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Shownotes
1:12 – MegaUpload Shutdown
The FBI has indicted MegaUpload on racketeering and criminal copyright infringement charges, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The FBI apparently got help from law enforcement authorities around the world, as MegaUpload’s servers have been taken down. The WSJ is also reporting that four people have been arrested in New Zealand.
- Kim Schmitz, who has recently been calling himself Kim Dotcom, is amongst those arrested. Schmitz used to live in Germany, but relocated to New Zealand a few years ago. The FBI has said in a press release that it and other law enforcement agencies have executed 20 search warrants in eight countries, seizing $50 million in assets and taking down MegaUpload’s servers.
- Never used it, but always assumed it was 99% illegal content
- News on Radio 1 – 5 or 6 people furious as they used it to share legit files?
- Anonymous not happy – http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/anonymous-megaupload-department-of-justice/
- the group claimed responsibility for taking down the Universal Music, RIAA (the record industry’s lobbying arm), MPAA (the movie industry’s lobbying arm), and Department of Justice websites, among others. The group also claimed that the current attacks were “the largest attack ever by Anonymous,” with 5,635 participants. And it looks like the campaign is ongoing — Anonymous says it’s going after the FBI’s website next…which they did
- Sends jitters through industry – http://torrentfreak.com/cyberlocker-ecosystem-shocked-as-big-players-take-drastic-action-120123/
- Over the past 48 to 72 hours, the operators of many prominent cyberlocker services have been taking unprecedented actions that can not simply be explained away by mere coincidence. The details in the Megaupload indictment clearly have some players in the file-hosting world spooked.
- Filesonic, a top 10 player in the file-sharing world with a billion pageviews a month, not only withdrew its affiliate rewards program, but also banned any third parties downloading files. Simply put, users can now only download files from the service that they uploaded themselves.
- But according to reports, there’s no guarantee of that. Account owners report that their files are being mass deleted, that’s if their entire account has been banned already.
- Fileserve, another leading player, also ended its affiliate program this weekend. Additionally, this morning TorrentFreak received news that Fileserve has now joined Filesonic in banning all 3rd party downloads.
- Uploaded.to banned all US IP addresses in what appears to be an effort to distance itself from US jurisdiction. Its affiliate program is still listed as operational but the same cannot be said about those run by some of its competitors.
- VideoBB and VideoZer have both reportedly closed their rewards program and according to reports have also been mass deleting accounts and huge numbers of files.
- Other sites closing their affiliate programs and/or deleting accounts/files includeFileJungle, UploadStation and FilePost.
- Smaller host UploadBox calls it quits. “All files will be deleted on January 30th. Feel free to download the files you store with UploadBox until this date.”
- Another host, x7.to, shuts down.
- FileJungle and UploadStation have disabled all 3rd party downloads.
- 4shared cancels affiilate program.
6:29 – Google user data to be merged across all sites under contentious plan
- Google is getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.
- Contentious with privacy campaigners
- “If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering, Alma Whitten, wrote in a blogpost.
- After the new policy comes into effect, user information from most Google products – such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google+ and Android mobile – will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising or other revenue-raising purposes.
- An article in the Washington Post raised concerns about details of people’s private meetings, health, politics and finances becoming part of their digital dossier kept by Google. Confidential discussions via Gmail of a meeting location might be transferred to Google Maps without the user’s consent, for example.
- “There is no way anyone expected this,” Jeffrey Chester, executive director of privacy advocacy group the Centre for Digital Democracy, told the Washington Post. “There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns.”[see update]
Google said it expected to roll out the revised guidelines on 1 March, consolidating more than 70 privacy policies covering all of its products.
- I think this is great to be honest – shorter, clearer and to be honest I expected data to be shared amongst my Google profile
- One issue – if you say no you can’t access your gmail or documents – people are forced to accept this really
9:54 – Focus on the user
Google search changes rumble on
- This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies. We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better.
- How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
- All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.
- When engaged, this “Don’t be evil” bookmarklet does one simple thing: It turns back the hands of time, and made Google work the way it did before the integration of Google+ earlier this month.
- Its a very elegant hack, using a number of Google’s own tools – including its “rich snippet” webmaster tool and its own organic search listings, to re-order not only the search engine results, but also the results of the promotional Google+ boxes on the right side of the results, as well as the “typeahead” results that now feature only Google+ accounts (see example below, the first a search on my name using “normal Google” and then one using the bookmarklet).
- Video is well worth watching – https://www.focusontheuser.org/video.php
- Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari available
15:37 – Apples Record Quarter
- Apple more than doubled its profits: to $13.06bn (£8.35bn), compared with $6bn for the same quarter in 2010. The result easily beat analysts’ forecasts, taking pressure off the chief executive, Tim Cook, handpicked by Jobs as his successor. Last October Apple shares recorded their biggest single-day dollar drop after iPhone sales missed their forecast.
- Cook said he was thrilled the company sold a record 37.04m iPhones in the final quarter of 2011, a 128% rise on a year ago. “We could have sold more if we’d had more supply,” he said. The recently launched iPhone 4S proved to be the company’s best seller in the quarter. “We could not be happier,” said Cook.
- In record sales across nearly all product categories, Apple sold a record 15.43m iPads over the quarter, more than double a year ago. It sold 5.2m Macs during the quarter, a 26% unit increase.
- 2nd largest quarterly earning of all time – http://parislemon.com/post/16436735313/this-is-actually-the-craziest-chart-about-apple
- Other 20 are all oil companies
- Sitting on $97 billion – isn’t that a bit obscene?
- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
- Why the iPhone is made in China
22:08 – RIMs CEOs step down
- BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) has said its co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, have bowed to investor pressure and resigned.
- The pair, who together built Lazaridis’s 1985 startup into a global business with $20bn in sales last year, have weathered a storm of criticism in recent years as Apple’s iPhone and the army of devices powered by Google’s innovative Android system eclipsed their email-focused BlackBerry.
- “There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognise the need to pass the baton to new leadership,” Lazaridis said in an interview at RIM’s Waterloo headquarters in Ontario.
- “Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now.” They have been replaced by Thorsten Heins, a former Siemens executive who has risen steadily through RIM’s upper management ranks since joining the Canadian company in late 2007.
- Too little too late – company is in a mess. Should jump on Windows or Android
- http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/23/2727096/rim-open-to-licensing-BB10-blackberry-ceo
- But they are open to licensing BB10
23:48 – UK signs ACTA
- The UK and 21 other European Union member states have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, better known as ACTA – also known as right to be forgotten law
- The countries signed the treaty, which aims to harmonise copyright enforcement across much of the world, in Tokyo on Thursday. However, the signatures of the EU member states and the EU itself will count for nothing unless the European Parliament gives its approval to ACTA in June, and digital activists have urged citizens to lobby their MEPs against voting yes.
- However, five EU countries did not sign, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia. Many other countries, such as the US, Japan and Australia,signed the document in September.
- Although ACTA is primarily concerned with the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), its designation as a trade treaty meant it could be negotiated behind closed doors. This lengthy process, led by the US and Japan, was exposed in a series of leaks — some via Wikileaks — that revealed what was going on.
- The final version of ACTA is very different to earlier drafts, which would have forced countries to disconnect internet users if they were found to be repeatedly sharing copyrighted content. The EU rejected this proposal, and other ideas, such as criminalising the use of a mobile phone camera in a cinema, also fell by the wayside.
- Problem is understanding what it actually means which will hopefully come out over the next few weeks and months
- http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/11014317553/european-parliament-official-charge-acta-quits-denounces-masquerade-behind-acta.shtml
- European parliamentary official asked to investigate ACTA resigned over it today
- I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.
As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.”
Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.
This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.
29:06 – Use pcAnywhere – disable it
- Symantec has confirmed that the hacker group Anonymous stole source code from the 2006 versions of several Norton security products and the pcAnywhere remote access tool.
Although Symantec says the theft actually occurred in 2006, the issue did not come to light until this month when hackers related to Anonymous said they had the source code and would release it publicly. Users of the Norton products in question are not at any increased risk of attack because of the age of the source code and security improvements made in the years since the breach, but the vendor acknowledged on Tuesday night that “Customers of Symantec’s pcAnywhere have increased risk as a result of this incident.”
- Symantec pointed customers to a white paper that recommends disabling pcAnywhere, unless it is needed for business-critical use, because malicious users with access to the source code could identify vulnerabilities and launch new exploits. “At this time, Symantec recommends disabling the product until Symantec releases a final set of software updates that resolve currently known vulnerability risks,” the company said.
30:37 – O2 Share your mobile number
- O2 has apologised for an error that shared users’ mobile phone numbers with the websites they visited.
- An experiment set up by Lewis Peckover, a 28-year-old web systems administrator, called attention to the problem last night.
- Peckover showed that O2 was providing websites with the mobile number of users who visited. The numbers were included as plain text in the header information sent by the phone to the website.
- As well as being a potential breach of the Data Protection Act, this raised the prospect that unscrupulous website owners could collect the phone numbers and send spam SMS or marketing calls.
- O2 admitted that the problem began on January 10th and said it was the “unintended effect” of some routine maintenance that the network carried out earlier this month. They said the issue was fixed this afternoon.
- In a statement, the company said: “We investigated, identified and fixed it this afternoon. We would like to apologise for the concern we have caused.”
- The company added: “The only information websites had access to is your mobile number, which could not have been linked to any other identifying information we have about customers.”

Picks
Ian
Snapseed
- Easy way t enhance photo’s
- Great effects can be added
- New for Mac’s, coming soon for Android
- iOS – £2.99, Mac – £13.99
Henry
Muvizu for PC
- 3d animation software
- free for non-commercial use
- based on unreal 3d engine
- from Digimania in Glasgow

Playback
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Shownotes
1:05 – SOPA protests
- The Stop Online Piracy Act is an act currently wending it’s way through american government. Key legislators have backed away from it, one of its central provisions was shelved and the Obama administration has denounced the more controversial aspects of the bill and hinted at a possible veto should something resembling SOPA land on his desk.
- However SOPA, despite being an American law, affects everyone!
- Order internet service providers to alter their DNS servers from resolving the domain names of websites in foreign countries that host illegal copies of videos, songs, and photos.
Order search engines like Google to modify search results to exclude foreign websites that host illegally copied material.
Order payment providers like PayPal to shut down the payment accounts of foreign websites that host illegally copied material.
Order ad services like Google’s AdSense to refuse any ads or payment from foreign sites that host illegally copied content.
(These rules don’t apply to domains that end in .com, .net, and .org, which fall under US law — the government has been seizing US domains used for piracy since 2010, and just seized 150 domains last month.)
- Large disapproval in the tech industry, wikipeida goes dark as do many sites on Jan 18th to highlight protest
- Many senators start to backtrack and withdraw their support – A freshman senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back anti-Internet piracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure that had been set for a test vote next week.
By Wednesday afternoon, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill’s original co-sponsors, called it “simply not ready for prime time” and withdrew his support.
- Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of SOPA
7:27 – Piracy student loses US extradition battle over copyright infringement
- A judge ruled on Friday that a 23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws.
- The ruling threw Britain’s contentious extradition treaty with the US, which critics allege is greatly biased against UK nationals fighting their removal to America, under further scrutiny. It came just hours after a businessman from Kent lost an appeal against the decision that he should be sent for trial in Texas for allegedly plotting to send missile components to Iran.
Richard O’Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O’Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student’s lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright.
- The defence team pointed out that the only UK prosecution of a similar site, TV-Links, ended last year with the case being thrown out.
- But the district judge, Quentin Purdy, ruled that O’Dwyer should nonetheless face trial in the US. “There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O’Dwyer in the USA, albeit by him never leaving the north of England,” Purdy said. “Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act, and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA.”
- O’Dwyer said he planned to appeal.
11:10 – Google – What Were You Thinking
- In September, Google launched Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO). Whilst we saw aspects of their program that were competitive, we welcomed the initiative, as Kenya still has enough growth in it that every new entrant helps the overall market. We are also confident enough in our product, our local team, and our deep local commitment that we believe we can hold our own against any competition, playing fair.
- Shortly after that launch, we started receiving some odd calls. One or two business owners were clearly getting confused because they wanted help with their website, and we don’t currently offer websites, only a listing. Initially, we didn’t think much of it, but the confusing calls continued through November.
- Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.
- Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.
When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.
- I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.
- Someone, somewhere, has some questions to answer.
These are my personal top 3:
If Google wanted to work with our data, why didn’t they just ask?
In discussions with various Google Kenya/Africa folks in the past, I’d raised the idea of working together more closely in Kenya. Getting Kenyan businesses online is precisely what we do.
Who authorised this? Until we uncovered the ‘India by way of Mountain View’ angle, I could have believed that this was a local team that somehow forgot the corporate motto, but not now.
Who knew, and who SHOULD have known, even if they didn’t know?
- Update – Google mortified -
- “We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites.
“We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”
- Also, vandalising OpenStreetMap -
- Alleged to make thousands of wrong edits
- Google sacked the contractors involved, but said it detected only 20 changes
15:55 – Jerry Yang quits Yahoo
- Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, has resigned from its board.
- Mr Yang founded the online company in 1995 with David Filo and was its chief executive from June 2007 until January 2009.
- His resignation comes two weeks after the company hired former PayPal executive Scott Thomson to be its new chief executive.
- Mr Yang annoyed some shareholders by turning down a $47.5bn (£31bn) takeover offer from Microsoft in 2008.
- The company’s current market value is about $20bn.
- Mr Yang has also resigned from the boards of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group and said in a statement: “The time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo!”
16:22 – A big year…for Flickr?
- Once the darling of photographers other sites like Shutterbug and 500px (and Google+ and Facebook) have taken much of the mindshare when it comes to photo’s
- Unloved, very little innovation and some big behind the scenes names leave the company
- No Flickr have started 2012…by removing some features
- They say it’s a big year so to start off, they are removing features that don’t meet their core vision
- Doing so will clear the decks for their upcoming announcements
- They are also hiring which is a good sign. Here’s hoping for some improvements.
17:29 – Kodak files for bankruptcy
- Kodak has filed for bankruptcy in a bid to survive a liquidity crisis after years of falling sales related to the decline of its namesake film business as digital cameras have taken over the market.
- Eastman Kodak Co, the photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950m, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.
17:59 – Listen to music with Friends
- Today, with music services on Facebook, there’s a new way to listen with friends. This feature lets you listen along with any of your friends who are currently listening to music. You can also listen together in a group while one of your friends plays DJ.
- You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time—so when your favorite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you’re jamming out at a performance or dance club.
- Look for the music note in the chat sidebar to see which of your friends are listening to music. To listen with a friend, hover over their name, and click the Listen With button. The music will play through the service your friend is using. When a new song plays, you’ll come along for the ride, discovering new music while your friend DJs for you.
19:19 – Facebook Apps
- Facebook’s Open Graph app launch event is underway here in San Francisco, where over 60 new Open Graph websites and apps are either demo-ing or launching remotely. The apps can publish user activity back to Timeline and Ticker, even from offsite. Launch partners include Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Gogobot, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook project manager, also announced that Facebook will now begin approving apps from third-party developers who aren’t partners.
The Open Graph platform was first announced at f8 in September. There, music, news reader, and video apps debuted showing how users could share what they listened to, read, or watched. With today’s launch, a wider variety of activity will begin to appear on Tickers, Timelines, and the Facebook news feed. This includes what users have pinned, tickets they’ve bought, trips they’ve planned, and movies they’ve reviewed.
22:07 – Facebook Verbs
- Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories — which go beyond what we’re used to on Facebook.
“When we say anything we really mean anything,” Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen said as he took the stage and announced that verbs like “knitting,” “shared” are now a part of Timeline story options.
- The new app actions are basically a conceptual expansion of actions posted by apps like Spotify and the Washington Post, and use verbs and nouns that go beyond the non custom actions like “listen” “watch” and “read” to “bought,””spot,””pose,””want,””love” and “become an expert.”
23:55 – Apple Education Event
- Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks.
- The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store™. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.
- iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch™ widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote® presentations and 3D objects.
- Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes® U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store. Over 500,000 lectures, videos and books
- Some of these books are massive – 2.7GB for example? A 16GB iPad isn’t going to be an option really
- While impressive, they remind me of Encarta!
- Love the look of notes and study cards though – they look great
- Seemingly the new iBook format is wrapped epub – not another format war?
- Create a book in iBooks Author – must be sold via Apple or given away for free
- iBooks and iTunes U content updates – always fresh. Pretty impressive – the book is finally an app?
- A whole 8 textbooks available today
33:20 – Worlds first self healing iPhone case….from Nissan
- Nissan on Monday announced the company’s new Scratch Shield case for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. The case is made of ABS plastic that is designed to create a rigid, robust and tighter-fitting case. Perhaps the most exciting news is the case’s unique ability to heal itself. Nissan’s Scratch Shield paint is the world’s first paint technology that allows fine scratches to quickly mend themselves. The paint is the same that is featured on numerous Nissan and Infiniti automobiles throughout the world. When damage occurs to the coating, the chemical structure is able to react to change back to its original shape and fill the gap, thus “healing” the blemish. The healing process takes between an hour and a week depending on the damage.
- Released…later this year
34:25 – Lucas calls it quits
- George Lucas has announced his retirement from the movie business.
The director blurted the news to the New York Times in an extensive interview centred on Lucasfilm’s upcoming flick, Red Tails.
- “I’m retiring,” Lucas told the paper. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”
- While reports suggest a fifth Indiana Jones movie is in the pipeline – a rumour Lucas was hesitant to quash – Red Tails is apparently the last blockbuster in the man’s plans.
- Long-time Lucas producer Rick McCallum fuelled the claim saying: “Once this is finished… He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.”

Picks
Henry
Blue Icicle
- USB converter and mic preamp combo that allows you to connect any XLR microphone directly into your computer via USB
- Good quality
- Easy to setup

Playback
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Shownotes
0:57 – Google Search plus your World
- Big search engine update – personal results appear alongside web results in Google
- Basically, Google+ is everywhere
- Twitter annoyed
- Google surprised – it was Twitter that pulled out of their search deal
4:19 – Netflix launches in the UK
- Netflix is available now and anyone can get a one month free trial: click-to-watch TV programmes and films streamed instantly over the Internet to your smart TV, game console, computer, tablet or mobile device. After the free trial, it costs just £5.99 or €6.99 per month
- PS3, Xbox, Wii, iOS and PC/Mac – limited Android and Smart TV support
- Quite a good range of content both American and British though nothing much from last year or two. Price seems not bad. Speed and quality good.
- Get recommendations via Facebook friends
6:32 – Roku to launch in the UK
- Launched by end of Jan
- The entry-level Roku LT will sell for £49.99 (about $77) and the top of the line Roku 2 XS, which comes with a motion-aware remote control for online gaming, will sell for £99.99. That’s a bit of a premium over U.S. pricing, where both models sell for $49 and $99, respectively. Sales will be online and through Amazon.co.uk only for the time being, but the company said that it is going to add additional retailers in the coming months.
7:50 – Zeebox and Sky tie up
- Sky has bought a 10% equity stake in Zeebox, in a deal reportedly worth upwards of $15m, which was founded by BBC iPlayer developer Anthony Rose and former EMI board director Ernesto Schmitt.
- Will appear in Sky’s apps this summer
12:25 – CES
- Lots of tablets
- Lot of Ultrabooks
- Lots of TV’s
- Kinect for Windows
- Anything catch the eye – Samsung Smart TV’s and the 55” OLED
- The rest is all meh…
14:03 – iTunes Match
- False start on Thursday 15th, but launches on Friday 16th
- £20.99 yearly subscription
- Overwhelmed at first
- Ian – 11,500 library – uploaded 11GB of music (1500 tracks), but matched the others. 6,500 were of better quality than I had already – downloading was fast
16:08 – Virgin Doubling Speeds
- Virgin Media is to invest more than £100m on a programme that will more than double the broadband speed for most of its 4m internetcustomers.
- Virgin Media, which has tested speeds of up to 1.5Gb a second in a trial of tech businesses at the so-called Silicon Roundabout in London, is to spend £110m on the 18-month upgrade programme.
- The company says that those who subscribe to its up to 10Mb service – 74% of its 4.1m internet subscribers – will see their speed double to 20Mb.
- Those on its up to 20Mb tier, 12% of the total subscriber base, will see their speed tripled to 60Mb.
- The 9% who take 30Mb broadband will rise to 60Mb.
- And the 5% who take services from 50Mb to 100Mb will rise to a speed of between 100Mb and 120Mb.
- The top-tier speed – at 120Mb it will be the quickest offered in the UK – will enable customers to download a high-definition movie in about five minutes.
- BT’s response – “It is no surprise to see that Virgin are following our lead by doubling speeds. We announced we would do this for our fibre products last autumn and so they are trying to catch up with us.” Cocks
18:03 – Microsoft taking pirates to court
- Microsoft has accused high-street retailer Comet of pirating 94,000 Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs and selling them to consumers.
- The software giant announced this morning that it had filed a suit against Comet Group PLC, accusing the group of manufacturing counterfeit discs at a factory in Hampshire and selling them through its UK retail outlets. Comet has 248 stores across the UK. A spokesperson for Microsoft was unable to say where the suit has been filed.
- The allegedly counterfeit recovery discs were then sold to customers who had bought desktops and laptops running Windows, Microsoft said. Microsoft’s associate general counsel for worldwide anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting David Finn called Comet’s actions “unfair to customers” in this morning’s statement.
- “We expect better from retailers of Microsoft products – and our customers deserve better, too,” he said.
- In an official statement, Comet told The Reg it had sought legal advice from “leading counsel” to “support its view that the production of recovery discs did not infringe Microsoft’s intellectual property.”
21:41 – School ICT to be replaced by computer science programme
- The current information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in England’s schools is a “mess” and must be radically revamped, the education secretary has announced.
- From September it will be replaced by a flexible curriculum in computer science and programming, designed with the help of universities and industry.
Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum “demotivating and dull”.
He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.
- “Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations,” he said.
Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.
27:25 – rFactor 2 and Skyrim
- rFactor 2 Beta released! Whoop. £29.99 – “Pre-purchase” basically, buy the game now and you get access to the Beta (planned to run for around 6 months.)
- initial impressions – still not at the bleeding edge of graphics… but the underlying simulation appears stronger than ever!
- Skyrim – addicted. Enought said. Too many hours.

Picks
Ian
F.Lux
- Makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
- Mac only
- Free
Chris
3D Laser Mapping
- Next gen Street View?
Henry
Action Movie FX
- Free app for iOS that allows you to add effects to your movies
- Great for blowing up your colleagues

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Shownotes
2:31 – Best Buy UK No More
- In a joint venture with CPW launched last year, Best Buy opened 11 giant outlets in the UK, employing some 1,100 staff, all of which will be shuttered.
- The battered retail sector forced Best Buy to freeze store expansion plans as losses for the joint venture tripled in the last full financial year. The JV is expected to be £35m in the red when half-year figures are released this week.
- “After conducting a thorough strategic review of our operations, we believe that our capital investment and ‘connectivity’ strategy should be prioritised within our Carphone Warehouse stores as they offer a higher and proven rate of return,” said Andrew Harrison, CEO of Best Buy Europe.
- Comet sold for £2 and lots of conditions around debt and pensions – a real struggle for electrical retailers right now
5:47 – Google + Brands
- Anyone can create a page
- Not necessary to authorise – easy to create duplicates – I did
- Can verify by adding code to your site and/or the Google+ button
- No shared admin but allegedly coming soon
- Feels pretty rushed – in fact it’s a mess
12:01 – Adobe kills development on Flash Mobile
- After many promises and many a key bullet point for Android devices, Adobe have announced that they will no longer produce/focus on Flash for Mobile browsers
- Steve Jobs wins? I think we all do – focus is on HTML5 and hopefully puts to an end the battery and CPU hog that is Flash on mobiles
- Most have said that mobile is the future of t’internet – does this mean an exit from Flash on the desktop too? 2-3 years left?
- Silverlight looks to be on the way out too – next release will be last release worked on by MS
16:04 – COD Modern Warfare 3 Sales Record
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has set a new record for the biggest ever entertainment launch. The game’s publisher, Activision Blizzard, has claimed that in the US and UK alone, the military shooter sold over 6.5m units within 24 hours of its launch on Tuesday, raising $400m in sales revenues.
- The figures are based on data from Charttrack as well as customer sell-through information. It is a third consecutive sales record for the Call of Duty series. 2009′s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7m copies in 24 hours earning $310m in revenue, while last year’s Call of Duty: Black Op hit 5.6m copies in its first day.
18:22 – 4G trial coming to London
- London will begin to switch on 4G high-speed mobile internet with the launch of the first large-scale public trial in Britain.
- Initiated by O2, Britain’s second largest operator with 22 million customers, the trial involves more than 25 masts covering 15 square miles in Canary Wharf, Soho, Westminster, South Bank and King’s Cross. It will run for nine months, and the equipment installed will eventually become part of O2′s first commercial 4G network.
- The technology is 10 times faster at navigating the internet than the current 3G networks, which often frustrate smartphone users because they are significantly slower than the average home broadbandconnection. The 25 masts in London will be able to carry more data than O2′s entire national 3G network.
- Britain’s 4G or long-term evolution (LTE) upgrade, expected to begin in earnest in 2013 after a much delayed spectrum auction, will make mobile networks powerful enough to handle video calls, high definition TV and live multi-player gaming. About 1,000 users will be invited to join the London trial, including staff at John Lewis department stores, O2 customers and selected small businesses.
21:00 – Virtual rush hour slows down broadband
- There is a virtual rush hour after the real one, and it slows down people who want to get things done there, too.
- New research has found that broadband download speeds in the UK drop by an average of 35% during the evening as millions of technology users go online and find themselves competing for the same bandwidth on phone lines in their area.
- The study by uSwitch.com analysed data from 2m broadband speed tests across Britain, and revealed a huge fluctuation in surfing speeds during peak and off-peak times.
- Those who navigate the web during the morning hours of 2am and 3am get the quickest download times, with a fastest average download speed of 9.6Mbps, analysts found.
- By contrast those who surf the web between 7pm and 9pm – the peak period when most people get home and go online – face the slowest times, with average speeds dropping by a third to 6.2Mbps.
23:11 – While in America
- Kindle Fire launches – ok to good reviews, some disappointed with software but that can be fixed
- iTunes match launches – generally positive, initially overwhelmed
- Google Music

Picks
Ian
Google Search for iPad
- Brings Chrome to iPad – almost
- Also enjoying Engadget Distro and Editions from AOL
Chris
Tiny Tower,Groove,W.E.L.D.E.R, Bought The Poke app as it brings much enjoyment through twitter…

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Shownotes
0:43 – Nokia Windows Phone Revealed
- Lumia 800
- The 800 sports a curved 3.7-inch WVGA ClearBlack AMOLED display, a single-core 1.4GHz processor, and 512MB of RAM. Mobile photographers will find much to like about the 8-megapixel camera with a f/2.2 Carl Zeiss lens, and the 16GB of onboard storage should hold quite a few cat pictures. The specs won’t exactly set anyone’s world on fire, but the design might: like the N9 before it, the Lumia 800 features a stunning unibody design that’s shaped out of a slab of durable polycarbonate material.
- The style-conscious among you will also be glad to know that the Lumia 800 comes in three colors: black, cyan, and magenta. Surprisingly, the Lumia 800 is already on its way to France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in time for a November launch. Customers in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan will be able to nab one by the end of the year, but domestic Windows Phones fans will have to wait until early 2012.
6:14 – Android passes iOS in total app downloads
- Android commanded 44 percent of overall mobile app downloads compared to 31 percent for iOS.
- According to ABI, Android has much bigger install base compared to iOS, with 2.4 users for every iOS user worldwide. By 2016, that gap is expected to grow to 3:1. But even with the bigger footprint, iOS users still download more apps individually than average Android users by a 2 to 1 ratio.
- Apple is still the No. 1 focus for most developers because of the fact that it’s a better place to monetize apps; Ovum predicts iOS will still generate more in paid download revenue in 2016 with iOS making $2.86 billion compared to $1.5 billion for Android. As I wrote about before, Apple customers are also more interested in downloading a wider variety of apps, which is helpful for developers.
9:23 – Apple admit iOS 5 battery issues
- “A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices,” Apple said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
- Apple didn’t say exactly what the “few bugs” were, but leading candidates right now are iCloud sync and notifications. Apple has just posted a developer beta for iOS 5.0.1, with the following changelog:
- iOS 5.0.1 beta contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
- Fixes bugs affecting battery life
- Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
- Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
- Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
- Contains security improvements
13:21 – Siri does not understand the Scots
- Problems with Scots accent
- Really. So surprised…
17:10 – Mobile britain – all about the data
- Staggeringly, 97% of all the traffic that now travels through our network is data. That’s amazing.
- It’s even more amazing when you know that since June last year and September this year (just 14 months) we’ve seen a 427% increase in data usage on Three for smartphone customers. Downloading apps, streaming movies, getting around town with Google Maps, even checking in on Facebook – it all adds up, and you’re doing it now more than ever.
19:57 – Home data rates are staggering too
- The average home broadband user downloads 17 gigabytes (GB) of data each month, equivalent to streaming 12 hours of high-definition content from the BBC’s iPlayer, as data use has increased sevenfold over the past five years, says a new report.
- At the same time 97% of UK premises – and 66% of the country – can get a voice signal outdoors from each of the mobile networks O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone, while 73% of premises and 13% of the country can access 3G data signals, according to research by the communications watchdog Ofcom.
- Internet service providers confirmed that customers’ data demands have increased dramatically as people have begun to adopt video catchup services and “cloud” services such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.
- Virgin Media told the Guardian that customers on faster lines use proportionally more data: those on its 10 megabit per second (Mbps) lines use about 19GB a month on average, while those using its 100Mbps lines consume 130GB. As the figures are averages, though, some people using filesharing networks may be downloading considerably more, said a Virgin spokesperson. TalkTalk said the average user downloads 13GB. BT declined to give figures.
22:19 – Netflix to hit UK in early 2012
- Netflix today said it will offer “unlimited TV shows and films streaming instantly over the internet to TVs and computers for one low monthly subscription price”.
- Streaming only, no DVD rentals
- Another step to cutting Sky or Virgin?
- No idea on price or range
- Dropped 800,000 subscribers in latest figures, and despite healthy revenues has said that they will move to net loss with roll out in UK & Ireland
- Shares dropped 37% – ouch
25:46 – SeeSaw goes Bye Bye
- The British streaming television service, SeeSaw, has been closed down.
- The website had been online less than two years, offering content from BBC Worldwide, Channel 4, Channel Five and several production companies.
- A group of investors led by Criterion Capital Partners took a majority stake in the business in July. CCP also owns the social network Bebo. Experts said the business was squeezed out by bigger players in the online video market.
- SeeSaw was created by the media services company, Arqiva, in February 2010. It used assets from the aborted catch-up TV platform, Project Kangeroo, which had been rejected by the UK’s competition regulator.
- It offered a range of free-to-watch programmes supported by advertising, with an optional fee to turn the adverts off. It also had premium pay-to-watch shows.
26:58 – BT given 14 days to block Newzbin 2
- BT has been given 14 days to block access to a website accused of promoting illegal filesharing “on a grand scale” by Hollywood studios, in the first high court ruling of its kind under UK copyright law.
- Wednesday’s court order also allows for the blocking of any other IP or internet address that the operators of the Newzbin2 site might look to use to continue to offer copyrighted content to users.
- The judge said that limiting the blocking order to the Newzbin2 site would be “too easily circumvented to be effective” because the site’s owners have already made available software that could allow users to get around a BT block.
- He backed the studios’ proposal that BT should also move to block “any other IP address or URL whose sole or predominant purpose is to enable or facilitate access to the Newzbin[2] website”.
- “Furthermore, I do not consider that the studios should be obliged to return to court for an order in respect of every single IP address or URL that the operators of Newzbin2 may use,” he added.
- The court said BT must foot the bill for the cost of implementing the web block on Newzbin2. BT, which argued that the creative industries should pay, has estimated the cost to be about £5,000 and £100 for each subsequent notification.
- App launched by Newzbin to get around the block
30:34 – Borrow Kindle books…if your a prime user…and live in the US
- The new Lending Library turns your Kindle into a sort of virtual library, with currently 5,000 titles you can borrow from Amazon, including 100 New York Times bestsellers. You can borrow one book a month by going to the “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library” in the Kindle Store on your Kindle device. Books with the Prime icon can be borrowed for free for the month (as long as you’re a Prime member). Correction: There are no due dates, but you can only have one book out at a time.
- Only works with Kindle devices – not Kindle software
- So prime in the US gives you lending and free streaming as well as the free day shipping
- UK is free next day shipping only – will that change when the content dels are in place
33:19 – HP Reverses
- Will retain PC division
- Now that the Personal Systems Group is staying part of HP, the board of directors feels that it can “drive profitable growth” and assist other parts of HP’s business.
- Web OS seemingly still for the chop – tablets will use Windows 8
- But they are still trying to maintain developer interest by offering cheap tablets to them…
34:57 – Google+ Updates
- Google+ now works for Google App users – finally
- Launches Whats Hot
- Exposing popular posts, not just from your circles
- Ripples
- Visualise how a story was shared
- Experimental but nice
- Creative Kit
- Add filters, effects, text to your images with ease
- After a release that the tech community loved – and praised fairly universally – pretty sure that takeup is pretty inconsequential… Can it survive? Not a daily visit on my we travels any more.
- Another Bing?
38:15 – Google TV Updates
- It’s coming to UK soon so worth mentioning this update
- Reworked UI – proper 10 foot interface
- New apps
- Android Marketplace
- Doesn’t replace Sky or Virgin, but to be used alongside those devices
41:01 – Google Reader Updates
- Removed sharing
- Everything through Google+
- Can’t follow others
- New design shows more white, shows less er page, is harder to understand
- iOS Gmail app released
- Basically a wrapper around a web app
- Attachments and notifications only real difference
- Except notifications are broke
- Only supports one gmail account
- An hour after release they pull the app and apologise
- Google figure out a way to get around the iOS limitation of 100 beta testers
- Seriously though – why do this?
48:24 – Facebook Stats
- Ahead of new trusted Friends feature, Faceook unleashed some pretty amazing stats
- every day, “only .06%” of Facebook’s 1 billion logins are compromised. Or, to put it another way, 600,000 logins per day are compromised.
- Less than 4% of the content shared on Facebook is spam (vs. 89.1% of email is spam)
- Less than 5% of Facebook users experience spam on any given day
- 50% of Facebook’s 750+ million users login to Facebook every day (wait, aren’t we up to 800 million now? Must be an old infographic).
- The average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes on the site per month
52:41 – Batman and other games
- Batman
- Another epic and deeply atmospheric chapter. Powerful end to story as well.
- Clever sandbox environment/story as well.
- Finishing main story line represents under 50% of game completion with challenge maps, side missions and riddlers tropies/riddles making up remainder.
- Serious no no… save game issues still… Extremely easy to corrupt a save file and then all progress lost. Only option to start again. Happened to me at 25% and a search around the internet turned up plenty more pissed off people. Also, issue with game failing to recognise downloaded content and then failing to load. Again, big no no.
- Battlefield
- Uncharted 3
- GTA V trailer – return to San Andreas
- MW3 just around the corner
- Threats from MS they will ban players playing early… even if you bought a legit copy, legitimately… Like to see the fallout from that one?

Picks
Chris
Jetpack Joyride
- Great game for iOS devices
- Using different weapons try and fly for as long as possible
- Good graphics and sound
Ian
idonethis
- Mails you once a day, you reply with events you’ve done that day
- Email only – can’t edit via website
- Calendar viewable online or shared via secret url into Google Calendar or iCal
- Nice way of tracking events – can be exported from site

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Shownotes
3:31 – Apple
- Steve Jobs dies
- iOS 5 – error 3200 trending world wide on twitter, Ian- reboot machine after each iOS device upgrade failed
- Newsstand working well
- Wired supports it, and print subscribers will get access to iPad editions at no extra cost – lovely
- Guardian iPad app supporting Newsstand as well
- Lots and lots of Future mags supporting Newsstand
- iPhone 4S
- In non-U.S. countries, or if you’re not using U.S. English as your device language, Siri can’t look for businesses, use maps or access traffic info. So asking it to find the best route to your cousin’s house in Germany won’t produce results, nor will inquiring about restaurants in your immediate vicinity.
- iCloud – took 36 hours before I could move and enable
- Half baked – Mac syncing of docs gone, many third party app’s in the dark. Sharing docs with the Mac is pretty awful
- Despite that, 4 million 4S’s sold in three days – double the sale rate of iPhone 4 at launch
21:11 – Box.net
- Twenty-four hours after Apple released iOS 5 and accompanying iCloud storage offering, Box has announced that they’re offering iPad and iPhone users 50 gigabytes of free storage starting tonight. It’s also increasing file upload limit from 25 MB to 100 MB.
To get that amount of storage from iCloud, users have to fork over $100 per year to Apple.
- Box’s promotion is good for the next 50 days, but once redeemed, the data is good for life. To activate it, simply download the latest version of Box for iOS and log into (or create) your account.
22:43 – Blackberry Outage
- Down for three days
- No internet, twitter, Facebook or BBM
- Horrible time for this to happen
- Affected people on 4 continents and indeed spread to America
- Apology from CEO
- Failure allegedly in Slough
26:30 – Google Fall Sweep
- At the start of September Google killed a slew of products – now it’s killing a few more
- Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:
Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
- In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it usingGoogle Takeout.
- Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
- Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle’s social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
- The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.
- In addition, later today the Google Labs site will shut down, and as previously announced, Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search.
29:03 – Youtube offers film rentals in the UK
- Video site YouTube has started a movie rental service in the UK.
Blockbusters such as The Dark Knight and classics including The Birds can be watched via the site. In total, about 1,000 movies have been made available.
- New releases will cost £3.49 to rent and library titles £2.49. Users have 30 days to begin watching a film, and 48 hours to finish it once they start.
- Most aren’t HD – 480p, DVD quality
- Does show ratings from Rotten Tomatoes and information about the films from elsewhere
31:09 – Google Books hits the UK
- Readers in the UK now have access to the world’s largest ebooks collection, with hundreds of thousands of ebooks for sale – from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin – as well as more than two million public domain ebooks for free.
- Just as in the US, we’ve designed the Google eBooks platform in the UK to be open. You can purchase, download and view Google eBooks on many devices: Android and Apple tablets and smartphones, the Google eBooks Web Reader and eReaders from Sony, Kobo, Elonex, and more. Your Google eBooks are stored in the cloud, so you can easily access them and continue reading wherever you last left off, regardless of which device you were on.
- We’ve partnered with independent booksellers, so you will soon be able to buy Google eBooks through your favourite bookstore. Booksellers like Gardners’ Hive, as well as others to come, will be selling Google eBooks in the UK. We’re also working with local retailers like Blackwell’s as affiliate partners.
32:24 – New Android Devices
41:08 – Android 4 – Ice Cream Sandwich revealed
- New UI – toned down honeycomb but still has that Tronesque UI
- No more physical buttons
- Native resolution – 720p
- Near instantaneous voice dictation
- Face unlock
- Android Beam – uses NFC to communicate between Android devices – contacts, video’s, URLS – API to come to allow developers to use it
- Camera app – brings many of the iOS UI features, gallery also improved bringing filters
- Lots of cloud enhancements
- Lots of tweaks throughout the OS
- SDK for dev’s already released
- Most gingerbread running phones should be able to run 4
47:24 – WH Smiths to launch e-book reader
- The UK newsagent will begin selling the Kobo reader from the Canadian company of the same name on 17 October.
- Kobo has e-book stores in Canada and Australia, and the WHSmith deal will bring its 2.2m – of which 1m are freebies: out-of-copyright classics and the like – to UK high streets.
- WHSmith will offer two devices: a basic £90 model and an upgraded version with a touch-sensitive screen for £110.
48:38 – Shopping centre calls police for father taking illegal pictures of his daughter
- Chris White claims a security guard told him that the pictures, taken at the Braehead centre near Glasgow on Friday afternoon, were “illegal”.
- The guard allegedly then asked Mr White to delete the photographs, taken on his mobile phone. Mr White, a mental health trainer, said: “I told him I had taken two photographs of my daughter Hazel, and that since I had already posted them on Facebook there was little point in deleting the pictures.
“The guard then told me to ‘remain right there’ while he called police, which I chose to do.”
- According to Mr White, Hazel was in tears while they waited five minutes for officers to arrive at the scene. He said he was then quizzed by two uniformed policemen who told him there had been a complaint about him taking photographs and that there were “clear signs” in the centre stating that the use of cameras was forbidden.
- Police issued a statement denying the above
- After the story exploded on Twitter and Facebook, Braehead issued an apology
- A spokesman for the centre said it was changing its photography policy with immediate effect to allow people to take pictures of family and friends in the mall. “We have listened to the very public debate surrounding our photography policy and as a result, with immediate effect, are changing the policy to allow family and friends to take photos in the mall. “We will publicise this more clearly in the mall and on our website. We will reserve the right to challenge suspicious behaviour for the safety and enjoyment of our shoppers. “We wish to apologise to Mr White for the distress we may have caused to him and his family and we will be in direct contact with him to apologise properly.”
51:53 – Playstation Vita UK Details
- The Wi-Fi only model will be yours for £230.
- The higher-specced 3G edition will cost £280.
- They’ll arrive on 22 February, 2012
57:24 – Lytro Details
- You won’t be able to get one until early 2012, but you can order one now for $399 (and $499 for a more advanced version).
- In design, Lytro takes more than a couple of cues from Apple. It’s supremely simple, with just two buttons and a slider for zooming. Plus, it’s available in a variety of colors. Hit the shutter button and it takes a picture instantly — no need to wait for it to focus.
- The Lytro is long, thin and small, like a viewfinder with a rubberized end (and nothing at all like a regular camera). Its “electric blue” and “graphite” models will have 8 GB of storage on board, which the company says is enough for 350 light-field pictures. For $100 more, you get 16 GB, with room for 750 pictures and a “fire red” design. (See the different colors below).
- The battery is a selling point, too. You should be able to fill up the entire camera with pictures on a single charge. That translates to about two weeks of battery time, with regular usage.
- Desktop editor only supports Mac

Picks
Ian
PressPausePlay
- The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunites.
- But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity?
- This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.
- Buy on iTunes (£9.99, or rent) or Amazon….or download via torrent for free

Playback
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Shownotes
1:11 – Windows 8
- Windows 8, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, will sport a dual interface aimed at both tablet and desktop computers, and the company will approve or reject third-party apps for the tablet version.
- Although Windows 8 will run on both Intel and ARM chip architectures, apps will have to be recompiled for the latter; there will be no virtualisation of Intel apps to run on ARM chips, which are already used in Apple’s iPad, Android tablets and HP’s discontinued TouchPad.
- Furthermore, applications for the ARM version of Windows 8 will only be available through the “Windows Store” – and only apps compiled to use its “Metro” touch interface will appear there.
- Windows 8 is expected to be released to the public in about a year’s time.
- Windows 8 is an OS with a dual personality: for tablets, and for desktops.
- The tablet side, called Metro, is a new user interface built from the ground up for touch control, and borrowing from the design used for Windows Phone 7. Instead of a Start menu with small icons, Windows 8 has chunky tiles, used both for launching applications and to display information. Run a Metro app and it fills the entire screen – a style Microsoft calls the immersive user interface.
- Internet Explorer 10 nicely demonstrates this immersive style. Browse the web, and all you see is the web page. If you need to see the address bar or other controls, you swipe the screen at top or bottom to display the application bar. Tap the page again and the controls disappear.
- There is one concession to PC-style multitasking, which is the ability to have two apps side by side. In this mode, one app occupies most of the screen, but another app runs alongside it.
- Another feature of Metro is “Charms”. Flick the screen on the right, and five icons appear, labelled Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings. These form a common user interface for performing standard tasks: searching, sharing content on social media such as Twitter or Facebook, interacting with devices like printers, or changing application settings.
- Although it is still Windows, Metro is properly described as a new platform, since it is not fully compatible with the old Windows API (Application Programming Interface). A wide range of programming languages is supported, but Microsoft is particularly promoting JavaScript, HTML and CSS – in other words, web technologies extended with Windows-specific libraries to create apps that use the internet Explorer engine as a runtime.
- While Metro in Windows 8 looks similar to Windows Phone 7, it is quite different under the covers, and Sinofsky says that will continue to be the case. “We’ve shown how code can be shared, but running the same apps on both is still a ways away, primarily because of the form factor,” he said.
- 5000 Samsung tablets running WIndows 8 handed out at Build
- Developer preview available to download now – Ian has running in VMware on Lion
- 2 browsers in Windows 8 – Metro browser and IE 10
- Metro browser will be plugin free – no Silverlight, no Flash – HTML5 only
- Big statement on battery life, usability and where the industry is heading
- Considering tablets are going to be mostly Metro driven and run on ARM it’s going to be an interesting year for technologies like Flash
10:46 – Ballmer admits lacklustre Windows Phone 7 sales
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed disappointment atWindows Phone 7 sales during Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting Wednesday.
- “We haven’t sold quite as many as I would have liked in the first year. … I’m not saying I love where we are, but I am very optimistic on where we can be,” Ballmer said.
- The Windows Phone 7 platform was embraced by many of the world’s largest phone manufacturers, including Samsungand HTC, both of whom soon plan to launch devices based on the next version of WP7 or Mango. However, these mobile giants have the majority of their chips invested in Google‘s Android — and that’s where most of their smartphone sales come from.
- This leaves Microsoft with only one big and really dedicated WP7 partner — the stumbling Finnish giant Nokia. “With Nokia we have a dedicated hardware partner that is all-in on Windows Phones. They are not doing something on Android,” Ballmer said.
13:32 – Intel and Google in Android chip-making partnership
- The move is aimed at giving Intel greater access to the fast-growing mobile devices sector.
- Intel is the world’s biggest chipmaker in the computer and server market.
- However, it has so far played second fiddle to Cambridge-based designer ARM Holdings in the market for low power consumption chips.
- End of Wintel?
16:19 – Google Wallet launches
- limited to just the Nexus S on Sprint so even the Nexus S for both T-Mobile and AT&T will have to wait until a deal is struck with those carriers. Users have access to a Google Wallet application that can quickly be set up using a Google sign-on. From there, you can choose to load up a MasterCard credit card from Citibank, which will directly pull from your accounts. Or you can do what I did, which is load up funds on to a Google Prepaid Card with funds from other credit and debit cards. You have to fill out all the address information to add funds from a card.
- Once your Prepaid Card is provisioned, you can choose to make that the default payment card with one click. You will need to set a PIN to unlock Google Wallet but you can set the time-out for 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes. That’s helpful when you want to unlock Google Wallet in line so you pay quickly. You can attach location to your payment history but it doesn’t record the actual store you visited, just an approximate address.
- While you’re out and about, you just go to any PayPass enabled point of sale terminal and in lieu of a card, you can just tap your phone to pay and get a buzz on your phone to confirm the purchase. You will need to wake up the phone because of security reasons, the NFC chip won’t work until that happens. And if the time-out period has expired on the lock for Google Wallet, you will also need to enter your PIN before completing a transaction. From Google Wallet you can see an updated balance on your pre-paid card but again there is no detailed history about what you bought or where.
- Google Wallet is tied to both Google Offers and Google Shopper. Users can search for local deals on Google Shopper and save them to their Google Wallet. They can apply their deals automatically through retailers and businesses who have enabled single tap and pay; their discount is deducted from their purchase. Many other offers, however, just require a user to show their phone coupon to an employee for instant redemption. You can also add loyalty cards to Google Wallet. That’s helpful for customers who forget their loyalty cards and it’s good for businesses who have enabled single tap and pay, so one wave of Google Wallet can also be recorded in existing loyalty programs.
- When works a advertised, it’s great according to reviews
- Some glitches though – sometimes they couldn’t make payment. Payment options limited, no payment history but it’s early days. Tis the future
19:18 – Google + Updates
- Big news – nine new features
- Hangouts on your phone – Android now, iOS soon
- Hangouts on Air
- just start a normal hangout, and you’ll have the option to broadcast and record your session. Once you’re “On Air,” up to nine others can join your hangout (as usual), and anyone can watch your live broadcast:
- Hangout extras
- Screensharing: for when you want to show off your vacation photos, your high score, your lesson plan or whatever else is on your screen
- Sketchpad: for when you want to draw, doodle, or just scribble together
- Google Docs: for when you want to write, plan or present something with others
- Named Hangouts: for when you want to join or create a public hangout about a certain topic (like fashion or music or sports…)
- Hangouts APIs
- Search in Google+
You’ve been asking for it, and we’ve been busy building it, so today we’re bringing Google’s search expertise to Google+. Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web.
- Anyone can sign up for Google+—no invitation required.
25:01 – Facebook Launches Subscriptions
- Facebook is rolling out another key new feature: a one-way follow model called Subscriptions. It’s sort of like Twitter, sort of like Google+, and it massages one of the service’s biggest pain points for users who have a lot of friends (or who want to share their status updates broadly).
- Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.
- Facebook says the feature will appeal to anyone looking to reach a broader audience, like journalists, artists, and political figures. To start sharing your own posts publicly, head to the new tab beneath your profile photo that says Subscriptions. Click it, and you’ll have the option to broadcast your public updates to anyone who has subscribed to you. Note that you’ll only syndicate updates that are marked Public; updates shared with Friend Lists won’t be seen by your subscribers.
- Of course, Facebook has offered a similar feature called Pages for years now, which was meant for nearly the same thing (you’ll find that many journalists and politicians have already created Facebook Pages… because that’s what Facebook told them to do). The difference here, Facebook says, is that users no longer have to maintain two separate entities; they can just use the site’s sharing settings to decide which content they want to share very broadly, and what will only be shared with friends.
- Facebook adds that this isn’t the end of Pages by any means — they say that feature will still appeal to brands and major celebrities, because Pages can be managed by multiple admins and can be customized with applications. Pages also offer Insights (Facebook’s analytics tool), whereas Subscriptions don’t. Fortunately, Facebook is allowing users to merge their Pages with their profiles, so you don’t have to rebuild your audience if you want to use the Subscription feature.
- Maybe a coincidence but Google+ has started an arms race with Facebook…and Twitter hasn’t really changed much in the last 6 months
26:52 – Facebook Updates News Feed
- Alongside subscribe and smart lists, now comes updated news feed
- Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.
- News Feed often has a time lag. Usually when you’re on Facebook, a lot of your friends are too. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to see and chat with your friends about photos, articles, and other things they’re posting in real-time. The new ticker helps you do just that.
- Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously. Now when a friend comments, asks a question or shares something like a check in, you’ll be able to join the conversation right away. Click on anything in ticker to see the full story and chime in – without losing your place.
33:51 – Carol Bartz Fired
- Carol Bartz fired by Yahoo board
- She’s not happy as it was done via a phone call
- Is it any surprise – not innovating, can’t think of anything they’ve done in last 2 years that stands out
36:17 – Guardian App now on Android
- The app – which is free to download and is available from the AndroidMarket worldwide – includes the latest news, sport, comment, reviews, videos, podcasts and picture galleries from guardian.co.uk.
- A full list of features and further information is available from our FAQs, but there are two bits of functionality that we’re really excited about.
First, the homescreen is highly customisable – if you like football, you could do away with the usual mix of news and sport and instead see the top five stories from our Premier League page followed by the latest from your favourite team and then Barry Glendenning’s most recent posts. If you want in depth coverage of a particular story, you can add that topic to your homescreen – UK riots or phone hacking, for instance. This level of customisation has also influenced the offline reading options. Rather than manually selecting what you want to download, there is one button that allows you to download your homescreen and your favourites. Alternatively, you can schedule this download to take place at a certain time each day – for example via Wi-Fi before you leave the house and go offline.
- Ad-supported and free unlike iPhone which is subscription (but cheap)
- iPad app nearly ready!
38:29 – Adobe works around iOS Flash Limitations
- Ardent iOS supporters have been clamoring for true Flash support for years, and with the announcement of their new version of Flash Media Server, Adobe completely fails to deliver. Instead, they’ve managed to update their media server with a way to get streaming Flash video running on Apple’s myriad iOS devices.
- Alas, while you can’t start working through your backlog of artsy Flash games, Flash Media Server 4.5 allows content producers to easily to get their Flash content onto iOS devices without any additional headache.
- While older versions of the media server served up video streams in the F4F format, the update has added support for the HTTP Live Streaming format, which iPads and the like can handle just fine.
- The media server system, according to ZDNet, detects the device’s level of Flash-capability and will switch over to using the HLS format when it sees an iOS device. It’s actually pretty ironic: in order to make Flash video streaming work, the new version of Media Server actually has to un-Flash the content and wrap it in another, more iOS-friendly container.
39:35 – Lion passwords can be changed by any local user
- In Lion the permissions for the user’s shadow files are still restrictive and prevent tampering; however, the need for direct access can be bypassed in because the system holds the password hashes in the system’s directory services, which any user can look up. As a result, the hashes can be extracted without needing to supply admin privileges, and then be run through various hacking tools and scripts to recover the user’s password.
In addition to being able to extract the password hashes for a user, any user can also directly change another user’s password, including those of system admins, merely by supplying the following command in the Terminal (substituting USERNAME for the short name of the target account):
dscl localhost -passwd /Search/Users/USERNAME
When run, this command will appear to give an error, but if you enter the same new password at all prompts then the target account’s password will be changed. This is particularly notable, because once an admin’s password is changed, the hacker can log in as that the admin account and have full access to the system.
Overall this issue in Lion means that any user (even nonadmins) can extract or change the password of another user’s account, provided they have access to the directory, such as via the Terminal utility. However, this problem does have two limitations:
Local access
The first is that the hacker needs to have access to local accounts your system, which means that you will have had to set the hacker up with an account beforehand. This hack can be done remotely with SSH connectivity, but the hacker would need to already know a local account username and password to do this. Alternatively the hacker can approach a system that is already logged in and change the passwords of accounts on it, but in this case the hacker would still need local physical access to do this.
Directory service access
Besides local access, the hacker then needs to have access to the system’s directory services (such as via the Terminal). Even if a hacker can log into the system, without access to the directory setup then the hacker will not be able to modify account information.
44:04 – Waterstones enters ereader race
- The British company’s managing director, James Daunt, told Radio 4 that it planned to enter the market with both an electronic book store and an actual reader by spring of 2012. Mr. Daunt claimed he was inspired by the success of the Nook, and the challenge it posed to Amazon’s Kindle, to finally take a stab at ushering the UK chain into the 21st century.
46:16 – Hunts anti-piracy drive
- Jeremy Hunt, CUNTure Secretary, has delivered a hard-hitting speech, calling on net firms, advertisers and credit card companies to cut ties with websites that link to unlawful content.
- Many of the changes mooted by Mr Hunt are destined for the new Communications Act which is due to become law towards the end of the current Parliament in 2015.
Suggested measures include:
A cross-industry body, perhaps modelled on the Internet Watch Foundation, to be charged with identifying infringing websites against which action could be taken
A streamlined legal process to make it possible for the courts to act quickly
A responsibility on search engines and ISPs to take reasonable steps to make it harder to access sites that a court has deemed contain unlawful content or promote unlawful distribution of content
A responsibility on advertisers to take reasonable steps to remove their advertisements from these sites
A responsibility on credit card companies and banks to remove their services from these sites.
- The hope is that the tough new measures will sit alongside the already controversial anti-piracy legislation outlined in the Digital Economy Act (DEA).
- The DEA remains in a state of suspended animation as the government waits for the European Parliament to approve changes to it.
- For its part, Google said that it felt that its current anti-piracy policies were sufficient.
It operates a takedown process in which it removes links identified as infringing copyright. Last year it removed three million items from its search engine.
50:12 – Newzbin 2 fights upcoming block
- In July, BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2 after legal action by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
- The MPA said the member-only Newzbin2 site brings together pirated movies and music put on Usenet discussion boards.
- The block is to be enforced via BT’s Cleanfeed system which is more usually used to stop people visiting sites that peddle images of child sex abuse.
- Before the block goes into effect in mid-October, programmers who work for Newzbin2 have been working on software they claim will be able to defeat the blocking system.
- On 14 September, the first version of the Windows program Newzbin2 members will use to get at the site was released. Versions for Apple’s OSX and Linux are planned.
According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, Newzbin2 is not willing to reveal how the code attempts to get around the Cleanfeed block.
- However, TorrentFreak ran some tests using network sniffing software and found that the program relies on encryption to hide communication between users and Newzbin2.
- Another technique it uses is to route all traffic through a well-established system known as TOR, which masks the identity of users and what they are trying to look at.
52:36 – Court bans man called Peter from calling himself Peter Because he is accused of being Anonymous
- A man called Peter has been banned from using the name “Peter” on the internet as a bail condition after being charged today with unauthorised use of a computer.
Peter David Gibson, 22, from Hartlepool, was among three men and one unnamed 17-year-old charged at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court this morning for offences in connection with the LulzSec and Anonymous hacks.
- The court records state that bail has been granted on the following conditions:
1) Not to be part of any internet relay and not to participate in any internet relay action.
2) Not to use the internet using the name “Peter”.
- The reason given was “to prevent reoffending”.

Picks
Ian
if this then that
- Put the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:
- So I’ve created a task – e-mail me if it’s to Snow in Glasgow tomorrow
- If I post to Instapaper, copy the photo to Facebook as well
- Reminders based on events, calendar etc can be alerted via text message
- Popular recipes – http://ifttt.com/recipes?sort=most_popular

Playback
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Shownotes
1:43 – Steve Jobs Resigns
- Steve Jobs steps down and will now act as Chairman of Apple and the board
- Tim Cook installed as CEO
- So Steve will still work at Apple, be involved but you’ve got to wonder for how much longer
- Ian – can’t help but feel sad about this, not because of the impact at Apple but how illness looks to have forced Steve Jobs out of a role that he excelled at and whether you like what Apple stands for or not, has shaped the digital world we live in
- Felt quite sad at the almost obituaries that were posted but then at the same time it was almost universal praise and some great storeis
- Ians fav – Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering at Google
- One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was attending religious services when my cell phone vibrated. As discreetly as possible, I checked the phone and noticed that my phone said “Caller ID unknown”. I choose to ignore.

After services, as I was walking to my car with my family, I checked my cell phone messages. The message left was from Steve Jobs. “Vic, can you call me at home? I have something urgent to discuss” it said.

Before I even reached my car, I called Steve Jobs back. I was responsible for all mobile applications at Google, and in that role, had regular dealings with Steve. It was one of the perks of the job.

“Hey Steve – this is Vic”, I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn’t pick up”.

Steve laughed. He said, “Vic, unless the Caller ID said ‘GOD’, you should never pick up during services”.

I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?

“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow” said Steve.

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

Of course this was okay with me. A few minutes later on that Sunday I received an email from Steve with the subject “Icon Ambulance”. The email directed me to work with Greg Christie to fix the icon.

Since I was 11 years old and fell in love with an Apple II, I have dozens of stories to tell about Apple products. They have been a part of my life for decades. Even when I worked for 15 years for Bill Gates at Microsoft, I had a huge admiration for Steve and what Apple had produced.

But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.

To one of the greatest leaders I’ve ever met, my prayers and hopes are with you Steve.

-Vic
16:01 – Facebook Privacy Changes
- Makes privacy easier…and looks like a direct response to Google+
- You can now approve photo’s you’ve been tagged in BEFORE they appear on your wall
- Making privacy around status updates more obvious – Everyone changed to Public
- Every post is more obviously tagged with how you are sharing it with
- Rolling out gradually
- Biggest/best privacy change they have made yet?
18:48 – Patent Folly
- Samsung cites Stanley Kubrick’s ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie as prior art against iPad design patent
- Amazing
- Apple get granted an injunction against sale/distribution of Samsung phones in Holland… which happens to be major European distribution centre for Samsung… dickishtm
22:18 – Government Backdown
- The government has climbed down on plans to ban suspected rioters from social networking websites including Facebook and Twitter in times of civil unrest.
- Unprecedented measures such as shutting down websites and banning users are understood to have been dismissed by all sides early at a Home Office summit between the home secretary, Theresa May, and the major social networks on Thursday afternoon.
- The one-hour discussion focused on how law enforcement can better use Twitter and Facebook as part of day-to-day operations as well as in emergencies.
- Focussed on how authorities can use networks to spread messages, dispel fears, gather information
25:56 – Google TV coming to the UK within 6 months
- Priority for Google
- Sure to feature iPlayer and ITV Player but what else?
- Flopped in America, does it really matter anymore?
33:49 – Google brings back offline modes
- Chrome app’s give offline access to GMail, Calendar and Google Docs
- Been a gap since they dropped Google Gears
- Takes advantage of HTML5
- Available in the Chrome store
36:27 – Google Updates +1
- Now lets you share your +1’s on Google+
- Finally!
37:58 – Fall Spring Clean
Google closing many products as they start to focus on whats important
- Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.
- Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
- Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.
- Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
- Google Pack: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
- Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we’ve integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although our previous sales channel will be discontinued, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
- Image Labeler: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety ofonline games from Google are still available.
Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
- Sidewiki: Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.
- Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we’ll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people’s search results.
42:43 – BBC Crowdsources mobile data
- Coverage not 90% as mobile operators state
- Concentrated on how signal varied with normal use cases – not static.
- Liked this story more for the innovative use of croudsourcing data – we’ll see this more no doubt.
43:51 – Touchpad
- HP drops it
- Price slash.
- MADDDDD rush to pick up for £89
- Sells out everywhere.
- Now HP say they will perhaps build more…
- People trying to get Android onto hardware (and succeeding – although not fully baked yet)
48:50 – Amazon Tablet
- The tablet is reportedly going to have a 7-inch touchscreen with a backlit LCD for the display. The design is said to be very similar to RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook (hence the Photoshopped image above) and based on Android. However, Android will be little more than the underpinnings here, likeSony’s Reader Wi-Fi and Fusion Garage’s Grid 10, the entire UI is custom. The homescreen will be a Cover Flow-like series of images representing your content. Navigation will come via a row of buttons on the bottom that appear on a single tap. There will also be a status bar for notifications, battery life, and so on.
- Amazon has been creating the necessary building blocks for a tablet ecosystem devoid of Google services for some time now, having released the Amazon App Store for Android Apps, Amazon Instant Video for movies and television, Amazon Music play for cloud-based music, and of course Kindle for ebooks. So while this is technically based on Android, it’s fully an Amazon tablet with no Google involvement or Google apps. While we will need to see just how fully-featured the Kindle Tablet is when it’s released, for the time-being it looks like it will be be directly taking on the Nook, which is also an Android-powered ereader at the same price point.
- If everything works out as above, we should expect a late-November release for a very-affordable $250. The initial version will be a Wi-Fi-only device, with 3G and potentially even a 10-inch version coming later depending on how well the original Kindle Tablet does on the market.
54:18 – Windows Explorer 8
- Blog post on the research Microsoft has done into the new Windows 8 UI
- Lots of great facts…but that ribbon UI on explorer looks awful
- Real split in direction between Mac and Windows
- Ian’s tablet woes!!!!!!!

Picks
Chris
Academic Earth
- Online lectures/courses freely available from major universities around the world. (US focus, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT etc
- Tonnes of topics – all available to watch/comment/interact free.
- Real lectures as you would receive if attending these places.
- Plenty of topics for a geek looking for self improvement
- Watch online – or even subscribe to all of a course as a pod/vodcast via itunes
Ian
Tweetmarker
- Syncs your position in twitter timeline
- Twitterrific, Tweetbot and Tweetings currently support it
- Simple but very very handy

Playback
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Shownotes
1:42 – England Riots
- Social Media to blame…
- Off course not…but was used for good
- The @RiotCleanup Twitter page has amassed more than 50,000 followers in fewer than 10 hours and is consistently broadcasting cleanup locations and times, along with other pertinent information regarding the initiative.
On Facebook, a similar page has emerged as the central location for information on the world’s largest social network.
And for a more static look at where the action is, riotcleanup.co.uk is being constantly updated with cleanup location information. In an email interview with Ian, the creator of the website and resident of rural Shropshire, England, he explained:
“I was sitting at home following the #londonriots hashtag — then I saw #riotcleanup start to appear. I am not in London, but wanted to do something. Near enough simultaneously, I registered riotcleanup.co.uk as someone else got the Twitter account @riotcleanup going. Then, I just knocked something together as fast as possible and uploaded it!”
- Beyond the riot cleanup, another effort to catch and prosecute looters has taken root, with the Tumblr account “Catch A Looter” accepting and posting images of looters for identification.
- Zavilla – http://zavilia.com/ – posting up pictures from the riots asking people to submit names of those they can identify
- Unless off course you read the Daily Mail, Express or Sun – then twitter is to blame for the riots
- Blackberry helping police as will T-Mobile/Orange
- 16 year old Glaswegian arrested over attempts to incite a riot via Facebook
- Twitter traffic sky rockets during riots
- Off course, the government need to blame something – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/11/david-cameron-rioters-social-media
- Social media tools have responsibility
- Home secretary to meet Facebook, Twitter and RIM to discus their responsibiliites
- Why not the mobile phone providers?
- A move to disconnect potential rioters would mark a huge shift in Britain’s internet policy, with free speech advocates likely to accuse the government of ushering in a new wave of online censorship.
- Scotland Yard has made a string of arrests of people suspected of inciting the violence across England by using BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and Facebook.
- Cameron urged Twitter and Facebook to remove messages, images and videos that could incite more unrest across the country. “All of them should think about their responsibility and about taking down those images,” he said.
- Greater Manchester Police use twitter to reveal details of those convicted – http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/08/11/greater-manchester-police-tweeting-names-dates-of-birth-and-addresses-of-looters/
- Names, DOB’s, Addresses are sent out via their twitter account
- Info already available due to court appearance, but making it much more available
- Back to Facebook – http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/08/16/uk-man-gets-4-year-jail-sentence-for-setting-up-facebook-riot-page/
- UK Man gets 4 years in jail for setting up facebook riot page
- a 22-year old Latchford man named Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan has been charged with organizing some of the actions after setting up a page on Facebook.
- While that might seem extreme for merely setting up a Facebook page, Assistant Chief Contable Phil Thompson believes otherwise:
“If we cast our minds back just a few days to last week and recall the way in which technology was used to spread incitement and bring people together to commit acts of criminality it is easy to understand the four year sentences that were handed down in court today.”
11:28 – Google buys Motorola Mobility
- Google just announced that it is acquiringMotorola Mobility. The search and online advertising company is buying the company for approximately $12.5 billion (or $40 per share), in cash. The price represents a premium of 63 percent to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday. Google had about $39 billion in cash at last count.
- The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.
- It’s also a move to build up the company’s patent portfolio, he adds, as it will “enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.
- 17000 patents, 7500 pending patents (Google only had 1000 patents prior to this)
- Although announcement talks up Android and patents, Motorola Mobility also makes TV hardware
- Now fully vertically aligned like Apple
- If seen as purely as a patent buy, thats $18 billion on big patents this year alone
- Motorola Mobility is what used to be the Mobile Devices division of Motorola until January 2011.
- A few years ago, Motorola bet its future in the mobile devices market by going full Android, launching the “Droid” – initially on the Verizon network – on November 6, 2009. The “Droid X” and “Droid 2″ followed in 2010.
- Big question now is: how will HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Acer, Lenovo and other Android device makers respond to this news? – http://www.google.com/press/motorola/quotes/
- It’s all about defending Android – allegedly
17:26 – HP to buy Autonomy…and spin off hardware business
- $10 billion for autonomy
- Spin off hardware…which includes web-os
- Post pc world, dominated by iPad and Apple, Google and Android – no profit in hardware for HP
- 250,000 touchpads unsold at best buy
- Look at IBM – top 5 company in world and mostly all software and services
21:39 – LinkedIn makes a dick move
- LinkedIn users are upset that the company has taken the Facebook approach in regards to online privacy with a recent change to the privacy policy. Under the guise of providing more privacy controlto the user, the social network has automatically opted-in its 100 million users into the social advertising program without informing them of the change beyond a blog post.
- When a LinkedIn user views a third-party advertisement on the social network, they will see user profile pictures and names of connections if that connection has recommended or followed a brand. Any time that a user follows a brand, they unwittingly become a cheerleader for the company or organization if it advertises through LinkedIn.
- In order to opt out of social advertising, the LinkedIn user has to take four steps to escape third-party advertisements:
- Hover over the user name in the top right hand corner of any LinkedIn page and click ‘Settings’. On the Settings page, click ‘Account’. On the Account tab, click ‘Manage Social Advertising’. Uncheck the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising.” and click the save button.
- Users also may want to opt out of receiving email from LinkedIn advertisers. This setting also allows LinkedIn advertising partners to spam users with promotions during email marketing campaigns if the user follows the brand. To opt out of this setting, click the Email Preferences tab and click on the ‘Turn on/off partner InMail’ link to locate the check box.
24:46 – Amazon release cloud based Kndle Reader
- Amazon may have changed its Kindle iOS app to comply with Apple’s revised in-app subscription policy, but the retailer has now come out with its own, web-based alternative, known as the Kindle Cloud Reader. Compatible with both Chrome and Safari, the new app is essentially a browser version of the Kindle eBook reader, providing PC, Mac and Chromebook users with access to their digitized libraries.
- The tool also offers local storage, allowing for offline reading, though Amazon’s device limit still applies, so if your library’s already strewn across multiple gadgets, the app’s reading functionality may be limited.
- The company unveiled the Cloud Reader today with relatively little fanfare or explanation, but its site highlights the service’s main attractions, including its iPad optimization
- Build around the app store restrictions
- Interesting to remember that first iPhone had no iPhone and told developers to build web apps, now dev’s are building web app’s to get around Apple restrictions.
26:57 – Apple win suit to block Samsung 10.1 sales in Europe
- A new ruling by a regional court in Dusseldorf, Germany has granted Cupertino a preliminary injunction, blocking the sale and advertising of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 across Europe, save for the Netherlands.
- Samsung can still appeal the ruling — in the meanwhile, however, the decision will stand. According to The Telegraph, the likely appeal will take about a month to be heard by the judge who granted the injunction.
- Samsung responded – The company notes that all products already distributed to retailers in Germany will not be affected by the decision. And naturally, Samsung promises to fight to have the injunction lifted.
- Looks really bad – Samsung didn’t defend themselves, Apple’s legal submissions look dubious (i.e. made up) and it’s now been reversed to just Germany
32:40 – Orange Film To Go
- Allows Orange customers to rent a free movie every week
- Text FILMTOGO to 85060 for redemption code
- Can be used on a Thursday, then normal iTunes rental conditions apply
- Although free, txt message costs 35p
34:24 – iPlayer updates for TV
- The app – launching initially on the Sony PlayStation 3 games console, which has run the browser-based version of iPlayer since 2008 – has been built from scratch and includes new features such as viewer recommendations. HTML5 based and will roll out to TV’s and connected devices over the coming months
- Daniel Danker, the BBC’s general manager of programmes and on demand, said that iPlayer viewing on internet-connected TVs increased five fold in the six months to July, reaching 3.1m programme requests a month.
- “We’re going beyond the tech-savvy. We’re making iPlayer easier to use for the mainstream audience,” Danker said. “With today’s announcement, we’re transforming iPlayer in its most natural home.”
36:15 – Sony Price Cuts
- PS3 now cut to £199, street price may be £180
- a new cheaper version of its PSPhandheld console, with a price point of €99 will be launched before christmas
- won’t have wi-fi support and I still can’t see it getting sales
37:56 – Slimmer Cheaper Wii
- Nintendo will launch a redesigned Wii gaming console in Europe by the end of 2011.
- The updated console will be part of a new Wii bundle, which will include “the newly configured Wii console in white, a Wii Remote Plus controller, Nunchuk, and copies of Wii Sports and Wii Party,” the company announced Wednesday.
- The device will be cheaper and slimmer than the original Wii. Nintendo did not announce the bundle’s price or release pictures of the new Wii. The console also will be designed to stand horizontally rather than vertically like the current Wii. Additionally, the new Wii will not be backward compatible with Gamecube games.
40:10 – Onlive UK Launch Date
- Launches in UK on September 22nd
- OnLive has claimed that more than 100 “top tier” titles will be available from the launch date. It is yet to announce specific games, but has told the Guardian that it is in the process of licensing most of the catalogue currently available in the US. Many major publishers including Ubisoft, THQ and Square Enix have partnered with OnLive to make games such as Assassin’s Creed, Homefront and Batman: Arkham Asylum available via the instant-play technology. However, the two biggest game publishers Electronic Arts and Activision have yet to announce any supporting titles.
- Users will be able subscribe for free at the official UK website. They can then choose to rent games for a limited periods, buy unlimited access to specific titles or pay a monthly fee to access the OnLive PlayPack Bundle, which gives unlimited access to a large chunk of the OnLive line-up. UK prices are yet to be announced, but in the US, most titles offer a three-day pass for $5.99, a five-day pass for $8.99 or a full price of $20-$60. The PlayPack bundle is $9.99 a month
- Can play on Mac, PC, iPad and Android tablets and via set top box
- Partnering with BT but will work on any broadband platform
- Still sceptical but time will tell
43:39 – Google+ Games
- Rolling out across the platform
- 16 games available initially
- Hopefully won’t pollute like facebook did
- It’s got Angry Birds!
47:32 – End of games drought
- Gears of War 3 – 20/09/11
- FIFA Soccer 12 – 30/09/11
- Forza – 14/10/11
- Batman: Arkham City – 21/10/11
- Battlefield 3 – 28/10/11
- Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception – 02/11/11
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – 08/11/11
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 11/11/11

Picks
Ian
Lion Tweaks
- The application has been developed to quickly turn off numerous exclusive features of Lion; the list includes, enable 2D-dock, remove system window animation, remove mail window animation, disable auto-spelling correction, change iCal and Address Book leather UI to aluminum look, enable permanent scrollbars, show hidden files, disable crash dialog popup.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
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Shownotes
1:42 – Police charge Scottish Teen over SOCA attack
- UK police have charged an 18-year-old with hacking the Serious Organised Crime Agency’s (Soca) website as part of an ongoing investigation into the infamous LulzSec and Anonymous hacktivist crews.
- Jake Davis, who allegedly used the online nickname Topiary and acted as a spokesman for the groups, will face five computer hacking charges at a hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court on Monday.
- The rap sheet includes a charge related to participating in denial of service attacks that floored Soca’s website in June.
- Davis, who was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week, is the second person to be arrested over attacks on Soca’s website, following the arrest of Ryan Cleary, 19, of Wickford, Essex, last month. A 16-year-old teenager from South London was arrested and questioned by police around the same time as Cleary’s arrest and bailed to return in late August, pending further inquiries.
4:39 – BT Ordered to block links to Newzbin 2
- A High Court judge has ruled that BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies.
Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums.
- The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site. It paves the way for other sites to be blocked as part of a major crackdown on piracy.
- In his ruling, Mr Justice Arnold stated: “In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin 2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes.”
- He continued: “It knows that the users of Newzbin 2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin 2.” BT and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which brought the case, will be back in court in October to work out how the blocking will work. BT said it will not appeal the ruling.
- Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed – which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse – to block Newzbin 2. In an email interview before the verdict, Newzbin 2 threatened to break BT’s filters.
- “We would be appalled if any group were to try to sabotage this technology as it helps to protect the innocent from highly offensive and illegal content,” said a spokesman for BT.
- The Internet Service Providers’ Association has been a fierce critic of web blocking. It said that using blocking technology designed to protect the public from images of child abuse, was inappropriate.
10:46 – UK Proposing changes to Copyright and Website Blocking Rules
- Plans to block websites that host copyright infringing material are to be dumped by the government. Website blocking was one of the key provision contained in the Digital Economy Act. Internet Service Providers had objected to the idea that copyright owners could compel them to cut off some sites.
- Speaking to the BBC, Vince Cable appeared to suggest that the Newzbin2 case had opened up other legal avenues.”We’ve discovered that the drafting of the original laws, which took place a year or so ago, were not tight.
- The government’s decision to drop the DEA’s blocking provision was criticised by UK Music, the body which represents musicians and record labels in the UK. Its chief executive, Fergal Sharkey said: “Who wants to tell the 80% of music businesses that employ fewer than five people, and the thousands of artists who self-finance the production of their own albums, that to enjoy the protection of the law, all they need now is to have millions of pounds and spend years in court to protect their work.”
- Mr Cable also announced a raft of measures intended to update the UK’s copyright laws. The changes are based on the Hargreaves Review which was set up to examine current legislation’s fitness for purpose in the digital age. One of the most significant recommendations that the government plans to implement is the legalisation of “format shifting” – where users rip content from CDs or DVDs for their own personal use.
- “Bringing the laws more up-to-date to have a proper balance which allows consumers and businesses to operate more freely, but at the same time protect genuinely creative artists and penalise pirates.” The business secretary said the economy would benefit by £8bn over the next few years by updating the legislation.
- Millions of people regularly convert movies on DVDs and music on CDs into a format that they can move around more easily, although most do not realise that it is technically illegal. “The review pointed out that if you have a situation where 90% of your population is doing something, then it’s not really a very good law,” said Simon Levine, head of the intellectual property and technology group at DLA Piper.
- Legalising non-commercial copying for private use would bring the UK into line with many other nations and also meet the “reasonable expectations” of consumers, said the government.
- Could also include fair usage and re-use clauses so that fan fiction, remixes etc are now legal and can be published online without threat of takedown
16:21 – Smartphone Watershed in the UK
- for the first time, smartphone sales outstripped sales of regular mobiles in the first half of this year as the enormous demand continues to rise. Just over half of the total 13.6m mobile sales from January to June 2011 were smartphones, according to research by GfK Retail and Technology UK.
- Of the new generation of smartphone users, 60% of teenagers classed themselves as “highly addicted” to their device, compared to 37% of adults.
- “Our research into the use of smartphones, in particular, reveals how quickly people become reliant on new technology – to the point of feeling addicted. As more and more people acquire smartphones, they are becoming an essential tool in peoples’ social lives whether they are out with friends socialising or using Facebook on the move.”
- Facebook remains far and away the most popular website for mobile users, with users spending almost four times the amount of time socialising online than using Google or any other website. Unsurprisingly, multi-tasking teenagers said they were less likely to read books if they owned a smartphone. But they also said that owning a smartphone made them more likely to ditch games consoles like the PS3 and the computer, in favour of their pocket-sized handset.
- The huge boost in smartphone sales has led to a 67% increase in mobile data use as phone users watched videos and sent emails on the go. Mobile operators, such as O2 and Vodafone, have been put under huge strain by the new load. But Thickett said the carriers are coping with the enormous demand.
- Over half (51 per cent) of adults and two thirds (65 per cent) of teenagers say they have used their smartphone while socialising with others, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of adults and a third (34 per cent) of teenagers have used them during mealtimes and over a fifth (22 per cent) of adult and nearly half (47 per cent) of teenage smartphone users admitted using or answering their handset in the bathroom or toilet.
19:56 – BBC Launches Global iPlayer App
- The BBC is launching an international version of its on-demand video service, the iPlayer, for Apple iPad users.
- Customers who pay a monthly subscription will get access to a range of current and classic programmes. The app will have one feature not available in the UK – the ability to download content and watch offline.
- The project is being run BBC Worldwide– the corporation’s commercial arm – which said that money earned would help supplement licence-fee income. Initially, global iPlayer will be available in 11 European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
- It will cost 6.99 euro per month (£6.14), with the option of an annual subscription priced at 49.99 euro (£44). According to BBC Worldwide, the international product will look and feel similar to the UK iPlayer, but function in a different way.
- Rather than a seven-day catch-up service, it will offer a showcase of BBC shows, old and new. Examples given include Fawlty towers, Only Fools and Horses, Sherlock and Doctor Who.
- It is possible that may provoke questions from viewers in the UK who do not have access to older shows.
21:14 – Amazon App Store – Rotten to the Core
- Amazon’s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here’s the dirty secret Amazon don’t want you to know, they don’t pay developers a single cent.
- Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion. All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.
- But that’s not our only beef with Amazon:
Lengthy review times of anywhere up to 2 weeks (I’ve lost count of the amount of emails from people asking why our Google Market app is newer)
Amazon gets to set the price of your app to whatever they want, without any input from you, or even the chance to reject their price
Amazon re-writes your description, and in ours they even made up things like ‘add up to 100 podcasts’. No idea where on earth they got that number from
Amazon don’t provide error reports like Google do making it hard to fix errors
They don’t yet support Google’s new multiple APK initiative
Amazon pays far later than Google does, and to date we haven’t received any cheques from them, even though we are listed as being ‘payed’
US Only
Much less real-time sales information than Google
Update: (and this one surprised us) you can’t remove apps from their store! You have to ask them for permission via an email. Every other store lets you remove apps from sale.
28:09 – Trojan risk for Android phones
- A mobile application for Google’s Android smartphones can secretly record users’ phone calls and transmit them to malicious hackers,security researchers have found.
Once downloaded by a user, the app – which the researcher has not named, but seems to have a name relating to “System Messages” – surreptitiously stores a recording of the user’s incoming and outgoing calls to the phone’s memory card, according to the New York-based security experts CA Technologies.
- In a blog post unveiling the finding, researcher Dinesh Venkatesan said the so-called “Trojan app” is one of the most invasive they have ever uncovered. He also warned that there is an increasing trend targeting smartphones using Google’s Android software, which allows developers to submit apps with little vetting.
- Google had not returned requests for comment at the time of publication.
- Venkateskan wrote on the researcher’s official blog: “In one of our earlier blogs, we have demonstrated how a Trojan logs all the details of incoming/outgoing calls and call duration in a text file.
- “This Trojan is more advanced as it records the conversation itself in ‘amr’ format [which is optimised for recording speech]. Also it has many other malicious activities that we have seen in many of the earlier malware incidents targeted for Android platform.”
- The app, which was not named by the researchers for security reasons, asks users’ permission to intercept outgoing calls and record audio before it is installed. Once downloaded, all calls the user makes will be logged on the phone’s memory – which can potentially be accessed by the app’s makers. The sound is filed in a folder called shangzhou/callrecord, suggesting that its author is Chinese.
30:39 – Nortel Patent Argument Continues
- Remember the group of tech companies that bought the Nortel patents for $4.5 billion – Microsoft, Apple et all?
- Google is still smarting – In a post just put up on the main Google Blog, Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond takes shot after shot at Google’s competitors. By name, he calls out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. What’s this all about? What else? Patents.
- “I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” is the way Drummond kicks off his post. He goes on to lay out what he believes is a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”
- While Drummond says that their rival’s “anti-competitive strategy” is driving up the price of patents on the market to insane levels, he believes the law will eventually prevail and “this patent bubble will pop”.
- “In this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it,” he notes, going on to say that the Department of Justice is currently looking into if Apple and Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nortel patents was for anti-competitive means.
- “We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone,” is how the post ends.
- Typical Google – painting themselves as the white knight in amongst these big bad companies who are out to destroy, not innovate…yawn. Post also doesn’t mention that Google bid over $4 billion as well.
- A couple of hours later…“Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no,” Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel tweeted out in response.
- Just in case that wasn’t enough, Frank Shaw, Microsoft Head of Communications, followed up with the real heat-seeker. “Free advice for David Drummond – next time check with Kent Walker before you blog. tweeted, referring to another Google SVP and General Counsel. Attached to that tweet was the picture of an email Walker apparently sent to Smith on October 28, 2010. It reads as follows:
Brad –
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you — I came down with a 24-hour bug on the way back from San Antonio. After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn’t be advisable for us on this one. But I appreciate your flagging it, and we’re open to discussing other similar opportunities in the future.
I hope the rest of your travels go well, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
– Kent
- While it’s only one instance, this really does undercut Google’s entire argument. Google was attempting to set up a pattern of Microsoft teaming up with other Google rivals to damage them. But the first instance listed was actually the result of Google turning Microsoft down, as the email shows. That doesn’t not look good for Google.
- Love this – Google are pussies – http://brianshall.com/content/google-are-pussies
39:44 – Push Pop Press acquired…by Facebook
- Now we’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.
- Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it’s going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.
- Al Gore’s Our Choice will remain available for purchase, and we’ve decided that our future profits from the book will be donated to The Climate Reality Project. There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported and expressed interest in Push Pop Press.
- Both Push Pop Press and Facebook share a passion for improving the way we share and explore ideas and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.
- Good for them, sad for everyone else? Good talent acquire by Facebook but that future of digital publishing that worked so well for Our Choice and promised so much has now gone. However Mike Matas, lead at Push Pop Press, was part of the iPhone UI team at Apple. Rumours of Facebook phone still around and there’s no doubting hat Facebook UI as they move into HTML5 is in need of help.
42:49 – Vita in Europe…next year
- Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai has today been quoted as saying that the portable console will not be available in the US or Europe until “early next year.” Japan, he hastens to add, is still on track for the “holiday season” release window we’ve been hearing since the PlayStation Vita’s first announcement under the NGP moniker.
- So import if you want it this year looks to be only option
44:22 – Nintendo 3DS Price Drop
- Price to drop by around a third
- Trying to kickstart poor sales
- Additionally, Nintendo Europe plans to offer an exclusive Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Programme to consumers who have purchased the Nintendo 3DS at the original launch price.
- The programme will enable these Nintendo 3DS owners to download ten NES games and ten Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games for free.
- To register for this programme, Nintendo 3DS owners need to connect to the Nintendo eShop before the 12th of August. The free software will then be made available at a later stage.
- Currently, the machine has a recommended retail price of £269.99, which retailers have already eroded to a street price of £199.99 with a game bundled in. But from 12 August, presuming that retailers resist the urge to increase their margins on the 3DS, we can anticipate a new RRP of around £170 – equating to a street price of between £130 and £140.
- Why is it struggling – EA results – http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=594196
- iPad is fastest growing platform and consoles used to account for 80% of sales…now 40%
47:49 – EA launches Sports Season ticket
- $25 or 2000 points a year
- It will grant full access to digital versions of games three days before their retail launch, offer a 20-percent discount on DLC, and enable “free premium web content” and brand you as a paying customer (i.e. “membership recognition”).
- However…”The digitally downloaded game will time out when the game is available at retail and consumers have the option to purchase the same full game on disc at retail.” If we’re reading that correctly, it means you get to download the game three days early, but you still have to go to the store to actually buy it.
- What?
- 5 games supported – Madden NFL 12, along with NHL,FIFA, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR golf and NCAA Football
51:05 – Don’t Mess With Duncan Bannatyne
- The Dragons’ Den star Duncan Bannatyne has been forced to delete tweets after offering a £50,000 reward for anyone who broke the arms of a man who used Twitter to threaten his daughter.
- Someone going by the name of Yuri Vasilyev tweeted Bannatyne three days ago, saying: “I’m looking for a £35,000 investment to stop us hurting your Hollie Bannatyne. We will bring hurt and pain into your life. We are watching her. She is very attractive. Want photos?”
- After revealing that police had been informed of the threat, Bannatynetold his 371,653 Twitter followers: “I offer £25,000 reward for the capture of the coward who calls himself @YuriVasilyev_ Double if his arms are broken first.”
- Got lots of criticism on twitter
- The criticism appeared to bring about a change of heart, and Bannatyne deleted the offending tweets and amended his offer to “£30,000 reward for info leading to his arrest”.
However, he kept up the pressure, telling his followers he had tracked the alleged criminal to an internet cafe in Moscow.
- “@YuriVasilyev_ My people are getting closer to you every minute, run and hide you little coward in Moscow,” he tweeted. “Go home to your mum and cry we are closing in on you little boy.”

Picks
Henry
Tilt
- Still developing and updating… may have debugging purpose but really it just looks cool.