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

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

Playback
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Shownotes
2:24 – Apple loosens grip on subscription terms
- Apple has lifted the conditions on in-app pricing.
- Significantly, these have now been replaced by a term that says publishers can include content that consumers have paid for elsewhere. So if a newspaper subscribers has paid the paper directly for a year’s online and in-app access, then Apple won’t take a piece of that payment because it was processed outside the App Store. The same applies for services including Spotify, or Netflix.
- Previous terms had insisted that in-app subscriptions were to be the same price or cheaper than subscriptions elsewhere, and also that external subscriptions had to be made available within the app.
- It means publishers can choose whatever price point they like for subscriptions wherever they are, and won’t have to include what might be irrelevant external subscription offers in the Apple apps.
- Apple blinked
4:11 – Apple antes up in Lodsys developer lawsuits
- Apple has made its move in support of theseven small app developers sued by Lodsys over in-app purchases in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas on May 31, filing a motion to intervene in the proceedings on June 9 according toFOSSpatents’ Florian Mueller. If granted, Apple would be added to the Lodsys suit as a defendant and counterclaim plaintiff.
- Mueller believes that even though Lodsys may oppose Apple’s motion to intervene, the Mac maker is likely to be admitted as a defendant, in which case it has already submitted its answer to Lodsys’ complaint of infringement, and its counterclaim. Apple also cites a number of other precedent-setting similar cases where tech companies were allowed to intervene in patent disputes, which back up and strengthen its motion. If Apple joins as a defendant, Mueller thinks it’s very likely it will take on any legal costs incurred by its developer partners.
6:48 – iTunes in the Cloud not until 2012 for the UK
- The music storage part of the iCloud, due to launch in the US around September time, will not be coming to the UK until at least quarter one of 2012.
- A spokesman for the Performing Right Society (PRS), which ensures that composers, songwriters and music publishers are paid for their work, told The Telegraph, that negotiations with Apple about ensuring rights in the UK had started but were at a “very early stage”.
- “The licensing team at the PRS have started talks with Apple, but are a long way off from any deals being signed…It is very much the early stages of the negotiations and is similar to the launch of iTunes – which began in the US and took a while to roll out to other countries,” they said.
- A music executive at one of the major record labels, who wished to remain unnamed, said: “Tentative talks have begun between the major labels and Apple in the UK. However, all talks are at the really early stages and no one expects to see the cloud music service live on this side of the pond until 2012.”
- Mark Mulligan, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, said: “Apple’s cloud music service will not launch in the UK until at least quarter one of 2012. These types of negotiations take a long time… For one thing the UK arms of all the major record labels are biding their time and waiting to see how the service affects download sales in the US before they sign up to anything.”
- Quicky – Final Cut Pro X, Compressor 5 Motion 4 available on Mac App store from Tuesday 21st as well as 3TB Time Capsule and updated Airport Extreme
13:14 – Nokia and Apple Settle
- Nokia and Apple have agreed a technology licensing agreement that ends the long-running legal dispute between the two firms.
- “The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies,” Nokia said. Nokia sued Apple for patent infringements in 2009 and extended the action in December last year. Apple had countersued, accusing Nokia of infringing its patents.
- Nokia said Apple had agreed a one-off payment, the value of which was not disclosed, and ongoing royalties to use its technologies. Apple said the deal covered both companies’ patents.
15:30 – Google Search Updates
- Google Search on the Desktop
- We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, “Can I speak for this?”—it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we’ve added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box.
- English only initially, beta version of Chrome soon
- Search by image
- Next to the microphone on images.google.com, you’ll also see a little camera for the new Search by Image feature. If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks—the search [mountain path] probably isn’t going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick. Search by Image is rolling out now globally in 40 languages. We’re also releasing Chrome and Firefox extensions that enable you to search any image on the web by right-clicking.
- Google Instant: Instant Pages
- Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches. Let’s say you’re searching for information about the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, so you search for [dc folklife festival]. As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already prerendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly.
- Next beta version of Chrome will have this feature
- It’s the borg!
- Sorry officer, I have no idea why my computer was downloading THAT page.
23:11 – iCann greenlights expansion of web domains
- Icann has decided to allow the number of internet “domains” to expand enormously in one of the biggest changes ever to the internet’s method of naming sites.
- New website suffixes should start appearing late in 2012 and could be categorised by subjects including industry, geography and ethnicity and include Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.
- A special meeting of Icann’s board approved a plan to expand the number of possible internet domain name endings from the current 22 – such as “.com”, “.org” and “.net” (which are separate of the country-specific domain endings such as “.uk”) – to allow domains “in any language or script”, according to Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive of Icann.
- Icann will receive applications for new domain names for 90 days from 12 January 2012. The fee is $185,000, and the form for application is 360 pages long. It will also begin an awareness campaign pointing out that it has introduced the new scheme.
26:08 – Mobile phone firms develop wave and pay system
- Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile announced plans on Thursday for a joint venture that would allow shoppers to pay for goods and services with their phones rather than cash or cards.
- Consumers will be able to pay for sandwiches, drinks and train tickets by placing their phones close to a reader similar to the Oyster card system on the London Underground. In the future the technology might even allow you to unlock your front door and start your car.
- Kevin Russell, chief executive of 3, the UK’s smallest operator, hit out at his larger rivals for leaving 3 out of the project. “We would want and expect to be a part at the heart of a cross-industry development like this and are more than a little concerned that, as a core competitor, we have not yet been invited to be part of this joint venture,” he said.
- Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere said the service would be open to all retailers, banks, ticketing companies, advertisers and other mobile companies, including 3, Tesco and Virgin Mobile.
- The trio said they would inject significant capital into the project and would each own one third of the equity. The service is expected to go live early next year, subject to regulatory clearance.
29:36 – O2 will not sell the Playbook
- Blackberry Playbook which launched on Jun 16th won’t be sold by O2 in the UK
- The telco emailed interested punters that RIM’s 7in, QNX OS-based slate will not be available after all, saying it had issues with the “end to end customer experience” offered by the gadget
31:17 – HP Touchpad Pricing and Launch
- HP wants £399 for the 16GB model, £479 for the 32GB version – exactly what Apple is asking for the equivalent iPads 2s.
- Both are driven by a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, and sport 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a 1.3Mp webcam too. 9.7” screen
- The 240 x 190 x 14mm gadget weighs 740g and ships in July.
32:16 – Sky Go Launches July 4th
- Sky Player and Sky Mobile TV, the two services for watching Sky away from your telly are being combined to form Sky Go — and it’s free to all Sky customers.
- Sky Player lets you watch Sky online, and Sky Mobile TV lets you watch on your phone. With the introduction of Sky Go there’ll be just one service for your phone, tablet, laptop and computer, which is free to all Sky subscribers.
- Sky Go will show live programmes and catch-up TV from across the board of Sky channels. That includes all five Sky Sports channels, ESPN, Sky News, Sky Movies, Sky News, Sky 1, Sky Atlantic, Sky Arts, MTV, Disney, GOLD, Nickelodeon, NatGeo, History, Eden and ESPN.
- On your computer or laptop you can choose from 30 channels to watch on the go. Tablets and smart phones are limited to slightly fewer stations, but can get all the Sky Sports channels, ESPN and Sky News. More channels will be added to the phone and tablet line-up over time.
- You can register two devices to watch Sky Go, whether it’s your laptop in bed or your phone on the bus. Sadly you won’t be able to watch when you’re on holiday, as rights issues prevent overseas streaming.
- Sky Player and Sky Sports on the iPhone were previously subscription options so great to have these free for Sky subscribers
- In August, Sky Go will become available to non-Sky TV customers for a monthly subscription price ranging from £15 to £40. Sky Player will remain available on Xbox Live and Freeview service Fetch TV, but will rebrand as just ‘Sky’.
35:46 – PR firm busted
- Redner Group stated:
- Too many went too far with their reviews…we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom,” the company tweeted. “Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews…that’s completely different,” another tweet read.
- That was on companies official twitter feed…but has since been removed and an apology tweeted out as well
- Everyone kind of expects it…but still not good to see
- Currently, Duke Nukem Forever has a Metacritic score of 49 on the Xbox 360
40:26 – Dropbox Left User Accounts Unlocked for 4 Hours Sunday
- Yesterday we made a code update at 1:54pm Pacific time that introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism. We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. A very small number of users (much less than 1 percent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions.
- We’re conducting a thorough investigation of related activity to understand whether any accounts were improperly accessed. If we identify any specific instances of unusual activity, we’ll immediately notify the account owner. If you’re concerned about any activity that has occurred in your account, you can contact us at support@dropbox.com.
- This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.
- If you were affected then you will have been e-mailed as review is complete
- Worried – check your event log – https://www.dropbox.com/events
- For those who are seeking a service similiar to Dropbox, but with more security, Wuala and SpiderOak encrypt data on users’ devices, not on a central server.
43:01 – WordPress.org Password reset
- Noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavory.
- To use the forums, trac, or commit to a plugin or theme, you’ll need to reset your password to a new one. (Same for bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org.)
44:25 – Lulzsec and Anonymous Declare Open War Against All Governments and Fat Cats
- Lulzsec and Anonymoushave just declared full open war against all governments, banks and big corporations in the world. They are calling all hackers in the world to unite. Their objective is to fully expose all corruption and dark secrets
- This is getting tiring…..and dangerous. Real change ala wikileaks is powerful but hacking user accounts and throwing them online for individuals to be damaged…is childish
- Trying to be characters like robin hood?
- Net may be closing in – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/21/lulzsec-hacker-group-who-belongs
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13859868 – 19 year old arrested in UK
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/22/ryan-cleary-charged-lulzsec-hacking
- Charged with 5 offences of computer hacking
51:05 – Microsoft launches Kinect SDK for Windows
- Embraces hacking community by launching official SDK for Kinect on Windows
- This will allow users to create games, UIs, and apps with Kinect’s 3D sensing technology including 3D scanning, audio tracking, and the creation of 3D wireframes in real time.
The three major features include, Raw sensor streams, Skeletal tracking, Advanced audio capabilities
52:41 – Popcap bought for $1 billion
- Huge news in the gaming world: PopCap Games, the company behind such hits as Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled, is in the process of being acquired — and we’re hearing from multiple sources that the price is over $1 billion.
54:29 – iOS Apps
- Bungie Mobile
- http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/14/bungie-releases-free-ios-app/
- Free app from Bungie
- Track your Halo stats
- Login with Bungie ID and enable blue flames!
- Discovr Apps and Music
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/discovr-launches-awesome-tool-to-find-and-discover-new-apps-think-interactive-graphs/
- Great apps for discovering new apps and music
- Graphically shows related apps or music, then details more on the app or artist
- Both £0.59 but very nicely written
- Order & Chaos
- http://toucharcade.com/2011/04/27/order-chaos-online-goes-worldwide-lets-take-over-the-arcadian-forest-server/
- Gameloft MMO – rip off of WOW
- Monthly sub but at the moment it’s £0.59 for 3 months gameplay
- Pretty amazing to have this running on iPhone/iPad
- Exfm
- Great music discovery app out today
- Get the chrome plugin to understand what it’s about
- Follow friends, industry leaders, music blogs etc
- Great way of finding new music
- Free!
59:02 – Lytro Light Field Cameras
- Introducing a light field camera this year
- Amazing demo – take a photo and in post you can change what is in focus
- Light field means capturing all the light moving in all the directions in the view of the camera
- A real step change in photography…
1:04:47 – Facebook – Spartan and iPad App
- Project Spartan is the codename for a new platform Facebook is on verge of launching. It’s entirely HTML5-based and the aim is to reach some 100 million users in a key place: mobile. More specifically, the initial target is both surprising and awesome: mobile Safari.
- Yes, Facebook is about to launch a mobile platform aimed squarely at working on the iPhone (and iPad). But it won’t be distributed through the App Store as a native application, it will be entirely HTML5-based and work in Safari. Why? Because it’s the one area of the device that Facebook will be able to control (or mostly control).
- Facebook iPad app

Picks
Chris
SlideIT
- Android Keyboard. Like HTC sense.
- Drag your fingers over the keys rather than pressing individual ones. Magically your words appear. Clever stuff.
- Trial – or buy full versoin £3.99
Ian
Reeder for Mac
- Reeder for Mac – £5.99 from Mac App Store
- The best feed reader for Mac
- Great Google reader integration
- Fast and it looks great too

Playback
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Shownotes
1:21 – WWDC Announced
- June 6-10
- Focus on iOS and Mac OSX
- Rumour – iOS5 preview?
- Lion launch?
- No hardware?
- Sold out in 10 hours – last year took 8 days
7:03 – Amazon Cloud Drive
- Play your media from anywhere – music, video etc
- Cloud Drive is name of media storage space on its servers
- Any album bought through Amazon MP3 is stored for free in your Cloud Drive — a very nice perk.
- If you buy one album from Amazon MP3, they’ll upgrade your Cloud Drive storage to 20 GB for free for a year — another nice perk.
- Normally, 20 GB of Drive storage will cost $20 for a year. 50 GB is $50. 100 GB is $100. And so on. All the way up to 1 TB for $1,000.
- The Cloud Drive storage isn’t just for music — Amazon notes that 1 TB will hold 70 hours of HD video.
- Other files can be uploaded — this includes music, movies, photos, and even documents.
- The MP3 uploader accepts MP3 or AAC files, but they must be DRM-free (.wma, .wav, .ogg and others are not supported)
- Old Amazon MP3 purchases aren’t put in your Cloud Drive, only new purchases going forward (though you can manually upload).
- Cloud Player is name of…the player
- Player for web, Player for Android and player for….nope – none for iOS
- The Android Cloud Player is built into the Amazon MP3 app — it’s in both the Android Market and Amazon’s new Appstore.
- This is for U.S. customers only for the time being.
- Cloud Player for the web works on IE 8 and above, Firefox 3.5 and above, Chrome, and Safari. There is no Opera support. And Flash is required (but for uploads only).
- There’s also a stand-alone uploader app for Mac and PC.
- You can’t upload music from your mobile device “at this time”.
- What about legality? Can upload any DRM free music. Amazon statement – “We don’t need a license to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive”
- Browser doesn’t work from iOS – blocking mobile version of Safari?
- You can play songs via service on iOS by downloading the file to the device – Safari’s built in player will then play file – not ideal
- Another workaround – iCab – http://mashable.com/2011/03/29/cloud-player-ios-guide/
- Amazon out first ahead of rumoured similar services from Google and Apple
12:39 – O2 Tarriff Changes
- new one-year contract allows customers to upgrade their handset too. You pay as much as you do on a monthly basis for an 18-month contract. If you want lower monthly payments, you’ll need to take out a new two-year plan.
- Standard packages run from 50 minutes of airtime and 250 text messages – £15.50 per month for 12- and 18-month deals, £10.50pm for a 24-month contract – to unlimited messages and minutes for £62pm and £57pm, respectively.
- You can opt to pay an extra £3, £6 or £10 per month for 100MB, 500MB or 1GB, respectively, of data, which now includes phone tethering a no extra cost. Until now, it cost you £7.65 extra. That’s handy for folk who want to use their iPhone 4′s newly gained Wi-Fi hotspot feature, or the same on an Android handset.
17:42 – Google +1
- +1 is a small button that will reside next to each and every Google Search result. If you like the result, you click the +1 button and it gets shared with your social circle — and the public (more on that in a bit).
- The button also works on the ads that appear in Google Search. If you like those and think they can be useful to friends, you can also hit the button there to highlight them
- Google’s Like button
- If you’ve upgraded to the new Google Profile, you will have a new +1 tab that will keep track of all the results you’ve clicked the button for. From here you can easily remove any result as well if you no longer want to publicly indicate that you like it. And when you’re adding +1 to search and your profile (it will be opt-in at first), you’ll notice that there’s a check box to opt-out of using your +1 information to “personalize content and ads across the web.”
- +1 is an easy way to recommend things to the world
Your profile and +1′s appear publicly in search, on ads, and across the web.
- Trying to make ad’s social – and better targeted to your and your graph
- +1’s will also spread to sites – just like the like button has.
Problem is, the like button works because there are a great many people linked to their friends on Facebook… In reality, this will be a great resource for Google’s use but the benefits to a userbase that’s not linked together as fully (people just using Google search without a Google associated account) is limited.
21:47 – RadioPlayer
- Radioplayer, BBC backed internet radioservice launched Thursday 31st March
- All BBC stations, 140 commercial stations from one place
- Within a year, all 400 stations in UK will be available
- Makes a more level playing field for all stations
- Search by station, location, programme, presenter or interest
23:44 – NY Times spend $40million on a paywall…that doesn’t work
- Last Monday the New York Times finally implemented its content paywall on its website. But at a staggering cost of $40 million, you would be surprised how easy it is to circumvent the security. Guy Daniels reports.
- The site allows access to 20 free stories per month, after which it will prompt you to buy a digital subscription for $15 per month. Two questions were occupying the thoughts of many bloggers last week: one, why bother; and two, how on earth could it cost $40 million?
- Circumvent – unhide CSS style, remove ?gwh=numbers’ from URL, plus many other ways
- Well done Rupert. Well done

Picks
Ian
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery
- Old style graphic adventure for ipad
- Delightful graphics, awesome soundtrack
- Buy it.

Firstly, the iPhone 3G S – worth the cost if you’ve already got a 3G? This is a hard one to call. The improvements are:

• Jump in size from 16GB to 32GB (assuming you buy the 32GB version)
• Improved camera – 2 to 3 megapixels
• Camera functions improved – auto white balance, better low light performance, macro
• Touch to focus
• Video recording
• Video editing
• Digital Compass
• Voice control
• Much improved chip speed
• Double the RAM to 256MB
• Screen has oleophobic coating

Not exactly ground breaking but for me it’s enough of an upgrade. We see the future of iPhones, much like the iPod range, to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary apart from a platform reboot ever 3-4 years. So assuming you agree and decide an iPhone 3G S is for you, how much will it cost? This is the real burning issue for 3G owners in the UK. For the iPhone 3G launch O2 allowed existing iPhone owners to upgrade to the iPhone 3G for £100. Everyone was happy and most also assumed that this was the model for iPhone’s upgrades in the future. Wrong!

Like every other mobile phone contract in the UK you would need to buy out your existing iPhone 3G contract before you could upgrade to the new 3G S. This announcement, made first on twitter, caused a bit of meltdown with #o2fail jumping into the trending topics on Twitter for a couple of days. Initially disappointed, in the cold light of day it was fairly obvious that this was the same rules for everyone else, so why not the iPhone – a bitter but expensive pill to swallow and if you don’t like it, don’t buy the 3G S. For me though, a purchase is likely so is there a better way to purchase than to buy out existing contract and start on a new fresh 18 month deal?

The spreadsheet above lists out costs assuming you buy off existing contract. Not cheap. Highlighted in blue is what we think is the typical option for most users which assumes that you will get £230 for your current iPhone 16GB 3G. There’s a few places that will buy your iPhone:

• MazumaMobile.com will buy your phone for £200
• Carphone Warehouse will buy it for £160
• eBay – forums quote £300 for your phone but it’s more like £250-£270. Remember those eBay fee’s too

Considering the potential flood of iPhone’s then £230 for a phone in great condition sounds fair. The issue with this method of upgrading is the new 18 month contract. Assuming that Apple will release an upgrade every 12 months, buying in to an 18 month contract will give you this hassle every year. Taking a 24 month contract will force you into upgrading every second generation which might not be too bad a thing if the theory on product evolution is sound. However there is another way which involves going down the Pay As You Go route.

It’s this route that offers the best cost and flexibility in our opinion. The table above assumes a 32GB purchase on Friday. You then swap the contract sim from your current phone to the new 3G S. Take the new sim from the 3G S and use that in your existing phone which you can then sell on for £230-£250. Let the 18 month contract expire then sign up for either a monthly or 12 month Simplicity contract from O2. This takes monthly costs down from £35 to £20 although you do lose visual voicemail and unlimited wi-fi on this tariff. You can also make a further saving by signing up to the Simplicity contract via QuidCo and you should also be able to leave the 18 month contract at least a month early so that’s another saving.

The monthly average via this route is slightly higher than opening a new 18 month contract but the benefit comes next year and the next iPhone. No contract to pay off and a tidy sum to be made on selling on the 3G S. Well, that’s the theory at least. If you don’t upgrade next year then another 12 months on Simplicity will be a significant saving over the iPhone contracts.

Hopefully that helps spell out some options for this coming Friday. All you need to do now is queue up on Friday morning, pre-order from O2 stores or make an appointment at a local Apple store which is the option I’m doing. Alternatively, chortle at the amount of money this is all costing and enjoy OS 3.0 which has just come out. The choice is yours.

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