0:57 – Facebook IPO
- Finally, Facebook files for $5 billion IPO (Initial Public Offering)
- Values company at around $100 billion
- Zuck owns just over %28%
- He still has full control – pretty impressive
- Zuckerberg compares Facebook to transformative technologies like the printing press and the television, stating “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
- Zuckerberg also describes Facebook’s internal mantra, known as “The Hacker Way”. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation…hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration…We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls.
- The letter concludes with Facebook’s 5 core principles: Focus on Impact, Move Fast, Be Bold, Be Open, Build Social Value.
- Going to make a lot of people very rich
- Will Facebook change now that it is answerable to shareholders?
- For example, the graffiti artist who has a shareholding worth around $200 million – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/technology/for-founders-to-decorators-facebook-riches.html
6:46 – UK Court says you can copyright the basic idea of a photograph
- a judge has ruled that a photograph using a similar idea, but totally different compositionis infringement. You can see the two photographs here:
- As you can tell, the expression is totally different. Obviously, the idea is quite similar, but ideas aren’t supposed to be protected. You can read the full ruling here, in which the court seems persuaded by the fact that the original photographer had to do some Photoshopping to the image. Now, it’s true that European copyright laws are much more open to “sweat of the brow” arguments for copyright (which is not the case in the US), but even so, this ruling is ridiculous and troubling.
- Court said: I have not found this to be an easy question but I have decided that the defendants’ work does reproduce a substantial part of the claimant’s artistic work. In the end the issue turns on a qualitative assessment of the reproduced elements. The elements which have been reproduced are a substantial part of the claimant’s work because, despite the absence of some important compositional elements, they still include the key combination of what I have called the visual contrast features with the basic composition of the scene itself. It is that combination which makes Mr Fielder’s image visually interesting. It is not just another photograph of cliched London icons.
- Bonkers! World gone mad.
10:09 – gov.uk enters beta
- a single domain for central government.
- As Mike Bracken, HMG Executive Director for Digital said, our aim is to deliver simpler, clearer, faster services for users and savings and innovation for Government.
- We have re-written, re-designed and re-thought 667 of the needs people have of Government (broadly, those currently catered for by Directgov) – making them asfindable, understandable and actionable as we can.
- We’ve built a scalable, modular open source technology platform to support them, we’ve designed the user experience around them and we’ve worked with colleagues across many departments to fact-check them. Source is on github – https://github.com/alphagov/
- Through designing and iterating these we’ve got the templates and techniques we need to support a whole host more needs – either written by ourselves or others.
- Now want feedback via getsatisfaction – http://getsatisfaction.com/govuk or twitter and facebook
- Very impressive
13:50 – BBC iPlayer and ITV Player to launch on Sky Anytime+
- Sky will extend Anytime+ to be open to all customers irrespective of broadband provider by Easter 2012
- ITV Player available today on Anytime+
- BBC iPlayer available later this year
- Sky building their VOD capability – Virgin have had iPlayer for years
- Is this to fight off Netflix and the upcoming Google TV?
- BBC and Sky deal unusual as they are hardly the most complementary of each other
- Didn’t know but the BBC still pays £10m per annum to gain access to the Sky network. Most figures show that the most viewed channels on the Sky network are from the BBC
15:41 – Skys New Web TV Service
- Sky has today announced a new service which will allow customers to watch its content over the internet, aimed at people who have so far resisted taking a pay-TV subscription.
- The as-yet-unnamed web-TV service will launch in the first half of 2012 and provide instant access to a range of Sky content, including hundreds of films from Sky Movies.
- It will be available to anyone in the UK on any connected devices, regardless of whether they take the Sky Broadband service.
- Sky said that the new service “will be an additional choice for people who don’t currently subscribe to a pay TV service”.
18:16 – Virgin Up Broadband Prices
- Those free upgrades later this year?
- Well there’s a price increase from April 1st
-Broadband S will increase by £2.00. This increases the product price of Broadband S to £20.95.
-Broadband M, L & XL will increase by £1.50.
-This increases the product price of Broadband M to £23.00, Broadband L to £27.50. and Broadband XL to £38.50
-Broadband XXL will increase by £2.25. The new product price will be £47.25.
20:18 – Twitter announces they have ability to censor a tweet by country
- As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
- Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
- We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.
- As part of being more open Twitter have published all takedown notices they have received – http://chillingeffects.org/twitter
- Generally a good step but people aren’t happy and called for a twitter boycott last Saturday – I noticed no difference!
- Great post on the realities of being a global internet business – http://tum.hitherto.net/post/16596051373/what-you-need-to-know-about-twitters-new-filters
- Summation – Internet companies will have very little influence over the laws of various countries
- Regimes have whole Internet kill switches, not just ability to censor one network or indeed one tweet
- Google announce the same for Blogger – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16852920
- Blogger sites can now be blocked on a “per country” basis after a change to its web address system.
- Google will now be able to block access in individual countries following a legal removal request.
- The new system means blocking will not require restricting world-wide access to a blog. The changes apply in Australia, New Zealand and India, but the BBC understands Google plans to roll it out globally.
25:06 – British tourists banned after making Twitter jokes
- Leigh-Van Bryan, a 26-year-old Irish national, just wanted to have a few beers while soaking up America’s freedom-y goodness. But his trip to the United States came to a halt when one of his tweets caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security:
“Free this week, for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”
- While real terrorists aren’t known to relay their plans via Twitter ahead of time, the Daily Mail reported that armed guards at Los Angeles International Airport took the threat seriously enough to apprehend Bryan and his travel-buddy, Emily Bunting, and bar them from entering the United States.
- “They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party,” said Bunting, according to the outlet.
- Despite explaining they meant no ill will either toward the United States or to its deceased starlets, the Daily Mail reports that Bryan and Bunting were held for another 12 hours in separate cells alongside suspected drug traffickers.
- To really drive home the ridiculousness of the situation, the Daily Mail also posted a photograph of Leigh’s charge sheet that reads: “Mr. Bryan confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”
26:55 – John Browett is Apples new Senior VP of Retail
- Browett replaces Ron Johnson, the inventor of Apple’s “Genius Bar” in-store customer service centres, who left the iPhone and iPad maker last year to become CEO of US clothing chain JC Penney.
- So whats Browetts background?
- Apple, the all-conquering maker of iPhones and iPads, has poached the boss of Dixons to head its network of stores across the world.
- John Browett, who has been chief executive of the struggling high street electronics firm since 2007, was named Apple’s senior vice president of retail, reporting directly to chief executive Tim Cook.
- Analysts said Apple’s board was attracted by Browett’s many years of experience in the retail sector and his performance in successfully turning around Dixons’s reputation for poor customer service. Robert Gregory, analyst at Planet Retail, said: “He is a very dynamic character and not afraid to take risks.
- “One of the things he has brought to Dixons is really improving their customer service. It had a reputation for many years of having poor service. That fits in well with Apple’s philosophy of making the stores a destination where people can go and really get great service.”
31:28 – Minecraft and Lego get married
- Rejoice – Lego will be bringing out official Minecraft sets
- Lego is now readying a concept that “celebrates the best aspects of building with the Lego system and in Minecraft.”

Picks
Ian
ShowYou
- Great video discovery app
- Version 3 just launched
- Find videos from your friends easily via Twitter or Facebook integration
- Really nice scrolling grid views of video – technically very impressive
- Free on iOS or Kindle Fire

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

Playback
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Shownotes
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

Playback
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Shownotes
2:30 – Footballer Sues Twitter
- A footballer has launched legal action against Twitter after a number of the microblogging site’s users purported to reveal the name of the player who allegedly had an affair with model Imogen Thomas.
- The footballer’s legal team began the legal action at the high court in London on Wednesday, in what is thought to be the first action against the US social media firm and its users.
- The lawsuit lists the defendants as “Twitter Inc and persons unknown”. The latter are described as those “responsible for the publication of information on the Twitter accounts” in the court document, according to reports.
- Earlier this month, an unknown person or individuals published the names of various people who had allegedly taken out gagging orders to conceal sexual indiscretions on a Twitter account. The account rapidly attracted more than 100,000 followers.
- Twitter declined to comment.
- The lord chief justice, Lord Judge, on Friday said Twitter and its users were totally out of control when it comes to privacy injunctions and court orders.
- Thousands tweet player name on Friday and Saturday – everyone knows who it is
- Sunday Herald publishes a picture of player with his eye’s blacked out – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/22/scottish-newspaper-identifies-injuction-footballer
- They don’t publish story online – only in the actual paper
- “Today we identify the footballer whose name has been linked to a court superinjunction by thousands of postings on Twitter. Why? Because we believe it is unsustainable that the law can be used to prevent newspapers from publishing information that readers can access on the internet at the click of a mouse.
- “Because we believe it unfair that the law can not only be used to prevent the publication of information which may be in the public interest but also to prevent any mention of such a court order. The so-called superinjunction holds no legal force in Scotland where a separate court order is needed. We should point out immediately that we are not accusing the footballer of any misdeed. Whether the allegations against him are true or not has no relevance to this debate.”
- MP eventually reveals Gigg’s name in the House of Commons
8:46 – Patent Troll targets iOS Developers
- a Texas-based company called Lodsys said it has four patents relating to in-app purchases, interactive online ads, online help and subscription renewals.
- Instead of suing Apple or any of the big companies like EA, it’s chasing small indie developers
- One claim was served on Friday by hand on James Thomson, a Glasgow-based developer who wrote the apps PCalc and DragThing. Another who received the couriered legal package was Matt Braun, a developer based in Toledo, Ohio, author of the best-selling iPhone kids game MASH who runs a mobile app development company, Magnate Interactive. Patrick McCarron of MobileAge, based in Chicago, has also received a demand.
- Developers have raised this with Apple legal hoping for some assistance – they are leveraging tools and API’s delivered by Apple
- May 23rd – Apple respond to developers and Lodsys – we have licenced your patent, our app developers aren’t in violation – do one you trolls
13:26 – Apple Malware
- A fake security program for Apple computers called MACDefender has racked up a significant number of victims.
- Hundreds of people who installed the software have turned to Apple’s forums for help to remove it.
- The program’s tactic of peppering screens with pornographic pictures has made many keen to get rid of it.
- MACDefender seems to have been successful because of the work its creators did to make it appear high up in search results.
- Has to be downloaded and then users supply username and password to install
- Note – the vast majority of malware that Sophos and other security firms see is aimed at Windows users. About 100,000 novel malicious programs for Windows are detected every day, he said.
- Joel Esler of the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team, who hasanalysed the attack, told the Guardian that when users visit a page with an infected ad or link, the download – called “mac-antivirus.zip” – is started automatically by Javascript. Because Apple’s Safari defaults to a setting of “open files after download”, the program – which contains an application package wrapped in a zip archive – is first unzipped and then triggers the installer program.
Users are then presented with a dialog asking for their administrator name and password so the installation can proceed. If they do, the program installs itself in the /Applications folder and adds itself to the user’s login items, and puts a menu item in the top right of the menu.
- Apple eventually issues a support doc – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4650
- Update to become available for OS X which will delete all instances of the malware and also warn against future downloads
- New version of malware released – doesn’t need admin password – http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/mac-malware-authors-release-a-new-more-dangerous-version/3385?tag=mantle_skin;content
- Nothing to fear at the moment for Apple users but Apple can’t be complacent, which I don’t think they are being
19:50 – iPad Explosion
20:35 – Facebook Apps Leak User Information
- Symantec said that, until recently, Facebook apps have inadvertently been leaking user data to third-party developers. In response, Facebook said the problem has been fixed and that no unauthorized Facebook data was shared with third parties.
- In a blog post, Symantec’s Nishant Doshi said that third-parties, mostly advertisers, have “accidentally” had access to Facebook user information like profiles, photographs, and chat.
- “Fortunately, these third-parties may not have realized their ability to access this information,” Doshi wrote. “[But] we estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.”
- Facebook said it worked with Symantec to rectify the issue, but took issue with how it characterized the situation.
- “We’ve conducted a thorough investigation which revealed no evidence of this issue resulting in a user’s private information being shared with unauthorized third parties,” Facebook said in a statement. “In addition, this report ignores the contractual obligations of advertisers and developers which prohibit them from obtaining or sharing user information in a way that violates our policies.”
- At issue is the permissions-based app menu to which users must agree when installing an app. Facebook has been working to transition from a legacy Facebook authentication system and HTTP to the more secure OAuth 2.0. In the wake of the Symantec investigation, Facebook said Tuesday that it will require all sites and apps to migrate to OAuth 2.0 and obtain an SSL certificate by October 1.
22:57 – Facebook exposed in Google smear campaign
- It has been revealed that Facebook embarked on a smear campaign against rival Google.
- The social network has admitted that it hired a PR firm to plant anti-Google stories related to user privacy.
- The details came to light when one blogger approached by PR firm Burson-Marsteller published the e-mail exchange. Burson had been touting stories on behalf of an unnamed client about the Google service Social Circle. Blogger Chris Soghain did not want to pursue the story and later released the e-mails he had exchanged with Burson.
- When the e-mails were published there was a mass of rumours about who the client could be, with Microsoft and Apple in the frame.
- It was down to US-based news website, the Daily Beast to uncover that the client was in fact Facebook.
- Facebook has confirmed that it used Burson-Marsteller to expose things which Google was doing that “raised privacy concerns”. Burson told Mr Soghain, among others, that “the American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloguing and broadcasting every minute of every day – without their permission.”
- A Facebook spokesman later told the Daily Beast that it resented Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social networking service.
27:56 – Windows Phone 7.1
- 500 new features
- Says MS: “The smartphone experience can be complicated by a sea of disconnected apps and accounts.”
- Its solution: integrate as much as possible. But not too far – it doesn’t want to dissuage developers from writing software for the platform, of course. But don’t think ‘apps’ so much as ‘plug-ins’ as MS “sees the promise of apps in how they can be integrated directly into the core experiences of the phone”.
- This approach will be aided by Mango’s improved multitasking and the ability to present more live information in WinPho’s main-screen tiles.
- Expect too SMS, Facebook and IM chats to be merged into a single thread, and a single inbox for all your email accounts. MS promised “deeper social network integration” and the ability to group contacts into a single tile. Built in Facebook and Twitter
- The browser will be based around IE 9. Fast – on a speed reading test it was way faster than anything else demo’d
- Search far more powerful than seen before – smarter – best demo yet seen on a mobile deice?
- Free update this autumn – Nokia phone this year?
- Very quickly MS have caught up with features on iOS and Android…but they have neither market or mind share
31:21 – LTE UK Trial
- BT & Everything Everywhere staging LTE trial in Cornwall, England’s most southerly county, which will last from the 1st of September through to the end of December.
- Connection speeds could scale as high as 40Mbps, though the typical rate is expected to be closer to 10Mbps.
- Volunteers are now being sought to participate in the trial, though they have to reside (or be willing to move, we presume) in the pretty tiny 4G coverage area near Newquay
33:27 – Mobile Money arrives in the UK
- The mobile wallet has arrived in Britain, in the form of a Samsung phone and a joint venture between Barclaycard and Orange.
- UK is years behind many Asian and African countries
- On the Orange Barclaycard phones you will only be able to spend a maximum of £15 a time, so you’re unlikely to decide you can afford to leave your credit cards behind when you leave home in the morning.
- But other operators will follow Orange, and once NFC becomes a standard feature of new phones, it’s possible that mobile payments will become commonplace too.
36:43 – Google Wallet
- Google Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We’re field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.
- Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.
- Working with 15 major partners
- With Google Wallet, we’re building an open commerce ecosystem, and we’re planning to develop APIs that will enable integration with numerous partners. In the beginning, Google Wallet will be compatible with Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint. Over time, we plan on expanding support to more phones.
41:33 – YouTube Turns 6
- YouTube says global daily views have gone up 50 percent in thepast 12 months, which means they currently handle a whopping 3 billion views per day.
- Also worth noting: YouTube says it has exceeded over 48 hours of video uploaded to the site every single minute (which, they add, represents a 100 percent increase year over year).
42:45 – Sony gets PSN back online
- Download new firmware
- Reset password on signing in
- Gaming, Home, Video rental playpack and Qriocity back online
- Store will come later with…
- Welcome back pack
- All existing PlayStation Network members will be able to access the following from PlayStation Store*:
Two PS3 games from the following list:
LittleBigPlanet
Infamous*
Wipeout HD/Fury
Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty
Dead Nation*
- For those with PSP accounts, you will also be eligible to download two PSP games from the following list:
LittleBigPlanet PSP
ModNation PSP
Pursuit Force
Killzone Liberation*
- 30 days free PlayStation Plus membership for non PS Plus subscribers*
- Existing PlayStation Plus subscribers will be given 60 days free subscription.
- For existing Music Unlimited subscribers, you will be given 30 days free subscription.
- We are working on a Welcome Back offer in PlayStation Home and will share that when it is confirmed.
- EU Identity Theft Protection Programme
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/05/17/details-of-snee-scees-identity-theft-protection-programme/
- That said, we are pleased to advise that Affinion International Limited, a leader in identity protection products in Europe, will be offering a comprehensive service that covers a significant proportion of PSN users free of charge for the first 12 months.
Affinion International Limited will be offering the following identity theft protection service and insurance through their fraud protect programme for the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany.
The fraud protect proposition cover three key areas:*
Personal Information protection
Monitoring and Alerting Service
Personal Information Protection Software
Help / Assistance and guidance
Dedicated helpline
Victim of Fraud support
Financial Protection
Insurance that covers the expenses incurred in identity restoration following identity fraud
Card Monitoring and Alerting Service
- Just when you thought it was safe
- http://kotaku.com/5803070/sony-playstation-network-password-reset-page-exploited-customer-accounts-potentially-compromised
- Sony’s PlayStation Network password reset system-the one just put in place after the PSN hack-has been compromised, allowing hackers to change a PSN password if they know your email and date of birth. Exactly the sort of information that was released in the original hack.
- Sony has taken the password reset system offline.
- Fixed within 24 hours
- If you were affected you would receive an e-mail about the reset
- Announce massive loss too
- In the lead-up to its fiscal year 2010 earnings report this Thursday, Sony today released a revised forecast — forewarning a $3.2 billion loss (yowzah!) — for the twelve months ending March 31, 2011. Having occurred in late April, the PlayStation Network attack and subsequent data theft and outage fall outside of that period, but the company nonetheless addressed “the impact” of the event during an investors call today, “since there have been so many media inquiries about this incident.”
49:30 – Mobile Minecraft
- Hit game Minecraft is being developed for iOS and Android
- First platform will be Android, specifically Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation-certified Xperia Play.
- Xperia Play version will feature customized controls that utilize the phone’s PlayStation-styled slide-out buttons.
- Strange to launch on brand new platform against all the millions of other Android phones not to mention iOS
51:06 – BBC News hits Android
- BBC News App finally available for Android
- 6-8 months on from iOS release
- Ability to share a story via email, SMS or social networks
- If your phone is running Android 2.2 or higher, BBC News can also be live-streamed using Flash.
51:58 – Dell make thinnest 15 inch laptop
- Noted in passing: advert for the Dell XPS-15, containing the phrase
Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*.
- Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk?
- Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a thickness comparison (front and rear measurements) of other 15″ laptop PCs manufactured by HP, Acer, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, MSI. No comparison made with Apple or other manufacturers not listed.”

Picks
Henry
Splashtop Remote
- Control your pc or mac from your iPad
- Fast and secure
Ian
Fantastical
- Easy to use Mac calendar
- Runs from your task bar
- Add events easily via natural language

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
2:30 – Sony Hacked
- Down since Wednesday evening – 5 days and counting
- Initially no word on what is causing this issue
- Eventually admitted it was an external intrusion and because of it Sony themselves had closed the network down – hack on the PS Network/Qriocity
- Second update on Sunday morning – having to rebuild network and increase security
- Monday headlines in Wall Street Journal – Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely
- http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/25/22402/
- Then it got a whole load worse
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/04/26/psnqriocity-service-update/
- Due to the hack Sony have:
- 1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.
- Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.
- Biggest ID theft yet? 71 million users worldwide, around 3 million in the UK
- What started off as embarrassing to the Sony brand and gaming network has taken a very serious and sinister turn
- But never mind – Sony hope to have the network back up and running in a week
- Further update
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/04/28/playstation-network-and-qriocity-outage-faq/
- Credit card data was encrypted
- They didn’t store the CVC (three digit number) at all
- Search your email for mail from “DoNotReply@ac.playstation.net”, subject “Wallet Funding”, to find which credit cards you’ve used on PSN. Those emails will show the first 4 and last 4 digits of any card you’ve used for PSN purchases.
- Passwords were in cleartext though – doh!!!!!!!!! Update – One other point to clarify is from this weekend’s press conference. While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,” they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function. There is a difference between these two types of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted. But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in cleartext form. For a description of the difference between encryption and hashing, follow this link.

- Hacker forums are spreading news that the hackers have 2.2 million credit card details alongside names and addresses – http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/hackers-claim-to-have-playstation-users-card-data/
- Also claim that the hackers want to sell the database for upwards of $100,000 and also offered it back to Sony
- True or false? Sony deny it.
- Geohot’s thoughts – http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-news.html
- Sony execs probably haughtily chuckled at the idea of threat modeling. Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client. But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client(can’t trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server? This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. It’s the same reason MW2 was covered in cheaters, Activision even admitted to the mistake of trusting Sony’s client. Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you. Notice it’s only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren’t crazy.
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/05/01/some-playstation-network-and-qriocity-services-to-be-available-this-week/
- Latest update – some services to resume this week, full service – this month
- Added automated software monitoring and configuration management to help defend against new attacks
- Enhanced levels of data protection and encryption
- Enhanced ability to detect software intrusions within the network, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns
- Implementation of additional firewalls
- Welcome back program
- Each territory will be offering selected PlayStation entertainment content for free download. Specific details of this content will be announced in each region soon.
- All existing PlayStation Network customers will be provided with 30 days free membership in the PlayStation Plus premium service. Current members of PlayStation Plus will receive 30 days free service.
- Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity subscribers (in countries where the service is available) will receive 30 days free service.
- PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai said that up to ten million customer’s account details could have been compromised
- Worse – there was an earlier breech
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/may/03/sony-data-breach-online-entertainment
- The crisis at Sony deepened on Tuesday as it admitted that an extra 25m customers who played games on its Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) PC games network have had their personal details stolen – and that they were taken before the theft of 77m peoples’ details on the PlayStation Network (PSN).
The electronics giant said the names, addresses, emails, birth dates, phone numbers and other information from PC games customers were stolen from its servers as well as an “outdated database” from 2007 which contained details of around 23,400 people outside the US. That includes 10,700 direct debit records for customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, Sony said.
The dataset was stolen on 16 and 17 April, before the PSN break-in, which occurred from 17 to 19 April. Sony said that it had not previously thought that the data was copied by the hackers who broke into its systems.
- Lost faith in Sony.
- Upside of a poor console is that I hadn’t used my newer credit card with them – cc details not lost – achievement unlocked
13:02 – Sony Android Tablets
- The S1, sports a 9.4-inch screen. The other is the S2; it bears a novel dual-screen design. The device’s two 5.5-inch screens can be used separately or together; they can also be folded onto one another to create a compact and highly portable package.
- Both tablets are WiFi and 3G/4G compatible and integrate with PlayStation Suite, Sony’s new Android-friendly platform that allows users to download and play PlayStation games.
Sony says the S1 in particular “uses infrared technology and works as a universal remote control for a variety of AV devices … turning on TVs, changing the channel and adjusting the volume.” The tablets can also take advantage of DLNA functionality to “project” content to other, larger screens and speakers.
- Most notable that it’s not Windows
14:12 – iPhone Privacy Fears
- Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.
- The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.
- For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010
- To view the data yourself – http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
- Nice Mac app that visualises your data
- Ian – don’t see the issue really although it would have been good to:
- Know about it
- Switch it off if I want to
- Saying that – vis is cool, love it to be honest and I blog, RunKeeper, Flickr and Fitbit anyway – it’s mostly all out there allready
- Similar data captured on Android
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983704576277101723453610.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEADSecond
- Similar data captured and sent to Google on Android devices
- One big difference – it’s an opt in so if you feel uncomfortable switch it off
- That’s the right way to do it
- Good technical explanation of what is being captured and why – http://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/3-new-thoughts-on-mobile-location/
- Data is being sent to Apple but only on radio device locations, not where you have been
- Apple eventually responds officially – http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html
- Treating this seriously – Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall do interviews – http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110427/qa-jobs-and-apple-execs-on-tracking-down-the-facts-about-iphones-and-location/
- Also admit bugs and and changes to come
- Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
- In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
- Out today – iOS 4.3.3 improves the way iPhones and iPads handle the location tracking database stored on-device by making is smaller and encrypted. The location database will be no longer backed up to iTunes and it will be deleted entirely when Location Services are turned off.
23:54 – The White iPhone
- Available on April 28th
- Same price as black iPhone – same features, nothings changed, well almost – 0.2mm thicker (maybe) – http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/28/white-iphone-4-slightly-thicker-than-black-iphone-4/
- 9 months after black iPhone
- “It was challenging,” Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said during a joint interview with CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday. “It’s not as simple as making something white. There’s a lot more that goes into both the material science of it–how it holds up over time…but also in how it all works with the sensors.”
Schiller said that it turned out there were a lot of unexpected interactions between the color of the device and various internal components. Also, like fair-skinned humans, white iPhones need a little more UV protection from the sun.
- Stopgap as iPhone 5 is in the Autumn this year?
25:31 – New iMacs
- Sandy bridge
- 2 thunderbolt ports on 27”
- Facetime HD – 720p camera in widescreen
- New AMD graphics up to 2GB of ram
- Can drive 2 external displays (27” only) so you could have 3 screens
- Up to 16gb of RAM
- Powerful machines…at a powerful price
30:49 – Digital Magazine Tipping Point
- Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, has reached a deal with Apple Inc. to make all its iPad editions free for print subscribers, marking a break in the impasse between publishers and Apple and lending support to Time’s contention that it’s business-as-usual after the ouster of its chief executive.
- Starting Monday, subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune magazines will be able to access the iPad editions via the apps, which will be able to authenticate them as subscribers. Time Inc.’s People magazine already had such an arrangement, but readers of most publications have had to pay separately for the iPad version regardless of their subscriber status.
32:14 – Push Pop Press
- Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.
- First book is Our Choice from Al Gore – £2.99
- Gore approached them in late 2009 – The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.
- Gore’s book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.
- Much better take on an interactive book/magazine than Wired for example
- Navigation is very easy – you know where you are at all times
- Photo’s are geotagged so you can see where they were taken – extra context
- Very fast despite all the animations – impressive – best attempt so far at adigital magazine that suits a tablet format
35:26 – Spotify Updates
- The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, which will allow all users (even those pesky ad-supported freeloaders) to sync Spotify desktop tracks with mobile devices, be they iPods, iPhones or Androids.
- Spotify intends to compete directly with iTunes, Spotify is also introducing its own music store, or “download service”, in which users can buy a range of MP3 “bundles” at 10 songs for roughly 8 pounds. Or 100 songs for 50 pounds. (Roughly the equivalent of $13 and $82, respectively.)
- So, not only will Spotify be offering its more than 10 million registered users a music store, it wants its music player to become the default mobile app on its listeners’ devices. To encourage this adoption, Spotify has enabled desktop-to-mobile sync-ing over WiFi. (Something iTunes, cough, doesn’t offer.)
37:17 – Tom Tom sells your data
- The company confessed that they’d been giving data to Dutch police who used it to target drivers.
- TomTom chief executive Harold Goddijn said the company sold the anonymous data believing it would be used to improve safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks.
- “We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it.”
- “We make this information available to local governments and authorities. It helps them to better understand where congestion takes place, where to build new roads and how to make roads safer.
- “We are now aware that the police have used traffic information that you have helped to create to place speed cameras at dangerous locations where the average speed is higher than the legally allowed speed limit. We are aware a lot of our customers do not like the idea and we will look at if we should allow this type of usage.”
- In an update today TomTom CEO Harold Goodijn stresses that the tracking of its devices is voluntary and that customers can choose not to allow it. He also says the data is provided anonymously, and is valuable information the company uses to improve the guidance of its devices, by identifying problem areas and routing customers around them.
39:11 – Amazon Cloud Outage
- EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) had a bumpy few days
- Problems took down Foursquare, Quora, Redit and many others
- Amazon was fairly quiet during this outage
- Can you really blame amazon? What’s the fallback for these services?
- Highights need for redundancy – http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html
- Also shows everything isn’t right for the cloud – https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=65649&tstart=0
- Life of our patients is at stake – I am desperately asking you to contact
- We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home.
We were unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April
- Not restored. Not heard from Amazon
People out there – please take a look at our volumes!
This not just some social network website issue, but a serious threat to peoples lives!
- Don’t be that guy – great post from SmugMug on how they survived the outage – http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
- Amazon eventually post long explanation – http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
- Make commitment to improve comms, speed up recovery and make it easier to use multiple availability zones
44:24 – DropBox Growth and Security Issues
- 25 million users
- 200 million files are saved daily to the service
- However, concerns are growing around Dropbox security – http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/19/dropbox-under-fire-for-security-concerns/
- Recently changed T&C’s to say that they will hand over your data to US government if asked, removing Dropbox encryption before doing so
- http://dereknewton.com/2011/04/dropbox-authentication-static-host-ids/
- config.db file (stores Dropbox client and security details) is portable, not tied to the system and so could be taken and used on another computer
- if used on another compute it would sync that persons Dropbox folder without notifying original user or prompting for any passwords or usernames
- So many app’s have built in Dropbox syncing as an option so hard to move away if your concerned
- Box.net is an alternative although I’ve no idea if it works in the same way
- Wuala from Lacie is another alternative – http://www.wuala.com/
50:24 – 30% of Youtube videos now in WebM
- Google have announced that all new video’s uploaded to YouTube are being transcoded to WebM
- They’ve also transitioned 30% of it’s whole library to WebM
- Sounds low but that 30% account for 99% of the views on YouTube
- WebM was the open source video format that Google has backed
- Bit confusing – if it’s open source why have Google just announced a WebM community cross-licence initiative – http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/04/introducing-webm-community-cross.html
- Is this to protect future users from patent threat?
53:05 – Google Docs and Talk Android Apps
- With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors.
- The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app
- The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap
- Also does OCR – take a photo with text on it and it will try and convert to editable text
- Doesn’t work with handwriting or some fonts but Google expects it to get better over time
56:07 – Delicious Acquired
- Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube, have acquired the Delicious bookmarking service from Yahoo for an undisclosed price and added it to their new internet company Avos.
- aim is to “continue to provide the same great service users love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s ‘tastiest’ content.”
- Whats next – who knows
58:01 – Twitter break Osama Death
- News of Obama addressing the nation
- Keith Urban, ex bush staffer breaks the news
- Retweeted thousands of times
- Finally confirmed
- Turns out the attack was tweeted by @ReallyVirtual
1:03:16 – Nintendo admit disappointing 3DS sales
- Sold 3.6 million in March but had predicted 4 million…and probably wanted a whole load more so they could boast on it’s success
- CEO Satoru Iwata – The value of 3D images without the need for special glasses is hard to be understood through the existing media. However, we have found that people cannot feel it just by trying out a device, rather, some might even misestimate it when experiencing the images in an improper fashion.
- It is now clear that the combination of these new features is not necessarily easy-to-understand by just saying one word to those without experience… We have found that not all Nintendo 3DS users enjoy this software. There seems to be more than a few consumers who have Nintendo 3DS hardware but don’t know about this software and possibly haven’t had a chance to get interested in it.
- Mobile phones eating into Nintendo’s core market
1:05:47 – Darren Gibson quits twitter after 2 hours
- First Coleen Rooney joins twitter and gets abused
- Then Wayne Rooney joins and starts to defend her – gets 200,000 followers in 2 days
- Cue Darren Gibson joining twitter…before shutting the account down – why?
- @dgibbo28 your performance on saturday was one of the worst I’ve ever seen of any utd player. scared of the ball much?’
@dgibbo28 hasn’t tweeted yet. Seems somewhat fitting after the countless anonymous performances we’ve seen from the ‘footballer’
@dgibbo28 my mate thought you were about 33 years old in the heart of midfield! Movement like pirlo!!
@dgibbo28 team do all hard work keeping possession then u hit row Z every fuckin time!!
@dgibbo28 the biggest compliment i can give you is that you are better than Carrick
- Bless

Picks
Chris
Portal 2 Free DLC
- DLC – new test chambers for players, leaderboards, challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes, and more.
- Free on steam and as it will be free on PS3, for first time it will be free on 360 too
Ian
Planetary
- Visual music player for the ipad
- lovely – artists are stars, albums are planets, tracks are moons
- very nice way of browsing music collection
Terra
- browser with tabs for ipad
- nice app – fast
- incognito mode and can appear as ie7, firefox etx
- more features than safari

Playback
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Shownotes
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

A new look and feel and a faster interface again. Mention’s and DM’s are now highlighted by a blue globe underneath the icon on the main screen. This is much improved on Tweetie where mentions and DM’s could be lost as you had to go and check to see if there was a DM rather than being notified. From this screen it’s easy to delve into a twitter users details – how many followers, their recent tweets, theirs favourites and so on. You can also follow/unfollow from the app and tweetie allows you to link a twitter user to a contact on your iPhone. A really neat navigation feature is if you swipe left to right on the application title bar you jump back to the timeline – very handy for when you’ve drilled down into a users followers or tweets.

A feature I haven’t seen in any of the other twitter app’s is what the developer calls Persistence. No matter what screen you leave from when Tweetie is closed, when you fire it back up it will continue from that screen. Really nice and makes it feel like your switching out of Tweetie and then back unlike most of the other iPhone app’s which feel like you are closing down and restarting again. It also does this very quickly – hopefully more app developers will add similar functionality. Tweetie 2 also add’s full support for landscape mode which is great for typing tweets but not so great for reading – I far prefer the landscape mode.

Searching is also strong within Tweetie. You can search the timeline, search for any term, view trending topics, save searches and also get a pretty fast local view that draws tweets on a map. Tweetie will sync your saved searches with twitter.com which is handy. What would be really nice is synchronisation with Tweetie on the Mac – the last tweet read on the iPhone is where tweetie on the Mac would refresh from, same accounts on each app. Probably a step too far as not every iPhone owner is a Mac user but it would be nice.

Final new additions worth mentioning can be found in the compose screen. You can now query for twitter usernames (at last – I can never remember some people’s twitter names) and also for hashtags so you can add the most relevant one to your tweet. You can also attach photo’s and video’s and geotag your tweet. Tweetie 2 comes with support for the new geotag features that Twitter are to roll out plus support for the new retweet functionality that is to come soon.

Other app’s have some if not all of the features in Tweetie 2 but none of them pull it together in a package that looks so good and works so well. the interface is well thought out and shows some real innovation. Oop’s, almost forgot another nice swipe feature – drag to refresh. Get to the top of the timeline, pull down and release to refresh. Fantastic and surely a feature that will be copied by many other app’s in the future. If you buy one twitter app for the iPhone it really has to be Tweetie 2.