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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

Playback
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Shownotes
2:32 – New New Twitter
- Redesign web and mobile clients
- As a company, create the simplest, fastest service in the world that will allow us to reach every person on the planet. Went through entire service. Mobile, web, got it down to four key elements.
- Home Timeline (browser-style “home” icon). First navigational element. Simple, clean, universe of tweet is now contained within the tweet on multiple platforms. Web site, iPhone, Android, HTML5 mobile, Tweetdeck, etc. Retweets, favorites, etc. all right there. Additionally, click on tweet, copy embed code, stick in the story. Everything follows it in. Wasn’t just a change in the interface. Not just adding a couple features to Twitter. Product engineers, infrastructure engineers focused on making it as fast as possible.
- Connect (@ symbol). We wanted to create the easiest way to reach others. Enter username. Or retweet. Where you’re being mentioned. Any conversations that you have. Everything that you’re doing socially on Twitter is in here.
Discover (# symbol). The newest navigation element. When people see a hashtag on a billboard, can click on the symbol, enter the tag they say, and relevant conversations will surface. Come to Twitter and want to see what’s happening in your world. More than 250 million tweets per day, we’ll surface whatever seems relevant to your world. Discover experience is personalized, so the more you engage, the more personalized they’ll become. Activities. What tweets are my friends following. Who are friends following.
Me (profile outline icon). We wanted to group everything that happens about you in one specific area. Favorites, media, tweets. Wanted to tell more compelling stories. Profile pages for individual users much richer. Media: pictures, videos, etc. Best place to represent yourself on the internet. Also for brands.
- Also providing bigger branding pages
- Twitter for iPhone and Android also available right now. Downloading app unlocks new version on web site. Roll out new version to 100% of users in the next few weeks.
- Tweetdeck also rewritten for Mac – native and no longer written in Adobe Air but missing many of the power features of Tweetdeck
8:04 – Spotify Apps
- Not a pivot, but Spotify is adding apps
- Spotify is letting third party developers expand on its functionality using its API and offering the results to users in a new HTML5 app directory, CEO Daniel Ek announced today in New York.
- Developers have already have already built apps with features like the ability to find and purchase concert tickets, a way to display a song’s lyrics on-screen through TuneWiki and deeper Last.fm integration for better music recommendations.
- Rolling Stone cofounder and publisher Jann Wenner took to the stage to sing Spotify’s praises, just before Ek unveiled the application that Rolling Stone built to work within Spotify. It takes publication-curated playlists to a new level with a rich HTML5 interface and more room for editorial content.
- The move attempts to rebrand Spotify as more of a platform, much as Facebook once did when it opened up the ability for developers to build applications on top of the social network. It’s a wise move for Spotify, which faces a rapidly-expanding user base and only a limited capacity to roll out new features itself. By opening up its platform to developers, Spotify allows for more rapid innovation without distracting itself from the core product.
- Other available apps include SongKick, The Guardian, Billboard and Soundrop, presumably with plenty more to come. Any developer can code apps for Spotify but they do have to be approved by the company before appearing in the directory.
- Loving this – great playlists – really helps with discovery
- Brought me back to Spotify…but don’t know for how long
11:39 – Super Connected Cities coming to the UK
- The government will take £100m from the £5bn national infrastructure investment pot over the course of this Parliament in a move to speed up broadband networks in selected urban areas. Rural areas, meanwhile, have been passed over. George Osborne announced the extra cash that the likes of BT and Virgin Media will be able to bid for in his autumn statement today.
- “The government will invest £100m to create up to 10 ‘super-connected cities’ across the UK, with 80-100 megabits per second broadband and city-wide high-speed mobile connectivity,” said the government in its National Infrastructure Programme report, which was published immediately after the chancellor finished his mini budget speech in the Commons today.
- “There will be a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and strategic employment zones to support economic growth. Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and London will all receive support from this fund, and a UK-wide competition will decide up to six further cities that will also receive funding.”
- That investment comes on top of the £530m Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) funds already dished out by the government to local authorities and Scotland.
Over the government’s next fiscal year (2012-2013), £20m will be allocated to help fun “super-connected cities”. In 2013/14 a further £60m will be spent, then in 2014/15 the final £20m left in that pot will be used.
- But, surprisingly, no extra cash was set aside by Osborne today for rural areas that are crying out for investment in broadband.
14:58 – Ofcom 2012/2013 Plans
- The auctioning off of the 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrums for 4G internet is coming as soon as the British FCC has booted off the remaining TV services that still use ‘em.
- It’s will open an online complaints site (for when the Saturday evening show of your choice offends you), crack down on slow broadband speeds and keep the airways clear for the Olympic Games.
19:12 – Carrier IQ
- Carrier IQ software secretly installed on millions of mobile phones reports most everything a user does on a phone. Numbers called, text messages, websites visited, passwords – everything. Shudder.
- Android only…..so everyone thought
- On Blackberry and iOS too
- But then a lot of carriers said it wasn’t installed – certainly not in the UK
23:52 – Jawbone UP
- Released recently but having charging and bricking issues
- Jawbone is offering consumers who have problems a full refund, no questions asked, even if they choose to keep their $99 device. Or they can ask for a new device. Consumers can request their refund starting Dec. 9 here. People who received an UP as a gift will also be able to participate in the refund. As an alternative to the refund, Jawbone is also offering users credit toward a purchase of another Jawbone product.
- The company said it will resume taking orders once the issues have been fixed. And it will continue to push out software updates.
- Finally, Fitbit can be bought in the UK – £79.99 – from end of December
26:33 – Netherlands Anti-Piracy Group caught Pirating
- Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.
29:53 – RIM take a charge
- announced it will book a $485 million write down on its large PlayBook tablet inventory in the company’s fiscal third quarter.
- The struggling Canadian device maker said it shipped around 150,000 PlayBooks to its channel partners during Q3, but sell-through to end users over the same period was higher than that amount, indicating retailers had leftover inventory. By comparison RIM shipped 200,000 tablets during its fiscal second quarter, and half a million in Q1 when the PlayBook first went on sale.
- In a statement RIM said it will require “an increase in promotional activity” to drive sales to end users, blaming weak demand on the competitive tablet market and the delay in the release of its PlayBook OS 2.0 software update.
31:52 – Web OS is Open Sourced
- HP to open source Web OS
- Say’s that new HP hardware will use Web OS
- Says they will make updates to it
- Reality is it’s dead? Android is the open source winner in the mobile and tablet space – can’t see it ever getting traction
33:08 – Facebook buys Gowalla
- Talent buy or killing a rival?
- Won’t buy app or data
- Service will wind down in January – plan to provide a way of exporting data
35:43 – Path v2
- For iOS and Android
- Private social network – quite lovely – so many novel design features
38:15 – Flipboard
- Really well done implementation of the iPad app
39:41 – iPlayer Update
- Now for iPhone, iPod Touch
- Also supports Airplay
- Streaming over 3G
- The Android version of the app remains restricted to wi-fi connections for the time being, but the BBC said a web version of the software would support 3G streams soon.
- The BBC said it had worked closely with network operators, but analysts fear it could put their systems under strain.
40:20 – Micorsoft release iOS Apps
- Skydrive – simple cloud app
- Kinectimals – good version of Xbox game
41:44 – GTA III for iOS and Android
- High end devices only
- Dec 15th – $4.99
- iOS: iPad 1 and 2, iPhone 4 and 4S, iPod touch 4th Generation
Android Phones: HTC Rezound, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2, Motorola Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy R, T-Mobile G2x
Android Tablets: Acer Iconia, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Dell Streak 7, LG Optimus Pad, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, Sony Tablet S, Toshiba Thrive
- Virtual controls will be awkward?
42:44 – Skyrim
- Don’t look too close, and it’s absolutely beautiful – and soooo atmospheric.
- Personally find it quite hard but a fantastic time-sink.
- Only scratched the outer surface but impressed.
- Paul has got totally consumed by this game – which is extremely unlike him.
44:06 – XBox Dash Update
- New look – Metro UI
- New features – cloud storage of profile, Windows Phone app, iOS app – big surprise, voice search via connect, beacon
- Better?
- BBC not available until 2012, still not sure what will actually appear

Predictions
Ian
- Best Tech – iMac, Airport Extreme, Fitbit, Halo Reach
- Worst Tech – PS3
- 2012 Predictions
– iPad 3 – retina display iPad – will be buying
- See the new Xbox
- New Wii a flop compared to previous Nintendo consoles
- Apple growth slows – reaching a saturation point on iOS
Chris
- Best Tech – iPad 2 is a great bit of kit that has seeped into my daily routines. Love my Blue Yeti Pro mic.
- Worst Tech – Not so much worst tech – but annoyance that some of the biggest moves have been “US Only” this year. Kindle Fire is now rumoured for UK in new year… but still no announcements on content deals. iCloud ahead of the curve of peoples internet connections. No tablets taking it to Apple yet. PS hate the magic mouse. I know it’s not a “this year” thing! But I detest it that much, this one spans the ages.
- 2012 Predictions
- I will lose some of my life to rFactor 2,Looking forward to Mass Effect 3 and surely new Ghost Recon will be out! PS3/XBOX rumours will ramp up – if one gets announced, the other will be hot on the tails. Believe that they want current boxes to last till 2013 though. Surely iPlayer WILL make it to XBOX this year!!!
- Siri to iPad 3. Apple need some bigger (less incremental) products to herald the “post Jobs” era. Return of the “One more thing”. A lot of Bull Crap will be spread about iPad 3 and iPhone 5 that never materialises.
- Haven’t seen the “next big thing” that I see killing it next year… guess that’s the state of the economy… So an evolution year likely. Tweaks rather than revolution.
Henry
- Best Tech – iPad 2, trello.com
- Worst Tech – NFC – not so much bad tech as just not delivering on promise.
- 2012 Predictions
- Samsung to become #1 mobile manufacturer by market share
- Apple will not release a TV

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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
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
1:42 – 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.

Playback
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Shownotes
2:11 – The Hackers Get Hacked
- Looks like hacker group LulzSec is back in action, this time redirecting the homepage of the Murdoch-owned The Sun (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/) to a fake story about Murdoch’s death from a drug overdose located on the Murdoch-owned URL used to broadcast theLondon Times’ redesign http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun. After the amount of requests caused a 404 failure on the Times site, the group then redirected The Sun’s homepage to the @LuzSecTwitter account. (The original page is archived at http://freze.it/pX)
- From what I can see the fake story was meant to mirror an actual The Sun story about the latest development in the messy Murdoch/New Corp/News of the World scandal, “Ex News of the World journalist found dead.” After about 10 minutes of being up (and I swear the real Sun homepage was redirecting) the fake story was pulled from the UK Times site.
- E-mails also grabbed
5:13 – Apple Earnings
- Cupertino just reported its best quarter ever, with earnings of $7.79 per share, revenue totaling $28.57 billion, and a net profit of $7.31 billion. We know you’re probably more interested in sales figures, however, and as you might expect, Apple’s continued to ship iPhones and iPads at a steady pace, with 20.34 million smartphones and 9.25 million tablets sold last quarter. It’s also shipped 3.95 million Macs — a 14 percent jump over Q3 2010′s numbers. Fewer iPods made it out the door this quarter, however, totaling 7.54 million compared to the 9.41 million Apple sold in Q3 2010.
7:26 – Google Earnings
- “We had a great quarter, with revenue up 32% year on year for a record breaking over $9 billion of revenue,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “I’m super excited about the amazing response to Google+ which lets you share just like in real life.”
- £3.5 billion in profit
- 550,000 android activations per day
13:30 – Microsoft Earnings
- The US technology giant Microsoft said its annual revenues hit a record of $69.94bn (£43.4bn).
- Sales of the company’s Xbox 360 videogame console and its Office software helped fuel the growth.
- Net income at the world’s biggest software maker jumped 23% to 23.15bn for the year.
- The figures, which beat forecasts, showed final quarter revenues reached a record high of $17.37bn, leading to profits of $5.87bn.
- Sales rose 8% to $17.37 billion, a boosted chiefly by sales of Office, Xbox and server software behind Microsoft’s push into cloud computing.
- Microsoft’s business division, which sells the Office suite of programs, including Outlook, SharePoint and Excel, was the company’s biggest seller in the quarter, increasing sales by 7% to $5.8bn.
- The company’s online services unit, which runs the Bing search engine and MSN internet portal, increased sales by 16.5% to $662m, but saw losses increase to $728m as it struggles to fight competitor Google.
- One weaker spot was sales of its widely-used Windows product, which are slowing as tablet PC sales eat into demand for traditional PCs.
16:43 – Nokia Earnings
- The Finnish phone-maker Nokia crashed to a loss for the second quarter as its smartphone and mobile business collapsed, leaving it in third place in the sector behind Samsung and Apple, and with no clear sign of any improvement in the short term.
Overall the company made a loss of €368m despite receiving a one-off payment of €430m from Apple to settle a long-running patent dispute. Revenues fell overall by 7% to €9.3bn.
- The company’s mobile revenue, normally the stalwart of its business, fell by 20% year on year to €5.47bn and made a loss of €247m, as the number of phones sold dropped by the same amount, to 88m – both figures not seen since 2006. Its existing Symbian smartphone business, which it has said that it will phase out in favour of phones using Microsoft Windows Phone from later this year, fell by 30% year on year to just 16.7m.
- The Navteq mapping and Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) businesses offered no comfort either, both racking up operating losses of €58m and €111m respectively, although sales at NSN were up by 20%.
20:11 – Lion
- Out for £21
- Digital download only
- Ian – speedier, like Mission Control, restore, versioning and some nice touches but overall a bit meh
- Ian – love Mail – hateful design choices on iCal and Address Book
- Ian – gestures is very nice, full screen turning to a Space is good…but OTT on a 27” iMac
- Ian – natural scrolling – disabled as use windows so much – too much adjustment
- August – available from Apple stores on USB stick
- http://www.apple.com/macosx/recovery/
- Lion has Recovery options and new Air and Mini can be recovered from the Internet
- iTunes 10.4 – 64 bit, Cocoa, Full screen
- iWork – updated to support full screen and versioning
- Xcode – 4.1 now free on the app store
37:19 – New Apple Hardware
- Airs – double the speed, more ram, better chip, backlit keyboard and thunderbolt – same price – lovely
- Mini – thunderbolt, better chip, no drive – cheaper – £650 down to £525
- White Macbook – dead
- The 27-inch Thunderbolt Display has an LED-backlit, 2560-by-1440 pixel, 16:9, in-plane switching (IPS) screen, which Apple says has a brightness of 375 cd/m2 and a 1000:1 contrast ratio. A single two-ended cable attaches to a Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro or Air, one lead going to the notebook’s MagSafe power port, and the other to its Thunderbolt port.
-The display has three powered USB 2.0 ports, plus one FireWire 800 and one Gigabit Ethernet port, all connected to its Thunderbolty host – MacBook Pro or Air, Mac mini, or iMac – through that single Thunderbolt cable. The display also has its own Thunderbolt port so you can daisy-chain up to five more Thunderbolt devices
- The display also has Apple’s FaceTime HD camera – an upgrade from the earlier iSight camera – and a 2.1 speaker system with 49 watts of oomph. There’s also an ambient light sensor that’ll adjust display brightness based on the level of lighting in its surrounding environment.
- £900
44:40 – Apple updates International App Store Prices
- Apple update international pricing
- Uk – £0.59 is now £0.69
- Apple’s iWork apps now cost £13.99, up from £11.99, on the Mac App Store in the U.K., while the popular iOS versions have jumped from £5.99 to £6.99.
- Most rises around 10-15% – £1.19 per issue will now pay £1.49 – a 25 per cent price rise
- No warning – magazines running adverts caught out
- Lion price of £20.99 should have been a clue of impending changes in price points
– Certainly interesting that no pre-warning!
46:37 – HTC (Android) Infringes two Apple Patents
- ITC judge prelim judgement finds in favour of Apple – HTC infringes Apple in two areas…
- Decision needs ratifying by a panel.
- Will outcome be ban of product? Damages? Technology Licence?
- And now HTC are willing to negotiate with Apple
50:19 – Fake Apple Stores in China
- Fake stores, look real, sell real products
- Same branding, staff where same brands
- Staff even thought it was real
- Apple are aware…and China are now shutting them down.
51:52 – Illegal Film Downloads up 30% in UK
- The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years, new figures suggest.
- That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.
- Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.
- But it’s not just illegal film downloading that’s on the rise – research suggests people are illegally downloading more TV shows too.
- The top five most popular shows were illegally downloaded a total of 1.24 million times in the UK last year. That’s a 33% increase from 2006 figures.
- Surely that just reflects the larger capacity broadband that we’re all now getting our hands on (well, some of us at least). Again – the end game is surely that better legit delivery methods need to be put in place. This takes time – so no doubt we’ll see more letters being sent in the mean-time.
53:15 – Cheaper broadband for rural users
- Up to 3m homes and businesses in rural parts of the UK could receive better value broadband services by the end of the year, following an Ofcom decision to force BT Wholesale to reduce the amount it charges other internet service providers (ISPs) to use its networks.
- The communications regulator has ruled that BT must reduce its charge to ISPs each year, by a rate of at least 12 percentage points below inflation. For example, if the RPI inflation rate is 5%, BT will have to cut its charges by 7%.
- The ruling is to take effect by mid-August 2011 and remain in force until 31 March 2014, and paves the way for cheaper broadband prices for millions of consumers and businesses in less densely populated areas across the UK.
- The rural areas set to benefit from the change include parts of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as Norfolk, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, the south-west of England and other areas. These are predominantly areas lacking in competition among ISPs.
55:12 – Govt releases more data
- Following their pledge and success of data released so far, Cameron has announced another set of data that will be published and available to public and devleopers
- NHS, Education (single portal to compare schools), Crime (more detailed local crime maps), Transport (rail data will be hot), Govt financial transactions – every spend above £500
57:11 – Google detects and warns on malware
- “Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results.”
- Windows malware only
58:43 – Google to kill labs
- Google just announced it is ending its Labs program, in an effort to focus more on its existing products, For many of Google’s hard-core or even medium-core users, certain labs features have become essential tools to personalize the apps to their needs.
- a Google spokesman said that Gmail Labs, Calendar Labs and other Labs will not be shut down, merely the Labs program that brought us such applications as Google Goggles and Google Reader. There are still cool affected apps, but it’s not the end of my personal world.
- 20% projects still exist though
1:00:42 – Think with Google
- The new online channel will feature each new issue of Google’s Think Quarterly along with Think Voices, which showcases the shared experiences and insights of marketing leaders, digital influencers and academics. The content is filled with bite-sized TED-like videos for inspiring ideas on topics like the latest in digital technology, the future of marketing and how to channel innovation to inspire your business decisions.
- add link to youtube channel

Picks
Henry
Halftone
- Halftone goes beyond typical “photo filter” apps to give images a unique, vintage style that makes them look like they came from an old comic strip.
- Easy to use
Comic Life
- Make comics on teh iPad
- Again easy to use with lots of effects that can be added to images

Ian
Conquist 2
- Great strategy game for the iPad
- Lots of singleplayer options – variations on Risk
- Now includes multiplayer

Playback
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Shownotes
1:41 – Windows 8 Revealed
- Appears to be a rethink of what Windows is
- Tiles similar to Windows Phone (Metro) are viewed – bigger so can show more
- Touch based OS – does look very nice
- Applications will be of two types: traditional Windows apps built using existing APIs, and new apps built on Javascript and HTML5. APIs and guidelines for these will be released a little further down the line. There is a big focus on making applications friendly to both touch and mouse/keyboard.
- Can go back to ‘traditional’ windows – almost jarring moving between the two environments
- When in windows the touch Metro environment feels like a skin on top – like a dashboard?
- For touch though I think it’s a bold move from MS and great to see that Javascript and HTML5 are the basis (even though the app’s written for Windows 8 won’t run elsewhere!?!)
- Too early to tell how good this will be
6:52 – Facebook launch face scanning
- Facebook has apologised for the way it rolled-out a new system that recognises users’ faces. The social network said that it should have done more to notify members about the global launch.
Its Tag Suggestions feature scans photos and automatically picks out existing friends.
- Although users have the option to switch it off, some complained that they were not explicitly asked if they wanted it activated.
Facebook said that the system was intended to speed up the process of assigning a name to a picture, known as tagging.
- It was introduced in the US in December 2010 but has only now been launched globally.
9:37 – WWDC
- Lion
- 10 new features that were known already
- App Store only, July, £20.99, 4GB download for Snow Leopard
- 200 new features overall
- App Store updates
- For enhanced security, apps will have a built-in sandbox mode whilst developers will have the ability to send “delta updates”, which are effectively ‘patch based’ updates, meaning the entire app will not have to re-downloaded with every update.Apps will also be able to send push notifications to users and just like iOS apps, can also have in-app purchases
Lots of their new features were really refinements (as always with Apple!). Nice to see development, just seems that the desktop PC is now rather an after-thought…
Full screen apps – finally a way to maximise an app on OSX
- iOS 5
- 1. Notifications: no more interruptions. Notifications will appear like Android . SLide your finger across the notification and you will go to the app. More information will be visible form the Home screen. You can also click on the X to lea all the notifications.
Quick Android, sue Apple for copying
2. Newsstand: Newsstand is the place for all your Magazine and newspaper subscriptions. On the iPad, this app will let you read, listen to audio and video as well. Each edition is automatically downloaded to your device.
3. Twitter: Twitter is not integrated into iOS. SIngle sign-on is integrated into the settings and you won’t have to login in for every app. It’s also integrated with Camera and photos so you can upload with a few clicks. Location and thumbnails are also included. As expected, the Twitter integration taps into your contacts.
4. Safari: Safari is the most popular web browser of all time and the basis of 90% of mobile browsing. Apple introduced Safari Reader which will bring an articles content into one page and lets you email the content of the article or tweet about it. Includes full tabbed browsing in Safari on the iPad.
Will be interesting to see how advert driven websites react to this feature! There are tools available already (as covered by Ian in his picks) but this will bring to the masses an ability to cut off revenue streams for site owners!
5. Reminders: Reminders does exactly what it says — remind you od al the important things you need to do. Includes location information and can remind you when you arrive and leave an event. Searchable and will sync with iCal.
6. Camera: The Camera app got a refresh with a new Camera shortcut on the lock screen (yay!). Double-click the home button and the camera app will launch. Will let you take a new picture even if you have a passcode set. You can use the volume up button as a snap for the camera and grid lines to help frame your photos. You can even pinch-to-zoom and set AE/AF lock without losing your previous settings. . Built-in editor will let you crop, rotate, reduce red-eye and more.
After months of stopping hardware buttons for shutter, finally they relent! Feel sorry for those apps that got the chop because of doing just that.
7. Mail: Mail also gets some fresh new features including full text searching, rich text formatting, and flagging. Swipe to add an inbox and new enterprise features that add support for S/MIME. New dictionary will help with your definitions. A new split keyboard will make typing text easier.
8. PC Free: Cut the cord. PC Free gives you the ability to setup and activate your brand new iPhone right on the handset. Software updates are now over the air (double-yay!), even minor patches and little changes like add/delete calendars and add/remove mailboxes can be done from the handset.
9. Game Center: Game Center now includes photos with the profiles, game recommendations, achievement point comparisons. You can also purchase games right through the game center. Support for turn-based games is now added into iOS so games like Scrabble will be easier to build.
10. iMessage: A new messaging service just for iOS 5 owners. It’s BBM for iOS! You can send text, photos, videos contacts, group messaging, delivery receipts and more. iMessages are pushed to all iOS device and it works over 3G and WiFi. And its all encrypted!
- Airplay mirroring – does that mean any app will mirror over Airplay without the app having to support it – thats massive for home and corporate environments
- Many app developers will be feeling the pinch – Instapaper, Camera+, ToDo apps, Messaging apps
- After all the previewed features and great news about iOS 5 (OTA updates, wireless sync, new apps, iMessage), Apple confirmed that iOS 5 will ship this Fall (perhaps with a new iPhone?), with a first developer seed available later today. The best part? Just like iOS 4, iOS 5 will run on your iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS (unlike a previous report claimed, 3GS is supported), iPad and iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen
If you have an app in the areas where Apple has now “baked in” functionality, you’ll be cursing at the moment! Always a risk for developers who come up with a great idea.
- iCloud
- http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/apple-details-iclouds-digital-storage-and-syncing-free-5gb-of-storage.ars
- iCloud integrates with a number of apps on both iOS devices and Macs to sync content like pictures, documents, and music between devices, and will provide 5GB of storage free to all users.
- iCloud can wirelessly push content to all the listed devices automatically and integrate with apps like Contacts, Mail, and iCal that were all previously handled by Apple’s old cloud service, MobileMe. Jobs said these apps have been “rebuilt from the ground up” to be iCloud apps.
- The iCloud version of iCal includes calendar sharing, so that an update to a calendar is not only pushed to all of a user’s own devices, but to those who subscribe to the calendar as well. In e-mail, @me.com addresses can sync mail between all devices.
- Jobs also announced a few newly iCloud-optimized apps. Integration with the App Store allows users to see a purchase history of all of their apps and pull one down to a device if they need it, as long as it’s compatible. A newly bought app can be automatically pushed to all devices. Likewise, new books and their bookmarks in iBooks can be auto-synced to all devices, and new Pages document will automatically be backed up to the service, then pushed to all other Pages-enabled devices.
- Another feature, called PhotoStream, pulls images directly from the camera roll of a user’s device, puts them in the cloud, and sends them to any desired devices, including Macs and the Apple TV. The last 1,000 photos are kept for 30 days by default, and moving the pictures to an album keeps them forever.
- iTunes was also primed for iCloud, and lets users pull down songs or albums purchased through the iTunes Store from their purchase history to the device they are using. Jobs noted there is a “switch” where users can tell iCloud to sync all songs bought on any device to up to 10 authorized devices.
- Jobs also described a new feature called iTunes Match, which attempts to match up songs in a user’s library with what is available in the iTunes Store. If a song can be matched, a customer will have access to it via iCloud without having to upload it, though they will be able to upload songs they already own as well. The service has no data caps, but costs $24.99 per year. So Apple’s basically betting you’ll pay $25 a year to legalize all your content, and for the convenience of having it with you everywhere
- Similar to HP’s webOS, iCloud will also allow iOS devices to complete automatic daily backups of your devices to the cloud.
- Jobs said little about how users will control the actions of iCloud (other than through iTunes), which is relevant to those concerned about data usage limits. During a demo, Roger Rosner, VP of iWork, indicated that when he wanted to access a Keynote presentation on his iPad from his iPhone, he first had to give consent for the phone to use the iCloud service.
- APIs for iCloud storage and a beta version will be available to developers starting today, and device owners running iOS 4.3 will also get access to a beta version of iTunes in the cloud. The full version of iCloud will be available with iOS 5, which is due out this fall. Jobs announced that 5GB of storage will be available free to all users for mail, documents, and backup, with the PhotoStream service operating outside that limit.
Another case of end to end control helping Apple to make a service that, in theory, ‘just works’. Extremely impressive stuff – not because we haven’t seen it before, just because it’s so completely realised. The data-centre was impressive!
However, what about people with low/limited upload speeds… Pictures and songs are large beasts and the data-centre is in the US after all. I’m sure they’ve thought about it and if anyone can pull it off, Apple can.
Their push towards delta updates on everything was also evidence that they are on the case.
How long before EU/Competitions commissions start getting involved? We’re talking features and functionality that you don’t have any options over – iCloud as a service for example. Microsoft are still suffering from having to open up their operating system to competition. Will this appen to Apple as well? I don’t think it’s that far away.
56:32 – FT bypass the Apple Tax
- The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.
- The browser app enables readers to access content when offline by saving a shortcut to articles, receive automatic updates without the need to download new versions of the app and access content exclusively made for tablets.
- An upcoming feature is ‘Clippings’, a service that will allow users to read articles later, either on their tablet or on their desktop PC. Sound familiar? (look for ‘reading list’)
- FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook.
- Accessing FT content is free for up to ten articles per month, if you register.
- Performance – pretty poor
What have I been bleating on about? Yep, the future is web-based services. Not apps.
1:02:39 – Microsoft Keynote
- Kinect dominated
- Ghost Recon:Future Warrior – kinect gesture and voice support, as will all future Tom Clancy games
- New dashboard this fall, kinect powered, metro’ish design, Bing and Youtube channels controlled by voice
- Bing allows you to search across Xbox content
- TV channel in the Fall – US only?
- Halo:Combat Evolved – Nov 15th – 10 year anniversary – HD graphics, co-op, multiplayer maps as well but you need Halo Reach to play multiplayer – 6 maps – no multiplayer with Halo:CE apart from co-op
- Fable: The Journey – first person journeying via kinect
- Minecraft coming to 360 this winter…with kinect support
- Forza 4 – October 11th – head tracking via kinect, new community features – not much else revealed
- Kinect Fun Labs, Disneyland – Wiitastic games coming to kinect
- Kinect sports 2, Dance Central 2
- Halo 4 – end of 2012 – new 3 parter
- Buried – Cloud storage for game saves and profiles – sign in anywhere to any console
Kinect seems to = games on rails… not exactly the future of gaming as I see it.
Mind you, all the games shows seemed to have massive amounts of “watching” the game rather than actually “playing” it.
1:11:44 – Sony Keynote
- Apologise for outage and hack
- Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to launch September 28
- A TV. And some 3D glasses. Available in one $499 bundle this fall, the 3D-enabled 24-inch television includes a pair of PlayStation-branded 3D glasses (extra glasses are available for $69.99 separately), a six foot HDMI cable and a copy of Resistance 3. Best of all, the screen includes some clever technology which allows two players looking at the display at two different angles to see separate images, effectively eschewing traditional split-screen multiplayer.
- Resistance 3 – September 6
- Dust 514 – spring/summer 2012
- When playing your FPS title of choice, have you ever wished that there was something more to it beyond your rank, weapon unlocks, your kill/death ratio and leaderboard prominence? Those things are all great – but what if those matches you fought in actually meant something? What if your successes and failures against your opponents impacted the course of events in a vast setting, potentially changed a virtual world and the gameplay experience of thousands of other players? More than that, what if that impact was felt across two separate games – one on PS3 and one on PC/Mac – that share the same sci-fi universe?
DUST 514 is that game.
- “Persistence” is the key word here. The world of DUST 514 doesn’t spawn when you fire up your PlayStation 3 — it’s always there and always being experienced and influenced by other players in the EVE universe. When you take part in events in the EVE universe through combat in DUST 514, you’re taking part in something greater than your own individual experience of that world.
- Your fights impact the entire EVE setting, comprised of both DUST 514 mercenaries and EVE Online starship pilots, known as “capsuleers“. When you capture or destroy planetary structures, you are asserting dominance over regions of that planet – perhaps eventually the planet itself. As you profit while wiping out your opposition in DUST 514, the outcomes of these conflicts can affect territorial control of vast regions of space in EVE Online, something of great importance to EVE’s starship pilots.
- Uncharted in september – looks really good
- Sony announce slew of games with Move support
- Saints Row:The Third with move – Nov 15th
- NGP is Playstation Vita
- The NGP PlayStation Vita will feature both Wi-Fi and 3G functionality, with AT&T being named the official wireless carrier of the new handheld. Audible groan and boo’s when AT&T announced. front and rear cams, Wi-Fi with optional 3G, a 5-inch AMOLED display, and touchpads on both sides
- As for pricing, the Wi-Fi model will retail for $249, while the 3G/Wi-Fi model will retail for $299 (£229 and £279)
- Launched globally by the end of 2011
- Streetfighter x Tekken a launch title as is Wipeout, Modnation Racers…and of course Ridge Racer
- This is my next hands on
- It’s big. Certainly not very pocket friendly, but not comical. It’s a pretty reasonable size given the fully articulated analog controls and all the other wild stuff going on here. Still, it’s big if you’re used to doing your gaming on a phone or even a recent PSP.
It’s light. Vita actually feels hollow. It’s a little bizarre given the fact that we’re looking at a seriously large display, and takes some getting used to. We’re happy to report, however, that this is some seriously quality craftsmanship. The see-through plastic triggers are big, meaty, and have a whole bunch of finely crafted travel.
The “cheapest” feeling part is probably the back touchscreen. It kind of feels (and looks) like a plastic sticker, and it actually made some tasks requiring rear touch a little sub-par feeling. We’d prefer something a bit more like brushed glass.
This screen is AMAZING. Not only is it amazing in size, color, and resolution, but the games are actually pumping enough pixels to look wonderful on it. Virtua Tennis was especially spectacular, with oodles of polygons available for every nuance of Federer’s face.
The analog sticks are good, but not DualShock or Xbox 360 controller good. We got through most gaming tasks fine, but shooting in Uncharted felt a little sloppy. Of course, there’s always a bit of a learning curve with a new shooter and a new analog stick, so we’re willing to give this one time.
1:18:48 – Nintendo Keynote
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword will arrive on Wii during Holiday 2011
- 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda. Part of the celebration, as announced by Shigeru Miyamoto, includes the release The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the 3DS eShop. And by “release,” we mean that the classic Game Boy title is actually available today.
- Luigi’s Mansion 2 officially announced for 3DS
- Super Mario 3D, the 3DS title briefly teased back at GDC, would launch before year’s end.
- Mario Kart for 3DS – winter
- Starfox 64 for 3DS this fall
- Nintendo Wii U
- The controller features a large, touch-capable screen, paired with two circle pads, a directional pad, face buttons, a camera, a gyroscope and an accelerometer. Nintendo is positioning it as an entertainment sharing device, with video and gameplay working across the controller and your home console.
- You can play games solely on the controller, which handles like a tablet and presumably includes the stylus we saw interacting with it during the reveal. It’s got a 6.2 inch screen, is backward compatible with all Wii games, Wii Remotes and other accessories — a video showed showed it being used with the Balance Board and as a Wii Remote, so it’s got motion controls built in. An example during the reveal showed an individual using it in a golf game, just like a Wiimote.
- It’s got rumble, trigger buttons, touch-screen, microphone and speakers, and an accelerometer. It’s also got a camera built in. Iwata says it’s got support for the “widest variety of games can be supported” and can play games independently of the Wii itself. Oh, and it’s HD.
- Expected 2012
- No games demo’d, just rolling montages – from 360 and PS3 versions of the games
- 1.8 inches tall, 6.8 inches wide, 10.5 inches long
Single-touch display
The new controller incorporates a 6.2-inch, 16:9 touch screen and traditional button controls, including two analog Circle Pads. This combination removes the traditional barriers between games, players and the TV by creating a second window into the video game world. The rechargeable controller includes a Power button, Home button, +Control Pad, A/B/X/Y buttons, L/R buttons and ZL/ZR buttons. It includes a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, rumble feature, camera, a microphone, stereo speakers, a sensor strip and a stylus
Up to four Wii Remote (or Wii Remote Plus) controllers can be connected at once. The new console supports all Wii controllers and input devices, including the Nunchuk controller, Classic Controller, Classic Controller Pro and Wii Balance Board
A single self-loading media bay will play 12-centimeter proprietary high-density optical discs for the new console, as well as 12-centimeter Wii optical discs
Supports 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i. Compatible cables include HDMI, component, S-video and composite
Uses AV Multi Out connector. Six-channel PCM linear output through HDMI
The console will have internal flash memory, as well as the option to expand its memory using either an SD memory card or an external USB hard disk drive
IBM Power®-based multi-core microprocessor
Four USB 2.0 connector slots are included. The new console is backward compatible with Wii games and Wii accessories
1:24:31 – E3 News
- Mass Effect 3 – Mar 6th 2012
- Battlefield 3 – October 25th
- A new social client for FIFA gamers launching with FIFA 12, known as “Football Club”. The service is said to track “status, bragging rights and progression,” allowing players to access their cross-game stats from FIFA titles. Think Bungie Pro or Call of Duty Elite, but, ya know, without the paid part. Thats right — it’s free! Football Club will launch with FIFA 12 this fall
- Tomb Raider – 2012, reimagined in some ways but classic Tomb Raider in many others
- On-Live hits the UK Q3 2011
- http://www.reghardware.com/2011/06/03/onlive_hits_uk_in_autumn/
- After a successful first year in the US, cloud-based game service OnLive is finally heading to the UK this autumn.
- Customers with fast internet connections will be able to stream games such as Borderlands and Prince of Persia straight to their computer or TV set, no download required.
- OnLive’s UK page now shows a countdown set to end June 7 at 8pm. Sign up then and you’ll be given an OnLive UK Founding Member account for early access.
- OnLive will launch in the UK in collaboration with BT
- iPad client also launching in the Autumn
1:28:38 – Finally – most damaging DM mistake yet?
- Rep. Anthony Weiner has confessed at a press conference that he sent via Twitter the picture that has captivated Washington for the past week — and that he lied about his account being hacked.
- “I regret not being honest about this,” Weiner said in a tearful statement. “I was embarrassed, I was humiliated. I was trying to protect my wife. I was trying to protect myself from shame.”
- He claimed to have tweeted the picture on May 27 to Seattle student Gennette Cordova “as a joke” but then “panicked” and removed the tweet from his Twitter account. Cordova, however, doesn’t understand what joke that would be. “Am I the only one still confused?” she tweeted during the press conference.
- “Once I realized I had posted it on Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said I’d been hacked,” Weiner explained.
- Weiner said he has had “cursory direct message contact” with Cordova and that she was not one of the women he was having an online relationship with.

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1:16 – Paypal sues Google
- Mentioned PayPal on last podcast in regards Google Wallet and how they would fight to retain their control – hours after we finished PayPal sued Google
- The complaint (embedded below) alleges “misappropriation of trade secrets, and “breach of fiduciary duty.” It revolves around Osama Bedier, who was the VP of Platform, Mobile, and New Ventures at PayPal before he was recruited to work at Google by Android chief Andy Rubin, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Bedier’s former PayPal colleague Stephanie Tilenius (who now heads up Commerce and Payments at Google, and I interviewed yesterday onstage at Disrupt NYC).
The lawsuit reveals that Google was negotiatiating with PayPal for two years to power payments on mobile devices. But just as the deal was about to be signed, Google backed off and instead hired the PayPal executive negotiating the deal—Bedier.
- Inferring that Google bought the knowledge and then used it to launch google Wallet
3:41 – SeeSaw Closes
- SeeSaw, UK based video TV venture to close
- At its launch in February last year, SeeSaw offered 3,000 hours of free programmes including Skins, Kingdom and Doc Martin. Three months later it began offering paid-for content, with 1,000 hours of shows including South Park and Spooks, and struck deals with US broadcasters including MTV and NBC Universal.
- But third-party internet TV aggregators have strugged to compete with broadcasters’ own in-house on-demand services, and SeeSaw failed to gain a significant following compared to rival offerings such as the BBC’s iPlayer, ITV Player and Channel 4′s on-demand service, 4oD.
- We first covered this back on Episode 37 and said we couldn’t see a reason to use this over iPlayer, 4OD etc
7:15 – Lodsys responds to Apple
- Sues developers and chases Android dev’s too
- Says if it has improperly targeted a developer it will give them $1000
12:09 – Apple responds to Malware
- Security update that spots and removes MacDefender and will update daily for new varients
15:24 – Twitter in UK Legal Landmark
- Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.
- The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user’s private details.
- It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.
- Ahmed Khan, the south Tyneside councillor accused of being the author of the pseudonymous Twitter accounts, described the council’s move as “Orwellian”. Khan received an email from Twitter earlier this month informing him that the site had handed over his personal information. He denies being the author of the allegedly defamatory material.
- “I don’t fully understand it but it all relates to my Twitter account and it not only breaches my human rights, but it potentially breaches the human rights of anyone who has ever sent me a message on Twitter.
- “A number of whistleblowers have sent me private messages, exposing any wrongdoing in the council, and the authority knows this.”
- He added: “I was never even told they were taking this case to court in California. The first I heard was when Twitter contacted me. I had just 14 days to defend the case and I was expected to fly 6,000 miles and hire my own lawyer – all at my expense.
22:41 – Twitter Integrates photos and improves Search
- New version of search – more relevant tweets – huge opportunity for twitter in realtime search
- Also show relevant photos and videos
- Speaking of photo’s…
- Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes.
- For users without smartphones, we’re working with mobile carriers around the world so you can also send photos via text message (MMS). Share what’s happening in your world, anywhere you are.
24:38 – Eric Schmidt D9 Revelations
- Google is the default search engine for Apple computers and iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). Google Maps also gets featured placement. That’s going to continue. “We have a very,very good search partnership” and map relationship with Apple, Schmidt said, saying that deals on both have been renewed.
- Schmidt said repeatedly that it would be “useful” to get social data from Facebook or elsewhere to improve its own products: “From Google’s perspective, it would be useful to have the information; it would make our products better.” Later, when asked if Google might need to buy Twitter or some other company, he said: “Our social strategy does not acquire the acquisition of any company, because we can get people to give us that information.”
- Google has facial recognition technology, but it’s uncomfortable with how it might be used, so it has withheld it. That’s apparently pretty unique for Google. “As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and stopped,” Schmidt said.
- “Four years ago, I wrote memos on identity and did nothing …. I clearly knew I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” Schmidt said. Why – “I think I was busy,” Schmidt said. “CEOs should take responsibility. I screwed up.
- Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases. “There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.
There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.
32:07 – Button Plague
- Twitter launch Follow button
- The Follow Button is to establish connections with other Twitter users remotely. So if we were to add a Follow Button to the sidebar on DigitalOutbox, with one click, you could follow our account
- Different from the tweet button that tweets content
- Google +1 for websites
- Do you want to +1 a page while you’re on it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that recipe for chocolate flan if you haven’t tried it out yet?
- Today, we’re releasing +1 buttons to the whole web. As a result, you might start seeing +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet.
- All competing with Facebook Like button
34:54 – Amazon launch Mac Download Store
- Amazon launches Mac Download store
- 250 titles including MS Office
- No way for independents to submit titles – for now – works with established software sellers only
- Downloads unlimited, linked to your Amazon account
- Another shot across Apple’s bow’s but will Apple users really care with the Mac App store built into OS X?
40:48 – Microsoft make more money from Android than from Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.
- Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement.
- Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it’s looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.
- A rough estimate of the number of HTC Android devices shipped is 30 million. If HTC paid $5 per unit to Microsoft, that adds up to $150 million Android revenues for Microsoft.
- Microsoft has admitted selling 2 million Windows Phone licenses (though not devices.) Estimating that the license fee is $15/WP phone, that makes Windows Phone revenues to date $30 million.
- So Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone.
44:12 – BT to embrace IPTV
- British Telecom will change the bulk of its broadband network to use multicast routers as from next year – this will mean that full IPTV services, using quality of service protocols, could then be launched for the first time on the BT network.
- at the Connected TV Summit in London last week Steve White, head of information systems and technology for IPTV at BT, said that the BT network was being upgraded to multicast to allow full IPTV. When asked why, White said: “It’s too expensive renting DVB-T multiplex space to deliver Sky Sports to BT Vision customers, so we want to send it multicast.”
- A multicast network uses a Type D internet addressing system whereby content is sent from one point in a network to another, and any branch along the way can opt to also access that address, or not. It is the basis of the Internet Group Management Protocol and is the basis of modern IPTV systems and saves a huge amount of bandwidth, because each TV channel only has to be sent around a city fiber network once, not as multiple unicast copies. Most public broadband networks across Europe do not cater for multicast, except where they have been specifically upgraded for IPTV.
- Potential for BT to launch hundreds of IPTV channels up to HD quality
48:00 – Apple launch iWork on iPhone
- Keynote, Pages and Numbers now available for iPhone
- Universal version so if you’ve bought them for iPad you can now use them on your phone
- £5.99 each or free if you have them for iPad
- Key part of iCloud next week?
51:49 – Call of Duty Elite
- Activision is set to launch a new social gaming platform for fans of its multi-million selling Call of Duty titles. The long-expected service, named Call of Duty Elite, will feature detailed multiplayer gaming statistics, community elements and user-generated content sharing.
- Downloadable map packs and other similar offerings for all subsequent Call of Duty game releases will be included in the monthly subscription fee.
- A public beta will begin in the summer, with a launch following in autumn. Vitally, basic multiplayer gaming will remain free of charge, despite fears that Activision would seek to monetise online play.
- Elite is essentially a thorough online matchmaking service, combined with elements of FaceBook, YouTube and the “Autolog” in-game social networking concept developed by EA for its Need for Speed titles. Players will create a single Elite profile, which then unites their experiences in all CoD titles. Access Elite via console, PC or mobile
- 4 sections – Career – stats on your CoD games, heatmaps of matches etc – Connect – extension of basic matchmaking, search for players by topic, eg photography, groups and clans – Compete – prize events – Improve – hints and tips
- Price – less than other competing services – rumours of $5 a month

Picks
Chris
The Website Is Down
- Very funny videos for anyone in IT
Henry
Polychord for iPad
- Music creation app for iPad
- Easy to use with loads of features

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1:22 – Microsoft buys Skype
- Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion
- Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.
- Skype will become a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division, reporting directly to Ballmer.
- Just when I thought Skype’s Mac interface couldn’t get any worse
5:49 – Google IO Day 1 – Android
- Youtube Movies
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/09/google-partners-with-sony-pictures-nbc-universal-and-warner-brothers-for-youtube-movies/
- 3000 full length movies available to rent on Youtube from Sony, NBC, Universal and Warner
- Standard industry pricing ($3.99 new release. $2.99 library)
- US Only
- Some good titles
- 1 week to start watching. 24 hour to finish once started.
- No subscription – just transactional.
- Will be on Google TV
- Google TV Update
- http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/google-tv-news/
- Hneycomb will come to platform in a couple of months
- Will have access to app store
- Ice Cream Sandwich
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/10/ice-cream-sandwich-to-bring-new-ui-framework-to-android/
- The next major release of Android comes just in time for hot summer days. Ice Cream Sandwich, as it’s called, is well, Google’s “most ambitious” release yet. And look! A new logo!
- Google says they wanted to create an OS that runs everywhere. Enter: Ice Cream Sandwich. Nevermind Honeycomb, - Google says this is the OS that will power tablets, convertible slates, smartphones and more. With it, comes a refreshed UI that leans heavily on a new application framework that Google has yet to detail, besides stating it will solve the issue of coding for different hardware profiles.
- Part of ICS is a new OpenGL facetracking, which Google demo’d on stage at I/O. It even auto-pans based on voice detection, focusing a cropped view on whoever is talking.
- Google and Hardware Manufacturers Promise
- http://lifehacker.com/5800425/google-and-hardware-manufacturers-promise-android-software-upgrades-every-18-months
- Guarantee 18 months of software upgrades for handsets
- Doesn’t guarantee speed…but that your handset should at least support the next 18 months of updates
- Android@Home
- http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/android-at-home/
- Google has just unveiled the Android@Home framework, a set of protocols for controlling light switches, alarm clocks and other home appliances through any Android device.
- The search giant’s ambitious plan intends to turn the home into one connected device. During a demo Tuesday at Google I/O in San Francisco, the company showed off the capability to control lights via an Android tablet. Android@Home essentially makes it possible to control wireless or connected devices.
- Google also showed off a new type of Android device: a home theater system called “Project Tungsten.” Google rigged several speakers to the Android OS and, using an Android tablet, controls the speaker system. Google also demonstrated how the system can start playing music just by swiping a near-field communication-enabled CD case in front of the “Project Tungsten” setup.
- Devices – end of this year
- Google gives away 5000 Galaxy Tab 10.1’s
- http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-launching-in-about-a-month-google-giv/
- Usually distribute some hardware
- This year it’s the brand new Galaxy Tab 10.1
- Limited edition (white babk), Honeycomb 3.0 but will get 3.1 in a couple fo weeks
- Google Music Finally Launched
- http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/google-music
- On Tuesday at Google I/O, the company took the wraps off Google Music Beta. Currently, that site is invite-only, but users will be added to the platform soon. The product is “free for a limited time.”
The service will be available starting on Android devices and via the web.
- It will run on all Android devices, including tablets and mobiles
- You’ll be able to create custom playlists
- You’ll be able to edit track info, get play counts, etc.
- Music will be available when you’re offline, too
- Users can upload and store songs to a cloud-based directory
- Users can wirelessly and automatically sync playlists from the web to connected devices and vice versa
- Google will automatically remove any music if subject to a copyright claim – http://gizmodo.com/5800490/google-will-remove-your-music-from-its-cloud-if-it-infringes-on-copyrights
22:24 – Google IO Day 2 – Chrome
- Chrome Browser
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/google-announces-160-million-chrome-users-massive-improvements-coming
- From 70 to 160 million users
- Google plans major improvements over the next few months including speech support built into the browser as well as more developer APIs to improve user interaction. Speech systems, for example, will allow you to use Chrome to translate speech in real time. Major HTML5 improvements to come too
- WebGL support – Angry Birds in chrome at 60fps
- Chrome Web Store
- Google’s Sundar Pichai also had some more to share about the Chrome Web Store. In the first three months since launch, they’ve seen 17 million app installs. And developers are telling them that apps installed through the store are seeing users spend roughly two times the amount of time in their apps installed through the store.
- And now it’s about to get bigger. Chrome Web Store is finally going international to all of Chrome’s 160 million users over the web, Pichai announced. This means it is now available in 41 languages around the world.
- Then Chrome’s Vikas Gupta took the stage to announce another big thing: in-app payments. But the bigger news may be that there will be a 5 percent flat fee to use these within Chrome. He laid out the math for everyone: that means developers keep 95 percent — that’s huge.
- Redesigned, better discovery – game on iOS App Store
- ChromeBook
- http://www.google.com/chromebook/#
- http://mashable.com/2011/05/11/google-chrome-notebooks/
- the first Google Chrome OS notebooks will make their worldwide debut June 15.
- Samsung and Acer will be the first companies to launch Chrome OS devices. Samsung’s device will sport a 12.1-inch screen with an 8-hour battery life, while Acer’s device will be a 11.6-inch display and a 6.5-hour battery life. Samsung’s device will retail for $429 for the Wi-Fi version and $499 for the 3G version. Acer’s more portable notebook will start at $349 and up.
- Google SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai said during Wednesday’s keynote at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco that both Chrome OS notebooks will be available starting June 15. It will launch in the U.S. on Amazon.com and in Best Buy stores nationwide, but the United Kingdom, France and other countries will get the chance to buy Chrome OS notebooks at the same time.
- The hardware seems like a dream machine: built-in security, “all day battery”, multiple connectivity methods that keep the hardware always connected. The production version now sports an unnamed Intel dual core CPU and feel much more polished than the CR-48 pilot program. External file storage now works, and unlike on the CR-48, users can plug in a camera and the Chromebook will mount the storage.
- However, as great as the Chromebook seems, it’s launching as what sounds like a post-beta product. The company announced on the stage of I/O that Chromebook updates will roll out every few weeks. Sort of awesome but also sort of scary.
- Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs – full offline support this summer
- Chromebooks for education will cost $20 a month
- Chromebooks for business – $28 a month
- The $28 per user monthly subscription fee will be covering hardware, a web console for multiple users, warranty and replacements, support and hardware auto-updates.
34:12 – Telegraph supports Apple Subscription Model
- The app is free to download but charges readers £1.19 for a single edition, or £9.99 for a monthly subscription. Telegraph newspaper subscribers get full access to its iPad edition for free. The Telegraph’s upgraded iPad app features letters, cartoons, galleries and puzzles – all of which were missing in the first version.
- The Telegraph Media Group title has adhered to Apple’s contentious terms for digital subscriptions, which allow the technology company to keep 30% of all the fees from subscriptions as well as all of the lucrative customer details.
- One downloaded the content can be accessed without a data connection
- Will last for 30 days before being removed
38:08 – Conde Nast support Apple Subscription Model
- Conde Nast is allowing new subscription rates for it’s New Yorker title.
- An updated version of that magazine’s iPad app lets users subscribe to the weekly magazine for $5.99 a month, or the equivalent of a $1.50 an issue. That’s a steep discount from the app’s old model, which only sold individual issues for $4.99 a pop.
- Conde Nast is selling an annual subscription to the iPad app for $59.99; a yearly subscription to the print version of the magazine costs $69.95. Very important: Conde says print subscribers will get iPad access for free.
- Extending to other titles including Wired over coming months
- Publishers maybe getting Apple to back down on terms;
- Apple still controls crucial subscriber information, and only allows Conde Nast to ask for name, zip and email. But the publisher now has two chances to ask for user’s email: The first as a standard opt-in screen, and then again on a screen that asks for email and a password in order to get exclusive content.
- Conde has more flexibility on pricing than Apple originally offered. For instance, at one point, Apple didn’t want the publisher to be able to offer a print+digital bundle at a $10 premium to digital-only, but wanted all prices to be the same (which they will be when GQ offers subscriptions later this month: $19.99 a year for digital-only, or digital + print).
- The agreement extends to international markets, etc.
40:26 – LastPass resets Master Passwords
- Password management system LastPass has reset users’ master passwords as a precaution following the discovery of a possible hack attack against its systems.
- The move follows the detection of two anomalies – one affecting a database server – on LastPass’s network on Tuesday that could be the result of a possible hack attack. LastPass detected that more traffic had been sent from the database than had been received by a server, an event that might be explained by hackers extracting sensitive login credentials, stored in an obfuscated (hashed) format.
- The worst case scenario is that miscreants might have swiped password hashes, a development that leaves users who selected easier-to-guess passphrases at risk of brute-force dictionary attacks. Once uncovered, these login credentials might be used to obtain access to all the login credentials stored through the service, as LastPass explains in a blog post
- The password-management outfit has taken the possible attack and resulting service disruption as the opportunity to introduce a stronger password hashing system. Although LastPass isn’t sure how hackers might have entered its network – if indeed that’s what happened – an assault based on an initial break-in via its Voice over IP system is the company’s best initial guess as to what might have gone wrong.
- This week’s security flap at LastPass.com follows a security breach just six weeks ago that created a means to extract the email addresses – though not the passwords – of enrolled users.
45:31 – Raspberry Pi
- Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has a HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? $25.
The hardware being offered is no slouch either. It uses a 700MHz ARM11 processor coupled with 128MB of RAM and runs OpenGL ES 2.0 allowing for decent graphics performance with 1080p output confirmed. Storage is catered for by an SD card slot. It also looks as though modules can be attached such as the 12MP camera seen in the image above.
We can expect it to run a range of Linux distributions, but it looks like Ubuntu may be the distro it ships with. That means it will handle web browsing, run office applications, and give the user a fully functional computer to play with as soon as it’s plugged in. All that and it can be carried in your pocket or on a key chain.
- Primarily used for education, it will be distributed through the Raspberry Pi foundation starting inn 2012

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2:06 – Twitter – Don’t compete with our apps
- Twitter has taken some time today in their developer forum to talk a bit about the state of the ecosystem and give some guidance.
- Platform lead Ryan Sarver notes that Twitter views a “consistent user experience” as very important to them. And it’s something they’re going to hold third-party developers to a very high standard to maintain. But they don’t want them to mimic Twitter’s own experience with their native apps in order to do this. They’ve updated the API Terms of Service to reflect all of this.
- “Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no,” Sarver writes very matter-of-factly.
“If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure a high bar is maintained,”
- So if your a developer what are Twitter happy with you developing:
- Publisher tools. Companies such as SocialFlow help publishers optimize how they use Twitter, leading to increased user engagement and the production of the right tweet at the right time.
- Curation, Realtime data signals, Social CRM, entreprise clients, and brand insights, Value-added content and vertical experiences.
- This hasn’t gone down well – Craig Hockenberry points out what Iconfactory’s Twitterrific brought to the Twitter platform – http://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/ – First use of tweet, first use of bird icon, first native mac client, first char count, first to support replies and conversations (with help from Twitter engineering), first native iPhone client
- Twitter killed my app – http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/03/twitter-killed-my-app/
- Some twitter stats to show you size (where’s identica?)
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/new-twitter-stats-140m-tweets-sent-per-day-460k-accounts-created-per-day/
- It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day from the first Tweet to get to the billionth Tweet. In a given week, users send a billion Tweets. Users are now sending 140 million Tweets, on average, per day, up from 50 million Tweets sent per day, a year ago. The all-time high in terms of Tweets sent per day was 177 million sent on March 11, 2011.
- In terms of Tweets per second, the all time high was 6,939 Tweets per second after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day. This compares to the previous record of 456 Tweets per second when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.
- Twitter says that 572,000 accounts were created on March 12, 2011, with 460,000 new accounts per day over the last month on average. Mobile users are up 182 percent over the past year. And Twitter currently has 400 employees, up from 8 in January 2008.
10:25 – ISPs to Provide Better Traffic Management Info
- BSkyB, BT, O2, TalkTalk, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone have all agreed to provide better information on traffic management, which should help customers understand why connection speeds vary.
- While such information is already available in many cases, in order for consumers to have a better handle on the data, the indicators must be understandable, accessible, comparable and verifiable. The info will therefore be published in a ‘Key Fact Indicator’ table that summarises the practices in a standardised format. These will be available on the ISPs’ websites by the end of June.
- The tables can be accessed directly by the consumer, but also used by price comparison websites and the like to inform potential customers of the best options available to them.
- Antony Walker, head of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, which facilitated the move, reckons it “will not only help to ensure consumers are better informed about the services they buy and use, but will also provide a clearer picture for policy makers of the way in which traffic management is actually used in the UK market”.
14:00 – Facebook Comment Box Plugin
- Facebook updates it’s comments box plugin – comment via Facebook account or Yahoo
- Forces people to use real name – deter spamming?
- Improved moderation tools
- Can send comments to wall, get notifications when others comment – fine on low traffic sites – comment on Techcrunch though and boom – spam tastic
- No Google or Twitter sign in available but it was rumoured
- Facebook marches on
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comments
- Techcrunch – less quantity, better quality
- Less anonymity = less trolls
20:06 – Google – Hide sites directly in search
- Similar to Chrome plugin launched a few weeks ago
- Click on block site to remove site from your search results
- Saved to your Google account so follows you around
20:52 – Google Maps Navigation now routes around traffic
- Google Maps Navigation has added traffic re-routing to it’s Android app
- Will take account of current and historic traffic levels when calculating best route
- Free!
- Traffic data is crowd sourced from other users to try and work out best available route
24:00 – Adobe Launches Wallaby
- Wallaby, a system it is launching today to convert basic Flash files — such as animations and banner ads — into code that will work on iOS.
- an AIR program that allows you to drag and drop a Flash file into it, at which point the system analyzes the file and outputs a sequence of HTML-friendly files that produce the same effect. By using HTML, CSS and SVG, the company says most simple Flash files can be recreated in ways that will work on Apple mobile products.
- I spoke to Adobe’s Tom Barclay about the launch, who said that the project had a specific purpose — to make Apple’s Flash ban less painful for developers — but pointed out that it was still very much experimental.
“There’s still room for improvement, but I think we’ve addressed a very specific use case for banner ads on iOS,” he told me.
- While it can port over simple animations and transitions, there’s a lot of information that it can’t handle: notably ActionScript instructions (which are used to program inside Flash) don’t convert, although Barclay suggested that they may come into the picture further down the line. Similarly, some of Flash’s higher-end features — such as filters and blend modes — aren’t being ported through Wallaby yet. And it doesn’t convert audio and video because HTML5 has its own dedicated tags for those.
26:29 – Conde Nast UK invests in iPad publishing
- Wired UK will release monthly app editions for iPad starting with its May issue, with British GQ making its tablet debut on the App Store with its July issue. Meanwhile, Vogue UK is to receive more “special edition” iPad issues throughout the year.
- For now, the publisher is focusing on iPad and iPhone only, although its thoughts are turning to other devices such as the raft of Android tablets about to go on sale, and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook.
- For now, the pricing model will remain one-off purchases, too. Apple’s recently introduced subscription billing system is also on Condé Nast’s agenda, but only if the terms are right, according to Read. “We’re in discussions with Apple in the US about how we might reach a subs arrangement that suits both sides.”
- The publisher will also launch 21 iPhone apps across seven of its magazine brands this year, including GQ, Glamour, Vogue and Wired.
29:52 – Apple Updates
- iOS 4.3
- iTunes 10.2.1
- Safari 5.0.4
- XCode 4 – Released – free for developers who pay $99 yearly or $4.99 on app store for non developers
- Benchmarks for iPad2 are very impressive – http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked
- Online backlog – 4-5 weeks now for delivery, physical stores sold out
- One More Thing
- Jon Bon Jovi
- Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it..
- God, it was a magical, magical time…I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.
38:54 – App Updates
- Flipboard – faster, instagram support
- Instapaper – faster, more social in that you can find liked reads from your twitter connections, can share to more places including Pinboard, can now search sync’d content – one of my fav apps just got better
41:14 – IE9 now released to mainstream
- Ars calling it the “most modern browser there is”
- Doesn’t work on anything before Vista.
- I’ve not had a chance to use yet. Speed graphs look good. Standards support looks much improved. Certainly a good thing. And with IE trying hard to now kill off IE6 – fingers crossed, those will move straight up to the latest version and save lots of development headaches!
44:09 – Kinect is record breaker
- Kinect officially fastest selling consumer electronic device ever… Guinness certified.
- “Fastest selling consumer electronics device in 60 days…”
45:38 – Zune Player is no more
- End of hardware. Software and service still live.

Picks
Chris
Droid@Screen
- Recently used to do my blog post on Android OS. It’s a desktop java app that can output your Android screen in a window! Fantastic! OK, you have to jump through a few hoops. You need to have the Android SDK and also the debug USB driver, but once that’s all up and running, you just load the .jar file and off you go.
- Used in conjunction with Camtasia/Jing you can then record the window.
- FPS is an issue – 30fps is fastest it offers and that’s not to say that you get 30 updates of the screen every second! It’s jerky at best but as a way of showing how Android works, I couldn’t find a better option out there at the moment.
- It’s also delightfully geeky!
Ian
Zite
- Magazine app for the iPad
- Displays content based on twitter followers, google reader and what you read as you use the app
- Like the front end, slower than Flipboard but not a dealbreaker