Tag: o2

DigitalOutbox Episode 137

DigitalOutbox Episode 137
DigitalOutbox Episode 137 – 4G, App.net and Maps. Again.

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Shownotes
1:58 – Apple release a letter
– To our customers,
– At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.
– We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.
– There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.
– While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.
– Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.
– Tim Cook
– Apple’s CEO
4:09 – While Samsung sue Apple for the iPhone 5
– Yesterday Samsung added the iPhone 5 to its patent lawsuit against Apple and other manufacturers. This comes after Apple was awarded $1 billion for Samsung’s infringements. But sales of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III haven’t been hurt and appear to have been helped by the news.
– The powerhouse Android device saw average growth of 9% in new devices each week since August 1st, with huge spikes in Galaxy S III adoption occurring after the Apple lawsuit verdict and after the iPhone 5 announcement.
– The first spike in weekly growth coincides with the same week that a jury awarded Apple $1 billion for Samsung infringing on Apple’s patents. The deluge of post-litigation press coverage both drove general attention to Samsung and suggested that Samsung devices were similar enough to iPhones to be an option for many consumers.
– The second spike started the week of September 12, when Apple announced the new iPhone 5. Apple’s announcement was quickly followed by hundreds of stories comparing the two phones, most of which again suggested they were similarly capable. That combined with the slowdown in new Galaxy S3 growth seen leading up to Apple’s announcement (week-over-week new devices were the same as the previous week, resulting in 0% growth) suggest that many consumers were waiting to hear about the new iPhone before making a decision.
– As expected Samsung also challenge their recent $1bn court loss – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19816642
– Samsung said foreman Velvin Hogan had provided an incomplete answer during jury selection.
– It said he had revealed he had been involved in a single previous lawsuit, but had failed to disclose two others.
– It noted that Mr Hogan had been sued by his former employer – hard disk maker Seagate – for breach of contract, and had subsequently filed for personal bankruptcy.
– Samsung’s filing highlights that it is the biggest direct shareholder in Seagate, following a $1.4bn deal in 2011.
– “Mr Hogan’s failure to disclose the Seagate suit raises issues of bias that Samsung should have been allowed to explore in questioning,” its lawyers wrote.
7:35 – O2 and Vodafone agree network sharing deal
– Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK today announce their intention to strengthen their existing network partnership, by pooling the basic parts of their network infrastructure to create one national grid running each operator’s independent spectrum.
– The plan will deliver real benefits for today’s mobile phone users by creating two competing networks that will be able to offer indoor 2G and 3G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population by 2015, delivering mobile coverage and mobile internet services to the vast majority of UK households.
– It will also ensure that the capability for the next generation of 4G mobile services is rolled out as widely and rapidly as possible*, helping to close the digital divide between rural and urban areas. The partnership will lay the foundations for two competing 4G networks to deliver a nationwide 4G service faster than could be achieved independently and up to two years before the anticipated regulatory requirement of 98% population coverage by 2017**.
– Just as under Cornerstone, the two companies’ existing network partnership, all shared sites will continue to carry Telefónica UK’s traffic on Telefónica’s spectrum and Vodafone UK’s traffic on Vodafone’s spectrum.
– Both operators will continue to remain responsible for their own existing spectrum holdings and for fulfilling their own spectrum needs in the future. The launch of 4G services is subject to the outcome of the forthcoming Ofcom auction of new spectrum and both companies will act wholly independently in that auction.
12:22 – 4G timetable agreed
– At a meeting with communications regulator Ofcom and the government, rival operators agreed to settle their differences and get services up and running quickly.
– The government said high-speed data services should launch by spring 2013, six months earlier than planned.
– O2 and Vodafone have agreed not to pursue legal action against EE.
– EE is likely to announce when its services will go live imminently.
– A combination of factors, from a change of government to threats of legal action from operators, had slowed down the process to free up spectrum used by analogue television broadcasts.While the auction of the airwaves made available by the digital switchover is still scheduled for January next year, clearing them for 4G use will happen far more quickly than originally envisaged.
– Ofcom said that it had secured the earlier release of frequencies that were previously used for digital-terrestrial broadcasting. Thanks to Freeview – switch to digital went better than expected.
– Ed Richards, Ofcom chief executive, said: “The actions we have taken with industry and government avoid the risk of significant delay and are tremendous news for consumers who might otherwise have waited a considerable period for the next generation of mobile broadband services.”
– Three was the first operator to comment, following the meeting.A spokesman said: “We see this as positive step for UK consumers by removing the monopoly on LTE that would have benefitted just one operator.” LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is the flavour of 4G that UK operators will be deploying.
15:25 – EE Announce 4G launch
– 4G will launch on October 30th
– Launched in 10 cities – BIRMINGHAM, LEEDS, BRISTOL, LIVERPOOL, CARDIFF, LONDON, EDINBURGH, MANCHESTER, GLASGOW, SHEFFIELD – 16 by Christmas – Belfast, Derby, Hull, Newcastle, Nottingham and Southampton
– No prices or plans yet
– 5 phones now available
– Apple iPhone 5
– Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (but not any SGS3 handsets sold in the UK up to this point)
– HTC’s One XL
– Huawei Ascend P1 LTE
– Samsung Galaxy Note 2 LTE (from 15 October)
– Huawei mobile dongle
– Progress!!
19:46 – App.net reveal price drop
– Now have 20,000 users
– Drops from $50 to $36 a year (or $5 a month)
– Developers still have to spend $100 per year to use the API. But App.net recently announced an incentive for developers. Beginning October 1, App.net will give $20,000 per month to developers for the most successful third-party apps or services. The incentive program is reminiscent of RIM’s investment to foster app development.
– Ummmm…underwhelming?
22:26 – Tabots release Netbot
– Netbot is a full-featured iPhone App.net client with a lot of personality. Whether it’s the meticulously-crafted interface, sounds & animation, or features like smart gestures, there’s a lot to love about Netbot.
– Has a version for iPhone and iPad – £2.99 each
– All the great features from Tweetbot
– Conversations exploded on App.net this evening with this new client
– Crossposting will be….interesting
– Shot in the arm
26:11 – XFactor for Tech community
– An X Factor style TV show aimed at discovering aspiring young technology entrepreneurs is reportedly being considered by music mogul Simon Cowell and rapper Will.i.am.
– Will.i.am told the Sun newspaper they had met to discuss the details of the project, X Factor for Tech, last month.
– The Black Eyed Peas frontman, who was last year appointed as Intel’s director of creative innovation, said the show would create “lots” of jobs.
– UK innovators have welcomed the idea.

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DigitalOutbox Episode 127

DigitalOutbox Episode 127
DigitalOutbox Episode 127 – Marissa Mayer, Office 13, Apple Woes and don’t criticise the Olympics

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Shownotes
1:05 – O2 Compensation
– The firm says customers who pay monthly will get back 10% of their July subscription, the equivalent of three days’ charges, applied to their September bill.
– Pay-as-you-go customers will get back 10% on their first top-up in September.
– All customers, even those who were not affected, will also be given a £10 voucher to spend in one of its stores.
2:14 – UK Texts more than Talks
– Mobile voice calls in decline for the first time ever, as more switch to text and online communications
– Newer ways of communicating led by 16-24s, with texting and social networking more frequently used than either phone calls or face to face communications
– The average Briton now sends 50 texts per week
– Two fifths of UK adults now own a smartphone, with the same proportion saying their phone is the most important device for accessing the internet
– Tablet ownership has jumped from 2% to 11% in 12 months
5:29 – Marissa Mayer is Yahoos new CEO
– Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next chief of Yahoo, making her one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and corporate America.
– The appointment of Ms. Mayer is consider a coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top talent in its battle with competitors. One of the few public faces of Google, Ms. Mayer, 37, has been responsible for the look and feel of some of the search company’s most popular products.
– The move to Yahoo is an opportunity for Ms. Mayer to step out on her own and claim a bigger stage. Ms. Mayer, an engineer by training whose first job at Google included computer programming, was behind the famously unadorned white search home page and the way users interacted with Gmail, Google News and Google Images. She also sat on Google’s operating committee, part of a small circle of senior executives who had the ear of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
– Marissa Mayer, the Google (GOOG) executive who today was named Yahoo’s (YHOO) new chief executive, is pregnant.
– Mayer told Fortune exclusively that her first child is due October 7. It’s a boy!
“He’s super-active,” Mayer told me in a phone call tonight, three hours after Yahoo announced her appointment. “He moves around a lot. My doctor says that he takes after his parents.”
– Great move by Yahoo – bold and looks to have put someone in place that will actually do something with the assets they have.
9:29 – Office 2013
– a “modern” version of the software that is used on a billion PCs worldwide. Cloud-connected and designed to work well on Windows 8 tablets, Office 2013 signals a shift to document collaboration and anywhere any device access. Notably, Microsoft is introducing an on-demand subscription version of Office 2013 that can be streamed from any Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC, with the ability to sync settings and documents.
– Perhaps the biggest change to Office 2013 isn’t the way it looks or its features, but rather the way documents are delivered along with some important under-the-hood changes. Microsoft is really pushing the ability to create a Word document on a Windows PC and edit it on a Windows Phone, Windows 8 tablet, or any Windows 7- or Windows 8-based PC with an internet connection. Home users can store documents in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage and businesses can use a range of the company’s SharePoint offerings. Office 2013’s big innovation is its ability to let users stream a full-featured version of Office to a PC with personal settings intact — an on-demand Office suite whenever you require it.
– Office on demand is a powerful aspect to Microsoft’s Office 2013 subscription offering, providing a way to access a full version of Office wherever you are. The service lets you stream a full-featured Office application to any internet-connected PC running Windows 7 and Windows 8, providing access to the settings and documents you use regularly. Simply put, you can sign in to a streaming version of Office at a friend’s PC and finish a document; the app will then be removed from the PC once it’s closed. This all requires an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, but its ease-of-use makes it a compelling prospect for users who are comfortable using Microsoft’s Office suite and require more document editing functionality than Google Docs or Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps provide. Despite this, you can still opt to simply buy a standalone version of the Office 2013 desktop software and utilize SkyDrive as an online storage hub for documents. You won’t get the streaming Office 2013 apps, but you’ll benefit from the cloud and avoid having to pay a subscription fee.
– Lots of different editions – Office 365, the company’s software plus services platform for Office, will power Office 2013 as a subscription service for those who want to avoid the up-front costs of a perpetual license and take advantage of some of the on-demand features. Available in Home Premium, Small Business Premium, Pro Plus, and Enterprise — Office 365 has a variety of offerings that are flexible based on needs, but like many of its other products there’s still no one size that fits all. The new Home Premium product allows a family to install Office 2013 on up to five PCs and get an additional 20GB of online SkyDrive storage to share documents online. Home Premium includes access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher through an Internet-connected Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC. Documents and settings, and even the actual apps will roam across whatever PC you choose to use Office 365 with. Other editions, like ProPlus and above, include additional user accounts and access to apps like InfoPath and Lync — designed for businesses. Office 365 will also include access to Office for Mac.
– Metro look and feel – A Touch Mode feature is present in each Office 2013 application, but it does very little. Although hit targets become larger, making it slightly easier to navigate with touch, and it’s easy to navigate or type data in documents, the feature feels a little gimmicky and is hidden away from immediate view.
– Word – open, edit and save pdf’s, embed web video, better layout options
– Outlook sees most improvements, but mostly back end
– OneNote look nice – could be great on a surface device
15:43 – Nokia Woes
– The woes at the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia continue to mount, with further losses in its main division in the second quarter of 2012, and a €220m (£170m) write-off on unsold stock of its smartphones.
– Nokia also admitted its high-profile attempt to break back into the US smartphone market with its new range of Lumia phones, running Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, had led to only about 600,000 sales in the US – down on the 1.5m sold in the same period a year ago when the company was only offering its outdated Symbian software.
– The mobile phone division recorded an operating loss of €474m, its second successive quarter of losses, on revenues down 26% year-on-year to €4.02bn. Overall, the company recorded a loss, including one-off restructuring costs, of €826m compared to a loss of €487m in the same period in 2011. Without the restructuring costs, losses would be €327m.
– Elop said Nokia had delivered 4m Lumia smartphones in the second quarter, and that he expected Microsoft’s launch of the new Windows Phone 8 software in the autumn would be “an important catalyst”.
– Existing Lumia phones won’t run the new Windows Phone 8 software…
18:15 – Man assaulted for wearing digital eye by McDonalds staff
– Steve Mann pioneered and wears a digital eye glass
– Think a more permanently attached Google Glass
– On the evening of 2012 July 1st, my wife and children and I went to McDonalds at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris, France, after a day of sightseeing (8 museums and other landmark sights, as part of a boat cruise package), and while we were standing in line at McDonalds, I was stopped by a person who subsequently stated that he was a McDonalds employee, and he asked about my eyeglass (digital computer vision system, i.e. EyeTap).
– Because we’d spent the day going to various museums and historical landmark sites guarded by military and police, I had brought with me the letter from my doctor regarding my computer vision eyeglass, along with documentation, etc., although I’d not needed to present any of this at any of the other places I visited (McDonald’s was the only establishement that seemed to have any problem with my eyeglass during our entire 2 week trip).
– Since I happened to have it with me, I showed this doctor’s letter and the documentation to the purported McDonalds employee who had stopped me in the McDonalds line.
– After reviewing the documentation, the purported McDonalds employee accepted me (and my family) as a customer, and left us to place our order. In what follows, I will refer to this person as “Possible Witness 1”.
– We ordered two Ranch Wraps, one burger, and one mango McFlurry, from a cashier who I will refer to as “Possible Witness 2”. My daughter handled the cash to pay Possible Witness 2, as my daughter wanted to practice her French. Possible Witness 2 complimented my daughter on her fluency in French.
Next my family and I seated ourselves in the restaurant right by the entrance, so we could watch people walking along Avenue Champs Elysees while we ate our meal.
– Subsequently another person within McDonalds physically assaulted me, while I was in McDonand’s, eating my McDonand’s Ranch Wrap that I had just purchased at this McDonald’s. He angrily grabbed my eyeglass, and tried to pull it off my head. The eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools.
– I tried to calm him down and I showed him the letter from my doctor and the documentation I had brought with me. He (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 1) then brought me to two other persons. He was standing in the middle, right in front of me, and there was another person to my left seated at a table (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 2), and a third person to my right. The third person (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 3) was holding a broom and dustpan, and wearing a shirt with a McDonald’s logo on it. The person in the center (Perpetrator 1) handed the materials I had given him to the person to my left (Perpetrator 2), while the three of them reviewed my doctor’s letter and the documentation.
– After all three of them reviewed this material, and deliberated on it for some time, Perpetrator 2 angrily crumpled and ripped up the letter from my doctor. My other documentation was also destroyed by Perpetrator 1.
– I noticed that Perpetrator 1 was wearing a name tag clipped to his belt. When I looked down at it, he quickly covered it up with his hand, and pulled it off and turned it around so that it was facing inwards, so that only the blank white backside of it was then facing outwards.
– Perpetrator 1 pushed me out the door, onto the street.
– The computerized eyeglass processes imagery using Augmediated Reality, in order to help the wearer see better, and when the computer is damaged, e.g. by falling and hitting the ground (or by a physical assault), buffered pictures for processing remain in its memory, and are not overwritten with new ones by the then non-functioning computer vision system.
– As a result of Perpetrator 1’s actions, therefore images that would not have otherwise been captured were captured. Therefore by damaging the Eye Glass, Perpetrator 1 photographed himself and others within McDonalds.
21:40 – Apple ordered to run Samsung didn’t copy ad’s
– A UK judge has ordered Apple to publish announcements that Samsung did not copy the design of its iPad, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
– It said the judge said one notice should remain on Apple’s website for at least six months, while other adverts should be placed in various newspapers and magazines.
– It follows the US company’s failed attempt to block sales of the South Korean firm’s Galaxy Tab tablets.
– Apple has not commented on the news.
– The order did not feature in Judge Colin Birss’s judgement published on 9 July, but Bloomberg said the matter was discussed in the court following the verdict.
– It said the notices must make reference to the court case and should be designed to “correct the damaging impression” that Samsung’s tablets had aped the look of Apple’s products.
23:08 – Apples in-app purchasing circumvented
– a Russian developer has published a method of obtaining in-app purchases from iOS apps for free. First noticed by Russian blog i-ekb.ru, the “in-app proxy” method does not require a jailbreak, can be completed by novices in three steps using just an iOS device, and allows users to install in-app content for free. The hack also works on all devices running iOS 3.0 to 6.0. We confirmed the method works (at least temporarily), and the published instructions are starting to get attention, so we decided to publish this story as a warning to the Apple developer community.
– The hack appears to come from Russian developer ZonD80 who posted the above video demonstration. ZonD80 also appears to run a website called In-AppStore.com, where donations are being accepted to support the development of the project and help keep servers up and running. The developer explained the three steps of the hack, which include the installation of CA certificate, the installation of in-appstore.com certificate, and the changing of DNS record in Wi-Fi settings. After the quick process, users are presented with the message pictured above when installing in-app purchases, opposed to Apple’s usual purchase confirmation dialog. The fact that this hack is being used to steal in-app purchase content is perhaps just as troubling as the developer’s terms of service. Below is a list of data processed through the devs servers as part of the process (but again, we are imploring readers not to try this):
-restriction level of app
-id of app
-id of version
-guid of your idevice
-quantity of in-app purchase
-offer name of in-app purchase
-language you are using
-identifier of application
-version of application
-your locale
– Developers concerned – in app purchasing is a major source of revenue
– Apple has responded to The Loop regarding the situation with the following statement:
“The security of the App Store is incredibly important to us and the developer community,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison, told The Loop. “We take reports of fraudulent activity very seriously and we are investigating.”
– One of the suggestions for a method by which Apple could improve the security of In App Purchasing was to include a unique identifier in validation receipts, and we’ve received word that developers are now seeing something along those lines coming from receipts issued by Apple since late yesterday. The receipts carry a new field called “unique_identifer” that appears to include the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) for the device making the In App Purchase – 5 days after the above report Apple has updated the purchase process
26:08 – Apple reverses course on EPEAT environmental standard
– Apple has posted a letter from retiring senior VP of hardware engineering Bob Mansfield to its website, walking back the company’s abandonment of the EPEAT certification for its eligible products. Per the letter:
– We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.
– There’s a corresponding statement from EPEAT president Robert Frisbee on the organization’s site. It was only last week that Apple’s 39 EPEAT-eligible products were pulled from the industry registry at the company’s request.
– As recently as this Tuesday, Apple’s PR team was pointing out that the company’s environmental efforts are continuing and include many areas of progress not covered by the outdated EPEAT standards. It’s likely that the “loyal Apple customers” who raised their concerns with Mansfield and Apple management included many large institutional and government accounts, which may have purchasing rules mandating EPEAT-eligible gear when possible.
– Both Mansfield and Frisbee emphasize that this experience has strengthened the collaborative efforts of Apple and EPEAT, and that Apple’s input will be crucial in evolving the standard to deal with more modern devices.
28:32 – Betaworks Acquires Digg
– Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount. Betaworks’ founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg. The site’s current CEO Matt Williams will join Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence after the Betaworks transition is complete. Digg’s founder Kevin Rose joined Google a few months ago after the search engine acquired his latest startup Milk.
– Betaworks promises to turn Digg “back into a startup,” with low budgets, a small team and fast update cycles. None of the remaining Digg employees, it seems, are moving to Betaworks. Instead, the News.me team will take over the management of the site. Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps.
– According to Digg’s outgoing CEO Matt Williams, his team “considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place — to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.” Betaworks says it’s planning to “build Digg for 2012.”
– Update: Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads. Talking to AllThingsD, Digg CEO Matt Williams confirmed that “the overall consideration is significantly larger” and includes a combination of cash and equity. Another source close to the negotiations tells us that the price was indeed not $500k. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact price yet.
31:56 – Now TV Launched
– BSkyB is to launch its internet service Now TV on Tuesday, with the aim of taking on rivals such as Netflix and LoveFilm, offering movies for £15 a month or up to £3.49 per view.
– The service, which will launch this week on PC, Mac and some Android smartphones, will initially only offer Sky Movies content at launch with access to 600 films and 11 channels.
– However a typically aggressive rollout plan will see Sky Sports content including Premier League, cricket, rugby and golf before the end of the year, as well as channels including Sky1, Sky Arts and Sky Atlantic.
– Now TV will be priced at £15 a month for customers who want to access Sky Movies content, with a “pay and play” option of selecting individual films from 99p to £3.49.
– Sky is aiming to break beyond its pay-TV roots and target the 13m UK households who refuse to sign up for what can be costly subscription packages.
– BSkyB has more than 10m pay-TV customers, however the number of new sign ups has dwindled to as low as 15,000 per quarter.
– The launch of Now TV is seen as potentially as important as BSkyB’s move into the broadband market in 2006, a move to protect and grow its business model to tap into shifting consumer viewing habits such as watching TV on mobile and handheld devices.
– “We are targeting the 13m non-pay TV households out there with a no commitment, no contract way of delivering Sky content they want in a dip in and dip out way,” said BSkyB managing director of sales and marketing Stephen van Rooyen. “The whole idea is to have something ‘not Sky’, it is purposely designed to attract new customers.”
– BSkyB intends to roll out the availability of Now TV rapidly to other devices including iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Xbox and Roku, while the company is also in discussions to bring it to the PlayStation 3.
36:04 – You can’t link to Olympics website if you say something mean about them
– For years, we’ve highlighted the overaggressive nature of the Olympics in over-protecting their intellectual property — even to the level of getting host countries to pass special IP laws that only apply to the Olympics. But this sense of ultimate entitlement seems to pervade everything that the Olympics does. It was recently noted that the terms of use for the London 2012 website include a restriction on how you can link to the site:
Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner. The use of our logo or any other Olympic or London 2012 Mark(s) as a link to the Site is not permitted. View our guidelines on Use of the Games’ Marks.
– Either way, this claim that you can’t link to their site in a “derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner” has inspired the creativity of the internet, it appears. Specifically, lots of folks have taken to Twitter to share their own derogatory or otherwise objectionable statements along with links to the website.

Picks

DigitalOutbox Episode 126

DigitalOutbox Episode 126
DigitalOutbox Episode 126 – O2 Outage, Samsung, KickStarter and Yodel

Playback
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Shownotes
1:54 – O2 Outage
– Started on Wednesday 11th
– Affected up to ⅓ of customers – around 7 million in total (they have 23 million customers)
– O2 customers found they were unable to make calls or send and receive text messages from about mid-afternoon on Wednesday. The disruption continued throughout the night and into Thursday morning.
– Some O2 customers who were not affected yesterday also claimed to have been disrupted on Thursday, in a sign that the network outage spread further overnight.
– O2 is the UK’s second-biggest mobile network and provides services to customers of Tesco Mobile and giffgaff, who were also affected by the prolonged disruption.
– Lasted around 24 hours
– Switching off 3g this morning resolved the issue for many
– Fully restored late this afternoon
– The UK’s second largest mobile network is now facing an investigation by telecoms regulator Ofcom into what caused the downtime and is likely to have to pay compensation to customers affected by the blackout.
– Pity the social media team dealing with complaints on twitter
6:21 – Samsung wins latest patent dispute
– Samsung won a victory over Apple in the UK high court as part of its world-spanning battle over intellectual property and design after a judge ruled the design of its Galaxy Tab isn’t cool enough to be confused with an iPad.

– The ruling, by Judge Colin Birss, means that Apple cannot stop the import or sale of the Galaxy Tab 10 under claims it has made that the designs are too close to those of the iPad.
– Instead, Judge Birss ruled that Samsung’s designs did not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design: “They are not as cool.”
– He noted distinctions such as the thickness and details on the backs of the devices in his ruling. “The informed user’s overall impression of each of the Samsung Galaxy Tablets is the following,” he said in his ruling. “From the front they belong to the family which includes the Apple design; but the Samsung products are very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back. They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool. The overall impression produced is different.”
– Apple has been given 21 days to appeal against the decision.
– In a statement, Samsung said the judgement confirmed its assertion that it did not infringe Apple’s design rights.
– “Samsung welcomes today’s judgment, which affirms our position that our Galaxy Tab products do not infringe Apple’s registered design right,” it said. “As the ruling proves, the origins of Apple’s registered design features can be found in numerous examples of prior art.
– “Should Apple continue to make excessive legal claims in other countries based on such generic designs, innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited.”
9:08 – Windows 8 Launch Date
– RTM in August, general release in October
– Slate from Intel – Jan 2013
9:44 – Dropbox doubling pro accounts
– Good news for Dropbox Pro users: Starting today, you’ll have twice the amount of storage space, for the same cost. Instead of 50GB, you’ll have 100GB to play with; instead of 100GB, it’ll be 200GB of space. You also can send others a 100GB 3-month trial for the online sharing and syncing service.
– So 100GB for $100 a year, 200GB for $200
– A new 500GB plan will also be offered for those who really need a lot of online storage space.
12:02 – Kickstarter coming to the UK
– It is the US-based crowdfunding website behind dozens of eclectic projects, including a $1m-backed fantasy webcomic and an unlikely brand of “rugged yet refined” men’s underwear.
– Now the site, Kickstarter, is to open in the UK, allowing British startups to solicit donations from the potential buyers among the public that could help get their projects off the ground.
– Kickstarter has already proved a remarkable success in the US. Since 2009, its users have helped fund more than 60,000 projects with nearly $280m, ranging from digital innovations to campaigns involving movies and photography. The site makes its money by levying a 5% fee on any projects that reach or exceed their funding target.
– So far seven projects – such as a visual-music project and a collection of “e-paper” watches called Pebble – have managed to raise more than $1m.
– Kickstarter confirmed in a tweet on Tuesday that it will be open to UK-based projects this autumn. “People in the UK will be able to launch projects on Kickstarter starting this autumn! More info soon! <3 <3 <3," the site said. 15:39 – Ouya – the android gaming console
– OUYA is a new game console for the TV, powered by Android and costing $99.
– We’ve packed this little box full of power. Developers will have access to OUYA’s open design so they can produce their games for the living room, taking advantage of everything the TV has to offer.
– Best of all, OUYA’s world-class controller, console, and interface come in one beautiful, inexpensive package. All the games on it will be free, at least to try.
– Specifications:
Tegra3 quad-core processor
1GB RAM
8GB of internal flash storage
HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth LE 4.0
USB 2.0 (one)
Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
Android 4.0
– Another kickstarter hit – over $3 million with over 20 days to go
19:49 – Amazon launches GameCircle
– Amazon has just announced a bit of good news for avid Kindle Fire gamers and developers — the company has been working to revamp the gaming experience on their wallet-conscious tablet and have decided to share the fruits of their labor.
– Starting today, developers can use Amazon’s GameCircle APIs to implement a host of new features in their Kindle Fire games. Considering how many other console and mobile gaming platforms already support them, it should come as no surprise that support for achievements is on that list of features. Also on deck is leaderboard functionality, which allows users to see how they stack up to their rivals without having to pop out of the game in question.
– So far, it all sounds very Game Center-y (though Amazon could do worse than to take cues from Apple), but GameCircle has one last trick up its sleeve. Perhaps the most immediately impressive feature is GameCircle’s sync functionality, which automatically saves a player’s progress to the cloud. As such, players are able to pick up where they left off even if they’ve had to re-install the game in question or switch devices.
22:38 – Yodel threatened to sue Twitter
– Home delivery firm Yodel, which handles packages for Amazon, Currys, Boots and O2 among others, has asked Twitter to delete dozens of critical tweets and accounts that it claims are defamatory and “constitute a serious libel”.
– Yodel’s lawyers, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, wrote to Twitter on May 9 threatening legal action if the tweets were not removed. It claims the statements in the tweets are “entirely false” and it includes a list of tweets that it wants removed.
– Yodel, formerly known as the Home Delivery Network, has been repeatedly criticised by customers awaiting packages and its reputation has taken a battering online and on TV after it was the subject of a BBC Watchdog programme
– The list of tweets that Yodel provided to Twitter typically include those hitting out its failure to deliver on time, lost parcels and advice to others not to use the deliver service. Many are disparaging while others are humorous but don’t strike me as particular libellous.
– Yodel appears to be using heavy handed legal tactics in an attempt to silence dozens of online critics – hardly a step that is likely to endear it to customers or a step in the right direction when it comes to customers service.
– Some of the tweets Yodel wanted deleted simply call on Yodel to fix its customers service. Others tell of horror stories similar to the one suffered by Claire Jolly.
– Many of the tweets still seem to be online while others appear to have disappeared. Yodel in its letter also asked that a parody account, @NotYodel, and another Twitter account @HDNL (the name by which Yodel previously went by before rebranding) be removed. Both accounts are no longer active and appear to have been taken down by Twitter.
– Weil, Gotshal & Manges claimed that it has been proven that the existence of these Twitter accounts “”over a substantial period of time, that the existence of these pages serves as a platform for such defamatory statements to be made against our client”.
– In a statement Twitter says it doesn’t “comment on actions taken around specific accounts or Tweets” and offered no comment on the Yodel letter.

Picks
Ian
Google+ for the iPad
– Fantastic update to the app to support iPad
– photo’s and video’s look amazing

Tweetbot for Mac
– Alpha release
– Free but will be a paid app upon release to the App store
– Despite missing features it’s my default client on the Mac

DigitalOutbox Episode 121

DigitalOutbox Episode 121
DigitalOutbox Episode 121 – LinkedIn stumble, Google Maps the future and E3

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
1:37 – Do Not Track – IE’s default already dead
– The latest proposed draft of the Do Not Trackspecification published Wednesday requires that users must choose to turn on the anti-behavioral tracking feature in their browsers and software.
– That means that Microsoft IE 10, which the company announced last week will have Do Not Track turned on by default, won’t be compliant with the official spec. Which means that tech and ad companies who say they comply with Do Not Track could simply ignore the flag set by IE 10 and track those who use that browser. Which means Microsoft has no choice but to change the setting.
2:48 – LinkedIn leaks your meeting notes
– LinkedIn mobile app subscribers may be surprised to learn that the calendar entries on their iPhones or iPads— which may include details about meeting locations, participants, dial-in information, passwords and sensitive meeting notes — are transmitted back to LinkedIn’s servers without their knowledge.
– LinkedIn’s mobile app for iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, included an opt-in feature that allows users to view their iOS calendar entries within the app. Once users opt in to that feature, however, LinkedIn automatically transmits their calendar entries to its servers. LinkedIn grabs details for every calendar on the iOS device, which may include both personal and corporate calendar entries.
– LinkedIn quickly respond – http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/mobile-calendar-feature/
– We Do:
We ask your permission before accessing your calendar, this will continue to be an opt-in feature
We provide you with a way to turn off the calendar feature at any time in the settings
We send calendar data to our server only when the LinkedIn app is launched to be matched with relevant LinkedIn profiles of meeting attendees
We send your calendar data to our servers over a secure SSL connection
We Don’t:
We do not store any calendar information on our servers
We do not share or use your calendar data for purposes other than matching it with relevant LinkedIn profiles
We do not under any circumstances access your calendar data unless you have explicitly opted in to sync your calendar
We Will Improve:
We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event
There will be a new “learn more” link to provide more information about how your calendar data is being used
These improvements are live on Android now and have been submitted to the Apple store and will be available shortly.
5:45 – 6.5 million passwords leaked from LinkedIn
– According to a new report from Dagens IT, nearly 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords were recently dumped onto a Russian hacker forum.
– Of the millions of passwords dumped, Dagen IT claims that nearly 300,000 of them have been decrypted so far and that number seems sure to grow as users spread that hefty file around.
– The passwords are stored as unsalted SHA-1 hashes, and multiple reports on Twitter indicate that users have found their own hashes buried in the massive text dump. While unsalted hashes are much less secure than their salted brethren, it still takes a non-trivial amount of time to decrypt unless a user opted to use a common dictionary word as their password. It’s currently unknown whether or not the email addresses that correspond to those passwords have also been dumped, though if they are in someone’s possession, they apparently don’t feel like sharing.
– Considering that LinkedIn reported back in February that 150 million people use the professional networking service (a number that has certainly grown since then), the breach represents a relatively small number of users. Though chances are slim that you yourself are personally affected — 6.5 million people makes up less than 5% of LinkedIn’s userbase — those odds seem unlikely to assuage the concerns of people who are.
– Linked in confirm it…kind off
– We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:
Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in these emails. For security reasons, you should never change your password on any website by following a link in an email.
These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.
– Check if your password was leaked – http://leakedin.org/
– Horrible – wait until there’s a leak of Facebook passwords. Meltdown.
– Eharmony and Last.fm also have password breaches
– http://www.last.fm/passwordsecurity
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/us-news-blog/2012/jun/07/blogpost-eharmony-linkedin-hacked-leaked
– Eharmony lose 1.5m passwords – same hackers that affected LinkedIn
– As a precaution, eHarmony has reset the affected passwords, but did not say how many of its 20 million registered users might have been compromised.
– Security experts believe more than the 1.5 million listed have been stolen
– Lastfm – only breaking news tonight but asking all users to change their passwords
– This weekend will see me go long and random on all passwords, ditch accounts I don’t use and be totally reliant on 1password. A pain but like 2 step authentication on Google, a necessary evil.
9:58 – Twitter tops 400m tweets a day
– The stratospheric figure was revealed by the social networks CEO, Dick Costolo, who noted that spam (not really) and both mobile usage and revenue are outpacing desktops.
11:05 – Vodafone and O2 speed up 4G rollout through use of shared network
– Vodafone and O2 are clubbing together to speed up the roll-out of superfast 4G mobile broadband to virtually everyone.
– The nation’s second- and third-biggest mobile operators say they will pool their network of radio masts and antennas to enable them to cover 98% of the population by 2015.
– Combined, the companies will share a network of 18,500 masts which, they promise, will extend current 2G and 3G coverage to all but the most remote villages. They will also kit out the masts with 4G technology so they can offer mobile internet speeds fast enough to download and stream TV and music as soon as the government approves the sales of 4G licences.
– The deal follows the merger of Orange and T-Mobile UK to create the nation’s biggest network, run by a new joint venture company calledEverything Everywhere. Vodafone and O2’s deal is not a full-blown merger and the companies will continue to operate different airwaves. Three, the nation’s smallest operator, piggybacks on Everything Everywhere’s network.
– Saves money but does consumer really benefit? Looks like there is 2 mobile networks now in the UK.

We asked Brian Lancaster, mobile industry expert and friend of the show
Is the O2/Vod deal purely to save money?
1. Yes, it’s all about money. Mobile operators want to move as far away from site ownership and engineering as possible and focus on being content and bandwidth suppliers. British mobile operators used to have sizeable engineering teams which have reduced to single figures of permanent employees – most are now contract staff or whole areas of network management/maintenance/engineering is contracted to the likes of Ericsson.

Will it limit customer choice?
2. No. Punters will still have deals from both networks to choose from – the spectrum cannot be blobbed into one single operator lump as this would breach OFCOM and the monopolies commission rules (only O2 and VF have 900MHz spectrum – T-Mobile/Orange/EE have 1800MHz only).

Will it deliver 4G more quickly to UK?
3. No as the existing Cornerstone agreement allowed both operators to share the same sites (towers, rooftops or large indoor sites such as the Wembley, Hampden, Millenium or St James Park. O2 and VF will still have separate LTE/4G spectrum (bid for and awarded to them separately) and there will still be some duplication of network hardware.

surely it’s the government auction that will dictate the pace of 4G?
4. The current limitations/critical paths are:

i) LTE spectrum award/auction – it is not clear whether 700MHz or 2600MHz will be used.
ii) Agreement on technology standards.
iii) Greater range of consumer devices (can only come from i) and ii) ).
iv) Improved backhaul network to carry the additional data loads.
15:48 – Digital music sales outstrip physical sales for the first time in the UK
– The British Phonographic Industry has released a report showing that physical music sales have been eclipsed by digital sales in the UK this year — a landmark achievement that the US experienced in 2011. The report indicates that 55.5 percent of the UK’s music revenues came from digital sales, resulting in part in a 2.7 percent increase in overall revenue over Q1 of last year, totaling £155.8 million. In contrast, physical media sales fell by 15.1 percent to £69.3 million, though BPI’s chief executive, Geoff Taylor, says that CD sales remain a strong source of revenue.
– One of the BPI’s most interesting numbers relates to à la carte and subscription based revenue, which increased 23.6 percent in Q1 to the tune of £86.5 million, or around $133 million. Considering the difference in population, this jump in digital sales revenue is rather impressive when compared to the $241 million the US generated last year.
18:30 – Instapaper hits Android
– Like Flipboard and Instagram, Instapaper was a much vaunted iOS exclusive…until now
– The Instapaper for Android app looks and operates much like its iOS cousin, and brings all of the mobile features you would want to Android devices, including your saved articles, the ability to share articles right from your device, and all of the reading and customization options you could possibly need.
– Despite Instapaper creator Marco Arment’s long-stated claim that an Android app wasn’t on his radar, he let the folks who developed the Tumblr app for Android build this gem for him.
20:18 – Major Google Maps update
– At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Google announced that it will soon feature far better 3D maps in Google Earth. The company also announced that Google Maps for mobile will soon feature offline caching. This feature will come to Google Maps to Android soon. Google says it wants to bring this feature to all platforms in the long run.
– The company also announced that its Street View cars have now driven 5 million miles and collected 20 petabytes worth of imagery data. Google also announced that it is bringing Map Maker to South Africa and Egypt today. Google’s engineering director for Street View, Luc Vincent also announced that the company has now managed to put the hardware that Google uses to capture its Street View data into a backpack called the Street View Trekker.
– To model the world in 3D, the company will now use the 45-degree aerial images it already gathers from planes. Thanks to new imagery rendering techniques and advances in computer vision, Google can now retire its old 3D view in Google Earth and replace it with these new images. The result, which Google demoed today, is nothing short of spectacular. These new features will come to Android and iOS devices. Google expects this new technology will cover “communities of over 300 million people” by the end of the year.
24:53 – Google buys Meebo
– Meebo, the seven year-old chat service that morphed into a website toolbar and ad platform, is indeed selling to Google. The companyconfirmed the news a few minutes ago, and we’ve since dug up some more details.
– First, the amount. After raising some $70 million in four venture rounds, Meebo’s acquisition was in fact for around the rumored$100 million, we’ve heard from a source close to the matter.
– Second, we’ve learned that the product team will be using its expertise to help build out publisher tools for Google+. We don’t know if this means there’ll be some sort of new Google+ toolbar coming. But, presumably the existing Meebo properties will be morphed into G+ or otherwise closed.
– Finally, following the original tip we got today, we’ve confirmed that there are layoffs happening within the sales and marketing arms of the company.
25:40 – Google buys QuickOffice
– it has acquiredQuickoffice, a company best known for its mobile productivity suite for Android and iOS. Google plans to bring Quickoffice’s “powerful technology” to its own Apps product suite. Quickoffice allows its users to create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on their mobile devices. The company says its software is currently installed on over 300 million devices in more than 180 countries.
– The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed by either Google or Quickoffice.
– Quickoffice CEO and co-founder Alan Masareknotes that he hopes that “by combining the magic of Google’s intuitive solutions with Quickoffice’s powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow.”
– Given Quickoffice’s focus on building native apps for mobile devices, chances are that Google will use this acquisition to launch more of its own native mobile productivity apps as well.
26:59 – Airtime finally launched
– Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning — who are debuting their much-anticipated (and more family-friendly!) version of ChatRoulette today.
More than 15 years ago, Fanning and Parker were just teenagers trolling chat rooms. “We were both hackers,” Parker said in New York today. “We were interested in computer security. The goal was some sort of miscreant behavior…. We were basically cyber criminals.”
Today, their lives are a world apart. Parker is a multi-billionaire, even factoring in Facebook’s recent declines. Their launch in a Chelsea warehouse right now has Martha Stewart in the front row and Jimmy Fallon as the MC.
– Basically a family friendly chatroulette
– Got $35 million in seed funding
– Parker’s first call on Airtime during the demo was to television host and model Olivia Munn. The second was Snoop Dogg.
But the celebs didn’t save Airtime from an embarrassing five-minute stretch where the product didn’t work in demo mode (the real product hadn’t gone live yet). A call to Snoop Dogg took a few tries. When Joel McHale, a TV host came on, the product failed to work for several minutes. “Whose ass are you going to fire?” he asked Parker on-stage.
– Login via Facebook
– You could call it a more fun version of Skype, a one-on-one Google+ Hangouts with your Facebook graph, or the evolution of Chat Roulette. But what you’re going to call it is fun. Pull in a favorite YouTube video or select one you’ve already shared to Facebook and instantly you’re watching together. It feels simple, intimate, and casual — like you’re actually interacting in person.
– However your paired with strangers based on your social graph
30:34 – Microsoft at E3
– Halo 4 – new enemy (forerunner) and weapons, step change for multiplayer
– Splintercell
– Fifa and Madden with Kinect – swear and the ref could punish you
– Fable
– Gears of War – 2013
– Forza Horizon – End October
– New Kinect voice commands
– New sport TV options this year
– Xbox Music – Xbox, Windows 8, Windows Phone – doesn’t discuss features, 30 million tracks, analyst says coming to iOS and Android
– Nike Kinect training
– Xbox SmartGlass – http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3064855/microsoft-xbox-smartglass-preview
– Works with Windows, iOS and Android phones and tablets. Makes TV more engaging and games more thrilling.
– Can resume video playback on different devices
– The SmartGlass app provides other, less obvious details. For instance, as Game of Thrones airs on the TV, the tablet shows a map of Westeros, showing where in the world a particular scene is taking place. Neat!
– SmartGlass will also extend to games. Developers can also harness it to create companion utilities for Windows 8 tablets and Windows Phone smartphones.
– A Madden title is compatible with SmartGlass. Choose your plays, draw hot routes and control the players using a tablet.
– “And you can do that with any device.”
– Internet Explorer is coming to Xbox this year.
– “Xbox Web Hub” opens up the browser. Anything is a voice command or simple swipe away. Menu navigation is done with swiping and voice on the Kinect, but it looks like typing and other navigation features can be done on SmartGlass.
– Tomb Raider
– Ascend:New Gods – God of War for Xbox – tick
– South Park – game looked shit but loved the South Park creators taking the mick out of Smartglass
– Dance Central 3
– Call of Duty:Black Ops 2
– Emphasising the ecosystem which is getting pretty strong. No new console…all next year?
40:28 – Nintendo at E3
– Pre-E3 demo showed many new things
– Wii-U gamepad
– http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/03/wii-u-gamepad/
– Nintendo has made some notable tweaks and revisions to the prototype version detailed last year at E3, adding a new NFC reader and writer, motion and gyroscope sensors, and fully-independent infrared TV remote functionality. The thumbsliders have been replaced by analog thumbsticks, which now support L3 and R3 inward depressions. Nintendo has also made adjustments to the controller’s ergonomics and dimensions, adding new handgrips on the bottom, making the Gamepad wider, and adjusting the button layout.
– Headphone jack and stylus
–
– Calling it the WiiPad? Wii U Gamepad?
– Wii U Pro controller
– http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/03/wii-u-pro-controller-unveiled-looks-awfully-familiar/
– Nintendo launch an Xbox Controller for the Wii U
– Miiverse for Wii U
– http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/03/miiverse-announced-for-wii-u/
– Miiverse is an online system planned for the company’s upcoming system that displays a Mii plaza on the Wii U GamePad – it’s looking like a much expanded version of the Wii’s Mii Plaza feature.
– The plaza will show Mii characters gathering around game icons and feature a messaging system for players to connect with players they both do and do not know, as well as a variety of other asynchronous functionality. The messaging system includes a “spoiler” checkbox to prevent players from wrecking a friend’s game experience (should they choose to use it), as well as the ability to send images and drawings to one another. Miiverse will also feature a social networking-style “wall” of sorts, where players can post screenshots from games.
– Miiverse will also inhabit the 3DS and mobile devices (Android, iOS) in the future, though it will not be available immediately at launch.
– Pikman 3
– Super Mario Bros U – classic 2D Mario game – friend can use gamepad to place blocks
– Batman: Arkham City – use touchscreen to control unique aspects in game
– Scribblenauts
– Darksiders II
– Mass Effect 3
– Tank, Tank, Tank
– Tekken Tag Tournament
– Trine 2
– Ninja Gaide 3
– Wii Fit U
– Sing – new music performance game – gamepad displays lyrics – gamers…sing
– Lego City Undercover – open world lego game, use gamepad to find…criminals?
– 3 games from Ubisoft – zombi u, rayman legends, something else, just dance 4
– Nintendoland – Wii U’s version of Wii Sports – 12 attractions
– No pricing or release date for Wii U
– 3DS
– Super Mario Bros 2
– Paper Mario:Sticker Star
– Luigis Mansion Dark Moon
42:20 – Sony at E3
– Beyond: Two Souls – live the life of a video game character – from creators of heavy rain – looking great and ‘stars’ ellen page
– Playstation All Stars Battle Royal – fighting using PS characters on Vita and PS3
– Playstation Plus – more free games coming to subscribers – this month Infamous 2 and Saints Row 2 – also free for a year to all those in the E3 audience
– Littlebigplanet 2 DLC – turn Vita into a controller
– Far Cry 3 – 4 player coop & free DLC on PS3
– Assassins Creed 3 – free DLC on PS3
– Vita – Call of Duty and Assassins Creed 3 this October, PSOne classics also coming
– Wonderbook – make books come to life with Eye and Move. Working with JK Rowling.
– HTC will be first Playstation Suite non Sony partner – now renamed Playstation Mobile – kick in the pants for Android gaming?
– God of War ascension – looks as good as ever but still with the QTE – March 2013
– The Last of Us – new from Naughty Dog (uncharted) – survival horror in post pandemic world – again looked very good
– Move – not much mention (unlike Kinect) although there is a racing wheel that yo plug the move controller into coming this year
– Also outed the gold controller – sums up everything wrong at E3
44:52 – Ubisoft at E3
– Just Dance 4
– Far Cry 3
– Wii U is coming out…so theres a Rayman game
– ZombiU – zombies…on the Wii U
– Assassins Creed 3 – looked very good
– Watch_Dogs – 2013 – GTA/Bladerunner/24/Rubicon – looked pretty amazing – http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-06-05-ubisofts-watch-dogs-unveiled-platforms-not-yet-disclosed
47:54 – EA at E3
– Dead Space 3 – Feb 2013
– Madden – control team from other devices
– Simcity – looked very impressive
– Battlefield – 5 expansion packs – new vehicle and maps – lots of new content
– Medal of Honour Warfighter – out October, uses Frostbite engine – environments are getting destroyed
– Fifa 13 – FIFA club getting a lot of attention, FIFA 13 on ipad, android connected to console game, new iPhone app connected to the social club – gameplay – updated impact engine, more dribbling
– Need for Speed Most Wanted – Open world driving game, where players race, chase and explore competing to become Most Wanted among their friends. That … sounds like Burnout Paradise – October 30th – video looks great 🙂
– Crysis 3 – 2013
48:42 – Missing at E3
– 3D
– streaming games (Onlives iOS client still in review…after 6 months)
– new consoles

Picks
Chris
Input Output
– A new chrome experiment for Google IO 🙂

Tam
Productive Macs Bundle
– 8 great Mac app’s for $39.99 – closes in 10 days
– RapidWeaver, DEVONthink, Printopia and MailTags are really good app’s

Ian
MacUpdate Bundle
– 11 great Mac app’s for $49.99
– Parallels Desktop 7, Screenflow, Civ V and Busycal are excellent
– If you wanted just Parallels or ScreenFlow this bundle would save you money and get you some extra free app’s

Competition Winner

A few weeks back we ran our first ever DigitalOutbox competition. As it was our first, we were a bit tardy with getting the prize shipped but after a couple of weeks we eventually employed good old Royal Mail who shipped the t-shirt to our winner.

Congratulations again to Brian (friend of the show but this wasn’t staged – honest!) who deserves a gold star for wearing the O2 t-shirt…while on site at O2. Hopefully we’ll run another competition soon when we, em, find a free prize.

DigitalOutbox Episode 119

DigitalOutbox Episode 119
DigitalOutbox Episode 119 – Twitter privacy issues, Facebook IPO and the Google Knowledge Graph

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

Shownotes
1:08 – Twitter Updates
– Will support Do Not Track
– Twitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data.
– Twitter announced that it will officially support “Do Not Track,” a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.
– Thats GOOD however
– Micro-blogging site Twitter is to start recommending users for you to follow, based on your recent web browsing history. The site calls these ” tailored suggestions,” and it will track your footsteps across the web by using integrated Twitter buttons and widgets as surveillance outposts. So, every website with a “Tweet this” button will log your visit.
– Then, the social network can recognise which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular websites, and recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days. It’s specifically targeted at new Twitter hatchlings, as it hopes to provide them with a relevant list of accounts to follow as soon as they’ve made an account. Right now, Twitter has a default handful of popular users — including Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian — that it shows to all new sign-ups.
– There’s an obvious privacy worry, but Twitter’s Othman Laraki writes, “we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience.”
– Thats NOT SO GOOD however
– Twitter now sends weekly e-mail digest
– Twitter just added a new feature that sends you a weekly email with the most popular tweets and links from people you follow.
– Sadly, Twitter signs you up without asking you, so you’ll have to take some action to get rid of them. You could wait until it comes and unsubscribe directly from the email, but if you want to stop them before they start, just head to Twitter’s Settings > Notifications > and uncheck the “Weekly digest of Stories & Tweets from my network” box at the bottom. Save your changes and you should never have to see one of those buggers make its way into your email.
– Thats POOR
5:12 – Facebook IPO
– Finally hits the stock market for $38
– Banks keep the price at just over $38 on day one but shares in Zynga drop 13% and they are suspended
– Monday sees Facebook drop
– It’ s a bubble!
– Facebook gets suited because some information only given to institutional investors…http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/23/us-facebook-lawsuit-idUSBRE84M0RK20120523
12:21 – Facebook Camera
– Facebook on Thursday announced a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Facebook Camera, which is intended to make it easier to take pictures and share them on Facebook.
– Dirk Stoop, a Facebook product manager for photos, said that the application was much faster than the current Facebook app for Apple’s iOS, and that it puts photos at the center of the experience.
– “We can basically show you more photos on the app, so we can make a more immersive experience around your photos,” Mr. Stoop said. “On the side of publishing these photos, Facebook Camera lets you upload much higher resolution photos at up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels wide.” The standard Facebook application uploads lower-resolution pictures.
The application will also finally bring photo filters to Facebook.
– Facebook Camera will offer 15 filters, and will also include tools for cropping and straightening photos, much like the photo editing tools within Apple’s photo app. The filters will include cool, light, bright, golden, cream and neon. “They are stylistic in nature, they are not just enhancements,” Mr. Stoop said.
– It might seem strange for Facebook to release a camera application with built-in filters just weeks after announcing plans to buy Instagram, the social photo app. But Facebook Camera is aimed at a different audience. Instagram has 40 million users, while Facebook has 900 million. This leaves a large swath of people who are not on Instagram but are actively taking photos and uploading them to Facebook. The filters in Facebook Camera were developed by Facebook and are not borrowed from Instagram.
14:20 – HP to lose 27000 employees
– Restructuring
– 27,000 employees to go worldwide
– The company said the cuts – about 8% of its workforce – will reduce costs by up to $3.5bn (£2.2bn) a year.
– HP employs about 350,000 people worldwide and about 20,000 in the UK.
18:22 – Yahoo Axis
– Yahoo introduced its new Axis browser tonight, with versions for the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as plugins for the top desktop browsers.
– The company briefed a media army on the product and the consensus is that it’s very good. My favorite headline from Gizmodo: “Yahoo Came Out With Its Own Web Browser and It Actually Doesn’t Suck.”
– It’s a slick offering, which essentially eliminates the texty link-filled search page for one of pretty visual tiles and pull-downs and more. Think Pinterest of search and you have the general idea.
– iPad app is nice but US only for the moment – won’t replace my browser but something different. It’s more than handsome enough, it runs very smoothly (thanks mostly to its WebKit underpinnings), and your bookmarks sync between devices quickly once you make sure you’re logged in.
– Not sure if it’s a browser as such
21:43 – Google finally gets Motorola
– Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion.
– As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android ecosystem: while Motorola will be making devices using the platform, it will also remain open.
– “It’s a great time to be in the mobile business…I’m confident Dennis [Woodhouse] and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page writes.
26:06 – Google launches the Knowledge Graph
– The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.
– Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.
– Helps you get a good summary of the search topic and go deeper if you wish to
28:26 – Waterstones teams up with…Amazon
– Waterstones will sell Kindles in their own stores and also the best Kindle experience
– The thinking seems to be that since we all like browsing in bookshops, and we all like reading on digital devices, combining the “singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop” with the “best digital readers” will make for the best of both worlds. But that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of the digital reading experience. Full disclosure: I don’t use a Kindle, but price aside, the attraction of the Kindle experience seems to be that you can have lots of books, straight away – neither of which is usually much of a problem when you’re standing in a bookshop. And the risk that Waterstones runs is that by welcoming its greatest rival onto the high street it puts Amazon’s device into the hands of its most committed customers.
– The terms of the deal won’t be announced until the autumn, but the success or failure of this deal will be determined by what people think digital reading is
– Basically says Kindle is the device/platform for reading books. Amazon wins.
30:36 – O2 rolling out 42Mbps 3G to major UK cities
– UK mobile network operator O2 has confirmed it is currently rolling out a variant of DC-HSPA which will support connections of up to 42Mbps. Although the dual-cell HSPA technology can support impressive speeds, the technology will still operate as 3G ahead of the 4G spectrum that is being planned for the UK. British owners of the latest iPad or Nokia Lumia 900 (devices that support DC-HSPA) will be able to take advantage of the speeds providing their local mast has been upgraded. O2 says it’s rolling out to “major UK cities,” but there’s no word on exact locations.
– Three is also planning to rollout a 42Mbps version of DC-HSPA over the summer and T-Mobile / Orange are planning to support the technology later this year. Vodafone, the fourth major UK network operator, started to rollout a variant of DC-HSPA last year, but with support for up to 28.8Mbps — the company says it has no plans to support the 42Mbps variant.

Picks
Henry
Swordigo
– £1.49
– Nice platform/adventure.
– Quite easy but nicely done.

Ian
Habit List
– £1.49
– Helps create good habits and break bad ones
– Add a habit, pick frequency, track how often you keep or break habits
– Looks great – finding it very handy

DigitalOutbox Episode 117

DigitalOutbox Episode 117
DigitalOutbox Episode 117 – Pirate Bay, John Lewis Broadband and Google Drive

Playback
Listen via iTunes
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Shownotes
0:49 – Pirate Bay blocked in the UK
– File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled.
– The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly-pirated free music and video.
– Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site. A sixth ISP, BT, has asked for more time to consider its position.
– “Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists,” the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.
– The BPI’s chief executive Geoff Taylor said: “The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale. “Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them. “This is wrong – musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else.”
– In November 2011, the BPI asked the group of ISPs to voluntarily block access to the site. The request followed a court order to block Newzbin 2, a site also offering links to download pirated material.
– The ISPs said they would not block the site unless a court order was made, as is now the case.
– Virgin Media told the BBC they will now comply with the request, but warned such measures are, in the long term, only part of the solution.
“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”
– http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-unblock-the-pirate-bay-111004/
– The UK Pirate Party is also prepared for the block and is offering a reverse proxy which allows blocked Internet users to access The Pirate Bay. – http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
– With censorship and plans to monitor traffic, is it time to configure a VPN?
3:25 – John Lewis Broadband
– John Lewis Broadband offers no activation fees, freephone support and a free wireless router. There are three packages, all on 12-month “no hidden catches” contracts.
Standard – up to 16Mbps, 20GB cap, £24.50 a month
Unlimited – up to 16Mbps, No limit, £31.50
Fibre – up to 38Mbps, 100GB cap, £38.50
– In the any questions section of its website John Lewis Broadband says it uses traffic management. Also the service will “let you know if you’re approaching your package’s limit. Once you’ve reached it you can buy more gigabytes for £5 per 5GB”.
– This is not the budget end of the market, where Tesco Broadband plays, for instance.
– Never knowingly…?
4:46 – Facebook buys Patents from Microsoft
– Facebook announced today that it will pay $550 million to Microsoft for the right to 650 patents and patent applications. Microsoft acquired those patents and hundreds of others in a deal with AOL earlier this month.
– The move comes as Facebook wades deeper into the waters of patent litigation while it readies for an IPO expected in May. The social network is in a major patent lawsuit with Yahoo and is also wrestling with dozens of smaller patent suits.
– The Facebook purchase is especially intriguing, however, as it suggests a deepening strategic alliance between Facebook and Microsoft . The latter was an early investor in the social network and both companies have common rivals in Google and Apple.
– Microsoft acquired 925 AOL patents and patent applications in an auction for $1 billion. Shortly after, reports stated that Facebook had been an unsuccessful bidder in the auction.
6:16 – Skydrive Improves
– Today, we’re excited to take another big step towards our vision by making SkyDrive far more powerful. There are new storage options, apps that connect your devices to SkyDrive, and a more powerful device cloud that lets you “fetch” any file from a Windows PC. Taken together with access from popular mobile phones and a browser, you can now take your SkyDrive with you anywhere, connect it to any app that works with files and folders, and get all the storage you need—making SkyDrive the most powerful personal cloud storage service available.
– Here’s what’s available for use, starting now:
SkyDrive for the Windows desktop (preview available now). View and manage your personal SkyDrive directly from Windows Explorer on Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista with this new preview app available in 106 languages worldwide.
Fetching files through SkyDrive.com. Easily access, browse, and stream files from a remote PC running the preview app to just about anywhere by simply fetching them via SkyDrive.com.
SkyDrive storage updates. A new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage as their needs grow.
SkyDrive for other devices. We’ve updated the SkyDrive apps on Windows Phone and iOS devices, bringing better management features and sharing options to those devices. We’re also releasing a new preview client for Mac OS X Lion, letting you manage your SkyDrive right from the Finder.
– So to claim your free 25gb, you need to upgrade to that option on the skydrive site
9:17 – Dropbox Improves
– We’re super excited to announce a whole new way to share: now you can send a link to the files or folders in your Dropbox!
– Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required! This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email.
– Dropbox for Windows and Mac Updated with Auto Photo Uploading and Up to 3 GB of Additional Free Space
– Windows/Mac: The desktop Dropbox client has been updated with the ability to automatically upload photos from SD cards and smartphones directly to Dropbox. When you do so, you’ll get a free 500 MB of space and if you continue to upload pictures you can get up to 3GB of additional space.
11:51 – Google Drive
– Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.
– Today, we’re introducing Google Drive
Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just… there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.
– You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.
– So more free than dropbox but less user friendly?
Privacy issues? PC Mag
17:54 – Apple
– they’ve got loads of cash ($110 billion). Nothing more to say, is there? Well,
– Looks like Tim Cook doesn’t quite want to go as “thermonuclear” on rival phone makers as Apple founder Steve Jobs did. Cook didn’t sound so eager to pursue patent infringement suits against Samsung, Motorola and HTC on today’s quarterly earnings call.
“I’d highly prefer to settle versus battle,” Cook said on Apple’s earnings call today. “But you know the key thing that’s very important is that Apple doesn’t become the developer to the world.” He added very pointedly, “I’ve always hated litigation. We need people to invent their own stuff.”
– WWDC – June 11th – 15th – nothing more to say. iOS 6? Mountain Lion?
– could buy Amazon and Nokia and RIM http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/04/24/apple-could-theoretically-buy-amazon-nokia-and-rim-with-its-pile-of-cash/
22:19 – O2 Mobile Wallet
– Mobile network O2 has launched a smartphone app that allows users to transfer up to £500 via text message.
– It also allows customers to “digitise” their debit and credit cards to speed up purchases from online stores.
– The firm also intends to allow users of phones with near-field communication (NFC) chips to make contactless payments in high street shops.
It is the latest of several firms to charge retailers a transaction fee for making it easier to shop.
– The service will be free to consumers at first, but O2 said that it would charge 15p for each money message sent by text at a later date.
– The network provider said that more than 100 retailers had agreed to accept payments from the service. They include Debenhams, Comet, Sainsbury’s Direct and Tesco Direct.
– Users can also benefit from a search facility that compares how much goods cost, the ability to load money onto the app from their debit cards and a “transaction history” that keeps track of what they have spent.
– The firm said it had held off introducing contactless payments as only a handful of retailers had installed the necessary systems.
– O2 and its rivals Vodafone and EverythingEverywhere are working on a national mobile payments service – dubbed Project Oscar. They had hoped to have it up and running in time for the London Olympics. But the project is held up in Brussels, subject to an anti-competitive investigation.
24:45 – Visa launches v.me
– European digital wallet
– Launching this Autumn
– Combine bank accounts, credit cards into a payment service accessed via username and password
– It’s PayPal!
– Web only – mobile app’s and NFC…soon
25:32 – Spectrum is 30
– Released on April 23rd in 1982, the machine typified the British approach to industrial design – utilitarian but also idiosyncratic and characterful. It should have been buried by its more powerful contemporary, the Commodore 64, but somehow this strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computingmarket, especially in Britain.
– Partly its success was about price. Since the launch of the ZX80 computer two years earlier, restless British inventor Clive Sinclair had been interested in computing for the masses.
Using cheap components and a minimalistic approach to design, he was able to manufacture machines at a lower cost than rivals such as Acorn, Apple and Tandy. The computer’s rubber keys, for example, were created from a single sheet, with a metal overlay to separate them – much less expensive than producing a conventional keyboard.
– So while the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A option and the C64 hit the shelves at around £350, the Spectrum launched at just £125 for the 16k version or £175 for the mighty 48k.
– Fond memories anyone?

Picks
Henry
TunnelBear
– easy to use VPN
– free for 500mb per month
– $4.99 pm for (unlimited) or $49.99 for a year

Ian
ScoTutor for Mac
– for Mac or iOs
– Free for a limited time
– Great tutorial app for those new to Mac’s
– 150 minutes all about the Mac – great if you’ve just picked up a Mac, or you parents for example have just started on a Mac.
– ScoTutor for iPad also now free, on Mac and iPad

DigitalOutbox Episode 104

DigitalOutbox Episode 104
In this episode the team discuss MegaUpload, Is Google Evil, Acta and Apple’s record quarter.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

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

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

DigitalOutbox Episode 89

DigitalOutbox Episode 89
In this episode the team discuss Apple, Lulzsec and Google Search.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

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

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

DigitalOutbox Episode 82

DigitalOutbox Episode 82
In this episode the team discuss the Amazon Cloud Player, Google +1 and an expensive fail for Rupert Murdoch.

Playback
Listen via iTunes
Listen via M4A
Listen via MP3

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

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