayStation 3 would trample on the console.
People pointed out that in 2007, despite a line-up which included Halo 3, Mass Effect and Bioshock, the console was only truly dominant (ie heavily outsold the PS3) in the US and UK.
The Nintendo Wii of course outsold both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
At the Game Developers Conference Microsoft decided to pull out one of its big guns and try and stave off the growing chatter that the console was in for a difficult 12 months.
At the end of a keynote speech delivered by the firm's head of Live services, John Schappert, Microsoft announced a follow-up to the multi-award winning Gears of War.
A teaser trailer was shown to delegates, which really gave nothing away, and the game's lead designer Cliffy B said it would be out in November and would be "bigger, better and more badass".
Crucially the game's developer Epic had been on stage earlier in the keynote showing off the latest features of its Unreal engine and used Gears of War characters and locations to show what it was now capable of.
It's no leap of logic to assume that those features will appear in Gears 2.
They include: more dynamic lighting, destructible environments, new water effects and flocking attributes for large numbers of characters on a screen at one time.
For Epic Gears of War 2 will be the ultimate poster boy for what its engine is capable of.
For Microsoft Gears of War 2 will be the ultimate rebuke to those who feel the console will suffer in the months ahead.
The game comes as no surprise - the first title was such a success Microsoft would have paid anything to get a sequel.
The criticism that Microsoft faces is that a blockbuster title like Gears of War 2 does nothing to bring new audiences to gamers; it just keeps the fan boys happy.
Zennstrom and the TV Revolution
- 20 Feb 08, 08:53 GMT
must be the most important digital entrepreneur to have emerged in Europe over the last five years. He has given us free music with the file-sharing service, free phone calls through , and is now touting free television through his service. He has pioneered technologies which threaten to disrupt the music, telecoms and television industries - his only problem has been how to prove they can be profitable.
Last year Joost raised $45 million from investors - after initial funding from Zennstrom and his Skype co-founder - to launch a platform enabling TV firms to put their content in front of a global audience. There was a lot of hype and hope about this advertising-supported platform which was going to be the big winner from the internet television revolution, just as Skype had made internet telephony take off.
But when I interviewed Niklas Zennstrom at a networking event in London this week, he conceded that Joost was going to take a lot longer to reach a big audience than Skype, partly because of the need to reach complex deals with media owners. And when I asked when he expected to turn a profit, he made it clear that was so far off it wasn't worth talking about now.
Once you download the Joost software, you do get access to an awful lot of television for nothing. But it's difficult to get very excited about what is on offer - whether it's old movies or the "Motors & Babes" channel - and indeed there are complaints on the discussion forum about the poor content.
Zennstrom insists that Joost does not need blockbuster programming, like the Premier League football on which BskyB built its business. He believes this global platform can prosper by serving viewers with all sorts of special interests, from fly-fishing enthusiasts to gadget fans. What's not clear to me is why a large audience will go to the bother of installing software without the lure of something they can't get anywhere else.
2007 was supposed to be the year that internet television took off, with the launch of a whole clutch of services with wacky names and big ambitions. But two things have happened - the viewers have been slower to take to online TV than expected, and the big established broadcasters have launched their own platforms, keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry which handed the digital initiative to Apple's iTunes service.
Still, the Swedish serial entrepreneur has a track record of producing services that people want to use and tell their friends about, so maybe Joost will take off. Niklas Zennstrom is sensitive about suggestions that he is better at innovation than commercialisation - he insists that Skype is now profitable, despite Ebay's $1.4 billion write-down of the business it bought in 2005. But he may have to prove that his internet television operation can make money before moving on to his next world-changing venture.
Gaming with the power of your mind
- 20 Feb 08, 01:39 GMT
The humble controller has long been a blessing and a curse of gaming. For many people it is a barrier, which is partly why Nintendo's Wii has been so successful.
The Wiimote makes gaming more intuitive and natural. But what about going several steps further and removing the controller altogether?
US/Australian firm Emotiv believe they have done just that with their - a neuroheadset which interprets the neural activity in the brain.
With it you can control action in a game with your thoughts and emotions; attacking creatures with an angry face or lifting objects by just thinking of the movement.
I was shown a demo this afternoon and the technology shows great promise. But to be clear - the headset doesn't mean you can strap on and run around Halo 3 blasting away at enemies just by thinking.
All of the actions I saw demonstrated were quite considered and slow paced. There was little sense that the device can translate thought to action in milliseconds - the kind of time frame needed for FPS games.
The Epoc will need the support of developers if it is to succeed and to that end Emotiv has released an SDK (software development kit).
Hopefully developers will rise to the challenge because this area of immersion and control could prove to be the breakthrough gaming has longed for.
Nokia push games as converged media
- 19 Feb 08, 22:49 GMT
Nokia have made some of the biggest noises at this year's Games Developer Conference, re-launching its NGage platform and committing to games as one of the key services of the converged world.
, the firms executive vice president for markets, gave one of the keynotes at this year's mobile conference.
In it he challenged game developers to make games that take advantage of the mobile phone - the new graphics capabilities, its location based services, its camera, in essence the phone's place as an always on, always converged device.
Nokia needs to succeed where it failed last time around. The original NGage was a device but now it has been re-born as a service; a platform for games that works on a range of handsets.
The problem for Nokia is that the mobile game market has not taken off as many observers had expected. It may be a $5bn industry but less than 5% of mobile users tend to play games.
Nokia is trying to fix many of the problems inherent in gaming - letting users try out games before they buy them, making it easier to find and download games, and pushing titles that take advantage of the phone as a device.
The challenge is huge, not least because the mobile phone market is so dynamic and subject to pressures and forces beyond Nokia's control, such as data charges, network bandwidth, the carrier's attitude to gaming etc.
It will be interesting to see what happens because if everything goes to Nokia's plans then the Finnish company could well join the big boys of gaming: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
Going beyond Tetris
- 19 Feb 08, 17:44 GMT
Classic puzzler Tetris is the world's most successful mobile phone game. It is the number one played, bought and downloaded game in every country in the world that offers games on your phone.
But if you thought mobile phones were only able to play Tetris, or games like Snake, think again.
The current generation of handsets - from the Nokia N95 to the NTTDocomo 905 series - have enough power to offer gaming experiences not unlike late PlayStation One, early PlayStation 2 games.
I've just been chatting to a British firm, Imagination Technologies, which develops dedicated graphics accelerators for mobile phones. It produces a bit of silicon that is incorporated into chips made by firms like Texas Instruments and Intel.
And the results are impressive. I'm writing a longer feature for the 麻豆官网首页入口 News website which looks at the development of mobile phone games and some of the issues around why the industry has yet to really take off.
But take a look at the video above - shot on a Nokia N95, as is all my stuff this week.
麻豆官网首页入口 programmes on your iPod
- 19 Feb 08, 09:53 GMT
Now this is an in-house story, so I'm going to have to strive even harder than usual to remain impartial, but that 麻豆官网首页入口 programmes are now on sale on seems really significant to me.
The idea is that after getting access to 麻豆官网首页入口 content for nothing for eight days via the iPlayer, you will then be able to pay 拢1.89 to download and own a programme from iTunes. It is the first time the 麻豆官网首页入口 has asked UK viewers to pay to download content, and it will be interesting to see how they react. Millions have been happy to pay for DVDs of series like Little Britain - but will they react differently when they are asked to shell out for something they can't stick on a shelf?
But what is really different about this move is that it makes TV portable. I've just downloaded an episode of Life On Mars, which I will then be able to view on my computer, or on my television - or transfer to an iPod or iPhone so that I can watch it on the tube on the way to work.
Atlast week there was a lot of excitement about media on the move, but not many new ideas about getting compelling content to users. This seems a step forward in that respect.
The iTunes launch is a way for the 麻豆官网首页入口 to try out a concept before the much more ambitious which will see a number of broadcasters come together with a platform offering thousands of hours of current and archive programming for paid downloading.
Of course, some are already swapping 麻豆官网首页入口 content for free using file-sharing software - and as the music industry has found it's difficult to get people to pay for something they can get - albeit illegally - for nothing. But, once you've handed over your credit card details, buying a programme from iTunes is an awful lot easier and more reliable than hunting it down on the web and trying to suck it into your computer. The 麻豆官网首页入口 - and other broadcasters - will be hoping that millions of viewers will now choose the simple option.
Red ring of death returns
- 19 Feb 08, 02:41 GMT
Microsoft wants consumers to believe that its with the Xbox 360 console in terms of hardware failure are over.
But wandering through the Game Developers Conference halls and it's clear that the problem persists.
On Microsoft's own stand at the show one of the demo consoles has a rather familiar problem - the red ring of death. There's no way of knowing if this particular console was manufactured before or after Microsoft identified the problems with the machines.
But at the very least it's embarrassing for the company that its own stock of demo machines are still susceptible to the problem.
Bungie: Life after Halo 3
- 18 Feb 08, 21:28 GMT
Bungie remain one of the games industry's great enigmas: starting life as a Mac developer, they embraced the PC, got bought by the world's most powerful software company (Microsoft), produced one of the world's biggest entertainment franchises (Halo) and then decided they wanted to be an independent studio once more and left the warm embrace of Gates et al.
Chris Butcher, the firm's engineering lead, is at the Game Developers' Conference to give a post-mortem on Halo 3 - what lessons did they learn?
I sat down with Chris to talk about life after Master Chief and it turns out that Bungie and the green giant are still very much an item.
Bungie plans on supporting Halo 3 for some time to come, with downloadable content and updates to the game's play system. The firm has always had its community in mind and has no intention of abandoning Halo.
It's a lesson other developers should learn - far too often companies release titles then wash their hands of the product, or stay strangely silent on "issues" in the game found by players.
Bungie remains tight lipped on what is come from the studio. Chris did say that the company was committed to remaining small - so don't expect the company to be working on a number of new projects all at once.
Tilt to play - on a phone
- 18 Feb 08, 19:18 GMT
The best thing about the Game Developers Conference is that you can bump into the unexpected at any time.
Wandering back from a keynote speech I saw a man playing a 3D racing game on his Nokia N95 and he was controlling the action just by tilting the phone left or right, up or down.
I'd never seen this before - certainly not on a mobile. Mitri Wiberg, from Swedish firm Polarbit, told me that Nokia had included an accelerometer in the N95 but had not given developers access to the feature until very recently.
The accelerometer means that the phone can be used just liked Sony's Playstation 3 controller, and potentially like the Wiimote for the Nintendo, if used in conjunction with Bluetooth.
Mitri's simple demonstration shows that mobile phones can find a way to bypass the problems inherent with playing games on a handset, nameley the small buttons and form factor.
It's also indicative of a wider trend - finding more natural human machine interfaces that make gaming more accessible.
Is gaming's future mobile?
- 18 Feb 08, 19:08 GMT
I'm talking to a lot of people at the Game Developers' Conference this week about mobile gaming.
Games on your phone have been the "next big thing" for many, many years but the industry has yet to go truly mainstream.
I've just been talking to Michel Guillemot, the head of Gameloft, the world's largest distributor of mobile games, and I'll be writing up his thoughts in a piece on the 麻豆官网首页入口 News website but I thought I'd detail some of the points he made. (Apologies for the audio on the video above - he was very softly spoken)
Every second two Gameloft titles are downloaded somewhere in the world. Last year the firm grew by 40% and its revenues topped $140m.
But Gameloft's rude health is not reflected in the industry at large: Mr Guillemot told me that 90% of mobile game publishers are losing money.
Yet he's predicting healthy things for the industry, propelled by new hardware, expanding services and a fresh attitude from carriers.
More immersive 3D games, real time multiplayer and touch controlled games are on the horizon.
By 2012 mobile phones will be able to play the kinds of games seen on consoles just two or three years ago, he said.
"The evolution of phones is moving five times quicker than consoles," he said.
So what do you think? Are you a mobile gamer? Can you imagine yourself playing games on your phone?
HD-DVD - They think it's all over
- 18 Feb 08, 15:18 GMT
The message from Japan this morning is that the - Toshiba says "We are currently assessing our business strategies, but nothing has been decided at this moment." But you'll struggle to find anyone in the business who believes that HD-DVD players will still be coming off the production lines six months from now.
First, the movie studios moved decisively into the camp, then giant American retailers like Wal-Mart followed suit. You can still get HD-DVD players in some stores and online. But the prices tell their own story. On Amazon today you can buy what looks like quite a with two movies chucked in. Bearing in mind that you could have paid four times as much a year ago, it looks like the fire-sale is starting.
For all those who've invested billions in getting both HD formats off the ground the end will come as a relief. Even Toshiba will able to refocus its business and stop pouring money down the drain - and its shares have risen today in anticipation of the lifting of the HD-DVD burden.
Sony will be celebrating and preparing a marketing blitz for Blu-Ray. But it may not reap the same rewards as its opponents in the of the early 1980s. For nearly two decades VHS was the only medium for recording and watching television. But Blu-Ray will have fierce competition from the online alternatives. Right now, few people have the bandwidth or storage to make downloading an HD movie an attractive option, but that will change.
The real losers though are those who have bought an HD-DVD player. Sure, they will be able to continue playing the discs they've already acquired and old DVDs. But they may choose instead to put the machine in the loft and wait for it to become a valuable antique.
MacBook Air - Light and Heavy
- 18 Feb 08, 11:53 GMT
It started so badly. My first few hours with the were full of frustration as I struggled - and failed - to import data and settings from my old computer. To make this ultra-slim laptop fit into its aluminium casing Apple has had to chuck a lot overboard - including a firewire port - so that means you are completely dependent on wireless technology to import your data or install new software. And for me - and plenty of others as far as I can see from online discussions - Apple's new migration assistant did not work.
But from then on life with the Air just got better and better. I took the laptop with me to Barcelona and used it as my prime tool for all my reporting from Mobile World Congress. Its sheer portability was a joy - when you're racing around a crowded congress site, a 1.4 kg load feels an awful lot better on your back than the 2.4 kg machine I normally carry.
The 13" screen is very bright and clear, there is a fully featured keyboard, and the Air coped with just about everything I threw at it - from checking the web, to editing audio and video, to uploading video via FTP. I had thought that I might miss a few more ports, a DVD-drive, and a removable battery. In fact, only the lack of a spare battery was a worry but every three or four hours I found somewhere to plug in.
The MacBook Air comes with Apple's latest operating system, Leopard, which features some decent - if not dramatic - new features. I also downloaded and installed three applications - iMovie 6 (Apple appears to recognise that iMovie 8 is a backwards step, so makes the later version available as a free download), a free audio editing programme Audacity, and Open Office, the open source productivity programme.
Which brings me to one complaint, common to all Apple computers. Where is the word processor or the spreadsheet? Many years ago Apple's Claris Works software came free with a new computer - now you have to choose to pay 拢55 for iWork or between 拢100 and 拢350 for Microsoft Office.
The MacBook Air certainly wins the battle with the Asus rival when it comes to looks. I was besieged in Barcelona whenever I got the notebook out and started working. As a design object it is a worthy successor to the iMac and iPod which have made Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, such a huge influence on the look and feel of the modern gadget.
It's also a pleasure to use - but at a price. I was trying the version with a Solid State Drive, which costs a ludicrous 拢829 extra, but even the standard machine with an 80gb hard drive costs 拢1200. For that money you can get an awful lot of laptop - albeit something rather heavier than the Air - or you can buy half a dozen Asus eee's.
But if money is no object, then the Air lives up to the hype. Just as the iPod was not the first MP3 player and the iPhone was not the first touchscreen phone, the MacBook Air is not the first ultra-slim laptop. But yet again, Apple has succeeded in setting a standard which others will have to try very hard to surpass.
Going ultra light with Asus
- 18 Feb 08, 11:41 GMT
I've never really had cause to complain about the bulk of my laptop - at least, not until I started using the .
After a few days use going back to my Macbook was like swapping a pebble in my pocket for a boulder.
The Asus U1E is undoubtedly a wonderfully mobile computer. It comes packed with all the features you should expect from a laptop - and that includes plenty of USB and Firewire posrts (Apple - take note).
And Asus throws in an external CD/DVD drive for the price. But that price is 拢1,300 - which is a lot of money.
The screen is crisp and the keyboard, while small, is perfectly usable for the road warrior with average size fingers.
Inside the machine there's a 100GB drive, 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
But here's the rub: the CPU clocks at just 1Ghz and so it positively creaks running Vista Business.
I have no idea why Asus has chosen to run the Business edition, or even Vista for that matter. This machine just doesn't have the CPU cycles to pull it off. XP would have been a much better option.
As such it's hard to really judge the machine. As a piece of hardware it is well-engineered, sleek and a joy to have in your laptop bag as it's lighter than many paperback books.
But trying to do any sort of task results in hangs, crashes and problems. Reopening the lid and awakening the machine from sleep can take up to a minute - that's just unacceptable in a modern laptop.
So until Asus improves the processor, or ditches Vista, I'll be lugging round my Macbook and trying to ignore just how heavy my bag feels.
Game Developers Conference kicks off
- 18 Feb 08, 09:58 GMT
The annual gathering of the world's elite developers starts tomorrow in San Francisco and the big question to be answered is this: how on earth will the games industry surpass last year's commercial and critical high?
With record sales and blockbuster titles like Halo 3 and Bioshock 2007 will go down as one of the most successful ever years for the industry.
The has a unique place in the gaming calendar. It's not a content show like or , but games are hyped and given soft-launches at the event.
The show is primarily a chance for the past year's most successful developers to tell the rest of the industry how they managed to build their work of genius and a forum for discussing the big issues and development challenges of the year ahead.
There is a lot to reflect on.
This time last year Sony was beginning its slow path to recovery amidst sniping and predictions of doom.
Microsoft was anticipating the launch of Halo 3 but had not reckoned on the red ring of death controversy.
Nintendo was in the midst of its seemingly unstoppable rise.
So what can we expect this year?
I've spoken to Jamil Moledina, the conference director, and you can read his predictions .
To summarise, mobile and new ways to control video games are at the top of the agenda.
I'll be focusing my efforts on mobile gaming and speaking to some of the biggest names at the show.
If there's a question you want put to Bioshock creator Ken Levine, Peter Molyneux, Bungie's Chris Butcher or EA's Lou Castle, let me know.
End of the road for CompUSA
- 18 Feb 08, 01:21 GMT
CompUSA, the American chain of technology shops, closes its doors for good in a few weeks after admitting defeat at the hands of online shopping and retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City.
I popped into the shop on Market Street in San Francisco yesterday as I wanted to check out the last minute bargains and for reasons of nostalgia - I bought my first ever PDA, an iPaq 1910, from the shop about five years ago.
The shop resembles a jumble sale, with laptops, cables, and software piled high in bins and on shelves with prices slashed: they are selling big name laptops at up to a third off and recent software like OS X Leopard at much reduced prices.
The problem for CompUSA was that the place always resembled something of a jumble sale. It was never easy to find anything and the level of knowledge of sales assistants was pretty poor.
I remember being on the verge of giving up on plans of buying the iPaq until a fellow customer kindly answered some of my queries.
CompUSA failed to adapt to the mainstream-lining of technology; people wanted to join the computer revolution but didn't want to have to think to hard about how, what or which.
So farewell then CompUSA and if you're in need of a cheap coffee pot, then I'd recommend the store on 4th Street (see video above).
Learning mobile lessons
- 15 Feb 08, 10:53 GMT
Hopefully you鈥檝e seen some of the short pieces produced by Rory Cellan Jones from Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.
It鈥檚 part of a project we call rather grandly The Mobile Future, but really it is a low-key trial of mobile video here on the Dot.Life blog.
We鈥檙e keen to explore the mobile space, write about it and learn some lessons along the way.
Principally we want to find out how useful mobiles are as journalist tools, how flexible are the web services for mobile video and discover if the 麻豆官网首页入口 can make use of them in any way.
We鈥檝e started simply: with a mobile phone, a laptop, a wi-fi connection, some online video services and embedding the flash video on the blog.
You can read Rory鈥檚 thoughts on his initial experiences here.
Next week we鈥檙e going to up the ante and try and cut the laptop out of the equation and make use of the phone to both write blogs, record video, send that video over wi-fi or a cell network to the blog and elsewhere.
I鈥檒l be recording the video on an N95 and using a mobile app called Shozu to push the video out to different places. Shozu is a freely available app which does the heavy lifting for me.
The phone uploads the video to Shozu鈥檚 servers and then they push it out to sites like Blip.TV, YouTube and even directly to the 麻豆官网首页入口.
We鈥檙e not affiliated to any of these services or companies; we just wanted to use freely available tools that mobile bloggers have used for ages.
Next week I鈥檓 at the in San Francisco and will be focusing in part on mobile gaming. I鈥檓 also talking to some key mobile players, like Google and Nokia.
Here are the people I鈥檓 talking to and if you want to chip in with any questions or thoughts feel free:
Andy Rubin, creator of Google鈥檚 Android
John Shen, head on Nokia鈥檚 Research Center, Palo Alto
Ramu Sunkara, chief executive of Qik.com
Bob Morgan, Shozu鈥檚 head of operations in North America
Jaakko Kaidesoja, head of Nokia鈥檚 N-Gage platform
Michel Guillemot, chief executive of Gameloft
Aside from the focus on mobile, here are some of the key developers I鈥檓 interviewing
David Braben, head of Frontier games
Peter Molyneux, head of Lionead
Lou Castle, head of creative development EA LA 鈥 and working with Steve Spielberg on a game
I鈥檓 also talking to Havok and Ageia about physics in games, and looking at Nvidia鈥檚 latest graphics technology.
News from a Mobile
- 15 Feb 08, 09:09 GMT
You may have noticed the video clips embedded in this blog over the past few days from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They marked the beginning of an experiment which will see us try out various ways of video blogging from mobile phones. So how was it done - and what do we think of it so far?
I took a number of mobile phones to Barcelona, intending to film with two of them, the Nokia N95 and the LG Viewty. The Viewty can produce better quality video - but I found the battery dies within two hours, so I ended up just using the N95.
The clips were recorded onto a Micro SD card, and then transferred to a laptop, either by bluetooth or via a card-reader. I then used Apple's free iMovie 6 programme (iMovie 8 which ships with current models is a disappointing backward step) to top and tail the clip. iMovie could then compress the clip from something like 80mb to just 6mb for faster uploading.
At first, we uploaded to my own account on Youtube - simple enough, but you get no information about the speed of upload. Then we started an account on a rival service, blip.tv, which gives you more information during and after the upload process, with a typical clip taking just two or three minutes to arrive. Let's make it clear at this point that we are not endorsing any products or services - we intend to test-drive whatever is around and see if it works.
The whole process was pretty speedy - so for instance I dashed off to film ARM's Android prototype, then found some free wi-fi in the T-Mobile pavillion and had the video online within an hour.
But what about the quality of these shaky clips, shot by someone who couldn't quite make up his mind what to point at? We had decided that this would be unedited material, so it all had to be done in one take. So, for instance during the ARM clip, that meant moving the camera from the interviewee's face down to the prototype phone and back again. It would have been better to shoot close-ups of the device separately to put over the interview but that would have involved a lengthy edit - and I had my proper job to do. Sound was also a problem - the N95 picks up everything from wherever you point it, but unless you are quite close to the interviewee you may get swamped by background noise.
It's fair to say the reaction from blog readers was mixed: "Thanks for the video but you may want to invest in something a little better than your cell-phone to film stuff. This is definitely not "broadcast" quality" and "Give this guy a steady cam! It's like the camera's strapped to his head" said two of the critics.
But some of you understood that this was not about producing high-quality television packages: "There is a big difference between filming for TV and filming for the internet," said one man. "Webcams allow you to capture stories opportunistically without having to wait for a TV crew."
And that's the point. Alongside this blog you will find links to the high quality television reports, beautifully shot and edited by my cameraman Peter Page, which were the main focus of our trip to Barcelona. Material shot on a mobile phone will never replace the real thing - but I think it can be a useful addition to our professional toolkit. Mind you, I think it might be worth investing in a mini tripod and an external microphone.
The video above - all shot on the mobile - gives a bit of a flavour of our multi-platform expedition to the Mobile World Congress.
PS3 takes on Slingbox
- 14 Feb 08, 08:43 GMT
Sony has talked up the multimedia capabilities of the PlayStation 3 since before it was launched - but it is only now that those promises are being met.
Later this year Sony will launch an add-on that will let PS3 owners watch digital TV via their console: PlayTV is a small black box which connects to a USB port on the machine and has an aerial port in (and a pass through port) to pick up digital terrestrial signals.
I had a chance to play with PlayTV at Sony's UK offices on Wednesday. The hardware itself is uninteresting - it's the software and features that are worth talking about.
It's a very slick piece of user interface design. The Electronic Programme Guide and menu systems are well designed and laid out and the whole experience is certainly simple enough that PlayTV could be used as a main Freeview system in the home.
Just like a PVR, you can pause and rewind live TV, as well as record programmes. The PlayTV has a dual tuner so you can record one channel while watching another.
At the moment you can't record TV in the background while playing a game on the PS3 but I'm told the software developers are working hard to add the feature. If it isn't available at launch, the feature could be added later as a software update.
But the really interesting feature is the ability to watch TV on your PlayStation Portable from anywhere in the world using PlayTV, turning the PS3 into a Slingbox on steroids.
RemotePlay allows PSP users to access their PlayStation 3's over a wi-fi connection, either on a local network or over the internet.
You can already watch videos stored on your PS3's hard drive - but with PlayTV you can now watch live TV, programmes you've recorded to the hard drive or schedule programmes to be recorded in the future.
Cleverly, if you know you are likely to stick with one channel for a period of time - if you are watching live sport or a film, for example - you can increase the buffering on the PSP to improve picture quality. And it makes a real difference.
The developers have worked hard to keep the whole operation as simple as possible so that even casual users can get live TV up and running on their PS3 quickly.
It will be interesting to see how much marketing effort is put behind PlayTV because this kind of feature is a real competitive advantage over Xbox 360, which offers nothing remotely similar.
It is also another strong feature for the PSP which is beginning to flourish as a handheld device once again.
Big in Barcelona
- 13 Feb 08, 20:45 GMT
Looking back on the teeming madness that is the mobile phone industry's annual shindig, there was no one headline-grabbing story, but plenty of pointers to the road ahead. I've picked five things that were big in Barcelona.
Touchscreen
Apple's touchscreen iPhone certainly started something. Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung were among the companies launching new touch-screen handsets. But not everyone is convinced that consumers want touch on its own 鈥 LG, for instance, has included a slide-out keyboard with its music phone. Texters still struggle with touch, but as Apple refines its software, expect plenty more imitations in the coming months.
Faster Networks
Talking to network people can give you a headache as the blizzard of acronyms 鈥 WiMax, LTE, UWB 鈥 fall thick and fast. But one thing's clear - if you have a need for speed you can expect your mobile connection to get a lot faster in the coming year. The battle is on between WiMax and LTE (Long Term Evolution) to show where mobile networks go after 3g 鈥 and in Barcelona LTE seemed to be winning more hearts and minds amongst operators than WiMax, even though it is a little further away. Korea's LG was promising downloads of up to 60 Mbps with its LTE technology 鈥 as someone who only gets 2 Mbps on his home broadband connection, that's a mouth-watering prospect. Mind you, promised speeds often don't materialise.
Femtocells
The mobile operators will be keen to see some of the work of these new networks handed over to customers in their homes by the Femtocell. This small mobile phone personal base station (some people in the industry were not amused when I described it in a previous post as a mobile phone mast in your front room) will undergo more trials in the coming months. The networks are very excited by a technology which could give customers such a fast, cheap, mobile connection at home that they give up their fixed-line phones. But they need customers to share that excitement.
Mobile Payments
This is an idea that has been around for a decade without really taking off 鈥 I remember going to Helsinki in 1999 and filming a vending machine that would sell me a Coke if I sent it a text message. But now it does seem to be happening, not in Europe or the United States, but in Kenya and Afghanistan. Last year Vodafone chose Kenya to launch its M-Pesa service which allows users to transfer money by mobile. One use is amongst migrant workers who can send money across the country without getting on a bus. 1.6 million people have signed up in Kenya, and now a similar service is to be launched in Afghanistan. There it will be used mainly by microfinance organisations to deliver loan instalments. There are even plans for voice recognition software to give wider access to the service in a country with high illiteracy rates.
Android
Google's new open operating system for mobiles was supposed to be the biggest thing in Barcelona this week. Yes, there was plenty of talk about Android鈥 and even a few prototype handsets 鈥 but there was less buzz about it than you might think. There were plenty of new Symbian phones to look at and Sony Ericsson's first Windows Mobile handset, the Xperian 1, was rated by many as the best in show. Suddenly talk that existing operating systems would be swept aside by Google's arrival seemed overdone. Still, this next time next year there will be plenty of Android phones available, the smartphone market will have expanded dramatically, and the battle of the operating systems can begin in earnest.
By the way, the video features Bill Gadja of the GSM association (they organise the show) giving his assessment of the stories of the week. You may notice that it looks a lot more polished than the other videos on this blog 鈥 that's because it was filmed by a professional cameraman on a professional camera!
Twittering a Yahoo exit
- 13 Feb 08, 08:17 GMT
Blogging about your departure from a job isn't new. But real time updates of your final hours via may well be.
is one of the unfortunate 1,000 staff who lost their jobs at Yahoo this week.
He started his chronicle with:
Y! layoffs today, I'm "impacted". I'm heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge...more to come.
And from there he gave an hourly detail of his parting from the company, with plenty of humour and pathos along the way, as well as lots of musings about the end of free lattes.
On the plus side, my commute just got a lot shorter.
This is a serious downer. Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss.
Dammit. I was hoping to hook up the free Flickr Pro account before I got canned. Major fail.
Lots of whispered conversations. Like people are afraid to ask who's gone.
I'm going dark in a few minutes. The HR guy is on his way over to confiscate my laptop.
Ryan hasn't got anything else lined up - and it seems strange that Yahoo is laying off people before the Microsoft deal has completely played out, especially when MS is hiring, not firing people.
But good luck to Ryan and thanks for the Tweets.
Media on your mobile
- 12 Feb 08, 18:42 GMT
Do you really want to watch movies on your mobile? And would you rather get unlimited music bundled with your phone, or pay for each track? As media giants examine new opportunities and risks in the mobile world, these are two questions being pondered by industry executives in Barcelona. And by Isabella Rossellini.
The actress and film-maker 鈥 and daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini 鈥 is one of the more unlikely visitors to the more Mobile World Congress but she certainly made a far more interesting interviewee than most of the executives with their stream of acronyms and jargon.
Ms Rossellini is here to promote a series of short films she has made especially for mobile phones, in a project backed by Robert Redford's Sundance Channel. Her five films are called 鈥淕reen Porno鈥 and, believe it or not, are about the sex lives of insects. As she explained, how can you go wrong with a mixture of innovation, environmentalism and sex?
Isabella Rossellini said she wasn't the right person to comment on the business model for mobile movies 鈥 then went on to talk in some detail about the attractions to advertisers of a medium where you know exactly who is watching your content.
For now, short movies are likely to be seen as little more than promotional gimmicks used by operators to show off the capabilities of their handsets. It's in the business of music on the mobile that the real media battle is now hotting up.
Both the record labels and the mobile industry are determined not to let Apple's iPhone win the same dominance in mobile music as it has on the desktop. And after saying goodbye to Isabella Rossellini I went to get a glimpse of the secret weapon that is supposed to stop that happening.
Rob Lewis of Omnifone 鈥 the British firm whose MusicStation service is used by a number of networks as an iTunes rival 鈥 showed me the new LG phone which is supposed to be the iPhone killer. It comes loaded with MusicStation Max, which promises unlimited free music downloads over a 3G network. Well actually, there will be a limit 鈥 you can't own more music than the phone holds.
But Mr Lewis was quite convincing about the attractions 鈥 the phone will probably come free with an 18 month contract, its contents will be continuously backed up onto the network's server, so if you lose the handset you can retrieve your music, and if you decide not to renew the contract you can keep what's on your phone. The one downside is that you never actually 鈥渙wn鈥 the music 鈥 the DRM prevents you from burning it to a CD, for instance.
We were not allowed to film the phone 鈥 but I can tell you it's a touchscreen device which looks just like an iPhone but also has a slide-out keyboard. So is this really the device which will give the music industry a chance to halt Apple's inexorable advance as a digital music giant?
Maybe, but music fans now seem convinced that anything cool has got to have an 鈥渋鈥 in front of it, so don't bet on it.
Hands on with Arm's Android
- 12 Feb 08, 11:37 GMT
There are a number of prototype handsets showing off the Google Android platform at the Barcelona show. I found one on the stand of the British chip firm ARM.
Interestingly, the firm - which has relationships with all of the big phone makers - was very keen to talk about the Open Handset Alliance rather than mention Google. It shows there is already sensitivity about how much of a disruptive role Google could play in this industry.
UK takes tough stance on piracy
- 12 Feb 08, 08:42 GMT
The that the UK government is considering legislation to ban people from the net if they are found guilty of online copyright theft is a dramatic escalation in the battle against "piracy".
If the law were enacted it would turn ISPs, like BT, Tiscali and Virgin, into a pro-active police force who would have to monitor traffic on the internet in order to look out for copyright files being swapped online.
This legislation would mean the UK would have the most stringent and prohibitive anti-piracy laws in the world.
It would be a technical challenge for ISPs to do this. Monitoring traffic that is shared using file-sharing tools like BitTorrent is perfectly feasible - as the programs use specific internet ports. In fact, ISPs already monitor file-sharing traffic across the net in order to shape the flow of information - prioritising certain bits of data over others.
Knowing where to look isn't the problem; knowing what to look for is. Every day many terabytes of data are being shared over the internet using file-sharing tools. Individual packets of information can be inspected - but who can tell if Person A is sharing an MP3 file of his own band performing with Person B or if it's the latest Kylie track?
Would all digital content have to be watermarked? Would ISPs have responsibility for this? If not, who would?
And there is evidence that more people are encrypting files that they send over peer to peer networks, making it difficult to know exactly what they are sharing. That may give rise to further suspicion but will ISPs be given powers to force users to decrypt their files?
Internet service providers have long been loath to become the net police - for obvious legal and financial reasons. They see themselves as passive conduits, like a road network or the postal system.
The global record industry has been quick to back the government's proposal.
"It is simply not acceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to the piracy on their networks which is at such a rate that there are 20 illegal music downloads for every legal track sold," said John Kennedy of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries.
Digital rights activist will be outraged by this move, I'm sure. Monitoring our internet traffic will have huge privacy issues.
No-one can deny that the scale of copyright theft is mammoth. A cursory glance at a website like The Pirate Bay revels thousands of films, TV programmes, albums, software programs etc being shared across the net.
But there is legitimate debate about what this means to the global content industry and to consumers. Does it signal a seismic shift in the way people want to pay, use and share their content, and what we understand by copyright? Or is it wholesale theft that needs to be stamped out user by user by user?
UPDATE:
As I suspected, there are already warnings about the privacy implications of this proposal as well as warnings about how big a technical challenge it would be.
Patrick Charnley, solicitor in the media group at international law firm Eversheds, comments: "In practice, however, the government's proposals may prove difficult to implement. How, for example, would an ISP deal with a person downloading legal peer-to-peer content ?
"If an ISP has to monitor exactly what each user is doing on sites normally known for their illegal content, not only may this be an unacceptably onerous task, but it may also land the ISPs on the wrong side of privacy law."
A Phone Mast in Your Front Room
- 12 Feb 08, 07:06 GMT
It's a little white box with a somewhat bizarre name but the will have more impact on the way we use phones than any of the flashy new handsets unveiled here. It is device which creates a mini 3g network inside your home and then introduces your mobile to your broadband connection.
The idea is that this means you will not only get a much better signal but be able to receive a lot of services on your mobile that may be difficult to access when you are on the move 鈥 catch-up TV, for instance. The mobile operators love the idea because it offers them a cheap way of extending their networks and gets them into the home to compete against fixed-line businesses and VOIP.
Plenty of big firms are showing off Femtocell technology 鈥 but a small British start-up looks to have a good chance of getting the first product onto the market. Its technology is being used in a British trial by O2 and there could be a commercial launch within a year.
Chris Gilbert of Ubiquisys is keen to stress that the Femtocell uses very little power - 鈥淎n RF engineer would struggle to detect it in your home鈥- so those who are concerned about health risks from phone masts should no more worry about a Femtocell than about next door's microwave oven.
This is the one device I've seen in Barcelona that really stands out from the crowd in its ability to change the game, But I still think they need to do something about that name.
Nokia Looks For The Next Turning
- 11 Feb 08, 17:00 GMT
I've spent the day searching for one real stand-out innovation at Mobile World Congress - and I'm afraid it wasn't on the Nokia stand. (I'll tell you what did make an impact in a subsequent post). What seemed to excite Nokia's Niklas Savander when I asked him which was the outstanding product in its new line-up was the 6210 Navigator which has a built-in compass and is aimed at helping pedestrians rather than drivers. It's obviously part of the whole drive - which I seem to have been hearing about for years - to make location-based services take off, promising an advertising bonanza as bars and shops try to lure passing pedestrians with ads on their Nokia Maps.
Maps are certainly useful on mobiles - though on the last Nokia handset I tried they drained the battery miles short of my destination - but this year's efforts look like evolution rather than revolution. Perhaps though, the big thinkers at Nokia are not so focussed on new gimmicks for jaded European customers as on the huge potential of markets in the developing world. In our interview, Niklas Savander talked of the excitement of bringing the internet to a village that had never heard of it.
By the way, during this video you'll see Mr Savander facing the usual live demo nightmare - but when we filmed the navigation handset later it seemed to work pretty well.
Robbie Bach on mobile
- 11 Feb 08, 13:04 GMT
is the man who launched Xbox - and as well as continuing to run Microsoft's games console business he's now in charge of mobile too. He is also a very patient fellow. Last night I interviewed him on a mobile phone - and somehow failed to press record. So he agreed to let me try again this morning.
Funnily enough I think we got a more relaxed interview second time around. But I still don't quite see how getting Windows Mobile onto 20 million handsets a year after six years is quite such a triumph....after all Apple's OS is on schedule to be on 10 million phones within 18 months. But Mr Bach, who's now been interviewed three times by me in a visit where he'll see nothing of Barcelona, is one of the industry's nice guys.
Nokia learning lessons
- 11 Feb 08, 12:13 GMT
Nokia is a smart company - you don't have 40% of the global mobile market without being clever, of course.
But it's clear the Finnish firm is learning from the successes of other companies. Take the company's new flagship store in London, for example. Take a look at this short video I filmed at the store this morning.
Remind you of anything? It reminded me of an Apple store. Coincidentally, Apple's flagship UK store is on the other side of the street.
Nokia has learned from Apple that customers want to play with technology. All of the handsets and all of the different types of experiences you can have with a phone are available in store.
There's even a psuedo-Genius bar, where customers can get problems solved by well-trained staff.
And it's not just at retail that Nokia is learning.
The company has seen the weather forecast and knows that the web 2.0 revolution of creating and sharing content is changing people's online experiences and that users know expect that freedom on their phones.
And so Nokia has launched , a portal where you can dump files - from video to photos to documents - and exchange them with friends.
What makes share.ovi.com is that Nokia has made it very open - you can share 100 different file types you have created and access it from any connected device. It doesn't matter if you are using an N95 or an Apple iPhone.
You can upload from PC or from a phone. You can pull in content from or .
This is a smart move by Nokia. It shows it is learning the lessons that digital content should be set free, not tied to one platform or one website.
Nokia still not touching
- 11 Feb 08, 09:26 GMT
has unveiled a raft of new handsets and services at the - but one of the key questions asked of the senior executives was about "touch".
The question people want answered is: when will Nokia react to the Apple iPhone and bring out devices that have touch screen capabilities?
The answer is: not yet but it is coming.
, head of services and software, said: "We have said that we are platform-ising touch and we will bring out touch products.
"It's important you don't bring out gimmicky touch. We want to take the heritage of the applications we have today - over 5,000 - and make sure there is some reasonable migration path.
"Absolutely the user interface will evolve. It will be different for different categories - some will have a lot of touch, some will have little and some none."
He added: "It's an over simplification to say touch is the answer or not the answer."
Who owns your mobile?
- 10 Feb 08, 21:01 GMT
The answer, of course, is you. But who owns you 鈥 or rather you as a mobile customer? That's the question being debated by the thousands of visitors to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As phones become mini-computers, the balance of power in the industry is shifting.
It used to be simple 鈥 your network owned you. After all, you signed up with them, they collected your bill, and they did their utmost to nurture you so you wouldn't stray. But now two other players want to interfere in that relationship 鈥 the handset makers and the software giants.
Nokia is tired of watching the networks launch 鈥 and sometimes profit from 鈥 flashy new services, so it's pushing its own offerings. That includes music, with a new range of 鈥渃omes with music鈥 mobiles out later this year, and its Ovi service which promises every form of entertainment a mobile user might want and currently gets from the networks.
Then there are the software businesses which are taking their battle from the desktop computer to the mobile. On a sunny Sunday evening in Barcelona, I've just met senior executives from Microsoft and Google, here to sell their vision of the mobile future 鈥 one where the operating system on your phone will actually matter. Let's face it, right now, not one in a thousand mobile users could tell you whether their phone ran Symbian (the system backed by Nokia), Windows Mobile, or something else. That may change as phones get smarter.
Robbie Bach, one of the the top three or four executives at Microsoft, running everything from Xbox to Zune to mobile, flew into Barcelona tonight to trumpet a new deal to put Windows Mobile onto Sony Ericsson handsets. As the manufacturer is one of the partners in the Symbian project, Microsoft believes this is a big step forward in its quest to be a major force on mobiles. Robbie Bach says 20 million Windows Mobile handsets were sold last year. I pointed out that this is less than 1 percent of global handset sales, six years after Microsoft got into mobile. He countered that it's a pretty good share of the smartphone market which is only now moving beyond business users into the wider population.
But while Microsoft is making plenty of noise here, it's Google which is getting all the attention. When I caught up with Rich Miner, Google's Vice President for mobile, he was quick to insist that his firm had been a force in mobile for years - but it's obviously the Android operating system which has made it a star of the show this year rather than a bit player. Despite rumours of Android handsets making a bow in Barcelona Mr Miner said a phone would not ago on sale until the second half of the year.
He went on to paint Google's efforts in this field as some kind of philanthropic mission to bring rich new applications to the industry and to mobile users , all for free. But, as he (almost) conceded, it's really all about taking the firm's dominance in search advertising onto a whole new platform.
And that means that there are huge sums at stake as Microsoft, Google, Nokia - and the odd phone network - battle to own the mobile consumer of the future.
You can see a quick interview with Rich Miner below. You would also have seen an interview with Robbie Bach - if I'd not pressed pause on the mobile when I started recording it. Even a smartphone needs a reasonably smart user.
Yahoo says no?
- 10 Feb 08, 07:53 GMT
Yahoo isn't commenting on reports that it has rejected the bid from Microsoft after a board meeting on Friday. We will probably know more when Wall Street starts trading on Monday.
But if Jerry Yang and his fellow directors are shutting the door to Microsoft they will need to explain to their shareholders exactly what their alternative strategy is.
Because it seems impossible that Yahoo can survive as an independent business - unless it manages to convince the regulators that an informal alliance with Google is no threat to competition, which seems unlikely.
Last night Yahoo responded to the 麻豆官网首页入口's inquiries with this:
"Yahoo!'s Board is carefully and thoroughly evaluating the Microsoft
proposal in the context of all of the company's strategic alternatives,
and will pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value
for shareholders. We are not providing details on the Board's review
process."
I'm off to the Mobile World Congress in Barcleona this morning where both Microsoft and Yahoo will have plenty of executives explaining how they are going to play a big part in the brave new world of the mobile internet. I'll be asking them how a MicroHoo future meshes in with those plans - but I'm not holding my breath for any answers....
Going mobile in Barcelona
- 8 Feb 08, 11:00 GMT
I'm off to to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday. Our very compact two-man team (me plus camera/lights/sound/editing specialist Peter Page) is hoping to bring 麻豆官网首页入口 viewers, listener and readers coverage of the most interesting products and stories from this annual shindig of the mobile industry.
Last year was all about the iPhone - or rather fear of the iPhone. Apple's new phone wasn't out, but the established players were all rushing to bring out shiny handsets that might steal the market before its arrival.
This year the theme is not hardware but software. With Google's Android operating system just over the horizon, the battle to be the dominant operating system is hotting up. We'll have interviews with Nokia, Google, and Microsoft, who'll all be explaining why they think they should be crawling all over your mobile screen.
But Barcelona will also see the start of an experiment for this blog. Darren Waters and I are keen to start experimenting with mobile blogging, using a variety of technologies to bring you more video from key stories.
I'm taking a couple of mobiles with video capture to Barcelona, and when I'm not broadcasting for the 麻豆官网首页入口's TV and radio output, I'll be recording a few shaky clips to post on this blog. It's a modest start - and we'll hope to try various other methods over the coming weeks. Here's a quick video explanation - let us know the kind of thing you'd like to see.
Making money from MySpace
- 8 Feb 08, 09:48 GMT
In a smart London bar last night eager young developers gathered to hear how they might make money out of . They were listening to the social network's Chief Technology Officer Aber Whitcomb who had flown direct from a similar event in San Francisco. The message was inspiring - start building quality applications for MySpace's 200 million users and you will soon share in the huge wealth generated by our global advertising business.
But hold on a minute. Last summer in a rather grubbier basement bar in London's East End, I heard executives preach much the same message to an even younger and more eager crowd of software wannabes. Back then we all believed that letting a thousand new applications bloom was a brilliant move for a social network. Everyone - Facebook, its users, and the external developers - would gain as the site became more useful and even more attractive to advertisers.
It hasn't quite worked out like that. First, thousands of applications of extremely variable quality have been lobbed at Facebook users, leaving many of them bewildered and bored by the onslaught of vampires, zombies and super-walls which have cluttered up what was once a clean, simple and elegant service. Second, it doesn't look as though it has proved profitable for any but a tiny handful of developers. Sure, the makers of Scrabulous have garnered a moderate income but
a) they have millions of users
b) the one advertiser I know who used the site gave up after only receiving responses from bored Canadians
c) they are being sued by the makers of Scrabble.
And for every Scrabulous, there are hundreds of applications which are being ignored by Facebook users.
With the economic climate getting stormy, advertisers no longer seem quite so convinced that social networks are the place to be. Sure, MySpace is still a much bigger business than Facebook. And canny old Rupert Murdoch, who was derided for , promptly proved that he wasn't born yesterday by doing a $900m advertising deal with Google. But this week Google admitted that social network advertising had so far failed to deliver what was expected. Or in the words of Google鈥檚 Sergey Brin : 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We have had a lot of experiments (and some disappointments)."
So those eager young software devleopers may soon share in that disappointment. Anyway, it was a very nice party, and Aber Whitcomb was kind enough to speak to a confused reporter wielding a mobile phone. Here he is:
Duel of the skinny laptops
- 7 Feb 08, 17:41 GMT
Darren Waters and I are in a slimming contest 鈥 comparing two new laptops which are sold on the basis of their weight rather than their power.
Darren is looking at the Asus U1E and I've got a MacBook Air.
If it鈥檚 about provoking the envy of your friends and colleagues, then I鈥檓 the clear winner. Ever since I removed the MacBook Air from the wrapping, I鈥檝e been getting plenty of ooohs and aaahs 鈥 both in the flesh and online 鈥 from people who鈥檝e lusted after Apple鈥檚 ultra-slim laptop since Steve Jobs pulled it out of a jiffy bag last month.
But I鈥檝e an uneasy feeling that this new model could prove to be beautiful but dumb.
To pack everything in to such a slim casing, Apple has had to chuck a lot overboard 鈥 Ethernet and firewire ports, an optical drive, and a removable battery. For me the Firewire is the big loss. Last time I got a new computer, I simply hooked it up to the old one via a Firewire cable and sucked out the entire contents.
So how when you get a brand new MacBook Air, are you to install new software or migrate your data from your old machine? Easy, says Apple, we now live in a wireless world - just use your home wi-fi to beam it all across to your new machine.
Oh, that it was that easy - I spent several hours trying without success to migrate.
First, it became clear that I needed to upload new software onto my old computer to perform the transfer. Then I sat and watched while both machines just hung around thinking about it. After half an hour or so - with no data transferred - my patience ran out. So I Googled 鈥淢acBook Air migration issue鈥 and came across a lot of people with exactly the same problem, including these testers at .
Their advice? Give up, and get an Ethernet adapter. I didn鈥檛 have time for that, so I opted to use a synchronisation program which allows me to share my calendar and contacts across different computers, and I e-mailed my browser bookmarks to the new machine.
Since then, things have gone a little more smoothly - but the first few hours of a new relationship are all-important and my slim new friend and I have got off to a rocky start.
Light laptop showdown
- 7 Feb 08, 17:20 GMT
The release of the MacBook Air has thrown a wider spotlight on the ultra light laptop market. Lots of people pointed out to us that Apple had done nothing particularly innovative with its MacBook Air, and said companies like Sony and Asus had been releasing similar products for years with little fanfare.
My colleague Rory Cellan-Jones want to put this new category of laptop to the test so we've managed to acquire a MacBook Air and an Asus U1E.
We'll be blogging our findings in the coming week. To kick things off, we're both posting our first impressions. Here are Rory's.
I'm in possession of the Asus, which runs Vista Business. As a design object the Asus can't match the MacBook Air's sleek looks but it isn't too shabby and feels well-built and just about sturdy enough to survive being knocked about in a rucksack.
I'm impressed with the connector options - plenty of USB ports, Ethernet and a mini Firewire port.
It has a built-in web cam and fingerprint sensor - which I couldn't get to work.
The model I have comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1Ghz. And to be honest so far the machine seems to be a little underpowered.
Even opening a fresh Word document takes an age. And resuming Windows from sleep when the lid has been down takes as long as my personal laptop takes to boot from cold.
We'll be going head to head in detail next week. If you're a U1E user, I'd love to hear your views.
In praise of Pirillo
- 5 Feb 08, 16:01 GMT
, blogger and technology evangelist, is celebrating his 1,000th video posted to .
Pirillo is a great example of someone who has taken the web and turned it into his own publishing powerhouse.
He broadcasts live multiple times each day, using web technology like and then publishes his videos on to YouTube, where he has a
"My model for publishing video on YouTube is not to have seven people watch one video but to have one person watch seven videos," he says in his 1,000th video, explaining why he posts so regularly.
Audiences for his YouTube videos are in the hundreds and in total more than 668,000 people have watched them. But it's not about the size of the audience it's about the strength of the community.
During live broadcasts viewers can leave comments that appear live on screen and are later embedded in the YouTube video.
Pirillo talks to his audience in a way that mainstream media - the 麻豆官网首页入口 included - is only beginning to understand.
His videos are on every aspect of technology, and often "how-tos" - from USB switches to backing up your computer and reviews of the latest devices and products.
He has a , a feed, the YouTube channel, a live channel and is one of the most networked people imaginable.
He also co-organises the blogging conference each year in Seattle.
Congratulations to Chris Pirillo. Here's his video:
UPDATE: The great picture of Pirillo is by . Thanks for letting me use it. And sorry for not crediting/asking earlier. My mistake.
Is Microsoft a doomed dinosaur?
- 5 Feb 08, 08:07 GMT
There, I knew that would draw a crowd. In the maelstrom of comment and analysis that has followed , two extraordinary assumptions have been very common.
First, that this is a make-or-break deal for Bill Gates鈥 behemoth, second that it will fail anyway because Microsoft has been in inexorable decline ever since it failed to spot the arrival of the internet.
The reasoning behind this view often has more to do with emotion than analysis. It's hard to like Microsoft - it has been a looming, overbearing presence for so long. Much of the geek community sees it as the Establishment, and would prefer to avoid its products if at all possible.
There's a nice story in this morning's about Yahoo finding it difficult to schedule meetings a few years back because so many staff refused to use Microsoft's Outlook.
Already, the opposition is organising, with Yahoo's own customers at its making their views pretty clear. Commentators are suggesting it's just a desperate shotgun marriage of crumbly old giants 鈥 one of which failed to spot Web 1.0, the other never coming to terms with Web 2.0. The new media commentator along these lines.
So just how much trouble is Microsoft in that makes it worth the huge aggro involved in going through with this deal? It was in 1995 that Bill Gates admitted that his business had failed to "get the internet" and it's been suffering ever since.
Well actually, no. In 1996 Microsoft reported income of $2.2 billion on revenue of $9 billion. This year it鈥檚 forecasting income of $24 billion on revenue of $60 billion.
Throughout the last decade, commentators have been warning that the growing impact of everything from search to open source to cloud computing would slow the ageing beast 鈥 and every year the Windows and Office profits machine has continued churning out ever bigger piles of greenbacks.
Google clearly doesn't share the view that Microsoft is doomed 鈥 just look at the sabre-rattling in Sunday鈥檚 blog, from a company which doesn鈥檛 make a habit of bad-mouthing its rivals.
It鈥檚 clear the search giant is determined to stop this deal. 鈥淲e鈥檙e very nervous about it,鈥 a Google insider told me. 鈥淢icrosoft is so huge it can just hire a couple of thousand engineers at the click of its fingers and put them to work on any problem.鈥
And while the figures show that a MicroHoo would still have a much smaller share of search than Google, the spinners at the Googleplex are keen to point out that there are nearly 500 million Hotmail and Yahoo Mail users compared to the 51 million who use Gmail. That鈥檚 a big audience using your products every day.
The dinosaur description may be applied more fairly to Yahoo, which has lost out at every turn to Google over the last decade by failing to realise that winning at search meant winning at everything else. It is now in a very hard place, looking desperately for a suitor to keep it from the clutches of Microsoft.
But even if this deal doesn鈥檛 come off, don鈥檛 bet on a wounded Microsoft crawling away to die. The company is already planning a major assault on the mobile world, where all the internet action is now moving, and has got the cash and the muscle to make an impact.
You may not like Microsoft 鈥 or its products. But many years after the internet meteorite hit the earth, this particular dinosaur can still scare smaller beasts.
China鈥檚 music sales won鈥檛 pay for Robbie
- 4 Feb 08, 16:40 GMT
Some terrifying figures landed on my desk this morning and any music industry executives who cast a glance at them may want to lie down and weep as they contemplate their future.
The statistics arrived in a press release from the music industry trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry () trumpeting lawsuits against Chinese internet piracy. They outlined just how much consumers in what the press release describes as 鈥減otentially the largest online music-buying public in the world鈥 currently spend on music.
$76 million last year 鈥 around 拢40 million at today鈥檚 exchange rate. That鈥檚 about 3p per head. Or to put it another way, about half the amount EMI agreed to pay in October 2002 when he signed a new contract.
So don鈥檛 the Chinese have any appetite for music? Or maybe they haven鈥檛 yet got enough internet connections to make digital downloads take off? Actually, there are as many broadband connections in China as in the US and one suspects the interest in music is just as great.
Unfortunately 鈥 from the record labels鈥 point of view 鈥 that interest is being satisfied without the inconvenience of paying for music. According to the IFPI, 99% of all digital music files distributed in China are pirated.
An IFPI spokesman told me the industry had hoped that the arrival of digital music would bring a fresh start after years in which China was a world leader in CD piracy. Na茂ve? Certainly.
And if the industry hopes its new wave of lawsuits will persuade giant Internet companies like Baidu and Yahoo China to behave themselves, further disappointment may lie ahead.
Of course, the behaviour of China鈥檚 new music fans is just an extreme version of what鈥檚 happening in the rest of the world. The industry has sued music consumers, threatened ISPs and challenged governments to stamp down on piracy. All without any noticeable effect. Someone may have to think of a new way of paying Robbie.
Brent Hoberman and the art of timing
- 4 Feb 08, 07:32 GMT
Ten years ago one of the very few people to make money out of Britain鈥檚 dot com bubble was just getting started. He launched a travel website into a market suddenly obsessed with the idea that the internet would transform every business and make huge fortunes for those who could grab a slice of the action.
His name was Brent Hoberman and the business he started with Martha Lane Fox was .
For Brent Hoberman, timing was all. Lastminute was a tiny business with negligible revenues in but when it arrived on the London Stock Exchange it was valued at over half a billion pounds.
A fortnight later the bubble burst and soon tech stocks were only useful for papering the bathroom. Lastminute had raised the cash it needed to survive in the nick of time.
Now a decade on Brent Hoberman is launching another business 鈥 and this time it鈥檚 aimed not at twenty-somethings looking for a cheap weekend in Tallinn but at thirty-somethings wondering whether to paint the new kitchen olive green or fire red.
has got everything 鈥 links to major retailers, a 3D home design tool, and that Web 2.0 clich茅 鈥溾, with ways to share your ideas about giving your kitchen a facelift with fellow users.
It has been far longer in the planning than Hoberman鈥檚 first venture and has raised 拢5 million in funding, compared to the 拢600,000 backing which got Lastminute off the drawing-board.
In 1998, there was still a relatively small internet audience 鈥 this time just about anyone who might have some cash to spend on doing up their home has already got a broadband connection.
But 鈥 and it鈥檚 a huge but 鈥 Mydeco could be a victim of bad timing. It launches into a crowded market just as the tech investment climate grows chilly, and at the very moment when consumers are getting more cautious about parting with their cash.
If the site鈥檚 backers want to recoup their investment via an IPO, they may have to be very patient. However Brent Hoberman has pulled in big names from Europe鈥檚 web scene like the Skype founder and insists they are in it for the long term.
Lastminute.com was a symbol of all the energy 鈥 and idiocy 鈥 of the UK鈥檚 dot com bubble. Mydeco will be far more low-profile in a more mature market but its progress will tell us whether the latest bout of bubble thinking is over.
Brent Hoberman tells me he is relying on what he calls counter-cyclical start-up theory. 鈥淲hen the big players retrench, the opportunities to innovate increase. Going against the grain is where entrepreneurs win.鈥
Good luck to him - he's one of the nicest guys to have emerged in British business in the last decade. But I fear this time Brent Hoberman's timing may be just a little out鈥
Google responds to MS/Yahoo
- 3 Feb 08, 20:12 GMT
Google has been said by many to be the root cause of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo.
I would imagine that Google was abuzz with speculation and opinion once news emerged on Friday.
And now the company has .
On the firm's official blog, David Drummond, senior vice president, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, says the bid "raises troubling questions".
Mr Drummond cuts straight to the chase: "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?"
In other words, will use firm use the same anti-competitive pracitices in the online world that it has been found guilty of in the offline world, and caused it to be fined very heavily?
"Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?" asks Mr Drummond, and by extension Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive.
This is clearly Google's opening move in a complex game of chess that will encompass ordinary users, politicians, regulators and businessmen.
The posting on the blog ends: "We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored."
So to be clear: Google isn't a fan of this bid.
MacBook Air unboxing
- 1 Feb 08, 20:56 GMT
Unboxing photos and videos are one of the defining features of a true geek. I'll admit I love the sights and sounds of a new gadget being released from its cardboard and polystyrene prison.
The first MacBook Air laptops are beginning to land in the hands of users and predictably the net is all a-quiver.
Here, Betty, gets to grips with her new toy:
from TUAW.com
Microsoft and Yahoo: Perfect partners?
- 1 Feb 08, 12:47 GMT
Microsoft's reveals the extent to which the Seattle giant has failed to adapt to the internet age.
At first glance, it would seem that Google's success is the key motivator for Microsoft's bid. But it's more complicated than that.
Certainly, a Microsoft and Yahoo joint search engine would in theory give Google some competition in the search and online ad business. But even a combined Yahoo and Microsoft search proposition would still be a long way behind Google.
According to comScore, the worldwide search figures for last August show Google way out in front:
# Google Sites: 37.1 billion (5 billion at YouTube)
# Yahoo Sites: 8.5 billion
# : 3.3 billion
# Microsoft Sites: 2.2 billion
To highlight one point: twice as many people make searches on YouTube alone than make searches using Microsoft's search engine.
But this is about gearing up for the second internet age - an age where commerce, community and communications are dominated by the web.
Microsoft was late to the internet and the company has never denied that. Bill Gates failed to see the potential of the net and from the back of the pack Microsoft has always been playing catch up.
It's not been all failure. From nowhere Microsoft was able to crush opposition in the browser space and Internet Explorer is the most popular way to surf the net.
But as companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as thousands of garage start-ups have shown, from Facebook to Joost, the battle was never really about the browser - it was about services.
From instant messaging and online advertising to social networks, blogs, communities, and IPTV Microsoft is not out in front in any of these areas.
Microsoft is attracted to Yahoo because a purchase would take a key rival out of the game in one swoop.
It also gives Microsoft access to Yahoo's community strengths - websites like the popular photo-sharing website Flickr - and strengthen areas that the two firms compete around now, like communications and advertising.
Microsoft and Yahoo could also benefit from combining their engineering teams. As the online and offline worlds merge and blur in this second internet age companies need the talent to scale their products and offerings.
In the not too distant future every type of electronic device will be online - that requires user interfaces, standards, content, search, archives, video on demand, voice over IP. And that means engineering talent.
Finally, what's in it for Yahoo? Potentially it could turn the company's fortunes around. It has been on the slide for some time with high profile departures and falling shares.
There's no guarantee Yahoo will say yes. At first glance $44.6bn seems like a lot of money. But wasn't Facebook valued at $15bn only recently?
UPDATE: Our news website business editor Tim Weber has written an excellent analysis piece. He describes the offer as a
The 麻豆官网首页入口 is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
This is dot.life - a blog about technology from 麻豆官网首页入口 News.
Rory Cellan-Jones is the 麻豆官网首页入口's technology correspondent.
Maggie Shiels is the 麻豆官网首页入口's tech reporter based in Silicon Valley.
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