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The world's most generic news report

This has been doing the rounds for the past couple of weeks. But it's really worth looking at for anyone who missed it.

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe is on BBC 4 on Thursday nights.

Six Foursquare updates you should avoid Tweeting

We all love Foursquare, right? Not always. There are some things we, on Twitter, don't want to know.

1. "I just became the mayor of Dublin Infertility Clinic"

2. "I just unlocked the "sex offender registration" badge on Foursquare"

3. "…wrote a tip @BallymunGardaStation: they have a CCTV camera in lobby, so don't urinate on the ground, like I just did"

4. "I just became mayor of my wife's sister's house"

5. "I just unlocked the "good inmate behaviour" badge"

6. "I just became the mayor of Pearse Street Welfare Office"

Video review: Google's Nexus One smartphone

This Sunday I'll have a long review of Google's much-hyped smartphone.

In the meantime, here's a short video review (please excuse the sub-par quality: I'm stuck with a basic camcorder until we sort the proper HDV videocam out). I really liked this phone. Mainly because:

-- it's really, really fast (thanks to its 1Ghz processor)

-- the touchscreen is incredibly responsive

-- Streetview is amazing on it

-- apps from the Market (Android's app store) run incredibly smoothly on it

Full review this Sunday in the paper.

The phone won't be out here for at least another six weeks, probably longer. So there's no pricing or operator subsidy details yet. However, it costs $530 sim-free in the US. So that could be a guide.

Three companies under threat: Philips, Nokia and Microsoft

The technology and electronics industry moves fast. One year you can be the toast of the market and the next shrink into oblivion. Take Motorola. Five years ago, when it had the slim Razr-phone, it was a top three market seller. Today, it has sunk without trace in the European market. (It is experiencing something of a revival in the US, thanks to its adoption of Android.) The same happened with Siemens Mobile.

In the online space, we've already seen MySpace -- once the king of social networking sites -- shrivel considerably. Bebo looks like it's losing a lot of users to Facebook, too.

Who else is under threat? And how can they avoid serious contraction?
I think that three companies, in particular, face huge challenges this year and next year. They are Philips, Nokia and Microsoft. Here's why.

1. Philips: In Ireland, Philips ruled television set sales. As recently as 2006, Philips had over 50 per cent of the entire market here. Today, that has shrunk considerably, mainly due to competition from Samsung, LG and lower-cost brands (Sony and Panasonic have remained steady, while JVC and Mitsubishi have tapered off). When you walk into a store to buy a television now, how many Philips sets do you see in front of you? Not nearly as many as you used to. Its marketing seems to have disappeared, too. In fairness, Philips is a fundamentally innovative company. But to compete with the Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese companies, it needs to cut its prices or re-invent its design (or both).

2. Nokia: there was a day, not so long ago, when 80 per cent of all the best new innovation in mobile phones came from Nokia. It pioneered usable web-browsers, mobile business applications, powerful cameras and 3G connectivity. Then, three years ago, the iPhone launched. All of a sudden, touchscreen was in, mobile apps became the innovative metric and the industry took a different turn. Although it kept an eye on all of this, Nokia continued on its own path, concentrating largely on updating versions of its existing products and services. At the same time, emerging markets became a very important segment for the Finnish company. Belatedly, Nokia has begun to turn its attention to mobile applications through its Ovi internet strategy. At the moment, it is losing vital ground in this area, which will be very hard to make up next year or the year after that. Nokia will remain a huge player in mobile phones for some time to come. But it would be a massive achievement were it able to retain its more than 50 per cent Irish market share in 18 months' time.

3. Microsoft: For all its diversification in recent years, Microsoft's major corporate achievement was to lodge itself as the default operating system for PC manufacturers. Windows has never been pretty, but the world has used it anyway, thanks to inertia and the lack of a talented, willing alternative (Apple still refuses to play on the same pitch as Windows). In its most recent quarterly figures, Microsoft shows again just how reliant it is on its computer operating system business. While the roll-out of Windows 7 licences has been very healthy, its online businesses -- the bits Microsoft associates its 'innovation' with -- make pretty horrible losses. It's not that Microsoft's online stuff doesn't work, it's just that none of it is quite as nice or compelling as rivals'. its other great crutch is Office 2010. This has been the default word-processing and 'productivity' software for business for years. Joe Officeworker has just gotten used to it.

The trouble for Microsoft is that both of these bulwarks are starting to look really, really vulnerable. The threat doesn't come from Apple -- a leisure-time mobile device company -- but from Google. When Chrome OS launches, there will be a completely compatible alternative ecosystem for companies and home users to choose. And it will cheaper (as in, free). Microsoft looks like it is adapting a little, especially with its plans to roll out a basic free version of Office 2010. But ultimately, to remain dominant, it will have to slash the prices of both Windows and Office. When it does that, its core revenue streams will shrink. So far, it hasn't come up with much else that makes money.

Blackberry's wireless PowerPoint gadget

Blackberry rolled into town today, showing off a few of its new(ish) phones. This includes the touchscreen Storm 2 which, even on preliminary perusal, seems to perform a lot smoother than the original. (The accelerometer is far quicker, for a start, and the texting is less awkward.) The Bold 2 (9700) and a new violet version of the Curve (for the laydeez, apparently) were also on show.

The most interesting device on display was not a phone, though. The Blackberry Presenter is a very knacky little device that wireless connects (via Bluetooth) to your phone, which should have Powerpoint (or a similar presentation application) on it.

The gadget itself connects via cable to a projector or an external display screen. Presto: your presentation on a big screen controlled from your mobile in your hand at the back of the room. It even has a switch to toggle between PAL and NTSC, in case you're travelling to the US or Canada. We're waiting on an RRP price for Ireland, but are told that it will be €180. (It costs $200 from Blackberry's online shop in the US.)

Hypocrisy and the "gutter press"

There has been something of an outcry on Twitter over the Mail On Sunday's rather over-the-top article yesterday on Melanie Schregardus.
Schregardus is an air-traffic controller in Shannon. Some time ago, she wrote a blog post describing the male-dominated atmosphere she encountered when she first started in her job.
The Irish Mail On Sunday picked up on the blog post and pumped it full of steroids. The end result was a piece with the following intro: "Controller's web diary reveals the sexism and filthy language that are rife in the tower".
Schregardus is mortified. Her colleagues will be mortified. I don't blame them at all. If I were her, I would be very annoyed.
However, the scale of the rant going on about "the scandal of gutter media" is another matter entirely.
For any of you who would join in this outrage, yet who are among the large majority of Irish newspaper readers who purchase tabloids or gossip magazines, I say that you are a big bunch of hypocrites.
Day in, day out, you cackle and leer and pore over celebrities' private lives in the media. If anything, a good invasion-of-privacy celebrity story will make you buy a paper.
Of course, there are umpteen alternative media organs available to you that do not go in for this type of journalism (my employer being one of them, though that is irrelevant to the point I'm making).
And do you buy them?
Nope.
Do you swap stories on Twitter, Facebook or Bebo about them?
Nope.
Here's the bottom line: you get the media you deserve.
By all means, pursue a newspaper or a journalist or an editor for something underhand. They deserve it.
But spare us the tone of moral outrage. Spare us the pious rant and faux-shock about "the standard of the gutter media". Look in the mirror -- that's YOUR standard, pal.
No? Well you buy three or four times as many copies of a tabloid as you do a broadsheet paper, don't you? The statistics don't lie.

UPC quietly ramps up internet speeds to 100Mbs

Take a look at these screenshots sent in to me by a guy in Onlinemeetingrooms.com, which is based in Dun Laoghaire. They upgraded to UPC's 30Mbs service and whoosh -- they discover they're getting 100Mbs plus. Lucky, lucky them.

Edit: holy crap! Here's the latest one...

 

Second update (2.30pm): Okay, this is getting silly now...

Can this go any higher???

Kids trust news blogs, but most don't read 'em

That's one of the findings from a very impressive survey carried out among almost 1,800 secondary school students by student blogger Tommy Collison. Tommy, a 2nd year student in Castletroy College, Limerick, entered the survey as part of this year's Young Scientist competition. The importance of this survey is that very little such research has been done in this area before.

Many digirati will know Tommy as the young brother of previous Young Scientist winner, Patrick Collision. He's also a farily prolific Tweeter (@trusttommy) in his own right.

I caught up with Tommy to hear him explain the conclusions of his survey.

The BT Young Scientist winner that doesn't want any money for his invention

The winner of the this year's BT Young Scientist contest is a very humble fellow. Richard O'Shea, from Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal in Blarney, County Cork, has no intention of seeking any patent for his winning invention.  Instead, he wants to encourage as many people as he can to just build it and use his self-build biomass stove. To this end, he's going over to Uganda in the summer to get a project going around it.

I caught up with him for a minute to talk about it.

Nokia Ovi Store: "a work in progress"

On Thursday, I attended the first major event that Nokia Ireland has held around Ovi, its answer (of sorts) to the iPhone's App Store. You can see the news piece I did in tomorrow's paper. But this is a blog interview I did with Nokia Ireland's product manager, Eoin Cruise.

Ovi has come in for a lot of flak. Most is due to confusion over what Ovi is and also the (inevitable) usability comparisons with the iPhone. In fact, Ovi (which means "door" in Finnish) is supposed to be more than just Nokia's app store. It's supposed to be the entire portfolio of internet services, including a music store and an email service.

Nokia has an uphill struggle in establishing this in the consumption pattern of its users. What Apple (and, now, Android) offers is simple and effective. By comparison, what Nokia is trying to manufacture is a wider service that is capable of being run on over 40 of the 73 handsets it has in the Irish market. That's a lot of customisation and differing technical standards. In fairness to Nokia Ireland, it is doing its level best to try and get local developers interested. However, it is likely to remain an uphill struggle.

An Apple Store for Dublin? Yes, says Apple, but not saying when

So on the plane back from Vegas, I was seated beside a guy who’s a senior manager for Apple Stores in Europe. He’d been to CES. We got talking about various things (like most Apple staff, he had no clue about an upcoming iSlate). Eventually we moved on to the topic of Apple Stores. I had one question: why was there an Apple Store in Belfast, for crying out loud, but NOT one in Dublin? He explained that it wasn’t based on a preference for Belfast over Dublin. He said that it was simply a case of rolling out the stores across the UK first. To prove his point, he said that they had only just opened their first Apple Store in France -- a major market -- before Christmas.
Anyway, here’s the story: he said that Apple Retail would definitely be putting in a store (he actually used the word “stores”) in Dublin. He did not say when. But he did say that Apple is absolutely anal about picking the right location in any given city. He said that the company held out for over a year from opening a Paris store because it wanted to get the right high-profile venue. (It did: the Louvre.)
Naturally, I told him that there were any number of high profile venues becoming available in Dublin. But, applying Apple’s location criteria to our capital city, it could only be Grafton Street. I told him this. However, I explained to him that Grafton Street was very, very expensive to rent. He said that that wasn’t the most important factor.
“If you look at where we put our stores, worldwide, they’re in the most expensive streets and retail areas,” he said. “They’re designed with a lot of space left for people to meet staff and do things other than be overwhelmed by product. And still our stores are among the most profitable retail outlets in the world, per square foot.”
I can think of a good venue for an Apple Store: the old Habitat shop that straddles Dame Street and Suffolk Street. I don’t think it would pass muster with Apple, though. Although only a stone’s throw from Grafton Street, it’s not actually ON Grafton Street. And that’s the kind of detail that would sink a venue, judging by what my plane-friend was saying.
Obviously there's no way that Apple would officially comment one way or the other on the matter. It never, ever comments on “speculation“, as it calls such queries.

Why solar power for the masses may finally be on the way

The problem with solar power is that the conversion rate from light rays into electricity isn't high enough to make it economical on a mass-market basis. That could change, though, with Sharp's latest solar power processor. The Japanese giant -- which is by far the world's biggest solar manufacturer -- has come up with a chip that has a 35 per cent conversion ratio. That's way above what we've seen up to now.

I asked Sharp's Adrian Taylor (pictured below) at CES how long it would be until solar power was a mainstream option for ordinary people. Taylor also explained why cloudy conditions are often better for solar power than sunny conditions, and how Germany is actually the number one market for solar power in the world.

Interview: Adrian Taylor of Sharp Solar

Set Phazzers to stun: "non-lethal" stun weapons at CES

This is an extraordinary sales pitch from a CES exhibitor selling stun guns called Phazzers. They discharge up to 3,000 kilovolts of electricity into the target's body. As I spoke to this guy, he activated the stun guns in front of me. You can hear it clearly: ZZZTTT! I also love the way he introduces models "for ladies" -- in pink. They start at $299 direct to the public.

Podcast interview with stun-gun salesman

Here are some pics of the Phazzers. In two of them, he's firing them to show how they work.

 

It's important to note two things: (i) this guy was doing GREAT business at his stand. As I spoke to him, two different buyers came up and committed to orders. (ii) he says he's done a deal with someone in Ireland.

Meet the iPhone app that tells you whether your date is a known felon

Here's a quick interview at CES with a woman from a company called Intelius about its DateCheck iPhone app, which purportedly tells you whether the man (or woman) you intend to date is a) a felon or b) married.

Podcast: interview on Datecheck app

The app might also give you your date's home address, true job details and a host of other private information. How? By scraping a load of information from availabel social networks phone records and other sources.

It's free but starts to charge when you ask for privileged info, such as what crimes they've committed. Only in America.

To negate getting the wrong Sean Murphy or Nora O'Brien (presumably there are many), you can put in other information you might know about them, such an email address, a city or a phone number.

The Irish at CES: Ivan McDonald, CEO, Dial2Do

I stopped by to check on a couple of plucky Irish companies flying the flag at the world's biggest technology fair.

Here's a two-minute podcast interview with Ivan McDonald from Dial2Do on how he "wasn't allowed go" to the Adult Entertainment Expo occurring a short distance away.

Audio: Ivan McDonald, CEO, Dial2Do

Dial2Do is trying to get into the hands-free market with its voice-activated technology. It made an announcement about a partnership with Bluetrek.

CES reviews: Samsung's 3D television masterpiece

There are a lot of competing 3D TVs at this year's CES. In my view, the best of them was Samsung's 55 inch LED9000. Not only does the device show full 3D (and is capable of upscaling 2D ordinary TV to 3D), but it is 0.3 inches thick. That's the width of a pencil. If you don't believe me, look at this picture:

It also has a smart remote control that -- wait for it -- lets you watch a live TV stream on it while you're telling the main TV to do something else. If this all sounds a little like overkill, fair enough. But it's damn impressive in the flesh.

No word of a price yet for the Irish market. But expect something in the region of €2,500 to €3,000.

CES Reviews: Intel's Reader -- the ultimate cogging machine?

Intel had some excellent stuff on display this year. For me, its Reader is among the best of them. It's a gadget that photographs a printed page, recognises the text, creates a portable text file and reads it back to you. Or, if you want to simply transfer the text file to another device, it has a USB port ready to serve.

It's aimed at visually impaired people. But the possibilities for lazy students 'researching' essays is obvious. Simply get one of the course textbooks, deploy the Reader on it and mix the paragraphs up in the hope that your striking lecturer doesn't notice.

There are, naturally, a few drawbacks. One is that it only guaranteed to recognise printed serif fonts. The other is that it currently costs almost $1,500 (€1,150).

CES reviews: 20 hour external battery for MacBooks

Those of us who use MacBooks truly love them. But their battery life is not brilliant. My MacBook, for example, averages about 2.5 hours. An exhibitor company called HyperMac has an impressive battery life boost in its external devices. Its MacBook models range from matching what your battery gives you (x1) to an additional four times the battery life (x4). For the latest MacBook modes, which claim 5 hours battery life, that's a whopping 20 hours. They can be bought directly from HyperMac.com and pricing ranges from $200 (for the x1 model) to $500 (for the x4 model).

The company also has a range of smaller external battery packs aimed at iPhones and iPod Touches. Called the HyperMac Mini, these come in a range of colours and cost $150.

CES reviews: 2-hour solar charger for iPhone, iPod Touch

This is a really great product. It's from a new company called Novothink. It's an iPhone (or iPod Touch) shell that is coated on one whole side with solar energy cells. Once you put the iPhone or the iPod Touch in there, it will fully recharge the gadget -- from dead -- in two hours (at peak sunlight levels).

The iPhone or Touch will also work normally as it is charging. The gadget has no Irish distributor yet, but can be purchased directly from Novothink.com for $80 (about €50).

CES reviews: Sony's Dash (personal internet viewer)

I stopped by Sony's humongous stand earlier today. Like all the other big audio-visual companies, its big story was 3D TV. But it also had another gadget on offer: the Dash.

Sony calls this a "personal internet viewer". In English, that means a smallish (7 inch screen) device that connects to wi-fi (no Bluetooth) and has no memory, a modest processor and no higher ambition than delivering the kind of internet experience that an iPhone does. And the iPhone comparison is apt: the Dash will work using apps instead of URLs. So far, it has between 1,000 and 1,500 apps available (Sony won't say for sure). The apps are almost all created within the Chumby ecosystem. The gadget has a speaker built in and a USB port, so it will play back audio and video (such as a YouTube app or a network news app).

When Sony talks about the Dash, it keeps mentioning "the kitchen", "the weather" and "recipes". What it is really trying to say is that it is marketing this device principally at women.  To be fair to Sony, it is a very well priced gadget, at $200 (I don't have a European price yet). In the few minutes I had with it, I thought it was easy to use. I'll update this when I know its launch date in Ireland.

The girls of CES

No accurate portrayal of CES would be complete with out showing the hostesses deployed by the male-dominated industry to attract other males to their stands. It's not quite the meat market that, for example, a car show is, but some of the exhibitors go to considerable lengths.

3D TV at CES

Okay, so Samsung has laid it on here at CES with a 3D shovel. It joins Toshiba and Panasonic in pushing the format to boost margins and keep fresh innovation rolling.

Another reason to celebratae 3D, said the CEO of Dreamworkd, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was that it would deter piracy. How? Because of the amount of extra bandwidth needed to download and distribute it. I'm not so sure about that logic, but let's move on

As you can see below, I had a good gander at what it's all about. It definitely is proper 3D. Images come out at you.

Will it justify the purchase of a new €1,000 telly? Not on its own, is my view. More impressive are the advances in LED quality and slim design: Samsung's new LED9000 model is less than half an inch thick, as my picture, below, shows.

 

Only the fittest survive at CES

If you want to see a media scrum, come to CES. But be prepared to fight. Literally.

A Microsoft tablet laptop. (Again.)

Here's the first decent bit of anticipation for CES. According to The New York Times, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) will use his speech to us tonight to announce a new Microsoft touchscreen tablet, in partnership with HP.

If so, it will garner a lot of headlines, mainly because Apple is expected to launch its iSlate tablet later this month (on the 26th). But aside from the headlines, most people remember the old tablet, based on XP. It was basically just a modified laptop. This is going to have to be a hell of a lot more compelling.