Technology correspondent Bobbie Johnson takes a closer look at some of the gadgets on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

I've been playing with a wide range of notebook PCs at CES, and Dell's Adamo XPS is not just the thinnest, it's one of the most innovative. Steve Ballmer did show it in his opening keynote, but he could have made much more of it

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer ran quickly through a number of innovative Windows 7 PCs during his keynote, and one that got slightly more attention than most was Dell's Adamo XPS. This is billed as being the world's thinnest laptop, and at 9.9mm it's thinner than many mobile phones. It also has a very nice unlocking system, where you simply stroke the front of the lid so you can open it. Then, once you have opened it, it sits up, with the keyboard tilted at a more ergonomic typing angle.

The Adamo XPS has an excellent 13.4 inch LED widescreen, which shows the now-almost-standard (for ultraportables) 1366 x 768 pixels.

One of the interesting innovations is that the motherboard and 128GB solid-state drive are behind the screen, not beneath the keyboard. This makes it possible both to fit ports and to have a really thin keyboard.

The Adamo XPS looks original, and stylish, and feels well made -- though at 1.44kg, it's not the lightest ultraportable around. However, innovation comes at a price. In the UK, it looks as though John Lewis has a retail exclusive, and it will set you back 1,750.

If Steve Jobs had been presenting the Adamo XPS, the first 50 rows of fanboys would probably have had multiple orgasms. I don't think he would have let a co-presenter say that "Being thin isn't everything," even though that is, of course, perfectly true.

Purists might complain that the Adamo XPS isn't all that new, because it appeared at the Windows 7 launch. But I suspect most people missed it in the flood of new PCs, and very few of us have had our hands on one.

If you do get the chance, the Adamo XPS is worth a look. But don't expect to see too many around the coffee shops. You can get lots of PCs that are almost as thin and have better battery life for a fraction of the price from the likes of Acer, Asus and MSI, and competitive systems from HP, Sony, Toshiba and others. Unlike MacBook Air buyers, Windows users have a vast array of choices, and just being thinner and more innovative than a MacBook Air doesn't earn you any sales at all.

Bobbie Johnson presents the first of our podcasts from the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Electronics giant Sony plans to broadcast live concerts in 3D for viewing in the home

Going to live concerts could become a thing of the past, according to Japanese electronics giant Sony.

In an event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced plans to start beaming 3D gigs directly into living rooms around the world, giving the chance to experience live music events in lifelike clarity without ever leaving the sofa.

The company, which owns an extensive media empire including the world's second largest record label, believes that new technology could change the way we experience live music.

Sony boss Howard Stringer showed off a 3D version of Jimi Hendrix's legendary Woodstock performance and said that it would not be long before it became a worldwide standard.

"When it comes to home entertainment, there really is no experience like 3D," he said. "We intend to take the lead in 3D. We want to provide the most compelling 3D content possible."

Sir Howard was also joined by pop star Taylor Swift, who gave a performance intended to show the benefits of watching live in three dimensions but instead the Welsh-born executive, who became the company's first ever non-Japanese boss in 2005, ended up joking about the company's recent troubles.

"Maybe you'll call us cool again, who knows," he said.

But Sony was not the only company betting heavily on 3D at the CES. Several broadcasters have announced plans to launch 3D channels, while other television makers have also been showing off 3D-capable sets at the world's most influential technology showcase.

Chief among them was a bank-busting high definition plasma TV screen from Panasonic which, at an incredible 152 in, is the world's largest. The screen, which runs almost 13ft from corner to corner, boasts four times higher resolution than a normal full high definition TV and is likely to cost tens of thousands of pounds when it goes on sale later this year.

Apparently ignoring the impact of the recession, the company also unveiled a camcorder that can film in 3D but comes with a hefty $21,000 ( 13,000) price tag.

"We've successfully moved from black and white, to colour, to high definition television," said Bob Perry, P's nasonic senior vice president. "But immersive, totally realistic 3D imagery has been the final frontier."

Despite the recent success of 3D movies including Avatar and Up, not everyone is convinced that the idea will prove a hit with viewers, particularly given that getting the best quality requires buying a new television set as well as wearing special glasses.

With many shoppers still in the process of upgrading to high definition, many industry observers are unsure that the idea of further pricey upgrades will catch on.

"I caution and say should we curb our enthusiasm a little bit for 3D," said Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis at the Consumer Electronics Association, which organises the event.

"We've already asked consumers to upgrade to HDTV, we've already offered 1080p resolution and surround sound, and we've got Blu-ray, and here we come again."

Elsewhere in Las Vegas, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer had to endure an embarrassing power cut that stopped his opening speech and left the company flailing in front of thousands of onlookers.

Among the technologies on display from Microsoft was the company's motion-sensing video game controller, Natal, which should be on sale before Christmas, and a selection of new "slate" PCs large, touch-sensitive screens for reading documents and surfing the web.

The announcement of slate devices was clearly intended as a spoiler for a similar device being prepared by arch rival Apple which has still not been confirmed, but speculation suggests will be launched by the end of this month.

Everywhere you go these days, there are people with camera-phones many of us record, document, and upload the minutae of our lives. But, ultimately, should we be doing it just because we can?

There are three people standing in front of a glass case in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each of us is trying to get a good view of the so-called Becket Casket. As you know, it was made in Limoges in the 12th century and depicts one of the most infamous events in English history, the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. It is is one of the most lovely things you can hope to see on a bleak January morning.

Only one problem. The bloke in the middle is hogging the full-frontal position, clearly the best view to savour Becket's martyrdom. He has been there for five minutes now not, so far as I can judge, appreciating the boldly engraved figures against a brilliant blue background, but meaninglessly, endlessly, exasperatingly snapping the same view. He has that dead-eyed, mouth-gaping, eminently slappable face we all have when we hold our camera phones a foot in front of our faces and click, click, click.

Unable to see the casket properly, I reflect sourly on what the great German philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote about how instrumental rationality undermines the emancipatory possibilities of technology, reducing it to a tool for our domination. What I think he meant by this was that instead of using technology such as camera phones to make our lives richer, freer and happier, we stand like lumps doing something socially irritating and existentially pointless, thereby ruining the view for everyone else. We have become snappers on autopilot, slaves to our machines, clogging up cyberspace with billions of images that nobody in their right minds not even the person who sent them thinks are worthwhile. Or maybe I'm wrong.

Seven years ago, the camera-phone hardly registered. Indeed, on 17 June 2003, some idiot wrote in the Guardian that the low take-up of those newfangled 3G phones with their built-in cameras, launched two months previously, could be ascribed to the fact that "it's not immediately clear what they're for, and that mystery is not sufficiently seductive to make many of us shell out". The writer all but argued that camera-phones were destined for the technological knacker's yard, like Sinclair C5s, the Securi-Gnome and NiteMates slippers with their built-in headlights (all real products). With the benefit of hindsight, let me admit what a bonehead I was to write that.

These days, the very idea of a mobile without camera or video facility seems absurd. They're more portable than most digital cameras and, more importantly, offer faster connection with the internet, which is a key consideration in this age of virtual presenteeism. So if you're Jonathan Ross and think your Twitter followers would like to see your photos of you playing in the snow with the kids, you can post them online before you've even cleared your desk at the BBC. The seemingly expendable has become the utterly essential. Such, quite often, is the appliance of science.

The latest figures from the Mobile Data Association show that the number of MMS (or video and picture messages) is rising fast: 336m were sent in the UK in 2006, 553m in 2008, and, when the MDA publishes its UK Mobile Trends report next month, another large rise is expected for 2009. True, the number of video and picture messages hardly compares with the number of texts sent (78.9bn text messages were sent in the UK in 2008), but the MDA argues that, "while SMS [texting] is used or conversational activity, MMS is much more 'event' driven." Hence the yuletide and New Year's Eve spikes in picture messaging: on Christmas Day 2008, 4.4m picture messages were sent 3,000 every minute. The safe money says many more were sent over Christmas 2009, and that there will have been another huge surge in UK picture messaging thanks to all the snow.

So what are all these images we are sending? The majority are, frankly, worthless, and often taken in socially unacceptable circumstances. During Peter and the Wolf at London's Royal Festival Hall last week, I watched parents (who had been instructed to turn off their phones before the show began) photograph their kids against a backdrop of the Philharmonia Orchestra and a big screen of the animated film. Why? "Just to prove we're here, to record it for our son when he grows up," said the woman next to me and my daughter on row NN, who was one of the parents taking the pictures.

At a Lily Allen gig, a colleague found she was one of the few in the audience not holding her camera-phone above her head to shoot pictures or make films that could be illicitly uploaded online. Meanwhile, at the London Aquarium, a friend's family excursion was all-but ruined by guppy-like adult snappers blocking the view of slightly less gormless, gaping fish. How many pictures of fish in tanks do we, as a society, really need?

When another friend visited the Taj Mahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times. And a recent letter to the Telegraph complained about how the solemnity of a christening was destroyed by a godmother elbowing the vicar aside to get shots of the baby at the font.

Back in Room 8 of the V&A, one of us cracks. "Will you bloody stop taking pictures!" shouts the woman to the man's right. "You're ruining it for everyone. Let someone else have a look for five seconds, please!" She's wearing a tweed cape, a solidly set hairdo and a forbidding expression that seems to say 'I'm on a day trip from the home counties and I'm not having this'. The man, who may have too little English to reply, skulks off towards Room 9.

Minutes later, I find him in front of the Soissons Diptych, snapping away again, oblivious to the hard stares and tutting from those in less favoured positions. I wander up and say: "That's going to be a rubbish picture, mate." He barely stops photographing to offer me this reply: "Yeah? This is a 10-megapixel Samsung SCH-B600, actually, so the photos are going to be pretty excellent. Thanks very much."

It turns out the man does have good English (he's from Manchester). And lines in sarcasm. He's a fan of gothic art and architecture, and plans to set up a Flickr photo stream as well as beautifying his Facebook page with some of the best shots from his trip. He has already emailed a picture of the Limoges Casket to prove that he was, on 10 January 2010 at 11.15am, standing in front of it. He plans to tweet some shots later, too.

Another great thinker, the Leeds-based sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, wrote in his book Liquid Love that, in a modern world in which those purportedly fixed and durable ties of family, class, religion, marriage have melted away, we look for something else to hold us together. Hence, no doubt, the rise of social networking sites and hence, too, the feverish snapping with camera-phones to take images that can validate our existence to our Twitter followers, our speed-dial intimates, our online "friends". It's a new Cartesian cogito: I photograph, therefore I am (and don't my uploaded images glam up my Facebook profile a treat?). Maybe Marcuse was wrong: we're not so much in thrall to technology, as using it for an unanticipated emancipatory project.

In that context it's not enough to moan, as Telegraph columnist Nigel Farndale did recently, that "photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness" Riffing on the verse of Welsh poet WH Davies, Farndale wrote: "What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. Click. No time to stand beneath the boughs click, click and stare as long as sheep or cows. Click, click, bloody click."

But moaning isn't enough. We also have to wonder what happens to us when technology increasingly gives us our windows on the world. One thought is that the camera-phone changes our experience of the world for good rather than evil. It can even be a tool against capitalism. Billy Bragg, the politically engaged musician, has been on the receiving ends of the click, click, bloody click of the camera-phone a great deal when playing gigs recently. And, counterintuitively, he loves it.

"I've had to tell bouncers not to stop people taking pictures of me when I'm playing," Bragg tells me. "You have to like it because people who take the photos or make the films with their camera-phones are not thinking you're a pranny. They're doing it because they like you, so there's no point getting upset." It's an interesting corrective to those musicians, such as Boy George, who have tweeted their pleas to audiences to leave their camera-phones at home and watch the show. At last November's 250-gig London jazz festival ushers tried to curb the increasing number of fans using camera-phones to record performances. But, as our jazz critic John Fordham noted at the time, this clampdown stopped his favourite music reaching a wider online audience.

One reason the rise of the camera-phone appeals to Bragg is that it gives him free publicity. It's transgressive technology that helps Bragg and his fans stick it to the Man. "In the past, I've spent thousands of pounds making videos that MTV wouldn't show. Now what happens is that some kid will put a film they've made of me playing live on YouTube and it can have 20,000 or so hits. What is happening is that you're being promoted."

Recently, Bragg was doing a soundcheck in Toronto and decided to have a go at fitting the words of John Cooper Clarke's Evidently Chickentown to the tune of Dylan's Desolation Row. It worked so well he played it at a late-night gig. "Somebody filmed it and now it's on YouTube. I thought that was brilliant."

But clearly there are downsides to camera-phones, too the plague of "upskirting" photos being posted on the web, for example, or Heat magazine encouraging its readers to pap stars in the street and send the photos to the magazine. Aren't these terrible things facilitated by camera-phone technology?

"I'm not sure privacy is all that important an issue when it comes to people who are famous and are seeking attention," says Bragg. Anyway, he argues, camera-phones have more serious uses.

"Thanks in part to camera-phones, we're all reporters now. And that idea is going to have some pretty radical consequences, especially for police officers. Think about it: only an idiot goes to a demonstration without a camera or a camera-phone nowadays." He cites the Guardian investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson, a demonstrator at the G20 protests in London last year, who was shown to have been beaten to the ground by police by means of films made by other demonstrators' mobile phones.

Today, grainy camera-phone images or films demonstrate the virile realness of a news event. We expect them to show that a story was so hot it took place before TV crews and the rest of the old media got there. Hence the wannabe Christmas Day pants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutalib was immortalised in blurry phone images taken as the plane descended into Detroit.

Media commentator and professor of interactive journalism Jeff Jarvis writes: "We are in the era of news served raw. Witnesses to any event can now capture and share what they see not just with acquaintances but with the world, and without the filter and delay of news media. And that doesn't mean just cell-phone snapshots of bombings or surreptitious footage of closed events. We also have access to the guts of news original documents, full transcripts, unedited video. Life is on the record."

The truth of this analysis was dramatised by the unauthorised images of Saddam Hussein's execution on 30 December 2006, taken by a security guard on his mobile. His grisly footage of the event spread through the internet, subverting the official version. In her paper, The Global and the Mobile: Camera Phone Witnessing in a Age of Terror, social media expert Dr Anna Reading of London's South Bank University argues that the footage "took away the pretence of civility that some tried to place around the act". Instead, it revealed that he was put to death during an unruly spectacle in which onlookers taunted Hussein by yelling, "Go to hell" and chanting "Muqtada, Muqtadaa, Muqtada" (a reference to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite Muslim cleric).

Reading also argues that camera phones lets the world into places from which we would hitherto have been excluded. When the white comedian and former Seinfeld star Michael Richards rounded on two black hecklers at a 2006 comedy gig in Los Angeles with racist abuse, his rant was captured by a member of the audience on their camera phone and broadcast on the internet, arguably ruining Richards' career.

Consider one significant contrast between the 9/11 bombings in the US (2001) and the 7/7 bombings in London (2005). Arguably, what connected us most poignantly with the former were the phone calls from the doomed passengers aboard Flight 93 to their loved ones, while four years later, what made us empathise most with the ordinary victims was the self-portrait of Adam Stacey escaping from a bombed tube train on the Piccadilly Line that the civil servant took with his phone. Imagine how different our perception of 9/11 would have been if the soon-to-die had emailed their last camera-phone images from the twin towers.

What interests Reading is how camera-phone technology can link people across borders. "It is not so much what the images capture indexically, but their iconic status in reminding us of our complicity in a war declared against global 'terror', rather than a nation state. Stacey's camera-phone image escaping from the London bombings was everyman with a mobile phone."

Arguably, the camera-phone first took on this raw witnessing role on Boxing Day 2004, when the tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean, killing nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries. Media outlets relied on footage from people on the spot, many of whom were using camera-phones. And last year, they were used to bear witness to government crackdowns in Teheran against those protesting against alleged fraud in June's presidential election.

In itself, the camera-phone changes nothing. The Standard 8mm colour home movie that Abraham Zapruder took in Dallas on 22 November 1963, which represents the most complete film of the murder of President John F Kennedy, is akin to the footage the unnamed security guard took of Saddam's execution. Both are short, grisly films showing the killing of an important public figure that have gone on to have immense political significance. But there are two big differences.

First, the camera phone is tiny, and thus relatively easy to slip into situations where authorities want to stop unofficial images or films of an event being taken. Second, and much more importantly, the images and films we take with them can be spread around the world in seconds. Our experiences can now travel freely across borders. Admittedly, most of them won't be worth sending in the first place, but that doesn't mean they won't get sent.

"It's absurd to argue that technology always changes things for the better," says Billy Bragg. "Clearly it doesn't. But at best the camera-phone is subversive in the way it's being used. We shouldn't be frightened of it. We should welcome it."

Government to seek advice from public on how to spend 1bn to make Britain's broadband better

The government is seeking public advice on how to spend 1bn to ensure that almost all of Britain gets superfast broadband this decade should it hook up rural communities first, or the suburbs?

The Next Generation Access (NGA) fund, which would come from a 50p a month levy on all telephone landlines proposed in the Digital Economy bill, is intended to persuade telecoms companies such as BT and Virgin Media to install fibre-optic cable to rural and suburban households where it might otherwise be unprofitable.

But the key question facing the government is whether it would be more effective to encourage telcos to install fibre-optic cable, capable of carrying two-way video and other high-speed internet links, in the most geographically remote areas or provide funding for installation at locations that are close to those where fibre would be put in anyway without intervention due to market demand.

The two opposing approaches dubbed "outside-in" and "inside-out" are outlined in a consultation published today by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

Charles Dunstone, chief executive of broadband provider TalkTalk, has previously described the proposed levy to produce the fund as "unjust and regressive". He has called for the private sector to be allowed to "drive next-generation broadband as far as it can".

The government has also pledged to ensure every community has access to 2 megabits per second (Mbps) broadband connection by 2012 in time for the Olympic Games. But higher-speed broadband, with the ability to transmit high definition films and carry out live high definition video conservations, has been identified as key to economic growth as more transactions and business is done electronically.

Building the infrastructure that would replace the old copper lines which presently link phone exchanges and houses with fibre-optic cables would also create jobs. The London School of Economics and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation have estimated that a 5bn investment in next-generation broadband would create 280,000 jobs, and that small and medium-sized businesses, or SMEs, would be particular beneficiaries.

Although the government expects that even without intervention companies like BT will deliver fibre to at least 50% and perhaps up to 70% of the population, there are concerns about whether it would ever be profitable for telcos to install fibre to the remainder because of the high capital cost of providing fibre connections to geographically remote locations.

Spending the "next generation fund" will "incentivise the rollout of next generation superfast broadband to at least 90% of UK homes and businesses by 2017", the government said, and should also speed up telecoms companies investment so that two-thirds of the UK population are connected to fibre through market provision.

Launching the consultation, the business secretary Lord Mandelson said: "This investment is about bringing the future of broadband to areas of the country that would otherwise miss out. We cannot underestimate the opportunities this will bring for homes and businesses which is why we are taking action to make sure everyone benefits.

"Already the market is delivering superfast internet speeds of 50Mbps to half the country but we cannot be certain that it will reach the communities that are not currently served, which is why we are putting in an extra 1bn to support the market."

Although many homes could get high-speed broadband through cable services provided by Virgin, BT has been slower to provide fibre to homes. Earlier this week it announced that 63 exchanges will be upgraded with fibre connections to the street cabinets from which homes are connected. Half of those are in the south-east of England or London, the most populous part of the UK. Another 99 exchanges are already being upgraded.

BT has said it will spend 1.5bn upgrading telephone exchanges that serve about 40% of premises in the UK by 2012, and that of the 10m who will be connected to those exchanges about 2.5m will have fibre connections at home capable of 100Mbps connections. Typical copper wire connections today run at about 4Mbps, up to 20Mbps in some places.

Other countries

What are other countries doing to invest in next-generation broadband?

In Finland, the Government is committed to getting fibre within 2km of 99% of homes by 2015. But only the last 4% will need government intervention which will be two-thirds funded by public investment of 133m ( 112m). But it's not clear how the final 2km, for which subscribers are responsible, will be completed. This will cost 55 ( 47) per household, besides the extra cost of connecting homes to the fibre.

By 2014, Germany will deliver 50Mbps to 75% of households, with public sector involvement where the market will not deliver. 180m has been identified for this.

In Greece. 0.7bn ( 0.6bn) of public money will be spent ,with a further 1.4bn ( 1.2bn) of private investment, to deliver fibre all the way to 2 million homes. This will cost 192 ( 160) per household.

The Australian government has announced an A$43bn ( 21bn) fibre-to-the-home project to provide speeds of 100Mbps to 90% of homes over the next eight years. Wireless technology will provide the final 10% of homes with up to 12 Mbps. This will be a joint venture with industry in which the public will own a minimum of 51% of the project. The cost per household is at least A$2,750 ( 1,350), depending on the size of the publicly owned share of the investment.

The screen is fantastic, it links superbly with your online Google account - but does it have what it takes to win over iPhone obsessives?

At first glance, the Nexus One doesn't look like a revolution waiting to happen. In fact, Google's much heralded rival to the Apple iPhone looks remarkably similar to almost every high-end mobile phone released in the last two years: big black screen with small button at the bottom. But as soon as you switch on the handset and swipe your finger across the screen to unlock it, it is clear this is more than just another also-ran.

The first thing that strikes you is how incredibly bright and clear the screen is. It's a 3.7in, low-power, "organic LED" screen that doesn't need backlighting and allows deep, clear blacks and vivid colours. In terms of visibility, it's streets ahead of the competition: a gang of Nexus One users waving their prized gadgets in the air could probably send a signal into space.

The second thing that leaps at your eyeballs is the animated background. Whether you've got rippling pools of water or computerised lights zipping around the screen, the constant movement whenever you're using the phone breathes a strange sort of life into this static object.

Above all, though, you are stepping through a portal into Google's world. On first use, the phone prompts you to log into your Google account within seconds it has synchronised your email, web searches, contacts book and any other information you happen to keep with the company. Convenient for you, but also thanks to the constant stream of data being fed back to California handy for Google. You're now a satellite-tracked, walking, talking, web-surfing recruit into Google's informationalised army.

Despite this nagging feeling that you've stepped into the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, becoming one of Google's disciples boasts some impressive benefits. Browsing the web is fast, the powerful five-megapixel camera-phone with built-in flash should make the all-important business of taking good photos a doddle. The really futuristic extra, though, is "voice search". On other handsets, including the iPhone, this addition seems like a gimmick hey, what kind of dimwit talks to their phone? but the accuracy and speed of the Nexus One makes it feels like something from Star Trek. I asked for "toy shops in San Francisco" and it found me a (Google) map of local toy shops in a couple of seconds. Combine this with the phone's simplified "in-car mode" display and ability to speak turn-by-turn directions, and it spells goodbye to satnav.

The downsides are its appearance sleek but bland, made from a dull, metallic-looking plastic and the small, rubber trackball that sits under your thumb, which feels like an awkward afterthought (although it does glow in different colours to let you know when the phone is charging or connected via Bluetooth).

But a big "miss" is the feature that makes the iPhone so simple to use: multi-touch. While the Nexus One's single-finger prodding works well enough, there's none of the pinching action to zoom into maps and photographs that makes the iPhone feel so advanced, nor its realistic-feel friction. Google's on-screen keyboard feels cramped, too, and won't completely satisfy text freaks and heavy emailers.

Also missing is the depth of downloadable applications that have turned the iPhone into something much more like a mini-computer. There are plenty of programs available through the Android Market (and Google is, of course, encouraging armies of coders to feverishly build more), but there is still nowhere near the volume you can get for Apple's gizmo.

Then, of course, there's the price. Salivating British gadget fans can buy one now from Google's US shop without a sim card or contract for 330, and Vodafone is scrambling to make it available on a contract here for significantly less. But even then, it's unlikely to come cheap.

What ultimately justifies the price, Google argues, is the phone's sheer power. And the thing certainly is fast, with the memory and processing guts equivalent to a top-of-the-range laptop from eight or nine years ago.

But will it beat the iPhone? This debut model falls short of the smooth and totally intuitive design that Apple came up with. Google prides itself on being a company of engineers, and despite all its bells and whistles the Nexus One still leaves behind an aftertaste of nerdiness.

Letters appeal to published authors in Congress to save 'freedom to negotiate your own book contract'

Less than a month after Ursula K Le Guin accused the Authors Guild of a "deal with the devil" over its support of Google's plans to scan and digitise millions of books, three US writers' groups have appealed to authors in the US Congress to speak out against the deal.

The presidents of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the National Writers Union and the American Society of Journalists and Authors yesterday wrote to more than 60 authors in Congress urging them to protest against the Google books settlement.

"As fellow authors, you know the freedom to negotiate your own book contract is basic and precious. We hope you will join us in speaking in opposition to the amended settlement," the letter, from presidents Larry Goldbetter from the NWU, Russell Davis from the SFFWA and Salley Shannon from the ASJA, said. "It isn't fair. There are millions of book authors in this country who could be locked into an agreement they don't understand and didn't ask for."

Google was last year forced to amend the $125m ( 78.5m) deal to digitise books it reached with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in 2008 after objections from a range of groups including the US Department of Justice. It presented a revised settlement to a New York federal court in November, and a final hearing is now scheduled for 18 February.

But Goldbetter, Davis and Shannon told Congress members that "the amended version of the settlement still creates a de facto monopoly for Google at the expense of all Americans". "The Constitution says copyright is essential and gives Congress responsibility for it, not Google and a gaggle of lawyers," they wrote. "The Department of Justice detailed fundamental flaws to the Court in September. A preponderance of those flaws remain. We urge you, as an author and member of Congress, to contact the DOJ and implore them to continue their close scrutiny of this settlement. Authors need to stick together."

In December, Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild after almost 40 years' membership over its support of the Google books settlement.

"You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can't. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle," she wrote in her letter of resignation.

But Le Guin retained her membership in the NWU and SFFWA, telling the Authors Guild that "they don't have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater".

The voting has begun for the second annual Shorty Awards which honour the best writers on Twitter

Oh no. Oh yes! And it's serious! Yesterday, the voting for the second annual Shorty Awards honouring the best writers on Twitter began. Categories range from serious topics such as government, health and politics to lighter ones such as music, culture, celebrities and humour.

At March's awards ceremony the winners will be revealed after they have been determined by a combination of popular vote and the members of the Real-Time Academy of shortform arts and sciences including the MIT Media Lab's director Frank Moss, the President and CEO of the Knight Foundation, Alberto Ibarg en, and the Creative Commons, CEO Joi Ito.

Yes, it is serious and not a PR stunt. In fact, the Shorty Awards do a good job to be the Twitter equivalent of the Oscars.

Anyone can nominate people and organisations who have excelled on Twitter over the past year. To nominate, Twitterers can send a tweet which should at least include #shortyawards @username #category and a creative reason for the nomination, or simply use the voting box on the website. There are 26 official categories from journalist to news and tech, food, advertisement, apps or customer service completed by community-created ones.

The rules are simple: to vote or receive votes you need to have a valid, active and public Twitter account. That's it. Campaigning is allowed and I guess necessary to finish among the five users with the highest rank in each official category who become finalists.

Last year's awards received more than 50,000 nominations. Among the winners were Nasa in the science category for tweeting the unmanned Mars Phoenix Lander mission and @PeggyOlson, of Mad Men, in the advertising category.

March's awards ceremony will be held in New York. It is still unknown who will be speaking and presenting gongs.

So get voting, Twitterers. There's a free flight to New York up for grabs for the winners, and of course the glory of holding aloft a Shorty.

Augmented reality and journalism are made for each other. Journalism gathers information about the world around us. Thanks to augmented reality, this information can be displayed where it got picked up which is especially interesting for event reporting.

But there are many more possibilities. So, having looked at what augmented reality applications are available, let's look at how it can be used in journalism.

The living magazine

Augmented reality found a mass market in smartphones last year, enabling users to see additional layers of data or 3D objects when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams. It is no surprise, therefore, that at the end of 2009 one magazine was making a big fuzz about the subject: Esquire.

The men's magazine, published in the US by the Hearst Corporation, featured an augmented reality cover, in which Robert Downey Jr introduced the December issue. Holding the issue in front of a webcam and moving it around a bit you could make changes on the screen, like having a model changing clothes as you turn the page, or listening to actor Gillian Jacobs telling a joke.

You are right, the whole thing was kind of a ridiculous PR stunt, and nobody really needed it; on other hand new technology often is a bit clumsy. However, the idea of a living magazine as the London based agency Moving Brands has developed it, makes perfectly sense (watch their video here).

If you have a closer look for example at the animation that the Munich company Metaio made for a toy company catalogue, you get an idea of what is possible.

Yes, Robert Downey Jr was just the beginning: more actors and wannabes are likely be filmed in front of a green screen to be featured as exclusive add-ons. Just think of how the tabloids will use the technology.

But that is just a start.

Sports journalism & augmented reality

There is an exciting potential for augmented reality in live events such as sport. Augmented Planet recently summed up several possibilities for that field: games such as cricket or football can be overlaid with statistical information that is usually delivered by commentators.

In the future, you might prefer to watch a game on your smartphone featuring the blogposts of a sports reporter (as a non-sports person who has to keep up with an Arsenal fan in her private life, I might say the Guardian sports editors do an excellent job that even takes me along).

Watching a game on your smartphone might even become as attractive as watching it on the TV. You can do it while at work or looking after kids, and catch up with the stats whenever you feel like it, as in this video featuring an augmented baseball game go to 3 minutes if you want to jump directly to watch the prototype.

Event reporting & augmented reality

Augmented reality might also be relevant if at big political events such as the G20, where it could deliver information in real time, explaining the role of key figures as they appear.

The technology could also enrich a serious investigation by making information tangible. Recently, Sunlight Labs launched an augmented reality application showing you where the US government's economic recovery funding went. Imagine driving through the UK, pointing your mobile somewhere, and get updates about where MPs' expenses were spent. See what I mean? And as London mayor Boris Johnson is launching a website hosting extensive data about the city today the material is already there.

Furthermore, news organisations' archives could be used to display information about the world around readers. The New York Times is looking into augmented reality to deliver its restaurant reviews, for example.

And local news organisations might be able to offer applications showing the biggest news stories of the past, allowing users to experience the past in a whole new way.

Summary

In summary, one can say that augmented reality will enrich journalism. It can provide new opportunities for distributing stories; it makes news tangible for readers in a very new and exciting way; and last but not least advertising people love it, too.

Hopefully its potential will be picked up by news organisations before other players get there first.

Households with a working G-rated boiler will get 400 towards the installation of an A-rated boiler or renewable heating system

Q&A: Boiler scrappage scheme

Thousands of households will be able to apply for 400 off a new boiler under a government-backed scrappage scheme launched today.

The scheme, which was announced in December's pre-budget report, is designed to cut carbon and help people save money on energy bills.

Up to 125,000 households in England with working boilers with the lowest "G" rating can apply for vouchers from the Energy Saving Trust, which they must put towards buying an A-rated boiler or installing a renewable heating system such as a biomass boiler or heat pump.

The government said the 50m scheme would save as much carbon as taking 45,000 cars off the roads, and cut a household's energy bills by up to 235 a year.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, who today launched the scheme with energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said: "Today's announcement will slash household energy bills and carbon emissions while providing an important boost for the British heating industry."

The average cost of a boiler and its installation is around 2,500, according to industry figures. People who own their homes and landlords who rent homes are eligible, but social landlords, housing associations and boiler installers are not.

Friends of the Earth criticised the scheme for not going far enough. "The boiler scrappage scheme is a welcome initiative but pathetically small," climate campaigner Dave Timms said. "It will only reach 125,000 households when the UK has over 4m inefficient G-rated boilers.

"A comprehensive programme to slash energy waste and fit renewable energy systems is desperately needed to tackle climate change, end fuel poverty and create thousands of green jobs."

To determine whether a gas boiler is G-rated, a quick test is to see if it has a permanent pilot light, the Energy Saving Trust said. If it has then it is very likely G-rated. If it is gas or oil fired and more than 15 years old it is also likely to be eligible.

Householders aged under 60 can only apply if the boiler is the main boiler used to heat the home and is in working order. For those aged over 60 the boiler does not even have to be working.

Those with a G-rated boiler then need to get a quote for a new boiler from a qualified installer and give this information, along with details of their old boiler, to the Energy Saving Trust.

Assuming everything is in order, householders will then be able to go ahead with the installation and claim the 400 voucher back from the trust. The first of these vouchers will be issued on 18 January.

Some energy companies will add to, and even match, the government offer with discounts for customers who want to upgrade to more energy-efficient heating systems. British Gas said it would offer 400 to customers who qualified for the government payout, allowing its customers to save 800 on the cost of a new boiler.

Npower launched its own energy scrappage scheme last year and will continue with this offer. Again, householders could save up to 800 by going through this scheme.

Cybersitter alleges its code was copied for Green Dam censorship program

A US firm is suing China for alleged piracy of internet filtering software, claiming that lines of code were copied for the controversial Green Dam censorship program.

Cybersitter, which produces software to help parents filter content for their children, filed a $2.2bn ( 1.4bn) lawsuit in a federal court in Los Angeles yesterday. The company names the Chinese government, two Chinese software firms and seven computer makers in the suit.

Chinese officials said last year that the Green Dam Youth Escort program would be mandatory on all new computers in China, but backed away at the last minute after an outcry by internet users, foreign governments and businesses.

Beijing said it was targeting pornography and violence. But experts said the program denied access to politically sensitive material, collected private data from internet users and was highly vulnerable to security breaches.

A research team at the University of Michigan in the US reported at the time that Green Dam appeared to use blacklist files derived from Cybersitter, but soon afterwards said that an update appeared to have disabled the files.

Gregory Fayer, a lawyer representing the US firm, told Associated Press: "I don't think I have ever seen such clearcut stealing."

He alleged that Chinese software makers appeared to have copied more than 3,000 lines of code.

"They did a sloppy job," he added, noting that they included directions on how to get to the Cybersitter website.

The suit alleges misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition, copyright infringement and conspiracy. It also claims the Chinese software makers broke US laws governing economic espionage.

Cybersitter is also suing manufacturers including Sony, Lenovo and Toshiba on the grounds that they distributed Green Dam with PCs sold in China. The other firms named are Acer, ASUSTeK, BenQ and Haier.

The Chinese government had ordered computer makers to include the software. Cybersitter's lawsuit alleges that manufacturers continued to distribute the program after learning of the piracy claims.

Fayer said that none of the defendants had been served with the lawsuit yet.

China's foreign ministry referred questions to the ministry of industry and information technology, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Lenovo Group spokeswoman told AP by email that the firm was unable to comment on pending litigation, adding that it had not shipped Green Dam with PCs for several months.

AP said spokespeople for Sony and Taiwan's BenQ said they had no details of the lawsuit and could not comment. Taiwan's Acer and China's Haier Group declined to comment, while Toshiba and Taiwan's ASUSTeK Computer did not respond to queries.

But the Financial Times quoted ASUSTeK as saying the program came from a mainland Chinese company and that they were trying to resolve the issue legally.

The chief executive of one of the Chinese software makers being sued, Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering, did not answer phone calls. The firm has previously denied any wrongdoing. A representative of the other software maker named in the lawsuit, Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy, was not available when AP called.

Fayer said Cybersitter was seeking damages for royalties due on its product, which sold for $39.95 a copy. He said the case could be "a watershed for the protection of American intellectual property internationally.

"We don't make many widgets anymore," he said. "What we have to offer the world is our ingenuity and creativity, our ideas and what lawyers call intellectual property It is important that they be protected."

Many in country unable to pay bills or get cash because of software problem in credit and debit cards

A 2010 software bug has left millions of German debit and credit card holders unable to withdraw money or make payments in shops, and thousands stranded on holiday with no access to cash.

About 30m chip and pin cards a quarter of those in circulation in Germany are thought to have been affected by the programming failure, which meant that microchips in cards could not recognise the year change to 2010.

A French card manufacturer, Gemalto, admitted today it was to blame for the failure, which it is estimated will cost 300m ( 270m) to rectify. Gemalto, whose shares dropped by 2.6%, said it was attempting a software update, but might have to replace the cards. Gemalto-manufactured cards in other countries were not affected.

The fault has led to comparisons with the millennium bug, when experts predicted the transition from 1999 to 2000 might cause computers to be fooled into thinking it was 1900. As it was, the changeover happened without much incident.

Although some cash machines were quickly reconfigured to override the 2010 problem, many bank customers were forced to queue to withdraw cash over the counter. Germany's economics minister, Rainer Br derle, urged banks to "ensure that credit and bank cards function without problem as soon as possible, or to replace them immediately".

Many Germans were stranded at ski resorts with no way of paying hotel and restaurant bills. Holidaymakers were being urged to take travellers' cheques. Experts said it might take weeks to re-configure foreign bank machines.

Germany's consumer affairs' minister, Ilse Aigner, accused banks of carelessness and insisted that consumers should not be held liable for any resulting bank charges.

The problem will do little to boost Germans' confidence in credit cards, which are still a relatively new method of payment in a country that is probably the most cautious in Europe when it comes to taking on debt.

Olivier Piou, the head of Gemalto, said: "We are doing our best to keep to a minimum the trouble this is causing for card holders." He insisted that said Gemalto-manufactured cards in other countries had not been affected.

Customers were today being urged to call telephone hotlines to find out what to do if their cards were affected.

Web forum 4chan declares 'YouTube Porn Day' after young Star Wars fan Lukeywes1234's account is suspended

Don't be surprised if you find some porn among the sport highlights, children's cartoons or music videos you are looking for on YouTube today. A web forum, the notorious 4chan, has declared today YouTube Porn Day.

To take vengeance for the apparent removal of the popular YouTube account of Lukeywes1234, 4chan called on its members to upload hidden porn onto the site.

But who is Lukeywes1234?

It was the username of an eight-year-old Nintendo fanboy who scored viral success with his hilarious videos. His "shows" featured childish ideas like ghost-fighting with tinfoil on his head directed by his grandmother, and performing his own versions of Super Mario Bros and Star Wars.

The videos attracted attention due to his very direct, sometimes vulgar, language. Members of the 4chan forum found the hilarious videos and gave them a broader audience on their message board, referred to as "/b/".

In the original and now deleted video Lukeywes1234 begged for 50 subscribers by February. Within a few hours, several thousand were following him, and praising him and declaring him"awesome". Lots of fan material is still online, as teenagers obviously sympathised with Lukeywes1234. Now his fans are raging against YouTube for deleting his videos, as you can see here and here and here.

Last May, 4chan started a similar campaign after YouTube deleted a lot of illegal music.

YouTube said that it is not able to comment on individual users, but it is likely that despite his 15,000 subscribers, Lukeywes1234 was suspended because he did not meet YouTube's age requirement of being 13 and over.

Meanwhile, YouTube doesn't sound too worried about 4chan's threat. In a statement it said: "We have heard rumors that a group of individuals plan to upload sexually explicit content to YouTube in a coordinated attack. As always, we are monitoring the site and will continue to remove inappropriate content as we become aware of it."

It sounds like Lukeywes1234's internet fame will soon be over. Still, there are a couple of questions.

Is it OK if underage children speak up freely and upload slightly embarrassing footage of themselves? Is posting funny videos and replying to them the way teenagers that teenagers relate to each other today? So are they destroying their future or has Lukeywes1234 launched himself into a great media career?

What do you think?

Junior Cabinet Office member of staff Khaled Moyeed set up group called 'We condemn David Cameron and Conservative party for smearing Muslim schools'

The Conservatives have lodged a complaint about a junior civil servant who set up an anti-David Cameron group on Facebook in protest at false accusations levelled by the Tory leader last month.

Khaled Moyeed, a junior civil servant in the Cabinet Office, set up a group called "We condemn David Cameron and Conservative party for smearing Muslim schools" following statements made by the Tory leader about Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation schools during prime minister's question time in December. The Tories subsequently admitted there were factual errors in his attack.

Comments attributed to Moyeed on the site included: "I am completely and utterly disgusted by these false statements that Mr Cameron made."

Francis Maude, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, fired off a letter to the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, to demand immediate action in light of impartiality rules covering civil servants.

Maude said Moyeed's actions were indefensible since political impartiality was the "cornerstone of our much respected civil service".

The Facebook group, which had over 300 members, has now vanished after Moyeed, its founder, withdrew from it.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said it was "investigating the circumstances in accordance with our employment policies".

"The civil service code of conduct is very specific about the high level of integrity and impartiality expected of all civil servants. The Cabinet Office takes extremely seriously any allegations that officials have breached these codes and will always act swiftly to enforce them."

Moyeed, a policy adviser at the Office of the Third Sector, told the Financial Times he had set up the Facebook page in a personal capacity and not at work.

Sensitivities to civil servants' impartiality began to heighten this week as the main parties in effect began their general election campaigns. The election must be held by 3 June.

The civil servants' union yesterday accused Labour of abusing the civil service by using Whitehall research to score party political points in general election campaigning.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, there were signs of resentment from Facebook users targeted by political parties.

New DS to have motion control?

Kotaku are reporting that the next Zelda game for the Wii will be out in 2010. No confirmation if this is Japan only or worldwide - I've got a sneaky feeling it will be Easter 2011 for Europe - but this is great news for Wii owners. I've been playing the latest Zelda game - Spirit Tracks on DS - over Christmas and have throughly enjoyed it despite the over-familiar gameplay mechanics. You can blame nostalgia. There is so much goodwill invested into the Zelda series by older gamers that a tinkle of the music alone is usually enough to renew the love affair. Roll on E3 in June, where we should get more details and hands-on.

Nintendo also talked DS too. It looks like a new version of the handheld device - now the fastest selling console in European history - could have motion control.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said about the new DS:

[It will have] highly detailed graphics, and it will be necessary to have a sensor with the ability to read the movements of people playing.

What he means by "highly detailed graphics" is up for debate. After all, Nintendo long since pulled out of the graphical arms race. Could we see PSP standard or better? More interesting is the motion sensor. Do we really want that on a handheld device? Sure, it will be fine at home but do you really want to be waving your hands in front of your DS while on the bus or train? It's bad enough blowing into the mic while playing Spirit Tracks.

What do you think then? Excited by the new Zelda game? Think that motion control will work on the "new" DS.

To save money, emissions and indulge my inner geek, I've tested the Google Powermeter and it has not been an entirely pleasant experience

Not content with dominating the way we send email, find information and navigate the real world, Google now hopes to manage your home's energy use. In the spirit of saving some money, emissions and indulging my inner geek, I signed up to see whether its Powermeter really is the future. For the past two months, the software which arrived in the UK in November has been tracking and broadcasting to a web page how much electricity my early-20th-century, three-bedroom terraced house consumes.

It's not been an entirely pleasant experience. While I had it setup in 10 minutes using a small hub and sensor from British company AlertMe to plug into my web connection seeing my electricity use on an iGoogle page alongside my email, news, RSS and other widgets was sometimes a scary reminder of our profligacy.

Our house typically rests at around 150 watts running a computer, fridge and a couple of lights, but it's not uncommon for that to jump up to more like 3kW (3,000 watts) with the washing machine and dishwasher running simultaneously. In December as a whole, the Powermeter graph reminded my daily, we used a shockingly high 370 kWh but fortunately December's also probably our highest month for energy use, because it's one of the darkest and the one where we're most frequently at home.

Google Powermeter makes looking at your energy consumption almost fun at least in comparison with deciphering cryptic energy bills. While you can download the raw data of your electricity use, a quick look at the baffling spreadsheet showed the importance of a meaningful interface such as Powermeter's graphs.

Interestingly, while I was trialling the service, Google dropped Powermeter's comparison feature where you can see how your use compares with US regional averages because it felt homes varied between regions to the point of making comparisons meanignless. I'm inclined to agree. Usage for our three-bedroom terrace house was regularly described as very good and akin to a one-bedroom apartment, which doesn't tell me much, except how high US domestic energy use is.

I've also been trying British Gas's new EnergySmart tariff, which gives you an energy monitor gadget and makes you submit monthly meter readings. Charles Arthur has reviewed a version of the monitor he was impressed but the most useful part of the tariff for me has been the financial incentive to save money on a month-by-month basis, knowing that each kWh saved will be reflected on that month's bank statement.

Ultimately, the really interesting stuff for this technology will come when all this data gets shared socially and results in the sharing of advice and the application of peer pressure to make people change their habits. While iGoogle and Powermeter doesn't let you publish your energy use direct to Twitter or Facebook, AlertMe offers a personal "Swingometer" to post a basic image of your energy use on Facebook, Twitter or your blog.

Regardless of whether or not Powermeter takes off, we'll all have some sort of standalone energy-monitoring gadget showing electricity usage in our homes by 2020, thanks to the government's smart meters plan.

Meantime, the best way for most people to try an energy monitor without spending 69 plus an ongoing 3 monthly subscription for AlertMe and Powermeter will be to borrow one from their local library. A trial that started in Lewisham has since spread across the country, from libraries in Leicester and Brentwood to Cardiff and York. Not for the first time, old-fashioned institutions of learning could trump new-fangled technology and gadgets.

Can the internet really bring about political change? Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.

As the Iranian regime cracked down on protesters and on international media, the story of the green movement was often brought to the world by those on the streets. Without mobile phone video, Neda Agha-Soltan might have become yet another protester denied a proper burial rather than the face of the struggle. The Iranian regime could send international journalists packing, but they couldn't stop the flow of information via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and email. It is not surprising that technology played such a role in Iran. Over the past decade, internet use there grew faster than any other country in the Middle East, and more than a third of all Iranians are online. Iran is a country of bloggers, with many journalists turning to blogs after their newspapers were shut down.

However, only cyber-utopians believe democratic change is just a mouse click away and toppling dictators is simply a matter of "just adding the internet". Despite Iranians' net sophistication, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in power. The enemies of democracy are also learning to counter cyber-activism with cyber-repression. But when real change is afoot, technology can force the pace whether under a repressive regime or an established democracy. As Britain looks forward to an election with the scandal of MPs' expenses still fresh in the minds of voters, parties must use the internet to re-engage disenchanted voters not to resist real change.

Following Barack Obama's successful use of social networking, British parties have redoubled their rush on to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. A few engaged MPs use such sites not only to broadcast their views but also to listen to their constituents. However, too much political effort online simply mimics traditional marketing-driven campaigning treating voters as little more than shoppers, and policies as slickly packaged products. The overlooked lesson of Obama's campaign is that it treated voters as citizens with active roles in a democratic society rather than passive consumers swayed by party marketing.

As the campaigns ramp up, parties poking voters on Facebook or tweeting their latest policy proposals that amount to nothing more than business as usual is likely to end in farce. Facebook voters will simply rage against the political machine.

There's lots to save you from the Christmas/New Year limbo with this week's Guardian Tech Weekly. It's the annual predictions show, where we're joined by Charles Arthur, Bobbie Johnson and Robert Andrews, who will spill the beans on what they're expecting from 2010.

There's talk of the hardware over which we're set to drool, monetisation of our favourite sites, and even a touch of augmented reality - all recorded for posterity, so you can sit back and judge the accuracy of the statements in a year's time.
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The age of creation on the web will begin to yield to an age of curation

One of our more charming American sayings is that a time comes when you have to shit or get off the pot. We can only hope that moment has arrived in the debate over paid content online, and that in 2010, Rupert Murdoch and company will charge or not, and succeed or fail, and we can be done with this tiresome topic.

While old media moguls fret over collecting pennies, upstarts will be creating more competitive news businesses, having the advantage of much lower costs. We have seen not-for-profit news organisations march into Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago and Texas. Next year, for-profit local news enterprises will launch in Washington, from Politico, and in Hawaii, from eBay's founder, Pierre Omidyar.

Algorithms will play a greater role in the media industry and its economics. Demand Media and the slightly rechristened "Aol." are using automated editors to select and assign to human writers pieces that will attract the most interest and revenue via search at the lowest cost. We should fear what these content farms will do to quality. But as we see content continue to explode, we are also seeing more efforts, human and computerised, to cut through the chaff to solve the problem Clay Shirky calls "filter failure". The age of creation on the web will begin to yield to an age of curation. While internet media continue to evolve at the rate of a fruit fly, old media companies will continue to flirt with extinction. Newspapers' revenue and circulation will still fall and cutbacks will worsen their products, accelerating the businesses' decline as more papers die. More magazines will fold. Following the sale of NBC as an afterthought in Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal, the value of broadcasting will continue to deflate.

This will be the year when it becomes apparent that the future of news and media is entrepreneurial, not institutional. The year will see the rise of the new overtake the fall of the old. Even so, while we suffer moguls' death rattles, we will hear continued debate over government intervention to protect them through proposed changes in copyright, tax favours and direct subsidy. If the government steps in, it will be to bail them out as it did for bad banks and General Motors. And we know how well that worked. A concurrent debate in Washington will reach its climax this year over net neutrality and the means to bring broadband ubiquity to the nation. That is the intervention the entrepreneurs seek.

If, instead of the same tired debates over old media, you seek something new, go mobile. In 2010, we will see Google battle Apple for the right to connect us, not just with each other but with information about any place, any thing and anyone. As we also say in America, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Jeff Jarvis blogs at buzzmachine.com

Internet pirates are moving away from safe havens such as Sweden to new territories that include China and Ukraine, as they try to avoid prosecution for illegal file sharing, according to experts.

For several years, piracy groups that run services allowing music, video and software to be illegally shared online have been using legal loopholes across a wide range of countries as a way of escaping prosecution for copyright infringement.

In the last year there has been a significant shift, say piracy experts, as the groups have worked to stay beyond the reach of western law enforcement.

The change is rooted in the evolution of "bulletproof hosting", or website provision by companies that make a virtue of being impervious to legal threats and blocks. Not all bulletproof services are linked to illegal activities, but they are popular among criminal groups, spammers and file-sharing services.

Rob Holmes, of the Texas law firm IP Cybercrime, which has worked to close down several bulletproof operations, said successful hosts were now starting to get stronger. "Some of the more popular ones have become more strongholds than they were previously," he said. "It's an industry and it always will be. When you think about it, bulletproof hosting is just a data version of money laundering."

Late last year a Swedish court found four men guilty of breaking copyright law through their links to the Pirate Bay website, one of the internet's most notorious gateways for pirated films and television shows.

That decision prompted many piracy services to seek jurisdictions beyond the reach of western law. Pirate Bay moved its web servers to Ukraine, while another popular file-sharing service, Demonoid, which started in Serbia, also relocated.

"Before going completely dark in October [2009], Demonoid physically moved their servers to Ukraine, and remotely controlled them," said John Robinson, of BigChampagne, a media tracking service based in Los Angeles. "Ukrainian communications law, as they paraphrase it, says that providers are not responsible for what their customers do. Therefore, they feel no need to speak about or defend what they do."

Not every controversial service has fled beyond traditional jurisdictions, however. Some problematic hosts still exist in the US, such as the infamous host McColo, which was based in San Jose, California, and remained in operation until last year.

Pirate Bay, after its brief excursion to Ukraine, is now run out of a Dutch data centre called CyberBunker, which is based in an old nuclear facility of the 1950s, about 120 miles south-west of Amsterdam.

Research published last year showed that most bulletproof hosts are located in China, where criminals are able to take advantage of low costs and legal loopholes to avoid prosecution.

Despite officials in Beijing talking in tough terms about computer crime hacking potentially carries a death sentence in China the authorities rarely co-operate with other countries to take action against hi-tech criminals. As a result, just a handful of firms in China are responsible for hosting thousands of criminal enterprises online.

A study of online crime conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in the US showed that more than 22,000 websites which sent pharmaceutical spam were hosted by six bulletproof servers in China.

Richard Cox of Spamhaus, a British organisation that watches spammers and monitors bulletproof hosts, said it was almost impossible to stop expansion of such services. "At the moment there are a number of individuals who are setting up bulletproof hosting sites in China," he said. "No matter how big a part of the Chinese network we block, the administrators there just do not care."

Not every controversial service has fled beyond traditional jurisdictions, however. Some problematic hosts still exist in the US, such as the infamous host McColo, which was based in San Jose, California, and remained in operation until last year.

But the long-term impact of offshore hosting is becoming more problematic as investigators worldwide try to cut the links between criminal groups and protected internet servers.

One notorious gang of hackers, known as the Russian Business Network, after disappearing for two years amid scrutiny from the authorities in Moscow, has also reportedly returned to action. The group started as a bulletproof host in St Petersburg but had connections to a wide range of criminal activities online. Widely known in the computer security community, it is being investigated by the FBI. The Russian authorities, meanwhile, have been keen to foster greater communication to stop the spread of criminal activity online.

Some are hopeful that greater co-operation between international governments will help prevent the development of new piracy havens, but others suggest that it is unlikely that a complete block on such activities will ever be possible.

"There will always be a place to run to," said Rob Holmes, of IP Cybercrime. "Each time a law passes, or a new country creates some kind of stumbling block for them, they'll always find another place to do this. It goes back to the speakeasies in the 1920s when one place got busted, they would just congregate in another place."

Troubled startup SpinVox - once a shooting star of the British technology industry - has been bought by an American rival in a deal worth $102m ( 64m).

After a difficult year that saw substantial losses and unrest among its investors, it was today confirmed that the company - which converts customers' voicemails into text messages that they can read more easily - has been acquired by US technology firm Nuance.

In a statement Nuance, which makes the popular voice recognition program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, said it was buying SpinVox to help expand its reach into new countries.

"Around the world, the voice-to-text market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year," said Nuance vice president John Pollard. "With SpinVox's robust infrastructure, language support and operational experience, we will broaden the reach and capabilities of our platform."

The deal marks a heavy loss on the investments made in the Buckinghamshire-based company, which had raised more than $230m ( 145m) in recent years to fund its ambitious expansion plans - and once valued itself at more than $500m.

While it boasted a legion of fans, however, the company had struggled to pay for major expansions around the world, while simultaneously fighting a series of claims that its automated voice-to-text technology actually relied heavily on call centre staff.

Over the summer, it rejected a BBC report suggesting that humans not computers - transcribed large portions of customers' messages and held a demonstration of its system for journalists.

The increased scrutiny exposed a series of fissures inside the company, however. The management team, led by chief executive Christine Domecq, came in for criticism, and in August, recently-appointed director Patrick Russo the former chief executive of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent - stepped down.

With losses mounting, the company raised more funding in August largely to service its debts and began paying staff with stock, rather than cash, as a way to save money. But in September one of its backers, Invesco, wrote down its outlay by 90% and confirmed that SpinVox was up for sale.

Rumours of the Nuance deal were reported earlier this month, around the same time that the company was given more time to repay a 30m loan that had placed extra pressure on its finances. However, early suggestions were that the company was closing in on a $150m price tag - significantly more than the $102.5m deal that was eventually struck.

Investors in the company who include Goldman Sachs, Carphone Warehouse chief Charles Dunstone and Peter Wood, the founder of insurance group Directline will receive a total of 42m in cash for the acquisition, with the rest of the money coming in the form of Nuance stock.

Shares in the Massachusetts technology company which had climbed by more than 50% over the past year - were down around 1%, to 15.97, on the news.

OLEDs may soon replace lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls

Wallpaper that can glow with light and bendable flat-panel screens are a step closer thanks to research into organic LEDs (OLEDs), which are widely hailed as the next generation of environmentally friendly lighting technology.

OLEDs use very little power to produce light, even compared with modern energy-saving bulbs. The chemicals they are made from can be painted on to thin, flexible surfaces, allowing them potentially to be used to replace traditional lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls, windows or even furniture. Other uses include flexible display screens, whose very low power consumption would mean they could operate without mains power, for example as roadside traffic warning signs powered by small solar panels.

Lomox Limited, a two-year-old company based in north Wales, awarded more than 450,000 today by the government-backed Carbon Trust to accelerate the development of its OLED technology.

Around a sixth of all the UK's electricity is used for lighting and Lomox claims its OLEDs are 2.5 times more efficient than standard energy-saving lightbulbs. The Carbon Trust said that, if all modern lights were replaced by OLEDs, annual carbon emissions around the world could fall by 2.5m tonnes by 2020 and almost 7.4mT by 2050. Replacing old, incandescent bulbs with OLEDs would generate even greater CO2 savings.

OLEDs have shown much promise in laboratories but must get over two major hurdles to become widespread consumer items: they are expensive to make and they tend to have relatively short lifetimes. "What our technology does, with the seven patents we have, is fix those problems," said Ken Lacey, chief executive of Lomox. He said his company's OLEDs have the potential to last as long as modern fluorescent lights and, for the display sector, as long as LCD panels. Lomox also claims its light matches natural light more closely than other energy-saving bulbs.

The company will focus its efforts on getting the first of its OLEDs to market by 2012, mainly for outdoor lighting. "The early part of the grant is to do the testing and take this out to that marketplace," said Lacey.

Mark Williamson, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said: "Lighting is a major producer of carbon emissions. This technology has the potential to produce ultra-efficient lighting for a wide range of applications, tapping into a huge global market. We're now on the look-out for other technologies that can save carbon and be a commercial success."

The grant for Lomox is one of 164 projects supported by the Carbon Trust for small companies working on a range of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies such as fuel cells, combined heat and power, bioenergy, solar power, low-carbon building technologies, marine energy devices and more efficient industrial processes.

With 500 million users in its sight, questions are raised over future growth for world's favourite social network site

Even by Facebook's standards, the past 12 months have been remarkable. The site cemented its position as the world's favourite social network, reached the verge of profitability and even exerted its influence over the race for the Christmas No 1.

After an extraordinary year, experts say the site now faces a series of challenges not least the problem of how to keep getting bigger in the face of government interventions and its own internal strife.

With the astonishing landmark of 500 million users now in sight, internet insiders suggest that the pressure may bring more headaches to Facebook's 25-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and his team.

"It's definitely an interesting time," said Justin Smith, whose Inside Facebook website has tracked the network's ups and downs for nearly four years. "While 2009 was a year in which Facebook saw really incredible growth... we'll see how they manage that growth."

There is little doubt that 2009 was the moment that the site truly exploded. In January, Zuckerberg announced the "milestone" of 150 million users worldwide. Less than a year later, the social network has more than doubled and now boasts that more than 350 million people log on each month.

The biggest difficulty is how to manage the privacy of users while growing so fast. With so much personal information kept on Facebook's servers, it is coming under increasing scrutiny from governments and campaign groups. Earlier this year it spent $9.5m ( 5.9m) settling a lawsuit over an intrusive advertising system launched in 2007, and last month it made a series of changes that exposed millions of people's information to the world.

The changes angered privacy advocates who called them "flawed" and "ugly" and led to an official complaint to the US regulator. To combat such threats to its future, Facebook has spent the past year hiring a team of lobbyists in Washington and Brussels to push its cause with politicians.

With no more than 1.5 billion people online worldwide, the company is already close to saturation point in many countries and is now looking further afield. Earlier this year Moscow internet group Digital Sky Technologies invested more than $200m in Facebook, with the explicit intention of making it the top social network in Russia and eastern Europe. And in August, Facebook's international manager, Javier Oliv n, told the Guardian that the company was putting more effort into places like Brazil, India and Indonesia.

"We're trying to do things in countries where we start seeing traction," he said. "We want to make sure people understand what Facebook's all about."

Such growth is crucially important to its business ambitions, and it has started cashing in on its popularity thanks to lucrative advertising programmes, brand campaigns developed with major TV, music and film franchises, and sales of virtual goods.

Those have not always proven a runaway success last month's live world premiere of a new music video from the Colombian singer Shakira, for example, took place exclusively on Facebook but drew less than 100,000 viewers less than one in 3,000 users tuning in. But with advertising picking up, the company says it is in good financial health and on the verge of profitability.

Rapid expansion into emerging markets is a double-edged sword, however, since the money to be made is smaller and harder to come by.

"There are challenges with making a profit in many places around the world where there's not as big an advertising market, or people have less disposable income," said Smith.

And amid all of its other struggles, the site has to worry about how to handle its staff while coping with such rapid expansion. Like any company growing quickly, Facebook appears to be suffering from its fair share of friction.

Testimonials on the employment website Glassdoor.com, where workers anonymously share their experiences from inside thousands of companies, suggest that some tempers are fraying.

"Burnout is more common, even as the company grows," said one comment.

"People are often not treated fairly, as egos get big fast when a company grows so quickly," said another. "You give up your life and soul with little career growth or monetary incentives."

However unassailable Facebook's position may appear today, history suggests that even the largest websites can fall spectacularly from grace in just a few years. A decade ago AOL was one of the most powerful companies in the world, worth so much money that it was able to force a $162bn merger with media giant Time Warner the biggest ever seen.

After 10 years of struggling to make the deal work, the company is now an internet also-ran valued at less than $3bn.

"Any time you get to the point where you're talking about 300, 400, 500 million users, you're starting to touch on some of the larger, global institutions you're starting to become relevant to governments and to politicians and to a variety of interests around the world," said Smith.

"I do think that will be a big challenge, and Facebook will need to navigate those questions."

PURE packs a lot into its promising all-singing touchscreen radio, but it's more than its poor little processor can handle

Last year, digital radio maker PURE began integrating DAB with internet radio with their Flow range. Now they've taken this one step further with the Sensia, bringing internet applications to your radio.

Shipping with two of what PURE says will be many applications, the Sensia's 5.7in capacitive touchscreen allows you to check the weather or update Twitter. Taking a page from the iPhone-inspired mobile phone app stores, PURE plans to open up their radio platform to external developers.

You can see the weather forecast full-screen or watch a slideshow of images stored on your computer while listening to music. PURE's Flowserver software, a modified version of Twonky Media's Universal Plug and Play server software, allows you to stream media from your computer. And the Sensia easily recognised other UPNP software such as Windows Media Player 10 and 11.

The Sensia has a timer and a clock and alarms so is useful in the kitchen or bedroom. It also boasts a light sensor to dim the screen when the lights are off.

As with the other radios in PURE's Flow range, the Sensia is coupled with The Lounge, a website that helps you manage stations, favourites, podcasts as well as add programmes from the BBC's catch-up radio service. When I last checked, The Lounge had 14,354 internet radio stations to choose from, too many to sift through on the radio itself.

It's a good job there is a website, because you wouldn't want to have to rely on the touchscreen. Even after a firmware upgrade, the interface was sluggish. The radio has a lot of features, perhaps too many for its processor.

The Sensia also suffers from the same problems that all DAB radios do. Reception can be poor in metal-framed buildings, unless you put the radio near a window. As DAB providers cram more stations on multiplexes, the lower bandwidth stations suffer poor sound quality. Many of the internet radio stations had higher bandwidth rates than DAB stations and provided better sound. That's not an criticism of the radio, but of DAB.

However, for 249, sound quality on the Sensia could be better. In comparison to a PURE Evoke, the DAB sound lacked the rich bass and supporting mid-range on the Sensia.

The Sensia has a lot of features and a lot of promise. More processing power, to ensure that the touchscreen experience is smooth, and audio that sounded as good on DAB as it does for internet radio would deliver on that promise.

Pros: Multitude of sources including DAB, FM, internet stations and music stored on your computer; easily networked with home music collection.
Cons: The interface is sluggish; it's expensive and, for the price, the sound should be better.
pure.com

Is Apple planning to show a 3D interface on its much-anticipated tablet later this month? A new patent suggests so

Apple has acquired the patent for a system that could create virtual 3D worlds on the tablet computer that the company is expected to unveil later this month.

The patent, originally filed under the names of three French inventors, is called "Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Manipulating Three-Dimensional Virtual Objects" and describes "a portable electronic device with a touch screen display" which displays what looks to the user like a 3D layout.

The key element here is that it's a multi-touch device - just like the Apple iPhone.

The Baltimore Sun's Gus Sentementes has also done some fabulous detective work to show that the ownership of the patent is entirely in Apple's hands:

"According to documents filed with the USPTO, Apple obtained the rights to this patent application from three French citizens: Fabrice Robinet, Thomas Goossens, and Alexandre Moha. The inventors assigned the patent to Apple on Sept. 29, 2008. It's not clear if those citizens are Apple employees, per se. (Update: Actually, Mr. Moha is a product and engineering manager at Apple, per his LinkedIn profile; Mr. Robinet is a software engineer at Apple, again, per LinkedIn, and Mr. Goossens is an Apple software engineer (thanks to Baltimore's Bill Mill for digging up Goossens!) Regardless, searches under Apple's name in the patents database doesn't retrieve this patent, because the names of the original French inventors are still on it. (I wonder why that is? Hmmm. :-) "

As Sentementes points out, the patent points out that the reason why we all need 3D touch interfaces now is that "...[T]here is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays that provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in three dimensional virtual spaces and manipulating three dimensional objects in these virtual spaces."

Well, of course. Even if it does look a bit like that 1980s game Battlezone (see below). Two steps forward....

Criticising social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is as pointless as knocking people who discuss the weather

Here are some suggested things to say if you want to sound like an idiot when you talk about social media:

It's inconsequential most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather

Yes, it certainly is. The reason for that is that most of it is "social grooming" messages passed between friends and family members as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."

I don't call my parents in Canada and recount the latest additions to my daughter's vocabulary because they need to know that the kid can say "elephant" and "potty" now; I call them up to say, "all is well with your son and his family", and "you are in my heart", and "I love you".

Criticizing the "banality" of Facebook conversation is as trite and ignorant as criticising people who talk about the weather. There's a reason we say "Did you sleep well?" at breakfast and "How was your weekend?" when we turn up to the office on Monday (and it's not that we care about the weekend or the rest).

Yes, people sometimes say consequential things on social media. The Twitter tag #whatTwitterdidforme has lots of sterling examples. But these are rare events that are not Twitter's raison d'etre. People don't join Twitter because they hope that someday they'll be sprung from jail, land a job, or reunite with a long-lost friend. These are bonuses.

The real value of Twitter et al is to keep the invisible lines of connection between us alive.

It is ugly MySpace is a graphic designer's worst nightmare

The word you're looking for isn't "ugly", it's "vernacular". Graphic designers are paid to clearly communicate messages (both covert and overt) to strangers on behalf of clients. Kids who bling out their MySpace pages do so because they are exuberant and playful.

These pages are as deliberately ugly as the photocopied punk band-posters that graced every telephone pole and building-site hoarding a generation ago.

The kids who make "ugly" MySpace pages are hardly ignorant of the visual vocabulary of professional design. On the contrary, they have been saturated with professional design since birth, and can recognise a message crafted by a designer on behalf of a client at 100 yards and what's more, they can distinguish it from a page crafted by a peer at the same distance.

These pages are made by people who know to the femtometre exactly how ugly they are. They are supposed to offend your sensibilities. They are intended to make designers weep. Their ugliness is a defence mechanism that protects them from being knocked off by marketing/communications firms, because most designers would rather break their own fingers than commit such an atrocity.

Prediction: in five years, some of these kids will have grown up, graduated from design college, and will be industriously turning out clones that authentically reproduce the exuberant no-design every bit as well as today's high-street shops do Sex Pistols chic.

It is ephemeral Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along

Totally correct, but this is a feature, not a bug. The technology that underpins social media is changing fast, and social media companies' bone-deep intuitions about what it should and shouldn't do are made obsolete every 18 months or so. Most of these companies won't be able to adapt. They will die, and be replaced by a new generation of social media companies who have better, more contemporary sensibilities.

Only ancient, clueless dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch are dumb enough to pay hundreds of millions for social media companies with the belief that they will grow to be immortal giants. Only lazy, fat media execs from firms that endured for decades without having to remake themselves from top to bottom think that a complete turnover in the corporate landscape is a failure.

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.

They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.

MoD document written before deaths of 29 passengers in June 1994 highlighted concerns over helicopter's engine systems

Faulty computer software could have led to a Chinook helicopter crash that killed 25 of Britain's top intelligence experts, it was reported today.

An internal Ministry of Defence document written nine months before the 1994 crash and obtained by the BBC said the software was "positively dangerous".

Written by experts working for the MoD's aircraft testing centre at Boscombe Down, it shows there were serious concerns about the engine control computer software, the BBC claimed.

Deficiencies meant the pilot's full control of the engines "could not be assured", said the report for Radio 4's Today programme.

The crash on the Mull of Kintyre in thick fog on 2 June killed 29 people including more than 20 senior members of Northern Ireland's military and intelligence community.

Their deaths were described at the time as a "catastrophic loss in the fight against terrorism".

An official RAF inquiry concluded the aircraft was airworthy and found the two pilots guilty of gross negligence. But three inquiries since have found that the cause of the crash was inconclusive.

Campaigners and relatives of those killed have always insisted that flaws in the Mark 2 helicopter were likely to have caused the crash and not the negligence of the pilots.

They believe the aircraft was rushed into service and the pilots, Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook, were blamed to save face.

The MoD said the Chinook crashed in poor visibility and the fleet had a safe and successful service history.

In a statement it said: "Ministers have repeatedly stated that they would reopen the board of inquiry if any new evidence is raised.

"Despite numerous representations over the years, nothing has been presented to successive secretaries of state that would justify reopening the inquiry.

"This latest information is from an RAF document; it was available to the inquiry team and cannot be classed as new evidence."

Now you too can play the role of the Australian government keeping all that pesky content out of the pristine continent

Censorship, the internet and the Australian government - that eternal threesome who never seem to tire of each other. Well, Australian internet users do seem to tire of the censorship, but the Aussie government seems to find it a constant, um, delight.

From the banning of Manhunt (and ever so many others) to attempts to throw a filter around the island (even though it is continent-sized, it's surrounded by water) - which go back to 2004, but were shown there to be a waste of time (and money) as far back as 2007 - the Australian government has shown an intriguing desire to raise the standards of its population by, essentially, not letting people see Bad Stuff.

And, realising how effective that always is, a Melbourne-based games developer called Conor O'Kane, who (as Kotaku puts it) "is no stranger to using games as a vehicle for political satire", has developed a Flash-based game where you can while away the hours trying to stop Bad Sites getting across the thin red line to Australia.

Of course, you could always just watch the video. But if you really need that game - will it be banned in Australia? - then you can head over to Ban This Game, where you can get versions for Windows or Mac.

In 1985s Vodafone projected it would sell only a million phones
Cheaper tariffs and fashionable phones appealed to consumers

In the early hours of New Year's Day 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father Sir Ernest to wish him a happy new year. There may appear nothing remarkable in such a private show of filial affection, but Sir Ernest was chairman of Racal Electronics and his son was making the first-ever mobile phone call in the UK, using the network built by its newest investment, a company based round the corner from a curry house in Newbury, Berkshire.

Later that morning, comedian Ernie Wise made a very public mobile phone call from St Katherine's Dock, east London, to announce that the very same network, Vodafone, was now open for business. A few days later, its sole rival, Cellnet, a joint venture between BT and Securicor, was also up and running.

At the time, mobile phones were barely portable, weighing in at almost a kilogram, costing several thousand pounds and, in some cases, with little more than 20 minutes talktime. The networks themselves were small; Vodafone had just a dozen masts covering London and the M4 corridor while Cellnet launched with a single mast, stuck on the BT Tower. Neither company had any inkling of the huge potential of wireless communications and the dramatic impact that mobile phones would have on society over the next quarter century.

"We projected there would only be about a million ever sold and we would get about 35% of the market and BT projected there would be about half a million and they would get about 80% of the market," remembers Sir Christopher Gent, former Vodafone chief executive who was at St Katherine's Dock a quarter of a decade ago as he prepared to take up his post of managing director the following day. "In the first year, we sold about 15,000 to 20,000 phones. The hand portable Motorola was about 3,000 but most of the phones we sold were carphones from the likes of Panasonic and Nokia."

The first generation of handsets quickly became synonymous with the yuppie excesses of Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the mid-1980s, and especially London, where the networks were first installed. But hardly anyone believed there would come a day when mobile phones were so popular that there would be more phones in the UK than there are people.

"Within both BT and Securicor, the view was [mobile communications] were not mass market," according to Mike Short, chief technology officer of Telefonica O2 Europe, Cellnet's successor, and who was with BT when Cellnet was founded. "That was also the view in Racal Vodafone. Some of us who were more active in the day to day business, certainly from 1986 to 1987 onwards, we could see a much bigger potential than that, but we never expected it would be as large as it has become."

For the first decade the predictions that mobile communications would not be mass market seemed correct. "In 1995, 10 years into the history of mobile phones, penetration in the UK was just 7%," according to Professor Nigel Linge, of the University of Salford's Computer Networking and Telecommunications Research Centre. "In 1998 it was about 25%, but by 1999 it was 46%, that was the 'tipping point'. In 1999 one mobile phone was sold in the UK every 4 seconds."

By 2004, there were more mobile phones in the UK than people a penetration level of more than 100%.

The boom was a consequence of increased competition which pushed prices lower and created innovations in the way that mobiles were sold, which helped put them within the reach of the mass market coupled with the switch to digital technology and a fundamental change in the way that the handset manufacturers viewed their products.

In 1986, Vodafone overtook Cellnet, Sir Christopher remembers, and BT was so irate that they did something which was to fundamentally change the way that mobile phones were sold in the UK. "Once we had got market share advantage over Cellnet they were desperate to get it back and they started subsidising handsets, bringing down the price of phones and we were obliged to follow them down that track," he recalls. Ever since then, the mobile phone networks have subsidised the upfront price of a phone, hoping to recoup its cost over the lifetime of a customer's contract. Cellnet also changed its prices, reducing its monthly access charge the equivalent of line rental and relying instead on actual call charges. It also introduced local call tariffs.

But there was still a fundamental block to mobile phones going mass market: not enough capacity.

"Mobile was still a business tool because frankly the analogue frequencies and capacity were not sufficiently big to think in terms of millions. But when digital came along, that really opened up the market," adds Sir Christopher. "I remember having a disagreement with my esteemed leader (Vodafone chief executive Sir Gerald 'Gerry' Whent) because I was thinking in terms of millions and Gerry said 'I am not a price cutter'. I said 'you are going to have to think about this because there is a bigger market out there'."

When the government introduced more competition, companies started cutting prices to attract more customers, leading to some of the cut-throat competition in the market today.

"The future's bright, the future's Orange" campaign, created by Wolff Olins, and the introduction of such novelties as per second and itemised billing helped give Orange a strong position in the market. Meanwhile, Rival One2One suddenly picked up a swathe of customers after a slip-up by Lord Young, chairman of Cable & Wireless, who in answer to a reporter's question said its offer of free off-peak local calls would last for life. It was only supposed to be an 'introductory' offer. When it launched in 1999, Virgin Mobile the world's first "virtual operator" that leased network space from rivals scored a major hit with the idea of pre-pay phones.

The way that handsets themselves were marketed was also changing and it was Finland's Nokia, which had been fighting hard with Motorola and Ericsson for dominance of the market, who made the leap from phones as technology to phones as fashion items with the Nokia 3210 device.

"The Nokia 3210 is iconic because it is the first phone that deliberately did not display any sort of external aerial," explains Linge. "Nokia in the late 1990s cottoned on to the fact that the mobile phone was a fashion item: so it allowed interchangeable covers, you could customise and personalise your handset."

In 1999, the film The Matrix was released, which featured Nokia's 8110 handset prominently. Nokia followed it up with the 7110, which was also the first device to fully exploit the new WAP mobile data service, the fore-runner of the 3G services of today.

Having seen mobile phone penetration soar above 100% in 2004, the industry has spent the later part of the past decade trying to persuade people to do more with their phones than just call and text, culminating in the fight between the iPhone and a succession of touchscreen rivals soon to include Google's Nexus One.

John Cunliffe, chief technology officer at Ericsson in north west Europe, believes the next wave of growth for mobile telephony will come not from persuading more people to get a phone because many already have one but connecting machines to wireless networks. Everything from vehicle fleets and smart electric and water meters to people's fridge freezers will one day be able to communicate.

"What we have at the moment is 4.5 billion devices worldwide, what we at Ericsson see is that going to 50 billion devices by 2020," he reckons. "This is all about machine to machine communication, touching all aspects of our lives."

Do you and your partner have the same online friends? Or does he or she have way more than you, a bit like in real life?

Friends you have on Facebook
MINUS
Friends your partner has on Facebook
PLUS
Mutual friends you have on Facebook

Score more than 30

You have hundreds and hundreds of online friends, virtually none of whom you share with your partner. Maybe this is because they don't really like your friends, or maybe it's because they actually have real friends with whom they like to go out in real life. It may be worth checking to see if they're secretly seeing one of your online "friends".

1-30

You have a few carefully chosen friends on Facebook. Correction: everyone you know is your friend on Facebook you just don't know many people. Your partner also knows exactly the same number of people, possibly because you met through a very specialist fan group such as brass-rubbing.

0

You both have a life that doesn't involve gluing your heads to a computer.

Less than 0

Your partner has many, many friends online, very few of whom you share. In fact, it's likely that you've never heard of or met most of them. The normal view you have of your partner is the back of their head and you have to go online to check their emotional status. Your relationship will soon be over or it is already.

Which Bond baddie does the 3008 resemble?

What do you get if you put an SUV, an MPV and a hatchback together? An "SUVMPV hatchback", obviously. But the motor industry is a capricious beast, so for reasons best known to itself, it hasn't taken to that perfectly useful title.

Instead, a CUV seems to be the preferred term for such a melange of auto genres. Depending on opinion, the CUV is a smart utilitarian compromise or a motorised crisis of identity.

In case you're wondering, CUV stands for crossover utility vehicle, a phrase that certainly sets the heart pumping and the imagination racing, at least when combined with a hefty cocktail of dangerous recreational drugs. But that sort of thing is not recommended when driving, so let's consider the Peugeot 3008, which is indeed a CUV, in a sober and sedate frame of mind.

With its bland shape, reminiscent of any typical urban family vehicle, and its chunky wheels and heightened position, the 3008 looks a bit like everything else and nothing in particular. Unlike its most obvious competitor, the Nissan Qashqai, it stops a notable way short of off-road styling and opts, instead, for something more reassuringly on-road. The one concession to distinctiveness is the grille, a sort of ugly wide mesh that is surely a homage to Richard Kiel's dental arrangements as Jaws in Bond films of the late 70s.

If nothing else, the grille can prove helpful in car parks, when you can't remember where you parked. However, this is not the sort of car that anyone buys to look at. It will be bought to look out.

Up front, the 3008 affords a clear and commanding view of the road. It's comfortable and easy to drive, conveying a sense of security without feeling cumbersome or heavy. One minor but not insignificant criticism, though, is the lack of a manual handbrake. Why does it need an electronic button when there are few pieces of machinery more satisfying or reliable than a good old-fashioned handbrake? After all, there is a sensible reason why it's called a handbrake. Never mind the hill start, what about the handbrake turn? What self-respecting getaway driver would attempt that most skilled of manoeuvres with a flimsy electronic button?

Peugeot says the car is the result of a process of "hybridisation", a word that, if it exists, should be used only by deranged genii in inferior sci-fis. Nevertheless, we live in an increasingly hybrid world in which innovation is rapidly cannibalised, regurgitated and reconsumed. Perhaps the 3008 is proof that the car industry will ultimately eat itself. But then, in its own oddly amorphous way, it's a CUV that's really rather tasty.

Sales of Sony's premium product have disappointed so far, accounting for just 12% of DVD player sales in Europe

It offers pictures with up to six times more detail than standard DVDs, and should be the ideal way to view films on the high-definition TVs now reckoned to be in nearly 50% of households. But although big-name releases such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Star Trek XI are expected to boost sales of blu-ray players and discs this Christmas, the format has not been the hit that many expected.

Two years ago, Sony was brimming with confidence: in April 2007 it produced an internal presentation of sales projections which reckoned that by the end of 2009, 27m players would be in use, and 85m discs sold.

Blu-ray player sales have grown rapidly this year , but they still make up less than 12% of DVD player sales in western Europe, according to data released recently by the analysis company GfK Group.

"Sales have been disappointing for the industry," said Richard Cooper, senior video analyst at the media analysis company Screen Digest. "They were expecting that it would be adopted more quickly. But you wouldn't choose to launch a premium upgrade product in the middle of a recession."

Blu-ray is a high-end product it is difficult to persuade people to upgrade to more expensive, premium products when they are surrounded with "good enough" cheaper ones. DVD was able to supplant VHS video because it offered direct access to any point on the disc, was more robust than tape, and had extras such as deleted scenes, commentaries and multiple languages. Even so, it took just over 10 years for DVD to completely kill off VHS sales.

Another problem was that like VHS, which outlasted Betamax, Blu-ray began in a format war with Toshiba's HD DVD format, another high definition video format. Although HD DVD bowed out of competition in early 2008, it had left people wary of committing to the new format.

The way seemed to be open. The difference is, instead of just one challenger, Blu-ray now faces many challenges in the fight for attention, including HD television and, particularly, the internet, where the iPlayer and YouTube - which both also offer high-definition versions - can be piped into TV sets via games consoles including the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. And there are also legal and illegal downloads in growing numbers, plus Sky and Virgin offering what are effectively video-on-demand services in standard and high definition.

In 2005 Bill Gates commented that Blu-ray would be "the last physical format there will ever be" because in the future, "everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk".

And now the film industry is moving to embrace a future of content delivered over the internet. Warner Brothers has launched a Europe-wide video on demand service that sees titles available to cable customers in some countries the same day they are released on DVD.

Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly sounding out leading US broadcasters with a view to launching subscription TV through it's online store iTunes. And in the UK, media companies offering video on demand, such as BT and Virgin, continue to expand their services.

But it is too early to read the last rites of Blu-ray. "There's a huge number of channels on TV, and it's easier to go to video-on-demand than it was before. Yet people still buy content in a package," said Cooper. Blu-ray can offer the complete package - discs, extras and, with newer machines, links to online extras, he explained.

Mike O'Mahoney, general sales manager at the consumer electronics company Pioneer GB, admits that take-up has been "fairly slow" but says that this year sales have been up 150-fold on 2008, helped by falling prices of players and discs.

One challenge has been that people can buy an "upscaling" DVD player - which will make an ordinary DVD played on a high-definition TV appear to fill the screen. Such upscaling players typically cost no more than 100, and the apparent improvement in quality over a normal DVD player (though using the same disc) is enough for many viewers.

But there are other problems. Ben Rose, an internet analyst, said: "The main issue is content. Most of the movie archive doesn't have an HD digital transfer and therefore can't be released on Blu-ray. Blockbusters like those from George Lucas or Spielberg are going to capture the public on the new format and they just aren't here yet."

Even among illegal downloaders, the preference is still for standard quality over HD, Rose notes, pointing to statistics from one of the largest "torrent" sites which shows that there were 12,500 "standard" downloads of the latest Doctor Who episode, The Waters of Mars, against 2,500 of the HD version. The same applies for Top Gear, also popular with downloaders, where only 1 in 3 went for the HD version.

GfK still expects Blu-ray players to be "one of the top-selling products this Christmas" and adds that the sales are underestimated because every PS3 sold is also a Blu-ray player. So far, 2.5m have been sold in the UK. It may be that Blu-ray is simply sidling into peoples' homes but whether it will be the success that was dreamed of in 2007 is quite another matter.

Online retailer may be on target for sales of 500,000 Kindle e-readers over Christmas

Spare a thought for the humble hardback this Christmas. It seems the traditional giftwrapped tome is being trumped by downloads, after Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

As people rushed to fill their freshly unwrapped e-readers one of the top-selling gadgets this festive season the online retailer said sales at its electronic book store quickly overtook orders for physical books. Its own e-reader, the Kindle, is now the most popular gift in Amazon's history.

Amazon's shares rose sharply today after it updated investors on a strong Christmas performance. On its peak day, 14 December, the retailer said customers ordered more than 9.5m items worldwide, the equivalent of a record-breaking 110 items a second.

The Seattle-based company's top sellers in its home market included Apple's iPod touch, Scrabble Slam Cards, Nintendo's Wii Fit Plus with balance board, the latest Harry Potter DVD, Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue and Susan Boyle's album, I Dreamed a Dream.

Although Amazon has repeatedly trumpeted "record-breaking" Kindle sales, it has refused to say exactly how many have been sold since the 2007 launch.

Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart in New York who has tracked the Kindle's performance, believes that across both models the paperback-sized Kindle 2 and larger DX Amazon may be on target to have sold a little over 500,000 units by the end of the year.

Nor does it divulge data about the Kindle-compatible books it sells from a Kindle Store that now includes more than 390,000 titles.

After first taking off in the US, e-readers are becoming increasingly popular in the UK and the Kindle went on sale in Britain in mid-October. The department store chain John Lewis highlighted the popularity of e-readers this Christmas, reporting a jump in sales of Sony's eBook readers.

British publishers have also been exploring the market for electronic versions of books in the hope of enjoying strong sales when e-book stores and reading devices achieve critical mass in the coming years.

The Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury made the 2009 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack available as an e-book for the first time this year, while Penguin has been selling a range of its classics in electronic form with extra features such as contemporary recipes.

The 100 most voted for games in this week's Games of the Noughties list.

A few readers have asked for this, so as an epilogue to an interesting week of discussion, here are the top 100 games that made up our Gamesblog Games of the Noughties list. As you'll see, plenty of favourites were bubbling just below the top 50, although still no room for Dwarf Fortress!

1. Half-Life 2
2. World of Warcraft
3. Fallout 3
4. Portal
5. GTA: San Andreas
6. GTA: Vice City
7. Resident Evil 4
8. Bioshock
9. Call of Duty Modern Warfare
10. Civilization 4
11. Deus Ex
12. Pro Evo Soccer
13. Baldur's Gate 2
14. Halo
15. Super Mario Galaxy
16. Elder Scrolls Oblivion
17. Ico
18. Shadow of the Colossus
19. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
20. Football Manager
21. GTA 4
22. Elder Scrolls: Morrorwind
23. GTA 3
24. Mass Effect
25. Metroid Prime
26. Left 4 Dead
27. Rome Total War
28. Uncharted 2
29. Guitar Hero
30. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
31. Advance Wars
32. Mario Kart Wii
33. Wii Sports
34. Gears of War
35. Metal Gear Solid 3
36. Okami
37. God of War
38. Medieval Total War
39. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
40. Rock Band
41. Halo 3
42. LittleBigPlanet
43. Zelda Twilight Princess
44. Bejeweled
45. Final Fantasy XII
46. Gran Turismo 3
47. Metal Gear Solid 2
48. Team Fortress 2
49. Timesplitters 2
50. Call of Duty
51. Final Fantasy X
52. Diablo 2
53. Eternal Darkness
54. Halo 2
55. Jet Set Radio
56. Mario Kart Double Dash
57. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
58. Battlefield 1942
59. Silent Hill 2
60. SSX Tricky
61. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
62. Demon Souls
63. Fable II
64. Gran Turismo 4
65. Killzone 2
66. Operation Flashpoint
67. Perfect Dark
68. Psychonauts
69. Shenmue
70. Sims
71. Super Monkey Ball
72. Batman Arkham Asylum
73. Dead Rising
74. Lego Star Wars
75. Rez
76. Street Fighter IV
77. Battlefield Bad Company
78. Beyond Good and Evil
79. Braid
80. Championship Manager
81. Counterstrike
82. Crackdown
83. Far Cry 2
84. FIFA 10
85. Gears of War 2
86. Katamari Damacy
87. Animal Crossing
88. Assassin's Creed 2
89. Burnout 3 Takedown
90. Crazy Taxi
91. Dead Space
92. Dragon Age Origins
93. Fable
94. Fahrenheit
95. Far Cry
96. God of War 2
97. Max Payne
98. Mirror's Edge
99. New Super Mario Brothers
100. Quake III Arena