Every iPhone ever made uses a 'totally wrong' formula to show signal strength, says Apple, after antenna complaints

Apple has confessed that it has discovered that every iPhone uses the wrong formula to calculate how strong a signal it is receiving meaning that it seems to show good reception when the signal is weak. It has promised a software fix for the problem "within a few weeks" which will match that used in other phones.

The explanation, in which the company says it used "totally wrong" calculations to work out the strength of the signal, seems to explain why some people have complained to the company that they see a dramatic dropoff in the signal strength displayed when they hold the iPhone 4 in a particular way. Within hours of the phone being delivered to customers last month, dozens had posted videos on YouTube showing that the number of "bars" indicating reception strength fell abruptly when they picked the phone up from a desk.

Apple says in a press release on its site that it was "surprised" after the launch of the phone to read reports of reception problems, especially those who reported that the signal strength dropped completely from five "bars" (the strongest reception) to none when held in a way that covers the antenna on the bottom of the phone.

But after getting "hundreds of emails from users" and seeing articles about the problem, it took the phones back to its laboratories and discovered, it says, that it has been measuring signal strength wrongly since the very first iPhone, in a development it calls "simple and surprising".

The company explains: "Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display four bars when we should be displaying as few as two bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying four or five bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."

That would mean that the apparently strong reception that vanished when the phone was picked up was a mirage and that the abrupt falloff was because the signal strength dipped below the normal levels for a lower range of bars.

The review site Anandtech investigated the iPhone 4's reception earlier this week, and found that there is comparatively little difference between the signal strength needed to get four "bars" and one: a difference of 12 decibels' signal strength is enough to boost the apparent reception from one to four bars. A difference of 10dB is equivalent to a tenfold difference in the power of the signal, and a 3dB difference equates to a factor of two in the signal power.

Other phones use different measures to indicate signal strength: different versions of RIM's BlackBerry, for example, will show only two bars out of five with a signal strength of -80dB which would be enough on the iPhone to show five bars.

Apple says it intends to fix the problem with a software update which will mean that the displayed signal strength matches the formula recommended by AT&T, the sole phone provider for iPhones in the US. There is no comment yet from UK phone providers as to whether the formula they recommend for signal strength is the same as AT&T's. Nor is AT&T's measurement system available online: the phrase "recommended formula" does not appear in any of its developer documentation, and an AT&T representative said that "You will need to speak to Apple about its letter."

But Apple insists that the iPhone 4's wireless performance is "the best we have ever shipped" and that for the vast majority of users, "this software update will only make your bars more accurate".

The company is facing a class action in the US from angry buyers of the iPhone 4 who have complained that Apple knew about the issues with the antennas before the phone was released. The company has not yet responded to the lawsuit, though in its letter it points out that dissatisfied customers can return their phones for a refund.

Temporary halt put on newly-introduced API feed as implementations catch the London open data experiment unprepared for demand

Stop all the tubes, cut off the API. Transport for London has had to stop its supply of data about the movements of Underground trains due to "overwhelming demand" from demonstrations of what can be done with that data such as Harry Metcalfe's Matthew Somerville's maths-and-magic live tube map. (If you try to go to that site now it just hangs.)

The reason: after opening up the API, requests for data ballooned from 180,000 to 10m. Consequently, TfL found itself a bit underprepared.

As the London Datastore - which has been the throughway for those API requests - notes,

"Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution."

Our understanding is that the London Datastore is now encouraging TfL to serve API requests directly, rather than proxied through the data store, because that will mean that TfL gets a clearer idea of who the customers and developers for its data actually are, and where they're based.

In the comments to the blogpost, there are some useful suggestions for TfL about how to improve the service while easing the strain on its (well, the LDS's) servers: more partitioning of feeds with less data per feed, and more caching. Obvious to developers - not so obvious to an organisation which has lived its life functioning, as one developer described it to me, as "a black box that people pour money into and which then spits out travel".

But for TfL, the lesson is clear: there's real, eager demand for its data via an API. There are people who have positive, helpful suggestions for how to improve its servicing. And it's being advised to hold those customers/developers closer, rather than at arm's length. It's going to be interesting to see how it progresses.

Now, can we have the live tube map back please? Soon?

Amazon takes over 'one day, one deal' rival Woot
Dallas-based online retailer to be independent subsidiary

The US shopping website Woot.com breaks every rule in retailing. It offers a choice of just one item each day. It labels products as "bags of crap", jokes that it hopes to be profitable by 2043 and has a Ryanair-style disdain for complaints. Yet Woot's cult success prompted a takeover yesterday by the online empire Amazon.

In a blog posting, Woot announced that it was being snapped up for an undisclosed sum by Amazon, the Seattle-based internet emporium best known for books that nowadays sells anything from shoes to groceries. The TechCrunch technology blog reported that the price was $110m ( 73m) in cash.

"Holy crap! Woot has signed an agreement with Amazon yes, THE Amazon to become an independent subsidiary of the e-commerce colossus," said Woot's company blog. "More details forthcoming after we pick our eyeballs up off the floor."

Woot, headquartered in Dallas, began life in 2004 as a venture to sell off excess inventory from a computer components company, Synapse. Its founder, Matt Rutledge, pursued a model whereby the site offers one single product each day at a discounted price.

The daily item can be anything from a tumble dryer to a luggage set or even "bacon-flavoured salt" to spice up cups of coffee. The product changes either when Woot sells out or at the stroke of midnight.

In 2008, Woot disclosed sales of $164m and the site was named by a business magazine, Inc., as the fastest-growing private retailer in the US. About 3 million people are registered as users.

Rutledge told the Dallas Morning News that all of the firm's 140 employees held stock options and would benefit from the buyout. He said: "It will be easier to run an aggressive growth company when you have the backing of a big operation like Amazon."

In tongue-in-cheek fashion, Woot's website notes that it anticipates "profitability in 2043 by then we should be retired".

It advises customers who are unsatisfied with purchases to offload their goods on the auction website eBay. If items don't work, it suggests researching the problem on Google.

Special offers feature grab bags from Woot's warehouse labelled as "bags of crap" and several spin-off sites have been launched, including Wine.Woot and Kids.Woot.

The purchase is the latest in a string of deals for Amazon, which bought the online shoe shop Zappos for $850m a year ago and acquired Audible, a digital books provider, for $300m in January 2008.

Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, said Amazon had a habit of buying out smaller rivals whose business models could, eventually, be a threat: "They have an acquisition strategy of keeping their friends close and their enemies closer."

A panel discussion at the Guardian's Activate 2010 summit illustrated how simple, cheap technology, adapted to the local context, is helping to lift people out of poverty

It seems improbable that in parts of the world where there is little sanitation or electricity and the largely illiterate population are subsistence farmers that mobile phones and computer technology are being received with great enthusiasm.

It seems equally improbable that maize and the media would be discussed at the same forum, but that is exactly what happened during the developing world panel session at the Guardian's Activate 2010 summit yesterday afternoon.

The five panellists came from disparate backgrounds, but all shared one common aim: to use technology to change the lives of some of the world's poorest people.

All the speakers conveyed the incredible hardship of human life in the different parts of the world in which they worked from the struggles of smallholder farmers in rural Kenya to the victims of the Haiti earthquake but illustrated how simple, cheap technologies, adapted to the local context, are helping to lift people out of poverty.

Whether through KickStart's low-cost irrigation pumps, capital education reform pioneered by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the work of Question Box to provide easy-access information or even the pioneering use of mobile technology by large corporations, such as Vodafone and Thomson Reuters, technology is helping to challenge the status quo for the poor.

Reuters provided "better, actionable information" through Market Light, a commodities information trading tool for farmers in India, which has attracted 200,000 farmers in 15,000 villages across 10 states in the last two and a half years.

Rose Shuman, founder of Question Box, reiterated the value of information and explained how her company was "leveraging human infrastructure" to provide information to communities in India and Uganda, where people were not only illiterate but encountered other language and technical barriers.

David Cavallo, vice-president of OLPC, acknowledged the role of universal primary education in poverty reduction, but said it was preparing children for an unknown future, using obsolete tools. Technology has a role everywhere, he said, but added that in places like Rwanda or Haiti technology provided a way to boost the "learning environment beyond where you can take it with incremental changes."

Cavallo explained that the biggest impact technology had on people's lives was social. Children in favelas in Brazil who received laptops not only had an improved sense of self-worth (which reduced absenteeism from school), but they started to teach their parents to read. In Uruguay, access to computers became a catalyst for e-governance.

But technology as a driver of development has its limits. The Comic Relief/Vodafone RedAlert partnership may have enabled 2m to be raised in 90 seconds through SMS fundraising, but after all the interfacing, tweeting and poking, it still seems that infrastructure (road linkages, storage facilities, a good legal system and access to finance) and the will of people to look beyond themselves and their own networks are still vital for development to happen.

What was also clear was that all these ideas must be financially viable to be sustainable: KickStart moved the production of their human powered pressure irrigation pumps from Africa to China because, as Nick Moon, its co-founder explained: "It is cheaper to ship from China to Africa than from Africa to Africa."

The obstacles to realising technology's potential may be considerable, but the resounding conclusion is that technology is a force for good. As David Craig, chief strategy officer of Thomson Reuters said at the end of his talk: "The world might be a tough place, but information can make it better."

Actor Chris Barrie admits to being a luddite, but he finds his satnav to be a true guiding light

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I have to say that being on the road quite a bit, the satnav is very convenient. I still occasionally use the good old-fashioned map book, but the satnav has been an absolute breath of fresh air.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Yesterday, to take me from West London down to Kent and it got to the point, about 70 miles into my journey, that it was taking me completely the wrong way. But it eventually delivered me to where I needed to be.

What additional features would you add if you could?
My particular satnav doesn't have a heavy traffic warning facility, so I would add that to it.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No, because people will always want to know where they're going. And, of course, it will be developed you'll have 3D ones with HD pictures of where you're passing.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
Items of technology [seem to be getting]smaller and smaller physically, and yet their handbooks get thicker and thicker. It's the instructions and technical aspects that frustrate me.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Between cassettes and iPods, you had portable CD players that you could jog with but that thing never worked properly. After about three months, it just stopped working it was a throw-in-the-bin job.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Make friends with someone who understands it.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Luddite, definitely. Some would say both, but luddite really.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I'd say it's probably my first foray into serious SLR digital cameras, which was a Nikon D100 which I traded in a film camera for.

Mac or PC, and why?
PC, because people told me that Mac was going to be the Betamax of the computer world. How wrong they were. I don't do much with computers internet, emails and the usual things. I've just had PCs all the time, and they're fine.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I still do physical media the downloading is really something we'll leave for the kids. I still like to hold something physical. The last DVD I bought was a collection of war films.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't think they are a good idea, no. None of them could ever be as good as Kryten. If I was ever going to have the wherewithal to employ a butler, it would have to be the human kind.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I think this is where the luddite in me comes out if you look at some of the things coming out, they're unnecessary, we end up facing permanently at a screen, which is why I fight against Twitter and Facebook. If anything, I think there should be a break in technological advance.I have no desire to be aided any other way in life.

Chris Barrie hosts Britain's Greatest Machines, series 2 of which is released on DVD on Monday, 5 July. Barrie also stars as Arnold Rimmer on TV's Red Dwarf

Google chief Eric Schmidt tells Activate summit that the future of newspapers is online and mobile

Video: Eric Schmidt discusses newspapers and the web with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that the experience of reading news will move to digital devices quite rapidly and that it will involve personalised and local news which will be alert to your interests and existing knowledge.

Speaking at the Activate 2010 summit held at the Guardian, Schmidt also warned that organisations should think of their mobile strategy ahead of their internet strategy but that the two were intertwined so deeply that it was impossible to think of one without the other.

"The internet is the most disruptive technology in history, even more than something like electricity, because it replaces scarcity with abundance, so that any business built on scarcity is completely upturned as it arrives there," Schmidt said. "You have to plan your corporate strategy around what the internet does."

There are now three fundamental technology trends, he said: the growth of mobile internet connectivity, the growth of cloud computing and networking.

"Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them."

Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

But Schmidt refused to condemn paywalls, such as the Times's, which goes into operation from today despite Rupert Murdoch having described Google as a "thief and a parasite" for its indexing operation of the Times site. Interviewed by Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Schmidt said he had an "extremely good relationship" with Murdoch, head of News International, and that he had "not asked or expected" an apology for the description.

"At Google we want to offer every publisher pieces for you to do with as you see fit," he said. "Murdoch's comment was really about paywalls. There's a dispute in the [news] industry about subscriptions versus advertising. We want to enable both, and let users choose. But there are many publishers with large sites which have been offered the choice to go to a paywall, but don't, because they reckon they can make it work. Others want a subscription because that's the model they're used to."

But he said that newspapers faced real challenges because "they're replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It's much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate."

Instead, he said, organisations should build their strategies around the internet and especially mobile. "The corollary of 'internet first' is 'mobile first'," he said.

But he said that the improved targeting of news and information, possibly with more personalised services, "opens fundamental questions: news will become more personal, because we will be reading what we know we're interested in. But is that too narrow? How does serendipity occur? Does that personalisation narrow our social view? If you follow the results of studies, it turns out that can lead to all sorts of biases. I don't know the answer, but to me this is a very fundamental question."

Asked what keeps him awake at night and what will eventually kill Google Schmidt, an industry veteran, replied: "Almost all deaths in the IT industry are self-inflicted. Large-scale companies make mistakes because they don't continue to innovate. For example, 'nowness' real-time information is a new concept that wasn't around when Google started, or even a few years ago. Now we integrate it into our searches.

"My fundamental fear about Google is that we have the same feature as other companies, which is that we lose that edge. If you lose that edge... But I think that will be a long, long time from now. External threats are likely to come from a truly innovative company that builds itself a big enough business quickly enough that we can't catch it. It's not different from other industries in that sense, except that in IT it happens so fast.

"The next great success will be built even faster than Google, and the one after that even faster. It's just how it is."

Nick Clegg's 'Your Freedom' project basically a bonfire of the inanities should start on the act passed in the wash-up, especially given the example of Finland

Finns now have the legal right to broadband access, as a law passed in October comes into force today. Under the law, telecomms providers are obliged to offer always-on high-speed internet connections to all of the country's 5.3 million citizens, with a minimum speed of at least 1 megabit per second.

It makes an interesting contrast with the UK where Nick Clegg's announcement of the "Your Freedom" project, aiming to repeal laws seen as onerous or unnecessary came with a new website where people can suggest laws that they want repealed. Basically, a bonfire of the inanities.

And one of the first laws that got put up there by annoyed citizens as a candidate for repeal? The Digital Economy Act, passed in the "wash-up" period at the fag-end of the last Parliament, opposed then by the Liberal Democrats (in particular Don Foster) and the occasion for his first-ever revolt by Labour MP and former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson.

Indeed, Clegg himself called during the election for the DEA to be repealed. Can't see his name in the comments. Yet.

The contrast between Finland and the UK could not be more stark. Where Finland is treating broadband as being essential to its infrastructure, the DEA offers the potential for strictures where people could, in theory, be cut off if they are judged to have broken copyright law. (The Labour government insisted that this would only happen in the most extreme of cases, and there is no mention in the Act of any "three strikes" methodology, but the threat still remains. It's just a question of process.)

Finland, of course, has good reason to want to make sure that all its citizens can get broadband. They're not solely about high-tech. It's also because Finland has some incredibly rural areas, as well as its cities. And it gets extremely cold in winter, which means that it's preferable to stay where you are than to travel long distances to work, if your work can be done via a computer.

Partly for that reason, Finland is already one of the world's most connected countries, with 96% of citizens online - but in October the communications minister, Suvi Linden, said that the mandate was necessary in order to improve the availability of internet in Finland's remote rural areas. In an announcement in September, Ms Linden committed to making 100Mb internet access - one hundred times faster than the connections mandated under the current law - available to all Finnish residents by 2015.

In the UK, the government is aiming at 2Mbps for 99% of the population by 2012 - but there's no law to back it. Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, declared early in June that he wants the UK to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe: "We are now ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than South Korea", he said. "Within this parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe."

Unfortunately we're miles behind in that race, and without any legal force to make telecomms companies provide that sort of connectivity, and no clear subsidy to encourage them to connect the rural areas (which are most expensive to wire, and produce the lowest return, because you have few customers far apart, compared to cities where you have many customers close together) it looks like we're going to continue to lag.

Even so, we can be hopeful about the DEA. It would be interesting if the Lib Dem arm of the coalition manages to get the DEA repealed. As sheredom, who suggested it for the bonfire, pointed out, the reasons for killing it are:

"1. Misguided bill that will not combat the issues that it claims to. Puts unnecessary strain on ISPs that do not wish to enforce the law; 2. To stand up to these lobby groups and say 'No, we are not going to do things because big business tells us to.'"

Today we are releasing a new tool that will enable you to post Guardian articles directly to your blog. You can add your own commentary to an article and then publish the article in full with only a few restrictions (more on that below).

Here are some simple instructions for installing and using the Guardian's News Feed plugin for WordPress.

First, to install it, you can either use the Plugins tool in your WordPress admin panel, or you can download it from WordPress.org here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-guardian-news-feed/

Then you will need to obtain an access key via the Guardian's Open Platform. You can register and then obtain a key here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

The process is self-serve, and you will have your key in moments.

Then you need to configure the plugin. You can do this from the main dashboard where you should see the Guardian News Feed Configuration panel. On this panel enter your API key into the box marked API key.

Now, you can begin using it. You will see the "Guardian News Feed" option in your "Posts" menu. That is where you can search and browse for articles that you'd like to publish.

When you find an article you want to publish, click the 'Save to Drafts' option. And you'll then be able to add your comments before posting it.

That's it, really.

We have included some publishing guidelines in the search panel. It's a list of some friendly reminders in case you forget what was in the Terms and Conditions that you agreed to:

1. Changes: You mustn't remove or alter the text, links or images you get from us.
2. Key: If you don't have a key, get one here. It's required. If you do have one, please don't share it or use it anywhere else.
3. Ads: Articles come with ads and performance tracking embedded in them. As above, you mustn't change or remove them. You can, of course, use your own ads elsewhere on your blog, too.
4. Deletions: Sometimes but very rarely we have to remove articles. When that happens, this plug-in will replace the withdrawn Guardian content within your blog post with a message saying that the content is not available anymore.

Some other things worth noting:

This first iteration is a beta, version 0.1.
It only works if you have your own hosted WordPress blog. It does not work if you are using WordPress.com or another blog platform.
We will be developing versions for other platforms, too. Stay tuned.
There are some issues with this version that we're working to fix. For example, articles with restricted rights are showing up in the search interface, but you can't publish them.

There is an FAQ on WordPress.org with some more information. You can also post questions in the Google Group. We'd love to hear what you think of it and how we can improve it.

Lastly, the plugin is designed to be used as is. We have several other ways of working with partners if you want to do something that varies from our standard terms. Find out more here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

News International to charge for online access to Times and Sunday Times content from today

Rupert Murdoch's much heralded move to charge for online access to Times and Sunday Times content begins today.

Web users who are not already subscribers to the print editions of the two papers will have to pay 1 for a day's access or 2 for a week-long subscription.

However, as an introductory offer, any customer who registers will get access to both websites for 30 days for 1.

News International, the UK subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation that publishes the titles, said the iPad edition of the Times, which costs 9.99 a month, would continue to be charged separately.

The company unveiled new Times and Sunday Times websites and introduced online registration in late May as a precursor to introducing pay-only access.

When Murdoch announced a year ago that he planned to charge for all News Corp's online content, he sparked a debate in the industry about the merits of charging against offering free access and relying on advertising revenue.

Rival newspaper publishers, including Guardian News & Media and Daily Mail & General Trust, have said they plan to maintain free online access but will be watching to see if the News International subscription move proves successful.

"We have been very pleased with the response from readers since the launch of the new websites in May," said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International.

"The new sites showcase our award-winning journalism in a very visual way, giving readers exclusive content and interactivity so that they can get even more from the news. We believe the new sites offer real value and we look forward to continuing to invest and innovate for readers."

The company's red-top titles, the Sun and News of the World, are also expected to go behind a paywall soon.

No one could see everything at Glasto but it's not too late to catch up on things

Most of those who attended last weekend's Glastonbury festival will have failed to see all of the acts they'd hoped to, because of the relentless heat and the mammoth site. But until midnight on Sunday, a thorough catch-up of the event's musical fare is available at bbc.co.uk/glastonbury. You can watch extended video footage of more than 40 artists. Most of the acts mentioned in dispatches as highlights are featured including Dizzee Rascal, Muse, Groove Armada, Stevie Wonder, Pet Shop Boys, Scissor Sisters, Orbital, Flaming Lips, Mumford & Sons and Shakira (skip to 24 minutes for her terrific cover of the xx). You can also check out the biggest opinion dividers, Gorillaz, and decide whether they treated the Pyramid Stage to artful pop inventiveness or indulgent noodling. The BBC are also offering highlights of 30 acts that played on their BBC Introducing stage. Have a flick through them and you'll be well versed in what 2011 might sound like. Chew Lips impress with their snappy, electro-powered pop, while Belfast band Seven Summits offer a pleasingly literate indie stomp. But Scottish hopeful Kid Adrift seems most assured of success, with his crunching, bedroom-made mixture of Aphex Twin and Muse sounding even mightier live.

Of course, when the BBC wasn't around to film, there was usually someone in the crowd who was. A surprise set from Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood in The Park has been well documented by those fortunate enough to witness it. The two songs which closed the pair's set with spine-tingling crowd singalongs, Karma Police and Street Spirit (Fade Out), are up in very decent quality at bit.ly/kpglasto and bit.ly/ssfoglasto respectively. For more fan-filmed mass karaoke, head to bit.ly/wowyglasto for Keane's raucously received cover of U2's With Or Without You in the tiny Avalon tent. Biffy Clyro's secret set is also covered on YouTube at bit.ly/bcglasto although if anyone captured singer Simon Neil howling in agony after jumping from a speaker, they haven't yet uploaded it.

The other big musical event of last weekend that's available to relive online is Paul McCartney's headline show in Hyde Park. The gig was streamed live on YouTube to help raise awareness of the Born HIV Free campaign, with 71 minutes of highlights still available at youtube.com/bornHIVfree. Although it wasn't quite as heavy on Beatles tracks as some had hoped, it's certainly worth skipping to the last 20 minutes for the rollicking, Fab Four-powered finale.

Send your links to chris.salmon@guardian.co.uk

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.

Xbox 360/PS3/Wii; 39.99; cert 3+; EA Sports

Famously, amid Tiger Woods' recent woes, his brand-partners abandoned him in droves but at least EA Sports stuck by him. And the latest version of the golf game that bears his name should provide him with some consolation, as it's very good. Although one aspect which, on the face of it, might add to his creeping paranoia strikes you when you see the packaging: for the first time, Tiger is joined on the cover by another pro golfer, Northern Irish hot-shot Rory McIlroy.

McIlroy's presence shouldn't be seen as evidence that EA Sports is hedging its bets on Brand Woods, though. Rather, it reflects the fact that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 contains a virtual facsimile of the Ryder Cup which will run this October at Celtic Manor in Wales, so a European poster-boy is required along with an American. The game's inclusion of the Ryder Cup should provide fans of the franchise with all the motivation they need to buy the latest iteration, and it is implemented in a commendably flexible manner: you can pretend to be Colin Montgomerie and pick a squad, then jump into whatever ongoing match takes your fancy after each hole. If you opt for the defaults (but choose the European team), you will be paired with McIlroy against Woods and Jim Furyk, at least in the initial stages of the tournament a daunting proposition.

However tempting, it's best not to jump straight into a Ryder Cup, as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 has a new RPG-style Experience Points (XP) mechanism. You earn XP for things like hitting fairways and greens in regulation, plus sinking birdies and eagles. But great chunks of XP can be liberated by taking on Skills Challenges, fronted by various pros, in which, for example, you might have to match noted short-iron specialist Boo Weekley around the greens. You can then cash in your XP on a bewildering array of attributes (or virtual items in the Pro Shop), and it makes sense to improve your golfing skills before taking on the hopes of a continent in the Ryder Cup.

You can also play an entire PGA Tour season, emphasising that this is a very meaty game. Along with the XP, there is another new gameplay mechanic called Shot Focus, which lets you improve length and accuracy by adding power-boost to your shots, imparting spin in mid-air or seeing a preview of your putt's likely course. But this is finite, so you must use it sparingly (although it recharges over the course of a few holes).

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 looks absolutely stunning: at last, there is a clearly visible demarcation between fairway and rough, and the cloud-studded skies and camera angles are great to behold. There are also plenty of engine tweaks that make the game more true-to-life: the wind can now swing around from shot to shot, for example, and your ball will no longer automatically be dead in the centre of your aiming circle, even if you catch it perfectly. Hitting from the rough is more unpredictable. Two teams of 12 people can contest a Ryder Cup online, and there's a slightly gimmicky mode called True Aim, which gives you a view close to what a real golfer would see and makes you think more about yardages. A very classy effort, which should bring a rare smile to Tiger Woods' lips.

Rating: 4/5

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

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.

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.

If you want to play high-definition video on a Mac... better make it yourself. A new email from the head of Apple points to no shift in its opposition to Sony's format

The Simpsons once had an episode which, in passing, showed newscaster Kent Brockman announcing "And now here is a list of celebrities that have been arrested", with a zip-fast list scrolling up the screen.

So, rather in that vein, here are things that Steve Jobs has revealed via his email replies - an output system that ought to be making his PR people look to their laurels.

First, Blu-ray: don't hold your breath. In fact, let your breath out, because Jobs, who in October 2008 called the Sony-controlled enhanced-DVD format "a bag of hurt" (quote: "Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."), is now suggesting that Blu-ray is just pass .

Responding to a reader at Mac Rumors who asked him how soon Blu-ray drives (even for reading discs) would be coming to the Apple Mac, Jobs responded:

"Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."

Certainly it's true that Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio died a thorough death, especially compared to MP3, despite offering higher quality audio.

The reader, Siva, demurred: the medium-term benefits of Blu-ray, he pointed out, include being able to do high-density backups (you can get Blu-ray writers and discs for backup), plus the video is higher-quality than you can get online, and MP3 took off because of its lack of DRM. (He might have pointed out: the short-term benefits include watching Blu-ray films.) So come on, Steve, how about it?

No moving Jobs:

"No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

"I think you may be wrong - we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over."

The strange thing about Blu-ray and Apple is how completely mulish Apple is being about incorporating it. You can now get Blu-ray DVD playback on dozens of manufacturers' machines, because it's seen as a benefit. Not though for Apple owners, who can't even buy an add-on drive to read Blu-ray discs because the OS won't control them.

And another Mac Rumors reader emailed Jobs earlier in the week about those "reception issues" with the iPhone 4. Jobs's response?

"There are no reception issues. Stay tuned."

Any more? Really he should have a Twitter account all of his own. Most of the replies could fit into 140 characters.

Then again, bad things might happen.

Oh, and since you wanted to know who was on the celebrities list, here it is. And to quote Kent: "Remember, if you see any celebrities, consider them dangerous."

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?

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".

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.

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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.

Why does Clay Shirky believe the internet is better than television?

Why is TV-dissing such a big part of internet orthodoxy? Clay Shirky has been out promoting his new book, Cognitive Surplus, which states that internet activity is displacing TV among the young and that this is a good thing. There have been newspaper reviews like this and yesterday he was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme .

To be fair to Shirky, he doesn't say that all TV is "bad", but he believes that being online is better connecting, creating, sharing. I would have to be a philistine not to recognise the many positive benefits that the internet has brought us, and I share Shirky's idealistic hope that it will promote democracy, knowledge, peace, love etc.

My problems with his book are three-fold: I dispute some of his facts, some of the distinctions that he draws and some of the science that he employs.

Facts first: is TV viewing declining for the first time ever among the young? Not in the UK or Europe, and TV catch-up services online are extra. TV viewing is booming in developing markets. Anyone who has watched the World Cup coverage will have been moved to see young African children joyfully watching their first TV football match.

Secondly, to position the internet as an alternative to TV is meaningless and I don't say that lightly, because Clay Shirky is clearly a very intelligent person. The internet is a vast and transformational technology, but it is not a homogenous medium.

Many human activities that once took place offline can now be conducted online, including watching TV. A growing percentage of young people's time online is spent watching TV and video and then talking about it, as a quick glance at Twitter will prove. Sadly, there is about a 1:99 ratio between people who create things online and those who just consume them, much as in the real world; and TV inspires online creativity.

Finally, a bit of science. The word "passive" is often used to denigrate TV viewing. There might be less physical movement than twitching with a mouse but the brain is deeply engaged watching TV. The brain is a complex organism; the very title of Shirky's book indicates he overvalues rational and cognitive processes over emotional intelligence and education; action over feelings.

We have just finished some neuroscientific research looking at the difference in the brain activity between watching TV and browsing websites (largely text based) and the differences are marked. TV is much stronger in areas such as emotion and long-term memory encoding and web browsing is stronger for visual attention. So they are different but complementary.

Watching TV is a mostly shared experience; the real-life conversations within families that TV provokes are enormously valuable. Entertaining people and promoting happiness is a noble pursuit; TV is the master. But we should also recognise TV's vast role as an informer, educator and promoter of democracy every bit as important as the internet.

Most of the time, the ease that the internet brings to human endeavour is brilliant, but I can think of areas where it has casualised and arguably cheapened some things. What's the exchange rate between an online click on a petition and a Jarrow marcher? Birthday wishes on Facebook take a mere two seconds.

I could reverse what Shirky does and make unfair comparisons between the best of TV and the worst of the internet: is it better to watch Survival and Dispatches or to play to World of Warcraft and poke a friend? But I'd rather value both these massive cultural treasures for all the good they can do, separately and together.

Tess Alps is chief executive of Thinkbox, the marketing body for UK commercial TV

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. (Correction: the Kin ran on a form of Windows CE, not Windows Mobile.)

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."

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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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
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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

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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.