Introduced in April as the result of the Danger acquisition, the Kin phones are already history and will not be sold in Europe. Now everything hinges on Windows Phone

Microsoft has taken the Kin - a shell-shaped mobile that emerged from its purchase of the Danger brand - out to the back and shot it.

Slow sales in the US mean that it's not going to be released in Europe (sorry, Windows Mobile fans) and that instead Microsoft is going to focus on Windows Phone 7, its upcoming revision to its entire mobile operating system.

In a statement to CNet News, which got the story first, Microsoft said "We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."

The Kin had a lot of advertising behind it in the US, including TV, web, print and radio ads. But it didn't make any difference.

The Kin was unveiled only in April, to be sold through Verizon in the US and slated for Vodafone in the UK in Europe in the autumn.

Among the elements that were being pushed by Microsoft as putting the Kin ahead of the pack were "deep social networking integration". However, it was never part of the main thrust of Microsoft's mobile strategy, which now revolves around the as-yet unreleased Windows Phone.

Michael Gartenberg, a consumer analyst, said he suspected part of the reason for the poor sales was Verizon's data pricing plans.

The Kin was part of a project being run within Microsoft called Pink, which was developed in parallel to the Windows Phone 7 project, whose products are scheduled to be released later this year.

However Microsoft's decision to kill the Kin means that for now it will struggle even further to maintain market share in the smartphone market, where it has been losing out to Apple's iPhone and especially to Google's Android platform, while Nokia has maintained its lead, with RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, holding its own in second place.

The Kin devices, which had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, were made by Sharp, but Microsoft determined the software, online services and hardware.

At the unveiling in April, Patrick Chomet, group director of terminals at Vodafone, said "Kin has a unique and intuitive way of engaging with the user, enabling them easily to share experiences and stay in touch with their friends."

Subscribers to discount website Groupola can pick up handset for 400 less than Apple charges if they are quick enough

A discount website specialising in 'city deals' is offering users the chance to purchase the new Apple iPhone 4 on 1 July for just 99, compared to the 499 Apple charges . Groupola.com only has a limited number of handsets available and is offering them exclusively to its email subscribers.

It says it is able to offer such low prices because it relies on group-buying to regularly offer discounts of up to 90% on events and products across the UK's major cities and tourist attractions.

O2 is selling the 16GB iPhone 4 for 209 if you sign up to an 18-month contract and spend 30 a month, while Vodafone wants 219 for the 16GB version if you also spend 30 a month for 18 months. You can compare packages here.

Mark Pearson, managing director of Groupola, says: "Given that the iPhone 4 sold out through pre-orders alone in just 48 hours through the Apple store, we thought it was only right to offer loyal Groupola.com discount hunters another bite of the cherry. We've proved that the concept of group buying can work within the UK."

To purchase the iPhone for 99 you need to be an email subscriber, so you'll need to visit the site and sign up to receive daily alerts. You will be sent a link on 1 July which will allow you to purchase the phone on 2 July on a first come, first served basis.

"My advice is to open the link the second the clock ticks over at 9.30am by 9.31am you may already have been too late," adds Pearson.

The firm has admitted that the deal is a loss-leader and there is only a limited number of phones available. It has also said that people can easily unsubscribe from the daily alerts should they wish to.

People over the age of 50 account for more than half of new users, taking total to 38.8 million

The UK internet audience rose by 1.9 million over the last year, with people over the age of 50 accounting for more than half of new users.

UK web surfers expanded by 5% to 38.8 million in May, compared with 36.9 million in the same month last year, according to UKOM, a division of market research company Nielsen that measures internet usage.

An additional 1 million people aged 50 or over are now online, representing 53% of that growth.

Most of those new users (722,000) were men and 15% (284,000) were women.

The next largest group were women aged 21-34, who accounted for 272,000, followed by teenage girls. An additional 231,000 females between the ages of 12 and 20 now have access to the internet.

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at UKOM/Neilsen said: "The internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups. The fact that one in four Britons who use the internet today are 50 to 64 years old proves it is no longer the sole preserve of the young."

The most popular UK sites for the 50-and-over audience include Saga, electronic greeting cards company Jacquie Lawson and health site RealAge. Nearly 90% of RealAge's traffic is generated by over-50s.

Video site Flixxy, which had 108,000 unique users in May, according to Nielsen, is also heavily reliant on older users, with 80% of its traffic coming from those aged 50 or above.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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It's not just our government that can be bullied into voting against the public interest by big content's power-brokers

A few months ago, Britain's archivists, educators, independent artists and technologists were up in arms over the digital economy bill, a dreadful piece of legislation that ignored all the independent experts' views on how to improve Britain's digital economy; instead, it further rewarded the slow-moving entertainment companies that refused to adapt to the changing marketplace and diverted even more public enforcement resources to shoring up their business-models.

The bill was passed despite enormous public outcry, without real parliamentary debate, in a largely empty house, hours before parliament dissolved for the election. Despite reassuring promises to their constituents, huge numbers of MPs just didn't bother to show up for work that day, allowing the bill to slip through (my own MP, Meg Hillier, sent me a letter to tell me that she was "concerned" that the bill was up for a vote without debate, but she voted for it anyway).

Well, here's some good news for Britons: you're not the only country whose laws are for sale to oligarchs from the entertainment industry. In my native Canada, a farce worthy of the worst moments of the Digital Economy Act is playing out even as I type these words.

Some background: there have been two recent attempts to reform Canadian copyright law. Both failed, due in large part to an unwillingness on the part of lawmakers to conduct public review or consultation on their proposals (though they were happy to have closed-door meetings with lobbyists representing offshore entertainment giants). The minority Tory government is now fielding a third attempt, called Bill C32 (Canadian bills have much less interesting names than their UK counterparts; here, we'd probably call it The Enhancement of Digital Life Through Extreme Punishments for Naughty Pirates Bill of 2010).

C32 follows the widest-ever public consultation on Canadian copyright. More than 8,300 Canadians filed comments in the consultation, and they spoke with near unanimity: "We don't want a US-style copyright regime."

The US's copyright law was last reformed in 1998, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provided for near-total protection for "digital locks" (also called "DRM," "TPM," "copy prevention," "copy protection" this explosion of names being the legacy of two decades' worth of attempts to rebrand an unpopular idea in the hopes of making it stick). In the US version of the law, breaking a digital lock is itself a crime even if you're breaking it for a perfectly legitimate reason.

For example, Apple uses digital locks to make sure that the only programs you can run on your iPad and iPhone come from its own App Store. The App Store has lots of conditions on it that are ripe for competitive challenge it scoops a hefty 30% commission from software creators, and imposes prudish conditions on the presentation of "adult" content (previously, Apple has rejected an ebook reader because it could be used to call up the Kama Sutra, a dictionary because it contained "naughty" words, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoons of Mark Fiore because they "ridiculed public figures" and a comic book adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses because you could see the characters' willies in each case, they reversed themselves after public outcry).

But breaking the digital locks on your iPad so that you can buy apps from someone other than Apple is against the law even though there is no copyright infringement taking place. Quite the contrary: marketplaces where creators exchange their works for money is the kind of thing you'd expect copyright law to encourage, rather than prohibit.

Nearly all of the respondents to the Canadian copyright consultation said that they didn't want to repeat America's 12-year-old mistake. Yes, they said, let us have protection for digital locks, but only if you're breaking them in order to commit an act of actual copyright infringement. Protecting the locks themselves is bad policy.

I was one of those Canadians. As a Canadian author (my latest novel, For the Win, is presently on the Canadian bestseller lists), I believe that I should have the major say in the destiny of my copyrighted works.

If I want to authorise a reader to break a digital lock to move her copies of my books from a Kindle to a competing ebook reader, that should be my call. Certainly, the mere act of putting my works into a digital locker shouldn't give a company the right to usurp my copyright: copyright protects authorship, not assembling electronics in Pacific Rim sweatshops.

Only 46 of the 8,306 commenters thought otherwise. These 46 commenters advocated replicating America's failed experiment in Canada; everyone else thought the idea was daft. You'd think that with numbers like 46:8260, the government would go with the majority, right? Wrong.

When minister of industry Tony Clement, and minister of heritage James Moore, published the text of their long-awaited copyright bill, Canadians were floored to discover that the ministers had replicated the American approach to digital locks. Actually, they made it worse the Americans conduct triennial hearings on proposed exemptions to the rule; Moore and Clement didn't bother with even this tiny safeguard.

The ministers have been incapable of explaining the discrepancy. When confronted on it, they inevitably point to the fact that their bill also establishes numerous "user rights" for everyday Canadians (for example, the right to record a TV show in order to watch it later), and suggest that this is the "balance" that Canadians asked for. When critics say, "Yes, you've created some user rights, but if a digital lock prevents their exercise, it's against the law to break the lock, right?" the ministers squirm and change the subject.

It's enough to leave you wondering whether the ministers understand their own bill. Indeed, Clement recently appeared on the public broadcaster TVOntario show Search Engine and promised that his law allows journalists to break a digital lock for the purposes of investigative reporting (according to lawyers, scholars and everyone else who's read the bill, he's wrong).

If they don't understand their bill, perhaps it's because they weren't really in charge of what went into it. According to the former head of staff for minister of foreign affairs Maxime Bernier: "The prime minister's office's position was, move quickly, satisfy the US; we don't care what you do, as long as the US is satisfied."

It's clear the US government has made a top priority out of ensuring other countries cut their throats just as stupidly as America did with the DMCA's digital locks rules. Last week, the Obama administration's newly minted IP enforcement czar, Victoria Espinel, reiterated America's priority to use its trade muscle to force countries into adopting US-style copyright rules.

American industry is pleased by this. A shadowy new Canadian "citizens' group", Balanced Copyright For Canada, looks to be the work of the big-four labels, with a membership composed of employees and executives of the labels' Canadian subsidiaries (the membership lists were taken offline hastily after this was publicised).

Moore seems to be cracking under the strain of supporting the unsupportable. He has publicly denounced opponents of his bill as "radical extremists" (these "extremists" include the Canadian Bookseller Association, the Retail Council of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and MPs from all the other parties). He then denied having made the remarks, blocked voters from following him on Twitter when they asked him about it, and has remained silent on the subject since videos of him making the remarks surfaced.

So, Britain, rejoice. It's not just our government that can be bullied into voting against the public interest by big content's power-brokers Canada's just as weak and pitiful.

Helium-powered ships could be carrying freight and even passengers in as little as a decade's time

Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries could be part of a global revolution by carrying cargo around the world in airships instead of planes, one of the UK's leading scientists has predicted.

The government's former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that massive helium balloons or blimps would replace aircraft as a key part of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions.

Despite languishing in sci-fi B-movies for most of the last 70 years, King said several major air and defence companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, were working on designs, and the US defence department had recently made a large grant to help develop the technology.

As a result, the helium-powered ships could be carrying freight and even passengers in as little as a decade's time, King told the

Guardian.

"There are an awful lot of people we talk to who say this is going to happen," said King. "This is something I believe is going to happen."

King was speaking this week at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, which has made transport a major focus of debate about global efforts to cut the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, which are a major contributor to global warming and climate change. In Europe 22% of greenhouse gases are from transport, compared with 28 from heat and electricity, 21% from industry and construction and 9% each from agriculture and homes, according to the European Environment Agency.

Emerging support for blimps is one of the more colourful developments in a more general trend towards looking beyond the most obvious solutions for reducing pollution as major economies such as the UK struggle to meet pledges to de-carbonise their economies over the next few decades.

Airships would be too slow for some high-speed airfreight, and would not be needed to carry the majority of cargo for which much slower ships are suitable. But with a speed of 125kph (78mph), and much lower fuel costs, plus a carrying capacity potentially many times that of a standard Boeing 747 plane, blimps could in future carry much of current air freight.

A recent report on mobility by the Smith School, for example, quoted an estimate by one developer, UK-owned SkyCat, that it could carry twice the weight of strawberries from Spain to the UK of a standard cargo plane, with a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, much of which is from avoiding the huge fuel burn a jet engine uses to take off.

Other benefits included the possibility that airships would not need to use airports if they were fitted with "lifts" to pick up and land cargo. This in turn would reduce the need for trucking goods to and from transport hubs, and allow less well-connected areas, perhaps in inland Africa, to take part in international trade, said King. For the same reasons the blimps could also be used to reach devastated areas in need of humanitarian aid, he said.

The essential idea of airships that they are buoyed by being lighter than air can be traced back to the use of air lanterns in the third century BC. The technology began to come of age when the Frenchmen Jean-Fran ois Pil tre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes made the first flight in a balloon in 1783. By the 1920s airships were making regular trips across the Atlantic, and in 1929 a graf zeppelin circumnavigated the planet in just over 21 days.

The craze for blimps came to an abrupt halt after the death of many people when the Hindenburg caught fire in New Jersey, US. However research and development "languished but never halted", said the Smith School report.

'Behavioural ad' targeting company shifts to South America - where it has its sole operational customer

Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur are joined by Tom Watson MP and Richard Wilson of the video games industry body TIGA to discuss this week's headline technology news.

The podcast team tackle the latest announcement from ICANN, who have released the .xxx as a top-level domain for adult sites. ICM Registry, the company that has been fighting for this for almost a decade, will now be able to sell websites with this suffix for $60 a pop. But who will buy?

Tom talks us through the prices of government websites, and explains why 75% of them are to be culled by the end of the year.

The shockwaves after George Osborne's first budget speech are beginning to ricochet through the creative sector, and none more destructively than in the video games industry. The once-thriving network of developers and publishers had been expecting tax credits for new software development, as promised by Alastair Darling in March, but Osborne's cuts have reversed this advance. Richard Wilson talks us through the implications, while Tom explains what may have happened.

Charles also explains the latest in the unfolding diplomatic battle between Google and China, in the week that the search company explicitly asked Chinese web consumers to redirect to their uncensored search facility in Hong Kong.

Finally, we look at a new search service called timmp.com, set up by the digital native Marcel Gashi, an 18-year-old serial digital entrepreneur.

Isometric co-op fun abounds in this new take on the well-worn franchise

Once the darling of the games industry, it's a been a tough few years for Lara Croft. While Tomb Raider: Underworld and Legend were seen as returns to form in many quarters, you can't help but see her as yesterday's girl.

Nevertheless, she remains a potent brand, and this latest adventure from developers Crystal Dynamics is a laudable attempt to maximise use of a valuable licence without resorting to rushing out a subpar franchise instalment that devalues the series.

This is, you see, anything but a Tomb Raider game - with the clue being in the title. For starters, the game is played entirely from an isometric viewpoint (think Diablo) and takes the format of a dungeon-crawling shooter-cum-puzzler. Available only as a download, Guardian of Light is intended to be short but sweet, and a relatively cheap slice (about 10) of disposable action fun.

As if it wasn't already enough of a departure from the hallmarks of its progenitors, Guardian of Light is also designed to be played co-operatively, on or offline. Lara is accompanied in her travails by an ancient Mayan warrior called Totec, and you'll need to use both characters' differing attributes and special abilities to progress.

Find a wall that's just too high to jump over? Simple, Totec can throw his spear into the wall, and Lara can jump on it. Then, using a neat grappling-hook system, Lara can pull Totec up after her.

Still can't get up? Totec can also hold his shield above his head for Lara to stand on. If he jumps, then she jumps at just the right time, you'll effectively double-jump - but the timing is critical. These nifty mechanics are worked into a variety of puzzles and traps, and make working together all the more enjoyable.

Commendably, the developers have included the option to play through a slightly modified version of the game just with Lara if you can't find any willing participants - eliminating the need for a frustrating AI teammate - though Guardian of Light is clearly enjoyed most when playing with friends.

The plot is predictably hokey fare - retrieving an ancient artefact to save the world. But plot isn't really something to worry about too much here - the game prioritises fun above all else. There's an arcadey feel as players compete to get high scores and retrieve power-ups, and the presentations and graphics are admirable for what is in essence a second-tier release.

Little touches like high-quality cutscenes and decent voice-acting all play their part in what feels like a surprisingly polished experience. One puzzle I was shown was particularly impressive, with Lara forced to run through a floor of spike-laden pressure pads without touching any pad twice - it's clear a lot of thought has gone into both the simple and cerebral elements of the game.

The controls, though not immediately intuitive, are simple enough (though the erratic aim control will hopefully be smoothed out before release) and the action, though punctuated by the odd platform section or puzzle, is pretty relentless.

In the hour I played through at Square Enix's offices in Wimbledon I was impressed by the variety on offer, both in the enemies you encounter - from giant spiders to horned demons - and the landscapes you traverse. There's a decent array of weapons available too, from Lara's iconic dual-pistols, to meatier fare like assault rifles and grenade launchers.

It's not often at preview events I'm sad to be forced to stop playing the game, but I felt that way about Guardian of Light. While it probably won't provide much more than a week's worth of entertainment, it's shaping up to be a real breath of fresh air for the series, and may prove a highly satisfying snack-size treat for a gamer looking for something different between this summer's heavyweight titles.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light will be released this summer on XBLA, PSN and PC

Bug in more than 500,000 Sony Vaio laptops can cause them to overheat but problem can be fixed by software update

About 535,000 Sony Vaio laptops have a software bug that could cause them to overheat, the company said today. But it denied reports that the machines would have to be recalled, saying that they can be fixed with a software update that is available on its website.

In a statement, Sony said that there have been 39 overheating cases in total, all outside Japan. Some of these have resulted in damage to computer bodies, but no burn injuries have been reported.

Some of Sony's F and C series Vaio PCs made in January this year and some custom-made models from the same series have been affected, the firm said.

Sony is asking a total of 646,000 owners to update their machines. The additional 111,000 machines are susceptible to several less serious problems that have also been found in the software.

The overheating is caused by a bug in the bios (basic input output system) software which provides the basic functionality for the machine, rather than the Windows operating system which runs on top of it. The bios is embedded in the chips of the machine, but can be upgraded. Sony says that people should either apply the update themselves, or take the affected machines to a Sony repair centre.

Affected models sold outside Japan are the VPCCW25FG/B, VPCCW25FG/P and VPCCW25FG/W.

A Sony spokeswoman said the company has not estimated possible costs stemming from the problem.

The fact that the problem is due to software, and not a hardware problem, will be a considerable relief to Sony. In 2006 it had to recall and replace approximately 10m Sony-made lithium-ion batteries used in laptops made by Sony, Dell and Apple. That cost it $250m.

Mobile company claimed its 3G network reached most people, but ad watchdog said this could not be substantiated

The advertising watchdog has forced Orange to retract a claim that its 3G network reaches more people than competitors' networks, after a challenge from rival company 3.

A press ad run by Orange for its mobile broadband made the boast that "the Orange 3G network covers more people in the UK than any other operator".

Hutchison 3G Ltd, parent company of 3, challenged the line, arguing that on the basis of population coverage it had the largest UK 3G network.

Orange argued that it had the biggest network measured by population coverage, while admitting 3 was larger by geographical coverage.

The mobile operator said that its own population coverage percentages "were calculated based on a marriage of in-house tools and recognised public domain population to location information and that the claim was capable of objective substantiation".

However, the Advertising Standards Authority said that while Orange may have intended the ad to solely mean covering more people where they lived as opposed to wherever they might geographically go the claim was ambiguous.

The ASA checked Ofcom's UK geographical coverage maps for the big five mobile companies and found it was not ranked No 1.

As a result the ASA banned the ad, ruling that it was misleading because Orange could not substantiate the claim as it was not based on directly comparable measurement and reporting methods.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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Google claims new software, dubbed Android 2.2 Froyo, could facilitate fivefold increase in performance speeds

Nexus One users can today get their hands on the latest Android software update, dubbed Android 2.2 Froyo. The over-the-air update will be restricted to Nexus One handsets initially, and will be gradually rolled out throughout this week.

Six months after the release of Android 2.1, Google says the new software revealed at the company's annual I/O conference last month could increase performance speeds by up to five times. Good news, too, for those wanting to use their Android-powered device as a portable WiFi hotspot, as the Froyo software upgrade now allows.

What else do we get with the 2.2 upgrade?

Certain mobiles using 2.2 software will be able to share their WiFi connection with up to eight other devices. And you can now use 2.2-powered devices as a 3G connection for Windows and Linux laptops by plugging in with a USB cable. CPU performance has been given a boost, with the software upgrade able to load data two-to-five times faster. An upgrade to the memory should result in faster app-switching and a "smoother performance" on memory-constrained devices, Google said. Performance of the browser has also been bolstered when loading 'JavaScript-heavy' pages and pages with Flash.

Users can now access the three pages phone, applications finder and browser from any of the five home screen panels.

The camera and galleries have been given a modest overhaul as well everything from white balance to geo-tagging to flash can be done with on-screen buttons. An LED flash also lets users film in the dark or in low-light settings.

Apple released its own software upgrade, iOS4, last week compatible with iPhones 3G, 3GS and 4, as well as the new-generation iPod Touch.

Android 2.2 is expected to reach HTC Desire devices by Q3 this year. An HTC spokesperson told Recombu: "We are working hard with our partners to update the HTC Sense experience on Froyo and distribute it to our customers as fast as possible. We expect to release updates for several of our 2010 models including Desire, Legend and Wildfire beginning in Q3."

Vodafone told the Guardian that it is in the process of getting approval of its own version of Android 2.2, and that the software upgrade will be rolled out to customers in due course. The mobile network also encouraged those planning to make use of Froyo's tethering capabilities to consider signing up to a Vodafone price plan, saying that 3G tethering would eat into a user's data tariff.

O2 said there was no specific timeframe for when the update would be available, but that it should be by the end of the week.

So far as the HTC Hero goes, Orange has confirmed that its Hero customers will get the software update 'in the near future'. Three is currently testing Android 2.1 for the HTC Hero and is looking to roll it out to customers by the end of July - exact dates are still to be confirmed, they told us. We're waiting to hear back from Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile.

New datasets released to prompt creation of mobile apps that will help people find available cycles when hire scheme starts on 30 July (updated with Layar links)

Transport for London (TfL) is suddenly getting the free data/app development religion. Having just relaxed its rules to allow commercial use of an initial set of its train and tube data, it is now calling on mobile developers to "come up with innovative and creative ways to keep users informed about the Mayor's flagship cycling scheme."

The London cycle hire scheme begins on Friday 30 July, and in the lead up TfL has relaxed its terms and conditions to allow commercial use of official data - "opening the door for developers to provide accurate and reliable information about the hundreds of locations where hire cycles will be available, smart routes around town or proximity of docking stations to Tube stations and places of interest", as TfL puts it.

TfL has released the data template of the Barclays Cycle Hire location data on the TfL Developers' Area of its website. The file contains example data but will be updated to contain details of the location of all operational Barclays Cycle Hire locations as soon as possible.

TfL hopes that independent apps will "complement the wealth of information that TfL is already generating to keep users up to speed about the scheme." People can also express an interest in the scheme by providing their details at www.tfl.gov.uk/barclayscyclehire to be kept informed of key developments.

As part of the Mayor's vision for London as a cycle city 6,000 cycles will be available at around 400 locations across central London. It's expected to generate up to 40,000 extra daily cycle trips a day. Users can pay 1 for 24 hour access, 5 for 7 day access, or take out a 45 annual Membership. Subsequently, each completed journey of up to half an hour will be free of charge. Journeys of between 30 minutes and one hour will cost 1, 4 for up to 90 minutes and 6 for up to two hours. Charges then increase incrementally up to a maximum hire period of 24 hours.

The Mayor of London's Transport Advisor, Kulveer Ranger said: "This scheme is the cornerstone of the cycle revolution the Mayor is bringing to the Capital and we want to make it as easy for Londoners to use as possible. Barclays Cycle Hire has got everybody talking and app developers are already recognising the opportunities that the scheme offers. They are incredibly creative people and I'm really looking forward to seeing and using the new apps."

It's a promising start. Developers, get on your bikes.

Update: Craig Poxon has put them into Layar, an augmented reality app: here's the one for Android, and here's the one for the iPhone. (You need the Layar Reality Browser installed, and to use a mobile device.) Who's next?

Buxter software is expected to take the market for game credits and gifts to 554m

Facebook users are expected to spend millions of pounds online following the release of a new application which allows developers to make money out of previously free games.

Platogo, a developer of games on the social networking site, has said it has begun using the application to enable its players to use real money up to 50 ( 40) at a time to buy virtual currency in its Facebook games.

The new application, called Buxter, was released by the payments company ClickandBuy earlier this year, and is described as an online wallet to allow Facebook users to send and receive money, for example to contribute towards a friend's birthday present, or to repay a share of a restaurant bill.

Buxter's website says: "It used to be only messages, images and videos that you could share with your friends on Facebook. With Buxter, you can now also share money.

"Whether it is the lunch money you owe a friend, or the virtual item you want to buy in your favourite game, Buxter is there to provide you with safe and simple payment solutions."

However, Platogo, an Austrian games company that has developed games such as Veggie Snake and Whac-A-Pal, believes that Buxter could also hold the key to helping developers generate revenues from previously free-to-play social network games.

Jakob Sommerhuber, chief executive officer at Platogo, said: "Research from the Inside Virtual Goods Report shows that the market for games and gifts within social networks will be worth $835m [ 554m] by the end of this year. For any business operating within Facebook this is a potentially huge market. The problem until now has been how to make it easy for users to make payments to buy virtual goods within games, for example. Buxter has solved that problem in a stroke."

In an interview for Inside Social Games, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, said it made sense that there should be one currency that could be used on games developed by different companies, including Farmville creator Zynga. "If I go play a CrowdStar game right now and get credits there, I can't go use those credits in a Zynga game, so that kind of sucks.

"One of the biggest inefficiencies in buying virtual goods is all the friction of having to take your credit card out, so having one store of [virtual currency] that you can use everywhere is both good for users and good for all the apps."

But this could be bad news for parents who are trying to keep tabs on their children's Facebook activities. The Guardian recently reported on a 12-year-old boy who used his mother's credit card to buy 900 of virtual currency on the Farmville game.

Michael Arrington, founder of the Techcrunch blog, criticised Zynga last year for monetising Farmville, accusing the games developer of generating "hundreds of millions of dollars" from unsuspecting players, many of whom are children.

ClickandBuy has welcomed Platogo's adoption of its application. Charles Fraenkl, CEO of ClickandBuy, said: "This is a fascinating piece of innovation by Platogo. They were quick to spot that Buxter is just as suited for use by businesses within Facebook that use micro-payments as it is for Facebook users."

Fraenkl added: "Platogo's imagination looks set to have opened up a way for thousands of Facebook businesses to begin generating revenues from apps that were previously free to use."

Though the American company had nothing to do with the industrial espionage in China in 2002 that led to faulty components, it paid the price with millions of faulty PCs

Is the green capacitor faulty? Photo by hr.icio on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Dell sold millions of computers between 2003 and 2005 that had faulty components - specifically, capacitors, according to documents unsealed in a case being heard in the federal court in North Carolina.

In an article in the New York Times, Ashlee Vance writes about the problems that Dell faced - and how it tried to prevent them becoming more widely known:

"Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company's employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute."

The documents do sound fascinating - though so far the only one from the case that that has made it onto the wider web from the case is this one - which is simply a list of documents that are no longer sealed. (The case is being heard at the Federal District Court in North Carolina.)

In 2005, Dell announced that it was taking a $300m charge to cover the cost of fixing and/or replacing the faulty machines.

The NYT then argues that "The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America's most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers."

That may be true - but it's not the whole story. Dell ran afoul, quite without realising it, of one of the most fascinating pieces of industrial espionage of recent times: the theft of a formula for making the electrolyte to go into capacitors from a Japanese company, which got taken to China, and then onto Taiwan - but somewhere, got messed up.

How do I know? Because I wrote about it seven years ago:

"A scientist steals a secret formula for an electrical product from his Japanese employer and takes it to China. Then it is stolen again and turns up in Taiwan. But something goes wrong - and thousands, perhaps millions, of computers and electrical goods in the West begin to burn out or explode.

"It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it's reality. Thousands of computers have failed and nobody is sure how many more products might go wrong because their capacitors - essential components to control the power supply - were made with faulty materials."

In 2001, a scientist - name still unknown - left Rubycon Corporation Japan to go and work for the Luminous Town Electric company in China. Both companies made (among other things) electrolytic capacitors, which are usually used in power circuits. At the LTE Company, the scientist made a copy of the electrolyte - the chemical that goes inside the capacitors and enhances its capacitative properties.

"Later that year, the scientist's staff defected to Taiwan, taking with them a copy of the electrolyte formula so they could set up their own company. Taiwan supplies 30 per cent of the world's electrolytic capacitors and most of the big PC manufacturers get their machines assembled in Taiwan. But the defectors mis-copied the formula. After a few hours of operation, the electrolyte would leak hydrogen gas, before bursting the metal body of the capacitor. The electrolyte would then leak its brownish filling and could cause a fire."

IBM confessed to having a problem - and so too, privately, did Dell at the time. But that was before it began selling millions of machines which had a consistent problem: the capacitors weren't up to scratch.

Because according to the NYT story, the problem that kept cropping up with those machines was, indeed, the capacitors. "The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break."

Passive Component Industry Magazine (passive components are things like capacitors and resistors) wrote about this in September 2002, though it didn't know then quite how bad things would get. As Dell's experience showed, it could get very bad indeed.

Back in 2003, Dennis Zogbi, president of Paumanok Publications, an expert on the market for passive components, told me that the problem is that "People want Western quality at Chinese prices," he said. "Well, you can't have both."

The story continued well after that, though, with sites such as Badcaps staying on the back of manufacturers including Apple which had had the faulty components. Wikipedia refers to the "capacitor plague" - and though it does seem to have gone into remittance now, Chris Passalacqua, owner of Badcaps, suggests, "They didn't discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. However, it's been going on way too long to simply blame on an industrial espionage boo-boo in my humble opinion, as this problem is still extremely common, and hasn't slowed down. Personally, I think it all boils down to shoddy components that are manufactured by shoddy component makers."

And that's where we circle back to Dell's problems. The NYT said that "The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America's most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers." And that's certainly true: for years, Dell led because it could undercut rivals, and kept pushing the price down.

But price and quality control are always in conflict - and in the end that seems to have done for Dell. While other companies had the capacitor problem too, they didn't suffer it as long as Dell appears to have. So it was partly something Dell couldn't have expected to have control over, namely the electrolyte formula in the capacitors in the motherboards and/or power supplies - but also partly something Dell could have acted on, which was the repeated failure of those capacitors.

Meanwhile, if anyone does have a Pacer account and wants to repost those court documents, please link them below.

Search giant ends automatic redirection to Hong Kong site for mainland web users in effort to placate Beijing authorities

Google today sought to placate the Chinese authorities by ending the automatic redirection of mainland users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, saying officials had warned they would otherwise refuse to renew the firm's licence.

Several industry analysts suggested the last-ditch move made only a day before Google's permit to provide content expires signalled the end for the google.cn service following the search giant's battle with the censors.

The company began diverting users of the site to google.com.hk in March, having said it was no longer willing to censor search results as required under Chinese law.

Today, it said it had introduced an extra step, redirecting users to a landing page with a link to the Hong Kong site.

In a post on the Google blog, the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond, wrote: "This redirect [to Hong Kong], which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google.

"However, it's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable and that if we continue redirecting users, our internet content provider licence will not be renewed (it's up for renewal on June 30).

"Without an ICP licence, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn, so Google would effectively go dark in China.

"That's a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive."

Drummond said some users were already being taken to the landing page and that, over the next few days, all users would be diverted that way.

He said the firm had resubmitted its licence renewal application on that basis.

Analysts said Google would be unable to use the google.cn domain and provide services such as music and mapping without a licence, analysts said.

Google spokesman Peter Barron said: "We have a choice. Keep the redirect, lose the licence and have .cn go dark, or look at a different option.

"We think this option stays true to our commitment not to censor, while also hopefully keeping .cn alive ... We are hopeful that our licence will be renewed on this basis, but we'll have to wait to hear from the Chinese authorities."

The Chinese ministry of industry and information technology, which oversees licensing, declined to comment.

Although Hong Kong is part of China, it is governed under different laws, but users from the mainland are still unable to see uncensored search results on google.com.hk because the country's firewall blocks sensitive terms.

Few expected Google's attempt at a compromise to win favour with Chinese authorities.

"My guess is that, by taking it public, they have basically sealed their fate," said the Beijing-based internet expert Bill Bishop, who blogs as Digicha.

"I have always been of the mind that the idea somehow Google had got through everything and now it was hunky-dory was a bit hopeful. People here have long memories."

Bishop suggested the drawn-out nature of the dispute with officials was beginning to "chip away at [Google's] position of moral superiority" in some people's eyes.

Paul Denlinger, an internet consultant specialising in the Chinese market, said: "I think what they want to do is keep the door open for being able to come back into China at some later date.

"Going out in a blaze of glory might make some people happy in the US and other parts of the world, but it would slam the door on China."

But Denlinger said that, in the shorter term, it "looks very bad" for Google's future in China.

Industry sources predicted an appreciable but not huge drop-off in traffic to google.com.hk if google.cn was turned off, because some mainland users were still not used to the google.com.hk domain.

A more important question may be whether Google is allowed to continue selling advertising in China in the long run. Denlinger also raised questions about Google's ability to offer mapping services.

The real winner of today's announcement is likely to be Baidu, the domestic search firm that had around two-thirds of the market even before Google moved its search services overseas.

The site dates back to 1997, but its terms and conditions to about 1770 - and mobile developers are very frustrated by them

The Edinburgh Fringe is nearly upon us: it runs from 4 August to 28 August. And to cover it, there's the venerable Edinburgh Festival Fringe website - set up in January 1997, when the web was young(ish).

But look more closely at the site - specifically, at its terms and conditions - and you may get a throwback to those days you thought long-gone.

They begin:

"You are reading the terms and conditions for use of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website (edfringe.com). They make a legally binding contract between us and you. Your acceptance of the terms and conditions is made by your browsing our website and is dated to your first use of the website. If you do not accept the terms and conditions or any part of them you should stop using our website immediately."

Gosh, I'm scared already. Reading them constitutes a legally binding contract? I'm no lawyer, but I think you have to do something - like signing dotted lines, opening packaging, or clicking buttons - to be shown to have entered into a contract. Reading isn't the same as assenting.

But carry on: there's another section.

"About linking by hypertext to our website: Before providing a link to our site you must seek our permission. To do this, email admin@edfringe.com with details of the URL to which you wish to link and the URL of the page on which you will be displaying the link. We do not permit the display of our web pages in any HTMLl [sic] frame unless we have expressly authorised this."

Pardon? We have to seek your permission to link to your site?
Update 17:40: that section has now been removed from the terms and conditions - although completely silently. (You can find it, for now, in Google's cache.)

At this point I did pick up the phone to speak to the people behind the site. So, I asked, has Google explicitly asked 1,200 times to link to pages inside the site? Has Bing asked 69 times? Or is there some sort of exemption for search engines?

There is a point to this line of questioning, which is driven by a post by Chris Gutteridge at Southampton University. He pointed to the absurd Ts&Cs, writing:

"I work with the Web Science Trust and some of the big names in the Semantic Web and I was hoping I would be able to create "linked data" for the fringe festival. Linked data is the technique being used to publish government data on data.gov.uk and, according to Sir Tim Berners Lee, is the future of the web.

"If I was able to do this (which I would happily do for free and with no bother to you), it would result in dozens of websites and phone apps remixing the fringe guide. While I'm sure your own iPhone app will be good (although I have a android phone, so no use to me), it would have been exciting to have 100's of people providing alternate ways to work with the programme, and far more in the spirit of the fringe. Sadly it looks like the rules have been written from the perspective of advertising revenue and control, rather than fostering creativity and experimentation.

"The Fringe will be awesome without linked data, but it could be and should be awesomer."

Well, I asked the Edinburgh Fringe website team, how about it? Why not let Gutteridge and similar people link in and create apps? Surely they'd be able to generate benefits for both the people visiting Edinburgh (you'd have an Android or iPhone app which you could use if you said "I've got a half-hour to spare... is there a show on? Are there tickets?") and the performers, who'd see more people at performances, and the site itself?

The response from Neil Mackinnon, head of external affairs for the Festival Fringe Society, was:

"The Edinburgh Fringe website is the only source of comprehensive and accurate information about every show taking place each August. It is also the only place where audience members can buy tickets for every show in every venue. In 2010 that amounts to 40,254 performances of 2,453 shows in 259 venues. The terms and conditions covering use of our website are kept under constant review to ensure that they meet the needs of the performers and venues who provide the information for the website and our audience members who trust us to deliver accurate and up to date information that can help them select the right shows for them."

Though I pointed out that this didn't actually answer any of the questions I'd put - about the weird Ts&Cs, the potential benefits to performers and customers - the team was unmoved, beyond saying that it "keeps these things under review".

Possibly, of course, it is simply trying to corner the market for itself, with its own iPhone app which - recently - it has begun picturing on the front of the site with the words "coming July". That might be useful, though it won't be much good for Android users.

And we really don't like those terms and conditions.

The games industry is facing a brain drain after the coalition government reneged on its promise to give it tax breaks

The British video game industry is in shock. Barely two months ago, Alistair Darling planned a series of tax breaks for the sector in his final budget. But last week, amid a range of painful austerity measures, George Osborne reversed the decision, calling Darling's plans "poorly targeted".

It is a hammer blow for UK game companies, who are losing out to rivals in countries such as Canada, the US and South Korea, where generous tax subsidies are available to games employers. Richard Wilson, chief executive of the industry's trade body Tiga, called the decision "a big mistake" and was furious at what he sees a "betrayal" of promises. "Before the general election the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats both explicitly stated that they supported tax breaks for the video game industry. In fact, the Conservatives said that Labour had stolen their idea."

Wilson is right to be enraged. It may be difficult for the rest of us, reeling from VAT increases and frozen child benefits, to have any sympathy for the makers of computer games. But the UK industry has, up until now, been one of our rare unmitigated success stories a vibrant, globally respected sector, producing such famed franchises as Tomb Raider, Fable, LittleBigPlanet and Lego Star Wars. We were once the third-largest producer of games in the world, and last year the industry managed to bring 1bn in to the British economy. Cameron loves to talk about moving away from relying on the public sector and financial services well, David, the video game business could have been part of your way out. It's export-orientated and cutting-edge, has highly skilled employees, and it's even low on carbon emissions.

But the signs of strain are showing. It is expensive to make games in Britain, and expensive for foreign investors to set up and support studios here; Wilson states that between 2008 and 2009, 15% of UK development studios went out of business. Meanwhile in Quebec, the government subsidises a third of the salaries paid out to development staff amid a range of other compelling initiatives. No wonder Electronic Arts, Square Enix and Warner Bros all have new studios in Montreal. And no wonder the UK is suffering a brain drain. The period between March 2009 and 2010 saw the loss of over 700 jobs in British games development. About 300 is believed to have gone to Canada. When my brother-in-law, a game designer, was made redundant from his UK firm five years ago, he was snapped up by Ubisoft Montreal.

There are no major UK-owned games publishers left, they've either gone bust or been bought out by foreign giants. The UK is now an outsourcing nation, competing for work with countries in Eastern Europe and the Far East where the workforce is cheap and skills are improving. There are growing parallels with the UK movie industry, once a major producer and maker of films, but now scraping by on limited funding. "We'll lose jobs, we'll lose influence, the UK games industry will not be world-leading," warns Wilson.

UK games companies have forged creative and commercial links with other sectors, from universities, to the fashion, animation, movie and TV industries. British games veterans are helping to shape the future of interactive TV, the growth of 3D technology and the pervasive "gamification" of consumer products and services in every area of business. How long will that continue?

The one bright spot in all this is Osborne's wording. His reference to the tax plans as poorly targeted, may indicate he's looking to review rather than abandon support for the industry. "I was surprised by those words," says Cliona Kirby, a partner in the tax group at technology law firm Olswang, who completed a report on video game tax credits for Ed Vaizey. "But then it's incredibly hard to introduce a targeted tax break for any one industry in the current economic climate, especially when we're looking at tax rises and large public sector cuts. But I believe the Conservatives are still committed to the industry." I'd like to agree but future initiatives may have to be spread out across the entire creative sector.

Certainly though, if there is a will there to aid this industry, Tiga will unearth it. Wilson will continue to lobby for tax breaks, as will Elspa, the video game publishers' association. The coalition government could do with an economic success story to rally behind. Video games are a popular component of our leisure time and there's only so much austerity we can take.

Russia, Japan, China and Japan only remaining countries where Facebook not leading social network says founder

Facebook's global dominance is almost complete with just Russia, Japan, China and Japan yet to be converted and the social networking giant aiming to reach 1 billion users, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed today.

Zuckerberg, who said he had recently met Prime Minister David Cameron "for just a minute [when] he was busy rolling out the budget", also admitted that one day he could see Facebook floating on the stockmarket just not anytime soon.

He added that there was "no chance" Facebook, which has cracked the 500 million user mark, would hit 1 billion this year but argued that "it is almost a guarantee that it will happen".

"If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this to a billion people it will be interesting to see how it plays out," he said speaking to two packed auditoriums one via video link at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Facebook's global domination is almost complete, he said. "We are down to just four countries where we aren't the leading social network."

Zuckerberg added that in Russia Facebook had just 1 million users, the kind of numbers that saw AOL sell off Bebo and ITV relinquish Friends Reunited. But in Facebook's case, growth is "doubling every six months", according to Zuckerberg, and Japan and Korea have similar user bases.

He said that Facebook can tell when an explosive growth "tipping point" is about to be reached by who is "friending" who. When Facebook first launches in a country, nearly all the friend connections are with foreign Facebook users.

"We know that a country has tipped when local-to-local connections outnumber local to foreign," he added. "It is a long-term thing [and with regard to the four left to tip] we are probably not going to win in six months, not in a year [but] things look promising in three to five years out."

He also said that the company would make an initial public offering. "At some point, sure," he said. "It is probably not that different [running a public company compared with a privately held one]." However, after many sceptical guffaws in the Cannes audience he backtracked and said: "OK, I'm sure it is a lot different."

Zuckerberg added that one of the issues was that he was in it with a long-term view, which most investors are not if you go public, which he admitted was a "challenge".

He also addressed concerns over privacy, explaining that Facebook's meteoric growth had meant the company had been caught out while it was in "transition". However, he added that the changing face of how privacy is perceived now that users are in a digital age meant that there were always going to be "natural tensions".

"Six years ago most people didn't want any information about themselves on web," he said. "To start off people were a bit reticent about this. Then over time people think it is great to be connected and share things. I think the world looks a lot different now. There is a real natural tension between people seeing the value of sharing more stuff but wanting control over what they share."

Zuckerberg added that as Facebook developed it built privacy controls for everything. At one point there were more than 100 individual settings users could change, which it had been important to simplify as the company had to "transition [and be] pretty quick to adjust and evolve to 500 million users".

"People have very legitimate questions and it is an important dialogue," he said.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

The company's head of PR has put out a fist-pumping set of figures to reassure its staff. But he seems to have left some analysis out. Never mind - we've put it in

Just before the weekend, Frank Shaw, one of Microsoft's top PR people posted a memo to his team which included a Rocky-style paean to the virtues of jogging uphill, but also a self-examinatory question: why is everyone looking at Apple and Google, and not at Microsoft?

The text of the memo is at All Things Daily, but far more interesting were the statistics that he chose to include in a morale-boosting blog post.

Thing is, as happens with many such statistics-wielding posts, they don't necessarily tell the full story. Just as you should not trust numbers given by an executive unless their share options and fiduciary duties to tell the truth about their company's performance depend on it, you should examine numbers like those paraded by Microsoft more closely - and look too at what has been left out.

So let's look more closely at what he offered on the Official Microsoft Blog:

(I'll point out that he clearly wrote it using Word, as it's full of insane markup such as "span" links opened and then closed immediately. Seriously, guys, this is not 1995 - you've got smart programmers, you can figure out how to export HTML from a text document.)

So, to work:
1
• 150,000,000 Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.[source]

Analysis: absolutely true: Windows 7 has had a very successful launch into the market. Much the same sorts of statistics were bandied around for Windows Vista's launch, however; but that obscured the fact that many people and organisations were buying Vista licences and downgrading to Windows XP. However, Windows 7 appears to be more secure and significantly more user-friendly OS than Vista.

2
• 7.1 million: Projected iPad sales for 2010. [source]
• 58 million: Projected netbook sales in 2010. [source]
• 355 million: Projected PC sales in 2010. [source]

Analysis: hang on, Frank: didn't Bill Gates say in November 2001 when he showed off the tablet format that he was sure it would be the best-selling form factor in the US in five years? Yes he did, here's the source. So does the focus on PC sales (which includes Apple's computers, of course) mean Microsoft has given up on tablets?

3
• <10 Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. [source]
• 96: Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009. [source]

Analysis: netbooks are an interesting area, and the fact that Linux made very little headway here is equally interesting. The links used for the source there point to the same Computerworld article about returns: people who bought Linux netbooks clearly couldn't understand why they couldn't run their Windows apps on them. I doubt anyone has taken their iPad back to the shop because it won't run Windows apps. That may argue to a failure of advertising on the part of the netbook manufacturers - which, given that they were competing against each other for razor-thin profits, is understandable. The shift to Windows on netbooks - though one might quibble, and suggest that Shaw is actually talking about market share, rather than the installed base running Windows - indicates that netbooks are supplementary to existing PCs. But I think we could guess that.

4
• 0: Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in November 2009.
•10,000: Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in June 2010. [source]
• 700,000: Number of students, teachers and staff using Microsoft's cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools, the largest cloud deployment in the US.[source]

Analysis: good numbers. Where's the comparison with the number of Google Apps customers, though, Frank? In October 2009 DailyFinance reported that it had passed the 2m mark.

5
• 16 million Total subscribers to largest 25 US daily newspapers. [source]
• 14 Million Total number of Netflix subscribers. [source]
• 23 million Total number of Xbox Live subscribers. [source]

Analysis: this feels very apples-to-oranges, though Xbox Live is definitely one of the great successes of the Microsoft's whole push into gaming - arguably, of gaming altogether. Not mentioned: the $1bn writeoff against faulty Xbox 360 consoles which had the red ring of death; Microsoft's continued faillure to make a notable profit from its Entertainment & Devices (E&D) division; Nintendo's dominance of the console market with the cheaper, more reliable Wii.

6
• 9,000,000 Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, the largest Microsoft beta program in history. [source]

Analysis: 9m is a lot of downloads. Not shown: to what extent feedback from customers affected how the product worked in the end.

7
• 21.4 million Number of new Bing search users in one year. [Comscore report requires subscription]

Analysis: This sounds a lot, until you look at how long Bing has been going and how many users it has already, and the extent to which it has had to buy in some of those new users (via its now-discontinued cashback scheme, which was abandoned because it was the target of scammers). Bing is necessary opposition to Google, but it doesn't - yet? - offer a Unique Selling Point (USP) in the manner of, say, Wolfram Alpha.

Oh, and Steve Ballmer said in January that Bing added 11m users in 2009 - though of course that's since June 2009. Are you rounding up, Frank? At the same January point, comScore said Bing had raised its share of the search market from 10.3% to ... drum roll... 10.7%. If 11m users equates to 0.4% of the market, 21m isn't going to make much of a dent, frankly.

8
• 24% Linux Server market share in 2005. [source]
• 33% Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005). [source]
• 21.2% Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009. [source]

Analysis: This is a really interesting one, because it is a distortion of reality that would have Steve Jobs applauding at its subtlety. You look at those numbers and think: wow, Linux servers really aren't popular. How odd, because you'll notice that you come across Linux servers all over the place: Google, Facebook (which runs F5's Big IP, which is Linux), Yahoo, Amazon, Wordpress.com (which hosts millions of blogs), Twitter... so why such a small number? (The only major site I could quickly find that runs Windows Server is eBay.)

Answer: because those "market share" figures are for Linux server licences sold. Microsoft doesn't count them - and because the market research companies can't count them - if money doesn't change hands. True, this indicates that companies selling Linux servers (principally hardware) aren't making headway against Windows Server. But what it doesn't tell you is what progress Linux is making overall on the web. For that, you need Netcraft. And that suggests that Linux has a really big market share.

Certainly, Microsoft's Windows Server business is holding up well, judging by the profit figures. But you won't find any small web startup using it; and (Update: @QuantumWaveFunction in the comments says they do.) You won't find any big web company using it, except Microsoft (update: and, obviously, eBay - as above). I once asked Google's open source advocate, Chris Di Bona, how much it would cost Google to run on Windows Server. He laughed a long time.

9
• 8.8 million Global iPhone sales in Q1 2010. [source]
• 21.5 million Nokia smartphone sales in Q1 2010. [source]
• 55 million Total smartphone sales globally in Q1 2010. [source]
• 439 million Projected global smartphone sales in 2014. [source]

Analysis: you've surely spotted the missing one here: Windows Mobile licence sales. Come on, Frank, if you're going to wave Nokia's willy at Apple, then surely you should be doing the same with Microsoft's mobile phone numbers? No? Perhaps that's because they're declining - having been passed by Apple - and Windows Phone, the upcoming phone OS, is a huge gamble in this space; which, if Microsoft gets it wrong, may be a stumble it can't recover from, especially with Android now growing rapidly - even faster than Apple, in fact. (But Apple isn't that troubled, as it gets the hardware revenues plus a slice of the app revenues.)

10
• 9 Number of years it took Salesforce.com to reach 1 million paid user milestone. [source]
• 6 Number of years it took Microsoft Dynamics CRM to reach 1 million paid user milestone. [source]
• 100% Percent chance that Salesforce.com CEO will mention Microsoft in a speech, panel, interview, or blog post.

Analysis: well, at least Frank Shaw has a sense of humour with that last one. Though if we're being pernickety, we'd point out that it should read "100: Percent chance..."

More to the point though, Microsoft Dynamics isn't a business that was built from the ground up, as Salesforce is; it's the result of two acquisitions in 2001 and 2002, and the Wikipedia page (if we can trust it; there don't seem to be any stats on the Microsoft Dynamics page) says there are 300,000 businesses that use Microsoft Dynamics applications and 10,000 Microsoft Dynamics reselling partners worldwide. Given that the companies pre-existed before Microsoft bought them, is that "6 years" milestone really so impressive? And: it would be helpful, Frank, to know how many customers Microsoft Dynamics CRM has now, and how many Salesforce (now 11 years old) has.

11
• 173 million Global Gmail users. [source]
• 284 million Global Yahoo! Mail users.[source]
• 360 million Global Windows Live Hotmail users.[source]
• 299 million Active Windows Live Messenger Accounts worldwide. [Comscore MyMetrix, WW, March 2010 - requires subscription]
• 1 Rank of Windows Live Messenger globally compared to all other instant messaging services. [Comscore MyMetrix, WW, March 2010 - requires subscription]

Analysis: Ignoring the fact that Hotmail was an acquisition (as it's so far back), it might be instructive to compare like with like. Gmail started on April 1 2003. At the end of 2003, Hotmail had 145m users. So in that time, Hotmail has put on 215m users, and Gmail - from a standing start - 173m. It's good for Microsoft, but not bad either for Gmail/

12
• $5.7 Billion Apple Net income for fiscal year ending Sep 2009. [source]
• $6.5 Billion Google Net income for fiscal year ending Dec 2009. [source]
• $14.5 Billion Microsoft Net Income for fiscal year ending June 2009. [source]
• $23.0 billion Total Microsoft revenue, FY2000. [source]
• $58.4 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2009. [source]

Analysis:Microsoft remains the most profitable of this group of companies - that's not in doubt. What people wonder about is the extent to which it can maintain growth, and whether that growth will be robust: will PCs become outdated? Will we all start using smartphones? Will we abandon desktop apps for web-based ones, or paid-for ones for free ones? That's still unclear.

Frank Shaw's efforts to boost the troops is laudable, but if all you do is look at the numbers, you're missing a big chunk of the story around Microsoft just now. It's a big and strong company - but perhaps not quite as strong as some of these numbers might make you think.

The news entrepreneur explains why the future lies in innovation and why tech conferences are the place to be

News innovator Nonny de la Pe a on developing the media's future

Last week, Stroome, a media startup intended to speed the editing and distribution of video throughout the world was one of 12 projects to win the Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge, an award for initiatives likely to 'impact the future of news'. The California-based startup, run by Nonny de la Pe a and Thomas Grasty, researchers at University of Southern California, will be awarded $200,000 ( 133,500) in order to continue developing the project.

Launched officially in April 2010, Stroome aims to connect journalists, filmmakers, travellers and anyone else with a video camera, allowing them to upload their films to the internet and then collaborate with other users to create new video, audio, and photo mashups from every corner of the world.

While the Stroome community is still small, with only 500 members based in 40 countries, the opportunity and potential for growth is substantial: think YouTube and Wikipedia rolled into one big creative melting pot.

In London this week, De La Pe a spoke about where Stroome fits in the new media landscape.

Where did the idea for Stroome come from?

I'm a former correspondent for Newsweek magazine and the way that Newsweek used to work is that you'd have multiple people reporting on the same story from multiple bureaus, so I already had this natural sense of how journalism could be a collaborative process.

Then I was doing a masters in online communities, and from my thesis it was very clear that there was a need for this collaborative platform for journalists.

We've seen many times where journalists are reporting from a scenario or a rally and their cameras get taken. But imagine if that video could be automatically streamed to Stroome where editors around the world could be cutting it any way they want to, telling the stories any way they want and spitting it out across the web. So we made the Alpha version of Stroome, got it alpha tested, raised a little money and started work on the beta version. We launched it in April.

What makes Stroome different from other online editing suites?

The biggest difference is that there's an ability for you and me to form a group and I can remix you and you can remix me. I can share it just with Stroome, or just my friends; I can make private groups, or I can push it across the web. That's the biggest difference from other sites; we're really sharing the video, the openness of the files is really distinct.

How does Stroome fit in with what's going on with the media as a whole?

I'm trying to get people to do and think about how it's so clearly a place of energy and openness and jobs and there's just so much movement. I know a lot of people have lost their jobs. It's really difficult for a lot of people, but we absolutely are at a critical point where we need a lot of innovations and are open to a lot of innovations. My drive is to innovate and innovate in journalism. But I don't go to the journalism conferences, I go to the tech conferences. The tech conferences are just alive whereas the journalism conferences are just weeping. You just want to bring them together and say, 'Guys, this is exciting! It's not your death knell, this is a wonderful opportunity.' Stroome is a lot easier than all that. People understand video, they understand audio and they understand cutting it all together.

What's your financial model?

We have a few ideas, number one being storage. You can only allow people to upload so much until you just can't bear it anymore. At some point we'll put in some advertising. We've talked about charging something really nominal, like 99 cents (66p), after users create a certain number of groups, so that you can keep making as many groups as you want. Financials are one of the things we get to do this summer, really take a deep breath and figure out how we're going to implement the next iteration.

Wii; 29.99; cert 12+; Mindscape

After the annoying success of that Boots "Here come the girls" commercial, it was perhaps inevitable that women would try to reclaim the rock-oriented music genre. U-Sing Girls Night claims to be the first all-girl music game, but is in fact a semi sequel to U-Sing U've Got Talent, neatly targeting the teen-fem market with a 30-track listing featuring only female artists. You can either buy the game on its own, or with two plug-in mics for an additional 20. If you don't already own one, these are matt black, nicely proportioned and balanced and, of course, essential to play the game properly.

So, is it worth the effort? Well, if you've seen one of these games you've basically seen them all. Each track is accompanied by the "real" star performing it on video and an onscreen "karaoke-bar" that previews the lyrics and notes as they are sung. Hit them at the right time and in tune and you score points the more accurately the better. Normally this would be it, but U-Sing does at least try to throw a few curve balls in the shape of Battle Mode, where one singer can hold a note to throw random obstacles at their opponent such as missing onscreen notes or lyrics. Obviously, you'll need both mics to use this feature.

Track-wise, it's a clever mix; sprinkling old favourites like Blondie and Tina Turner with younger upstarts like Duffy, Katy Perry and the omnipresent Lady Gaga. Other tracks can be downloaded from Wi-Store for 200-300 Wii points each which equates to a surprisingly pricey 1.40- 2.10. Whether you go for that option depends on how much you like the basic pack or, indeed, the Jukebox mode that allows you to dispense with onscreen scoring to concentrate on just singing along.

If you wanted to quibble, you could say that the rhythm-scoring is a little restrictive particularly with artists like Amy Winehouse, who rarely sings precisely on the beat, meaning you can copy her almost perfectly and still fail to score well. However, U-Sing does exactly what it sets out to; combining familiar singalong shenanigans with a decent track listing and a bumper shot of oestrogen. As a middle-aged male, I'm hardly its target market but, if I were, I'd probably make some noise about it.

Rating: 3/5

Spotify, Last.fm and We7 are old hat when it comes to innovation within the industry check these out

The music industry, as bemoaned ad nauseum, has been financially skewered by the digital revolution and consumers' new-found ability to share music freely. But green shoots are springing up everywhere and even Spotify, Last.fm and We7 are old hat when it comes to innovation within the industry. Here are five new digital music projects using crowd-sourcing, cool coding and collaboration to help the music industry rock out in the digital age:

No1: GigsWiz

GigsWiz is a site that generates analytics allowing bands to gather more accurate information about local fan demand for gigs. Based on a few questions, GigsWiz generates a piece of code that artists can embed on their websites, MySpace and Facebook pages. This piece of code then pumps out data about where visitors to their site come from. Bands can use this data to plan their next gigs. Based in Helsinki, Finland, GigsWiz was founded last summer by marketing professional Juuso Vermashein and entrepreneurs Joonas Pekkanen and Kai Lemmetty. It launched its invite-only beta site in May 2010 and is now open for all. GigsWiz aims to overcome the recorded music industry's financial challenges by allowing bands to maximise their revenues from live performances.

No2: MusicGPS

This iPhone app produced by musicDNA - not to be confused with MusicDNA, the possible successor to the MP3 which launched in January is focused on pairing music with maps. Users download the app to their iPhone and as they travel while listening to music, MusicGPS records which songs are listened to where. While the community is still small, at only just over 700 members, the potential applications for the sort of data collected are significant if it gained enough popularity. Similar to GigsWiz, MusicGPS collects local data about musical tastes, but is listener-driven rather than artist-driven. While it has huge potential for targeted advertising and local revenue generation, it is also a step in the development of the semantic web.

No3: Indaba Music

Ever wanted to start a garage band but without a garage and with band members stationed all over the world? Thought so. Indaba has created a very usable online music collaboration platform where multiple people can upload and remix with hundreds of other musically minded individuals. There are also community forums for everyone involved in music from engineers to producers to musicians. Wired used Indaba in May to take crowd-sourced music to the next level. 122 members remixed one single track, creating 85 new music files. Voting is underway to determine which of the top five of these tracks is king. At the end of the day, the project takes music production to the next level using crowd power and collaboration.

No4 fairsharemusic

Will people be more willing to pay for music online if they know it's going to a good cause? Maybe. Fairsharemusic's going to find out. Apple's iTunes store may have begun to get music consumers used to the idea of paying for their music online, but UK-based Fairshare adds a philanthropic element to this model. The site which launched Tuesday donates half the profit of every music file downloaded to one of 11 partner charities chosen by the listener. Fairshare takes the now ubiquitous idea of micro-payments, and turns them into "micro-donations".

No5: slicethepie

In digital years, slicethepie is actually pretty old at the ripe age of three, but it's got the right idea. Slicethepie, as we've talked about before, allows fans to fund the bands they like, cutting out the middle men between producers and consumers of music. Fans are also paid to review bands and scout out new talent. At slicethepie, anyone can invest in any band and every 1 chipped into the hat entitles the donator to a share in the band and subsequent royalties. Contracts can also be traded on the virtual exchange for the chance to profit from their good scouting abilities and get in on other bands from the ground up.

Video from BBC site sees internet traffic more than triple as almost 1 million people log on to watch from work

Was there a sporting fixture on yesterday? Why, yes, there was - but apart from the titanic struggle of John Isner and Nicolas Mahut (the longest-ever professional tennis match in the history of the solar system, which is 6bn years, so not bad) there also seems to have been some sort of football game going on in a distant land. It didn't last very long, but football doesn't compared to tennis.

But because the England v someone else match happened during office hours, many people were, well, in the office when it happened. Which meant that they had to take sneaky advantage of the streaming capabilities of modern networks to watch it.

Early figures from the BBC suggest the total number of 'concurrent streams' peaked at 800,000 although the total number of viewers will be many times higher. The BBC said this was a viewing record.

That, according to Demon Internet, which provided the graph above (click for a larger version), saw internet use increase by 55% solely during the game compared to an ordinary working Wednesday afternoon, compared with a 38% increase during the first World Cup game between Mexico and South Africa on 11 June.

But EasyNet Connect, a business ISP, says things got even heftier: it saw a 226% surge (that would be a more than threefold increase) in web traffic compared to the average day.

After kick-off, traffic more than doubled (up 114%) compared with the pre-match levels (from 0900 to 1400).

Chris Stening, the managing director of EasyNet Connect, said: "As the first England game to take place during work hours, this afternoon's match between England and Slovenia was the biggest test for businesses' internet connections so far. The data from our own network shows that streaming the game at work was a popular choice this afternoon, pushing many business connections to their limits."

Matt Cantwell, the head of Demon, states: "Customers see the internet as a utility and yet, their networks might not be able to cope with the demands like electricity can. The surge in internet traffic could cause problems for SME businesses, who are the lifeblood the UK's economy. If they can't run their business normally during a World Cup match and ban their workers from keeping an eye on games during working hours, then inevitably, the business will lose out both on productivity and customer satisfaction. Whatever happens, it's a lose-lose situation for those without the right network infrastructure and support."

And another business ISP, KC, says that the game triggered a 31% jump in web traffic, as users watched the game via the BBC's live online stream.

Not mentioned because it worked so well is the fact that the BBC's streaming has held up so well, while ITV's has been roundly criticised for failing to manage the load, notably during England's the tournament's first game, which also happened during office hours, but for which the demand was probably impossible to estimate. The BBC may have been better warned but even so, it can pat itself on the back for its success here.

The fallout from Google's collection of data from Wi-Fi networks while compiling its StreetView catalogue carries on

Google's gathering of data from open Wi-Fi access points in the UK as it collected its StreetView data now has a crime reference number: 2318672/10.

That doesn't mean it's definitely a crime, though; that's the investigation number issued on Tuesday by London's Metropolitan Police at the request of the pressure group Privacy International, which alleges that the search company carried out "criminal interception of wireless communications content" and that that constitutes an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Wireless Telegraphy Act.

Google has insisted all along that the collection of the data was an accident caused when code left in a production system kept the content being broadcast over the Wi-Fi networks as the Google StreetView car drove past.

It admitted to the collection in May.

Google was mapping the networks' location, names and MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is unique to each network and is broadcast by it and can be picked up by any passer-by equipped with a Wi-Fi receiver. It is not an offence to capture the latter details - but Google also captured content from messages being broadcast over the open networks, which French authorities say includes passwords from emails. Google did not try and would not have been able to access content on password-protected networks.

According to Privacy International, which has been briefed by police on the likely path the investigation will take, the next step will be initial inquiries into the essential facts of the case before deciding which (if any) law may have been breached. The police will need to seek advice on which legislation to focus on, as each involves a different prosecution process. The police estimate that this initial investigation will take eight to ten days, after which the case will be escalated to a specialist team working at the national level. No estimate has been given regarding the likely period of the main investigation.

Google has offered to delete the data relating to the UK. The UK's Information Commissioner acceded to the request, but Privacy International demanded that it be kept so that the police could carry out the investigation.

A number of different countries are investigating whether Google has broken any laws, because it used the same mapping/recording system when it carried out its StreetView sampling in other countries. The company has offered to delete the content data (though not the data about network locations)unread for every country, but only a handful, including Ireland, have agreed.

In some countries local laws have stymied further investigation. In Germany, its equivalent of the information commissioner, an arm of the government, has demanded to see the content - but there are strict rules against government agencies viewing private citizens' data without their permission.

In the UK, the police will need to interview Google staff to find out who the "responsible person" is for this matter.

Simon Davies, PI's Director said "We are pleased that the police have taken up this complaint for investigation. An evidence based approach to this complex matter is sorely needed now. We have already told police that we will cooperate fully with any inquiries. I know Google will want to do the same".

He added: "We hope that this difficult process will give Google pause for thought about how it conducts itself. Perhaps in future the company will rely less on PR spin and more on good governance and reliable product oversight".

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age and where it's taking us

A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing.

The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".

Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much if not most media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on.

All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?

So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently.

But how many ideas? In 1956, the psychologist George Miller published a famous paper in the journal Psychological Review. Its title was "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" and in it Miller set out to summarise some earlier experiments which attempted to measure the limits of people's short-term memory. In each case he reported that the effective "channel capacity" lay between five and nine choices. Miller did not draw any firm conclusions from this, however, and contented himself by merely conjecturing that "the recurring sevens might represent something deep and profound or be just coincidence". And that, he probably thought, was that.

But Miller had underestimated the appetite of popular culture for anything with the word "magical' in the title. Instead of being known as a mere aggregator of research results, Miller found himself identified as a kind of sage a discoverer of a profound truth about human nature. "My problem," he wrote, "is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution."

But in fact, the basic idea that emerges from Miller's 1956 paper seems to have stood the test of time. The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are.

1 TAKE THE LONG VIEW

The strange thing about living through a revolution is that it's very difficult to see what's going on. Imagine what it must have been like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Only with the benefit of hindsight will we get a clear idea of what was going on. But the clarity that hindsight bestows is also misleading, because it understates how confusing things appeared to people at the time.

So it is with us now. We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us. And one thing we've learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies and to underestimate their long-term implications.

We see this all around us at the moment, as would-be savants, commentators, writers, consultants and visionaries tout their personal interpretations of what the internet means for business, publishing, retailing, education, politics and the future of civilisation as we know it. Often, these interpretations are compressed into vivid slogans, memes or aphorisms: information "wants to be free"; the "long tail" is the future of retailing; "Facebook just seized control of the internet", and so on. These kinds of slogans are really just short-term extrapolations from yesterday's or today's experience. They tell us little about where the revolution we're currently living through is heading. The question is: can we do any better without falling into the trap of feigning omniscience?

Here's a radical idea: why not see if there's anything to be learned from history? Because mankind has lived through an earlier transformation in its communications environment, brought about by the invention of printing by movable type. This technology changed the world indeed, it shaped the cultural environment in which most of us grew up. And the great thing about it, from the point of view of this essay, is that we can view it with the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened.

A thought experiment

So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment?

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.

2 THE WEB ISN'T THE NET

The most common and still surprisingly widespread misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains.

On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention.

And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.

Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.

3 DISRUPTION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

One of the things that most baffles (and troubles) people about the net is its capacity for disruption. One moment you've got a stable, profitable business say, as the CEO of a music label; the next minute your industry is struggling for survival, and you're paying a king's ransom to intellectual property lawyers in a losing struggle to stem the tide. Or you're a newspaper group, wondering how a solid revenue stream from classified ads could suddenly have vaporised; or a university librarian wondering why students use only Google nowadays. How can this stuff happen? And how does it happen so fast?

The answer lies deep in the network's architecture. When it was being created in the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the lead designers, were faced with two difficult tasks: how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and how to design a network that is future-proof. The answer they came up with was breathtakingly simple. It was based on two axioms. Firstly, there should be no central ownership or control no institution which would decide who could join or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the network should not be optimised for any particular application. This led to the idea of a "simple" network that did only one thing take in data packets at one end and do its best to deliver them to their destinations. The network would be neutral as to the content of those packets they could be fragments of email, porn videos, phone conversations, images The network didn't care, and would treat them all equally.

By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises. The implication of their design was that if you had an idea that could be implemented using data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

The explosion of creativity in the form of disruptive applications that the world has seen since the network emerged in the 1980s may have taken a lot of institutions and industries by surprise, but it was predictable, given the architecture. There are a lot of smart programmers in the world, and the net provided them with a perfect launch pad for springing surprises. What kinds of surprises? Well, the web itself. It was largely the creation of a single individual Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1991 put the code on an internet server without having to ask anyone's permission.

Ten years after Berners-Lee started work, a disaffected, music-loving teenager named Shawn Fanning spent six months writing software for sharing music files and, in 1999, put his little surprise on an internet server. He called it Napster and it acquired over 60 million delighted users before the music industry managed to shut it down. But by that time the file-sharing genie was out of the bottle.

While all this was going on, plenty of equally smart programmers were incubating more sinister surprises, in the shape of a plague of spam, viruses, worms and other security "exploits" which they have been able to unleash over a network which doesn't care what's in your data packets. The potential dangers of this "malware" explosion are alarming. For example, mysterious groups have assembled "botnets" (made up of millions of covertly compromised, networked PCs) which could be used to launch massive, co-ordinated attacks that could conceivably bring down the network infrastructure of entire industries, or perhaps even countries. So far, with the exception of Estonia in 2007, we haven't seen such an attack, but the fear is that it will eventually come, and it will be the net's own version of 9/11.

The internet's disruptiveness is a consequence of its technical DNA. In programmers' parlance, it's a feature, not a bug ie an intentional facility, not a mistake. And it's difficult to see how we could disable the network's facility for generating unpleasant surprises without also disabling the other forms of creativity it engenders.

4 THINK ECOLOGY, NOT ECONOMICS

As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what's happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.

Since the web went mainstream in 1993, our media "ecosystem", if you like, has become immeasurably more complex. The old, industrialised, mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining rates of growth; relatively small numbers of powerful, profitable, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters; mass audiences consisting mainly of passive consumers of centrally produced content; relatively few communication channels, and a slow pace of change. The new ecosystem is expanding rapidly: it has millions of publishers; billions of active, web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change.

To an ecologist, this looks like an ecosystem whose biodiversity has expanded radically. It's as if a world in which large organisms like dinosaurs (think Time Warner, Encyclopaedia Britannica) had trudged slowly across the landscape exchanging information in large, discrete units, but life was now morphing into an ecosystem in which billions of smaller species consume, transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information goods in much smaller units and in which new gigantic life-forms (think Google, Facebook) are emerging. In the natural world, increased biodiversity is closely correlated with higher whole-system productivity ie the rate at which energy and material inputs are translated into growth. Could it be that this is also happening in the information sphere? And if it is, who will benefit in the long term?

5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY

Even if you don't accept the ecological metaphor, there's no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change than anything that has gone before. This complexity is not an aberration or something to be wished away: it's the new reality, and one that we have to address. This is a challenge, for several reasons. First, the behaviour of complex systems is often difficult to understand and even harder to predict. Second, and more importantly, our collective mindsets in industry and government are not well adapted for dealing with complexity. Traditionally, organisations have tried to deal with the problem by reducing complexity acquiring competitors, locking in customers, producing standardised products and services, etc. These strategies are unlikely to work in our emerging environment, where intelligence, agility, responsiveness and a willingness to experiment (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you.

6 THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

For baby-boomers, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked, first locally (via office networks) and then globally (via the internet). But as broadband connections to the net became commonplace, something strange happened: if you had a fast enough connection to the network, you became less concerned about the precise location of either your stored data or the processor that was performing computational tasks for you. And these tasks became easier to do. First, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who provided search also began to offer "webmail" email provided via programs that ran not on your PC but on servers in the internet "cloud". Then Google offered word-processing, spreadsheets, slide-making and other "office"-type services over the network. And so on.

Here was a transition from a world in which the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is effectively the computer. It has led to the emergence of "cloud computing" a technology in which we use simple devices (mobile phones, low-power laptops or tablets) to access computing services that are provided by powerful servers somewhere on the net. This switch to computing as a utility rather than a service that you provide with your own equipment has profound implications for privacy, security and economic development and public perceptions are lagging way behind the pace of development. What happens to your family's photo collection if it's held in the cloud and your password goes to the grave with you? And what about your documents and emails all likewise stored in the cloud on someone else's server? Or your "reputation" on eBay? Everywhere one looks, the transition to cloud computing has profound implications, because it makes us more and more dependent on the net. And yet we're sleepwalking into this brave new world.

7 THE WEB IS CHANGING

Once upon a time, the web was merely a publication medium, in which publishers (professional or amateur) uploaded passive web pages to servers. For many people in the media business, that's still their mental model of the web. But in fact, the web has gone through at least three phases of evolution from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the 'semantic web' in which web pages will contain enough metadata about their content to enable software to make informed judgements about their relevance and function. If we are to understand the web as it is, rather than as it once was, we need more realistic mental models of it. Above all, we need to remember that it's no longer just a publication medium.

8 HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE

Many years ago, the cultural critic Neil Postman, one of the 20th century's most perceptive critics of technology, predicted that the insights of two writers would, like a pair of bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

Postman was writing before the internet became such a force in our societies, but I believe he got it right. On the one (Huxleyan) hand, the net has been a profoundly liberating influence in our lives creating endless opportunities for information, entertainment, pleasure, delight, communication, and apparently effortless consumption, to the point where it has acquired quasi-addictive power, especially over younger generations. One can calibrate the extent of the impact by the growing levels of concern among teachers, governments and politicians. "Is Google making us stupid?" was the title of one of the most cited articles in Atlantic magazine in 2008. It was written by Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and author, and raised the question of whether permanent access to networked information (not just Google) is turning us into restless, shallow thinkers with shorter attention spans. (According to Nielsen, a market research firm, the average time spent viewing a web page is 56 seconds.) Other critics are worried that incessant internet use is actually rewiring our brains.

On the other (Orwellian) hand, the internet is the nearest thing to a perfect surveillance machine the world has ever seen. Everything you do on the net is logged every email you send, every website you visit, every file you download, every search you conduct is recorded and filed somewhere, either on the servers of your internet service provider or of the cloud services that you access. As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.

9 OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

In the analogue world, copying was difficult and degenerative (ie copies of copies became progressively worse than the original). In the digital world, copying is effortless and perfect. In fact, copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms, inasmuch as all computational operations involve it. When you view a web page, for example, a copy of the page is loaded into the video memory of your computer (or phone, or iPad) before the device can display it on the screen. So you can't even look at something on the web without (unknowingly) making a copy of it.

Since our current intellectual property regime was conceived in an era when copying was difficult and imperfect, it's not surprising that it seems increasingly out of sync with the networked world. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your point of view), digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form which means nearly everything, nowadays. As a result, millions of people have become "publishers" in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. So everywhere one looks, one finds things that infringe copyright in one way or another.

This is a disagreeable but inescapable fact as inescapable in its way as the fact that young adults tend to drink too much alcohol. The only way to stop copying is to shut down the net. There's nothing wrong with intellectual property (or alcohol), per se, but our copyright laws are now so laughably out of touch with reality that they are falling into disrepute. They urgently need reforming to make them relevant to digital circumstances. The problem is that none of our legislators seems to understand this, so it won't happen any time soon.

Postscript

It would be ridiculous to pretend that these nine ideas encapsulate everything that there is to be known about the net. But they do provide a framework for seeing the phenomenon "in the round", as it were, and might even serve as an antidote to the fevered extrapolation that often passes for commentary on developments in cyberspace. The sad fact is that if there is a "truth" about the internet, it's rather prosaic: to almost every big question about the network's long-term implications the only rational answer is the one famously given by Mao Zedong's foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: "It's too early to say." It is.

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. He is currently working on a book about the internet phenomenon.

This week, Guardian games contributor Keith Stuart joins Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur to dissect the big announcements from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) the biggest computer games event in the English-speaking world. Keith weighs in on the Nintendo 3DS, Microsoft's Kinect and how the indies fare in a console world.

Also in this week's programme, Charles breaks down what the sale of social networking site Bebo for a huge loss to owners AOL means for the networking scene, and gives the heads up on a new scam directed at British computer users that could cost victims up to 200.

A survey of 1,000 businesses finds that they're keen on open data initiatives from the government - but unwilling to follow suit

British businesses aren't hurrying to follow their government in pledging free access to non-personal datasets they collect, a new study has found.

Of those surveyed, 68% said that they would not be prepared to open up access to their own data - despite recognising that sharing data could bring commercial benefits, according to a study by Informatic Corporation, which sells data integration software.

However, companies are keen that the government should continue with its plans to increase access to public data, such as the Ordnance Survey's OpenData scheme and the measures put in place to make more non-personal central and local datasets available through services such as the data.gov.uk portal.

Among the reasons that the companies gave for not opening up their own data were:
• Corporate privacy (43%)
• Protection of intellectual property (32%)
• Concerns that online data may be mismanaged (29%), which could result in poor quality information and a loss of data value.

Even so, 83% of businesses surveyed believe they should be entitled to greater access to public sector data:
• 32% believe that access to this data should be a right for businesses and the public
• 61% of businesses have no concerns around the exposure of public sector data
• 46% think that greater access to public data would provide commercial insight
• 43% believe access to this data would provide practical business benefits.

This report was conducted on behalf of Informatica by LM Research in April 2010. It surveyed 1,000 national and multinational businesses with 100 employees or more from across the UK.

In April Ordnance Survey released a number of its mapping products for free commercial reuse, including a postcode-to-location dataset. On 24 June the Prime Minister, David Cameron, chaired the first meeting of the government's Public Transparency Board which declared that public data should be released under an open licence that enables free commercial re-use, and in a machine-readable format.

But businesses are less willing to join in - possibly because they see a commercial risk in being making their data available if others do not reciprocate. While a number of companies participate in open source software projects such as the Linux operating system and Apache web server, to which companies such as IBM and Sun have been substantial contributors, that is some distance from making data - even anonymised - about the business visible to rivals.

"These results reveal a serious disconnect in attitudes of the business and public sector communities when it comes to sharing data online. But with many multinationals and governing bodies pledging open data initiatives, data transparency looks set to become the status quo," said John Poulter, senior vice president, EMEA, Informatica. "We operate in an increasingly digital society, where knowledge sharing has become central for day to day business. Prospective customers are more likely to engage with companies that they feel provide them with added value and insight and it is increasingly important for businesses to recognise, this when embracing digital practices."

The same proportion - 83% - of businesses which thought they should have access to public sector data said they would use it to identify new commercial opportunities - which indicates that the freeing of that data should have the effect intended of both increasing government transparency and encouraging commercial exploitation of the data. In the survey, 78% said they would utilise the data as a point of reference when making future investment decisions, and 76% would use it to build knowledge of their customer base.

Having greater access to public data would provide the opportunity to make their company more agile and competitive, respondents said.

"If the government executes its plans effectively, businesses have the potential opportunity to use this data to suit their business needs," said Poulter. "In order for its plans to open up public sector data to be successful, it is vital that the government puts the right measures in place to ensure that the available data is managed correctly; relevant, structured and precise."

Poulter added: "While the value of increased access to data is clear, it's understandable that businesses worry about what competitors would be able to do if they opened up the windows to their world. By harnessing their own data and sharing information, businesses could build their customer knowledge even further, providing potential customers with greater insight into their business, whilst at the same time ensuring that confidential data remains protected."

Icann decision marks end of 10-year battle, but pornography companies fear US politicians will shunt them into web ghetto

The internet could soon have its own red light district after the ".xxx" suffix was approved though pornography companies are not keen to use it.

Icann, the organisation which determines what "top-level domains" (TLDs) such as .com or .uk can be added to the internet announced today that it will begin the process of registering .xxx by making checks on ICM Registry, the company that wants to run the domain and sell registrations.

It marks the closing stages of a 10-year battle by ICM Registry, now run by the British internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley, to get the .xxx domain set up so that legal pornography sites can be found in a single grouping.

Yet pornography is already plentiful online. One of the most valuable domains in the early days was sex.com, which was the object of a bitter battle in which rivals battled it out to own what was seen as a honeypot for surfers. In 2007 porn.com was sold for $12m.

But many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org.

That would mean that sex sites could be more easily filtered out from web searches, and lower their revenues. Free speech advocates also worry that sites about topics seen by US conservatives as controversial, such as homosexuality, might also be forced to use the .xxx suffix.

Icann acknowledged it had made mistakes in reversing its decision to accept ICM Registry's proposal three years ago under pressure from the Bush administration. Icann also said the proposal had been rejected because it lacked the backing of the pornography industry.

Lawley, who insists that child pornography will be banned in the domain space, thought the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites making it after ".mobi" the second biggest top-level domain name with a specific sponsor registrar.

The .mobi TLD, set up in 2005, was sponsored by a range of companies, including Google and Nokia, to create sites for browsing with mobile phones.

But where the .mobi TLD had commercial sponsors, the .xxx domain is notable for only having ICM Registry, which stands to benefit from every domain name it sells. Lawley says he expects to make $30m ( 20m) a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60, and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives.

The chief executive of the search giant believes smartphones will empower the poor and is the equivalent to the arrival of TV

Phenomenally successful, but also imitated, envied and feared Google is the technological icon of our time. But is its ubiquity and influence a force for good?

Chief executive Eric Schmidt has no doubts. He tells the Guardian that Google has been instrumental in a generational shift in democratising information. "Over my lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access to most of the world's information, to virtually everybody in the world having access to virtually all of the world's information," he said. "That's because of web search, cheap phones and automatic translation. That's a pretty amazing achievement and Google is part of that."

Yet with Google active in so many areas, from shopping to video and translation to music, its competitors are becoming more numerous and opponents more vociferous. Schmidt admits: "We try to do everything We don't shake off the big goals."

In an interview ahead of his keynote presentation at the Guardian's Activate Summit on Thursday, he makes it clear Google is positioning itself for the future through mobile, with the development of its Android mobile system and with subsequent Google-branded handsets. He is keener to talk about this area than the battle with newspaper groupss such as News International, whose paywall model is partly based on what it considers Google's parasitical attitude to original content.

The mobile battle pitches the three biggest tech firms against each other: Google, Apple and Microsoft. Analyst Gartner puts Android as the world's fourth most-popular smartphone operating system in the first quarter of 2010 ahead of Microsoft in a market it joined less than two years ago but behind Symbian (Nokia), Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Apple.

"I believe that the very best engineering is now going on the mobile devices the hardest problems and the most clever solutions," says Schmidt. "You know who the person is and where they are, and you don't get that from a desktop app." The 50,000 apps built for Android, mostly by third-party developers, cover almost every topic, but the one killer app is still Google itself, says Schmidt.

Schmidt describes how our online lives are now more personal, social and mobile. "When people are awake, they are now online, and that has a lot of implications for society and for Google," he says. Google's secret, he adds (though it's not much of a secret), is that it can handle more data than its rivals because it has larger networks and data centres. Google in effect pulled its business from China earlier this year after moving the operation to Hong Kong, bypassingChina's censorship regime. Google, whose company motto is "Do no evil" had been heavily criticised for its decision to do business in China and its rethink was welcomed by the industry. It also increased pressure on rivals who still operate there.

"Google doesn't necessarily do things that other companies do. We have our own set of principles that we work hard on. In the China case, the decision was made not for revenue it was about what we were willing to deal with. We want to be a good global citizen and we believe very strongly in the openness of information."

Another key push from Google is encouraging governments to open information to the public, via formats that developers can build useful public services around. One recent victory for open data campaigners in the UK was Transport for London opening its travel data for commercial use, but the coalition government has indicated it may establish a broader public "right to data" that will have to be provided by local and national authorities.Schmidt says Google's policy is to encourage governments to open their data to the public. The California-based company has teams helping to prepare "non web-resident" archives and databases for the web. "It is no longer acceptable online for government researchers to publish documents read by 500 people in printed form," he says. "It needs to be web first.

Once that happens, there are lots of interesting things you can do to correlate real-time information, if that is what is needed, or put it on a map ... government services are fundamentally about where people are, about what is going on in my town or my school."

These projects are just as relevant in developing countries, where the introduction of smarter, cheaper phones has created a powerful network. How does Google help developing countries break through the digital divide, and ensure the opportunities of the web are open to all? "Hardware manufacturers are being incentivised to make higher volumes of lower-priced mobiles, and prices have fallen dramatically. But a young person now in pretty much any country, if they have a mobile device, can get access to pretty much all the world's information and get it translated into their own language."

Arriving at Google in 2001 after a career spent in Silicon Valley, Schmidt is still excited by its possibilities. "That's a big news thing that's equivalent to the arrival of television."

For more information on the Activate Summit, visit guardian.co.uk/activate

Brimming with technology, the latest super clever Mercedes-Benz S-Class demands your attention

Price 58,000
MPG 37.2
Top speed 155mph

It's dark. It's late. You are feeling sleeeeepy. Your head feels heavy. Your eyes are beginning to clo Wake up for goodness sake! You are supposed to be driving, not nodding off. Turn up the music, open the windows, pinch yourself. That's better. But before long, the motorway's blinking Catseyes will be hypnotising you again, and the whole awful head-jerking battle to stay awake on the road will start once more.

Tiredness Kills, yet we have all been guilty of pressing on into the night and a perilous future. Well, if you are at the wheel of the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class, you won't be doing it again. The winner, for the fourth year running, of What Car?'s prestigious "Luxury Car of the Year" award is also contender for the safest, smartest and most wide-awake car on the road.

It is 60 years since the Mercedes-Benz 220 the originator of today's S-Class appeared on our streets. Since then, each generation of the German flagship car has raised the bar in terms of safety, luxury, performance and technological ability. In its class, the S-Class is simply unbeatable. It is scholarship material; the victor ludorum; an unbearable swot. It has sold more than 3.3m models around the globe and is easily the top-selling luxury saloon in the world. Fortunately, we drivers don't have to compete against it (it would win every time) because it is on our side. All we have to do is sign that cheque and the S-Class will lay down its life for you.

Over the years the car has pioneered everything from anti-lock brakes to airbags, catalytic converters to electronic stability programmes. The latest feather in its cap has the rather dull name of Attention Assist. But this programme could do more for road safety than any development since the seatbelt. Almost 25% of serious road accidents are caused by drowsiness making sleeping at the wheel an even bigger threat than drink driving.

So how does Attention Assist work? In essence, it's like inviting Big Brother to belt himself into the passenger seat so he can keep an eye on your every move and then advise you in firm tones what to do next.

During the first few minutes of every journey you make, the car's computer generates a profile of your driving behaviour. For the rest of that journey it then compares this representation continuously with data it collects from 70 monitors around the car paid-up sneaks, if you like. These track your speed, acceleration, erratic steering (just before a driver drifts off, he or she will correct numerous tiny steering errors), and indicator and pedal use. The monitors note journey length, time of day and the music you are listening to flick from Radio 4 to Kerrang! and alarm bells will ring (not quite, but it gives you an idea of the forensic detail the computer is assimilating). Also taken into account are the day's driving conditions including wind direction, road surface and whether it is raining, snowing, hailing or not.

The key for Attention Assist is to detect the crucial moment what Mercedes rather poetically calls "the floating transition" when you slip from alertness to drowsiness. And when you do, Big Brother wakes you up with an unpleasant high-pitched warning sound which jerks you into consciousness. The digital dashboard then goes blank and in large capital letters the unequivocal message "ATTENTION ASSIST. Break!" flashes on and off until you pull over and fill yourself with espresso And, you're back in the room!

Clunk click: crash-test dummies

It is 60 years since "Sierra Sam", the world's first crash-test dummy, was strapped into an ejector seat on a 600mph rocket-propelled sled and fired into the desert to test the efficacy of a pilot-restraint harness. Things have moved on since Sam's day, and nowhere more so than Volvo's state-of-the-art crash laboratory in Torslanda, Sweden. This month the centre celebrates its 10th birthday and the 100 dummies who live and work there are in a party mood. But the big question is: who will have the honour of driving the 3,000th test car at 75mph into the centre's own 850-tonne concrete block?

Dream ride: Bennetts biker competition

Have you ever had the urge to ride up Route 66, own a Harley Davidson, or simply be decked out in the very best biking leathers? Bennetts, the UK's No 1 for bike insurance, is offering bikers across the country the chance to have their dreams fulfilled. Bennetts Biker Dreams will award 80,000 worth of prizes to the most deserving applicants in celebration of its 80th birthday. Entries to the campaign will be accepted until 30 September 2010. To enter and for full details visit bennetts.co.uk/dreams.

Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/martinlove for all his reviews in one place

Google, Yahoo and Amazon among sites to be monitored for content deemed offensive to Muslims

Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google, Yahoo and Amazon, for sacrilegious content, while blocking 17 lesser-known sites that it deems offensive to Muslims, an official said today.

The moves follow a temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to decide how strict a version of Islam it should follow.

Both the Facebook ban and the move announced today were in response to court orders.

The sites to be monitored include MSN, Hotmail, YouTube and Bing, said Khurram Mehran, a spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.

"If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the [link] shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website," Mehran said.

Mehran said that, under instructions from the ministry of information technology, the authority had begun the process of barring and monitoring the sites.

Facebook was not part of the latest petition, which was ruled upon by the judge in the city of Bahawalpur, Mehran said.

A top court ordered the ban on Facebook for about two weeks in May amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of the prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favourable ones, as blasphemous. YouTube was also briefly blocked at the time.

The Facebook ban was lifted after the social-networking site blocked that particular page in Pakistan, but officials said the government would keep blocking other unspecified sites that contained "sacrilegious material".

AOL confirms sale to new owners Criterion Capital Partners, which describes business as 'attractive media platform'

AOL has confirmed the sale of Bebo to new owners Criterion Capital Partners, which argues that the young user base and revenue history continue to make the business an "attractive media platform".

Details of the deal were not disclosed it has been rumoured that Bebo may have been sold for $10m or less although AOL admitted that "the transaction will create a meaningful tax deduction". AOL needed to structure the deal to avoid being hit by massive corporate tax charges after paying $850m for Bebo just over two years ago.

Adam Levin, the managing partner at CCP who led the deal, said that Bebo remained attractive as both a "standalone entity and in the context of our broader investment objectives".

"The young, highly active user base, revenue history, presence in countries throughout the world and solid technical infrastructure make it an attractive media platform both as a standalone entity and in the context of our broader investment objectives," he said.

Tim Armstrong, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said that the deal meant that Bebo users would be able to "remain within the social platform that they know and love".

"Criterion Capital Partners are specialists in facilitating growth plans and turnarounds, and are well placed to drive Bebo's effort to strengthen its foothold within the highly competitive social networking arena," said Armstrong.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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Despite the best efforts of the House of Commons, we've managed to extract every MP expenses claim as a spreadsheet. See how the numbers add up
Get the data
MP travel claims, Oct-Dec 2009

Yesterday the House of Commons published the latest set of MPs' expenses. As I wrote then, they were published in a new searchable database, which actually makes the data harder to compile and extract. (Compare this to Simon Willison's work on MPs' expenses crowdsourcing).

Well, thanks to the work of Guardian developers Daniel Vydra and Roberto Tyley, we've managed to scrape the entire lot out of the Commons website for you as a downloadable spreadsheet. You cannot get this anywhere else.

Previously, we could give you totals claimed by MP: here's last year's. Because this is not a year's complete data, the Commons authorities are not keen on giving out totals - here's what they told me yesterday:

Please note that overall totals for each individual MP's overall expenditure are not published at this time of year. This is because MPs do not all submit claims on the same timescale: for example some submit claims at the end of the month and others do so less frequently, or even at the end of the year. Thus comparisons between individual total expenditure would be misleading.

It's a pretty reasonable reason, but that doesn't stop us working out totals from the data - with the enormous caveats above.

Here's how the totals look for just those two quarters, thanks to the genius of Many Eyes (I know we've been using Many Eyes a lot recently, but if you want to produce a quick visualisation, then it really can't be beaten at the moment).

The spreadsheet is just the raw numbers - with details of each claim for each MP. To get the exact details, you need to see the claim form on the commons site.

This is just a start - what can you do with the data?

Download the data

DATA: download the full datasheet

World government data

Search the world's government data with our gateway

Can you do something with this data?

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Actor Naoko Mori loves all things Apple except for the iPhone

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
There's a lot. I'm Japanese, I'm a gadget freak I like anything with buttons. I want to say my computer, but if I had to choose one, I'd say my mobile phone. This is almost sacrilegious, because I'm a complete Macophile, but I actually still have a BlackBerry I just prefer the buttons. I'm still on the fence with the iPhone because of the buttons and the texting.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Eight minutes ago, checking emails.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I travel so much I'm in the US a lot, and in Japan that I currently have three phones. So what I would really like to see is a phone that holds three Sim cards, so you have different numbers in different territories. So what it can do is choose the best network, depending on what country you're in.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I don't think so, I hope not. I think it will just be newer and better.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
When it breaks down, or runs out of juice. It's just that dread that it can go wrong, and it often does.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I've had a rotten time with shredders.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I believe you should always buy the best that you can afford at the time. Also, be clear about what you need, and read the instructions. I know everyone hates to do it, but I think that to get the best out of whatever you buy, you have to. It's a bit boring, but it's worth it.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Both. I'm Japanese, so it's in our blood to be geeks. But for certain things I'm old-skool I love technology, and I love what it does, but I think it should enhance and not take over your life. Emails are great, texting is great, but for the right purposes. Also, I miss peoples' handwriting we never write letters any more.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I guess it would be my laptop, my Macbook Pro.

Mac or PC, and why?
Definitely Mac. Everything about it, it just feels right. For me it's like the difference between coffee and tea I'm a coffee person. But I'm not sure about the iPhone yet.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
CDs not so much, but DVDs definitely. I recently re-bought The King of Comedy, because I lost my old one I love that film. I like having the physical thing not just DVDs, but even books. I like the smell and the feel of the paper. I'd much rather read a newspaper something like a Kindle wouldn't be a big pull for me.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't need a butler what I do want a robot. But I don't want one of those human-looking robots, I want like an old-skool one with the square head almost like a companion, or a pet.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
If it was something not real, I would like a time machine/transporter. With the amount of travelling I do, that would be a lot quicker and greener. In real terms, a helicopter or a massage chair.

Naoko Mori stars as Yoko Ono in Lennon Naked, screening on Wednesday 23 June at 9.30pm, on BBC4

Sending mobile data over your broadband with paid-for femtocell will count against monthly tariff

Vodafone has a nasty shock in store for would-be users of its "femtocell", which boosts patchy mobile signals indoors by sending the voice and data signal over the customer's home broadband. Any mobile data sent over the home broadband connection will still be charged against customers' monthly usage, the company has told the Guardian.

Outlining plans for future deployment, Vodafone senior marketing manager Lee McDougall said Vodafone is confident that consumer uptake of femtocells will be high. However he declined to give figures for sales since the launch in July 2009, or to say what increase in mobile use had been seen by femtocell users.

Femtocells whose name comes from the prefix "femto", meaning one millionth of a billionth are designed to improve mobile network coverage by plugging into a home broadband network and providing a 3G connection to attached phones.

Vodafone remains the only UK mobile operator in the UK to offer femtocells, through two different price plans. The current range dubbed Sure Signal boxes are retailing at 50 for existing customers on contracts over 25 per month, or 120 5 per month for two years for those on smaller contracts or pay-as-you-go contracts.

But though femtocells effectively relieve load on the mobile network, and send them via the broadband paid for by the customer, any minutes used calling via the femtocell will be taken from a customers monthly allowance, despite having already paid for the bandwidth in the original package. And mobile data sent via Sure Signal and through the customer's broadband will count against the data tariff for the contract as though the customer were outside using a mobile mast.

In Japan, mobile corporation SoftBank offers free femtocell packages to existing customers. Asked why Vodafone would not be following its lead, McDougall said: "Different markets have different drivers. We know we've got a competitive product."

At a time when data traffic is doubling every four months, according to O2, femtocells are an inexpensive solution to rapidly growing demand. Data transfers over femtocell are also far less expensive to the network operator than other means, as Dave Nowicki of mobile technology firm Airvana confirmed. "The marginal cost of delivery per gigabyte is much lower," he said. "Femtocells are complementary to Wi-Fi."

The Advertising Standards Authority last week upheld four complaints from rival mobile operators who said that advertising for the product was "misleading".

Vodafone's poster campaign pictured a man leaning out of his apartment window, apparently struggling to get a mobile signal, headed: "Only Vodafone can guarantee mobile signal in your home."

The most pointed complaint came from rival mobile operator O2 which said Vodafone did not make clear users would have to pay additional costs for a femtocell device. On this, the ASA said it was reasonable for people to infer that a guaranteed signal was part of the original mobile package but because this was not the case, the advertisement was likely to mislead.

McDougall told the Guardian the campaign would be modified to take into account the ASA ruling, maintaining that Vodafone Sure Start boxes would not be a hard sell to would-be customers.

"Customers have told us the product is lifechanging for them," McDougall told the Guardian. "They said it had made a significant difference to their life. The more they hear about them the more they're interested."

Although he said he couldn't put a figure on it, internal reports showed a higher-than-predicted uplift in data usage for customers trialling the Sure Signal boxes.

"Feedback from an 8m-leaflet door drop indicated that 90% of potential customers were willing to pay up front; unsurprisingly the desire to boost mobile signal was the biggest driver," he said.

In the US, AT&T is taking the same approach to mobile data sent through femtocells as Vodafone, and counting it against the customer's bill. AT&T argues that it is costly to install the systems at ISPs which will collect the voice and mobile data being sent by broadband and route it through its own network.

A single weekend plus Transport for London's API was enough to produce a live, self-updating map of where Underground trains are. What else is possible? (Updated)

If you haven't already spotted it from yesterday's Newsbucket, you can now see a fascinating animated Google Map (requires Javascript) showing where London Underground trains are - live. Built by Matthew Somerville of MySociety at Science Hack Day over the weekend, it uses the new Transport for London API (via the London Datastore) - combining the train predictions service plus "a bit of maths and magic.. As Somerville says on the page, "It's surprisingly okay given this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday and the many naming/location issues encountered, some unresolved. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly due to duplicate IDs; some H&C stations are missing in the TfL feed..."

Given that the API has only been available for just over a week, you've got to applaud Somerville and his (very) small array of helpers. It is fascinating (not least for the occasional "ghost train" which whizzes across the map at supersonic speeds, reckoned to be a software reset). Since its launch on Sunday, it's also got colour-coded lines and Underground symbols.

Somerville has also built a similar live-updating map for network trains from all the major termini (it defaults to Birmingham New Street, but there's a menu offering all the choices). Again, splendid stuff, using data pulled - scraped, actually - from the National Rail website. (National Rail doesn't offer an API.)

Then again, if you were going to be difficult, you might ask: why is it that we've had live feeds for aircraft positions all over Europe (created in November 2009, but launched in Sweden in 2007) for longer than we've had live feeds of the Underground? (The simple answer: aircraft have transponders which detail their location to the world. Then again, buses now have GPS units which indicate their positions to bus stops.) One (outside) developer I've spoken to says that for years TfL has been "a black box that the Greater London Authority pours money into which generates outputs, but nobody can see inside".

It looks like that is changing, though, and one has to say that the efforts of Emer Coleman, head of London's Data Store have been instrumental in getting TfL to open up its data in this way.

For example, you can find out about traffic on your commute to work.

Or you can see the locations of traffic cameras on an OpenStreetMap

In fact they're so good that the page of inspirational uses of London Datastore data is already getting rather long.

She can also take pride that the Greater London Authority is one of only four local authorities across the whole of the UK which is judged "truly open" according to Openly Local (the others are Lichfield District Council, Salford City Council and Warwickshire County Council.

However, OpenlyLocal points to another 7 authorities which are "semi-open". So that's 11 which are open or semi-open - out of a total of 434 across the country.

That's an enormous amount of work to be done by those 423 authorities - which have only until January before they should have all sort of extra data made available for free.

Yet look at the possibilities: if opening up just the first tranche of TfL data can mean this, then there could be enormous potential for other local government data applications. What would you do if you could get your hands on that data?