Digital music - you can't give it away...

Here's a round-up of some of the pieces posted to the Technology section this week, just in case you missed them:

From our regular columnists:

UK online music service and social network Last FM launched a streaming service for users, with deals with most of the big labels. The downside? You can only ever listen to a track three times.

A British firm believes it has the solution to our next-generation broadband needs. H2O will be rolling out fibre optic cable connections to people's homes via the sewers, offering speeds of 100Mbps. But unless you live in Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee, you might have to wait a while.

Social networking sites have gone from fad to mainstream in a short space of time. But what happens when you want to leave? One British student found leaving MySpace harder than he thought...

Features:

If you've just joined the HD revolution and spent thousands of a TV you might not want to hear about the post-HD age. This week Japanese broadcaster NHK visited the BBC to talk about Super Hi Vision. And no, your current TV is almost certainly not good enough for the new technology.

And in the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has unveiled unmanned planes which can be used to fly into disaster zones, such as hurricanes, to help gather data.

Blog:

Who are the most influential people in technology over the last 150 years? That question certainly provoked a debate.

Apple released its most recent financials and Rory ran over some of the detail.

And what were the forgotten concepts of technology. Many of you had some great suggestions.

MySpace and BBC - friend or foe?

Now here's an interesting thing. On the very day we - in BBC News - are running a rather negative story about MySpace and just how difficult it can be to delete your profile, our colleagues at BBC Worldwide have signed a major deal with the biggest social networking site. A good way of proving a) how impartial we are and b) how no two parts of the BBC know what each other is up to.

The deal with MySpace TV is not the first to see BBC content made available for free on outside websites - there are a number of BBC Youtube channels and there's a deal to show programmes on Bebo.

But as far as I can tell, this is the first time the Beeb has allowed users complete freedom to use its content and embed it in their own sites. For instance, I've just gone and copied the code of this Top Gear clip from the BBC worldwide site on MySpace and pasted it right here:
Top Gear: Killing a Toyota

What this means is that for the first time BBC content will be able to spread virally (and legally) around the internet. Of course, plenty of people have been posting all sorts of clips without permission all over Youtube and other sites - but now this can happen with Auntie's blessing. The aim is obviously to reach young social networkers who spend very little time sitting in front of the television but countless hours online - and then get them to spread the word about our fabulous content. Let's see if it works.

Mind you, the deal with MySpace does not include any news content, which means I can't embed here my report on how difficult it can be to leave the site. But my bosses promise me that feature will be coming soon to our very own BBC news site.

Who's in, out and on the list...

Last night I participated in an Intel event to pick the 45 most influential people in technology over the last 150 years.

Gathered to draw up the names were journalists from the BBC, PC Pro, The Inquirer, and Zdnet among others.

I can't give you the final list yet - as the scores are still being collated - but I can tell you a little bit about the process.

We were given a shortlist of 69 people and we had to score each person from one to 10 across five categories - Innovation, Ground-breaking technology, Industry success, Impact on society and Influence.

The first thing we did was automatically dump a number of short-listed names that we felt had no right to be on the list to begin with - so I'm afraid Richard Branson and Charles Dunstone were quickly excised.

There were also a lot of obvious absentees on the short-list - in part because Intel decided that the list be confined to ICT figures. So there was no Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, for example.

I lobbied for two people I wanted, at the very least, to be up for discussion - Don Estridge, who led development of the IBM PC and Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser.

I'm pleased to say I managed to get both on the list.

The voting was a bit raucous - and we all gave individual scores after much baiting, shouting, laughing and disagreement.

Bill Gates didn't seem to be too popular with a few in the room - one hack, who shall remain nameless, felt Bill Gates' impact on society was negligible. Really?

Hopefully, I'll have the final 45 tomorrow and will post it on the blog for discussion. The journalists' individual scores, I'm told, will not be published...

Apple - it's about iMacs not iPhones

In London's Apple store on a damp January evening the tills were besieged by customers buying not just iPods but shiny new iMacs. It's what the economics world calls "anecdotal evidence" and should be taken with a pinch of salt - but Apple's latest financial results do show its renewed strength as a computer maker.

Wall Street marked the shares down sharply - more evidence of the way the mood around technology stocks has darkened - but that was because of Apple's typically cautious guidance on future earnings, not because of a performance in the last quarter which was difficult to fault.

Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs in the last quarter - up 44% on a year ago. This in the year that the company changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc to reinforce the message about its new role as a music, video and telecoms giant. True, iPod sales were up (but only 5% on the year) and it is the aura that the device has created which has helped drive people back to the Mac. Now the trick is to keep them there.

I'm still not convinced that, in business terms, the iPhone is more than a brilliant way of promoting the Apple brand. Sales of 2.3 million in the quarter keep it on track for Steve Jobs' very modest target of 10 million (about 1% of world shipments) by the end of 2008. But sales in Europe (no breakdown last night) appear to be slowing, and the deal to bring the iPhone to China is on hold.

So Apple looks like a niche player in telecoms, is struggling to make a big impact in video and can't really expect to be bigger in music than it already is. So it's back to the Mac - but with millions now apparently ready to pay a premium price for an Apple computer in preference to a Windows machine, that is not a bad place to be.

Now how about a new name. Apple Computers, anyone?

I left home – and my 2mb broadband connection – armed with a laptop, a Blackberry and an iPhone, confident that I had every base covered.

On the tube, I was obviously offline – but surely at the sparkling new St Pancras International station, wi-fi would be everywhere? But the fact that the ticket office was closed because of a “software problem” didn’t bode well. My iPhone detected something called “Free Public wi-fi” but didn’t seem to like the look of it, so I hopped on the Nottingham train in search of something better.

A few train services now have on-board wi-fi – this wasn’t one of them – and the EDGE network which serves the iPhone seems to evaporate just north of Watford. No problem – I’ve got a USB modem giving my laptop a 3g mobile broadband connection. I plugged it in and got the rather discouraging message “the selected communications device does not exist.”

When, after a certain amount of cursing and fiddling, I eventually got the laptop online it was hardly worth the bother. It took about three minutes to load the BBC homepage, and then choked and gave up. Having enviously watched all those businessmen with similar devices furiously tapping away on trains, I’m now convinced they are just playing Tetris.

My iPhone was still refusing to go online and meet my desire to check what was happening on world stock markets, but my Blackberry, with its modest GPRS connection was at least delivering me emails about the dramas on the markets.

My destination was the Computing and Informatics Building at Nottingham Trent University – surely here of all places I would be able to get online at lightning speed? Not a chance. Once inside, neither my laptop nor my iPhone could spot a trace of wi-fi. Apparently there is a network right through the building and across the campus – but you cannot even detect it unless you are a bona fide student who has signed up to the university’s conditions of service.

Frustrated beyond measure, I headed for the student union bar – and suddenly found myself in wi-fi heaven. My phone locked on to a wi-fi hotspot operated by The Cloud, which provides free access for iPhone customers (once they’ve signed up to O2’s hefty monthly subscription). For a few brief minutes, I emailed, sent photos, and learned more than I needed to know about the nervous breakdown unfolding on the stock exchange.

Then it was back on the train and into the internet dead-zone again. All day, my most effective communication device had been the one which relies on the slowest network, my Blackberry. Which makes you wonder when the billions being invested in HSDPA, wi-fi, and eventually Wimax networks are finally going to make an impact on the way we connect.

Forgotten concepts

I was searching for a photograph in the BBC's online stills library yesterday when I accidentally stumbled across photographs of the Psion Ace.

This was a concept model from 2001, built to show the potential of 3G technology and future PDA designs. Sadly, the Ace never saw the light of day because in the same year Psion dropped out of the PDA business due to pressure from competitors.

But for a numbers of years this British company was the top dog in the emerging PDA market - creating the Psion Organiser, developing the basis of the Symbian operating system and helping pave the way for mobile markets such as GPS and portable media players.

There's a really interesting article in The Register's archives by Andrew Orlowski, which outlines the plans Psion had for its final machine, the Protea project.

But coming across the Psion Ace made me wonder about other concepts which never went from design to execution, and technologies which were built but never sold...

What about the original Sony/Nintendo console the companies made together before the PlayStation? Or the aptly-named Phantom console?

If you have information about such products, leave a comment and any links to photos and we'll do a round-up later in the week.

UPDATE:Ian Fogg at Jupiter Research (and formerly of Psion) has e-mailed me to point out that the Protea wasn't Psion's final consumer product. It was, in fact, the codename for the Psion Series 5.
He also throws light on the Ace. Apparently it was "the codename for a small, light, mass market handheld designed to compete with Palm".
He said it led to the Revo, and that the Ace drawings were never a serious project within Psion.
Thanks for the info Ian.

Tech heaven or hell?

In my very first post on this blog, way back on New Year’s Eve 2007, I wondered whether we were seeing another bubble in technology stocks and, if so, whether it might burst in 2008. Now I’m hearing two things at once – a lot of excited noise about a whole rash of start-ups, coupled with the sound of air escaping from that bubble.

So into my e-mail this morning drops a note about a company called Zlio, offering customers the chance to start their own online shops - “an interesting concept that's already taking off in France and the US, and is now coming to the UK".

It boasts backing from the venture capital firm that put money into Skype. So one reason to be cheerful - new web ventures are forming and finding VC backing.

Another sign of the continuing buzz around web 2.0 businesses comes in the results of the Crunchies – the awards for start-ups sponsored by the leading technology blogs Techcrunch and Gigaom.

The predictable overall winner was Facebook - but the awards give a useful feel for what is exciting technology investors right now.

So Hulu - the latest in a whole raft of online video sharing sites, and another to promise “premium content” - is named best video start-up. Tesla Motors - whose environmentally friendly sports car is released later this year - is the best clean tech start-up.

Twitter - the mobile social network that many of us already find annoying rather than addictive - gets the best mobile start-up award. And the best international start-up is Netvibes - a personal web portal reinventing what so many of the big internet players tried and failed to achieve a decade ago and doing it much better.

But just as the blushing winners step forward and accept their Crunchies, the world’s stock markets are going into meltdown again.

The darker mood that infected many financial stocks in the second half of 2007 left technology shares virtually untouched - but in 2008 they have succumbed to the general gloom.

In late December, Google was somewhere around $700, and Apple was breaking through the $200 mark. Three weeks on, Google is back to $600, Apple to $160. And one of Britain’s top technology stocks ARM, maker of the chips that go into smart mobiles like the iPhone, has fallen more than 30% in two months, despite the absence of any bad news.

But why does this matter to the start-ups? Because the venture capitalists who back them have always got an eye on the exit, recouping their investment by selling up to stock market investors. Back in 1999, every bright young dot com was rushing to float, with the IPO exit door providing healthy piles of cash for them and their backers. But in 2000, that door closed, and very soon the supply of venture capital dried up.

Now the market has turned, it will get a lot harder to make that journey to IPO heaven. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook - and his backers at Microsoft - may never see that $15 billion valuation put on the infant business last autumn turned into hard cash. And the inventors of the next Hulu or Netvibes may find that 2008 is not the greatest year to do that elevator pitch for a venture capitalist.

Who's who of technology

Who are the 45 most important figures in technology over the last 100 years?

I ask because I'm going to be discussing that question tomorrow as part of an Intel event marking the roll-out of its 45-nanometre chips.

It's a big question and a lot of names spring to mind. Handily, Intel has sent participating journalists a suggested long-list, which is designed to help us choose our final 45.

The list has a lot of the usual suspects: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, William Hewlett and Dave Packard.

It also has some younger upstarts: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Shawn Fanning (Napster creator), Philip Rosedale (Second Life) and Jonathan Ive (iPod, iMac designer).

But would you include Richard Branson, Charles Dunstone (Carphone Warehouse chief executive), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari) or Nikolas Zennstrom (founder of Skype)?

I'd love to hear your suggestions of who should or should not make the final list.

I'll come back with the list that was agreed on by Wednesday morning.

Tech Tools Aid Heathrow Hack

I’ve been away from my normal beat for a couple of days, getting involved in coverage of the Heathrow crash landing. But reporting on this story has reminded me of how new technology has changed the lives of journalists. Ten years ago, we would not have had three tools that proved essential over recent days – Google, Youtube, and games software downloaded online.

Even just a decade ago, my first stop in examining the possible causes of this near disaster would have been the BBC library, home to volumes of Jane’s Aircraft and to dedicated researchers who would comb through countless dusty folders of little cuttings from newspapers in search of vital scraps of information. Next, I would have called our film library in search of archive pictures, then waited for a stack of tapes, sometimes in old formats which needed converting, to arrive on a van..

But nowadays I turn to Google. A quick look at my web history shows I made around 70 searches over the last two days. The first, an hour or so after the crash landing, was for “instrument landing system” (Wikipedia gave me a useful summary) but soon the theories moved on and I was typing “777 power incidents” into the search box.

My very first search, though, was on Youtube – and it quickly turned up something very useful. A passenger on a BA 777 flight to Heathrow last year had posted his footage filmed out of the window as it made a safe landing, passing over the exact spot where Thursday’s flight fell short. We used those pictures on the Six O Clock News – and other broadcasters had the same idea, finding Youtube footage of bird strikes to illustrate one possible cause of the crash landing.

Graphics artists are invaluable on these occasions and Google Earth provided them with useful images of the approach to Heathrow. But to get a real feel for the view from the cockpit, I despatched a producer to go and buy a Flight Simulator PC game. Then we realised that the small aircraft that comes with the game wouldn’t do the trick, so we went online to download a Boeing 777 add-on.

When we invited a retired pilot into our edit suite to describe what happens when you find yourself without power at 600 feet, we expected him to be scornful of our game footage. Quite the opposite – he said it was identical to the experience provided by the simulator where he learned to fly a 777 at Heathrow ten years ago. So a £25 piece of software is now performing the same task as a machine that cost a six-figure sum to build – another example of the advance of computing power.

Mind you, as the grateful passengers of the BA flight will attest, technology has its limitations. When something went terribly wrong with the systems on one of the world’s most advanced passenger aircraft, it was human qualities – the skill and nerve of the crew – which saw them safely onto the ground.

Seesmic killed the YouTube star?

It's not often you are presented with a vision of the future of online video in a pub in London.

But that's exactly what I was shown last night by celebrated French blogger, well-connected entrepreneur and Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur.

He believes that the future of online video is not YouTube or even live video, he thinks it is video conversations among a community.

His Seesmic project is currently in Alpha - very early release - but already he has built up a strong, and loyal, community of so-called Seesmic-ers.

Here's an example of a video he made while we chatted.

Within minutes of posting the video to Seesmic, he had replies from the community all around the world, including from members sat around the corner in the same bar.

"YouTube is not a conversation," explained LeMeur. "As one Seesmic-er said to me, 'YouTube is about the videos, Seesmic is about the people in the videos'."

Users can record videos via webcams and upload directly to Seesmic, or record using YouTube and post from that site.

The company is also working on a mobile phone version of Seesmic.

He says Seesmic is more intimate because video allows users to see each other for who they are.

Users reply to each others' replies, creating an almost infinite threaded conversation around different topics.

Seesmic has an arrangement with micro-blogging site Twitter so that as soon as a new reply is posted, it is also posted on a user's Twitter page.

It's a great example of how two start-up companies are leveraging each others' success to strengthen their own platform's offering.

The death of Benazir Bhutto and the recent crash-landing of the British Airways plane at Heathrow had provoked much video chattering, says LeMeur.

"People are fed up of seeing the same footage on the mainstream networks. With Seesmic they can go in a different direction," he explains.

For LeMeur, Seesmic is not just a business and a social space, it's also where he has done business.

"Half of my development team I met on Seesmic," he explains.

He has $6m in funding and says he is in no hurry to start monetising the project. His backers include big names such as Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and people like Ron Conway, one of the original investors in Google.

LeMeur hopes that Seesmic will become THE platform for video conversations. There is an API that people can use to build on top of, in much the way Facebook is positioning itself as the lingua franca of social networking.

He admits that the thought of YouTube wading into the video conversation space is a risk.

"That's the challenge. That's the excitement of being small," he says.

LeMeur is due to meet YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley soon after he requested one of the sought-after invites to take part in the Seesmic trial.

But he says if YouTube came knocking, Seesmic would not be for sale.

LeMeur will be in Davos at the World Economic Forum next week. He is working with CNN who will use Seesmic-ers replies to questions posed by LeMeur on the channel as an experiment.

It will be a very high-profile public showing of Seesmic.

And something that is bound to keep investors happy.

Web 2.0 for all?

Web 2.0 may have become old hat/ a cliche/ superseded depending on your point of view. But there is a lot of work still to be done in this area as we move from a rather static web experience to one that is richer and more interactive.

We may all think that that now sites such as Flickr and even the BBC homepage are part of our daily online lives that all the issues around Web 2.0 have been solved.

Far from it.

I've just been at a very interesting talk given by Rod Smith and David Boloker, from IBM's Emerging Tech labs, to BBC development staff and they made it very clear that a lot of work around standards for Web 2.0 work has yet to properly started, let alone finished.

Why does this matter?

Well, we live in a cut and paste digital world. For example - we all take it for granted that a piece of text that you copy in one web page, for example, can be pasted into a Word document, or a text-entry box on a website.

But in the Web 2.0 world it is not so simple. Standards are needed so that data from one website can be moved into another, added to a third site and then spat out the other end. It is what makes the Web 2.0 world so exciting.

Some of this work has happened. Things like RSS feeds, XML etc have made it simpler for computers to share complicated bits of data. But it hasn't gone far enough and it's not just data.

The Web 2.0 world needs to work across browsers, across mobile phones, across emerging connected devices like televisions, set-top boxes, gadgets like the Chumby (See picture)

For example - widgets have been the poster-boy for the Web 2.0 world. These mini-programs delivering news or weather, traffic details or cinema times can be used on your Google homepage, or your Vista desktop, your Mac and your personalised Yahoo page.

But a widget for Dashboard on my Mac won't work on my Google homepage and vice versa. Why not? Because we haven't got standards in the Web 2.0 world for this sort of thing.

IBM, along with other companies, is working on solutions that make this a lot easier. The company is also working on standards to make the Web 2.0 accessible for all.

There are standards that websites should adhere to, for example, to ensure that someone who is visually impaired can use a site.

But these standards only apply to the Web 1.0 world. What happens if someone is visually impaired and is using a hip Web 2.0 site? Will they get text information about the pop-up boxes, or drag and drop features inside the page?

Possibly not. And it's hard to web developers to know what they should implement in terms of technologies to support people with disabilities.

That's where standards come in. And IBM is working with the gatekeepers of web standards, the W3C, to ensure that Web 2.0 is for all.

So when anyone starts throwing around the term Web 3.0, remember that Web 2.0 is a long way from being a fundamental part of our daily web experience.

One day for One Laptop doc

Just a note to say that Rory Cellan Jones' 30-minute documentary on the One Laptop Per Child project in Nigeria can be viewed for just one more day on the BBC iPlayer.

It's a great watch - and also looks at Intel's Classmate project, being run in a near-by school. It wasn't intentional - but the disparity between the OLPC scheme and school and the Intel project looks very ironic in the light of the recent divorce between the charity and company.

Sadly, the iPlayer is only available to people in the UK at present.

Facebook, Scrabulous, and the End of Innocence

Oh no. I’d finally managed to kick the Scrabulous habit – at one stage I had eight games going simultaneously – when news came through that the Facebook application was under threat from the makers of Scrabble. After a couple of months in rehab, I had to start another game – just so that we could get some television pictures, you understand.

But the bust-up over a game which is currently enjoyed daily by nearly 600,000 users is not just of interest to the addicts. It tells us something about what happens when bright young internet brands start to grow up.

Remember when Youtube was young, all those years ago? It started life by maintaining that it was merely a playground for the video activities of its users – so if a teenager posted a happy-slapping video from a mobile phone or grabbed the latest episode of Lost and puts it up for friends to enjoy, that was not their fault. Then Google bought Youtube for an outlandish sum, and both regulators and litigators realised that here was a business worthy of litigation and regulation.

So last May Facebook threw open its doors to outside developers. Immediately, it entered a new golden age where all the work of making the network more compelling would be done by keen young kids from Bangalore to Berkeley –without payment, and with no comeback if they made a mess on the carpet.

It hasn’t quite worked out like that. For one thing, a zillion messy and annoying applications have spread like bindweed across Facebook, making it a much less attractive place to hang out. For another, those who are unhappy about any aspect of those applications are more likely to target what is now a $15 billion company (on paper, at least) rather than the developers.

So the letters from Mattel and Hasbro accusing Scrabulous of stealing their intellectual property have winged their way to Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, rather than to Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the two brothers who designed it. Mind you, they are rumoured to be making $25,000 a month from selling advertising on Scrabulous, so they too will be in the sights of Scrabble’s two owners. But my point is that, as Google has already found, the early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, “do no evil” kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing.

Incidentally, some friends have suggested that the demise of Scrabulous (if this is not just a clever tactic to buy up the application) is what will finally see them departing Facebook. “The end is nigh!” was a message from one. But writing this post has reminded me of its usefulness. I spoke to several Facebook friends who are developing applications, and got a message through to Rajat Agarwalla, receiving this speedy reply:

“Hi Rory,
At the moment we would not be able to talk to you. However, we'll be in touch with you very soon! :)
Sorry!
Rajat”

Oh well, in the meantime, back to more serious matters. Can anyone think of a seven letter word involving the letters N,O,Y C, E, I and W?

One More Thing....

Too much coverage of the Apple announcements on the BBC News website? Well, if you think so, you'll be glad to hear that this will be the last of it for a while....

Now that the Steve Jobs reality distortion field has melted away, what to make of Apple’s announcement? My colleague Rory has done a very good job of assessing the immediate impact of the speech, but what about the nitty gritty?

The headline grabber of the event was the world’s thinnest laptop, but the biggest announcement was almost certainly the online film rentals.

But let’s start with the MacBook Air. Its looks will certainly win over many an admirer but ultra-thin laptop PC users will probably be shrugging their shoulders. Sony's TZ Series and the Asus Eee all offer similar features and increased mobility.

At $1,799 the machine is pitched firmly between Apple’s Macbook Pro and Macbook users.

The question is will Macbook customers pay the extra $300 to gain the increased mobility, and will MacBook Pro users sacrifice grunt for the convenience, all for a saving of only $200.

And what does the laptop actually offer in terms of ultra mobility? Yes it is incredibly thin and at three pounds is 40% lighter than the MacBook.

It’s also the most powerful machine in its class – but has Apple pushed any boundaries in terms of mobility?

It may come with 802.11n wi-fi on board but you are going to need to plug in a USB dongle if you want too go wireless via a cellular network. Wimax would have been a bold, if perhaps premature, step.

The best thing that can be said about it – and one that should not be underestimated – is that the Air is a powerful Mac in the most portable form factor ever.

One thing to add: How does Apple justify charging $999 for having the optional solid state drive instead of a hard disk?

So on to the online movie rentals announcement…

Apple has certainly shaken the tree with its line-up of movie studios and revamp of the Apple TV.

European iTunes users can certainly feel rightly aggrieved that once again they are something of an afterthought in Apple’s eyes.

US customers are right now enjoying high definition films while in the UK a dated episode of Lost or South Park is the best we can expect.

The sheer amount of content available in the US will certainly boost Apple’s credentials as a serious player in the content delivery business.

And the revamp to the Apple TV corrects many of the fundamental flaws in the device that were obvious from the outset.

At a stroke the box is a strong contender to take the central place in your digital living room. But it does not go far enough.

Apple has seen sense and recognised that the box needs to be cut free from the umbilical cord tethering it to the computer while at the same needing the flexibility to take advantage of the Mac or PCs ubiquity.

But the box remains a glorified jukebox. Adding the ability to stream photos from a service like Flickr hints that the boffins realise people want to conn