Bobbie Johnson goes in search for the coolest robots at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and tests a diving mask with a built-in HD camera

In our latest podcast from the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas we hear from Sean Maloney, who is tipped to be the next boss of Intel. He talks to Jack Schofield about its new chips, which use less power than previous incarnations.

Bobbie Johnson is joined by Jack and Leander Kahney from Cult Of Mac to discuss the computing chip industry, plus their highlights from CES so far.

Finally Scott Cawley continues his tour of CES, this time making it to (most) of the central halls, and finds out about a gadget that can charge your devices using the energy from Wi-Fi signals.

Tech Weekly is back on Tuesday with a roundup of the week at CES.

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

It's day two of the Consumer Electronics Show, and one of the gadgets making its debut is the Que from Plastic Logic, a company founded in Cambridge. The company hopes to head the charge into ebooks with the Que a lightweight touchscreen ereader that comes with a hefty price tag. Steven Glass from Plastic Logic talks to Bobbie Johnson, gives him a demonstration and explains the technology behind the gadget.

Fixation Video's Will Head, and Matt Egan from PC Advisor, tell us what has caught their eye out on the show floor There's also a look around the in-car technology and healthy lifestyle sections of the North Hall here in the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

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Microsoft is developing Project Natal plus new software and content services to prolong the life of the Xbox 360 games console, rather than introduce a new machine

We all know that the games business goes in cycles and that a new generation of consoles always comes along to replace whatever is popular today. In fact, we should now be talking about the Xbox 720, Sony PlayStation 4 and Wii II, or whatever they might be called, because game developers need a couple of years to create new games to exploit the new hardware capabilities that justify the launch of a new generation. But we aren't, and Microsoft doesn't want us to.

"I think it's important to say that the Xbox 360 is the console of the long future for us. There is no need to launch a new console, because we're able to give this console new life either with software upgrades or hardware upgrades like Project Natal," said David Hufford, senior director of Xbox product management in a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "The Xbox 360 was designed for a long life, and I don't even know if we're at the midpoint yet."

Rather than release a new console, Microsoft is developing Project Natal to enhance existing systems. At a CES keynote, Xbox boss Robbie Bach said Natal will be released for the 2010 holiday season, ie in the run-up to Christmas. Hufford said the team had demonstrated at E3 that the technology worked, and now "we've asked the development teams to concentrate on making the games."

Hufford said that the Xbox 360 did not need an upgrade to support 3D games -- "Avatar is on Xbox and we have a 3D game, Scrap Metal, in our booth right now" -- and nor would he commit to offering a Blu-ray drive. Indeed, I couldn't even get him to speculate about moving the 360 forward to a more modern chip technology. This would reduce the Xbox's manufacturing cost and also produce a console that generated less heat and cost less to run -- benefits that have already accrued to Sony with the launch of the PS3 Slim. It should also be more reliable.

"We love our prices right now," said Hufford. "I don't want to say that technology stops, but we believe we have a high quality console, and we stand by that quality with an unprecedented warranty, so we think we're in a good place now heading into the Natal era."

Microsoft is clearly working on the software and content parts of the Xbox with the Zune movie service, support for social networking, the Gameroom of classic arcade games, Mediaroom TV services, Project Natal and so on. It's not looking to launch new hardware.

This makes sense because new consoles typically sell at a loss, and the system only becomes really profitable in the later years as manufacturing costs fall and sales of high-priced software mount up. Sony, of course, is in the same position but worse, because it's still selling PlayStation 3 consoles at a loss, and will need several profitable years to get back its huge investment.

So what has changed?

Most console wars result in a big win for one player -- Atari VCS, Nintendo NES, Sega Mega Drive, Sony PlayStation or whatever -- with the others failing. This encourages the failing companies to move to the next generation first to get a competitive edge.

This time around, the three major players have all achieved viable market shares. Perhaps there's no incentive for any of them to start a next-generation console war, and Ken Kutaragi will have been correct in claiming that the PS3 would last a decade.

What do you think? Technology has moved on since 2005, when the Xbox 360 was announced. Will you be happy to have the same system in 2015?

Take a look at some of the gadgets being unveiled at the 2010 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.

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.

News International has changed its search engine settings to stop NewsNow.co.uk from linking to Times Online content

News International is blocking the news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from linking to Times Online content.

News International has told the aggregator that it may no longer link to any content on Times Online, and imposed a technical block by altering its robots.txt, the file through which a website can ask search engines not to index its pages.

"News International has for some time been indicating to us that it would like us to refrain from linking to their content," said Struan Bartlett, managing director and chairman of NewsNow, who is sponsoring a campaign called right2link.

"We have been trying to solicit from them their reason for wanting us to stop, but not other search engines. They haven't given us a reason that we understand."

The move seems to be part of Times Online's preparation for moving its content behind a paywall. News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch declared his intention to charge for newspaper content online last August, and the scheme is due to start with the relaunch of Times Online in spring.

Another online cuttings service, Meltwater, is currently taking the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) to a copyright tribunal over whether or not newspapers can control the use of their links. The NLA is owned by eight national newspaper publishers, among them News International and Guardian News & Media, which publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk.

In December 2009, NewsNow decided to pull links to many national newspaper websites from its subscription service following attempts by the NLA to impose a fee structure. But its free news aggregation site, newsnow.co.uk, continued to include the links.

Yesterday the NLA announced that it is suspending invoicing for the new web licences for end users that it brought into effect as of 1 January. "We are confirming that licensing is effective from January 1 2010 and that charges will be incurred from that date but we are suspending invoicing until the tribunal has ruled," Andrew Hughes, its commercial director, said.

News International has yet to comment about any plans it may have to block other aggregators.

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.

Fund of up to 200,000 will help developers to create innovative use of 200 datasets in new free data initiative

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data - including previously unreleased information - about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create "mashups" of data to boost the city's transparency and accountability.

Channel 4 will also be offering up to 200,000 through its 4ip fund to help develop the most innovative uses of the data.

To announce the site, Johnson will take part in a live linkup on Thursday to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with President Barack Obama's chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who has overseen the development of the US government's "data.gov" project, which aims to put all US government data onto the web for others to use.

The London Datastore, as it is called, will be fully open from 29 January. It will be the first such "datastore" for a city in the UK. The government is working on a similar site, called data.gov.uk, which is also expected to be unveiled this month under the auspices of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. He has been working inside the civil service since summer 2009 to unlock and unify datasets collected inside government: when it launches, data.gov.uk is expected to carry hundreds of datasets for free reuse.

The government took a significant step towards making such datasets easier to use with the announcement by Gordon Brown in November that Ordnance Survey mapping data from 1:10,000 would be free for all use, including commercial applications, from April.

A number of cities in the US have their own datastores, such as DataSF for San Francisco and the Chicago data store. The idea has rapidly gained traction since the introduction of Google Maps in 2005, which allowed people to attach sets of data with geographical information to a map in real time.

Johnson has been a strong advocate of open data, having campaigned in 2008 on the promise that he would introduce crime maps, despite misgivings of some senior police officers. The Metropolitan Police did however quickly implement] crime mapping in London, following the lead that had already been set by a number of other police forces around the country.

In a statement, Johnson said: "The superb new London 'Datastore' will unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall. I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people particularly that held by the public sector and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.

"The US has led the way on this idea of setting their data free for anyone - students, campaigners, software developers to use. Now it's time for Britain to get up to speed and I want London, as the greatest city in the UK, to be at the forefront of this revolution, that will not only increase democracy, but also provide a potential money-spinner for the city's hugely important software development sector."

The datasets that will be available include attainment, pupil number and schools data; fire incidents, ambulance rates, crime rates; carbon emissions, floorspace, vacant commercial offices, industrial stock data, abandoned vehicles, recycling rates, waste data, waste re-use centres, fly tipping rates, alcohol indicators, abortion rates, hospital waiting lists and admissions, excess winter deaths - and many dozens more.

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.

Xbox 360; 39.99; cert 16+; THQ

For the uninitiated, Blood Bowl is a pretty strange concept. Based on a 20-year-old Warhammer spinoff board game, it merges the worlds of dice, tape-measures and overpriced metal miniature figurines with the similarly stop-and-start and rule-heavy world of American football.

In fact, the cover of the Xbox 360 game itself tells you pretty much all you really need to know a big orc, with a spiky helmet, bashing some poor bloke holding a pigskin. A sport sim with added violence and hitting people. Fair enough. The thing is, while you may expect Madden with monsters, what Blood Bowl actually offers is simply the original Games Workshop board game, but played on your TV with added animations and graphics. You don't control the players yourself, nothing happens in real-time hell, you even have to roll virtual dice every turn. Think 3D chess, with a ball.

What this means is that while Blood Bowl fanatics will be immensely satisfied (and it seems like there are a fair few out there), for everyone else the game is a bit of a head-scratcher. For starters, it's incredibly complex, and the tutorial offered is pretty woeful. The impenetrable amount of rules, clauses, special bonuses etc may work well on a long afternoon gathered around a gaming table where you have the time and patience to consult huge rule books and sets of cards, special dice, and so on but somehow this doesn't really seem right for the pick-up-and-play nature of console gaming. So difficult is the game to get to grips with for the newcomer it must have originally been made strictly with Blood Bowl aficionados in mind.

The game is, in fact, a version of a PC game released on Steam, the popularity of which convinced THQ to release a console version. Sadly, as these things often seem to be, it's a pretty lazy port. You've got no chance reading the captions on screen if your television is anything less than a 21in. The controls are poor. And the loading times are appalling. You shouldn't have to wait for more than a minute to load a field of small, unimpressively rendered creatures and a few waving fans. Fifa manages twice as much detail in less than half the time.

If you do manage to get the hang of the basic gameplay (something that took me a fair few hours), the game does start to become fairly playable. Scoring your first touchdown after dozens of games, most of which were spent grimly trying to make any sense of what's going on, is genuinely satisfying. Working out successful tactics and strategies is actually be pretty stimulating. There is a reason, after all, that the game in its original form has lasted 20 years.

The presentation, though something of a mixed bag with ugly menu screens and a pretty drably rendered field of play, is quite charming. The commentary is actually pretty funny Mark Lawrenson could learn a thing or two from the ogre pundit, Jim Johnson. Blood Bowl fans will doubtless relish being able to play a game they love without all the faff that the physical game entails. The opportunity for online play is also a big plus having thousands of people willing to play such a niche game at your fingertips must be appealing.

The problem is I'd expect all those aforementioned fans to already have the game on PC why would they want to play an inferior version? Meanwhile, uninitiated gamers could spend hours trying to understand a fiddly and repetitive game that clearly doesn't work all that well on a console. But they could play something more fun, and less obscure instead.

For the dozens of PC-less Blood Bowl fans out there, this game is a must. For the rest of us however, all we can do is wonder how this game ever got released on a console in the first place.

Rating: 2/5

Have you spent the recent weeks fantasising about escaping the cold and the daily grind? Meet the modern-day nomads who have taken the plunge

Read more: the beginner's guide to travel blogging

The diving instructors

It's not unusual for disillusioned graduates to pack a bag and hit the road, but what distinguishes dive enthusiasts Ben Stokes, 30, and Sarah Kemsley, 31, is that they kept going. Since meeting in Malaysia in 2003, the couple have worked as diving instructors in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt, Honduras, Belize and Fiji, clocking up over 5,000 dives between them and leaving their respective studies in advertising and fashion far behind.

The couple, who learned to dive while travelling, now have their own bespoke travel company, Dive Safari Asia, which is based in the UK but can be run from wherever they are in the world. They put together unguided package trips (flights, accommodation, diving) for their clients or, for more remote destinations, step in and act as guides. "Being in Asia for so many months of the year allows us to discover new destinations and really connect with the places," says Ben.

Typically stationing themselves in a location for two to four months, their three essential requirements are internet access, phone signal and "very good-quality diving".

"Communication is generally good in Asia, but bad weather and poor connection can make things incredibly frustrating," admits Ben. "What might take half an hour online in the UK could take two hours in Indonesia."

One of their best experiences so far has been diving in Sumatra, Indonesia, where their boat was circled by a 4m manta ray. They are now in Bali, where they plan to base themselves for 12 months, making various trips around the area. "You couldn't cover this area fully in a lifetime," enthuses Ben.

Ben and Sarah, originally from Bristol and Leamington Spa respectively, can imagine continuing their nomadic lifestyle for another five years and then maybe setting up a more long-term base, perhaps in Asia. "We're not so against the 9-to-5 lifestyle or the UK that we'll never go back," says Ben. "In fact, we could only do this with complete confidence, and enjoyment, knowing that the door is always open to return."

Ben's tip "Start by getting rid of all the possessions that are holding you back from becoming location independent. Sell them, give them away or, if you really have to, put them into storage. You'll be surprised by how little you'll need or want on the road."

The online consultants

Lea and Jonathan Woodward left the UK in February 2007. Since then, the childhood sweethearts, originally from Nottingham, have lived in Panama, Argentina, Grenada, Canada, Hong Kong, Dubai, Italy and South Africa. Last year, they were joined by a new travel companion, their daughter Mali, now four months old. "We're not quite sure where we're headed next possibly somewhere else in Asia," says Lea, 32. "And Costa Rica is definitely on our itinerary for some time in 2010."

The Woodwards' calling came when graphic designer Jonathan, 34, was made redundant for the second time in two years. "We decided to make a go of it on our own and set up our own business together," recalls Lea. "The only problem was we had trouble meeting the same living standard loft apartment, nice car, regular meals out . . . That's when I hit upon the idea of moving somewhere else in the world, where we could enjoy the same standard of living but for far less."

The couple now run a branding and marketing consultancy, Kinetiva , which has clients across the world. They also run an online community, Location Independent, that offers guidance for people looking to adopt a nomadic lifestyle. The couple make money through the site by selling online courses, travel guides and ebooks. "The main aim for our business is not just to cover costs but to make a profit, and living in lower-cost countries enables us to do this even more so than if we were in the UK," says Lea.

The Woodwards live on a typical budget of between 1,000 and 2,000 per month, which gives them a very comfortable standard of living. Travelling with a baby has meant some readjustments, but they are adamant that family life can be compatible with a life on the road. "It's not like we'll go trekking in the wilds of Borneo with a young baby," says Lea, from their current base, a one-bedroom bungalow on the Thai island of Phuket, which costs them 70 per week. "We'll probably stay a bit longer in places now, so it's not too unsettling. We're really just going to see how it goes and adjust our approach as required."

Their advice to any parents considering this lifestyle is to focus on creating the income stream first, even if it takes a year or two. Lea admits that there can be unsettling periods when you feel "insecure, uncertain and out of sorts". But there have certainly been many more high points along the way. "One of my dreams had always been to experience Caribbean life, and the five months we spent in Grenada were fantastic," she recalls. "Being able to swim in the warm, turquoise sea every single day and realising that this was our life is something I will always remember."

Lea's tip "If you're totally new to the concept, read around to understand how it all works, and get a few insights into the realities of it. You can also connect with people who live the lifestyle through blogs, Facebook or Twitter. Many are happy to answer questions."

The DJ

In November 2006, Adam Schofield sold everything he owned including an inherited house and bought a flight to San Francisco. Three years on, the 31-year-old from Bolton has travelled down through the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, and enjoyed a stint in the Caribbean. Having made his funds stretch by DJing along the way and finding free accommodation through couchsurfing.com, he's now taking a "break" in Saigon, Vietnam.

"I totally fell in love with this country," he says of Vietnam, where he plans to stay for a year or two before travelling the rest of Asia. "A local Couchsurfer helped get me a job as a teacher and found me an incredible six-storey house to live in which I rent with three other people. I got myself a motorbike to drive around the city and I'm teaching English for 18 hours a week." In between, he still fits in the occasional DJ set and some freelance writing, as well as getting additional money through sponsors and affiliates on his blog, couchsurfingtheworld.com.

Adam estimates that he has spent 20,000 over the past three years. His current cost of living is around 200 a month, 125 of which is rent, and he earns 620 a month through teaching. He invested in stocks when he sold his house and this bumps up his funds. "I had to sit back and wait for the market to improve, but now I'm making money again," he says.

Adam cites his destination highlights as Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba and Brazil, while the most memorable DJ gigs of his trip have been a full-moon party beside the sea in Oaxaca, Mexico and in a club on the 40th floor of a skyscraper in Bogot , Colombia. "[In Bogot ] I told the boss I would DJ for free as long as Couchsurfers got free entry. He didn't think 260 people would show up!"

Now that he has a temporary base, Adam is hoping his family and friends whom he hasn't seen for three years will finally get a chance to visit. He also insists that his couch will be open to anyone. And although he'd love to make a return visit to the UK making a special pilgrimage to the curry houses in Manchester's Rusholme he's sure he'd soon be ready to move on again. "I love England," he admits, "but it will always be there, and until I've seen the world I still don't have a home as such."

Adam's tip "You have to be good at trusting people. Building and maintaining a new social circle of friends is pivotal to your overall experience of settling into a new place. Also remember that your intended destination may not be everything you imagined, so have a back-up plan."

The home-swappers

In summer 2008, Julie and Martin Gibbons (39 and 42) crossed the "last hurdle to freedom" and removed their 11-year-old son Ruaridh from school. Their line of work a web business that builds psychometric personality applications was already location independent, and now the entire family was, too.

The Gibbons travel by keeping a base, a four-bedroom home in West Lothian, Scotland, and swapping it with other homeowners on a short-term basis (between two weeks and four months) through home-exchange websites. So far, they have stayed in seven locations across France and one in Spain, including an apartment in the centre of French spa town, Aix-les-Bains, a renovated farmhouse in a tiny hamlet near La Rochelle on France's Atlantic coast, and a basic mountain house in Spanish Catalonia.

"Our expenses are the same as when we're at home because we continue to pay bills as normal, with only the travel expenses costing extra," says Julie. "Wherever we are the cost of living is generally less than it is in the UK, and because we are paid a fixed salary from our company, we know exactly where we stand from month to month."

Their company, People Maps , was set up with the goal of geographic independence, and employs up to 11 people at any time. ("Some of whom we haven't even met," explains Julie. "But they're hired on the basis of a psychometric test, a telephone call and a test exercise.") They have permanent staff in Calcutta, and have also hired people in France, Ukraine and the Philippines at various times. As Julie explains: "We all work from home but that 'home' can be anywhere in the world." Meanwhile, Ruaridh appears to be thriving in his new way of life. "At first, he was slightly nervous about spending so much time away from home," says Julie. "But after a year and a half, he's by far and away the best traveller out of all of us. We do home-schooling both of us teach him and also count nearly all experiences as 'educational'. Learning a new language has proven one of the most valuable aspects for him."

The family is currently setting up their house-swap for next summer. "We're planning to move on to Spain, but beyond that, it's all a bit of a mystery. One of the things that's so great about home-swapping is that you can start off with one plan, and end up in places you've never heard of, or considered."

Julie's tip "Don't start out with grand plans to emigrate and leave the country forever. It makes it sound less scary, for you and the people around you if you treat it as a 'trip' even if your 'trip' turns out to be never-ending."

The blogger

"Whenever someone asks about my profession, I simply say that I help people quit their day jobs," says 20-year-old Glen Allsopp, from Newcastle upon Tyne. Two years ago, his online work as a blogger and marketeer caught the eye of a South African company, which recruited him to work as a social media manager for some Fortune 100 clients. Having also spent time working in Hanoi and Bangkok, he became fully freelance in January 2009 and launched a guide to becoming a digital nomad. Although his online income fluctuates a lot, the monthly figure is now typically above 6,000. "For a college dropout, and given the current economic climate, I'm quite proud of my achievements," he says.

Glen is currently based in Amsterdam, where he has rented an apartment 10 minutes' walk from Leidseplein, one of the main squares, and is planning to spend two months in the city, soaking up local life. He says the so-called "passive income" he gains from having already built a portfolio of websites means he works only three to four hours per week.

Of course, such a lifestyle hasn't come without ample groundwork. Glen showed entrepreneurial flare through his teens and developed an expertise in search engine optimisation (getting websites to rank higher in search engines like Google). He now makes his money by setting up successful blogs, which he uses to promote various affiliate products, sells advertising and, in some cases, sells on the entire site. Much of his income also comes from a self-published ebook and series of tutorial videos for those who want to earn an income online.

For Glen, the main appeal of this type of travel is being able to combine leisurely sightseeing with fitting into everyday life and making local friends. He's particularly enjoyed seeing how the festive season is celebrated in Holland, including SinterKlaas, a traditional Dutch festival on 5 December, where good children are left presents in their shoes.

Glen's next step will be to continue his travels through Europe (Prague, Milan, Paris, Stockholm), before "probably moving back to Asia". Although it can be tough living out of a suitcase and constantly having to say goodbyes, the plus points of not having a boss and being able to travel on mean he wouldn't change his lifestyle for anything.

Glen's tip "A lot of people don't believe this kind of lifestyle is possible, so they'll unconsciously try and hold you back. Instead of judging them for it, just accept it and keep moving forward towards your goals."

The steadily growing list of banned websites makes it impossible to predict, let alone stop, your favourite sites being blocked

Most Chinese bloggers, Twitter users and internet-savvy folk are happy about the suing of the Green Dam by Cybersitter LLC, who this week claimed that China's software developers stole 3,000 lines of code directly from them and used it for the controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software.

The reaction from internet supporters in China isn't positive. "It serves them right," Michael Anti, long-time online media guru and outspoken Twitter user, told me. Another internet personality and wanderer around China, "Zola", supports the suing of the Green Dam. He said, "The Green Dam is not something that I support, the people behind it should be punished." But a more concise explanation was offered by a software developer based in Guangzhou, who goes by the name "Lemoned": "First, it's a sign that software developers and users in China have limited awareness of intellectual property rights. Second, those in power and the policymakers have not accrued enough information about computers and new technology. Finally, this is China in the far east that we're talking about. Don't think that it's in the west."

Lemoned is certain about one thing: although the lawsuit is somewhat expected and the software fills a gap, he directs his argument towards the trend that online control has become stricter in China.

For example, the Beijing News recently wrote about the blacklist of websites and that the government intends to create a "white-list" of approved sites taken from all around the world. All foreign sites would need to register with the government before they launched or continued having their site open to visitors within China. No headway has been made since the regulations were announced. As the Beijing News hinted, it might be that the Green Dam is taking a different form.

The end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 saw the attempt to block websites hosted on servers outside of China. The PKU media professor Hu Yong's blog, internet essayist Hecaitou and agony uncle Lian Yue also had their external websites blocked. The fact that these were all prominent internet writers, and that their writings were hosted on external servers, made them the target. The frustration of not knowing what will happen to your website or the website you work for is bad in China. Waking up and finding your favourite download site no longer available isn't easy, especially when certain types of material, such as university learning tools, cannot easily be accessed otherwise. Some of the headaches are minor, such as downloading a TV series that would be deemed as illegal copyright infringement in any country (it's just more rife in China). But when it comes to the seemingly random, but actually calculated, selection of things that are blocked, it's hard to guess what will be next.

The Guardian has been translated into Chinese by a translation group called Yeeyan. Their website, Yeeyan.com, has been down since the beginning of December, but the founders have said that republishing would begin this week, with a closer watch on their material. The demise of a translation community, and the now unclear status of its return, is yet one more indicator that as there is no stopping, and little way of telling, what will happen next.

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.

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.

This hot hatch is so bright, you've got to wear shades

Why do they always come in white, these hot hatches? Ouch! Even the wheel rims are white. And so white. Whiter not just than snow. Whiter not just than white. But whiter than a soap star's teeth. Normally, a pair of sunglasses are a standard accessory when dealing with a revved-up boy-mobile. But in the case of the ultra-white Honda Civic Type R, they're more a health and safety necessity. Tinted windows don't really do the trick the dazzle from the bonnet on a sunny day could easily laser your eyeballs. A full crack dealer's blackout appears a more sensible option.

Sometimes it does seem as if the highways are jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. There they are in their Golf GTIs and Ford Focus RSs and Toyota Priuses (OK, just kidding about the last one), full of an aching desire to floor the accelerator and break free from what? Suburban convention? Come on. Is there anything, aside from multiplex cinemas and DIY warehouse centres, more conventionally suburban than a hot hatch?

And now Honda is squeezing in on all those clogged arteries of the urban sprawl with its very own fat slice of road cholesterol. The Honda Civic Type R 2.0 i-VTec lacks the iconic frame of the GTI and the noisy styling of the RS. It also lacks their handling. But, as these sorts of cars go, it's not unattractive. Because, let's face it, ugliness is seen as an aesthetic virtue in this area of the car market, a mark of seriousness and authentic sense of purpose.

The Type R doesn't convince on this front. The rear spoiler hardly spoils the line of the boot. The front spoiler can barely muster a stroppy pout. Nothing really says, "Get out of the way or I'm going to ruin your life and terrorise your family" the way we've come to expect from a hot hatch. But there you go, times change and new fashions emerge, and we shouldn't necessarily assume that psychopathology should be the only suitable visual language for fast-accelerating hatchbacks.

Indeed, I found the brothel-red interior of the Type R almost cosy, as though Cynthia Payne had brought her distinctive eye to the seats and floor carpet. But it's the predominance of the rev counter on the dash that most boldly states the car's, or its notional owner's, true ambitions. It sits centre stage, all but daring the driver to see how far the indicator will swivel round the dial.

To what end, though? Where is it leading, this obsession with ordinary small cars being transformed into monsters of the suburban id? I mean, this town rips the bones from your back. It's a death trap, a suicide rap. We've got to get out while we're young. That said, the Type R is a joyride to drive, if a tad stiff in the suspension.

Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage where was I right and wrong about the year just gone?

Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let's see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up

Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business.

They didn't. Did they? That's 0/1

Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? "Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11," he explained. And of course there's Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn't. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register.

In fact, companies didn't withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren't making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business.

Prediction 2: There will be more "netbooks" aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market.

Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2

Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won't have a near-death experience, but it's going to keep shrinking.

True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn't made it grow. 2/3

Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I'm sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying "interest" (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That's just not sustainable, and debt isn't going to get cheaper to service, either.

Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4

Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it.

Its latest figures show that it didn't do well, and the Pre hasn't actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5

Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive.

Tricky, this. Twitter's growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their "real-time" search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google "Twitter users"? I don't see why not I've previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough.
So, 4/6

Prediction 7: Many as in thousands of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there's a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don't need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?).

(The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7

Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you're coordinating the project, or you're doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less.

This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon's S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We're still hearing that there's a skills shortage in IT but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There's less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let's call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.)
5.5/8

And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft.
Prediction 9: Windows 7 will be pushed out of the door in time for the end of the year, and particularly for Christmas sales. It won't be perfect, but it will get corporates interested in an upgrade from XP, which Vista didn't.

It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it's not perfect, it's considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that's solid.
6.5/9

Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it.

Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn't challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it's wrong.
6.5/10

Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks.

Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn't formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it's been declared dead ages ago) but it's vanishing.
7.5/11

Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple's Safari and especially Google's Chrome.

Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping.
8.5/12

Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either.

Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried er, hoped no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn't launched a Zune Phone (it's doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod's transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe.
9.5/13

Ubiquity

Prediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it's a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they'll become pervasive. Let's put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year.

Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely.
10.5/14

Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it.

It's an enduring mystery why this hasn't been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don't tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That's not, though, what I'd imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though "more" DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn't happened.
10.5/15

Prediction 16: Femtocells which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product.

I also said during the year that femtocells weren't going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can't be anything but correct.
11.5/16

Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter rather than last year's favourite, Facebook via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.)

Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you'd be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter's penetration on my part though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts.
11.5/17

Linux

Prediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be "the year of desktop Linux" while the bugs are ironed out this year.

This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April.
11.5/18

Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it's best-selling year for desktop Linux ever.

Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn't going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google's mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still:
12.5/19

Apple

Prediction 20: Let's start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone's OSX by the end of the year.

Correct. It always is, year after year.
13.5/20

Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard's release in October 2007 which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule.

Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009.
13.5/21

Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don't think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers.

Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn't announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.)
14.5/22

Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade just as much as it has for previous upgrades.

Yes, it did charge but not as much as for previous upgrades. That's a miss.
14.5/23

Prediction 24: ZFS won't be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it'll be an optional install, for server honchos.

In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare.
15.5/24

Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn't.

Hmm technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs's illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn't such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right - no more.
16/25

Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won't be updated before the autumn.

The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere.
16/26

Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time.

It was, and it did. Finally.
17/27

Environment

Prediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies even quite big ones to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

This is the move to cloud computing, and it's one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud?
18/28

Free Our Data

Prediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey's data available for free unfettered reuse and will do it.

I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I'd have traded all the other predictions for this one but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it.
19/29

Processing

Prediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts' predictions about how in five years we'd all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn't. [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly.

Er, we didn't. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we're still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we're always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.)
19/30

So that's 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what's a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we're seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that's better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.)

And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That's going to be huge this year, I think so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.

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.

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 3 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 passer-by 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 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."

This article was amended on 8 January 2009. The original described Ian Tomlinson, who died after being injured at the G20 protests in London lin 2009, as a demonstrator. It also said that a picture picture of the Limoges Caske was taken on 10 January 2010. This has been corrected.

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.

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

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."

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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It's a Renault Clio, but not as you know it. Martin Love straps himself into an old-style hot hatch

RENAULTSPORT 200 CUP CLIO
15,750
TOP SPEED: 141MPH
MILES PER GALLON: 34.4
GOOD FOR: SPEED FREAKS
BAD FOR: SPEED BUMPS
Mud snorkelling, naked cycling, speed eating I'm happy to take my sporting pleasures where I find them, but I didn't imagine I'd ever find myself ringside for a spot of "precision parking". Yes, parking can yield hilarious results. Watching my neighbour snag his bumper on a full wheelie bin and empty its contents across the road was an event I wouldn't have wanted to miss. But this is extreme parking. These are drivers who spin their cars through 360 degrees before popping them into spaces which make Posh Spice look wide. The world record is held by Terry Grant, who reverse-swerved his Renault into a slot only 32cm longer than the overall length of his car. Impressive stuff and it made me wonder what he could have pulled off with the Renaultsport 200 Cup which, in case you hadn't spotted, is actually a Clio with too few X chromosomes.

It's exactly 20 years since the first Clio was produced taking over the mantle of the much-loved Renault 5. Since then it has consistently been one of Renault's top-selling models. It's been the European Car of the Year twice, and its famous ad campaign starring Thierry Henry (this is pre "Hand of Henry" days) cemented the car's place in our psyche. The ad's tagline, "va-va-voom", is now even listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. However, fans of fluffy romance and sentimentality are in for a wake-up call with this Clio. The Renaultsport 200 Cup is a full-on street fighter fast, furious and quite the most uncomfortable car you'll ever travel in. But then this is a car that isn't built for comfort; it's all about performance. Other than the figure-hugging Recaro bucket seats, Renault hasn't wasted a penny on soft furnishings for its small, snappy beastie. The interior finish is plasticky and unforgiving. There isn't even a clip to hold the tool kit in place just a cable tie, which is quite something considering the car costs 15 grand.

So what do you get for your money? You get a phenomenal 1,998cc, 200hp four-cylinder petrol engine which offers the highest power-to-weight ratio in its class. You get a top speed of 141mph and a 0-62mph time of 6.9 seconds. You get a super stiff, lowered chassis. You get a longer and wider wheelbase which, along with the double-axis strut front suspension, means you get a car that sticks to the road like nylon sheets stick to your shoulders on a fetid night. You get performance, speed and grip by the bucketload and if you are fluent in the thrills of tight turns and electric straights, then the 200 Cup speaks your language.

"Great. That's the motor for me," I hear you say. "In Alien Green, with chrome exhausts and a yellow F1-inspired dashboard." And maybe it is. But after a week of having my brain shaken over speed bumps, of manically careering away from traffic lights, of straddling the uncomfortable seats, I was happy to give it back. Maybe that says more about me, but I was more than relieved to park it at the end of the week, carefully, and with plenty of space at both ends.

martin.love@observer.co.uk