DigitalOutbox Episode 407

Chris and Ian discuss CES and Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard

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DigitalOutbox Episode 260

Chris and Ian discuss Googles Pixel event, web security and Peeple

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Picks

Ian

Shooty Skies

– Free

– iOS

– Fantastic scrolling shooter for iOS

– Similar graphics to Crossy Road

– In app purchases but don’t need it

DigitalOutbox Episode 161

DigitalOutbox Episode 161
DigitalOutbox Episode 161 – Apple Doomed, Twitter Hacks and Long Live Clegg.

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Shownotes
1:38 – Microsoft introduces two step authentication for its user accounts
2:42 – Dow drops 100 points over a tweet
5:44 – Apple is doomed
10:15 – The Bearer of BadNews
12:46 – Google offers clearer search labels after EU probe
15:57 – Nick Clegg kills off Tory hopes of swift deal on revised ‘snooper’s charter’
18:10 – Virgin adds 21 new channels to its TV Anywhere service, confirms an Android app for later this year
19:14 – First UK 4G service EE reaches 318,000 LTE customers 5 months after launch
20:26 – Samsung S4 Reviews
22:51 – Nintendo posts annual loss of $366m for 2012, as its 3.45m Wii U sales fall short of 4m target
24:23 – Microsoft to unveil next Xbox at event on May 21st at its Redmond campus
26:51 – Apple auction the most exclusive cup of coffee

Picks
Ian
iPlayer Radio for Android
– Great Android app – not just an iOS port
– All the BBC radio stations and all the BBC podcasts too and on-demand content from the last 7 days
– Marks tracks as favourites as you listen, share them too
– Links to Radioplayer app so you can listen to the BBC’s competition. How civil.

DigitalOutbox Episode 150

DigitalOutbox Episode 150
DigitalOutbox Episode 150 – Three’s LTE promise, Dell goes private and next gen consoles

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Shownotes
1:01 – Three UK promises to provide LTE without increasing prices
4:32 – BT to end traffic throttling – claims capacity is FAT
6:35 – Liberty Global to buy Virgin Media for $23.3bn
9:57 – Sky+ Android app catches up
11:32 – Channel 4 gives its catch-up TV service 4oD a native Android app
13:57 – iPhone 5 iPad mini jailbreak now available
15:08 – Dell goes private
18:51 – Microsoft Surface Pro Tablet Gets Good Reviews – Except For Battery Life
23:04 – Twitter Hacked
26:00 – Glasgow has the chattiest people on Twitter in the UK
27:41 – Amazon Launches Amazon Coins
30:25 – Hailo closes $30.6m Series B round from Union Square Ventures
32:51 – Next Gen Consoles

DigitalOutbox Episode 120

DigitalOutbox Episode 120
DigitalOutbox Episode 120 – Cookies, Windows 8 and Chrome OS

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2:35 – Cookies Law now active
– New EU regulations on the use by British websites of cookies have been watered down by the UK’s information commissioner just hours before they were due to come into force.
But they could mean that Britain is out of step with EU law in its implementation of the continent-wide directives, and lead to fights with European courts.
– In an updated version of its advice for websites on how to use cookies – small text files that are stored on the user’s computer and can identify them – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that websites can assume that users have consented to their use of them.
The advice was only updated on Thursday, 48 hours before the deadline for implementing the new rules, and published the next day.
– “This is a striking shift,” said Stephen Groom, head of marketing and privacy law at the law firm Osborne Clarke. “Previously the ICO said that implied consent would be unlikely to work. Now it says that implied consent is a valid form of consent.”
– The use of “implied consent” shifts responsibility to the user rather than the website operator, and will come as a relief to thousands of website operators who have been struggling to comply with new EU directives which came into law a year ago.
4:40 – Twitter joke retrial
– The penitent hoaxer who tweeted a joke threat to “blow up” Robin Hood airport in south Yorkshire has lost his attempt to overturn the judgment – but a stalemate between two judges means that his appeal will now be heard again.
– Three high court judges will consider the case against Paul Chambers, 27, from Doncaster, who sent his message when the airport was closed by snow in January 2010.
– Unlike tweets, the essence of which is to be brief and to the point, the increasingly notorious legal action is now heading for its third unresolved year. No date has been set for the fresh hearing.
– Chambers lost his job as an accountant following an avalanche of publicity when he was convicted in May last year of sending “an electronic comunication of a menacing character”, contrary to provisions of the 2003 Communications Act. He was fined £385 and ordered to pay £600 costs after crown court judge Jacqueline Davies, sitting with two magistrates, called the tweet “clearly menacing”, with airport staff sufficiently concerned to report it to police.
7:18 – Windows 8 Release Candidate
– Now available
– Look and feel will change prior to expected release in October as Aero is being retired
– New
– Stripped down flash for IE10
– Some new metro apps
– New gestures
– Not much changed between this and consumer preview
– Fast and stable according to reviews online
12:16 – Google launches new Chromebook and a Chromebox
– Google and its partner, Samsung, are launching a new Chromebook and Chromebox today, targeting them at the educational and corporate customers.
The Chromebook from Samsung is like any other 12.1-inch budget laptop, while Chromebox is a tiny PC that you can connect to any keyboard, mouse and monitor similar to Apple’s Mac Mini. The Chromebook starts at $449 while the entry-level price of Chromebox is $329.
They both are powered by Intel Core processors and include 4GB RAM, Display Port, USB ports, gigabit ethernet, and dual band Wi-Fi. The Chromebox has Bluetooth and DVI output as well, while for $529 you can buy a Chromebook with an integrated 3G modem. And jokes aside, there is a lot to like about both of these new improved devices.
– Chrome OS has seen many updates
– Google says it has has released eight new upgrades to Chrome OS over past 12 months and as a result you are seeing 2.5x (and higher) improvement in speeds of the devices as well as speedier boot times, much faster browsing and responsiveness with hardware-accelerated graphics and a new trackpad stack. Here are some other new additions:
Multi-window support and the UI scales from seamlessly scales from 11” to 30” screens.
An app launcher and an option to pin favorite/most used apps to the launchbar.
Now you can customize backgrounds.
Built-in ability to view office files, online and offline, support for dozens of file formats
There is Google Drive support and in the next version of the Chrome OS release, there will be support for online and offline usage and will syncs with other devices that connect to Google Drive.
Google says Google Docs offline editing will be rolling out over the next several weeks to all Docs users. Google is currently testing it inside Google.
New media player & a built-in photo editor and uploader
– Universal praise really – now a viable platform and in some ways simpler than iOS said one review but is it overpriced for what you can do with it? Isn’t it still a browser?
17:26 – Google helping UK Education
– Google has announced a three-year partnership with UK organization Teach First, which aims to increase students’ exposure to science and technology by training teachers and providing equipment. Each year 34 teachers will go through a six-week training program, for a total of 102, with the first group due to start working in classrooms this September.
– Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt believes that the program could help more than 20,000 students from underprivileged backgrounds. The teachers will be provided funds to “purchase of innovative teaching aides to inspire their classes,” including theRaspberry Pi computer and Arduino microcontroller.
– “The success of the BBC Micro in the 1980s shows what’s possible,” said Schmidt. “There’s no reason why Raspberry Pi shouldn’t have the same impact, with the right support.
20:55 – YouView trial launched
– Being tested in 350 homes right now
– Sounds like an attempt to meet the goal of launching prior to the Olympics
– YouView is a joint TV venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five, BT, TalkTalk, and Arquiva
– Originally known as Project Canvas, the service was intended to launch in 2010, but has suffered delay after delay. YouView is a web-enabled version of Freeview, the UK’s free-to-air digital network, which adds widgets, apps, catch-up TV, and DVR services alongside traditional programming.
22:45 – ITV adds live streaming and airplay support
– The ITV Player iOS app has been updated to version 2.0 and now supports live streaming of ITV1 and ITV2 in the UK. The channels will stream over 3G or Wi-Fi, although on-demand content will still require Wi-Fi to play. In addition to ITV1 and ITV2 streams, the app will also offer access to live events broadcast on ITV3 and ITV4 through one-off streams. The app also now allows for AirPlay Mirroring of all content to other supported devices.
23:29 – Lovefilm brings 1080p to the UK
– Amazon’s Lovefilm is adding new high-definition options to its Instant streaming service. From today, Lovefilm will now stream 1080p movies to all customers that subscribe to an Instant package. In the UK, HD streaming will be available via Mac, PC, Xbox 360, and LG or Samsung Smart TVs.
– In order to stream HD content LoveFilm says you need a 4Mbps connection for 720p or 12Mbps for 1080p.
– LoveFilm will gradually upgrade its catalogue “over the coming weeks and months” to support the new resolutions.
– Brings parity with Netflix
24:17 – Virgin unclogs Spotify
– Many users complain of pausing and stuttering on Spotify using VirginMedia broadband
– Many blamed VM’s traffic management policy but
– Virgin needed more bandwidth to support Spotify
– Still growing then…
26:10 – Master Chief called in to resolve Syria
– The image, shown in the background of the clip above, even gets a special spotlight as the camera zooms in on the anchor as she discusses the very serious, very real issues plaguing Syria over the past year.
– The BBC has since acknowledged and apologized for airing the Halo logo, telling Eurogamer, “BBC News makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all images broadcast, however very occasionally mistakes do happen. Unfortunately an incorrect logo was used during a segment on last week’s News at One bulletin and we apologise to viewers for the mistake.
27:31 – Ghost Recon
– Slight disappointment
– Laggy night of gaming
– More Rainbow Six than Ghost Recon of old

Picks
Ian
CheetSheet
– Free
– For Mac OSX
– Just hold the ⌘-Key a bit longer to get a list of all active short cuts of the current application.
– It’s as simple as that.

DigitalOutbox Episode 114

DigitalOutbox Episode 114
In this episode the team discuss Project Glass, Privacy and Apple woes

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Shownotes
0:58 – Girls Around Me
– When you load it up, the first thing Girls Around Me does is figure out where you are and load up a Google Map centered around your location.
– It’s when you push the radar button that Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area.
– These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”
– Tap on a girl – Girls Around Me quickly loaded up a fullscreen render of her Facebook profile picture. The app then told me where Zoe had last been seen (The Independent) and when (15 minutes ago). A big green button at the bottom reading “Photos & Messaging” just begged to be tapped, and when I did, I was whisked away to Zoe’s Facebook profile.
“Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”
– While the app is bad, this is a wake up call for privacy on social sites
– Data was publicly shared by these girls – du to Foursquare and Facebook allowing friends to sign them in, they might not realise that their friends are sharing their location
– Lot’s of fallout – Foursquare suspended the app’s API access
– Apple then withdrew the app from the app store – actually the app developers did, not because of the -ve publicity but due to the API restrictions. The app no longer worked.
– Developer defends app – it was about venue discovery, not girl discovery – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/03/31/girls-around-me-developer-defends-app-after-foursquare-dismissal/
4:02 – Govt plans increased email and social media surveillance
– Ministers are to introduce a new law allowing police and security services to extend their monitoring of the public’s email and social media communications, the Home Office has confirmed.
– It is expected that the new system will allow security officials to scrutinise who is talking to whom and exactly when the conversations are taking plac, but not the content of messages.
– Labour tried to introduce a similar system using a central database tracking all phone, text, email and internet use but that was ditched in 2009. It followed concerns raised by internet service providers and mobile phone operators over the project’s feasibility, and anxieties over who would foot the bill.
– The coalition’s proposals are likely to be introduced in the Queen’s speech on 9 May and will centre on internet service providers gathering the information and allowing government intelligence operatives to scrutinise it.
– “It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” said a Home Office spokesman, who said the plans would be brought forward “as soon as parliamentary time allows”.
– Internet service providers are obliged to keep details of users’ web access, email and internet phone calls for 12 months, under an EU directive from 2009.
– Although the content of the calls is not kept, the sender, recipient, time of communication and geographical location does have to be recorded.
– The proposed new law – which the Home Office says will be brought in “as soon as parliamentary time allows” – would extend those requirements to social networking sites and internet phone services such as Skype.
– It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively.
– Overzealous civil servants driving policy?
– Lib dem briefing doc – https://docs.google.com/file/d/1_wMtlFHrktpyOEFSkRSmBnOBPYDkPF6y-gL7Es_h0tu58aPVeHq9p45ulRcX/view?sle=true&pli=1
– Also, Gove fought to keep his e-mails private in early March
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17235168
– *** How would this work in practice? What about data that is held on servers overseas? Surely that can’t be part of this?
10:02 – Twitter suing spammers
– Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twittersaid in a statement on its blog, it believes it’s going “straight to the source”.
– By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter … While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam.
– Finally doing something about spam?
– Annoying thing is a spammer is so obvious – why is it down to users to report?
13:29 – Game rescued
– The administrators of Game Group have announced that the 333 of its UK shops that are still open have been sold to OpCapita.
– The agreement will safeguard the jobs of nearly 3,200 Game Group employees. A small number from head office who were previously made redundant may also be re-employed.
– OpCapita is a private investment firm specialising in retail. It has set up a company called Baker Acquisitions to buy the shops.
– Former Halfords Group chief executive David Hamid, now a partner at OpCapita, has been appointed chairman of Game. A chief executive is expected to be named shortly. Ian Shepherd held the role until last week, when he resigned with immediate effect after a two-year battle to turn the company around.
– OpCapita acquired electrical retailer Comet from its owner Kesa Electricals last year for a nominal sum of £2. The financial terms of its Game acquisition have not been disclosed, but it is thought to have paid a nominal sum and taken on the company’s debts.
15:07 – Foxconn audit
– A report into working conditions at Chinese factories operated by anApple supplier has revealed “serious” labour violations, including excessive hours, unpaid wages and major health and safety risks.
– The Fair Labor Association (FLA) said employees at Foxconn, which produces products including iPhones and iPads, typically worked more than 60 hours a week during peak periods but were paid unfair compensation for overtime.
– Around two-thirds of workers told investigators that their take-home pay was insufficient to meet basic needs.
– In addition, 43% said they had witnessed an accident at work, leading to fears of poor safety provisions at the plants.
– The (FLA) was asked by Apple to investigate working conditions at Foxconn after reports of long hours and poor safety.
– The FLA says it has now secured agreements to reduce hours, protect pay, and improve staff representation.
– Apple said it “fully accepted” the report’s recommendations. “We share the FLA’s goal of improving lives and raising the bar for manufacturing companies everywhere,” it said in a statement.
– Of course, some employees aren’t happy with the reduction in money:
-“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years.
“We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).
17:58 – iPad Wifi Issues
– Besides the supposed third-generation iPad charging and overheating issues, the iPad WiFi issues were noted by the media during the past couple of weeks. Apple has taken notice and has admitted internally to some new iPad models having the WiFi issues described in numerous reports and on forum threads. The company says “symptoms can include, but are not limited to: intermittent connectivity, slow WiFi speeds, and WiFi network not seen.”

– Apple tells AppleCare employees to ensure that devices they test are not facing these issues due to normal software bugs, but instead because of the actual hardware components.
WiFi-only third-generation iPads are the only devices affected by these issues, according to Apple. The 4G LTE models are presumably safe from these issues due to the extra network power allowed by the black rubber cut on the top of the unit.
19:44 – Mac trojan affects 600000
– Apple released a Java 1.6.0_31 update for OS X on Tuesday that claims to deliver “improved compatibility, security, and reliability.” The patch closes multiple vulnerabilities found in Java 1.6.0_29, the most serious of which allows malicious code to be executed just by visiting a compromised website. The update is available from Software Update on any Mac running Mac OS X v10.6.8, Mac OS X Server v10.6.8, OS X Lion v10.7.3, or Lion Server v10.7.3.
– Russian security firm Doctor Web claims that attackers began to exploit the Java vulnerability on March 16th which Apple closed with the release of the Java update on April 3rd. Dr. Web now estimates that about 600,000 Macs, most of which reside in the US (55 percent) and Canada (19.8 percent), are now infected members of the Flashbackbotnet. The company also notes that some four million compromised web-pages could be found in Google search results at the end of March with some users claiming infection by visiting sites as mainstream as dlink.com.
– Security company F-Secure has instructions for detecting and deleting the Flashback botnet on infected computers.
22:47 – Project Glass
– Glasses not for sale but Google has begun public testing of it’s augmented reality glasses
– The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.
– This is the future…or is it?
– On sale this year – Google says unlikely
28:06 – HTC One X and S Launched
– O2, Vodafone, Three, Orange, and T-Mobile are all taking orders for the brand new One X and One S Android 4.0 smartphones from HTC. As usual, Three will give you the most for your money, though O2’s new On & On tariff — which the company describes as its best ever — is also worth a look, costing you £36 per month over a two-year contract, but also giving you unlimited minutes and the One X for no upfront cost. Should you be more inclined to buy the handset by itself, Amazon will sell you an unlocked and SIM-free One X for £489.99
– The One X got some great reviews – best phone you can buy today – http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/2/2919202/htc-one-x-review
29:35 – Instagram launches for Android
– The app adds creative, nostalgic filters to your pictures and makes sharing them easy (almost addictive).
– You can add effects to a picture you take with your front or back camera or choose a picture from your gallery. There are a number of custom filters and borders to choose from, including several ’70s effects and a black and white effect. Instantly upload the photo to your Instagram account and share it if you please to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare; Flickr is in the works.
– 1 million downloads in a day
– Hated the snobs on twitter – oh no – now I need to see android users photos on instagram
– Now I need to see photos from poor people
31:13 – Olympics Overload
– The BBC will make 24-HD quality live Olympic streams available to cable and satellite providers for the duration of the Olympics Games
– Viewers will be able to watch every Olympic sport, live from every venue, via tools such as Sky EPG and BBC Red Button. Virgin Media and Freesat customers will also have access. This complements previously confirmed plans for 24 simultaneous streams live online on the BBC Sport website.
– 48 new channels will be added to the Sports section of Sky’s EPG from July 24. The channels are free-to-air and available to any Sky home. The HD channels are available on any Sky+HD box and do not require a subscription, but do require an HD ready TV.
– Freesat viewers and Freesat standard definition viewers will also have access to the streams.
33:39 – Virgin throttles all users
– Virgin Media has introduced new throttling “trigger levels” for customers who make heavy use of its network.
– The telco updated its subscriber traffic management (STM) policy yesterday to “ensure the vast majority of customers get the high quality of service they expect from Virgin Media’s fibre optic broadband without being negatively affected by extremely heavy users” at peak times.
– It classified a so-called “bandwidth hog” as a 60Mbit/s customer, for example, who can download 5,000MB of data between 4pm and 9pm on a weekday before having their broadband connection throttled.
– A company spokesman told The Register that around 5 per cent of users would be affected by the STM policy. Those punters can expect to see their speed usage of the network temporarily throttled by 50 per cent.
36:03 – 0x10c
– Next game from Minecraft creator Notch
– Space game

Picks
Ian
Hero Academy
– RPG’ish battle between friends
– Like mini chess
– Seems simple but has real depth due to different factions, characters, powers and upgrades
– Multiplayer – play quickly or over a few days like words with friends
– Now universal – lovely lovely graphics
– Free, but in app purchases to unlock other classes

DigitalOutbox Episode 111

DigitalOutbox Episode 111
In this episode the team discuss Encyclopedia Britannica, BBC, Yahoo Sues Facebook and homeless wi-fi transmitters

Playback
Listen via iTunes
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Shownotes
1:29 – BBC Boss confirms Pay Download Service
– BBC director general Mark Thompson has confirmed plans for aniTunes-style download service that will allow viewers to buy programmes minutes after they have finished on TV.
– Thompson said the proposal, called Project Barcelona, would allow viewers to “purchase a digital copy of a programme to own and keep [for] a relatively modest charge”.
– Thompson was not specific about the timescale or pricing, but sources said it was hoped that programmes would be available to buy at the same time as they go on the iPlayer. Early speculation put the price at £1.89 a show.
– Anticipating criticism that viewers were being made to pay twice for the same content, Thompson said: “This is not a second licence-fee by stealth or any reduction in the current public service offering from the BBC – it’s the exact analogy of going into a high-street shop to buy a DVD or, before that, a VHS cassette.
3:47 – DrawSomething is a hit
– In just five weeks, the pictionary-like game has been downloaded 20 million times.
– That’s more users than 3-year-old Foursquare has. That’s almost as many users as 1.5-year-old Instagram.
– Draw Something is one of the fastest growing mobile apps of all time.
– CEO Dan Porter tells us the game is generating 6-figures per day. His company has generated more revenue from the game in five weeks than the entire company generated last year. He hasn’t spent a dime on marketing since the app’s first week.
– Of the 20 million downloads, Porter says 12 million are active users.
5:46 – Game warns investors
– officially warned investors that it is on the brink of collapse.
– The company said it had put itself up for sale but warned that “it is uncertain whether any of the solutions currently being explored by the board will be successful or will result in any value being attributed to the shares of the company.”
– Game desperately needs cash before the end of the month to pay its quarterly rent bill. If it fails to pay up it could be pushed into administration, putting 10,000 jobs at risk and wiping out any shareholder value. The warning sent the shares, which have already lost more than 95% of their value over the past year, crashing a further 65% to 1.2p, valuing the company at just £4.3m.
– At a conference in New York this weekend John Riccitiello, EA’s chief executive, said: “It was a risk a month ago. Now it looks like a fact, although we’re still praying for the lenders to get rational and keep them in business. You probably know who I’m talking about.”

– Diablo III Finally Dated
– http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/15/diablo-3-emerges-from-hell-may-15/
– Diable III launches May 15th – PC & Mac
– Blizzard also took a moment to remind everyone that you can still snag a free copy of Diablo 3 by signing up for a World of Warcraft annual pass. The deal expires on May 1.
– Diablo II came out in…..2000!
9:38 – Everything Everywhere should be allowed to offer 4G
– The UK’s largest mobile phone company, Everything Everywhere, should be allowed to offer its 27 million customers a 4G superfast broadband connection this year, Ofcom said on Monday.
– The telecoms watchdog said it was inclined to approve an application from EE, which owns the Orange and T-Mobile networks, to launch a 4G network ahead of its rivals.
– “Ofcom has considered whether allowing Everything Everywhere to use this spectrum in this way would distort competition, and provisionally concluded that it would not. And given the benefits this would bring to consumers, Ofcom is minded to allow this change of use.”
– There will be a consultation, which closes on 17 April. Ofcom could grant approval during the second quarter, allowing EE to have its 4G service running by autumn. The company has not said where it intends to make 4G available, although it will be trialling the technology and is likely to target major cities including London.
– This will give EE a significant first-mover advantage over rivals. The UK’s other operators, Vodafone, O2 and Three, are unlikely to be able to create their own 4G networks until they buy more spectrum from the government, and the auction is not due to conclude before the summer of 2013.
11:16 – Virgin Media chosen to bring wi-fi to London Underground
– Virgin Media has been selected to deliver Wi-Fi to 80 tube stations on the London Underground in time for the Olympics, with 120 locations to be live by the end of the year
– Free during Olympics
– Pay as you go post Olympics
12:30 – Yahoo sues Facebook
– Yahoo is filing a lawsuit against Facebook claiming infringement of patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking, following through on a threat it made last month.
– In a court filing , the former web giant – which has been reduced to a shadow of its former self as internal strife and the rise of Facebook have eaten away at its position – said that Facebook, founded in 2004, infringes 10 of its patents.
– Not just that – “Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo!’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo says in its complaint.
– Time to abolish software patents? Stifling innovation?
15:00 – Twitter buy Posterous
– Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the Y Combinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.
– Posterous says its service Spaces will stay up and running and that the company will give plenty of notice to users if they start to change the service.
16:36 – Encyclopaedia Britannica goes online only
– For 244 years, the thick volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica have stood on the shelves of homes, libraries, and businesses everywhere, a source of enlightenment as well as comfort to their owners and users around the world.
– Today we’ve announced that we will discontinue the 32-volume printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when our current inventory is gone.
– Free access to website for a week
– Then switches to paid access
20:41 – South by Southwest breakout product
– A marketing agency touched off a wave of criticism and debate when it hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conferencegoers Internet access in exchange for donations.
BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, outfitted 13 volunteers from a homeless shelter with the devices, business cards and T-shirts bearing their names: “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.” They were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the conference, which has become a magnet for those who want to chase the latest in technology trends.
– Clever?
– Exploitative?
– SXSW outgrown itself
23:54 – Employers asking for facebook logins

Picks
Henry
Bryce 7 pro
– Free until end of march
– Mac and PC – doesn’t work well with Lion

Ian
MacUpdate Bundle
– VMware Fusion 4 ($49.99) – Run Windows and more on your Mac without rebooting
– Drive Genius 3 ($99.00) – Optimize, repair, test, resize and clean up your Mac
– PDFpen 5 ($59.95) – Edit and annotate PDFs
– ForkLift 2.5 ($29.95) – File manager: FTP, WebDAV, S3, Bluetooth, and more
– Typinator 5 ($33.00) – Text expansion solution
– DesktopShelves 2 ($14.99) – Display folders as desktop shelves
– Snapheal ($14.99) – Professional-quality image enhancement utility
– Boom ($10.99) – Boost audio output for your entire system
– Phone to Mac ($24.95) – Copy media from an iOS device to your Mac
– Star Wars: The Force Unleashed ($29.99) – High-energy action set in the Star Wars universe
– Worms Special Edition ($9.99) – Classic turn-based strategy game
– $378 of app’s for $49.99
– 13 days and 8 hours – so a couple of weeks to bag a bargain

DigitalOutbox Episode 105

Shownotes
Mark Zuckerberg image – (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com / bub.blicio.us / CC-BY

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

DigitalOutbox Episode 102

DigitalOutbox Episode 102
In this episode the team discuss Google+, Netflix launching in the UK, Virgin Doubling Up and CES

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

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

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

DigitalOutbox Episode 68

DigitalOutbox Episode 68
In this episode the team discuss Kinect, Virgin, Digital Britain, RockMelt and Sheep Wars.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
2:27 – Times Paywall Fail
– Persuaded 50,000 people to pay for The times
– Analysts estimated that the initial annual revenues generated from digital would be about £5m.
– The Times charges £2 a week – the “paywall” – for access to its digital content, after customers pay an inital £1 for a 30-day trial. Customers can also pay £9.99 a month to sign up to a dedicated edition for the Apple iPad, although only about 10,000 chose to pay for this version only.
– All we know is that “around half” of the total are monthly subscribers. They will be composed of people taking advantage of News International’s 30-day £1 introductory offer to the website itself and people who have paid £9.99 for The Times’s iPad app.
Similarly, that comment in News Int’s statement about “many” of “the early adopters” living in the UK does not give a geographical breakdown. How many of the total come from inside and outside Britain?
– It is no surprise that they are “relatively affluent”, of course. That message is clearly aimed at advertisers. But ad agencies will surely want to know the British audience numbers.
Most importantly, there is no clear breakdown of the 105,000 total figure to show how many people have subscribed monthly, weekly or daily.
– They did have a figure of 30 million impressions at one point – nothing like that now
– None of their content is shared either – nothing can go viral
6:31 – SkyFire
– SkyFire can convert Flash videos — which the iPhone normally cannot display — into HTML5 on SkyFire’s servers, making it possible to view said videos on the iPhone after a short delay
– Browser approved by apple, selling for $2.99 or £1.79 in proper money
– Needs fast connection, doesn’t always work, wont work with games and is blocked by Hulu
– Hours after launch it was pulled from the App Store
– Not by Apple….by developers due to overwhelming demand
– Stunt? It worked – $1 million in revenue i first weekend
8:11 – Virgin announce TiVo Boxes
– Virgin Media has revealed the first details about its new TiVo-powered set top boxes, including a massive 1 Terabyte of storage and web applications for the TV screen.
– Later in the year, the cable operator will launch the new platform, along with a TiVo-powered set top box capable of storing 500 hours of programming.
– When coupled with Virgin Media’s existing video on-demand service, the receiver will give users access to more than 4,600 hours of TV shows, movies and music videos, including HD and 3D content.
– Underpinned by Virgin Media’s fibre optic broadband network, the new box will also feature a dedicated internal modem for delivering bandwidth-heavy services without impacting the user’s main broadband connection.
– That also means the TiVo service will bring a wide range of internet services and digital applications to the television screen.
– No specific details were given on the apps, but it’s likely that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter will be available, along with other digital services.
14:17 – XMarks Saved
– Free and premium options
14:53 – Google Get Knuckles Wrapped
– no punishment though
– Google has also been ordered to delete the data it collected from users’ Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars once legally cleared to do so. The culture minister, Ed Vaizey, last week announced the Metropolitan police had dropped its investigation into the breaches.
– He added that the technology giant would now be subject to an official audit of its data protection practices in the UK.
15:37 – Skype 5 Hits the Mac
– New UI
– Integrates with address book
– Group video chat
17:19 – Ministry of Sound Suspend File Sharing Action
– Ministry of Sound is suspending plans to send warning notices to more than 25,000 BT broadband customers suspected of illegal downloading, claiming that the internet service provider has deleted their details.
– BT had agreed to retain the personal details of 20,000 of its customers earlier this year, so that Ministry of Sound could pursue them once an injunction on the court order was lifted. However, the record label today said that BT had “failed to preserve” the details.
– A BT spokesman responded: “We’re surprised at this claim since we provided a similar number of customer details to comply with a court order earlier this year for Ministry of Sound and there was no suggestion then that this was a problem for them.
– “All such information is automatically deleted from our systems after 90 days in accordance with our data retention policy; the Ministry of Sound and its solicitors are well aware of this. Upon request from Ministry of Sound we saved as much of the specific data sought as we reasonably could and any not preserved must have been too old. Our door remains open to Ministry of Sound and any other rights holder who wants to enforce their rights in a fair way through an established legal process.”
21:10 – Queen joins Facebook
– First Youtube, then Twitter, then Flickr now Facebook
– Not an individual account but an official page
22:36 – Sheep wars…
– Blacksheep is a firefox addon that scans open networks for Firesheep snoopers and alerts the user.
– Available for download on the Zscaler website (http://www.zscaler.com/blacksheep.html)
24:56 – RockMelt
– Social browser that lives in the cloud
– Built on Chromium it uses Facebook to authenticate and sign in
– See friends on left hand side of browser
– Can easily post content to them, chat, mail etc from browser
– Bookmarks on right hand side alongside tweets but these are favourite sites whch ping you when new content is added
– All stored on cloud – same browser experience wherever you login to browser
– Isn’t this Flock 2.0?
– Limited beta for the moment
32:34 – Kinect Launches
– The Kinect is out in shops. £130
– And the amazing thing? That the first reviews are almost universal in saying that it’s an impressive piece of tech.
– Other than a couple of howlers, most launch games are around the 7 mark.
– You can’t ignore the fact that all reviews say there are some glitches along the way and that you need a good amount of space to use but most are convinced that this is a game changer (not for your average gamer – but for casual).
– Finally, all reviews are looking forward to the defining games for the tech which will no doubt come next year…
– I’m tempted…
– Oh’ and there’s a bounty out for people to hack and get working on PC – looks like someones already managed it at rudimentary level.
38:39 – Dev Builds Bot to Buy Cheap Stuff Online
– Started with a strip from xkcd – http://xkcd.com/576/
– Hunkin wrote a Python script that would scrape certain categories on the site for cheap, buy-now items with free shipping. The script is optimized to search for rare, esoteric items, as well. The bot gets $1 added to its savings every day, and all purchases are deducted from the savings.
– Not only does the bot buy these treasures on Hunkin’s behalf; it also shares its finds with the world via Twitter: – http://twitter.com/#!/trademe_xkcd576
– If the bot doesn’t find any items that meet its parameters, it simply tweets that it’s putting its dollar into savings.

Picks
Ian
COD Black Ops
– Great update
– Multiplayer is good
– Single player more of the same, with some pretty controversial scenes