Director of Gladiator, Alien and Blade Runner asks public to post snippets of their life and offers co-directing credit

Ridley Scott, director of films such as Gladiator and Alien, is to crowdsource a feature length documentary by getting members of the public to post snippets of a day in their life on YouTube.

Scott, who is collaborating with the State of Play director Kevin Macdonald and YouTube, intends to create a feature length documentary based on the clips called Life in a Day. The project aims to get individuals to upload to YouTube footage of a moment in their lives on 24 July.

Individuals whose footage makes it into the final film will be credited as co-directors and 20 will be flown to the Sundance Film Festival in January where the film will have its premiere. Life in a Day will also be shown for free on YouTube.

"Life in a Day is a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on 24 July 2010," said Macdonald, who will direct the project. "It is a unique experiment in social filmmaking, and what better way to gather a limitless array of footage than to engage the world's online community?"

The project will be executive produced by Scott and produced by his company, Scott Free Productions.

Life in a Day follows two previous crowd-sourcing projects by the Google-owned videosharing website. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered together classical musicians and a tie-up with the Guggenheim took artist submissions from around the world.

"Over the past five years, You Tube has changed the way media is created and consumed," said Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google. "We're thrilled to give our community the opportunity to work with Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott and are grateful to our long-term partner, the Sundance Institute, for their support of this global initiative."

There's a new layout, increased speed and plenty of new features to be found in the first beta of Firefox 4

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the first beta version of Firefox 4, the next generation of its cross-platform web browser.

Although there is some way to go until the final release, the beta is considered to be stable and safe enough for daily use.

Mozilla is aiming to engage up to 4 million users in an interactive process to shape the final release. Feedback opportunities are prominent in the user interface, with users encouraged to submit their thoughts to the developers.

The popular browser is undergoing many changes, both visible and under the hood. The Windows release has seen the most apparent refinements, with tabs moved above the address bar as well as a single Firefox button to replace the menu bar.

Universal changes include a Smart Location bar, updated add-ons manager, replacement of the bookmarks bar with a bookmarks button, support for high definition WebM video, extra privacy protection and crash protection against media plug ins.

For web developers, the main feature to embrace is the new HTML5 parser which has full support for drag and drop, audio, video, file handling, and in-line SVG and MathML support.

Taking the beta for a spin, one enhancement is immediately apparent the speed. Taking a leaf from the book of Chrome, the rendering of web pages is instantaneous and video sites such as YouTube load up in record time.

The beta does not include all the intended features of the final release the Mac and Linux releases have yet to adopt the new menu layout and the synchronisation and privacy controls features are yet to be seen. Mozilla claims that it is going to squeeze even more speed from the engine for the final release later in the year.

So, have you had a look at the Firefox 4 beta yet? If so, what do you think? Do you like it? Let us know below.

Apple iPhone 4 - good for Apple, bad for Apple PR, bad for mobile operators, good for HTML5 developers. And the customers? Well they're not exactly fully paid-up members of the Apple fan club either, according to a new report on the mobile web.


Photo by Sroown on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The unique selling point of the iPhone - it's App Store - will dwindle in appeal within two years as HTML5 becomes the standard for browsers and mobile web applications become increasingly feature-rich, says the 2010 Mobile Web Usage Forecast by mobile internet firm Volantis. And it will be gaming and social networking that provide the biggest pull towards the mobile web, the YouGov poll of over 4,000 US and UK consumers aged 18+ found.

Fifty-five percent of UK-based respondents said social networking would encourage them to use the mobile web more, while 17% were keen to access games on their mobiles. Those findings certainly correlate with this year's GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report which found that Facebook accounted for almost half of the 4.8bn minutes UK folk spent browsing the mobile web in December 2009. Over a third (38%) of all respondents felt that an iPhone was inconsequential as part of having a good mobile web experience, with just one in ten Americans thinking that an iPhone was essential to enjoy the mobile internet.

Volantis chief executive Mark Watson said the findings were good news for developers turned off by Apple's more restrictive approach to mobile apps: "The arrival of HTML5 will release developers from the constraints of Flash, making the user experience more varied and allowing the development of entertainment, lifestyle and business apps which are optimised to provide the same experience across all devices. Freeing developers from having to focus on either 'Apple' or 'Other' applications will further drive the mobile web market.

"Mobile internet users want compelling web experiences that will allow them quick and seamless access to the services that matter to them most," he said. "With the advancement of HTML5 the limitations of web apps for mobile are declining; inch by inch, function by function, handsets are becoming more web accessible."

In January this year, Gartner predicted mobile app downloads would surpass 21.6bn by 2013. By the same year, the analyst said, mobile phones would replace PCs as the most common device for web access.

An unrelated report by Denmark-based Strand Consult say Apple's latest mobile offering is "really bad news" for carriers, warning that mobile operators could well be issuing profit warnings due to large subsidies for the iPhone 4. Invoking its almost countercultural September 2009 report, The Moment of Truth - a Portrait of the iPhone, Strand Consult argue that any evaluation of iPhone 4 success should be based on six parameters:

How does the iPhone 4 differ compared to previous iPhone models?

Does the iPhone 4 have a new form factor that makes it attractive to new customer segments that did not purchase previous iPhone models due to the design?

Which customers will primarily purchase the new iPhone 4, new customers or existing iPhone customers that want the new model?

How will a massive upgrade of the iPhone base influence the economy of operators that have large customer bases that want a new subsidised iPhone 4?

What will happen with all the old iPhones when people purchase a new iPhone 4? Will they destroy them, or will they try to sell them to friends and family?

How big is the iPhone market? Is it so big that it deserves the uncritical attention it is receiving?

On each of these scores, Strand Consult contends, the iPhone 4 leaves much to be desired from mobile operators, while leaving the door open for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to deal in SIM-only strategies.

Facebookers advised to be vigilant, as rogue applications plague users of the social-networking site

The world of Facebook can be a dangerous place, as two separate incidents this week have proven.

The first instance is actually a genuine IQ test, which takes control of your profile and signs you up to a $10 per month premium mobile phone service. If you spot a link along the lines of 'I'm NEVER texting AGAIN' in your feed, then be sure to stay clear.

Roger Thompson from AVG demonstrates what you are likely to find if you click through.

The second rogue has its main intent on becoming viral through your friends. The page '99% of people can't watch this video for more than 25 seconds' suggests you copy some Javascript code into a browser window to view the video.

Executing this code will pass the page to all of your friends, casuing them similar hardships. The eventual intent is still unsure, as the page has been taken down after compiling over 93,555 fans.

Legitimate Facebook pages and applications will never ask you to paste something into your address bar, or to sign up to premium services. Remember to always how much data the application is requesting access to.

Common sense will usually prevail in these situations though, so do not be fooled. Vigilance is the best method of stopping these rogues from spreading.

Twitter finally explains new EarlyBird promotional account to distribute exclusive offers to users

Despite reeling in $160m in venture capital funding and worth an estimated $1bn, Twitter is still on the hunt for sustainable revenue sources to support the company.

Early indications on Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets appear to have been successful, and are part of a larger strategy to avoid paid accounts yet gain financial security.

After what seems like a lifetime, the company has now officially announced EarlyBird, which aims to inform users of special promotions that are unique to Twitter and the account. Selected advertisers will pay to distribute offers to the thousands of users present on the network, although none of these has yet been named. The offers will be time sensitive, so fast action will be needed to catch that particular worm.

EarlyBird functions in the same way as a normal Twitter account for the offers to appear in your follow feed. Unlike Promoted Trends, however, they do not appear automatically on your front page and it is an opt-in service, as opposed to the opt-out follow that had been mooted. EarlyBird tweets can also be retweeted to pass them onto your followers.

What's the catch? Initially, EarlyBird offers will be US-centric, although Twitter has said this will likely change: "We're starting with US-wide offers but will explore location-based deals in the future."

The opportunity for EarlyBird to go viral is huge, with offers potentially spreading around like internet like wildfire if they are deemed worthy enough. As I type, the account has 9,545 followers, something that will need to multiply infinitely for the scheme to be successful. Thanks to the joys of trends and retweeting, this seems likely. Assuming the followers flood in, Twitter will be closer to long-term sustainability.

Analogue sets are no longer available in British shops. Here's a glimpse back through the history of the cathode ray tube

ScreenReach co-founder Paul Rawlings says the Difference Engine was the most rewarding experience of his life

Reflecting on 91 days holed-up in an intense business hub in the North East, entrepreneur Paul Rawlings exhales heavily. "It was the most rewarding experience of my life. Seriously, I can't emphasise it enough," said the ScreenReach co-founder.

Rawlings' feet have barely touched the ground for the past three months. Along with entrepreneurs from eight other fledgling companies, he has just completed the first 13-week programme of new start-up incubator The Difference Engine.

"When we started The Difference Engine we started with a technology which we had high hopes for," Rawlings says. "Being part of the Engine has really helped us focus our technology into a series of products, given us access to some of the North East's finest mentors, and given us the confidence to sit in front of global businesses and tell them why they should be using ScreenReach."

Using Reach XML code, ScreenReach offers an "audience engagement technology", ripe for content companies and retailers to interact with their customers. Having secured 250,000 first-round investment through the programme, Rawlings and fellow co-founder Chris Farrell are in talks with big-name potential clients with partnerships expected to go live in the next two weeks.

As well as the access to mentors, initial funding of 20,000 (in return for 8% of future stock) and being surrounded by like-minded digital upstarts, Rawlings said being squirreled away in Middlesbrough away from the hustle-and-bustle of London helped focus attention on the product. The importance of this can be understated, says Jon Bradford, who originated the idea of The Difference Engine two years ago, eventually launching the first programme in December last year.

"There are significant advantages of being outside London," Bradford says as he catches a breather inbetween catching trains and aeroplanes marketing the Engine. "One of the key elements of being up north is for them to concentrate on their start-ups for a short period of time. We make sure we have all the right people for the right companies so there's no distractions.

"You have to have the right people to do the programme. Most good small businesses start and work up to 25 people then start fragmenting that's why we only have around 10 teams, to create a more cooperative atmosphere."

Bradford says that he actively encourages people to launch similar incubator setups around the UK. "The model we've adopted is similar to TechStars in the US, that kind of open-source spirit to help build an ecosystem of mentorship.

"That's the hard part of Europe," he says. "Culturally, we're people who are not warm and friendy, we're quite reserved people. When we get over that and not feel there's something in it for us, I think we genuinely can compete with the Americans."

The Difference Engine are now accepting applications for the second programme, based in Sunderland and starting on September 20. A shortlist of around 25 start-ups will be whittled down to around 10 who will complete the 13-week programme ending on December 17.

UK-based Difference Engine early alumni

CANDDi
In it's own words, CANDDi "turns anonymous aggregated analytics into a rich list of targeted individuals". The team threw away their software two weeks before the end of the Difference Engine programme and started from scratch, having realised that it wasn't what people wanted!

Curated.by
Curated.by is a curation platform for the real-time web. The crowd are given the tools to create handpicked streams of updated, tagged and categorised content. Similar to Wikipedia, users sort the best content into bundles of information to be shared and consumed by other people. Curated.by currently supports Twitter, with additional social networks and microblogging services coming soon.

Recite
Recite says it allows any website to become more accessible to people who are dyslexic, visually impaired or who have a "young reading age." By intercepting the webpage content, Recite instantly adds and outputs accessibility features such as voice, high contrast text, and alternate word options.

Rock Control
Rock Control encourages the public to launch and manage a band from scratch. From deciding the final line-up, "the public" will decide the look and feel of the band and manage their PR. Ultimately, one song will be created and simultaneously released into every chart around the world with the intention of gaining a global number one slot.

ScreenReach
ScreenReach is pitched as "the next generation in presentation and interaction technology," allowing real-time delivery of media content to a smartphone via any digital display (TV, outdoor advertising, PC, kiosk etc). Service providers - such as museums, broadcasters, fashion retailers - can engage and interact with customers instantly and reward them for interacting with their content. Secured 250,000 first round funding.

Tagorize
The Tagorize system apparently describes online information so accurately that it can provide a level of search relevancy that is more valuable and accurate than existing systems. Using the Tagorize indexing system substantially increases search accuracy and relevancy, leading to higher search conversion rates. Tagorize is the most natural and flexible way to store and retrieve data of large, unstructured datasets.

Wishlist
wishli.st is a Facebook application that helps people give gifts. Users can create a list of the people they buy presents for and invite them to create wishlists. Then they receive email reminders before birthdays and buy them things they want.

Amazon's grocery service will offer 22,000 lines as it challenges Ocado for the position of pre-eminent online grocer

Amazon today launched a grocery division offering free delivery on thousands of household goods.

The online retailer, which launched in the UK in 1998 as a bookseller, will offer 22,000 top grocery lines including Pampers, Ariel, Uncle Ben's, Dolmio, Kraft, Schwartz, Kenco, Carte Noir, Walkers and Oreo, and leading pet food products Bakers and Purina One.

As well as selling individual items the Amazon.co.uk Grocery store allows customers to save money by bulk-buying items such as nappies, washing powders, pasta, rice, herbs, cooking oils and spices.

Goods on sale will also include a large selection of international and specialist items including organic, kosher, gluten free, sugar free and vegan ranges. Products offered include Montana hot chocolate, Illy coffee, Clif Bar natural energy bars, and Loacker chocolate and wafers.

Shoppers will be able to use Amazon.co.uk's delivery options including unlimited free one-day delivery for an annual membership fee of 49 with Amazon Prime, and free super saver delivery where each product automatically qualifies for free delivery within the UK.

Customers will be able to shop via their computers or their smart phones. Alternatively, iPhone and iPod touch users can download the Amazon app.

Grocery orders will be processed in all of Amazon UK's "fulfilment centres" in Milton Keynes, Swansea, Glenrothes, Gourock, Peterborough and Doncaster.

The move is likely to be regarded as a blow to Ocado, which is aiming to persuade investors to buy its shares for between 200p and 275p, valuing the firm at 1.18bn despite failing to make a profit in its 10-year history.

James Leeson, director of grocery at Amazon.co.uk Ltd, said: "Amazon.co.uk's aim is to be the place where customers can find and discover any product they want to buy online, and with the introduction of this new store there are thousands of household, niche, ethnic and international grocery items, all available at the click of a button.

"With unlimited virtual shelf space customers can choose from a wide variety of products, all of which benefit from free delivery. We will work tirelessly to increase the selection of grocery items available to be delivered directly to customers' doors."

However, the Amazon service does not a "shopping list" facility which allows customers to order the same basic goods every week without typing them in individually, and as yet it is not "scraped" by Mysupermarket.co.uk to compare its prices for a set shopping basket of goods with those of online supermarkets Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Ocado.

Amazon, which has 160 million customers worldwide and operates in the US, Canada, Japan, China, France and Germany as well as the UK, has sold groceries in the US since 2006. The move to sell groceries in the UK store follows its entrance in the musical instrument market last week.

'Rigour and honesty' of scientists not in doubt but Sir Muir Russell says UEA's Climatic Research Unit was not sufficiently open
Follow the latest developments on our Climategate live blog
Read the full text of the review here

The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm were today cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics to bolster the case for man-made global warming.

Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the world-leading Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are not in doubt. They did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism as alleged, the panel found, while key data needed to reproduce their findings was freely available to any "competent" researcher.

The panel did criticise the scientists for not being open enough about their work, and said they were "unhelpful and defensive" when responding to legitimate requests made under freedom of information (FOI) laws.

The row was sparked when 13 years of emails from CRU scientists were hacked and released online last year. Climate change sceptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of man-made climate change. Critics also alleged that the scientists abused their positions to cover up flaws and distort the peer review process that determines which studies are published in journals, and so enter the scientific record. Some alleged that the emails cast doubt on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Announcing the findings, Russell said: "Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said."

He added: "The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt ... We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

The review is the third and final inquiry into the email affair, dubbed "climategate", and effectively clears Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, and his colleagues of the most serious charges. Questions remain over the way in which they responded to requests for information from people outside the conventional scientific arena, some of whom were long-standing critics of Jones.

"We do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA," the report, commissioned by UEA, said.

It also criticised the CRU scientists for failing to include proper labels on a 1999 graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation, which was the subject of an infamous email about Jones using a "trick" to "hide the decline". The panel said the result was misleading, though they accepted this was not deliberate as the necessary caveats had been included in the report text.

Separately, it was announced today that Phil Jones has accepted the new post of director of research at CRU. The vice chancellor of UEA, Professor Edward Acton, said this was "not a demotion but a shift in emphasis of role" for Phil Jones. "CRU will be more closely integrated in the bigger school of environmental sciences and a key difference is to place some of the administrative burden that Phil had before this incident on the head of the school," said Prof Acton. Jones will be more free to direct and conduct his own research.

Future FOI requests for the CRU will be directed though the head of the school, Professor Jacquie Burgess, and the ultimate responsibility for such requests will lie with the vice-chancellor, as highlighted in the Russell report.

Additional reporting by Christine Ottery

Local authorities are about to release a real tsunami of data - but campaigners are already worried it could be going wrong. How useful will it really be?

We all thought Coins was going to be the government's promised "tsunami of data", but the real data storm is going to come when local government (under Downing Street duress) will release every spending item over 500.

This should be a moment to celebrate, for developers, journalists and everyone concerned with how councils spend our council tax. Instead, campaigners are united in anxiety that what we might get could just be more of the same.

And it all started so well. Local government secretary Eric Pickles told councils that:

"I don't expect everyone to get it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it".

Well getting it wrong might be the default position for some local authorities. CountCulture's Chris Taggart is concerned about data company Spikes Cavell's SpotlightOnSpend muscling in on local government data (you can see his latest post on the issue here).

The upshot seems to be this, councils hand over all their valuable financial data to a company which aggregates for its own purposes, and, er, doesn't open up the data, shooting down all those goals of mashing up the data, using the community to analyse and undermining much of the good work that's been done.

Paul Bradshaw reports that a Help Me Investigate page has been set up over the issue, to see how widespread it really is.

Spikes Cavell has been stung by the furore - chief executive Luke Spikes has pledged to allow raw data downloads, according to Information Age.

As it is, there is a real fear that councils could get it clangingly wrong. Openlylocal's data scoreboard shows that only 15 out of 434 local councils are publishing open data at the moment - only seven of them in a truly open format.

There seems to be a panic up and down the country among councils suddenly faced with releasing data they've previously kept to themselves - presumably combined with beffudlement over why they have to do it at all. If that panic translates into a default position of outsourcing the task, then we have real problems.

The thing is, there are no shortage of official guidelines showing exactly how to release the data. The Local Data Panel has a concise and clear set of principles for local data release - worth reading for their clarity alone. The Open Knowledge Foundation does too.

Essentially, they boil down to some pretty simple ideas:

1. Make it open

No T&Cs about not using the data for commercial use, no restrictions on access. Make the data available to anyone to do whatever they want to with it. That's the only way that the data information revolution is going to work.

2. Make it readable for computers

The data needs to be in a format that any computer can use - no more PDFs, thank you very much. If developers can't build applications and campaigners can't analyse it, what use is it?

3. Make it granular

The days when we only wanted official statisticians to just put the numbers together in a way we could understand are gone. Now we also want the full, disaggregated data too. It's the only way it will ever be useful for someone wanting to gather the true local picture of local spending. Let us worry about whether the dataset is too big or not. It's not your problem anymore.

4. Make it quick

Just get the stuff out there. We'd rather have it as it is - and then get it revised later than have to wait months for it to be finalised. The government has provided express permission for local authorities to do this. So just do it.

5. Make it easy to find

There's no point hiding this stuff away. If we can't find it, it may as well not exist. It should be easy to discover and simple to access.

That's a manifesto we can sign up to. What do you think?

Can you do something with our data?

Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk

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Foursquare's recent announcements leave competitors languishing in the background of geolocation apps

Another week, another fleet of brands signing-up to partner with Foursquare. This time, the of-the-moment check-in application has announced separate partnerships with Huffington Post and the Independent Film Channel (IFC).

Photo by mjpeacecorps on Flickr. Some rights reserved

By friending Huffington Post or the IFC, Foursquare users will be tipped-off about recommended haunts when checking-in to the near vicinity, steadily building a virtual community around physical locations.

Some reports, including that of ReadWriteWeb, said these partnerships marked the introduction of "location layers," but as the unaffiliated blog About Foursquare and Foursquare's own Tristan Walker point out that's not the case.

Last week, the $95m-valued New York start-up announced it had secured Series B funding of $20m. These new partnerships add to the growing list of brands wanting a slice of the Foursquare pie.

'The internet's completely over,' says his royal purpleness of a decision to ditch online sales. '[It's] like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.'

Content from latest print edition abridged on website, with message pointing users to 'print and iPad editions'

Time magazine is restricting online access to its latest edition to users who subcribe either in print or via the iPad.

Visitors to Time.com can access relatively little content from the latest edition of the magazine, dated 12 July, with sections including letters to the editor behind the paywall.

Clicking on almost any story that comes from the magazine leads to a message: "The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010 print and iPad editions of TIME."

Most of Time.com's extensive web-only content remains free, but this message appears on all content from the print edition of the magazine. Time's digital iPad edition costs $4.99 ( 3.30).

The jury is out on whether the new strategy, spotted by Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab, is an experiment or part of a long term plan. Benton refers to it as a "paywall without a door" strategy, as there appears to be no way for users online to pay for access.

Peter Kafka, at All Things Digital, said that he "wouldn't be surprised" if the Time Warner-owned title "is going to stick with the strategy for a while".

Last summer Ann Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc, sent a message to employees explaining that the company needed to work out "How to Put the [digital] Genie Back Into the Bottle".

"It's increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business," she Moore at the time. "We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content."

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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Death of the analogue TV set officially confirmed today nearly 85 years after John Logie Baird held his first public display

The death of the analogue television set was officially confirmed today, nearly 85 years after John Logie Baird held his first public display of the capabilities of the box in the corner of the living room that has tranformed our lives.

All the major high street electronics retailers have now stopped selling analogue sets after quietly running down their stocks in recent months, in preparation for the switch to digital terrestrial television (DTT) by 2012.

Last month, for the first time, there were no sales of analogue TV sets in the UK, according to figures published today by the organisation responsible for helping viewers switch, Digital UK.

With 5 million homes now transferred to a DTT-only signal and 11 million more due to switch by the end of 2011, new analogue TV sets are of little use to viewers.

And even though the process of turning off the analogue terrestrial television signal region by region across the UK will continue for two more years, in practice switchover has already nearly been achieved.

Out of 26.8 million UK TV homes, 23.8 already have digital via DTT (Freeview), satellite (Sky, Freesat), or cable (Virgin Media) according to figures from TV ratings body Barb.

The phasing out of analogue television began in 2005 after the government announced the country would switch to digital, region by region, by 2012.

Today Digital UK gave a progress report and said, despite predictions it would be a disaster, the operation has been running smoothly.

About 20% of the country has already been converted the Border region, the West Country, Wales, the north west and west of England.

The north of Scotland is currently being switched, with central Scotland and the Channel Islands following later this year. But next year will be even busier with 11 million homes converting in Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the east of England.

London, the south east, Tynes Tees and Ulster will be the last regions to switch in 2012.

There have only been a couple of glitches some viewers have struggled to retune their set-top boxes and in some parts of the north west, viewers got Welsh television when their region's analogue transmitter was switched off.

The Digital UK chief executive, David Scott, said: "People like digital television. It's still early days for TV switchover but there is clear evidence that the benefits of digital TV are welcomed by the vast majority of those who have upgraded, most of whom found it a straightforward process."

With the switch going more smoothly than expected and by working closely with local charities to let vulnerable viewers know what was happening, rather than running long expensive national advertising campaigns, Digital UK has a projected 55m surplus from its budget that will be handed back to the government in 2012.

In 2005, it was allocated 201m to fund nationwide switchover communications campaigns telling people when their region was being switched from analogue to digital and how to deal with it.

Digital UK's surplus is in addition to the 250m expected to be left over from the so-called "digital help scheme", a pot of money set aside from the BBC licence fee to pay for the most vulnerable in society to get digital TV.

The culture minister, Ed Vaizey, congratulated Digital UK and said most of the 55m will be used to help the rollout of broadband. "The majority of the underspend will go to fund universal service commitment," he added.

However, he said: "I don't want to commit every penny in case it's something I have to roll back on."

Vaisey congratulated Digital UK and said it provided a role model for the impending switch from analogue to digital that the government wants the radio industry to make.

Digital UK also said research showed that when over-65s switched to digital TV, it gave them the confidence to try out other new technologies.

Around 64% of late converters to digital TV said they now want to try other gadgets.

Personal video recorders such as Sky+ were the most popular digital devices the over-65s were keen to try (36%), with the internet in third place on 28%.

Most of them also said they would rather give up having a mobile phone or going to the cinema than lose their digital television.

Michelle Mitchell, director of the charity Age UK, said: "TV is a really important part of many older people's lives and it's clear that for many, updating to digital has brought not only more choice but also increased confidence when it comes to dealing with technology."

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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Graphs put together by Pingdom show the prounounced long tail of the internet, competition is fierce around websites topping four million uniques per month

Using data from Google's top 1000 sites list, Royal Pingdom have put together this fascinating graphic showing just what it takes to make it to the top of the internet pile.

The graphic above shows that to break into the totemic top 100, your website needs to be pulling in a not inconsiderable 22m unique visitors a month. Take those 22m visitors, add at least another 78m and your website will sit pretty in the top 13.

Altogether, the top 10 websites attract 2.78bn visitors per month - that's 42% of all visitors to the top 100. See the full list on Royal Pingdom .

Top 1000 websites by monthly unique visitors

1. Facebook.com - 540m
10. Mozilla.com - 110m
25. Hotmail.com - 60m
50. Sogou.com - 37m
100. Thepiratebay.com - 21m
200. Typepad.com - 13m
300. Ourtoolbar.com - 9.8m
400. Zhaopin.com - 8.1m
500. The2009.cn - 6.8m
750. Marriott.com - 5m
1000. Trialpay.com - 3.8m

A new Twitter account is quietly launched speculation points to a new revenue stream, Twitter neither confirms nor denies.

Intriguing things are afoot at Twitter HQ, no doubt many of them centred on generating revenue for the four-year-old company. It should come as no surprise, then, that a new account called Earlybird has launched, seemingly primed to channel offers, deals and other exclusive goodies from outside retailers.

Earlybird looks the likely natural progression of other recently launched revenue streams, promoted tweets and sponsored trends. Speaking to Read Write Web, Twitter's Carolyn Penner gave nothing away: "There are interesting things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are."

RWW'S Michael Kirkpatrick ruminates that Early Bird could be the starting place for a number of vertical platforms such as EarlyBirdElectronics and EarlyBirdMusic, offering selected deals to opt-in customers in a similar way to Keynoir and Groupon.

If early reports from Coca-Cola are anything to go by, promoting products directly through Twitter is proving a lucrative return on modest investment. Speaking to the Financial Times last week, Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, said the number of impressions (views of the sponsored trending topic) Coca-Cola had received in the short period from launch had been "phenomenal" 86m in 24 hours with an "engagement rate" of 6%, compared with the average 0.02% of users engaging with a standard online advertisement.

Kruse also indicated this new form of advertising was relatively inexpensive compared to traditional online ads.

For now, Earlybird remains a private account with fewer than 300 followers but by tomorrow morning? We'll follow with interest.

This week's programme comes from the Guardian's Activate summit a conference dedicated to the future of the web, and how we get there.

The editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, spoke to Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the search giant's current problems in China, the future of newspapers in a digital world, and Google's ongoing issues with personal information and privacy.

Aleks Krotoski sits down with Martha Lane-Fox, the UK government's digital champion. She's tasked with connecting 100% of the population to broadband, and engaging them with a digital Britain. They're joined by Martha's US counterpart Beth Noveck to discuss their respective approaches to empowering citizens through the internet.

Finally, Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University tells Charles Arthur about the next phase of his drive to open up government data. After success earlier this year with national government, now comes the tricky task of securing the release of local government information.

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Apple's Steve Jobs doesn't like pornography. Nor do parents' groups and campaigners. The new .xxx web domain, approved last week after a $10m battle, promises benefits to porn buyers and sellers, but does the internet need a red light district?

Everyone at Gerrard Dennis's online swimwear business, run out of a business park in Kent with his wife Jo, is enthusiastic about Apple. The marketing department use Apple computers, senior staff have iPhones. So it came as a shock when Dennis received an email from Apple earlier this year informing him the iPhone app he had spent several thousand pounds developing, advertising his Simply Beach range, had been banned due to sexual connotations.

"We replied saying, 'Are you sure? Have you had a complaint?'" he says, "but in true Apple style, absolutely nothing back. I felt a bit hard done by. To sell bikinis you have to have pictures of women in bikinis, that's what you have to do. We're not talking micro bikinis or anything we're talking about normal bikinis."

Dennis decided to give his grievance an airing on a trade website, from where it was picked up by technology blogs. Five days later his app reappeared in the App store. "I did try sending them an email to say thanks," Dennis says. "But no word from Apple. We're now developing an app for the iPad and we hold no malice. I think my comment was, 'It seems unfair that we're caught up in Apple's puritanic morals but we understand why they're doing it.'"

In the past year, with much-hyped launches of the iPhone and iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become famed for the stand he has taken against pornography. The company's developer agreement prohibits "materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable [eg] materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory". Recently the Sun newspaper fell foul of the rules, only managing to launch its iPhone app two weeks ago.

Critics have been quick to point out inconsistencies: since Apple gadgets feature web browsers, banning rude apps doesn't stop anyone accessing pornography on the internet, and while thousands of apps were removed from the App store, Playboy and Sports Illustrated kept theirs (Apple executive Phil Schiller explained that rules apply differently in the case of "a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format"). Staff at Dazed and Confused magazine nicknamed their iPad app "the Iranian version". But while in the technology world Jobs's anti-porn stand is ridiculed as control-freakery or Google-baiting, outside the media loop his views find vocal support.

Jobs has made it clear that it is the idea of children accessing porn that bothers him, and over recent months and years parents' groups, feminists and anti-pornography campaigners have been making the same point. Pornography, they argue, is ubiquitous as never before. With the click of a mouse, without a credit card, anyone using the internet can access vast numbers of images of people having sex in a variety of ways, many of them unusual and cruel.

What once was taboo, hidden inside a suitcase or wardrobe in an older male relative's "girlie magazines", has moved into all our homes, goes the argument. A new generation growing up on the internet will be routinely exposed to extreme sexual violence before they have so much as removed their shirts in front of a real-life boyfriend or girlfriend.

When the British, Florida-based internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley won the right last week to start selling registrations to a new domain devoted to pornographic content, .xxx (known as "dot-triple-x"), he was eager to point out that concerned parents were among those who stood to gain. Registration at .xxx is voluntary, and Lawley believes the first amendment guaranteeing free speech means any attempt by US legislators to corral sex sites into .xxx is doomed to fail. But he believes that the premium service offered by .xxx which at $60 ( 40) per registration is much more expensive than other domains will lead to a "natural migration". Within five to 10 years, he hopes ".xxx will be synonymous with adult online entertainment and will be the first location people look for it", a kind of online equivalent to the top shelf, an internet red-light district.

While this doesn't necessarily mean there will be less pornography in other domains some sex domain operators insist that it won't, that dotcom will remain the "premium" online property Lawley's idea is that his compulsory labelling system, tagging sex sites with keywords in the computer code read by browsers and search engines, will mean that explicit sexual content becomes easier to filter or block.

"Many adult webmasters own multiple domains all pointing to the same site, so you might have bigboobs.uk, bigboobs.net and bigboobs.com all pointing to the same underlying website," he explains. "So bigboobs.xxx will point to the same website. The rule we have is that any website that the domain redirects to or lands on has to be labelled, so as a knock-on effect those adult sites that are in .uk or .com are going to be labelled as well."

The history of porn on the internet is almost as old as the internet itself. In the early days people scanned pictures from magazines and sent files to each other via modem. Bulletin board systems created the first opportunity for commercial online porn, and became stores that charged users for access. New e-commerce mechanisms and faster broadband connections led to vast expansion, and porn sites today offer video chats and live webcams, enabling real-time interactions.

Internet consultant Kieren McCarthy, who wrote a book about the battle for the sex.com domain and has worked for Icann, the non-profit body that governs the internet, says that "because they're very focused, and there's a lot of money there, pornographers often do really good advances in technology, so in-stream video, a big chunk of that is thanks to the adult industry".

"Also affiliate linking and making money simply by having links on the internet, that was all the adult industry," says McCarthy. "The step forward to think of doing that, or monetising it as they call it, was a kind of genius."

But technology brought problems too, as amateur pornographers began to put up their own footage, and there were lawsuits over piracy.

Today, between 15% and 23% of all internet searches are pornographic, and in 2008 the FT estimated global revenues from the industry to be about $12bn, though in the US, which controls 40% of the global business, more profits come from DVDs than from the internet.

To those like McCarthy who regard pornography with acceptance mixed with disapproval ("some of it I think is awful, big chunks of it aren't"), a designated x-rated zone on the internet seems like a good idea. Feminist writer Natasha Walter agrees it could be a step in the right direction, and 83% of 240,000 respondents to a CNN poll last weekend supported it.

But not everyone is convinced. The most vociferous objections to .xxx came from rightwing Christian groups in the US, who lobbied the department of commerce and led to Lawley's application being rejected in 2007.

A highly vocal section of the porn industry, organised under the banner of the Free Speech Coalition, was also violently opposed, fearing ghettoisation and objecting to .xxx's fees. Independent adult entertainment creators such as Ms Naughty voiced objections along similar lines ("Already people are demanding that all adult sites be forced on to .xxx domain and blocked"). She also complained about being forced to fork out for pricey .xxx domains in order to protect existing properties. Zoe Margolis, who wrote the sex blog Girl With a One Track Mind under the pen name Abby Lee, shares the fear that .xxx could signal the start of attempts to censor sexual content more widely.

Meanwhile, anti-porn campaigners such as the writer and academic Gail Dines (interviewed in yesterday's G2), think .xxx is a disaster because "the only thing that can happen is that pornography will increase". About this, and nothing else, she is in firm agreement with Stuart Lawley.

Lawley expects to make a lot of money out of .xxx. Currently, there are 7m adult domains and if he sells half a million more, he will have revenues of $30m a year. His company, ICM Registry, has 158,242 pre-reservations, but he hopes to win a 50% market share within a couple of years. Lawley has spent almost $10m of his own money on the project, most of it on lawyers. About pornography itself he claims to be "neutral" and he refuses to comment on the suggestion that exploitation of vulnerable women in the industry is rife.

But he apparently has some scruples about making a fortune out of porn, and has promised to give a substantial chunk of his money away. "For me it was clear this would be a very lucrative business venture," he says, "but at the same time, at the beginning of this process I was the father of a two-year-old son and we put this non-profit element in, that we have this sponsoring organisation [Iffor] to which we donate $10 of every registration every year, that is going to use most of those proceeds to further parental education, and child protection initiatives on a global basis."

Iffor stands for the International Foundation for Online Responsibility and its charter employs the words "responsible" and "responsibility" six times. Whether this is PR, a rich man's guilty conscience, or good business one of the things he has promised his clients is an enhanced reputation is debatable. McCarthy, who wrote a report for Lawley about the .xxx consultation, says: "Oddly enough, there are quite a lot of what you would call responsible people in the adult industry, they're putting up porn which a lot of people have a lot of issues with but their philosophy is, it's not illegal, people want this, I'm going to try and be as responsible as possible in providing it".

Those like Dines who oppose the huge increase in the availability of pornography that the internet has brought about, see a more sinister attempt to infiltrate the mainstream and it is true that Lawley's pitch to the industry, that effective self-regulation is the best way forward, is designed to buy credibility, leading to "more customers spending more money on a repeat basis", in his phrase. Lawley plans to enhance data protection and security and get rid of the viruses and rip-offs for which adult sites are famed. He likens .xxx to a club, a kite mark and a trade association, whose benefits will be so great that belonging to it will become the norm.

Gregory Dumas, an industry veteran who runs an adult portfolio, GEC Media, from Panama, lost his seat on the Free Speech Coalition board as a result of his support for .xxx. He is a robust defender of practices within the sex industry, suggesting critics "need to get their head out of their ass, and you can quote me on that the women in the adult business, they dominate, they reign over the business, they're who everybody wants to see". But he supports Lawley's effort to tighten up age registration: "I do think the marketplace does need to be cleaner and clearer If adult sites can be seen to clean up their act then it will benefit the industry."

So far, research on the social impact of internet pornography is inconclusive partly for the good reason that its effect on a generation of young people growing up now can't be measured yet. Critics express a range of concerns, including addiction and its knock-on effects on relationships; the specific risk to vulnerable young people; and the wider influence of pornography on contemporary culture, as set out by journalist Ariel Levy in her influential book Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Psychologist Terri Apter, of Cambridge University, is more doubtful, arguing that there's no historical correlation between the incidence of sex crimes and pornography. She believes the wider pressures on girls and women to conform to a visual ideal are more corrosive than porn itself, and also that cultural anxiety about pornography serves to displace wider fears about the impact of new technologies on our ways of thinking and relating to each other. "I don't want to be alarmist, the brain is plastic and adapts very rapidly to changing circumstances, but daily life has changed and we haven't yet really managed to think about that."

Feminist philosopher Nina Power agrees that we risk overstating the significance of pornography, and suggests we pay more attention to the economics: "If there's this new domain set up, who makes the money? Where does it go?" She agrees that the pressures on women to shave, slim, seek surgical enhancement, are not down to pornography, and takes issue with what she sees as the overwhelming pessimism of porn's critics: "I have a belief in human nature, that things do change, and people are not doomed to be stuck in these horrible stereotypes."

Sex blogger Margolis says: "I don't think we will 'win' an 'anti-porn' battle and I also don't think that censorship is the answer. The best way to oppose the offensive material is to a) not buy in to it and b) support feminist pornographers like Ms Naughty, who are trying to offer an alternative."

"Will there be a broader backlash against porn?" asks McCarthy. "I doubt it. If a lot of people decide they really want to block pornography then a lot of applications will appear that enable them to do that.

".xxx might be the perfect answer, it might be a partial answer, it might be a complete failure. You don't know until you do it. With the internet you never know quite what will happen."

Numberplate recognition cameras routinely survey the movements of millions of motorists

The home secretary, Theresa May, has ordered that a national police camera network that logs more than 10m movements of motorists every day be placed under statutory regulation.

Her decision means that a "Big Brother" police database that currently holds a mammoth 7.6bn records of the movement of motorists using more than 4,000 cameras across the country will have to be operated with proper accountability and safeguards.

Each entry on the database includes the numberplate, location, date, time and a photograph of the front of the car, which may include images of the driver and any passengers. These details are routinely held for two years.

The options being looked at by the Home Office for regulating the system, known as automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), include establishing a lawful right for the police to collect and retain such details as well as defining who can gain access to the database and placing a legal limit on the period information can be stored for.

Regulation is also expected to require the police to be more open with the public over the number and locations of cameras, with exceptions made for legally authorised covert police operations.

The home secretary's decision goes further than the existing review of the use of CCTV cameras set out in the coalition agreement.

In recent years the use of CCTV cameras has expanded rapidly without clear statutory framework.

The installation of hundreds of ANPR cameras in two Muslim areas in Birmingham was recently halted after a Guardian investigation disclosed they were funded as a counter-terrorism initiative.

The regulation of the police car tracking system will now form part of the wider review of counter-terrorism laws expected to be completed by the autumn.

The Home Office options for regulating the system include:

Establishing the lawful right to collect and retain ANPR data for policing purposes.

Defining how widely this data can be used for policing purposes.

Limiting by whom and for how long ANPR data can be stored.

Establishing who can have access to ANPR data and for what purposes.

enabling the bulk transfer of data between agencies and between the private sector and the police for agreed purposes

Making ANPR cameras transparent to the public (unless authorised for covert purposes).

Establishing a means of redress around the use of ANPR data.

A Home Office minister, James Brokenshire, said: "Both CCTV and ANPR can be essential tools in combating crime, but the growth in their use has been outside of a suitable governance regime. To ensure that these important technologies continue to command the support and confidence of the public and are used effectively, we believe that further regulation is required. We are examining a number of options and will also be considering the work of the interim CCTV regulator, who is due to report to ministers shortly."

The national system of traffic tracking cameras was introduced in 2006 under the auspices of the Association of Chief Police officers, and without much parliamentary debate, in order to spot uninsured drivers and stolen cars so that motorway patrols could intercept them.

The human rights group Liberty says there has been a massive expansion in the use of ANPR over the past 18 months. The National Police Improvement Agency says that every police force in Britain is now using ANPR as well as the Ministry of Defence, customs and tax investigators, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

The NPIA revealed that there were 7.6bn records stored at the National ANPR Data Centre in response to a freedom of information request on 15 June. They also revealed that 4,045 fixed and mobile cameras across England and Wales were feeding reports to the national database on a daily basis in the first week of June.

The National ANPR Data Centre provides a central search facility for all the data captured in England and Wales. It can also analyse ANPR readings -including the number, location, date and time - from all the cameras and hopes to move towards sharing its database with other agencies in the future. It already plans to have the capacity to store more than 50mn traffic movements each day.Critics acknowledge that ANPR has played a crucial role in cases such that of Steve Wright, who murdered five Ipswich women, and in helping the police hunt the gang that tried to bomb London and Glasgow in 2007.

But privacy campaigners say no other country does it and it amounts to the routine surveillance of millions of innocent motorists.

Since 1984, visionaries in technology, science and entertainment have met at the Ted conference, to share their ideas for a happier, healthier world. Now it's coming to Oxford

So, what is TED? And, more important, why should I care?

For 22 years, Ted was a conference, an exclusive ideas forum where the great and the good came to hear Al Gore talk about climate change and Bill Gates about computing, right up until four years ago, when TED Talks was launched online and promptly became an internet sensation. It's a bit like YouTube, but instead of featuring cats falling into lavatories, it has short, cutting-edge talks by the world's leading neuroscientists, behavioural economists, video artists, philosophers, particle physicists, rocket scientists, endurance athletes, Aids researchers you name it, it's been at TED.

What TED does is seek out the most interesting, unusual and potentially groundbreaking ideas on Earth and then provide a platform to share them with the world. At the heart of it all are the conferences. The main event takes place once a year in Long Beach, California, and in a week's time the new, annual TED Global conference will take place in Oxford. It's a smaller, more intimate affair 700 delegates (it's 2,000 at Long Beach) listening to 50 speakers over four consecutive days.

There is no shortage of shadowy, elite conferences where masters of the universe converge on Swiss mountain tops or exclusive Mediterranean resorts in order to plot world domination (think the World Economic Forum in Davos or last month's Bilderberg Group in Sitges). TED, however, is a shadowy, elite conference where masters of the universe converge in order to plot how to make the world a nicer, fairer, better place. It's a not-for-profit foundation and it's something like the World Economic Forum might be if capitalism were replaced as the world's dominant ideological system by, say, optimism.

Can TED change the world? Possibly, possibly not. But trying to tackle social problems such as eradicating world hunger or reversing climate change seems a better place to start than, say, dreaming up new ways of propping up failed financial institutions with large injections of public money. It's this mission that has helped TED attract a mix of thinkers, writers, scientists, hedge-fund billionaires, tech entrepreneurs, philanthropists and radical ideologues. And that's just the audience.

The unique thing about TED is that people such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Clinton, philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologist-entrepreneur Craig Venter speak for free and people such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin pay to listen.

It sounds awfully elitist

It is. That's the point, or at least it used to be. It's also expensive, at 3,460 a ticket for TED Global and almost 4,000 for TED in Long Beach (even a live simulcast event in Palm Springs costs 2,500), although money, in itself, will get you only so far. The main conference sells out within days of tickets being released, a year in advance, and a tough vetting procedure is enforced. To be invited, you must fill out an extensive application form, which includes questions such as what are your greatest personal achievements and how have they had an impact on society?

For the first 22 years of its existence, TED was held in the chichi California seaside town of Monterey and was the hottest four-day dinner party on Earth; it was a kind of spring break for world thinkers, a place of inspiring ideas, but which only the select few would hear.

But in 2006, once speaker after speaker had stood on the stage and talked about the Creative Commons licences, open-source software, the wisdom of crowds and how the internet could leverage an individual idea into a mass, public action, TED took the decision to release these talks online (at ted.com).

The response has been astonishing: there are, to date, 727 talks online. Eighteen months ago, they had been viewed 50 million times; today, the viewing figure stands at more than 290 million. TED has gone viral. Ideas have become the new rock'n'roll.

And TED is its Glastonbury?

It is. Obscure academics toiling away in unknown research institutes have been dragged into the light and turned into superstars. Everybody at TED cites the example of Hans Rosling, a Swedish, bespectacled professor of international health whose TED talk on that unlikely hot-button topic, statistics, has now been seen by millions (a top tip to professors of international health everywhere: try underlining your final point by swallowing a sword).

The talks are not constrained by national or linguistic boundaries. The Open Translation Project, launched last year, encourages volunteers to translate talks using a Wikipedia-type model; in just a year, talks have been translated into 77 languages, with 8,500 completed and another 23,000 ongoing. All free of charge.

TED's new motto is "radical openness", which means that it gives away all its content free. But (and here's a trick to remember, newspaper executives), at its heart it's still exclusive and expensive. A bit of elitism, it turns out, is good for business. TED makes money, lots of money, and then tries to think up the most interesting ways of giving it away again.

But brilliantly, and possibly uniquely, TED has no VIP section, no special celebtastic treatment. Last year, in Oxford, Meg Ryan and Cameron Diaz showed up and, like everyone else at the conference, had to wear massive name tags the size of a dinner plate, which said MEG RYAN and CAMERON DIAZ. Even then, at least half the audience had no idea who they actually were and mobbed the theoretical physicist standing next to them.

Why the silly name?

Because in 1984, when it was founded by an information architect called Richard Saul Wurman, its mission was to bring together the brightest brains in technology, entertainment and design. And this it did. At that first conference, a whizzy new computer was unveiled: the very first Apple Macintosh. And somebody brought along some funny shiny silver discs, which was how the world was introduced to the CD Rom.

It was still largely about TED when, in 2001, Chris Anderson bought the organisation on behalf of his Sapling Foundation.

It was when he bought TED that it began to change. Because Anderson is not your average multimillionaire entrepreneur. He was born in rural Pakistan and his parents were missionaries (his father was also an eye surgeon who worked for years in the developing world). And while sometimes the rich discover a social conscience after they've made their fortune, Anderson had one from birth. It was this, a degree in philosophy, plus some business nous and publishing experience that showed him how TED could be transformed from an elitist talking shop into a global ideas platform. Which is exactly what it has done.

Anderson says it was "not a top-down plan" but a "bottom-up phenomenon". He believes it's because there was a demand for TED-type content, an appetite for ideas communicated in an inspirational way. "We put the talks out there, but it's only because people are excited by learning new stuff that it's become this amazing thing."

Although there's still a techie element to TED (last year, for example, saw a demonstration of a television powered by wireless electricity), it has developed a new seriousness under Anderson. Its slogan is "Ideas Worth Spreading" and it is constantly challenging its members to apply their collective brainpower to intractable social issues. It was at TED that Al Gore first delivered the talk which became An Inconvenient Truth.

In 2005, the TED prize was inaugurated. It's awarded annually to an "exceptional individual", who receives $100,000 and the support of Tedsters and the TED community to carry out "One Wish to Change the World". So far, it has spawned a Charter for Compassion, the big idea of Karen Armstrong, the former nun turned religious academic; and from EO Wilson, the scientist who coined the term "sociobiology", an Encyclopaedia of Life. This year's winner, to the surprise of those who still think of him as that puppy-faced bloke from Essex, was Jamie Oliver. His wish is to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat.

Tedsters?

It's unfortunate but true. Delegates and speakers are indeed called Tedsters. Even the somewhat uncuddly ones, such as Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

What is a TED talk?

Quite apart from anything else, it's short. Each speaker has just 18 minutes to sum up their life's work or their big idea and even if your talk is about how you intend to create artificial life within five years (as I heard Craig Venter do in 2005 and which he did, bang on target, in 2010), you have 18 minutes and not a minute more.

The genius of this, according to Bruno Giussani, European director of TED, is that "it's too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach. It really puts pressure on them."

Or, in other words, the same old shtick will not work. Speakers have to come to TED with a new shtick. While it attracts the most stellar of international speakers, cutting-edge scientists, ex-presidents, world-class philosophers and the like, the internet is a great leveller. The greatest hits online have been people you've never heard of: the number one talk on ted.com is by the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who grippingly describes the day when, aged 37, she had a massive stroke and, having studied the brain for her whole career, understood, even as her brain was shutting down, exactly how it was shutting down.

At number five is David Gallo, an oceanographer who was also a key speaker at TED x Oilspill.

TED x what?

TED x is the latest unlikely but spectacularly successful grassroots innovation from TED HQ. Essentially, it's a mini-TED. Self-organised and self-supporting, anyone can apply for a licence to host one, and all TED content is free, although most of those held so far use a mixture of recorded content and their own invited speakers. It was another experimental initiative, begun in spring last year, which has snowballed into a phenomenon.

As Bruno Giussani explains: "We kept on having people contacting us, saying, 'Why can't you have a TED in Doha? Or Barcelona? Or Indonesia?' And we simply can't do that. We can't expand the conferences. But we came up with this 13 months ago and we thought that there might be perhaps 20 of them."

In fact, there have already been 618 TED x events in 98 countries, with another 577 planned, including TED x Tehran, which will join TED x Kibera, held in a shanty town in Kenya, and TED x Nasa, featuring a roster of rocket scientists near the Langley Research Centre in Virginia.

Last year, Gordon Brown got a standing ovation. So what equally improbable feats are predicted for this year?

This year's theme is the somewhat untopical "And Now the Good News". So, no, George Osborne is not a featured speaker. "Read any newspaper, or turn on any news report, and there's so much doom and gloom and cynicism," says Bruno Giussani, who has organised the programme for the event. "But we think people are looking for a new sense of possibilities; for rationally optimistic thinkers, for solutions to big and complex problems."

And TED itself is proof of this, he says. It's been enabled by the new technologies, because 10 years ago, ideas simply couldn't travel so far, so fast. The ideas this year include those of Inge Missmahl, a German psychologist whose strategy for transforming Afghanistan is via the mental health of its people, and Peter Molyneux, who is revealing to the world "Microsoft's new intuitive interface". It's a techie's wet dream, hotly awaited but never before seen a Wii, basically, with no Wii or, at least, you become the Wii, controlling a screen with your movements or facial expressions.

Great, where do I sign up?

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."

The internet guru on the death of newspapers, why paywall will fail and how the internet has brought out our creativity and generosity

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won't exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you're probably already reading this on your computer screen. "And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

You have probably never even heard of Shirky, and until this interview I hadn't either. When I ask him to define what he does, he laughs, and admits that often when he's leaving a party someone will say to him, "What exactly is it you do?" His standard reply "I work on the theory and practice of social media" is not just wilfully opaque, but crushingly dreary, which is funny, because he is one of the most illuminating people I've ever met.

The people who know about Shirky call him an "internet guru". He winces when I say so "Oh, I hate that!" and it's easy to see why, for he is the very opposite of the techie stereotype. Now 46, his first career was in the theatre in New York, and he didn't even own a computer until the age of 28, when he had to be introduced to the internet by his mother. Arrestingly self-assured and charismatic, his conversation is warm and discursive, intently engaged yet relaxed but it's his rhetorical fluency which bowls you over. The architecture of his argument is a Malcolm Gladwell-esque structure of psychological and sociological insight, analysing contemporary technology with the clarity of a historian's perspective and such authority that were he to tell you the sun actually sets in the east, you might almost believe him. At the very least, you'd probably want to and if a guru is defined by the credulous deference he commands from others, then Shirky unquestionably qualifies. Within minutes I found myself hanging on his every word despite being temperamentally hostile to almost everything he believes.

Shirky has been writing about the internet since 1996. As the chief technological officer for several web design companies during the 90s, he was quickly hired as a consultant by major media companies News Corporation, Time Warner, Hearst all curious about this new thing called the world wide web. In 2000, following "an intuition that the internet was turning social", Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, to become the web's primary purpose for billions of people all over the world. Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals' new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

"Everyone's waiting to see what will happen with the paywall it's the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don't think the numbers add up." But then, interestingly, he goes on, "Here's what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they're critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn't want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times."

This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia for no financial reward because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for "an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer" has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.

Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky's new book scorns a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they've just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler. I do, however, recognise that what I like to think of as my opinions are really emotional prejudices. But equally, Shirky's prediction for Murdoch's paywall sounds suspiciously like an emotional objection, rather than a financial calculation. How, then, can he be certain his entire analysis of the internet isn't just as subjective as my kneejerk cynicism?

"I'd say first of all that the notion that any expression of the world can be a value-neutral description of what life is really like is a fantasy, right?" he agrees readily. "We're all postmodern enough to recognise that any writer on any subject is operating within those constraints. And I have the amiably simple-minded view of this stuff you would expect from an American, which is that I think freedom is good, full stop. So therefore I think I'm probably constitutionally incapable of seeing a massive spread in those freedoms as being anything other than salutary for society.

"But ultimately, over the long haul I'm vetted on accuracy, not on enthusiasm. So if I'm wrong about paywall, I've got no place to hide. I will have been flamingly, publicly wrong for 15 years. There will be no way I can weasel out of it." He laughs, looking sublimely untroubled by this possibility.

"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."

The one point of agreement between internet utopians and sceptics has been their techno-deterministic assumption that the web has fundamentally changed human behaviour. Both sides, Shirky says, are wrong. "Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I'm saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it's because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours but they don't cause them." Had Facebook been around when he was in his 20s, he cheerfully admits, he too would have spent his youth emailing photos of himself to everyone he knew.

But even if he's right, and the internet has merely unveiled ancient truths about human behaviour, isn't it still legitimate to feel a little bit dismayed by Facebook's revelation of almost infinite narcissism? Shirky lets out a polite but weary sigh. "Would the world really be better off if we were to hide from ourselves the fact that teenagers waste a lot of time trying to either flirt with each other or to crack each other up? Like, to whom was this a mystery, prior to the launch of Facebook?" He grins in good-natured amazement.

"Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time because that's been true of every medium ever launched."

Shirky concedes that the web's ability to connect people with a common enthusiasm, however obscure or deviant, can create a dangerously distorted impression of what is healthy or normal. "But so the question in all of this stuff, always, always, always, is: is the net trade-off better or worse for society? I've never been a cyber utopian. I've always understood that this is a set of trade-offs. So for all the normalisation of, say, paedophilia, we also get young small-town kids growing up gay who now know they're not abnormal. And it seems to me that the net trade-off of lessening society's ability to project a sense of normal that no one actually lives up to is a good thing.

"I don't mean to say it will therefore be an endless fountain of raindrop-flavoured kittens from now till St Swithin's day. But rather, in the same way that we've generally decided that the printing press was a good thing and I would contrast that with television, which in my mind is an open question rather than just saying in the panglossian way that all new technologies are an improvement, it is an on-the-balance calculation."

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield produced a report last year which suggested that the popularity of online social media was damaging children's brain development, in particular their capacity for empathy. Shirky has two children, aged nine and six, and says they live in "a very restricted media household", with only supervised access to a communal computer. "I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the internet in the first two years. It can be addictive and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Riding a bicycle changes our brains. Watching TV changes our brains. If there's a screen you need to worry about in your household, it's not the one with a mouse attached."

Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. "As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I'd still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV."

By now, despite myself, I'm having to reconsider my old snootiness towards social media. There's just one last thing, I say. Had I never been online before, and had just read his book, I'd probably be so inspired by his account of the creative and collaborative instincts of the online community, I'd be rushing to log on. But if I started out on, say, the Guardian's Comment is free site, the sheer nastiness of many of the commenters would floor me like a train. If the web has unlocked all this human potential for generosity and sharing, how come the people using it are so horrible to each other?

Shirky smiles, confident that he has the answer even to this. "So, there's two things to this paradox. One is that those conversations were always happening. People were saying those nasty things to one another in the pub or whatever. You just couldn't hear them before. So it's a change in our awareness of truth, not a change in the truth.

"Then there's this second effect, that anonymity makes people behave more meanly. What I think is going to happen there is we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse. There's no way to make the internet not anonymous and if there was, the most enthusiastic consumers of that technology would be Iranian and Chinese and Burmese governments. But there are ways of saying, while you're here, use your real identity. We need to set up the social norms which say in this space you need to use your real names, or some well-known handle.

"Whenever you say that, people cry censorship, but frankly? Fuck off." He breaks off, laughing. "You know, getting that right is important. The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good that's the really big challenge."

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky is published by Allen Lane, price 20

This article was amended on 5 July 2010. The original referred to Western Union telegrams looking arcane today. This has been corrected.

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?

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.

London's newest startup workspace and networking centre for TechHub has just scored sponsorship from Google, it announced today, ahead of the the launch party on Friday and official opening on Monday 12 July.

TechHub is based at Silicon Roundabout on Old Street and is already sponsored by Pearson. Membership, with various access to events, cheap hotdesking and room hire, is 300  per year and desk space is 275 per month. For startups who are ready to move out of the spare bedroom but don't want the expense and commitment of a commercial lease, these kind of shared workspaces work well.

TechHub is designed to be a central meeting place for visting entrepreneurs and investors, a venue for tech events and networking and shared workspace. A mobile testing lab is also planned, and Google has said it has more planned for the project. Given Google's particular focus on mobile in London, that's likely to be a focus and TechHub would be a likely location for more hack events. That's a pretty simple way to put yourself in the thick of it.

PS3/Xbox 360/PC; 39.99; cert 18+; Raven/Activision

It must be so hard for developers to create truly original games in the 21st century, given that so many games have gone before, and you could glibly describe Singularity as a mutant hybrid of Half-Life 2 and BioShock. After all, it combines Half-Life 2's gravity gun with time-slowing/speeding powers that are reminiscent of BioShock, and has a very Steampunk, 1950s-meets-2010 visual style. At first, it tests your patience, too, limping through a horribly slow, scene-setting period in which the gameplay seems horribly bog-standard.

But it's worth persevering with, as it improves dramatically about three-quarters of an hour in, when the threads of the preposterous story finally congeal, in such a way that some decent and, indeed, often original gameplay can be generated. The action is set on a fictional Russian island called Katorga-12, in which, in the 1950s, a new element (presumably radioactive) called E-99 was found. A research institute discovered that it was devastatingly powerful, but a cataclysmic event destroyed the island and turned its inhabitants into mutants. It's up to you to time-travel (aided by a scientist who can flit between 1950 and 2010), overcome all manner of enemies and solve puzzles, in order to save the world (which was taken over by the crazed Katorga-12 commander after he discovered the devastation an E-99 bomb could wreak).

The key object you have to help you in your quest is a Time Manipulation Device (TMD), which ages or renews objects that contain E-99 thus, you can restore crumpled, rusted crates to their former glory, or crumple them up again, in order to solve accessibility puzzles. The TMD also lets you grab objects and fire them, just like Half-Life 2's gravity gun and, as it upgrades, fire Deadlocks blue domes in which time slows down for a while. Useful for taking out enemies that tend to disappear and teleport around the room, or just buying time for a reload.

The weaponry, in what is essentially a first-person shooter, is pretty decent. You can carry two guns, and alter your load-out, plus upgrade weapons at weapons lockers. An E-99 gun called the Seeker lets you steer bullets in mid-air. You can also upgrade abilities by collecting E-99 technology and blueprints again reminiscent of BioShock, plus perhaps a whiff of Fallout 3.

The gameplay is pleasantly diverse and nicely paced, with frenetic periods taking on bosses who require a strategic approach interspersed with puzzle-solving sequences and more conventional shooting, against both humans and mutants. There is even a stealth sequence, as you traverse tunnels full of blind mutants, without any ammo.

You could say Singularity is somewhat old-fashioned: it's linear, adopts a well-worn shooting-and-puzzle-solving format, although it does have a multiplayer side. But it's storyline, which just seems annoyingly ludicrous at first, does at least generate some compelling and absorbing gameplay, which feels surprisingly fresh. As such, it will appeal to those who enjoyed games like Half-Life.

Rating: 4/5

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."

Domestic web connection joins holidays, mobile phones and fridge-freezer among necessities of modern life, Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds

A computer and an internet connection at home are no longer viewed as luxuries but as essentials, according to research published today. The latest Minimum Income Standard report released by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the social research charity, gauges what members of the public think people need to achieve a "socially acceptable standard of living".

Participants decided that a computer and internet access at home were now vital for all working-age households to enable people "to participate in society", both to access job opportunities and to get discounts on services.

The Minimum Income Standard differs from the government's official poverty line (which is set at 60% of the median income) because it looks beyond money and focuses on what a household has to budget for. It is an attempt to determine what, aside from physical necessities such as food, warmth and shelter, people need to allow them to feel part of society.

Participants confirmed that fridge-freezers, DVD players and mobile phones are "such an integral part of modern life that everyone should be able to afford them". Everyone should have enough money to allow them to buy birthday presents and to go on a week's holiday a year (not abroad), they said.

A car, however, is not seen as essential: it was judged that a minimum budget should cover only public transport.

The inclusion of a computer and internet connection echoes the government's drive to get more people online a campaign motivated partly by the desire to streamline public services and partly by a drive to foster digital inclusion. The Race Online 2012 strategy calculates that 10 million people in the UK have never been online four million are among the country's most socially excluded, it says.

The Rowntree paper reveals that a single person needs to earn at least 14,400 before tax to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children would need 29,200.

Because the price of food, council tax and public transport have outstripped official inflation, families on a low income have seen their benefits dwindle.

The report calculates a single person whose income had risen by only the official inflation rate would have experienced a 10% fall in his or her standard of living over the past decade. "Without action to combat these effects, social and economic exclusion are likely to rise," the report concludes.

According to Rowntree's calculations, basic out-of-work benefits provide less than half the minimum income for an adult with no children and about two-thirds for families with children. Those in work need to be earning 7.38 an hour well above the national minimum wage ( 5.80) to achieve this minimum standard.

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.'"

The BBC spent 199.3m on its BBC Online service in 2009/10, according to its annual report - 12% more than the previous year.

The outlay is 6% of the 142.50 annual licence fee, or the equivalent of 0.67 per month

BBC Online spend breaks down as: 126.7m content budget, 22.3m on distribution and 50.3m on infrastructure and support.

Future media and technology director Erik Huggers' salary totalled 407,000 - that's 330,000 base pay, 15,000 in taxable benefits and 62,000 in cash-based pension supplements.

More stats
BBC Online reaches 37% of the population each week and therefore costs 8.9 pence per user hour.
On a per user user basis, that makes it amongst the most costly of the BBC's main services, with only BBC Alba costing more.
More than 18m iPlayer requests per week.
Monthly mobile users up from 4.4m to 7.8m.
External suppliers received 26% of BBC Online spend - slightly more than its 25% quota.

Coinciding with the annual report, the BBC Trust has published its response to the BBC's Putting Quality First strategic review proposals. Regarding online, it says: "The Trust endorses the Executive's proposed 25% budget reduction, although it will want to understand and approve the editorial changes involved. In line with the Executive's proposals, the BBC should sharpen online's focus so that it is truly distinctive and has clearer editorial vision and control .

"The BBC needs to identify future tipping points where reassessment of the structure will become necessary, such as full digital switchover in 2012 and 50% of viewing on a non-linear basis.

"The case has not been made for the closure of 6 Music. The Executive should draw up an overarching strategy for digital radio."

Meanwhile, BBC is now rolling out "BBC Fabric", "a desktop-based digital production tool that allows content to be accessed, edited, and shared remotely across the entire BBC" and "will fundamentally change the way we make programmes", according to the annual report.

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.

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."

Internet rights group claims restrictions on access to Google-owned sites illegally discriminate against users

An internet rights group has launched a legal challenge in Turkey over a ban on access to a host of Google-owned sites.

The case, in which the Internet Technologies Association argues that the restrictions illegally discriminate against millions of users, is the latest front in an ongoing dispute that raises questions about free speech in a country attempting to join the EU.

"It's an infringement on our fundamental human rights, the freedom of conversations and our right to information," said Yaman Akdeniz, an associate professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University and founder of the thinktank Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties.

Turkey's censorship of the internet dates back to 2007, when a law was passed to tackle child pornography and websites that encourage suicide, drug use, gambling or prostitution. The law broadened state powers by creating a government office with the authority to shut down websites without a court order.

YouTube was banned in 2008 after a video was posted on the site showing Greek football fans taunting Turks and making claims about the country's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atat rk.

But the site still regularly scores among the top 10 most visited in Turkey, largely due to the use of proxy servers to circumvent the ban.

"Some people call us Atat rk-haters because we want YouTube to be accessible in Turkey," said Akdeniz. "But things need to change here."

Ankara has accused Google of "waging a battle" against Turkey and dodging more than 13m in taxes generated from YouTube revenues a charge that the US internet company has flatly denied.

Binali Yildirim, Turkey's minister for transport and communications and the most visible figure behind the ban, said: "This site has entered a fight with the Turkish Republic, but Turkey will not accept this."

But there has even been mounting anger over the ban among those in power. This month President Abdullah Gul expressed his opposition in a series of tweets, saying free speech restrictions were preventing Turkey from "integrating with the world". He said he has instructed officials to look into ways to overcome the ban.

Richard Howitt, a British MEP and spokesman for the European parliament's committee on Turkey, has warned that the ban puts "the country alongside Iran, North Korea and Vietnam as one of the world's worst offenders for cyber censorship".

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.

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.

It's a hatchback on steriods. And it works

Another year, another minor variation. The car industry likes to talk in terms of complete overhauls, extensive updates and revolutionary redesigns. That way a car sounds so dramatic and new that it makes 2009 seem so last year. Suddenly you find that what you need is the very latest model featuring a fearlessly radical initiative on ashtray positioning.

That's the theory, at least. Generally, of course, manufacturers are not in the habit of changing a winning hand, and Nissan is no different. The new Qashqai Crossover claims to be a makeover, but in cosmetics terms it's a facial rather than a facelift. Which makes sense. After all, the Qashqai has proven a success, so why redesign the wheel?

Actually, that's one of the few things Nissan has redesigned. There's now a five-spoke alloy wheel that's perfectly nice, though I can't say it changed my view of the Qashqai. It remains that strange paradox: a car designed to look like a large, fuel-guzzling, space-eating 4x4 SUV in an era that takes a dim view of large, fuel-guzzling, space-eating 4x4 SUVs, while in fact being a relatively compact, not overly fuel-hungry 2x4 that is a decidedly on-road, urban car a hatchback on steroids.

And it works. The reason being that driving an SUV, even a pseudo-SUV, is a soothingly empowering experience. You feel on top of the road, rather than ground down by it, and protected from the beastliness of the world, in particular those revved-up, fist-faced drivers whose path you happen to be blocking.

However, the Qashqai I drove was a CVT or continually variable transmission version. CVT is a type of automatic transmission without fixed gear ratios. Instead, it aims to match the engine revs' speed to the car's different speed demands higher revs for increased acceleration, lower for more fuel-efficient cruising. The idea is that a more efficiently responsive engine helps conserve energy.

In practice, though, it can seem as if you're in the wrong gear all the time. As if you don't actually know how to drive a car, which is an achievement in an automatic. A few times when the engine raced as I was accelerating away from a stationary position, I almost felt obliged to make theatrical shoulder-hunching movements, as if to say, "Search me, I dunno what's wrong with it."

But you do get used to it, or perhaps it gets used to you. Either way, I found that after a while I didn't try to hide as I pressed the throttle. Still, it's not quite as soothing a ride as we've come to associate with SUVs. And overall, the appeal of the Qashqai remains a mystery to me. But then I don't even get why it's named after Persian nomads.

Qashqai Crossover n-tec CVT 2.0

Price 21,295
Top speed 114mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 10.7 seconds
Average consumption 37.1mpg
CO2 emissions 179g/km
Eco rating 5.5/10
Bound for Isfahan
In a word Puzzling

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.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the data

DATA: download the full datasheet

World government data

Search the world's government data with our gateway

Can you do something with this data?

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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.