Andy Roberts

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• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/how-gold-farmers-reap-huge-harvest-from-online-gaming

  Estimates suggest 400,000 people are employed to build up credits in online games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest by virtual gold mining or r such ways of building up in-game credits that can be translated into real value.This article titled “How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming” was written by Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th May 2011 19.15 UTCTens of millions of people spend hours and pay big money for virtual gains on the most popular multiplayer online games, including World of Warcraft, Eve Online and EverQuest.Behind these games are “gold farmers”, who spend hours within the games each day, gathering virtual credits and selling them to gamers for real world cash.The most recent estimates, from 2009, suggest that 400,000 people are employed as gold farmers across the world, with 85% of those in China and Vietnam, according to Professor Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester.These gold farmers are almost entirely males between 18 and 25, and most are either cash-strapped college students or unemployed rural migrants. They sell in-game advantages – an increased skill level, or a virtual ore – to players eager to boost their online reputation.The multiplayer online games industry has boomed in recent years thanks to increased internet access and the rise of social networks. World of Warcraft, easily the most popular of its kind, had 12 million subscribers last year.According to a report published by the World Bank last month, gold farming was worth about $3bn (£1.85bn) in 2009 – most of which was kept by developing countries. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gamingRelated posts:Farmers collaborate online to face rural uncertaintyOnline advertising in the UKRolling Your Own Online Office

  

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  May 29 2011, 9:16am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven

  As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini

  

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  May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/17/boot-up-facebooks-oauthpocalypse-bing-friends-facebook-and-more

  Plus Nvidia boss explains why Android tablets aren’t selling, and Nokia ‘rebrands’ Ovi. Also Facebook and Bing.

  This article titled “Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.30 UTC A quick burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Facebook’s Own (Smaller) “OAuthpocalypse”: Devs Have 48 Hours To Secure Apps >> TechCrunch “Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their policy against sending authentication data to third parties. Those developers have 48 hours to fix their apps or they risk being “subject to one of the enforcement actions” — read: being booted.” Bing Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing >> Bing Community Big move: “Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.” Nvidia CEO: Why Android tablets aren’t selling |>> CNET News “During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, ‘Consumers want more apps for Android tablets.’That’s not the whole story, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who I chatted with on Thursday…“”It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,’ he said, for starters.Though Huang didn’t mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. ‘The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn’t have,’he said. ‘Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones,’ he said.He didn’t stop there. ‘And it’s a software richness of content problem,’ he added, echoing Jha’s comments.”3G’s there because Android is a phone OS. Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rt Hon George Osborne MP, at Google Zeitgeist 2011 >> HM Treasury It didn’t sound that content-ful when he read it out, either – open data hirings and cyberattacks apart. Honeycomb has a fighting chance against the iPad >> Techcrunch “Don’t get me wrong: Honeycomb 3.0 on the Galaxy Tab is still buggy as hell. Sometimes I feel like the browser is a game — tap the wrong thing, and you’ll suddenly jump to the bottom of a webpage, or all animations will get sluggish. Even the 3.1 update, which I just tried out on my Xoom and will be available for the Galaxy Tab in a few weeks, doesn’t seem to have fixed all the performance kinks. And Android Market still appears to have fewer than 100 applications optimized for the tablet form factor.“But I think that will change soon.” This must be some strange new meaning of the word “soon” that we’re not familiar with. Then again, they handed out tablets to everyone at Google I/O. Didn’t they do that with Google TV? And look how that’s turned out. Oh. Top 10 awesome Android features that the iPhone doesn’t have >> Lifehacker Numbers 7-10 are unequivocally good, though the top 3 – “control your phone from your computer” (uh?), Flash (hmm) and “App integration” (leads to annoying modal dialogs) we’re less sure about. The evolution of Nokia and Ovi >> Official Nokia Blog “Starting with first services on some of the new Nokia devices in July and August, Ovi services will be rebranded as Nokia services in a transition expected to continue into 2012. Each of the services under the Ovi umbrella will simply be rebranded as Nokia, with no planned disruption to the service roadmaps.“Nokia’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Jerri DeVard explains the shift: ‘We have made the decision to change our service branding from Ovi to Nokia. By centralizing our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful master brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture..’” So why was “Ovi” ever chosen if there’s this powerful master brand? The whole situation should become a case study in a book on marketing. You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBoot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more

  Related posts:Blog Friends app on Facebook Facebook MySpace and Linkedin friends Blog Friends growth accelerates to 10% a day

  

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  May 17 2011, 2:57am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/16/apple-studies-patent-infringement-claims-by-lodsys

  Patent holding firm Lodsys claims revenue from Apple iPhone and iPad 2 app developers, but critics say it is abusing the patent system

  This article titled “Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th May 2011 16.24 UTC Apple’s legal department is understood to be “actively investigating” claims by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas, to have a claim against iPhone and iPad developers who use in-app purchase systems.

  So far Lodsys has served papers on about a dozen iOS developers who it says are infringing its patent 10/732,102, which it bought in 2004 from the inventor, who filed it in the 1990s, covering user interaction over a network.

  Apple is not expected to respond to the claims, which have been passed to it by affected developers, until later this week.

  Lodsys is asking for 0.575% of US revenue for in-app purchase. Although that may not be substantial for individual developers, one told the Guardian: “0.575% of the in-app purchase market across all platforms would be a very nice figure to have indeed. And, of course, it’s 0.575% for this patent today. Tomorrow it’s another 1% from some other company, and so on.”

  Lodsys says that Apple has licensed the patent covering in-app purchasing – but adds that it can still claim for payments that use the technology in developers’ own apps. “The scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide ‘pixie dust’ to bless another third-party business applications [sic]. The value of the customer relationship is between the Application vendor of record and the paying customer,” notes the blog’s author, believed to be Lodsys‘s chief executive, Mark Small. “The operating system is acting as an enabler and the retailers are acting as a conduit to connect that value.”

  In a series of blog posts, the company notes that Google and Microsoft have taken out licences, but notes that “so far no one has asked” whether apps written on those platforms might be liable for licence fees.

  A number of iOS developers received couriered documents last week from Lodsys claiming payments were due following their use of in-app purchases.

  The move has worried app developers, who see it as a dangerous and slippery slope where they become liable for payments to third parties after using the in-system APIs that they are required to by the mobile OS company. Apple does not allow apps that use other systems for purchasing to be sold through its app store, and Google is also tightening its rules on app APIs.

  Lodsys is also suing a number of larger companies including Samsung, Brother, HP and Motorola Mobility.

  Lodsys comments on its blog that:

  “There are lots of bills in life that it would be preferable to not pay if one didn’t have to. Lodsys is just trying to get value for assets that it owns, just like each and every company selling products or services is, trying to do business and make a profit. It’s odd that some of the companies that received notices had such a visceral reaction. Some of these companies have our favorite apps, for which we paid the asking price. We realise you have to get paid for your work and so do we.”

  One developer told the Guardian: “They do imply they’ve have a horrible weekend, but then again, I seem to be the one who hasn’t slept properly since Friday, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who sent the letters in the first place! It feels very hypocritical for them to paint themselves as the victim here.”

  Florian Mueller, who has tracked patent disputes in the US and EU, suggests on his blog: “Lodsys is trying to abuse the patent system in a way that could ultimately destroy the entire mobile apps economy, which is not only thriving on its own but has been and continues to be a key factor in making new mobile devices so useful and popular.”

  He says: “It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid,” adding: “Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and” Lodsys, which bought them from the inventor.

  Mueller fears that if Lodsys prevails it will buy more patents and use them against small app developers who would be unable to defend themselves; and other companies would follow its business model, “shaking trees for money that you just can’t lose because your opponents can’t even defend themselves”.

  The risk to the mobile app economy is huge, says Mueller, and this move by a small, relatively unknown company might be the final straw needed to get the mobile companies, including Apple – which is the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue – to lobby the US administration finally to do something positive about software patents. The problem is, what?

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogApple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys

  Related posts:Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’

  

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  May 16 2011, 11:39am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/the-cyberplague-that-threatens-an-internet-armageddon

  The unchecked rise of malware could culminate in a massive global event that would change forever the way we use the broadband internet

  This article titled “The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.04 UTC In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the “creeper” on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the “reaper”. Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world. For as we became more and more dependent on information and communications technology, we were also subjected to a plague of what came to be called “malware”. It’s an ugly term, as befits something that covers a multitude of sins, all involving computer code designed with destructive or malevolent intent. It includes not only viruses, which are programs that replicate by copying themselves into other programs, but also worms (self-replicating programs that use a network to send copies of themselves to other machines on the network, with or without human assistance) and Trojans (similar to viruses but instead of replicating they infiltrate a computer and perform some illicit activity, possibly under remote control). Malware also refers to other evils: the junk mail we call spam; “phishing”, or trying to hoodwink internet users into revealing bank account passwords etc; page-jacking, which makes it difficult or impossible for a victim to get rid of a web page; and other scams. The malware plague has gone through several phases. It began in a harmless and experimental way with the creeper and a worm released on to the internet in 1988 by Robert Morris, a student from New York State’s Cornell University. Morris wanted to find out how many computers were connected to the internet so he wrote a small program that would install itself on every machine it found and send back a “present and correct” message. But there was a flaw in his code that meant the worm replicated. On 2 November 1988, network administrators realised something was up because their machines – and the network itself – had slowed to a crawl. In the end, the culprit was identified and carpeted, though it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm: Morris is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Malware began on the internet, but its next phase involved the stand-alone machines we now call personal computers. In 1982, a Pennsylvanian teenager named Rich Skrenta created the “elk cloner” virus that infected the Apple II, then the most popular personal computer in upmarket US households. Skrenta’s virus covertly altered the floppy disk needed to boot up the computer, displaying some doggerel on the screen on start up. It was annoying but harmless. Early PC malware tended to be like that – irritating but not terribly destructive. And malware spread slowly, because most of these PCs were not networked; infections spread by “sneakernet” – ie users sharing floppy disks. The real trouble began when domestic internet use exploded in 1993. From then on, an infected PC was a potential menace not just to its owner, but to other machines with which it communicated. For many people, early malware was a baffling phenomenon. It was seen as something akin to physical vandalism in the real world – hooligans despoiling an environment for no obvious reason. What motivated them? Nobody knew, though several psychologists had a go at explaining it. The notion that malware was motiveless destructiveness was fuelled by the fact that much of it was imitative, carried out by “script kiddies” – non-programmers who downloaded DIY virus-construction kits. In the 1990s, malware development accelerated. When Microsoft released Windows 95, it rapidly became the de facto standard for the PC industry and the world’s IT systems came to exhibit the characteristics of a monoculture: millions and millions of PCs across the globe, all running the same software, all sharing the same security vulnerabilities. At the same time, domestic broadband connections became common. Suddenly, there were millions of machines, operated by people with little understanding of computer security, with shared vulnerabilities and fast connections to the network. Most importantly, malware found a business model in the late 1990s. The fragility of the monoculture could be exploited for profit. Spamming – junk emailing – could now be done on a truly gigantic scale. Hitherto, it had required identifiable servers with broadband access to the net. But the new broadband environment offered a better infrastructure. All you had to do was find machines with fast connections, unpatched security vulnerabilities and non-savvy owners and infect them with a Trojan that would turn them into relay stations for spam (and which could be turned off just as easily, to avoid detection). Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you’re selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you’ll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you’ll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up “botnets” – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site’s servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on. Domestic PCs that have been compromised by Trojans can be put to other uses too. For example, they can covertly monitor their user’s keystrokes when logging into banking and other sites, thereby stealing passwords and credit card details. At a recent presentation by officers from Soca (Serious Organised Crime Agency), I was struck by a slide that showed how highly developed the online market in stolen credit card data had become. It showed a marketplace for “USA 100% APPROVED TRACK2 DUMPS” in which Visa debit card details were going for $8 and American Express details were $10. On another such marketplace, American MasterCard details cost $15 while European credit card details were going for $40 a pop. “Buying large quantities,” it said, “prices are negotiable for every customers.” (Grammar and spelling are not a speciality in this particular netherworld.) We’ve come a long way from the creeper and elk cloner. The driving forces behind contemporary malware are financial gain and organised crime, much of it with its headquarters in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. One of the most blatant examples of an online marketplace in stolen credit card data was CarderPlanet.com, a website ostensibly based in Vietnam, but operated by people based in Russia and Ukraine, and now shut down. A senior US secret service official described CarderPlanet as “one of the most sophisticated organisations of online financial criminals in the world” which had been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community”. Some of the principals behind CarderPlanet were arrested after an intensive campaign by the US authorities. But one of them, Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, was subsequently released by the Ukrainian authorities and has allegedly started a political organisation called “the Internet Party of the Ukraine”. The latest round in the malware saga came in June last year when the Stuxnet worm finally broke cover. Stuxnet infects Windows computers and spreads mainly via infected USB sticks, so it doesn’t require the internet for dissemination. Once a USB stick infects a machine, it uses a variety of tricks to infect other machines on the local network and to take control of them, but with an added twist. It looks for a special kind of programmable logic controller (PLC) made by the German company Siemens. If a PLC is found, the worm infects it using a vulnerability in the controller’s software and changes its code and thus its behaviour. This is scary because these Siemens controllers play a critical role in virtually every industrialised plant in the world, including water treatment plants, electricity grids and oil refineries, and nuclear reprocessing facilities. One target of Stuxnet was Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons programme, specifically the gas centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. It is claimed that the worm reprogrammed the Siemens PLCs to cause over 900 centrifuges to spin uncontrollably while at the same time feeding back “normal” data to the plant’s operators, thereby concealing the problem until it was too late. The fact that this has set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years has led to speculation that the worm was the creation not of criminal hackers, but of a state agency (possibly Israeli or American). This hunch was supported by the fact that Stuxnet seems a pretty sophisticated piece of malware. Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, estimates that it would have taken eight to 10 accomplished programmers six months to design, implement and test it under laboratory conditions. It’s difficult to imagine the criminal hacking fraternity having the resources to do that. Why has malware become so pervasive and so difficult to combat? The main reason is that malevolent innovation is the downside of the open architecture of the PC and the internet. The combination of an open, programmable PC and a network that is open to anyone created a “generative system” which was uniquely hospitable to what has come to be called “permissionless innovation”. This had some amazing benefits – it gave us the world wide web, for example, Wikipedia, the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server software that powers a majority of the world’s web sites. But it has also given us the malware plague. There is another, deeper, fear – that the mysterious botnets that have been assembled by the merchants of malware may one day be used in some co-ordinated way to engineer a massive global event – cyberspace’s equivalent of 9/11, if you will. If something like that were to happen, then the response of governments everywhere would be draconian. Just as civil liberties in western democracies were massively eroded by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror”, so the freedoms we have hitherto taken for granted in cyberspace would be correspondingly curtailed. The day might come when you’ll need a government licence to connect to the internet. Bob Thomas’s creeper could have a creepy inheritance.

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  May 1 2011, 9:06am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Game facing 60% drop in profits, warn retail analysts

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/26/game-facing-60-drop-in-profits-warn-retail-analysts

  The computer game retailer Game, is expected to publish results badly affected by the rise of digital downloads in the same way as music filesharing has hit record shops.

  This article titled “Game facing 60% drop in profits, warn retail analysts” was written by Andrew Clark, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC Britain’s leading computer games retailer, Game, is likely to reveal a plunge in profits of up to 60% this week as electronic entertainment enthusiasts shun high street shops in favour of digital downloads. Game, which is expected to name former Ladbrokes boss Chris Bell to replace its soon-to-retire chairman Peter Lewis, is forecast by analysts to deliver profits of £37m-£39m for the year to January, a dramatic drop from £90m a year ago, in spite of the success of hit games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops and Fight Night Champion. In common with music specialist HMV, the company is facing fundamental structural challenges as sales migrate onto the internet. In a strategic review in February, Game promised a “step change” in its own online offering, pledging to triple digital sales to £300m by 2013 to offset weak trading at its 1,300 shops. Analysts at Deutsche Bank have suggested Game could be a takeover target for US retailer Gamestop, which has a handful of shops in Britain and is rumoured to be considering expansion.

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  April 26 2011, 12:48pm | Comments »

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  Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

  Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

  This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

  We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

  At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

  Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

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  April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Spotify to halve free music allowance

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/14/spotify-to-halve-free-music-allowance

  Spotify is notorious amongst musicians for only paying a fraction of the royalties that other online music sites pay to bands. But it’s popular with music fans for allowing them to listen to almost anything on demand. Now they are being forced to bring in new restrictions

  This article titled “Spotify to halve free music allowance” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 09.31 UTC Spotify is to cut back the amount of free listening available to users from 20 to 10 hours.

  From 1 May, the music streaming service will reduce by half the amount of free music available to its six million users in the UK and Europe.

  Under the new restrictions, non-subscribers will only be allowed to listen to an individual track a maximum of five times. New users will be moved on to the restricted model within six months; it will apply to existing users from 1 May.

  Since its 2008 launch, Spotify’s free offering has proved popular enough to tempt more than 1 million people to become paying customers.

  Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder, announced the changes in a blogpost on the company’s website on Thursday.

  “Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen,” he said.

  “So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.”

  Ek said that the changes would mainly affect heavier users of the service, and that users would still be able to listen to around 200 tracks or 20 albums for free each month.

  The move will no doubt rankle with some music fans, who had grown used to Spotify’s free streaming service being “too good to be true“.

  The first commenter on Spotify’s official blogpost lamented: “So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I’ll go back to pirating music again then.”

  More details soon…

  • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook

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  April 14 2011, 6:19am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Click to Download: YouTube, Cut Copy, Stereogum Monthly Mix

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/click-to-download-youtube-cut-copy-stereogum-monthly-mix

  YouTube is already fundamental to online music, but now it’s expanding its official content and moving into live streaming.

  This article titled “Click to Download: YouTube, Cut Copy, Stereogum Monthly Mix” was written by Chris Salmon, for The Guardian on Wednesday 13th April 2011 15.30 UTC At last year’s BT Digital Music Awards, YouTube beat Spotify, Last.fm, MySpace, SoundCloud and BBC 6 Music to the publicly-voted title of “Best Place to Hear Music”. That, as well as the genuinely rapturous response to the site’s win from the audience of young pop fans, underlined the fact that, for many, YouTube is as much a cherished on-demand music listening resource as it is a video site. Now, they’ve expanded that service. Following a number of one-offs, YouTube has unveiled a dedicated streaming section, youtube.com/live, where selected YouTube partners can webcast live. One of the first to take advantage is the Coachella festival, America’s nearest equivalent to Glastonbury, which will broadcast a selection of its acts, from today until Sunday. Head to youtube.com/coachella from tonight to watch live footage of artists, slated to include the National, Mumford & Sons, Duran Duran, PJ Harvey, Interpol and Cut Copy. That last act is also the latest band to appear on the excellent Swedish music TV programme Klubbland, a 20-minute show which features a short interview with a particular artist alongside live highlights of their gig in a Swedish venue. The Cut Copy episode, which you can watch in full at klubbland.se, features the groovesome Australians wandering around Malmo searching out good coffee and old records, before belting out three songs in the city’s Kulturbolaget venue. Meanwhile, the previous episode features Glasvegas discussing their success and playing some of their new songs in snowy Stockholm. Trawl back through the other 27 shows uploaded so far and you’ll find Lloyd Cole, Teenage Fanclub, Lykke Li, Beach House and, perhaps best of all, Robyn. It’s hard to think of a British music TV show as tasteful and enjoyable as this. According to a study of 4,500 US high-school students published last week, only 22% of teenagers would be willing to pay 99¢ to download a single track, despite the fact that 77% of them admitted to downloading music from the internet (with almost two-thirds getting it from file-sharing sites). In that climate, the offer of a (seemingly) legal free download isn’t as exciting as it once was, but it’s still worth checking out the latest Monthly Mix from Stereogum, the mighty US music blog. The compilation, available from bit.ly/sgapril, features 10 mostly-excellent tracks from acts recently featured on the site, including their three latest Bands to Watch, all of which happen to be impressive, female-fronted indie/electro popsters. With the album also featuring a gorgeously sparse track from the new solo album by Smog’s Bill Callahan, it’s definitely worth a download. Send your favourite links to chris.salmon@guardian.co.uk

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  April 13 2011, 11:14am | Comments »

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  30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad

  New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.

  This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.

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  April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Now That’s What I Call Music goes digital

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/11/now-thats-what-i-call-music-goes-digital

  New service from 1980s tapes maker “Now That’s What I Call Music” allows fans to make and download own compilations.

  This article titled “Now That’s What I Call Music goes digital” was written by Alexandra Topping, for The Guardian on Sunday 10th April 2011 20.51 UTC Back in the dry-ice-swept and pre-digital days of the 1980s, their endless series of twin-packed cassettes supplied the latest in cheesy chart fodder. Now That’s What I Call Music! was the compilation that everyone had but no one would admit owning. Three decades on, Now has finally taken a leap into the digital age, with its website allowing fans to create and download their own compilations. To spread the word, the company helped organise 500 house parties across the UK, where teenyboppers, pop fanatics and pressured parents from Cornwall to the Highlands danced around their living rooms to party tunes such as Jessie J’s Do it Like a Dude and Britney Spears’ comeback single Hold it Against Me, made their own playlists on the Now website, and took photos which they were then encouraged to share on Facebook. The new marketing campaign is a recognition that while advertising billboards and a glossy picture of New Kids on the Block may have sold music in the 90s, they have little impact in 2011, said James Foley, music editor of industry newsletter Record of the Day. “It’s a brilliant mix between a Tupperware party and an online social network,” he said. “In the past, kids made mix tapes and took them into school on Monday morning, but now they are going to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter. That’s how the noise is made.” Giles Harris, managing director of party organisers Come Round, which has organised similar bashes to promote Usher, JLS and The Wanted, explained how from the seed of a 10-person party a nationwide campaign is spawned. “In the real world, everyone who comes to a party tells at least 10 others, and through Facebook and Twitter they reach about 50 more – so for those 500 parties, you are actually going to touch around 375,000 people,” he said. But it isn’t just a sneaky sales technique dressed up as good fun, he insisted. “No one at these parties has anything forced on them, it is not like receiving junk mail. Organisers apply to hold a party – they get the album before its release as well as other goodies. If we are being sneaky at all, it is just by making it lots of fun.” As one party organiser, Andrew Crotty, croakily put it the morning after his bash: “Everyone loves a freebie.” After holding several Come Round parties for his 10-year-old daughter and her friends, they had become so popular that he held his Now festivities in a nightclub, where events took a rather more debauched turn. “We had a lot of fun, put it that way. We had a couple of streakers – you’ll be amazed at what some people will do to get their hands on a free CD.” The new marketing technique reflects record labels’ obsession with marketing directly to customers, said Harris. “In the past, EMI or Universal’s customer was HMV or Woolworths, but now they want to go straight to the fan. Through the parties they get to be in the lounges of their consumers for more than four hours.” Labels and artists also benefit from the most powerful form of marketing – word-of-mouth. According to research from Nielsen, 90% of consumers rate friends as their most trusted way of discovering products, and 60% tell 10 or more friends if they like something new. PR agent Mark Borkowski said the move reflected a shift from selling a product to getting consumers to buy into it. “Music fans know how to get music for free, so record labels need to find ways, like Radiohead, of giving them more value.” In an industry that is strapped for cash – album sales declined by a further 8% last year – harnessing that power makes economic sense, said Pete Duckworth, joint managing director of Now. “Social networks are hugely powerful means of marketing music. You have a readymade community to market to. The fan gets something they want, the record company doesn’t waste money advertising to people who aren’t interested, and the artist gets to speak directly to their fans.” Now and then Since its launch in 1983 Now That’s What I Call Music! has been as much an integral part of the pop psyche as prefab girl groups and perfectly coiffed teen heartthrobs. Despite the demise of other pop institutions such as Top of the Pops, Smash Hits and Hit Man and Her, the series has remained in robust health, its 2010 Christmas album one of its best sellers to date. Through the years Now! has ridden the waves of potentially tempestuous format changes. Starting out on vinyl and cassette, early compilations had accompanying VHS (and earlier Betamax) tapes with music videos of classic 80s artists such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the immortal Kajagoogoo. The first double CD came in 1987, vinyl lasted until 1996, and cassettes to 2006 before finally giving up the ghost. There was a brief fling with MiniDisc from 1999 to 2001, and in 2005 Now 62 became the first Now album to be released as a digital download. Robbie Williams is the most featured artist in Now!’s 28-year history with 30 different songs with, without and with again Take That while with the nation’s sweetheart, Cheryl Cole has featured 25 times. The honour of being the longest-standing star, getting songs on to both Now 1 and Now 68 belongs, quite rightfully, to Phil Collins.

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  April 11 2011, 3:57am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Justin.tv boss: ‘We want to replace the camera app on the phone’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/01/justin-tv-boss-we-want-to-replace-the-camera-app-on-the-phone

  Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel has grand ambitions for the company’s iPhone video clip app Socialcam

  This article titled “Justin.tv boss: ‘We want to replace the camera app on the phone’” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 1st April 2011 14.32 UTC US startup Justin.tv started life as one man livestreaming his daily life to the world, before evolving into a platform for anyone to broadcast video over the internet from their webcams – and more recently from their phones.   However, the company’s future may lie more with its new Socialcam iPhone app, which focuses on helping people upload short video clips and share them across social networks. Launched at the start of March, the free app sailed past 200,000 downloads in a couple of weeks, with claims that it does for video what apps like Instagram and Picplz do for photos.   Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel certainly has grand ambitions for Socialcam, as he explained to Apps Blog in an interview. “We want to replace the camera app on the phone,” he says. “That’s our goal: to be used by almost everyone who’s got a smartphone to store all of their media, and distribute that media wherever they like.” Which is what anyone would say when pitching their social video startup, although Seibel’s talk of replacing the camera app – not to mention his deliberate use of the word ‘media’ – makes it clear that Socialcam’s current focus on video will expand in the future, most likely to photos first. Socialcam was born in response to feedback from the Justin.tv livestreaming iPhone app, which was downloaded more than four million times in the first six months after its release in March 2010. “We realised that more than 90% of views of those videos were not people watching live, but after the fact,” says Seibel. “What’s more, the videos themselves were not broadcast as live videos: they were taken as video clips. So we wondered why people were using our live video app to take video clips – wasn’t this a solved problem? And it turned out that it wasn’t.” Seibel has a point. Smartphones like iPhone and Android handsets are good at uploading people’s video clips to YouTube, but not so good at helping these videos to be shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s iPhone app does allow users to upload video clips directly, but the feature is somewhat hidden beneath the ‘photo’ button, while Twitter’s is still photos only. “The whole process was broken, so we’re trying to solve the problem of sharing videos from the phone,” says Seibel. Three months’ development led to the launch of Socialcam, during which time photo-sharing app Instagram made its own burst to prominence, with two million downloads. “Their success showed us there is a massive amount of room in this space to take on the big boys,” says Seibel. “They’re not scared of Facebook, and nor should they be. They’re doing a really good job in their niche.” However, Seibel resists the label of ‘an Instagram for videos’ that has been applied to Socialcam in some early press coverage. “We think of ourselves as much more like a Facebook Photos for video”. Hence the ability to tag friends in Socialcam videos. Justin.tv has strong views about what its new app is and is not for. Seibel says it’s focused on the personal – videos of people’s friends, family and nights out – rather than a tool for people to broadcast to the world, as the livestreaming apps were intended to be. “We don’t see this as YouTube,” he says. “This isn’t people producing videos for general consumption. We don’t even put a view-count on the videos. What we’re really about is that there is a moment happening now with a small circle of friends, and all the people in that video would love to watch it later.” How to make money from this? Like many apps of this kind, Socialcam is currently going for reach – the maximum number of users – rather than monetisation. That said, Seibel says that in-app payments for additional features may play a role in the app’s future, along with subscription-based pricing, and possibly charging for storage as Socialcam users build up a collection of videos. Justin.tv is also looking at the new range of tablets, led by Apple’s iPad 2, which come with front and rear cameras as standard. “For me, iPad 2 and tablets in general are really exciting from a front-facing camera perspective, making those short video clips where you’re talking about where you are or what you’re interested in, and your face fills up the entire screen,” he says, while declining to give any specific details about a Socialcam app for iPad. Meanwhile, Socialcam is already having a big effect on Justin.tv’s approach as a company. “We are no longer iterating and improving on our live video app,” says Seibel. “We are putting all our resources into solving this more basic problem. Live is much more of a niche case than video clips.” Which is when he comes back to the idea of becoming the default camera app for smartphone users. “YouTube could never control the ingestion point: they always had to use your phone or digital camera or Flip video or webcam,” he says. “But on smartphones, we suddenly get to leapfrog all those other devices and control the ingestion point, with the potential to reach many more people than Sony or Flip or Panasonic with their dedicated video creation devices. Smartphones should completely disrupt that market, except on the extreme high end.” The big challenge for an app like Socialcam will be the competition in trying to become that default camera app: competition from Facebook in particular, but also from handset makers, OS platform owners and other startups with VC money to fling at the social photos ‘n’ videos area.

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  April 1 2011, 4:00pm | Comments »

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  iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/30/ipad-2-where-can-i-buy-one-in-the-uk

  Supplies of Apple‘s iPad 2 are running perilously short – but more iPad 2s are expected to surface before the weekend.

  This article titled “iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 30th March 2011 15.04 UTC Apple’s iPad 2 has been virtually out of stock in the UK since its launch on Friday. Streams of shiny geeks have been left dissapointed and empty-handed by gadget shops up and down the land. But we have good news. Dixons, PC World and Currys expect to get more iPad 2s in stock today. Most will be going to those who have pre-ordered, but if you hurry you might just be able to buy one over the counter. Fancy that. Argos, meanwhile, has been left woefully short handed. Its 750 stores in the UK and Ireland ran out of stock on Monday – and doesn’t expect to get any more until 25 April. Sounds like a bad April Fools’ joke. At Phones4U, which was reported to have been given just one iPad 2 for each of its 500+ stores, the devices are only “down to the last few”, according to a spokeswoman. No word, yet, on when more will be available. John Lewis, which is famously “never knowingly undersold”, has sold out. The retailer says it will have more of the Apple gadgets in time for the weekend. As does Tesco, which encourages customers to order online. Now, over to you. Tweet @GuardianTech or @JoshHalliday with the store name, location (preferably with the postcode), and whether there are any iPad 2s in stock. We’ll update the map below.

  Click here for a larger map.

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  March 30 2011, 10:58am | Comments »

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  Q&A: Plutonium detected at Fukushima

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/29/qa-plutonium-detected-at-fukushima

  Finally they are starting to talk about the Plutonium with Japanese authorities confirmed that they had identified plutonium in soil samples around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. What risks does plutonium radiation pose?

  This article titled “Q&A: Plutonium detected at Fukushima” was written by Alok Jha, science correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 29th March 2011 14.15 UTC How dangerous is the plutonium found in the soil at Fukushima? Plutonium is a radioactive metal with a half-life of more than 24,000 years. It emits alpha radiation, which is a stream heavy particles that can be stopped by skin and clothes but which is very dangerous if it enters the body. Like other forms of ionising radiation, alpha particles can disrupt the activity of biological cells and damage DNA, which can lead to cancers. Potentially, plutonium dust in the atmosphere could be breathed in and become lodged in the lungs, or the metal could get into food supplies or drinking water, where it might be ingested by people or animals. If there is a fire or the fuel rods in the reactors are damaged, plutonium could be released into the air or ground. Where did the plutonium come from? Plutonium is a by-product of the nuclear reactions, so it would be present in any of the reactors. However, it is most concentrated in reactor number 3, which is the only one of the six at the Fukushima plant to use plutonium-239 as part of its fuel mix. The detection of plutonium could mean that there has been a partial meltdown at reactor number 3, though that cannot be confirmed. How much has been detected in the environment? Exact amounts are uncertain, but the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has found plutonium in two of five soil samples, and the Japanese authorities have said that it probably got there as a result of the nuclear accident rather than from other sources, such as natural background. “Traces of plutonium are not uncommon in soil because they were deposited worldwide during the atmospheric nuclear testing era,” said a statement on the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency. “However, the isotopic composition of the plutonium found at Fukushima Daiichi suggests the material came from the reactor site, according to Tepco officials. Still, the quantity of plutonium found does not exceed background levels tracked by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology over the past 30 years.” But Hidehiko Nishiyama, an official from Japan’s nuclear safety agency, said: “While it’s not at a level harmful to human health, I am not optimistic. This means the containment mechanism is being breached, so I think the situation is worrisome.” How far could it travel? Richard Lahey, who was General Electric’s head of safety research for boiling water reactors when the company installed them at Fukushima, said that radioactive material that has leached into the land is likely to bind to the soil and stay there, while any plutonium released into the sea would become diluted and disperse.

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  March 29 2011, 9:45am | Comments »

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  How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/how-the-ipad-revolution-has-transformed-working-lives

  Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launched, Charles Arthur looked at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work.

  This article titled “How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives” was written by Charles Arthur and Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb”, designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA   Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA   Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF   David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF   Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net], to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  Related posts:Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2 iPad 2 queues start 33 hours early as demand expected to beat supply

  

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  March 27 2011, 4:51am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/25/while-you-were-sleeping-australians-end-long-wait-for-ipad-2

  Australians have been queueing up for the Apple iPad 2 for just as long as Britons – almost two days – and the numbers in the line built up to more than 300 in many locations

  This article titled “While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2″ was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th March 2011 06.29 UTC While you were sleeping, the iPad 2 went on sale in Australia, and it seems to have drawn a lot of attention. This was the queue at 0704am this morning in Sydney…

  Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved …and this was the queue by sale time at 5pm:

  Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved (Thanks to Beau Giles in Sydney who took a whole set of pictures through the night. People had been queueing outside the Sydney Apple store for almost two days: some told World News Australia that it’s all about meeting people: Canadian backpacker Alex Lee arrived in Sydney on Wednesday to be first in line to buy Apple’s iPad 2 and has theorised on the phenomenon. “I call it the 90/10 rule for Apple – 90 per cent is about the people, the experience and just the whole feeling and 10 per cent is about the product itself,” the IT consultant said. CNet Australia says there were around 300 people queueing at the Brisbane story in Chermside and that they had started at around 5.30am that morning. Large queues were also seen in Hobart. And lest you think it’s only a game for the whippersnappers, the Australian newspapers found Sally Johnson, aged 73, who “may be hot and tired, but that hasn’t deterred her from queueing…” (It’s not the heat of summer in Sydney – it’s just turning to autumn. Which is still hot compared to the UK, of course.) Johnson has recently emigrated from Nottingham. She was roughly 250th in line. And why was she there? “Queuing for her son Mark, who was at work.”

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  March 25 2011, 7:43am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/are-social-photo-apps-trapped-in-a-silicon-valley-bubble

  Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them

  This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.

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  March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »

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