HP made its play for the lucrative mobile market with a number of products that will be powered using its own operating system, sending a message to Microsoft that the clock is ticking for its Windows OS.

 

During a two-hour presentation at a disused fort situated by San Francisco Bay, the world’s biggest technology company unveiled two new phones and its long awaited tablet computer that will be driven by its webOS. The Veer is tiny, the size of a credit card and the Pre3 is aimed at the smartphone market.

The centre piece of the whole presentation at Fort Mason was the TouchPad. Apart from all the specs, I can’t really say how it handles because the demos in the backstage area were done by HP professionals and we mere mortals were not even allowed to touch them.

Early industry word is that the TouchPad will open up the competition in the tablet market. Sure Apple dominates with its iPad, which it got out of the gate months before anyone else. Since April last year the company has sold almost 15m devices.

RIM’s Playbook, which should find a solid foothold in the enterprise market, is due out in March for around $500.

 

Google is putting up a good fight for market share now that it has finally unleashed its Honeycomb operating system to developers, an OS specifically designed for tablet computers.

Morotola’s Xoom, which was the darling of the consumer gadget fest CES in Las Vegas last month and is powered by Android’s Honeycomb, is due to hit shelves next week. Still no word on price though. However, early rumours peg it at roughly $800. The basic iPad is $499 and a survey earlier in the year by the Consumer Electronics Association said that the sweet spot was between $500 and $700.

Talking of price, there are no figures for HP’s TouchPad, Veer or Pre3.

Why? There is no doubt the number crunchers have come up with a figure that works for the company and gives a return they can more than live with given the growth potential of tablets, so why not just put it out there now?

When Apple announces products it tells you how much it is going to hurt your bank account and when they hold a press conference they have real products in the back that you can actually touch and mess around with.

 

At the end of the presentation, HP dropped a bomb on Microsoft by announcing that its laptops and desktops will also be powered by its webOS. No-one would tell me what this means for its relationship with Microsoft and Windows, the de facto OS in most PC’s but I did speak to one or two industry analysts about the situation.

Microsoft has nothing to worry about, for now, Charles Golvin at Forrester Research told me.

“It is crucial to underscore that having webOS in a PC does not necessarily mean not having Windows. If you think about it in the way in which a Mac user today can run Windows, the same thing would be true for HP products – having a PC running Windows but also delivering the webOS experience.
 
“At this stage one does not exclude the other. Clearly though the reason HP bought Palm was for the webOS platform – so they could have a software platform that they could control and allow them to design a unique experience across all their devices.
 
“The truth is if they put only webOS in their devices starting tomorrow, they wouldn’t be able to sell PCs into the corporate world and that means for the moment Windows remains at the core of the PC experience for all manufacturers including HP.”

However Mr Golvin said that situation will undoubtedly change as time moves on.

At the HP event the big focus was tablets and as far as analysts, industry watchers and bloggers were concerned, Microsoft is not even at the races here.

“What is interesting here is that HP chose not to parent with Microsoft but spent over a billion dollars buying Palm and doing it for themselves,” said Michael Gartenberg, senior analyst with Gartner.

“No-one is even mentioning Microsoft right now. They are just not overly relevant in the tablet space right now. They have a decent product with Windows 7 but the consumer mass market has not embraced Windows as a tablet platform despite the fact Microsoft has been pushing tablet PCs for ten years. This is not good for the software giant when tablet computing is one of the hottest products generating so much revenue that Microsoft is not even part of the conversation.”

Forrester’s Mr Golving agrees that Microsoft should be worried that it has been left behind in a market that many forecast will sell as many as 50m tablets this year alone. He said:

“In the broader context of the growing category of connected devices that are increasingly in consumers hands, Microsoft is losing share of that broad market. They have a very weak presence in the smartphone market and virtually no presence in the tablet market.
 
“Given those weak presences in these two fast emerging markets, the strategic challenge for Microsoft is they need a software platform the device manufacturers can count on for delivering a compelling experience across these various platforms and not just on PCs running Windows.”

Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP’s personal systems group, noted that by 2014 one in five adults will own a tablet.

There is little doubt that growth potential of tablets is evidence that Microsoft needs to get its head in the game quickly or prepare to cede the market to Apple, Google and perhaps RIM and HP.

Read More

A year and a half after cutting the ribbon on its Palo Alto HQ, Facebook has just unveiled plans to quit that complex and move six miles up the road to Menlo Park to a home that will house the social network’s expanding employee base.

With a workforce of around 2,000, two-thirds of which are in the Bay Area, Facebook is busting at the seams. That is very evident when you walk around the place with people always milling around, the cafeteria’s always brimming with employees and the overcrowded car park.

The world’s biggest social network, which celebrated its seventh birthday last week, is growing like a weed and predicts that this year will see their hiring department working overtime to fill new posts.

There are 3,700 parking spaces at the new campus and room for 3,600 people, reporters were told during a news conference to unveil the new premises. When questioned, David Ebersman, chief financial officer admitted the company is planning to “add people”. While he refused to be drawn on precise figures he did say “Facebook is growing 50% a year in terms of headcount and our growth plan is to continue hiring in the Bay Area.”

The new digs which were built between 1993 and 1995, was Sun’s corporate HQ until Oracle bought it for $7.4bn in 2010. The campus takes up 57 acres, has nine sprawling buildings and totals about one million square feet.

Facebook said it has also purchased an adjacent 22-acre tract that is connected to its new campus by a tunnel for possible future development.

Facebook did not say how much this is all costing but said Menlo Park did not offer any tax breaks to entice the hot Silicon Valley company to its neighbourhood.

Menlo Park Mayor Rich Cline said that while snagging Facebook was a coup, it won’t be a walk in the park selling the idea to the locals.

“It is a dynamic company and will bring that dynamic brand to our town” but despite the “great excitement” at Facebook moving to the area there will be a healthy debate going forward.

The mayor said that the big problems that need to be ironed out centre around jobs, housing issues, traffic and the impact on schools.

Talking of impact, Facebook is taking on three fellows from the Environmental Defence Fund to map out a plan that will reduce the environmental burden of the project and save money.

“This is not just a feel good thing, this makes good business sense,” said Melanie Janin of EDF.

“Embedding these fellows in companies helps embed an understanding of pairing environmental innovation with business sense. You can cut costs and your carbon footprint.”

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley making real estate news.

Last month, Google announced it was leasing the famous Frank Gehry “Binoculars” building as part of its drive to hire 6,000 new people this year and expand its southern California base.

Rumours have been swirling for weeks that Twitter is looking to leave San Francisco and head to the town of Brisbane.

Seems highly unlikely and if the city by the Bay has anything to do with it, they will pull out the stops to keep this tech company in town. Stories are emerging that the city will offer Twitter tax breaks to stay put.

Of course all this address changing is a clear signal that Silicon Valley is on a major expansion drive and the quest for talent is only going to heat up.

Read More

All day Tuesday search giant Google traded barbs with search upstart Bing, owned and operated by the world’s biggest software company, Microsoft.

At the heart of this dispute is a claim by Google that Bing has been watching what people search for on Google and then taking those results and using them to improve the results that Bing dishes up to users.

“I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book,” Google fellow Amit Singhal told the industry blog SearchEngineLand.com.

“It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work. I don’t know what else to call it but plain and simply cheating,” said Mr Singhal.

The issue started back in the summer of 2010 when Google said it was looking at search queries for an unusual misspelled query. In this case it was the word torsorophy which should have been spelled tarsorrhaphy – and is in actual fact a rare surgical procedure on eyelids.

In a lengthy blog post, Mr Singhal who oversees Google’s ranking algorithm said “Google returned the correct spelling – tarsorrhaphy – along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling.

“Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction. This was very strange. How could they return our first result to users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.”

Google said at that point, it smelled a rat.

“This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries.”

Mr Singhal said the company then embarked on an experiment or a sting operation to test out their suspicions that “Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking”.

Google created about 100 “synthetic queries” that there was no way on earth users would type. For example hiybbprqag or delhipublicschool40 chdjob or juegosdeben1ogrande – that would be gobbledigook to you and me.

Google said each time it attached a wrong result to these nonsensical queries, Bing delivered the same results.

Hours after a story about the whole issue appeared in SearchEngineLand, Microsoft fired back in retaliation.

In defence, Bing’s corporate vice president Dr Harry Shum explained in a blog post:

“[W]e use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.
 
“To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back handed compliment.”

So neither an outright admission nor a denial.

At a conference in San Francisco, Google and Bing came face to face at an event organised by Microsoft to discuss the future of search.

During the Big Think Farsight Conference, Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Dr Shum traded a few insults over the issue.

Mr Cutts levelled the cheating claim at Bing while Dr Shum also went for the jugular accusing Google of profiting from spam sites.

Meanwhile over on Twitter, Microsoft’s communication head Frank Shaw cranked things up when he tweeted his view on why Google embarked on the sting operation and why it decided to go public with the results.

The tech blog TechCrunch has them staked up, but in one Mr Shaw tweeted:

“Don’t be fooled. Google wants to change the subject because they’re under investigation in the US and Europe for manipulating search results.”

This contretemps looks like it is destined to get a lot uglier.

Interestingly enough, Rich Skrenta the chief executive of the Blekko search engine, which has been written about here, also took part in the conference. He said this issue pointed to a bigger problem which was that there are only two dominant search engines left on the web and that there should be more options.

With Yahoo’s search results now being delivered by Bing, this of course is where Blekko comes in.

Read More

This year at the world’s gadget jamboree, the Consumer Electronics Association, 3DTV was being given the hard sell.

The same big push happened in 2010 with the likes of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg telling the BBC that 3D was the future.

As for the viewing public and whether or not they will part with their hard earned dollars for a big ticket item like a 3DTV, well the forecasters are bullish.

A report by Companies and Markets this week estimates the market will hit $100bn by 2014.

Another report by DisplaySearch noted that 2010 was a dud in terms of sales with 3.2m sets shipping but the company said that figure will rise to nearly 18m for 2011.

The big barrier says DisplaySearch’s Paul Gray is down to what’s worth watching:

“People will only buy a 3DTV if there is enough content to watch, and in 2010, there simply was not enough 3D content available. As a result, only 4% of TVs 40″ and larger had 3D capabilities.”

James Cameron’s hit with Avatar did woo millions of people to the big screen to watch 3D done at its best. Since then there have been a plethora of movies that reviewers say just seem to have had 3D slapped on them so the theatre can charge more for the privilege.

One big naysayer of 3D and the efforts by studios to render everything in this mould is Pulitzer prize winning film critic Roger Ebert who has written for the Chicago Sun Times since 1967.

He hates 3D and maintains our brains just can’t handle the visuals.

“It doesn’t work with our brains and it never will,” Mr Ebert has opined in his latest column.

“The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous.”

Helping Mr Ebert bring in the closing credits on 3D is an award winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch who won an Oscar for his sound editing on Apocalypse Now and the English Patient.

Mr Murch told Mr Ebert that watching a 3D movie is like “tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult.”

It forces us as humans to do “something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for”.

Read his explanation here in a letter he has written to the critic.

As far as Mr Ebert is concerned, Mr Murch’s word on the whole affair now proves “3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.”

Do you agree or disagree with Mr Ebert and Mr Murch? Are you thinking of buying a 3DTV this year?

Read More

Apple’s earnings call one day after announcing that the boss Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence had to be one of the best attended since, well, the last time he took time off in 2009.

Apple may well have crushed its financial results with record quarterly revenue of $26.74bn and record net profits of $6bn but the company and investor analysts failed to please the scores of journalists listening in on the call.

Sure there was provocative talk about Android tablets being nothing more than “scaled up smart phones’ and concerns about the supply line for iPhones, but all we wanted was for them to talk about Steve.

After the parade of impressive figures delivered by chief operating officer Tim Cook, who will be stepping in for Mr Jobs while he is away, we waited with baited breath poised for a mention of his fearsome leader.

Nothing.

OK not to worry. The analysts would take this one because of all the talk about how and whether Apple can survive without Mr Jobs at the helm. Shannon Cross of Cross Research got the first question after someone else bumbled with the line and couldn’t get through.

Here we go I thought – the game is really on.

Alas, our hopes died at the first hurdle. Ms Shannon asked a perfectly fine question about iPhone shortages, but it wasn’t the one the legion of journos on the line wanted to hear.

In fact in the hour long call not one person outright asked anything about Mr Jobs. It was the elephant in the room. Meanwhile on Twitter a firestorm of comments were swirling about the issue. The press are only allowed to listen in on the call, not probe with unwelcome questions.

The only analyst who got near to becoming our saviour was Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray when he quizzed Mr Cook about giving some guidance of a future roadmap.

It resulted in the first mention of Mr Jobs from Mr Cook.

“In my view, Apple is doing its best work ever,” Mr Cook told analysts. “That we are all very happy with product pipeline, and the team here has an unparalleled breadth and depth of talent and a culture of innovation that Steve has driven in the company, and excellence has become a habit. And so we feel very, very confident about the future of the company.”

And that was more or less it.

Afterwards I asked Mr Munster why not one analyst asked about the impact Mr Jobs’ medical leave would have on the company or about future successors.

“You have one question to ask,” he explained.

“There was no conspiracy among analysts and no gag order. People were free to ask what they wanted but it would have been a wasted question because we knew that we would get a dead end answer.”

Mr Munster said the fact there was no mention of Mr Jobs in the opening statement told analysts it would have been a waste of time pursuing the issue:

“Steve Jobs said in his statement he wanted privacy and this was one way to do that – downplay the issue by not even mentioning it in the opening earnings statement. As an analyst it is a question we are clearly interested in but they clearly didn’t want to talk about it. With one question to ask it was not one worth asking in these circumstances.”

OK so for the moment that is Apple’s prerogative. The latest figures are hardly likely to result in an uproar from shareholders, for the moment.

Outside of one infinite loop however, there have been scores of people commenting on the future of Apple without Mr Jobs at the helm day-to-day and what this latest absence means to a company so closely identified with one man.

I have also indulged in this latest sport by speaking to Adam Hanft of brand strategy firm Hanft Projects whose clients include Match.com and Virgin mobile. Mr Hanft said:

“Apple has pulled off what has been here-to-fore nearly impossible – which is becoming a brand that is both simplified and sophisticated at the same time. They have democratised technology and normally when a company does that they have a stigma of being less than cool. That hasn’t happened with Apple because of their aesthetic value. Apple is the only brand that has managed to revolutionise access to technology, not make it daunting but make it fun and cool for the user.
 
“We talk about the ‘Apple Tax’ where you pay extra for Apple products because they are perceived as cool. Steve is a big part of that ‘Apple Tax’. For the man on the street, they believe there is something very magical about the brand and they are buying a product that is a reflection of today’s Henry Ford – cutting edge – and that association helps add brand value to an incalculable degree.”

Mr Hanft said while there has been a strength in having Apple so closely identified with one man, that is also its weakness:

“There is a heightened emotional connection to the devices rather than the man himself. There is a huge amount of respect for him as an entrepreneur, a businessman, an innovator, a visionary and a leader but he does not exude warmth the way say Oprah does or Martha Stewart. He does not have the same accessibility factor as they do.
 
“There are a lot of companies out there playing catch-up fast from Sony to Samsung to Google and part of Apple’s lead has been this brand duopoly between the products and Mr Jobs.”

He also said that Mr Jobs’ decision to remain as CEO with his hand on the tiller from a distance does not help the company or Mr Cook who will be running things in the interim:

“One way to put the company in the strongest possible position would be to make Mr Cook the acting CEO. It would send a strong and important signal that Mr Jobs has faith in Mr Cook to run things the way they are needed and of course the way he did when Mr Jobs took medical leave last time. To not do this reinforces the ‘one man one company’ issue.”

I reported earlier in the week about the shock and sadness felt by many in technology circles at Mr Jobs’ decision to take some time off to get better.

Among those extending their best is Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg who has become very friendly with Mr Jobs.

In a posting on his wall, Mr Zuckerberg wrote “Steve, you’ve done so much good for the world already. I hope you get better soon.”

Read More

The recent so-called “snowpocalypse” laid the north-east corner of America low and threw the festive travel plans of thousands of people into chaos because planes, trains and automobiles really couldn’t go anywhere.

Take a look at this video called “Idiot with a Tripod” by film maker Jamie Stuart to show how it all looked on Boxing Day.

It has been estimated that the snow storms resulted in the cancellation of as many as 4,000 flights in and out of New York alone.

But one Fortune 100 company thinks that the devastation to flight schedules and travel plans needn’t have been that bad if the technology they are developing had been in play.

Honeywell’s Synthetic Enhanced Vision System has been described as something straight out of Star Wars that allows pilots to “see” even when true visibility is at zero.

“Pilots know how to fly an aircraft by looking out the window. It’s the first thing they learn to do, but in bad weather or low visibility that isn’t enough”, said Chad Cundiff who is the vice president in charge of the SEVS project.

“What we can do with our technology is give a pilot a view of the world that is always clear and sunny regardless of what goes on outside his cockpit. We show a pilot what he really cares about like where is the runway, we show the airport, the terrain and mountains.
 
“We don’t show clouds because obviously one of the benefits of the technology is to see through the clouds – to have it appear like a clear sunny day even when it is not. We can also show the energy, fuel being used, the state of the aircraft, how fast it is going and which direction they are heading to, if they have enough energy (fuel) to clear a particular mountain and where the aircraft is going to end up.”

The system dubbed SEVS relies on a number of technologies including a rich 3D view of the world taken from a GPS database to real time images captured by infrared sensors that would show any planes or obstacles on the strip that otherwise couldn’t be seen by looking out the cockpit window.

Mr Cundiff said Honeywell’s “terrain database” is made up of data gathered over 800 million flight hours.

The biggest problem for most airports is low visibility. The Federal Aviation Authority reports that 55% of all flight delays are due to bad weather.

Generally speaking if an aircraft cannot see the runway at a height of 200ft, it will not be able or allowed to land. Mr Cundiff said Honeywell’s system can lop at least 50ft off that limit.

“Our analysis shows that airports shut down because of weather and that what we find is that 50% of the time that additional 50 feet would open an airport up 50% of the time it is shut down. In other words we would be able to cut down in half the amount of airports that have to close because of weather issues.”

Think about the amount of money an airport and an airline can save if they are able to take off and land without the weather grounding them. Also think of the expense when an aircraft has to land at an alternative airport because weather prevented it landing where it was scheduled to.

Mr Cundiff said that on average the cost of diverting a Boeing 737 jet is around $6,000 (£3,861.42).

Honeywell is busy testing their product and working with the authorities to consider using it.

To date Mr Cundiff told the BBC that Honeywell had clocked up 100 flight hours in tests involving aircraft and 1,000 flight hours in the lab. He estimated that it would be about five to 10 years before the system was deployed in commercial jets.

His belief is that business jets will be the first to use SEVS because “they tend to adopt technology a little bit faster and that is because they can make purchase decisions easier than airlines can”.

The system is presently being tested by the military especially in helicopters because “they operate low to the ground and need that real-time obstacle awareness,” added Mr Cundiff.

Bill Voss, president and chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation said he is intrigued by what SEVS promises it can do.

“This technology represents an important synthesis of synthetic information and enhanced vision. Both technologies have important benefits and both have combined seamlessly in this new technology. It opens up a whole new set of opportunities in the area of human factors.
 
“About a third of major airline accidents involve runway excursions (running off the runway). This technology integrates information that makes a pilot continuously aware of how much energy has to be dissipated, and where he or she is likely to touch down. That is a very important advantage.
 
“The addition of infrared vision adds another safety component. It allows the pilot to see objects on the runway such as animals, people, cars or other aircraft. Often these are invisible due to darkness and poor visibility. This system will put those objects right in the pilots face. It clearly adds another layer of protection.”

Honeywell admits that while their system would have made quite a dent in the travel devastation caused by the recent snowstorms, it would not have eradicated the problem altogether.

“When you have got a few feet of snow on a runway, you are not going to take off. This technology doesn’t melt snow and besides no-one wants to land in a blizzard. It makes the passengers nervous,” said Mr Cundiff.

Read More

The Superbowl of gadgets has officially opened in Las Vegas and it is not for the faint hearted.

The Consumer Electronics show is a challenge for everyone attending. Day one and your feet are guaranteed to hurt, so is your back and your senses are completely overloaded to the point where you need to lie down in a dark room. By the end of the day it feels like you are trapped inside 100 nightclubs all raging at once.

One thing I will say for CES is the designers of the booths are pure geniuses. High end and full of impact. My photos don’t do justice, but here they are for a taster of some of what can be found over the 1.6million square feet of floor space.

Last year 3DTV was all the rage at the show, and despite only selling 1.1 million in the US, they continued this year to take up a lot of floor space. Panasonic made heavy play with their offerings:

LG offered a more modest display, but you still need those infernal glasses:

Toshiba were also showing off a 3DTV but this one didn’t need glasses:

Still banging on about 3DTV but this time Sharp is boasting about having the world’s largest full HD 3D LED TV:

And back to LG and their massive display of sets just rocked:

OK enough about TV’s. Connected cars are also grabbing a lot of attention and ink this week, but this Audi chrome is the P Diddy of them all. It was inspired by the movie Tron Legacy:

Despite the mobility theme, this is one phone that will build the biceps:

In a further homage to the booth designers, I couldn’t resist this camera that I spied:

I wish I could say the photo of the abandoned toilet was some existential joke, but it’s not. It is meant to suggest that you can find the paper you need from discarded books which have become surplus to requirement because of e-readers:

And finally, bearing no relation to what has gone before, a picture of moi as a piece of “smart art”. Well that is what it said on the label:

Read More

Steve Wozniak is an out and out self proclaimed geek. As the co-founder of Apple, he has given the world products aimed at making our life easier and more fun.

On the occasions I have interviewed him he is always bright and upbeat about the state of the industry and where it is going. Today he is feeling very differently about his view of the world.

In a lengthy letter in the distinguished magazine The Atlantic, Woz expresses a high degree of frustration and concern about the future of internet.

“The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away. Please, I beg you, open your senses to the will of the people to keep the Internet as free as possible.”

Woz’s plea is aimed at US regulators and legislators. His consternation follows a vote by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week to approve rules aimed at ensuring that all traffic is treated equally in the wired world and that broadband companies cannot favour anyone’s content over another.

Rules for the wireless world have been watered down. It’s a move that many net neutrality advocates I have spoken to are deeply worried about as more and more consumers turn to their smartphones and tablet devices to access the web for work, keeping in touch and entertainment.

Mr Wosniak wrote:

“We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.”

The full details of the order approved in a 3-2 majority vote this week will not be released for a few days, but two Democrat commissioners serving on the FCC expressed their distaste with the rules because they felt they did not go far enough to protect consumers. Michael Copps told the agency “universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…(though) not many people have talked about it that way”.

Woz is clearly of the same mind:

“I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I’m asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to ‘sign on’ with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I’m a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.
 
“That’s how the people think. They don’t want this to encroach on their Internet freedom.”

For a full read of the letter go here.

Read More

Libboo has a lofty aim – it wants change the way books are both written and read by creating what it describes as the world’s first globally-written novel.

No tall order, but a project that has potential appeal to every wannabe scribe while perhaps angering those who make their living from writing.

Libboo is the brainchild of Chris Howard, a Brit who teaches at Harvard. In a nutshell, he is using crowdsourcing and a fancy algorithm to capture the imagination – in more ways than one.

There will be no single author but a multitude in what he has dubbed “the biggest literary experiment in history”. He told the BBC:

“We realise there are a lot of people out there who like to write but perhaps don’t enjoy writing great screeds and we thought how could we get these people to write something that would constitute something somebody would like to read.

“We are trying to do someting new by trying to bring writing in to the social world.”

Mr Howard wants as many people as possible to write from 100 to 1,000 words. And fear not, ye humble novice: the first chapter will set the scene and act as the inspiration for the rest of the book.

The beta trial that has just started is a romance disaster called Flight of the Burning Stallion. Mr Howard is hoping around 1,000 people take part and has opened applications.

For the actual book he plans to publish, the inspiration is a murder mystery called PARADOX: The Curious Life, and Mysterious Death, of Mr Joseph Wheeler. Mr Howard has persuaded a leading scholar to pen its opening chapter.

Professor Richard Wiseman, who has garnered a reputation for research into unusual areas of psychology such as the paranormal, humour, luck, deception and the science of self-help, will set the tone and look to other writers to solve the mystery.

In both the beta and the experiment involving Professor Wiseman, hundreds or thousands of people can write the next chapter and everyone can read them. The same goes for each successive section which will undoubtedly result in the book veering off in different directions as writers take inspiration from parts that others have contributed.

Mr Howard describes it as being like a tree where people can navigate their way through the story by following different branches. Each branch is different and offers a new storyline.

The choice of chapters that end up published is where the computer science comes in; an algorithm discreetly tracks the most successful or popular routes through the tree:

“We want to target all those aspiring writers, whether it’s people working in an office who have a spare 20 minutes or those who see themselves as potential authors.

“The success of the experiment is highly dependent on the number of people who take part. If we have too few people, the statistics will not be high enough to judge how people read through the tree.”

Mr Howard stresses that he is not “trying to replace the way books are written today” but to “facilitate a new way for people to read and write in a way that is accessible for everyone”.

He said that publishers are watching the experiment with interest. Money from the project will go to the Literacy Trust.

“Our entire ethos is to find new ways to write books. I see this as a new era,” added Mr Howard.

Read More

The 43rd president of the United States of America and the 26-year-old upstart behind the world’s biggest social network are destined to become a double act following their performance on Facebook.

 

For nearly an hour George W Bush engaged in lively banter as he fielded questions from Mark Zuckerberg and those submitted by staff and Facebook users.

The antagonism among users on the live feed before Mr Bush took to the stage suggested that he might be in for a rough ride and that this could be a tough audience.

In the end the questions were ones he has been asked a thousand times, especially while punting his memoir Decision Points.

Over the last couple of weeks no prime-time stage – be it Oprah’s or Jay Leno’s – has been complete without an appearance from Mr Bush. His visit to Facebook’s Palo Alto office was a brilliant coup by his wranglers, given the potential reach of more than 500 million users.

Mr Bush has an inside link with Facebook: the company’s general counsel Ted Ullyot has strong ties to the Republican Party and worked as a White House lawyer.

However the appearance came about, it generated a lot of buzz; the site lit up with comments, praise and criticism.

From the get-go, Mr Bush was candid about the reasons for his social media volte-face:

“You got a lot of people paying attention to us and I’m trying to sell books.
 
“I’ve got over 600,000 friends on my Facebook page and I have watched your company grow. I love a country that enables somebody like you to have a dream and actually make it work and employ a lot of people and give them a chance to create wealth and create jobs.
 
“Plus the truth of the matter is I am shamelessly marketing. I hope people read my book. I have written this book because I recognise there is no such thing as short-term history and I want to give future historians a perspective – mine.”

Even though Mr Bush referred to the social-networking service as “the Facebook” (as it was originally known), he insisted that he is not the Luddite many cast him as.

He told the audience he was the first “e-mail president” and that while he didn’t want his name on any e-mails because they are all archived and could be misconstrued in years to come, his administration generated 170 million of them.

Mr Bush said that today he is a Blackberry person and an iPad person and gave his own view on subjects from the financial meltdown to management styles. Nothing seemed to be off the table. Many of the answers, however, didn’t really delve deep despite the near-hour-long session.

Take Iraq, a subject that has divided this country and others: Mr Bush’s answer was a tad long-winded, beginning with a description of the process which included bringing in new team members to move forward on the surge.

“I had to get everyone inside the administration on board because this is one of these decisions nobody was for at the time and any criticisms within the administration would have made it really hard to get funded in Congress.
 
“I hope people find it interesting [in terms of the] process. They may not agree with the decision but nevertheless it will give you a sense of what it was like to make a decision like this particularly since the country was against it.
 
“But what you didn’t know at the time is I was deeply affected by many members of the military, particularly [by] the families who had lost a loved one. When they came to see me, and many did, they really wanted to know whether or not I was going to lead their child on the battlefield because of politics or whether or not I cared more about my standing politically or did I care really about completing the mission so that some point in time history would validate their loved one’s sacrifice.
 
“Those words echoed in my mind all the time, just all the time.”

Mr Zuckerberg shifted the issue of foreign relations to China, seen by companies like Facebook as a major growth area given the size of the population and the numbers set to come online. Again, Mr Bush offered an anecdote:

“I actually believe trade with China will change the Chinese system. I do believe in this case the markets will drive change. I think there is enormous freedom in the marketplace.
 
“When I first went to China to visit my dad, who was envoy there in 1975, everybody dressed the same. And I went back in 2001 the marketplace was flourishing. People had choice. That is freedom and it is the ultimate expression of freedom where a collection of consumers can demand product that then gets produced.
 
“A more effective way is for the marketplace to change, then the political system follows. One of the things I like to ask these leaders is ‘What keeps you up at night?’ And they said the creation of 25 million new jobs a year.
 
“To me it explains a lot about China. They are inward-looking. They are gluttonous for natural resources. It explains a lot of their Iranian policy and their Sudanese policy.”

What kept Mr Bush up at night when he was in power?

“It seems kind of far-fetched probably, here in Palo Alto, this idyllic setting, that there would be another attack [like 9/11]. But I thought about it every night,” said Mr Bush.

One question that was, oddly, presented as a foreign policy issue regarded U2′s singer Bono, who appears in the book. Mr Bush joked about his chief of staff’s concern about the extent of the president’s musical knowledge:

“Josh Bolton says, before I meet Bono, he says ‘You do know who Bono is?’ I say ‘Yeah, he is like an Irish rock star…’
 
“And Josh says ‘You got it right.’ And I said ‘…married to Cher.’”

Alongside the joke, Mr Bush said that at first he thought Bono was a “self-promoting rock star” but, after working with him, regarded him as a “friend” and “a really good guy”.

Mr Bush was also candid about his feelings and imparted some sage words for fathers based on his own upbringing:

“If you are a father out there, my advice is to love your child unconditionally. I was given a great gift by George HW Bush and that is unconditional love. Life is full of risks and if you have the love of someone you admire, it mitigates risk.
 
“I tell people half-way jokingly that running for president is risky. You can run and lose and they can say ‘what a pathetic candidate’, or you can run and win and they can say ‘what a pathetic president’.
 
“Either way it doesn’t matter if you have the unconditional love of somebody you admire. And if you are fortunate enough to be a father my advice is: love your child with all your heart and soul.”

Mr Bush denied that the book was his way of burnishing his image in the light of events like Iraq and the financial meltdown. Though he said he hoped to be remembered for the right reasons, it doesn’t keep him up at night:

“A guy who protected the country and didn’t sell his soul for the sake of politics. I am not worried about it. I am a comfortable guy. I have a great wife. My daughters are awesome. I am blessed.
 
“You’ve got to live life to the fullest. I didn’t want it to be said I didn’t seize that moment. I thought long and hard about running for president. I could have passed on it and ended up being governor, finished out my term and gone back to the private sector but I had an opportunity.
 
“Ultimately it boiled down to: I wanted to live life to the fullest. I wasn’t going to let the moment pass and you have seized the moment here at Facebook and I congratulate you for living life to the fullest and going for it.
 
“Your life is not going to work out the way you expect. The unexpected will happen. You will get dealt a hand you didn’t want to play. That is going to happen to all of us. The question is: how are you going to play it?”

Even though the fist-pump Mr Bush gave Mr Zuckerberg came across as trying too hard, it appears that his appearance was a success and one that other politicians will be only too eager to copy.

Mr Bush certainly hopes it won over a few more “friends” who will part with their cash and buy the book:

“This book is my way of letting you in on my life as president and that is it. I am not trying to shape any post president. If you see me in an airport I hope you wave with all five fingers, but if you don’t, you won’t be the first.”

Read More