Archives for February 2009

Carol Bartz, the new CEO at Yahoo, clearly doesn't believe in letting the grass grow under her feet. Six weeks into the job, and she has taken the axe to some of the top execs at the internet portal in order to turn the business around.

For most of this week speculation has been rife about an announcement that would result in a major shake up at the top end of the company. Well that has now come to pass.

Being given the order of the boot, or I should say, resigning is chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen, who just a few weeks ago sat by Ms Bartz's side during the company's earning's announcement. And just yesterday he was shilling for Yahoo at the Goldman Sachs Technology conference in San Francisco and talking about the door still being open to a search deal with Microsoft.

I was intrigued to learn that he was getting paid a salary of $500,000 (£352,000) according to the company's most recent disclosures about exec compensation.

Also leaving is Yahoo's mobile lead Marco Boerries who has family back in Germany.

Neeraj Khemlani, who ran the news and information division is jumping ship to Hearst. That's the same company that owns the San Francisco Chronicle which faces the prospect of being shut down because of financial losses of $50m (£35m).

Ms Bartz has also done a bit of streamlining at the top and slimmed down the confusing hierarchy. I for one have always been lost on who does what because there seemed to be so many execs and a myriad of management layers that all appeared very similar.

A few top names are being given a big bump up under the new regime. Chief technology officer Ari Balogh, whom I have met a few times and strikes me as a very cool guy with an easy manner, has been made head of all products.

Hilary Schneider who runs the advertising side of things, and who seems to me to be one very capable lady, is now head of North America. An international head is still to be appointed.

And in terms of getting the word out on the street, especially Wall Street I suspect, there is a new marketing head in the shape of Elisa Steele who comes from NetApp, where Ms Bartz is also a board member.

The boss of HR is a guy called David Windley who previously worked in HR for Microsoft. Mmmm? Sorry, I am just being mischievous because so many people who work and have worked at Yahoo have also worked at Microsoft and vice versa.

There is to be a new head of customer advocacy to "help us better hear the voice of the customer" said the new CEO.

It seems Ms Bartz has embraced the role of chief blogger with her blog entitled "Getting our house in order." In her post, she wrote "People here have impressed the hell out of me. There's so much great energy and frankly lots of optimism. But there's also plenty that has bogged this company down.

"So today I'm rolling out a new management structure that I will believe will make Yahoo a lot faster on its feet. For you using Yahoo! every day it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, 'Wow'," wrote Ms Bartz.

Analyst reaction was mixed with Ross Sandler of RBC Capital Markets noting that: "This is what Carol did at Autodesk. That's one of her biggest strengths and why she was brought in."

However Barclays analyst Dough Anmuth said he is: "Increasingly concerned about Yahoo's thinning management ranks and about who internally will help guide new CEO Bartz as she moves deeper into the internet space and soon makes critical strategic decisions for the company."

Investors though seemed to like the changes with shares closing at $12.98 (£9.14), up 50 cents or 4% on a day when most stock indexes were down.

As a sidebar, I should note that the BBC also benefits from Yahoo's shake up. John Linwood, who left his senior executive role at Yahoo last month, will join the corporation as its new CTO, a new role at the BBC, starting in April.

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I've just come off the phone with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who has been explaining a little more about the changes taking place at the social network, which are designed to "democratise" how the website behaves and operates in the future.

"Openness", "transparency" and "dialogue" were the three words he used more than any other in the course of my five-minute slot with him.

Facebook has responded quickly and boldly to what Zuckerberg himself called a "firestorm" from users after the firm had made changes to its terms of services without informing any of its users.

"We should have been communicating more broadly. Being as transparent as possible is a really valuable thing," said Mr Zuckerberg in relation to that recent controversy.

"We made a few mistakes," he admitted.

Some people might be wondering what the fuss is exactly about? After all, nobody ever reads the terms and conditions or terms of service documents on a website.

And that is part of the issue. As more and more of our lives are shifting to the network and as we hand over increasingly huge chunks of personal data to faceless websites important questions have to be asked about what happens to that information.

Social networks are becoming a mirror to not just our public lives but also to our private lives. And there is huge value in what we are reflecting on those sites - both to ourselves and to advertisers.

Organisations like Privacy International are asking the important questions about how that data is being handled and what rights we have as users once we sign up to services.

During the most recent controversy, Simon Davies from the privacybody accused Facebook of a "breach of faith".

He is now applauding the move to democratise decision-making within Facebook and calling on others to follow suit.

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In the last couple of days, I've talked to three people about the future of music - the head of digital at the world's biggest music label, a very wired music consumer, and an executive at a fast growing new streaming service. I asked them all the same thing - will the arrival of that new service Spotify change the music industry?

Unsurprisingly, Roberta Maley from Spotify was convinced that this was a game-changer, not just another me-too service. She did give me some new figures on its growth - 250,000 UK subscribers, 800,000 worldwide, with Sweden and Spain the biggest markets.

But she was less forthcoming about two vital issues for the future of the company - the split between those who listen to the ad-supported service for free and those who pay for an ad-free service, and the possibility that users could listen on the move. Spotify is keen to have a "mixed economy" with new arrivals drawn in by the free service then migrating to the £9.99 per month subscription deal to avoid the ads.

Right now you only hear one thirty second advert every twenty minutes, as compared with 12 to 14 minutes per hour on commercial radio, but Spotify plans an increase to two and a half minutes per hour soon. The trick will be to have enough advertising to make some money and convince existing users it is worth upgrading to the premium service - but not enough to put off those trying out Spotify for the first time. Roberta wouldn't confirm the story that Spotify is working on an iPhone application - I understand some work has been done, but mobile music is still some way off.

Rob Wells is Senior Vice President, Digital, for Universal International - in other words he is in charge of making sure the world's biggest music business finds a way to prosper in a digital age which has so far been pretty disastrous for his industry. When we spoke over a Skype connection to Los Angeles, he seemed pretty enthusiastic about Spotify - but keen to put it in the context of a whole range of new services, such as Nokia's Comes With Music and Sky's upcoming broadband service. He says consumers are changing, "away from the per-transaction model, where they buy a body of work, and into a subscription model where they pay for access to all music. That subscription could be bundled into the cost of a mobile phone contract or a broadband connection."

He was obviously keener that Spotify users upgrade to the premium service - the labels earn a bigger share of the revenue that way - but was also hoping that a free service would wean music fans off the file-sharing habit. "The consumers are already familiar with not paying for their music when they download it off the internet. So we have to do more and more interesting deals to make them listen to music in a legitimate format where we earn revenue."

But it is Dan Moon whose views really matter. He is the very model of a modern music fan. He has put all his CDs away, and has about 30Gb of music stored on his laptop, which he streams over his wireless network to an amplifier and then to a pair of big speakers in his attic flat in London's Maida Vale. But he has also started using Spotify, mainly to explore some new music rather than listen to stuff he already knows.

Dan says he used to go to file-sharing sites when he was a teenager - but now prefers to buy his music in the form of downloads from iTunes to be sure of a quality product. He's not entirely sure whether Spotify will kill file-sharing: "If I were a heavy file-sharer, there would be a pull on the usability front. Spotify looks nice, quite pretty, while file-sharing is a bit laborious." But he says it's difficult to beat the likes of Limewire on one front: "There isn't a better model than free - with file-sharing there's no adverts either." And the fact that he can't take his Spotify music with him is another downside: "When I'm on the tube there's no Spotify. I'm quite tethered to my laptop. It's not portable."

Spotify won't change the music industry on its own - and still has to prove it can attract both a big crowd and a lot more advertisers. But, along with a host of other new services, its arrival does seem to herald a change in the way we view music. Rob Wells of Universal thinks the fact that his industry has cut deals with the likes of Spotify shows that it has turned a corner: "These new deals show that the industry is maturing, the market is maturing and consumers are willing to pay for music."

Maybe. But let's wait and see what happens with the new U2 album, "No Line on the Horizon", so important to the revenues of Universal. You can stream it on Spotify, you can pay for a CD or download - or you can go and get it from a file-sharing site for nothing. The choices music fans make will show whether an ailing industry really has found a profitable way forward.

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Microsoft's Xbox project has long been seen as not just an attempt to own the console space but also to act as a Trojan horse, putting a device at the heart of the digital living room.

Ever since the first console launched it has come replete with multimedia features - from DVD and CD playback to sharing and extending content from Windows Media Centre and then Windows Vista PCs.

The Xbox has also been at the forefront of the digital delivery world, offering movies and video content over the network.

Today Microsoft announced a new partner to its Xbox Live service in the UK - NBC Universal movie are a welcome addition given the relatively limited range of content the service offers, particularly in comparison to the US version.

But have all the billions of dollars of investment and roll out of content partners been worth the effort?

Microsoft won't say how many movies have been downloaded in the UK over Xbox Live.

Neil Thompson, head of Xbox in the UK, told me: "We are certainly the biggest VOD service in front of the TV in the UK."

But that statement is being based on the number of users of Xbox Live in the UK and the size of the movie portfolio - and the statement doesn't include movie on demand services from Sky because Microsoft don't think they are comparable technologies.

Whatever the figure, the amount of movies going from the service to the screen is likely to be much lower than the video on demand viewings of movies on a subscription service like Sky or Virgin.

But Microsoft is a sizeable player in the European video on demand market, in part because it is a nascent sector.

Nick Thomas, an analyst with Forrester research, told me: "Xbox Live has been pretty smart and slick in building this service and developing the install base."

The difficulty for Microsoft is that the on demand video space is changing dramatically and it is facing increasing pressure from set-top boxes, web-based catch-up TV services and other network-enabled video on demand services.

Mr Thomas from Forrester said: "The onus is clearly on Virgin and Sky to see what they can do with there existing PVR user base."

According to Forrester Research, in the short and medium term, standalone OTT VOD offers will become increasingly available in Europe. OTT VOD basically means devices dedicated to delivering video on demand, such as Apple TV.

And the pressure is not just from hardware manufacturers - the BBC is working with BT to deliver a set of IPTV standards that could pave the way for future services.

Adobe is pushing the Open Screen Project and Yahoo is partnering with TV firms to bridge the divide between the network and the television.

At the moment the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are two of the best solutions to bridge the gap but they could find themselves competing with networked TVs and smarter set-top boxes that come with network connections as standard.

The BBC's deal with Virgin to deliver the iPlayer to a set-top box shows that web applications can find their way to the TV screen without too much hassle for the consumer and without forcing them to buy more hardware.

Mr Thompson said the addition of NBC Universal was a "broadening" of the range of content Xbox Live offers and another step in its evolution into the being the multimedia device of choice.

The success of incorporating Netflix onto Xbox Live in the US - with 1.5 billion minutes of TV and films streamed in just three months - shows just how crucial widening the portfolio and range of viewing options on the service is for the platform.

Yet there is still no sign of the iPlayer or catch-up TV services on Xbox Live, despite the fact the BBC's technology is now on the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii, as well as Virgin.

Mr Thompson said the iPlayer was "not on the slate" and "the question we have to ask is what is unique? A lot of people are accessing it through their PCs".

The very ubiquity of the iPlayer is perhaps making it less attractive to Microsoft.

But Microsoft has a number of advantages over set top box firms, Mr Thomas told me. It has a built-in user base - primarily gamers - and it has a box which can be constantly upgraded through software.

"The ability to upgrade the black box is crucial as this is a fast moving market," he said.

And Mr Thompson hinted the evolution of the Xbox 360 will continue in the coming 12 months.

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So how many of you have been playing QuakeLive over the last few days? Given that tens thousands of people have been waiting in virtual queues to play the game I would say a fair few.

The relaunch of a 10-year-old video game inside a web browser is not just a chance to wallow in some nostalgia, but also a strong pointer to the direction in which the video games industry is heading, and a potential herald of the future of rich internet media on many types of devices.

Accessible, with a low barrier to entry, both for the developers and gamers, and above all delivered digitally - QuakeLive is at the phalanx of a growing wave of web-only games.

Raph Koster, the highly-regarded creator of Ultima Online and a respected games commentator, knows a thing or two about the industry and changes that are afoot.

"We are rapidly approaching a place where you can deliver gaming experiences in the browser comparable to consoles a generation or two ago," he tells me.

Inside the browser games are now throwing about a few thousands polygons on screen, using texture maps for increased detail, and shaders for more realistic lighting.

And behind this development is the rise and rise of an application that could one day monopolise the gaming, browsing and connected media world: Flash.

"The ubiquity of Flash is driving these developments. It's installed on about 98 to 99% of all computers, what means there is a virtual army of developers working on Flash.

"There are far more flash developers than there are game developers."

He added: "Flash is the new console. I call it the next, next-generation."

Flash has become the defacto standard for the vast majority of web media content and is beginning to be deployed on almost every computer device in circulation from computers, to smartphones, consoles and set-top boxes.

Adobe, the creator of Flash, is aggressively pushing the standard and has formed the Open Screen Project in order to deliver rich internet experiences across almost any device.

Mr Koster says: "Adobe wants to be the default rendering layer for everything from a phone's user interace, to cable channel selection and the actual content.

"Given their dominance in other areas and the quantity of content being produced they are in very, very strong position. Others have noticed, which is why Microsoft is pushing Silverlight hard."

He adds: "This is a battle outside of games that has lot of impact on games."

For the games industry in the short to medium term it means a continued explosion in the growth of casual gaming and an increasing sophistication around browser game experiences.

"Right now Flash is rendering in high-end 2D, equivalent to games like Diablo (from 1997)," says Mr Koster.

"There are a few 3D engines out there - Papervision, Alternativa and Away3D - and they are developing rapidly.

"They are surprisingly good and are all built on top of Flash."

Games like QuakeLive, says Mr Koster, are delivering the "eye candy" for browser games, which can persuade the mainstream gamer to take a look.

"One of the significant lessons of the last few years that some people knew and that others had to learn the hard way is that it's not about texture mapping and polygons.

"It's not just about graphics. The games industry is littered with the corpses of pretty games that didn't play well."

Flash and browser games are enabling start-ups to dip a toe into the industry and overturn the traditional business model.

Mr Koster says: "Boxed games require a massive infrastructure around retail, marketing and guaranteed day one sales.

"Web distribution is about marketing to hundreds of millions of people and getting a percentage of them to pay and betting more will pay."

Mr Koster says there is a gradual recognition among large publishers, developers and the console hardware markers that the boxed retail model is not where they want to be.

"Many factors are pushing that; it is a hit driven business and so day one has to be good, because day two never as good as day one."

This model pushes the industry towards more sequels because they have a guaranteed pre-sold audience.

It is that stifling business model that is leading the games industry to explore avenues such as browser games, as well as services such as Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo's Virtual Console.

Well-known games publisher Atari has committed itself to 90% digital distribution within a few years while Valve's Steam delivery platform is signing up big names at an impressive rate, with Final Fantasy creator Square Enix and Everquest developer Sony Online among the new names on the roster.

The shift to the network - both in terms of delivery of content and at the end of point of the experience itself - is touching every aspect of the media industry and for video gamers it means a lot more fun in a browser near you soon.

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A few bloggers have picked up on my speed tests of the 50Mbps connection I have been carrying out and have carried on the debate.

At Net Strategics Stuart Newstead said:

The blog shows that the advertised headline speed is fairly irrelevant to the actual experience of an average customer, even when the provider can actually deliver such speeds reliably within the confines of their own network.

I agree. While many of the benchmark tests and real world tests I carried out reached close to the advertised maximum speed, the most important aspect of all was the sense of speed and the appreciation that tasks which once took an age were now happening must faster.

At Fibre to the Home blog Cybersavvy noted:

His very first sentence is wrong. He is only one of the broadband elite in the UK!! Far too many other countries' consumers would think 50Mbps/1.5Mbps is not a particularly great connection in 2009....

That may be true of countries like South Korea but as Professor Leonard Waverman's Connectivity Scorecard recently showed the UK "is one of the
few countries in which a mainstream incumbent operator offers 50 Mbps services. "

Over at Fibre Revolution Fibre Guy remarks,

Does the quality of the link degrade over time? It's a sad reality of network that they're super cool when they're (comparatively) empty and get really bad when new customers join.

I'll certainly be keeping a regular eye on the connection speed.

And finally, ISP Review gave a welcome nod to the tests on the site. Thanks for the link.

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You will struggle to find a happy shopkeeper right now - but I've just met one. His name is Eric, and he has good reason to be contented. After all his store only opened in July last year, but has already sold 500 million products, and its deal with its suppliers means it gets 30% of the revenues. And as the store is in cyberspace, it is cheap to run and most of that revenue is profit.

I'm talking, of course, about Apple's App Store, which has created a whole new industry of mobile application developers. Yes, I know that Nokia and Windows Mobile users have been able to install applications on their phones for years - but the figures show that it was only the arrival of the iPhone which sparked real interest from both users and developers.

The company called me in to the Apple Store on London's Regent Street to meet Eric Jue. His title is "Senior Product Manager for iPhone", which I think means he minds the Apps Store. Eric was keen to give me a sneak preview of some upcoming applications - all of them games, which apparently account for 25% of downloads.

They included Sway, where you climb across a wall until you fall off, and Zen Bound, where you wrap a rope around a 3D object and paint it different colours. "Why?, I asked. "It's a game - it's a zen thing", came the answer. I was more impressed by something called WordFu, a sort of cross between Boggle and Scrabble, in which you race to make words in two minutes, and can play against a friend if you both happen to have an iPhone on the same wireless network.

All of these were relatively simple affairs made by tiny firms, with a handful of staff. But businesses like the games giant EA are also weighing in. Eric Jue showed me a version of their Tiger Woods golf game, due for release in the summer, with some pretty stunning graphics, evidence that the iPhone is being taken seriously as a gaming platform.

I'd come armed with questions about some notable gaps on the shelves of the apps store from users and developers who wondered whether Apple was deliberately blocking admission to some ideas. For instance, where are the sat-nav applications? Google maps doesn't really quite do the trick if you're driving because there is no voice guide. Will Apple allow music services like Spotify to offer mobile applications, risking iTunes sales? And does Apple make it easier for big developers to get their applications through than the smaller developers?

Eric Jue insisted that any idea was welcome, as long as it met Apple's terms and conditions - only something that might seriously offend would be refused. He said there was a level playing field. "Everybody has the same tools - whether you're a bedroom developer or you're EA Sports with a big budget. The public decides whether it's a success or not."

Among the biggest successes are the Ocarina, which turns the iPhone into a musical instrument and has reaped big profits for its creators, who include a Stanford professor of computing and music. But is it really that easy to make your fortune from mobile phone apps? Not according to two British developers.

Jeremy Rayner, who describes himself as a "hobby" developer says he developed his game "Rabbit Run" on his train commute from Hastings to his day job in London. It sells for £1.19 and after Apple's 30% and the tax is deducted, he ends up with 50p. "Initially, I got about 30 downloads a day, but that's now down to about one a day." So an income of 50p a day? "Yes, but that's 50p I didn't have before." Mr Rayner says he's glad to get on the same platform as giant firms, but does wonder a little how he might promote his game a bit better.

Riccardo Ettore has been developing Apple software for more than 20 years, but again he does it in his spare time from his job as an IT administrator. He has a range of iPhone apps, including Big Ben, which puts the famous clock face onto the phone, and - perhaps more useful - Tapit4me, a so-called snippet expander which allows you to tap out whole words from abbreviations, making it quicker to use the iPhone's touch keyboard.

Mr Ettore says it's getting harder, not easier to make money, as the field gets more crowded." In the early days people just downloaded anything. My first application, a xylophone, got 200 downloads on its first day." He thought Big Ben was going to be a big money spinner when a free version was downloaded 3000 times in a couple of days, but when he started charging 59p, just 20 people a day thought it worth paying. "What seems to be happening is that most people expect all applications to be free," he laments. "You hear all these incredible stories like Ocarina, but it's like buying a lottery ticket."

Still, both of these hobbyists seem happy enough to keep on churning out applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch for little or no return. And Apple is even happier - all those tiny amounts earned by the "long tail" of App Store developers add up to a big fat profit for the shopkeeper. And even if users gradually decide that most apps are not worth paying for, Apple will have succeeded in getting a lot of software which makes the iPhone more useable for nothing.

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Chris Shipley has been called everything from a "Woman of Distinction" to one of the "Top 10 Minds in Small Business."

Chris Shipley has been called everything from a "Woman of Distinction" to one of theOutside of the Valley, her name may not be as familiar as other top females executives like Meg Whitman, Carol Bartz or Carly Fiorina. But her influence is just as impressive.

For the last 13 years she has been responsible for bringing more than 1,500 new products to market including Java and Palm Pilot . Every year she meets with more than 500 companies before whittling that number down to a handful who are invited to launch at DEMO,which is regarded as a major launch pad for start-ups.

Over the years some of those products and companies put under the spotlight have included BitGravity, Green Plug, LeapFrog Enterprises, Six Apart, Trend Micro, NASA Ames Research, Handspring, Autonomy and Mobio.

While the companies might not be household names, in the industry these starts-ups get tagged as the ones to watch and often end up being acquired by others. For example Homestead Technologies was bought by Intuit for $170m, CISCO bought Ironport for $830m and HP purchased Bitfone for an undisclosed sum.

Next year will be Ms Shipley's last running the conference, and later on Wednesday I will get the opportunity to sit down with her and talk to her about her years at the helm.

While I have my own thoughts about what I want to ask her, I figured this was a great opportunity to find out if you have any questions for the woman who has been at the centre of the start-up world for so many years.

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Want to know what the boffins at Microsoft are up to? Well, every year Microsoft's Research Labs around the world open up to demonstrate some of the more exciting technologies they are exploring.

Forty technologies from the many hundreds the firm is working on are shown to Microsoft employees first hand in Redmond, Washington, at the annual TechFest.

According to Microsoft, technologies shown at TechFest "have found their way into Live Search, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, digital media technologies and other products".

Among the tech on show this year is a tool that enables small videos from devices like mobile phones to be "stitched" together into one higher-resolution video in real time (see photo above).

Also shown was an in-car dialogue technology called Commute UX, which is designed to let drivers ask natural language questions of entertainment and diagnostic systems.

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A number of readers of this blog and my Twitter followers were kind enough to suggest different ways to test our 50Mbps cable broadband connection, as part of a Speed Diary I've been carrying out over the last week.

So here they are. I should also point out that I performed all of these tests over a wireless connection. They would have been faster over an Ethernet connection.

Try using a download manager and downloading a file from ftp.virginmedia.com then uploading it to /incoming

There are a number of game demo files sitting on the Virgin FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site and I was able to easily saturate the downstream speeds getting very close to the 50Mbps upper limit. Each of the five files I simultaneously downloaded was coming down at almost 1.0MB per second.

On the upload site I was getting around 1Mbps.

Two readers suggested downloading some TV programmes via BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay. One reader said: "In the name of journalistic research and only to watch Beeb programs of course."

Given the current court case against The Pirate Bay going on in the Swedish courts, it is probably not a good career move to be downloading any unauthorised content via The Pirate Bay, even material from my own employer without permission.

So I used LegalTorrents.com to download some video files covered under a Creative Commons license for free distribution.

A 900MB file being shared by 25 peers on BitTorrent came down the pipe at about 400 to 500KBps in about 40 minutes. In my experience the more seeders there are on BitTorrent sharing a file, the quicker it tends to arrive so a more popular file would have been downloaded faster.

A number of users suggested downloading files from news servers, such as Giganews and the Virgin Media news server

News servers pre-date the World Wide Web and are both text discussion boards and a method of distributing large files, often it has to be said copied movies, TV programmes and music. But there are also game demos, and copyright-free material to be found.

The advantage of news servers over tools like BitTorrent is speed. Most providers of news servers have incredibly quick connections and downloading files is often only limited by the speed of your own broadband connection.

I downloaded a 350MB file from both GigaNews and the news server operated by Virgin Media. The file downloaded via GigaNews came down the pipe at between 4MB per second 4.2MB per second, which is pretty much the top end of my connection speed.

The Virgin Media news server was a little bit slower - with a minimum of 1MB per second and a maximum of 3.9MB per second.

How about a download of a large game/demo on a console?

So how quickly can you download files from a service like Xbox Live? I selected the demo of strategy game Halo Wars to download, a file over 1GB in size.

The demo was downloaded and playing on my Xbox 360 in under eight minutes.

What are the speeds like when e-mailing high resolution images, such as 50MB photos?

It is very difficult to find a mail service that will accept files as big as 50MB, and it is probably more advisable to use FTP, BitTorrent or a file transfer service like YouSendIt, or SendThisFile.

Google Mail accepts attachments up to 20MB in size. I sent two JPGs of about 8MB in size each using Google's mail service. The files left my outbox within five minutes.

How about streaming video on 2-3 clients simultaneously? Can it cope?

I wrote about this last week. To recap: I streamed the BBC's iPlayer across three machines with little difficulty but as soon as I threw in some background downloads of large files then the picture started to stutter on one of the machines.

Try Xbox 360 racing games, not FPS. Try hosting Forza 2 session with maximum racers.

Last week I used the connection to play some First Person Shooter games with some mixed results. I don't have a copy of Forza 2 but I do have a copy of Project Gotham Racing 4. I hosted a number of races and all of the gamers in my session reported the session was lag free.

Schedule daily speed tests and record the results over time to see if, as the success of the service increases the quality does not decrease (something that has often been seen in cable broadband).

Virgin says there is no bandwidth throttling on the connection of users of its 50Mbps service - something that is not true of its other connection speeds.

I took readings of the connection speed from a number of different measurement tools across the week and found there was a slight variance in the speed.

On wired connections, the tests revealed that the speeds varied from 36Mbps to 48Mbps over the period.

On wireless connections - once I had fixed my router issues - the speeds varied between 25Mbps and 46Mbps during the week.

There was one reader request that I was not able to help with, however.

Could you download the internet for me and put it on a CD please?

I think I draw the line at that test.

Finally, having the luxury of a 50Mbps service has reminded me how much has changed in term of connection speeds in the last 25 years that I have been online.

I stumbled across my first ever modem recently - a Commodore 64 Communications modem that I used to connect to Compunet when I was a teenager.

This was a 1200/75 baud modem which means, if I've got my calculations right, that the maximum downstream speed I could have reached was about 1Kbps.

That means that I had been using that modem today and tried to download the Halo Wars demo - it would have taken about 97 days to download, rather than the eight minutes on the 50Mbps connection.

I think it is safe to say that we have made some great leaps in terms of internet connection speeds over the last 25 years.

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Children's charities are accusing the government and the internet service providers of a failure to ensure that all domestic broadband users cannot get access to sites showing child abuse images. This is a battle over the merits of self-regulation versus legislation.

But it's also another row over the Internet Watch Foundation, the charity which has been acting as a self-appointed - if widely supported - policeman of child abuse sites for many years. Last December the IWF was widely criticised for blocking a Wikipedia page about the 1976 Scorpions' album Virgin Killer because it featured a naked young girl. The IWF quickly reversed that decision - but web libertarians saw the incident as evidence of internet "regulation creep".

The big ISPs all use the IWF's list of banned sites, which is updated twice a day after the charity's staff examine questionable sites reported to them by members of the public. The process, as we discovered during the Wikipedia row, is automatic. Once the ISPs have signed up to the list, then whenever their users click on any link, that URL is checked against their list, and customers get a "website not found" error message if there is a match.

But why has a minority decided to opt out - or rather not opt in? The Internet Service Providers Association told me that cost was an issue - the system was potentially probitively expensive for smaller ISPs to implement, in particular those that mainly served business customers with just a few domestic users. I'm still not clear why that should be the case and indeed the one company I've spoken to which doesn't use the list cites completely different reasons.

That company was Zen Internet, a small Rochdale-based ISP with a reputation for great customer service (in the interests of full disclosure, I'm a customer). They provided me with this statement: "Zen Internet has not yet implemented IWF's recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness. Our Managing Director, Richard Tang, is going to meet Peter Robbins the Chief Executive of the IWF to discuss these concerns."

I was also pointed towards the work of Dr Richard Clayton, a Cambridge computer scientist who has been a long-term critic of aspect of the Internet Watch Foundation's work. He has written at length about technical aspects of the blocking system - but his overall conclusion is that the blacklist is just a waste of time. Why? Because most of this material is held abroad and the IWF is ineffective about getting it removed.

He told me that, if the aim was to stop people coming across these images by accident, then the system was a failure because that didn't happen anyway: "This material tends to be held on paid-for sites or is held by people who don't publish it to the world because they don't want to get arrested."

Dr Clayton's view is that the big ISPs use the system because they've been pressured to adopt it, but smaller firms are perfectly justified in opting out. "Everybody thinks they've done something by blocking this stuff but in practice it makes very little difference to who sees it and it's quite expensive."

For its part, the Internet Watch Foundation says it has neither the powers nor the resources to act as a global policeman. The charity says the only real solution is to remove the offending material at its source - but it insists that its list is part of a "layered approach" which can disrupt the activities of the child pornography merchants and protect innocent users.

The charities want the government to get heavy with the 5% of ISPs who are refusing to adopt the Internet Watch Foundation list. "The idea that blocking child pornography is an optional extra we do not accept," one charity official told me. "It is technically possible and should be counted as the cost of doing business in the United Kingdom." But Richard Clayton suspects that a mood of realism has infected ministers, who will be satisfied with 95% compliance by the broadband providers: "The government has seen sense," he told me, "and has decided that legislation is inappropriate."

It would be hard to find anyone who thinks that blocking access to images of child abuse is a bad idea. But getting agreement on how to set about that task is a whole lot harder.

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When you are playing an online First Person Shooter, such as Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3, stop amidst the chaos for a moment and think about all the different things going on inside that space.

Every bullet being fired has a specific trajectory that could affect a number of different players. And there could be hundreds, perhaps thousands of bullets, flying through the air at any moment.

Grenades, rocket lauchers, laser rifles, the smack on the back of a head with a rifle butt - all of this information has to pass back and forth between some, if not all, of the online players.

You would be forgiven for thinking that many megabytes of data are being swapped from player to player each second during the game. But in fact it is much, much less than that.

What is more important in FPS online games is latency, which is the delay betwen sending data and receiving data between the client and the server. The longer the round trip takes, the more problems you are going to have and you'll probably encounter lag.

Lag is the curse of all online gamers as you experience a delay between your actions and the responses of others, and vice versa. What it means is that you can be shooting someone with 100% accuracy but by the time your bullet reaches them their character is long since gone. Or you can be shot even before you ever knew a bullet had been fired.

When playing online video games one computer typically is the server, hosting the game and responsible for sending clients only necessary information and maintaining the game continuity.

In Massively Multiplayer Online games the server is typically owned and maintained by the creator of the game to provide security, reliability and persistance in the gaming world.

But in FPS titles, often one of the gamers is the server, while the other players are the clients. On services like Xbox Live, the game detects the player with the best connection and selects him or her as the host, or server. In some titles you can elect to be host and be the server of the game.

The nature of the client/server model means that the weakest link in the web of connections can have a detrimental effect on everyone playing.

So how much data is flying back and forth?

An upload speed of a few hundred kilobits per second is enough to host a game of around six players. The faster your upload speed as host, and those of your fellow gamers, the better your experience playing online games will be.

But it is not quite that cut and dried. Earlier I mentioned latency, and it is that delay between sending data and receiving data that can make all the difference when playing online.

Latency, or ping, is determined by more than just upload and download speeds.

The distance data has to travel is one factor, and the speed of light is the ultimate barrier, while delays as data moves through routers on the internet is another.

For an online FPS a latency of less than 100 milliseconds is an absolute must. According to Bungie, the developers of Halo 3, the average latency between host and client playing their game is around 80-100ms, which is around three frames of action in the actual online world.

But even with less than 100ms latency there are still issues, because that three frame delay can mean the difference between life and death for some gamers as the bullets fly.

I mention all of this because I'm currently testing a 50Mbps broadband connection, with 1.5Mbps upstream. On the face of it, those kinds of speed mean I should have no problems playing and hosting online games, like Halo 3.

And when I was playing a game on my Xbox 360 while my wife surfed the net on her laptop, the experience remained smooth and lag free.

Virgin Broadband is advertising the fact that the speed of the connection gives consumers enough bandwidth to share among family members doing many different tasks.

But it is not quite that simple, however.

I ran into some lag problems when hosting a game of Call of Duty 4. But my wife wasn't also surfing the net, she was watching video on her laptop being streamed from a Slingbox plugged into our wireless network.

The Slingbox was not using any of the broadband connection merely the bandwidth of the router. And because my Xbox 360 was also hardwired into the router, and a 802.11n router with plenty of bandwidth, I had assumed there would be no problem.

Yet there was a problem and it was possibly related to the Slingbox and the router. I asked my followers on Twitter and there were a number of different explanations - all of them feasible.

With my router streaming video wirelessly at more than 2,000kbps, while also handling traffic from my Xbox 360 the problem could have been on the hardware side dealing with the different traffic from the two sources.

Or it could have been an issue with latency somewhere out there on the internet beyond my control.

Luckily the problem didn't persist, not least because my wife stopped using the Slingbox.

My point is - when 16 players are exchanging thousands of bullets, every second counts and even a small climb in latency can have an impact.

Remember that the next time you curse your high-speed internet connection.

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I'm not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was jet-lagged, having stepped off a flight from Los Angeles that morning into a punishing schedule of interviews and the launch of a new mobile offering. Then I arrived to interview him for radio - and to point a video camera at him for this blog:

I spent half an hour suggesting that MySpace just wasn't cool any more. To his credit, he didn't lose his cool - just kept on insisting I was wrong to suggest that he'd been left standing by Facebook.

There are all sorts of ways of comparing the audiences of social networking sites. I quoted Nielsen figures, showing that Facebook's global users now numbered 110 million, compared with the 83 million using MySpace. Chris DeWolfe punched back with figures showing MySpace had 76 million US users and 135 million worldwide, but the number he was really keen on was one from Comscore showing the average MySpace user in the US spent 266 minutes on the site each month, around 100 minutes more than Facebook users. But whatever you think of Nielsen or Comscore the trend seems clear - Facebook has been gaining on MySpace, particularly outside the US, and looks to be the social network with momentum behind it.

Ah, but here's the key difference, according to Mr De Wolfe - MySpace makes money. Good point. From the start, the site was focussed on profits and once it joined Rupert Murdoch's News Corp stable, telling the boss it was all about eyeballs, not the bottom line, was never going to wash. So MySpace's CEO says it has been profitable throughout its history - and he reckons it is the only social network making money. In its most recent results, however, News Corp reported a drop in revenues from the division which includes MySpace, blaming it partly on the cost of launching the social network's new music offering.

Like almost every Web 2.0 company, MySpace depends almost entirely on advertising for revenues and, whatever anyone said a few months ago, online advertising isn't recession-proof. "It's certainly got softer" was how Chris DeWolfe described the advert market, but maintained that his business was holding up better than others.

Fashion, however, is everything in this area. The first social network to take off in the UK was Friends Reunited, which ITV bought for £120 million in 2005, when it was already going out of fashion, and is now apparently trying to offload for a lot less. I'm too old to tell whether MySpace has lost the cool factor but a teenager of my acquaintance was pretty forthright in his verdict: "It's dead. Nobody I know uses it any more."

But at least it discovered a business model before the bad times came - unlike some networks that are seeing tremendous growth in traffic but have precious little revenue to show for it. As Chris DeWolfe said, gathering himself for a punchy soundbite at the end of our radio interview: "Time will tell whether they can figure out how to make money - we have."

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I was planning to write this post while connected to my 50Mbps broadband pipe but I have had to shift to my ADSL connection because of continued problems accessing the net over wireless. My topic was going to be online gaming but a few technical issues got in the way.

I should stress that this ongoing problem with wi-fi is not related to the 50Mbps service. When connected via Ethernet I am consistently getting speeds of about 45Mbps downstream.

This is a problem which highlights the vagaries of wireless networks. I'm sure everyone reading this has had a problem with a wi-fi network at some point and so my tale of woe will be pretty familiar.

Even though I can connect to the net my speeds are very unpredictable and even casual browsing has become painful.

"Looking up", "Waiting for" and "Connecting to" have become the by-words of my experience as my browser struggles to load websites.

However, if I were to do a Speed Test (assuming I can load the website) it reports back that I'm getting speeds of between 15Mbps and 30Mbps - more than enough to enjoy lightning fast web surfing, even if it is well below what I should be getting at the upper limit.

So what is the problem? When it comes to wireless there are so many potential issues that can affect your connection speed and experience:

• Other wireless networks on channels close to your router
• Interference from other devices operating in the 2.4Ghz range - from cordless telephones to microwave ovens
• Thick walls in an old house can block or slow speeds
• Mis-configuration of the router
• A low-spec computer

I've ensured none of those issues are the cause in this particular case. But experience with wireless routers and similar problems over the years with dropped connections and slow speeds lead me to believe that sometimes wireless networks have a mind of their own and just refuse to work.

Hardly a scientific explanation then, but before I throw in the towel completely I will be swapping in a different router, albeit an identical model, and finding out if my laptops have a problem.

If there's a lesson from all of this - and I sincerely hope I'll fix the problem - it is that any connection you have, be it ADSL, ADSL2+ or cable, is only as fast as the weakest point on your network.

I may have a fantastically fat broadband pipe right up to my door but if I can't enjoy it, then what is the point?

A few people have suggested Powerline adaptors - I have a couple in the attic and I could give them a whirl but I'm going to hit a ceiling of 20Mbps and I prefer the freedom of roaming around the house with my laptop.

Assuming my problems are solved: I've had lots of really good ideas from readers about how to test my connection speeds and I'll be using a lot of them today and reporting on them tomorrow.

UPDATE: I've swapped in a new .11n router and so far, things seem to be going well. I'll keep monitoring before I definitively declare the problem is solved.

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"What do we need a 50Mbps broadband connection for?" was the first question asked of me when I had the fast broadband pipe installed in my house.

It's a valid question. With most people in the UK enjoying 3.6Mbps speeds and services like iPlayer, Spotify, Last.fm, Flickr, Xbox Live and PlayStation network working happily for many people, do we need such speeds?

But it's clear that our appetite for on demand content and the ways in which we are getting hold of our content is changing rapidly.

More than 60% of households in the UK now have a broadband connection, and almost one in five people with an internet connection now watch TV programmes online.

In 2008 there were 271 million requests to watch content on the BBC iPlayer. And more than 14.5 million people in the UK now listen to radio online.

At the moment a BBC iPlayer high-quality stream is delivered at 800kbps, which means the average broadband connection in the UK should have no problem streaming the video.

But in the future the BBC will deliver iPlayer streams in HD, and with more and more devices in the home capable of delivering video and rich web applications, more and more burden is being put on our broadband connections.

I may not have the typical home but with two laptops, a desktop, three internet-enabled games consoles, a Slingbox, an iPhone and a PSP there is plenty of competition for bandwidth in my house.

We may not use all of the devices all of the time - think of the electricity bill - but it's not uncommon for two of the laptops to be surfing the net while my desktop is downloading video files.

In an effort to test the bandwidth of my 50Mbps connection I performed some real world tests, which were about the experience, not any particular downstream or upstream speed.

As Forrester analyst Ian Fogg pointed out to me, "the only speed that matters is subjective".

In that spirit, watching iPlayer on the highest quality option on two laptops proved to be a very positive experience - no buffering or stutters.

Throw in a couple of background downloads of large files and the streaming continued unaffected. But add a third iPlayer stream on a third machine and at this point the stutters started and the viewing experience became intolerable.

All of this was done via wi-fi on a router that supports the fastest connections, 802.11n, and one could question just how often a household would be streaming three different TV programmes and downloading two 500MB+ files.

But projects like Canvas point to a time in the not too distant future when such tasks will become the norm rather than a rarity.

I also tested using the iPlayer in conjunction with some online gaming on Xbox Live and my wife was perfectly able to catch up on TV, while I shot some gamers on Call of Duty 4.

As commenters on this blog have pointed out, online gaming is more about latency than upload and download speeds but the fact we could share the broadband comfortably was a pleasant change from my experiences on the ADSL connection.

So what other real world, empirical observations do I have about the connection?

1. The faster your broadband connection the more irritating it is when a web page doesn't immediately snap onto the browser

2. Accessing the web over wi-fi on a portable device like an iPhone or PSP with a 50Mbps connection seems no different to using my ADSL 6Mbps connection

3. Speed Tests are useful but no replacement for the actual experience in using a connection

Tonight I'm going to be testing my "hosting" capabilities in online gaming so if you fancy taking part in some real world experiments then add me as a friend on Xbox Live. My gamertag is UNBELIEVER, which, yes, I know is a shocking name.

I'll probably play a mix of Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War 2 - so if you want to party up, feel free to add my gamertag. I'll be online from 2100GMT.

UPDATE I'm afraid I have to postpone the online gaming sesssion tonight. Small family illness!

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A couple of days at the Mobile World Congress have passed in a blur of new handsets and over-excited press releases, but I've learnt a few things.

I now know, for instance, that Barcelona is a city where you can still smoke in the bars and you can make mobile calls from the Metro - a place somewhere between the past and the future then. But I've also learnt a few things about the mobile industry.

It's about the networks

I guess we're all going to have to get our heads round LTE, Wimax and 4g, because the big news over the next few years is going to be about that boring back-end stuff that phone customers don't care about. The jargon probably doesn't matter to mobile internet users either but their experience is about to get a lot better.

Mobile networks are getting faster. I've been using a 3g dongle here delivering a reliable 2Mbps, but a trip around the city in an LTE-enabled van, watching high definition television beamed over the network, showed me a whole new world.

Now we've learned to be sceptical about promises of technological advances from the mobile industry - a decade after its arrival 3g is only now making a real impact - but I do expect that in a couple of years I'll be surfing much faster on the move than I do currently at home.

VOIP isn't rocking the mobile world

The idea of free calls over the internet - or Voice over IP in the jargon - has been all the rage for years now, threatening to rock the fixed-line telecoms industry and now the mobile world.

At the show, Nokia announced a plan to put Skype on new handsets, and 3 has had some success in the UK with its Skype phone. But I'm sceptical about this, having tried out a couple of VOIP apps on my phone.

Fring and Truphone both look good - but only really work when you're on wifi. Getting a solid wifi connection is still a struggle outside - I've got one in my hotel room, but I've also got a laptop which is far better suited to making calls.

Truphone has an option called "Truphone Anywhere" for use away from wifi, but when I slowly cranked it into action, up popped a warning that it would not save me money when calling from abroad. Fully integrated Skype on a mobile may be a different proposition - but how happy are operators going to be with Nokia's plan? I wouldn't mind betting that those "free" calls on an N97 will turn out to be rather hard to make.

Mobile kills the digital camera?

The idea that we will have one converged device that will do everything has been over-hyped - but surely the time is coming when we can forget about carrying both a simple digital camera and a phone?

This week Sony Ericsson launched a 12Mp phone, and 5Mp seems to be just about standard - with a decent lens and flash that should be enough for most people. Keen photographers will want a digital SLR - but the days of the standalone compact camera may be numbered.

Where is the power?

The single most eye-catching announcement out of Barcelona was the plan unveiled by the GSM Association for what it called a Universal Charging Solution - or what you and I might call one damn power adapter that will charge any mobile phone.

Having travelled here laden with three phones and three different adapters, I can't wait. But why is it taking so long. When it comes to software the industry is already delivering cross-platform applications to customers - but they'll have to wait until 2012 for the universal charger, and don't bet on it arriving then.

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So Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and boss of Facebook, has had to learn the hard way that a social network is nothing like e-mail.

In his original attempt to defuse a growing row over changes to its terms of service, Zuckerberg had tried to explain the decision to hold on to people's data, even if they quit the social network, by likening it to e-mail.

He said: "When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created - one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like e-mail work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear."

But users clearly have different expectations about their data when it comes to e-mail.

Users have come to accept and understand that e-mail takes on a persistent state when it leaves an outbox and flies across mail servers to reach the intended recipient.

On countless occasions retrieved e-mails have helped expose fraud or duplicity. And that's because e-mail is copied and copied again as it makes its journey to the intended recipient.

On a social network, users have a different notion of ownership of information. By signing up to a walled garden like Facebook, it is only natural perhaps that people feel the data that is stored on the social network remains their property.

From comments, to videos, photos and applications - this data remains sealed inside the Facebook garden regardless of whether it is sitting on a friend's Wall, or is a photo that can only be seen by members of a specific Facebook Group.

Unlike the web in general, where the spiders of search engines never sleep and crawl our data on public sites 24/7, making it available to all, Facebook is a private members club, in which each member decides who can and who cannot see or share their information.

What's so surprising about this row is perhaps how naive Facebook would appear to have been.

After all, users have long complained about how difficult it is to actually delete their accounts on the social network.

And terms of service for sites in general have always been a contentious issue. From Twitter rows to Google Chrome complaints and global data privacy debates, web firms have been wrangling with these issues for years.

And by flip-flopping between defending the new terms of service and reverting back to the old agreement while encouraging user feedback, Facebook is clearly one of many companies that have yet to fully resolve these issues.

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I've seen two new phones in Barcelona today, and they're both devices on which an awful lot hangs. One may make Google's Android operating system go mainstream, the other could determine whether Palm, one of the pioneers of the PDA, survives into the converged future.

First the G2 - whoops, it's not called that. While the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1, was heavily branded with the Google name, this time both Vodafone and the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC (also behind the G1) are determined to get their names out there.

So this is the HTC Magic and at first glance, it is just a slightly more elegant version of the G1. What is different is that there is no slide-out keyboard - this time you are entirely dependent on the touchscreen interface, except for a little clutch of buttons at the bottom of the screen.

I only had time for a quick play, but the screen seems pretty responsive and the on-screen keyboard no more of a pain to use than the one on Apple's iPhone. There is a 3MP camera, without a flash, and it's clearly not going to be the phone for someone intent on giving up their digital camera.

But what matters is the software, and the possibilities that the Android platform opens up for developers. As with the G1, it is easy to find your way around the phone, surf the web, and launch applications - I noticed the one I used had apps for Facebook and last.fm.

HTC's Chief Executive Peter Chou and Patrick Chomet of Vodafone performed a double act at the press conference, and while there was some mention of features like Google Streetview, their key message was that this was a simple phone aimed not at the geeks and early adopters but a wider public.

Incidentally, one rather cross correspondent to this blog has commented that we have failed to differentiate between smartphones and the mass market. Well I think the boundary is increasingly blurred. A couple of years ago any phone that could do e-mail was considered "smart", now any handset that can't looks pretty dumb. Now Vodafone wants to convince a broad range of its customers that they need a phone which is, in effect a mini-computer.

Those consumers will also be able to choose a phone made by the company that set the standard for PDAs and early smartphones, then watched as others came along and took the market away. At least they will once Palm's new Pre makes it to Europe, after its American launch in the first half of this year.

The Pre was actually unveiled a few weeks ago but this was my first chance to get my hands on a device that's received rave reviews from the bloggers. Mind you, there was some nervousness on Palm's part about my fat fingers actually touching their sacred object - the company told me that it would rather I let a demonstrator show me round.

But I did get to hold it for a few seconds - long enough to find out that it is both lighter and smaller than you-know-what. Yes the inevitable comparison will be with the iPhone and this does look a worthy competitor.

The touchscreen is if anything even better than that on the iPhone or the HTC Magic - and there's a keyboard just about big enough to be useful without making the device clunky. The Pre also has some of the missing links that are annoying about the iPhone - proper bluetooth, cut and paste, easy switching between applications. What it shares with the Apple device is an under-powered camera - just 3MP again - and a lack of video capture, though that may come. It should eventually have Flash too, following an agreement with Adobe. That means you will be able to play video in a browser window, something you can't do on the iPhone.

So two phones from companies that really need them to be hits for different reasons. Vodafone has failed to hitch its name to any stand-out product lately - the Blackberry Storm has been more of a squall. And for Palm the stakes are much higher - it has developed a whole new operating system for the Pre and if the phone doesn't win plenty of fans, then its makers might not be around in a few years' time.

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I am one of the fortunate; a member of the broadband elite.

Last week I had a Virgin 50Mbps broadband connection installed and the goal is to put it to the test over the next week or so and explore the limits of the online fast lane.

Yesterday I described my set-up experiences but I wanted to focus Day One proper on raw speeds, and putting the connection through an obstacle course of downloads and uploads.

The first place to start is with some formal speed tests. Virgin's own website says that just one third-party site is equipped to deal with its XXL connection, Thinkbroadband.com.

I also had a link to an internal Virgin speed test site.

I tested the connection on both a wired and wireless configuration. (For those who want to know: an 802.11n router with WPA2 encryption)

Wired

Thinkbroadband put my download speeds at 37Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream.
The Virgin test put my speed at 46Mbps down and 1.5Mbps.

So why the variation? Andrew Ferguson, from Thinkbroadband.com, told me it was to be expected. The Virgin test had "less network" in the way between my connection and its own test.

Wireless

Both Thinkbroadband.com and Virgin put my download at about 35Mbps and upload at 1Mbps.

If you are seeking absolute speed then an Ethernet connection, always beats wi-fi - even the 802.11n standard. But even so, my contact at Virgin felt I should be seeing faster speeds over the wireless connection. I'll be keeping an eye on this speed over the week.

But there are plenty of other reasons why you won't always see the advertised speeds - even if you are on a wired connection.

The age of your computer, interference from other devices, bandwidth saturation on wi-fi can all have an effect.

So what about some real world tests? How would the connection perform under a heavy load?

The first thing I tried was a straight single download of a large file - in this case, the Linux distribution (an open source operating system) Ubuntu. This is a large file of almost 700MB and I got speeds of up to 5.4MB per second during the download and it landed on my desktop in about four minutes.

One of the best ways to test your download is to simultaneously download a series of large files and then add up all the downstream speeds. I downloaded five large game demo files and each one was flying down the pipe at more than 1MB per second.

These two tests would seem to indicate that I was hitting very close to the advertised 50Mbps.

It's not that often I download a large program file but I do download and stream quite a bit of video. So how would the connection cope with HD video?

I picked a HD version of 30 Rock to download - in all, about 750MB of comedy heaven. I went from click to buy to click to play and Tina Fey in HD quality in under six minutes.

HD trailers streamed in 720p from the Apple movies website were ready to start watching in about 15 seconds, while a 720p HD download of a game trailer from Xbox Live took 50 seconds to download the 108MB file.

But what about the neglected sibling of broadband speed: upstream?

The tests would seem to suggest I have between 1Mbps and 1.5Mbps - but what does this mean in the real world?
I'll be testing these upload speeds with some online gaming later in the week - and inviting you all to come and join me in a game of Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 - but I started with a simple test.

I uploaded five high quality Jpegs - about 17MB in all - to Flickr and the process took 90 seconds to complete.

So that's Day One of testing. I welcome your thoughts and questions. You can follow some more of my tests and experiences on my Twitter feed @darrenwaters. I'll be sharing my gamertag with people on the Twitter feed later in the week.

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Two years ago all the talk at the Mobile World Congress was of the imminent arrival of the Apple iPhone, and how it was going to change the industry. One year ago, all the talk was of Google's open-source Android operating system, and what a radical impact that might have. In each case, the big established players blew a collective raspberry at the thought that these upstarts would rock their world - so how much has changed?

However often it is pointed out that the iPhone has only a tiny fraction of world handset sales, a walk around the halls here provides plenty of evidence of its influence. Touchscreen phones are everywhere - and although early versions appeared pale imitations, some of them now look as good as the original, and have a lot more firepower.

A case in point is Nokia's N97, a touchscreen phone with a very neat slide-out keyboard. When I went to interview Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki, we had a photographic face-off - his N97 versus my iPhone (I have brought a Nokia N95 and a Blackberry with me too, by the way). He was the clear winner, and the phone, which hits the shops in the summer, looks pretty good, as you can see here in my picture of him taken with my iPhone. Just below, is his photo of me with the iPhone. What I couldn't tell was just how much Nokia has improved the software on the phone to make it more intuitive.

And it's on software that Apple has really made a big impact. Ever tried to get onto the web with an N95? I found it too much of a struggle to bother, with this or other phones, and the statistics show that it was only the arrival of the iPhone which encouraged many users to see their phones as surfing devices.

Would we have seen the launch of phone application stores by both Nokia and Microsoft today if Apple's Apps Store hadn't shown there was a latent demand for useful, wacky or even totally pointless things to do on your mobile?

But what about Google? This show got underway with just one Android device - T-Mobile's G1 - on the market. As I arrived this morning, I saw a picture on the front of the show magazine of a new Android handset made by Huawei. I rushed to the firm's stand - and was turned away. But returning a couple of hours later I found the new Android behind a glass screen - it appeared to be a non-working prototype looking rather similar to, you've guessed it, the iPhone.

When I caught up with Google's mobile chief Hugo Barra, I asked him whether he was disappointed that Android hadn't yet taken over the world. He insisted that the hundreds of applications now being built for the new operating system proved that it was going to be very popular with all sorts of manufacturers - but pointed out that as it was an open-source system, he'd be the last to know what was in the pipeline because nobody needed to tell Google.

I am hearing rumours that a major operator will unveil its own Android handset on Tuesday - but it does seem that it's still too early to judge whether Google really has changed the rules of the game for this industry. Whereas Apple, with its very far from open operating system, seems to have everyone dancing to its tune.

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Britain is widely seen as a bit of a laggard in the high speed broadband stakes when compared to countries like France, Sweden, Japan and Korea.

The average speed for most people in the UK is 3.6Mbps, according to Ofcom. Which is why Lord Carter's suggestion in his Digital Britain report that everybody had a minimum of 2Mbps feels a little backwards looking to some.

Many in the industry were hoping that Lord Carter would drive the adoption of high speed broadband by setting a much higher speed as the minimum for everyone.

But what does this high speed broadband world offer?

I've been lucky enough to have broadband at home for many years - first at a 512Kbps (which can now hardly be classed as broadband), then 1Mbps, then 4Mbps and now "up to 8Mbps" via ADSL.

And I'll be honest. I find the connection is often slow, especially when my wife is using her laptop at the same time I am doing something on mine.

Websites load slowly, downloads seem to crawl down the pipe and the overall experience is patchy at best.

And this is at speeds supposedly four times faster than the minimum laid down by Lord Carter.

But the reality is few of us ever achieve the maximum speeds that are on offer for reasons that are well known.

In the UK one of the fastest connections available to consumers is Virgin's 50Mbps service.

I've had the 50Mbps installed for more than a week on trial and I'm going to be writing a speed diary of my experiences over the next week or so.

I want to find out just how much bang for my buck I'm getting and experiment with the best ways of making use of a fast connection.

Virgin's 50Mbps service, known as the XXL package, costs £50 a month on its own, or £46 if you take a Virgin phone line as well.

For that money you get up to 50Mbps downstream and up to 1.5Mbps upstream. You get a cable modem with a single ethernet connection and a Netgear WNR 2000 wireless router that operates to the 802.11n specifications, which means in theory you should have the wireless bandwidth to get the best out of the fast connection.

You also get a .11n USB adaptor for your computer, in case your machine's existing wireless card doesn't support the standard.

I say "standard" - but I actually mean draft standard because .11n has yet to be officially ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association.

Unfortunately for me, the Netgear USB adaptor doesn't work on Apple Macs so I'm not able to take advantage of the greater bandwidth and speeds on my desktop machine.
Luckily, my laptop does already support .11n so it's not too much of an issue.

However, I've also been unable to connect my Xbox 360 wirelessly to the supplied router.

I'm not alone with this problem and it looks to be a hardware conflict between the 360's wi-fi adaptor and the Netgear router and is not in Virgin's control. But it does highlight some of the issues involved in using technology deployed with draft standards - not all devices will connect and it is best to check in advance.

Thankfully the router has plenty of ethernet ports and I was able to connect an Ethernet cable between the 360 and router. But if my Xbox 360 had been in another room then I do not know what the solution would have been.

Virgin has been waging a vigorous advertising campaign of late to promote its high-speed service but some of its claims were a little, er, too enthusiastic and had to be withdrawn after complaints.

Virgin had claimed in adverts that broadband suppliers that using copper wire - ie ADSL technology - were "struggling to cope".

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the claim was misleading because Virgin itself operates a traffic management policy which restricts bandwidth during peak times for heavy users. Currently, Virgin says it is implementing no traffic management of its 50Mbps users, but this is set to be reviewed in the future.

The ASA also rapped Virgin on the knuckles when it came to comparing its network to future plans from BT to deliver a national fibre optic network.

BT has spoken about plans to introduce a mix of fibre network to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), while Virgin's network delivers FTTC.

Virgin's claim that: "Everybody's talking about fibre optic broadband there's only one company actually doing it." was misleading, said the ASA.

So what's the difference between FTTH and FTTC? Well, FTTH means fibre optic cabling is run directly into your home, offering the fastest available connection.

FTTC is fibre to a cabinet with the "last mile" of connection - sometimes it's only a matter of yards - being delivered along coaxial cable, which means a reduction in the available speeds.

A few weeks back we reported on a company called Velocity1 which was offering 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstreaconnections to a housing development in Wembley. It can achieve these speeds because it is piping fibre optic direct to the home.

And there are other "high-speed" broadband providers in the UK marketplace. O2, Be, Pipex, Tiscali and Sky are among those offering ADSL2+ technology which can, depending on where you live, offer between upto 16Mbps and 24Mbps downstream speeds.

BT is trialling ADSL2+ currently, and is also rolling out trials of FTTC in some homes later this year.

After plugging in my new Virgin cable modem and configuring the router I was up and running on the 50Mbps service.

Of course the first thing I did was test the speed. Virgin says that only two one website - thinkbroadband.com and speedtest.net had tests that could successfully gauge the speeds available to its users.

I used both tests - on both a wired and wireless connection - and my initial readings were between 13Mbps and 25Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream.

That's not bad - and at least double the best speed I was getting on my ADSL connection - but still someway short of the 50Mbps advertised speed.

Unfortunately after a day or two I found that the connection speed was dropping considerably when connected wirelessly - to below 1Mbps at one point which was clearly suspect.

After much hunting around on forums and a quick phonecall to Virgin I changed the encryption protocol on the router from WEP - the default setting - to WPA2 based on a recommendation. To my mind, this shouldn't make too great a difference in available speeds.

However, as soon as I changed the encryption protocol my speeds leaped back up to their previous high of about 25Mbps.

So what are my initial impressions of speed? You can never have too much speed, in my opinion, and the casual web surfer will notice a snappier experience when surfing the net.

Virgin does have direct peering into some high bandwidth sites, including the BBC, so there should be a speedy connection. Other ISPs, including PlusNet, have similar direct peering in place with sites like the BBC to maximise connection speeds.

But the real difference comes when downloading larger files.

Of course, the speed of any download all depends on how fast the server can deliver a file to you and the network content travels over. This varies from server to server, and from website to website.

For example - I downloaded a video file from an internal BBC server over wi-fi and I was getting downstream speeds of 3.7MB per second. (That equates to speeds of more than 31Mbps). A 600MB file landed on my machine in under three minutes, which is pretty quick by any yardstick.

Over the next week or two I'm going to be measuring the speeds on my 50Mbps line and looking at different ways of getting the most from the connecton.

From setting up my own web server, to online gaming, and broadcasting from my living room, I'm aiming to test the connection to its limits.

If you've got any suggestions of how I should test or use the connection, let me know. If you're a broadband speed merchant, perhaps using ADSL2+ connections, or are using Velocity1, let me know how you are finding the service, and what you are using it for.

UPDATE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Virgin has been in touch to say there is no reason I shouldn't be seeing speeds of 50Mbps downstream on my connection. I want this test to be as fair as possible, and as realistic as possible, so I'm going to do some speed checks this evening, and if I still don't see an improvement, then a call to technical support will be in order.

UPDATE TWO I've made a change to the copy above. According to the Virgin site, only one speed test, the one supplied by Thinkbroadband.com is capable of measuring its 50Mbps connection.

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If you fancy a couple of days in Barcelona right now, my advice is to forget it. The flights are full, a hotel room will cost you a fortune, and the place is full of geeky types talking a strange language - LTE, MVNO, HSPA - and pointing excitedly at the tiny screens in their hands.

This is the week the Mobile World Congress comes to town, and the thousands gathered here are even less interested than normal in the glories of Gaudi, or a ramble down the Ramblas. For only the second time in its history the mobile industry is bracing itself for a year of contraction, with handsets sales forecast to drop.

But that doesn't mean that innovation has come to a halt - quite the opposite, with everyone even more desperate to prove that their handset or service can really bring something new to the table. So what are we hoping to see? Here's what's on my list:

Handsets

It seems using a mobile just to make a call is now very old hat, so expect more all-singing all-dancing phones-that-think-they're-computers. Sony Ericsson jumped the gun last night, with a phone combining a Walkman with an 8.1-megapixel camera, but Samsung may trump that with a phone which shoots video in HD (er, why?). There will be yet more touchscreen iPhone lookalikes - I'm interested in getting a look at Nokia's N97 and the Palm Pre which I've heard are the best efforts yet at knocking Apple from its smartphone perch. Energy efficiency is another theme, with a couple of solar-powered handsets on display. And at long last we may see a second Android phone based on Google's software platform - T-Mobile's G1 has had the field to itself so far. At the other end of the complexity spectrum, there is even wild talk of a Lego phone, which must be some kind of retro joke aimed at the yuppies who wielded those "brick" phones in the '80s.

Software

Now that just about every phone is a smartphone, it is the software that is becoming the differentiating factor. I spent yesterday evening at a preview event for some of the smaller exhibitors and just about every one seemed to be in software, not hardware. Turning voice messages into text may be one theme - Britain's Spinvox may see itself undercut by others doing a similar job at a lower price. Location-based services are another - but then again, the mobile industry has been selling the idea of arranging your social life via a mobile Google map for years, and I've sill not met anyone who does it.

As the High Street closes down, a whole new range of shops is opening up in the internet cloud, with Microsoft and others rushing to imitate Apple's iPhone Apps Store. Expect a flood of hopeful developers promising to turn your Nokia or your Windows Mobile into a musical instrument or a games arcade.

Mobile Money

No, not just the outlandish amounts of cash your operator charges you to surf the web whenever you leave the country, but the use of mobiles as "digital wallets", allowing users to pay for small items without cash. This has been a long time coming, but as we report elsewhere on this site, the convergence of two technologies - contactless cards and advanced mobile phones - could now spark a revolution in the way we pay. It's already happening in developing countries, where many people without bank accounts are now using phones to transfer money - I'll be looking out for more signs of the spread of mobile money.

Mobile Broadband

If 2008 was the year of the dongle, expect a whole lot more progress on the mobile broadband front this year. I've already met one firm selling a device which takes a 3g signal and turns it into a portable wi-fi hotspot that you can share amongst a number of users in the home, the office - even in the car. But we're now moving beyond 3g to much faster networks, and Barcelona will be the scene for a battle between two rival technologies - LTE and WiMax - the backers of which believe that they provide the answer to the wireless broadband future.

There - in just one sentence I've used enough mobile industry jargon to convince anyone to steer clear of Barcelona this week. But I will try to decipher what they're talking about in the halls of the Mobile World Congress and pass on a translation to you.

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For Britain's technology crowd, Buckingham Palace is rather far from their usual beat. But inside the Palace at lunchtime, you would have found senior people from Google, Apple and AOL, assorted professors of computing, web entrepreneurs (from Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com, to Michael Smith of Firebox), and just about anyone else who you'd normally find at a techie networking event. Oh, and a motley crew of technology journalists, including yours truly.

We were here to meet royalty - not just the Queen, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web and probably the only person for whom the technology world has unalloyed respect. Sir Tim was on hand to unveil the relaunched royal website, www.royal.gov.uk.

The website was born back in 1997, which now seems relatively early in the history of the web. It has now undergone major renovations, with far more video and more opportunities for interaction, including a Google map which allows you to track royal visits to your area.

At this stage you cannot email the Queen and there is no evidence that Her Majesty wishes to blog or join a social network. I do gather, however, that at least one member of the royal family is considering starting a blog.

Sir Tim gave us a brief history of the web and the royal site - and then handed over a remote control device to the Queen. After Her Majesty pressed a button there was a brief hiatus - and suddenly we were seeing the "surprise" element of the website, what the Palace is calling "virtual rooms". High-resolution pictures shot inside Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace will now allow visitors to get a look around.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee hadn't actually knocked up a new website for the Queen. That was the responsibility of Emma Goodey from the Royal Household. I asked her whether she had some ornate title - Her Majesty's Webmaster? - but I'm afraid she doesn't. She told me that there had been months of effort, much of it involving working out just what it was that drew members of the public to the website and kept them there. "We didn't want to make assumptions about what people wanted - we wanted to go out there and find out".

So far, it seems to have done the job, with heavy traffic to the new site. When I looked mid-afternoon, the "virtual rooms" were not yet visible - the Palace told me that it was waiting for a bit of a lull before putting the bandwidth-hungry material up.

I grabbed a quick chat with Sir Tim to get his views on good website practice - for royal families, governments and other public bodies.

The technology crowd at the launch seemed impressed by the new site, but they were not going to miss the opportunity to do some heavy networking, swapping rumours about other businesses and boosting their own. One executive from a social networking site told me they were about to have a "fabulous" relaunch, another told me that his interior design website was worthy of an hour long television programme.

And I think I may have achieved my own technology breakthrough - the first tweet from inside the Palace. And I sent a quick picture of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Twitter just before the event got underway. Members of the Buckingham Palace press office told me they were pretty sure that this had never happened before. But I think we can be pretty confident that, whatever the technological progress made by the royal website, we won't be seeing tweets from the Queen.

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If you want music streamed to your computer for free there's already a big choice. As the ailing record industry thrashes around in search of a viable business model for the digital age, all sorts of deals are being done with new online services.

The latest to make a splash is called Spotify. It started in Scandinavia last year, began offering invitations to some British users a couple of months ago, and this week opened its doors to anyone in the UK who wants to come in. On the face of it, this is quite a compelling offer - millions of tracks that can be streamed to you, quickly and efficiently, for nothing. The catch is that, unless you shell out for a monthly subscription, you have to listen to an advert after every few tracks.

So, in this crowded field, who is the main opposition to Spotify? Judging by the people who've messaged me, it's last.fm. The streaming, "scrobbling" social music network (I always find it difficult to describe) has been going for six years, and a couple of years ago fell into the arms of America's broadcasting giant CBS for a tidy sum. Though it is unclear whether CBS has succeeded in turning it into a major money-spinner, last.fm continues to develop, appearing on new mobile platforms and offering new music.

So how do they compare? A few facts, figures - and comments from users of each service:

last.fm

The company tells me it has 25 million users worldwide, and they have access to over 7 million tracks. For users, the emphasis is on discovering new music, rather than simply playing stuff they already know.

And its supporters are pretty passionate about it: "Far better for recommendations than Spotify," one told me. "I'm a happy last.fm user and I do not see the point in investing time to build a new playlist," said another. And while it has text adverts, users seem happy that there are no audio commercials: "I had a quick look at SPOTIFY and couldn't see why I'd use it over last.fm and that's free and ad free."

Spotify

This young company is still pretty coy about figures, though it says that it has a third of a million users in Sweden, and there has been a big rush of new users in the UK since it opened to all-comers on Tuesday. It says it has licensing deals with all the big record labels and a number of independents - and a quick search seems to show that most artists are well represented. Mind you, last week it had to remove some tracks after a licensing dispute with some of the labels, a reminder that music rights remain a minefield in the digital world.

Spotify, too, has already attracted some enthusiastic fans: "Spotify is the business (last.fm unceremoniously abandoned!)", one told me." Another said: "I just prefer spotify, quality seems better."

In the end it may come down to a judgement about what kind of person looks for music online. Someone from last.fm told me he thought Spotify users were probably older and more settled in their ways, "people who already know what they like" - whereas the last.fm crowd is younger, more edgy, and more inclined to see the service as a social network.

Is there room for both services? While they both hope to make some money from steering people towards paid-for downloads, it looks as though their finances really depend on advertising. Last.fm, safe in the embrace of a giant parent, can be reasonably relaxed. But Spotify needs to attract a big crowd in a hurry - and convince increasingly picky advertisers that it's a cool place to hang out.

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I'm writing this from the fastest domestic broadband connection I've yet experienced. It's at a new housing development in Wembley in north London which lured me here with the promise of 100Mbps.

From their show flat with a view of the roof of Wembley Stadium I've so far managed to do a live radio broadcast via fast broadband - though my PC crashed and needed rebooting minutes before I had to go live - and we're also trying to broadcast live TV over the net, though here we're being slightly hamstrung by the limitations of our broadcast software.

While this housing development has been wired with fibre from the start, and residents have access to phone, broadband and TV over the network, nobody is actually being offered a 100Mbps subscription.

Instead residents pay for an 8, 16 or 32Mbps service - but then can press a button marked "boost" to get their speed up to 100Mbps. That costs them £1 for 30 minutes. It seems the developers aren't convinced there is yet a real demand for 100Mps. They have "future-proofed" the homes, but if you want to spend a lot of time in the internet fast lane the bills will mount up.

What the developers Quintain tell me is that for plenty of residents 32Mbps at around £30 a month is more than enough. For some of the students who live here, that means they can also get by without a television, using the BBC iPlayer and other online services for all their viewing needs. I didn't inquire too closely whether they had got themselves a television licence.

We pressed the boost button - and revved up to "100Mbps". A quick speed test proved pretty impressive. I got 78Mps downstream and as much as 50Mbps upstream, meaning I could have sent my video files to the BBC in seconds rather than minutes. And nobody really expects to get right up to the advertised speed, do they?

But showing just what fast broadband could do proved tricky. There had been some rather over-excited claims that it meant you could download a movie in seconds, which was obviously untrue. But we tested it with Apple's iTunes, attempting to download a 1Gb movie. We got a message telling us that would take 20 minutes, so we stopped.

A helpful network engineer from the organisation running the service told me that even if you were getting out onto the internet at 100Mbps, you would find the brakes being slammed on once you hit Apple's servers. "iTunes has a limit on the speed at which you can download," he said. With very few people able to go that fast, it's apparently not worthwhile catering for them.

So we turned to the good old iPlayer and downloaded a programme. The latest edition of "Who Do You Think You Are?" is an hour long and is a 341Mb file. We had that downloaded and playing within a minute - pretty impressive. (By the way, you may notice that on the tape the man from Quintain ends up clicking on the stream rather than the download but I can assure you that the file was there - I had a go after him and downloaded an episode of Top Gear in under a minute too).

This kind of speed will only spread slowly across Britain - it's relatively cheap to lay fibre into new homes, but costs a fortune to dig up the streets and bring fast broadband to everyone.

But from what I've seen in Wembley, fast broadband will mean big changes to the way we view - and make - television.

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I took a short train ride on Saturday to a local shopping centre, and in my bag I packed a book to while away the quarter of an hour in each direction.

Sadly, the book never emerged from the bag. I was too busy with my internet-connected mobile phone: sending messages to friends; reading articles after clicking on links they'd sent; even looking at a couple of pages of a Sherlock Holmes story which I have stored in an application on the phone.

Which brings us to the oft-asked question - is the internet killing the book? It's an appropriate time to ask, as Amazon prepares to unveil the latest version of its electronic reader, the Kindle 2.

It strikes me that there are two separate issues: the impact of new technology on the publishing industry and the change in readers' habits caused by the arrival of a flood of online material.

So is the Kindle going to be the iPod, symbolising the moment all publishers had to get with the digital revolution or see their businesses submerged under a wave of piracy? No, because there is no evidence that book sales are declining in the way that CD sales have throughout this decade. In the United States, there was a steady if unspectacular rise in book sales between 2002 and 2007, with quite a shift from the high street to online bookshops.

In the UK, according to the Booksellers' Association, the value of book sales grew from £2.7bn in 2004 to nearly £3bn in 2007. Again, pretty slow growth, but a lot healthier than what happened to the music market over the same period.

In 2007, the UK music industry's total sales - including digital - amounted to about £1.4bn, down from nearly £2bn three years before. Sales of "digital" books are so low that they do not feature on the publishing industry's charts. The book market is not falling off a cliff - even if the bestsellers' list is full of celebrity biographies and cookbooks - and there is no urgent pressure on publishers to go digital.

Electronic books - from the Kindle to the Sony reader to the "Stanza" application on the iPhone - are gimmicks right now, beloved of early-adopting geeks, rather than the mainstream playthings that MP3 players have quickly become. And there is no obvious reason why that should change quickly.

Music is, like it or not, an art form that can be enjoyed part-time, on the move, while doing something else. But it's difficult to read a book while engaged in another task, although I've occasionally found myself walking into lamp posts while engrossed in the final chapter of a compelling novel.

And perhaps it is fiction that will survive best in its analogue form in the digital age. Factual and reference works, which you may want to dip into rather than read all the way through, are ideally suited to online access. Has anybody other than Ammon Shea ever read a whole dictionary or encyclopedia? But a successful work of fiction is something you dive into, leaving the outside world to get on with its business.

The biggest threat posed by new technology is to the attention span of the reader - the "Google is making us stupid" syndrome. The argument goes that there is so much information online that we flit from link to link, without ever reading more than the odd paragraph.

It certainly rings true to this reader. I returned recently from a week's holiday where, with limited internet access, I managed to get through 400 pages of a pretty heavy book. Since getting home, I've barely managed ten pages a day.

But perhaps I'm the exception, and most of you are more diligent readers? Or maybe you didn't make it beyond my first paragraph?

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The week began with a great story. The Indian government was going to build a $20 (or maybe even $10) laptop, finally bringing cheap computing to the masses, in a manner which had eluded projects like One Laptop Per Child.

The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the BBC - so how did that happen?

It was all triggered by an article in the Financial Times on Monday. This claimed that the device would be launched at an education event on Tuesday, and compared the $20 laptop to India's $2000 car - although that too has so far failed to appear, some years after it was promised. The FT's article went round the world at the speed of light, and my editors - and I suspect others - were soon asking why we hadn't got the story.

But on the Tuesday, when the press conference happened in the town of Tirupati, the miracle gizmo turned out to be a prototype of a handheld device, rather than a laptop. The aim of the device, under development by local universities, was to use technology to bring education to millions of new students across India.

And the price? Well, that was pretty unclear. It might be $20, it might be $10, depending on production volumes, and presumably the level of government subsidy. The only photo to have emerged appears to show a solid white rectangular object, without a display or a keyboard.

I've spoken to the author of the FT article, James Lamont, who told me that reports about a laptop had actually surfaced first in the Indian press last week after a briefing by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. It appears that the ministry official, perhaps not technically aware, used the word laptop in that briefing to describe an e-learning device.

That was enough to turn an interesting educational initiative by the Indian government into a story that sparked worldwide interest amongst the techie community. Now it has turned out to be less than it appeared, many of my fellow journalists and bloggers have reacted with contempt. Engadget talked of "purposeful misinformation" by politicians seeking re-election, while the Times of India quoted a university researcher as saying "The entire world was watching. This act.....has shamed the nation."

But perhaps this is a little unfair. The Indian government, James Lamont told me, is faced with a massive educational challenge, needing to create as many as 1500 new universities over the next six years. It seems to be deadly serious about using technology to bridge its educational gap.

The price of computing is coming down - though $20 seems a bit of a stretch, with component makers rushing to explain that you won't even get a screen for that price. And aren't we getting hung up on the idea of a laptop? It is mobile phones that are really proving to be the transformational technology in developing countries. If Indian researchers can come up with a $20 mobile internet device to put millions of students online, then they really will deserve global headlines.

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It's a great headline, made all the more punchy by its place on the front page of yesterday's Metro newspaper.

But is Google really putting a "spy in your pocket"?

The search giant has long been a soft target for journalists keen to warn about Big Brother culture, and every step it takes is closely monitored by those who are concerned that the firm has too much of a stranglehold on our data.

So what has Google done this time? Quite simply, it's joined a growing number of firms that offer geolocation services using a combination of GPS and user input.

Latitude is a service that allows you to share your location with friends using your computer, or the GPS that comes built in with many of today's smartphones. It can also triangulate using mobile phone towers, and using wi-fi hotspots.

You can see the location of your friends that have opted in, while they can see yours, using Google Maps on your phone or on your computer.

Other firms are doing something similar. Fire Eagle is Yahoo's cross-platform geo-service (developed, incidentally, by ex-BBC man Tom Coates), while you can also use BrightKite or Loopt to do something similar.

Advocates of these tools see them as a natural extension of services like Twitter, or social networking.

So Google is not exactly breaking new ground here - just joining a growing number of companies trying to exploit the combination of mobile computing power and location-aware devices.

Metro quotes a well-respected privacy expert - Simon Davies of Privacy International.

Mr Davies has long voiced his concerns about what he sees as a lack of rigour in Google's security systems and the danger of its near-monopolistic position in some markets.

He shrugs off Google's defence that Latitude is opt-in - it's up to you whether you want to share your location - by saying that peer pressure will force many to join.

I don't think that Google can be blamed necessarily for peer pressure, however.

But Privacy International also says it has identified a security flaw in Latitude.

It says: "After studying the system documentation, PI has determined that the Google system lacks adequate safeguards to protect users from covert opt-in to Latitude's tracking technology. While it is clear that Google has made at least some effort to embed privacy protections, Latitude appears to present an immediate privacy threat."

It says there are clear scenarios when the reciprocal authorisation system employed by Google's Latitude (eg I want to share my location data with you, and you want to share your location data with me, and we both agree to do so) can be exploited:

 • An employer provides staff with Latitude-enabled phones on which a reciprocal sharing agreement has been enabled, but does not inform staff of this action or that their movements will be tracked.
 • A parent gifts a mobile phone to a child without disclosing that the phone has been Latitude-enabled.
 • A partner, friend or other person gains access to an unattended phone (left on a bar or in the house) and enables Latitude without the other person's knowledge.
 • A Latitude-enabled phone is given as a gift.
 • A phone left unattended, for example with security personnel or a repair shop, is covertly enabled.

These are, of course, human failings rather than technological. Privacy International is seeking a further layer of technological security to the authorisation process.

Fire Eagle, for example, can be set up to be re-authorised every few months or so.

Latitude does also allow users to mask their location, and even control how accurate it is.

The story here is less about Google, to my mind, and more about the imperative for everyone in society to grapple with the implications surrounding technology and privacy, especially when it is moving so quickly.

And I've been trying out services like BrightKite for a while now to try and get my head around those implications.

I can be found - quite literally - on BrightKite here.

PS: In the video below, you can see a Google product manager demonstrating Latitude.

PPS: In case anyone was wondering why my posting to dot.life has been so dismal of late, I've actually been away from Technology for almost six months on a few side projects with the BBC. I'm back in the wi-fi-enabled saddle from the middle of this month. My thanks to Rory and Maggie for doing such an excellent job with the blog in my absence.

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Happy Birthday, Facebook. You've made it to five, and you're still standing on your own two feet.

That is a pretty good achievement for a little website started in a bedroom by a student. Mark Zuckerberg has defied those who advised him to sell up when the going was good rather than forging ahead on his own.

And for those, like me, who've tired of Facebook and moved on to another social network (I won't mention it because I know it's beginning to bore some of you), it is worth looking at the latest figures to remind ourselves of the extent to which Mr Zuckerberg's creation now dominates its young industry.

Eighteen months ago, when the London media became somewhat obsessed with Facebook, it was growing rapidly but was still way behind MySpace in terms of its total audience. Even 12 months ago, according to Nielsen Online, Facebook had a global audience of 38 million compared to MySpace's 78 million - although in the UK it had already grabbed the number one spot. But by the end of 2008, Mr Zuckerberg's network had nearly trebled, with 110 million people using it worldwide, while MySpace had barely moved at all, up to 83 million.

In the UK the figures are even more startling. Facebook has more than 17 million users, three times as many as MySpace, and people spend more time on it than on any other site. Networks with professional rather than social aims, such as LinkedIn, are also growing rapidly, but are minnows in the wake of the Facebook whale.

So who are all these people in the poking crowd? Well, it seems that at least in the UK just about anyone between 15 and 25 feels obliged to have a Facebook profile.

I've been talking to some students in Bristol, who seem almost addicted to the network. Joe Gilder, now the communications officer at Bristol University students' union, admitted he was amazed that he'd got through his degree, so much time had he spent just mucking around on Facebook.

"I used to spend at least three hours a day on it which I called revising," he told me. "For me it's the most important thing around. I know exactly what's going on everywhere through my Facebook profile." His verdict - and that of others I spoke to - was that it was almost impossible to live the student life without Facebook.

But how is Mr Z getting on with turning all this obsessive devotion into money? He certainly hasn't taken the easy way out. The MySpace founders got out rather rapidly, selling up to the Murdoch empire. Friends Reunited was bought by ITV. And most impressively of all, Bebo tied the knot with AOL for $850 million a year ago.

All of those deals now look pretty smart. AOL has denied recent reports that it's now looking to shed Bebo at a loss, but you can't help thinking that anyone who bought a social network before the global downturn really began to bite is now feeling like someone who took out a 100% mortgage on a London house in 2007. While those who sold the houses - and banked their winnings - are feeling, well, somewhat smug.

Social networking is one trend that shows no sign of going away. But it is proving surprisingly hard to "monetise", with users deeply suspicous of any attempt to insert marketing messages between them and their friends. Still, according to the Harvard Crimson's report, just five days after Mark Zuckerberg launched "thefacebook.com", he "did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue".

So, as he lights the candles on the birthday cake, maybe it's enough for him just to have created something that has changed the way millions of people communicate.

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We all like to think that our words and our musings are worth something - that they have real value and real meaning.

Well, in the world of Twitter, the popular microblogging service that restricts you to 140 characters, there is a way to find out just what those bon mots add up to in terms, apparently, of dollars and cents.

I would like to stress that I know I am setting myself up for a fall here, but please keep the put-downs to a minimum. Thanks to a new service called TweetValue.com my so-called "bling-bling" rating tops out at $62 (£43.66) .Yeah!

In my defence, I have really only been a regular tweeter since the middle of December.

I looked up the tweetvalue of my lovely colleague Rory Cellan-Jones, and he comes in at a stonking $350 (which would be £246.47 if the figures were real). The recently-started BBC is at $3,305 (£2,327), but - get this - Stephen Fry is off the charts at $5,552 (£3,909).

The site says that the service was created in four hours by the Swedish entrepreneur and developer Jonas Lejon and is "calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile" [sic].

Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear reckons the service takes into account "the number of followers you have, how frequently you tweet, how many @replies you get, etc".

And, in case you are wondering who tops the TweetValue list, it's the leader of the free world. President Barack Obama is currently worth $41,150 (£28,978) and he hasn't tweeted since 19 January, Martin Luther King Day.

And while my self-esteem might have taken a knock or two there, it got a real thumping when I visited a similar kind of service called whatsyourtweetworth, which aims to tell you what advertisers would pay to auction ads on your Twitter page.

My value really plummets here and comes in at an ego-bruising $17.58 (£12.38) an advert. Rory fares much better at $174.65 (£122.99), while the BBC really is currently in the doldrums at $7.79 (£5.48).

Okay, enough mindless fun - time to get back to real life!

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The heaviest snowfall in south east England since the early 1990s has brought out the best in the most technically-aware sections of the population - or the worst, if, like many in other parts of the country, you think this is just an excuse for soft Southerners to stay at home putting their feet up.

From late on Sunday, social networks - particularly Twitter - were alive with excited speculation about the arrival of the snow. Then on Monday morning, there was a new rush of information and photos, with useful detail about transport problems, school closures, and local snow conditions. I set off for school with a child this morning - and posted this picture when we arrived. Rapidly, more information came my way advising me on how I might get to work. The web was working in a useful collaborative way.

But Ben Marsh went one step further. He's a web developer who was hanging around on Twitter on Sunday afternoon. "I was looking at snow-related posts. Someone had suggested putting a postcode and a rating of how much snow they were getting next to the #uksnow tag on Twitter. Someone else said it would be really nice to see that on a map, so I thought let's give it a whirl."

By Sunday evening he'd finished it, and as soon as he put a link to advertise it, his snow map began to take off. Now it's receiving reports from across Britain - and Northern France - giving details of snow conditions, plus the occasional picture.

Technology hasn't just made it easier to communicate about the effects of a weather emergency; it has probably lessened its economic impact. Plenty of people appear to have decided it is better to work from home rather than risk taking to the roads or public transport - just stick "working from home" into the Twitter search box to find out.

Some may be skiving, but others insist that the arrival of broadband has meant they are as effective at home on the laptop - or even more so - than they would be at their desk in the office. While I have manfully struggled my way into the office today (okay, I only live five miles away), I've found myself speaking to plenty of people on the phone who are working from home, without any apparent impact on their ability to do business.

Among them is Ben Marsh, who besides knocking up that map, has been working away for his web development firm from home. "I've got remote access, I'm straight in - and I've got everything here," he told me. And before you ask, Ben is not a soft Southerner - he lives in Derbyshire and getting to his office in Derby just hasn't been possible.

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It was the weekend which shook Google to its very foundations... possibly. All around the world, users of the search engine which prides itself - and has built a multi-billion dollar business - on providing the best, most useful answers to every query were greeted with a message warning that "this site may harm your computer".

The same text was pasted next to every search result - for everything from Aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. In effect, Google was warning users that the entire internet was sick and shouldn't be touched with an electronic bargepole.

Panic spread as the global web community told each other about this apparent breakdown. Google eventually fixed the problem, explaining that an update of a list of malicious sites somehow ended up including every web address, instead of one specific URL. But what a textbook example of a corporate disaster allowed to rage out of control...

...hold on a minute. The entire incident lasted just 55 minutes. And if you were on the West Coast of the USA, where Google is based, you are unlikely to have been affected, because it started at 0630 your time on a Saturday morning and was over by 0725. So why all the hoo-hah?

Well, news spread like wildfire around the blogosphere - or more accurately the Twitterverse - as everyone seemed determined to pass on their panic, along with rumours that Google's Gmail was also misfiring. So far. more people knew about the "may harm" incident than were affected by it. I got off a plane on my way home from a holiday on Saturday afternoon, asked online whether I'd missed any big tech stories, and was bombarded with messages about the Google crash.

So what's the verdict on the importance of this incident? One blogger decided that Google could have done better, awarding the company just 5 out of 10 for its handling of the crisis and accusing it of failing to respond as quickly as it could have done. That seems a bit harsh - it sounds like someone was hauled out of bed in Mountain View at 0645 on a Saturday to tinker with the engine, and got it sorted straight away. But it does go to show how rapidly you need to react to a crisis in a world where your mistakes will be the subject of web chatter within minutes of them happening.

Two Twitterers gave rather different views of Google's 55 minute crisis. One said, perhaps not completely seriously: "kennedy, lady di crash, and now #googmayharm! Everyone will remember what they were doing". Another put it like this: "small message under Google search results brings Twitterverse to a halt. Real world curiously unaffected!"

And the other thing to remember is that while the web's reactions may be fast, and its gaze intense, its attention span is very short. In Britain at least, a temporary problem with a search engine has been eclipsed by the arrival of snow. #uksnow is the tag attracting thousands of comments on Twitter - and I suspect it may take a little longer than 55 minutes to sort that out.

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