Archives for June 2010

Whose network should you choose if you want the best 3G coverage for your phone?

According to Orange, it's obvious. "The Orange 3G network covers more people in the UK than any other operator," boasted the company in a newspaper advert.

But its rival network Three hit out at that claim, insisting it had better coverage of the UK.

Now the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that the Orange advert was misleading.

The dispute centred on the difference between population coverage and geographical coverage, and the ASA went to the only source of information about these issues, Ofcom's maps of each network's reach [667.34KB PDF] published last year.

What those maps show is a very broad brush picture of the geographical reach of each network, rather than any data on how many people each of them can reach.

They do show that Three has more coverage of the UK than Orange, but there is no information on how many people they reach.

Orange says its network is ahead of Three on that count, using statistics published by each network.

While Ofcom has done some work on measuring 3G population coverage, it has not published any findings. So the ASA ruled that Orange was not in a position to claim that it was ahead of Three.

Confused? I don't blame you, and this all goes to show how difficult it is for consumers to get reliable information about the quality of the networks.

When people are buying very expensive smartphones they need to know whether they will be able to use them in their area - and right now they just have to take the word of the retailer or the network.

What's needed is a lot more data about people's real life experience of getting a decent 3G signal.

At the moment all we have is anecdotal evidence - like the story from a colleague who's just turned up at my desk to complain that a brand new top of the range smartphone can barely get a signal from the Orange network in London.

So isn't it about time someone undertook a large-scale comprehensive and objective study of how the different UK mobile networks perform for their customers?

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

The big story about the new iPhone has been the problem with the antenna which means that if you grip it the wrong way, your signal fades or disappears.

"Don't hold it that way" was Steve Jobs advice to one complaining e-mail, but that's not much comfort if you've paid a hefty sum for a handset which has trouble making calls.

Embarrassing to say the least and something you would have thought would be sorted out in the extensive testing.

But one aspect of the phone which does look a success is the onboard video editing software, an app called iMovie. I've been trying it out over the weekend, and you can see the results of my efforts here.

My conclusion? Apple's latest gadget is a useful mobile video production device. Pity it's not so good at making phone calls.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

"Clamp down on government websites to save millions" and "Martha Lane Fox appointed as UK Digital Champion."

Two headlines currently prominent on the Cabinet Office website which could just as well have been there under the previous government.

For some years now, politicians have been trying to do two things - cut spending while putting more services online, and so far it's proved rather hard.

But now the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is having another go, promising a review which could see up to 75% of government websites shut down. He says the previous government promised similar action, but ended up with more websites, not fewer.

This morning's press release also contains some damning evidence from a report which looked at value for money from government websites. Among its findings:

• Just 46 websites cost £94 million to build, with staff costs of £32m

• Quango websites have competed with government sites, so the Potato Marketing Board's lovechips.co.uk is up against the Department of Health's Change4Life healthy living campaign.

• The Department for Energy bid against the Energy Saving Trust for Google search terms, driving up the costs.

But the most eye-catching line in the report is the cost of different websites. The star prize here goes to the UK Trade and Investment site, www.ukti.gov.co.uk which had a cost per visit of £11.78. That compares with just 3p per visit for www.opsi.gov.uk, a site which gives access to UK legislation.

The comparison is of course quite unfair. The two sites are doing very different jobs, and the UKTI is only trying to reach a limited audience, exporters, rather than the wider public. But the overall cost of producing government sites does look extremely high.

This morning I spoke to Tom Watson, the former Labour Cabinet Office minister, who set out to trim web spending and indeed commissioned this report.

While he said there was a certain amount of spin in this morning's announcement - "we did actually close down over 1,000 websites" - he welcomed Francis Maude's determination to push through the efficiency programme.

But he had a warning: "It's like that Greek fellow, Sisyphus, trying to push a boulder up a mountain," he said. "It's very hard, it requires ministerial purpose to get it done."

What's more, at the very time that websites face closure, the Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox is talking of encouraging people to get on the internet by making sure that some government services are only available online. It sounds like that could mean more sites, not fewer.

The trick will be to identify those government websites that are drawing big audiences and delivering useful services at a reasonable cost and close the rest.

Easier said than done. By my calculation, the government is promising to identify by September over 600 of its 800 websites for closure. Let's keep an eye on how that goes.

Update, 12:30: UKTI have been in touch to say the figure of £11.78 per visit does not paint a true picture of the cost of their website. A spokesperson said "This calculation is based on the site traffic to a single part of the website that represents just 20% of total traffic." UKTI claims its website actually represents great value for money, promoting trade events which earn the UK hundreds of millions of pounds in export orders.

But this just goes to show what a fight ministers can expect from every government department with a website threatened with closure.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

They may not have known it, but the thousands queueing for the iPhone 4 this morning were a symptom of an issue that's only now rearing its head in the UK - net neutrality. As more and more people use smartphones to consume vast amounts of data, the cries of pain from the network operators, fixed and mobile, are going to get louder. What's more they are beginning to ask whether the media firms which pump their products down the pipes shouldn't be paying for the privilege.

That's the theme of a discussion document unveiled by Ofcom's Ed Richards this morning. I had arrived at the briefing puzzled as to how to sum up net neutrality in a sentence. Someone suggested "all data is created equal" but Mr Richards admitted it was a term that meant different things to different people. He said he preferred to talk about the practice of internet traffic management - and mentioned O2's move to end unlimited data plans for the new iPhone as an example.

Ofcom defines traffic management as "a technique used by network operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to stem or accelerate the flow of traffic over the web." The regulator outlined a spectrum of techniques, from speed limits only imposed during periods of high congestion, through the throttling back of some types of traffic, all the way to blocking rival content such as a competitor's online television service.

The network operators are responding to an explosion in the use of online services which chew up a lot of data - an example being the record amounts of video-streaming during the England World Cup match on Wednesday.

The mobile operators in particular seem to have been caught unaware by this phenomenon - Ofcom's document includes this interesting graph showing mobile data volumes increasing by a factor of 23 during a period when revenues doubled.

So the operators need to spend money improving their infrastructure, and are concerned that they will not earn the revenues to pay for that. In both the fixed and mobile world the networks are already trying to control consumer behaviour and they are now turning to the content owners responsible for much of the traffic.

This has been a very controversial issue in the United States, where Ofcom's equivalent, the FCC, has taken a robust stance, backing the principle of net neutrality and making it clear it opposes the practice of discriminating between different forms of internet traffic. That stance has been applauded by the likes of Google, and attacked by telecoms perators who want the freedom to act against bandwidth-heavy peer-to-peer services.

Ofcom says it has two concerns - transparency for consumers, and competition. So it wants to make sure consumers understand the traffic management policies of their broadband providers, and that companies don't use these techniques to do down their rivals.

But unlike the FCC, Ofcom is not coming out strongly in favour of net neutrality or ruling out the use of traffic management altogether. "We don't have the knee-jerk position on this that some have," says Ed Richards, "that any discussions of that kind are in all circumstances wrong."

The regulator says the UK has a far more competitive broadband landscape than the US, where most consumers can only choose between two suppliers.

Ofcom is now inviting comments on its policy document. So far, the net neutrality debate has not excited much passion in the UK. That may be about to change.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

How did you watch the England match yesterday? If you watched online, you were part of a record-breaking crowd.

With the match being played in the afternoon, the BBC was expecting exceptional levels of traffic as people at work accessed the Sport website or the iPlayer.

And so it proved - as well as office workers, a number of schools watched online. My son returned home with tales of electronic whiteboards used to show the game.

At the peak, the BBC says there were 800,000 concurrent streams during the England v Slovenia game - that's the peak number watching at any one time, and will be much lower than the figure for unique visitors.

That smashed the previous record set, ooh, ages ago on Monday, when there were 355,000 concurrent streams for coverage of the World Cup and Wimbledon.

There were other reports of record traffic; the internet service provider Demon says there was a 55% increase in internet traffic during the match, while Easynet put the spike in traffic at kick-off at 226%.

This was not just in the UK: there are reports from across the Atlantic that web traffic to news sites hit record levels as the USA played Algeria.

Arbor Networks, a firm which monitors the internet, says it saw Flash traffic peak at more than double normal levels, and Flash, as it points out is just one small part of World Cup video.

By the way, for evidence of how excited some Americans now are about the football, take a look at this clip.

But despite this huge flow of video, the internet stood up to the strain. Interoute, which runs Europe's largest fibre-optic network, says there was no mass surge in internet traffic overall. It speculates that routine net activities, such as web browsing, fell away.

True, some people reported problems viewing the video streams - one viewer told me that his reception of the BBC stream was 13 minutes behind the TV by the end of the match.

But the real loser has been Twitter, which has come under unprecedented strain during the World Cup.

A site which measures the availability of services like Twitter shows it suffered significant downtime on Wednesday, one of a number of incidents over recent days.

All in all, however, a day when the internet proved once again how robust it is. A few months back, Craig Labovits of Arbor Networks told me that the running joke in the engineering community is that the internet is always on the verge of collapse.

Fingers crossed, it looks like it might just cope with the global online event which the World Cup has become.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

"We will not go ahead with the poorly-targeted tax relief for the video games industry." Just one line in George Osborne's Budget speech yesterday sent an industry into despair. For years, the big guns of the games business have been in and out of Downing Street lobbying for help for their industry - and back in March when Alistair Darling finally delivered the tax relief they'd been asking for, the champagne corks were no doubt popping at developers and publishers across the UK.

Even after the arrival of the new government, the industry seemed convinced it was still in line for help. After all, the new digital minister was Ed Vaizey, who'd already promised a games industry conference back in March that tax breaks would be introduced in the Conservatives' first Budget. Perhaps ELSPA (Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), the industry's main lobbying organisation, should have been listening a bit more carefully a couple of weeks ago when Mr Vaizey and his boss Jeremy Hunt seemed just a little more cautious about what the Budget would offer.

Anyway, yesterday ELSPA's boss Mike Rawlinson sounded like a bride jilted at the altar:

"Bearing in mind the pre election commitment towards tax breaks made by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats we are extremely disappointed by the outcome of today's Budget. Our industry will be rightly puzzled as to how tax breaks can be lauded before an election, only to be seen as 'poorly targeted' and scrapped just six weeks later."

But why should the games industry really expect special treatment at a time of huge strains on the nation's finances? The argument is that a vital creative industry which is a significant exporter is losing out because other countries, such as Canada, are using government money to lure games investment away from our firms. In Los Angeles last week at the E3 games event, I met leading British developers who accepted that tax breaks were bad for the industry as a whole - but argued that if others were playing that game, the UK could not afford to stand on the sidelines.

But if we do have such a thriving industry already, where's the evidence that it really needs propping up? TIGA, another industry lobbying group, put out a report earlier this month showing that UK developers were eager to export even more - but, of course, that would only happen if the tax relief was delivered. And like every industry down the ages, from coal to steel to cars, the games folks pushed the line that a little investment now would deliver a return for the Treasury in the long run: "TIGA's research shows that over a five year period it (tax relief) will generate £415 million in tax receipts for HM Treasury."

A Treasury which has heard those arguments many time before appears to have looked sceptically at those sums. But the games lobby had another, perhaps more powerful argument - if we are prepared to support the British film industry, now a minnow on the world stage, why not give similar help to an industry which has a far brighter future? I think that's to ignore the justification for the help to the film industry, which is there for cultural rather than economic reasons. In a movie industry still dominated by Hollywood, it would be hard for British films to make an impact without some support, though you can argue whether the likes of "Sex Lives of The Potato Men" are a great adornment to our unique cinematic heritage.

"We're part of the culture too!" is the response from UK games developers, but is there anything uniquely British developed here? The big winner at this year's games BAFTAs was Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum, and the big hits made by the leading independent developer Blitz Games Studios are based on American TV shows. Both are making excellent games but they hardly reek of Kentish Town or Leamington Spa, where they were made.

Still, the games industry will have another chance to put all of these arguments to a government minister next month. Ed Vaizey is speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton - he may want to sharpen up his first-person shooter skills in advance.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

The wealthiest 26-year-old in the world has been in London with some of his senior colleagues, trying to extend the hand of friendship. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, dropped in on David Cameron in Downing Street, then went to meet a gathering of developers, and the odd journalist, at a "developer garage".

So what did we learn? Well first of all, when a young guy in a hoodie and trainers from a company that did not exist six years ago can get access to a prime minister when he drops into town, that's a sign of how rapidly the world is changing. Neither side was saying much about the visit - though the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt did tweet about it - except that it was about how government can use the internet more to engage with the public.

During the election campaign the Conservatives were enthusiastic users of Facebook, so perhaps we will now see the coalition government making the Budget a Facebook event to which we're all invited - or putting a "Like" button on the Inland Revenue's website.

And the main message that Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues gave to the developers they met at the Barbican was that this process of taking what the firm calls its social graph right across the web was moving ahead at a pace. Over 300,000 sites have now installed social plug-ins, integrating their users' activities with their Facebook lives, since they were launched in April.

Examples on display at the event included Playfish, the casual games developer which now lets users play games like Fifa Superstars through Facebook, the BBC's new iPlayer which encourages users to tell friends about favourite programmes, and the music-streaming service Spotify, which allows its users to share playlists with their Facebook friends.

Incidentally, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his brief address to the developers that he was a big fan of Spotify, which is interesting as the firm has not yet launched in the United States - they're obviously preparing the way with accounts for VIPs.

So a vision was painted of a world brought together by Facebook, to the benefit of users and developers.

In a speech peppered with "awesomes" Mark Zuckerberg told us,"every year that goes by there's just more and more ways of getting information and the world just keeps getting better and better. So it's a really exciting time to be developing."

What we heard little or nothing about was how this added up as a business - for the developers or for Facebook - and you might have thought that everyone was there just to spread the message of peace, love and sharing. The answer is of course that the more "sticky" the social network can be made for users through the exploitation of this social graph, the easier it will be to sell advertising.

What also seemed clear was that Mark Zuckerberg was far more comfortable talking to a crowd of young developers than he would be presenting his company to investment analysts or financial journalists. If Facebook's future includes a stock-market flotation, then he might find he needs to hire someone older, greyer and less likely to wear trainers, to talk balance sheets while he concentrates on the geeky stuff.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Toshiba wants to be loved. It's a company which invented the laptop 25 years ago. It is at the forefront of innovation in mobile computing now and it is the third biggest player in the market behind HP and Acer. But the Japanese firm thinks it is not getting the credit for its achievements, and it is frustrated that a rival which it believes is no further forward in the technology race is stealing its thunder.

At least that was the message that I took from a meeting with Alan Thompson, Toshiba's European boss. He was passionate about his company's products and brought with him three new devices which he believes show it at its best. There was the Portege R700 - the latest laptop to claim the crown of thinnest and lightest. There was the AC100, a mobile internet device running on Google's Android operating system. And most interesting of all, the Libretto W100, a Windows 7 multi-touch laptop with a virtual keyboard, which appears to be an attempt to win leadership in the fast-growing tablet category.

And swiftly the talk turned to tablets and the device which has grabbed the limelight - Apple's iPad. "Apple think they've invented the category of the tablet," said Mr Thompson dismissively, "but our first slate-based tablet was launched in 1993." I asked, with a degree of irony, how that was all going, and he was good enough to laugh and admit that the fact that I hadn't heard of any such device indicated that it had not gone all that well so far.

Perhaps the Libretto will prove a breakthrough, though the one I saw was not yet ready to be put through its paces. But Mr Thompson described a touchscreen tablet that Toshiba launched last year, which was selling reasonably well. "It has most of the functions of the iPad," he said,"it's just that we don't have the millions of dollars of marketing spend that other companies have."

He promised to send me one to try out, and a few days later the Journ.e Touch home multimedia tablet turned up. Obviously the first thing Toshiba needs to sort out is the name - how about iTosh? Once I'd got past that hurdle I found that Toshiba's tablet did indeed have many of the functions of the iPad, packed into a smaller device with a seven-inch screen. It uses the Opera browser for the web, it allows you to store and play videos, music and photos, and unlike Apple's tablet it has removable storage options, with ports for USB devices and SD cards. There are even apps that can be installed from a Toshiba virtual store, all of them apparently free.

What's more the Journ.e Touch retails at less than half the price of the cheapest iPad, so in theory it should be a huge hit, generating very significant revenues for Toshiba. So why isn't it? Mr Thompson believes that a combination of Steve Jobs' charisma, the marketing muscle of Apple, and the tens of thousands of apps now available for its devices are to blame.

But I think that's only part of the story. The truth is that the device, like so many tablets that came along before Apple transformed the market, just isn't good enough. It's hard to use - I found myself jabbing at the screen with increasing frustration - harder to navigate, and its design already looks a little dated. But even if it isn't beautiful perhaps it is more functional than Apple's shiny plaything?

I tried a simple test, updating my Facebook status with each machine. It took me five minutes on the Toshiba - and my status update was so full of typos as to be virtually unreadable. The same task carried out on an iPad took half as long, despite having to reset my wireless connection halfway through, and produced a readable result.

So is the iPad a lot more expensive to make than the Journ.e Touch? Alan Thompson reckons the two firms use very similar components and manufacturing processes, so the underlying cost of the £199 product is little different from that of something which retails at between £400 and £700. In other words, Apple must be enjoying quite extraordinary profit margins on the iPad so no wonder that other firms are rushing to enter this market.

Now it looks as though Toshiba will be adopting a different strategy with the new Libretto dual-screen device - I've seen reports that it will retail at over $1,000, or around £700. But however it prices its products, the Japanese company needs to learn one simple lesson from Apple. Elegant design and above all a great user experience matter as much or more than a history of innovation.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

In Los Angeles and then at home this week, I've had a vision of the future of the games industry - and it's not great news for the console-makers. Everything about the industry is moving online - and while the likes of XBoxLive and Sony's PS3 online service are growing rapidly, a host of other players will be promising gamers that they can deliver a better or at least cheaper experience.

People like Dave Jones, who I met at the Los Angeles Convention Centre in a room packed with screens where his team were preparing to show off the fruits of years of work. Dave is a games industry legend, and I think I first met him in 1996, when I visited a small firm in Dundee which was then working on a new title called Grand Theft Auto.

After selling the business behind GTA, Dave set up a firm called Realtime Worlds which now has offices both in Dundee and in Boulder, Colorado, and has won significant amounts of venture capital backing from Silicon Valley. For the last five years, a team of 200 has been working on a project in line with a philosophy outlined on the company's website like this:

"As avid game players, we believe the future of video games lies in massively multiplayer on-line gaming. Constantly evolving worlds with real players and communities offer an unrivalled experience that many players have yet to enjoy."

The result is APB - All Points Bulletin - which appears to deliver a similar experience to Grand Theft Auto, but exclusively online.

APB is stored in data centres in Europe and the United States and Dave Jones says making that run smoothly has been the biggest issue:

"There's been a great technology challenge to make it possible to have a seamless experience. It allows thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of players to connect and play together in a dynamic world."

When the game launches in July, players will pay £34.99 to download it with 50 hours of online play, and can then choose to pay a monthly fee or buy extra time in one-off payments.

It sounds like the model successfully pioneered by World of Warcraft, which has proved hugely profitable for its owners Activision. Realtime Worlds says it has got a twist, enabling gamers to earn extra hours by playing skilfully and by creating virtual goods that other players want.

There seems no reason why the 18-rated game should not win plenty of customers amongst the GTA and Call of Duty crowd, but younger gamers with less money to spend are also finding plenty to entertain them online.

I got home to find an 11-year-old asking me for help in spending £10 of his pocket money in an online world called Maple Story. This is a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) created in South Korea seven years ago, which has attracted millions of players around the world who battle monsters and complete quests. It has now apparently become a craze amongst British 11-year-olds, who are abandoning their Wiis to play this and other simple but compelling online games.

Maple Story is free but its makers are generating revenue through a virtual shop where players use real money to buy items for their characters. Anyone who remembers how keen they were at 11 to buy cards, stickers and all sorts of other ephemeral goodies will understand how powerful this kind of craze can be. Nexon, the Korean firm behind Maple Story and other free casual online games, earned revenues of nearly £400m last year.

So two examples of online games which are finding new ways of getting users to spend their money. But gamers do not have unlimited cash, and every pound that goes to APB or Maple Story is money that won't be spent on games for the Wii, the Xbox 360, or the PS3.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Los Angeles: When I last came to E3 I made a big mistake about Nintendo. It was in 2005 for the launch of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360, and once we had finished filming I rang home and talked to my then 14-year-old son, an expert gamer. "Dad," he told me, "be sure to go to Nintendo's press conference, they're bound to come up with something special."

In my best patronising Dad tone I told him we had no time for the number three in the console market, a company now sure to be left behind by the stunning graphics capabilities of the high-end machines just launched by Microsoft and Sony. How wrong I was, as the Wii's emergence as the hottest console of the moment went on to prove.

So on the day I flew out of Los Angeles, I made sure I went along to the Nintendo press conference. Even though it involved standing in a queue outside the venue from 7 am, then going through airport-style security to get in.

Inside I found the same kind of slightly scary crowd you get at an Apple keynote, oohing and aahing, cheering and wowing at every demo, though it's Mario and Zelda who get the warmest welcome rather than a guy in a black turtle neck. The Nintendo demonstrators even managed to repeat Steve Jobs trick at his iPhone 4 launch, blaming wireless interference from the crowd of bloggers when things went slightly wrong.

Reggie Fils-Aime, the splendidly named boss of Nintendo's US division, welcomed us with a useful summary of his firm's philosophy. Yes, we'd seen all sorts of exciting new tech at E3, from 3D to HD to motion control, but that was only part of the story:

"It begins with technology -  but technology is only a tool. The thing that matters is the experience."

We then got quite a show - when an American game demonstrator appeared to be too clumsy, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's presiding genius, was magicked off a screen and onto the stage to loud applause to demonstrate how it should be done.

We raced through a series of new games for the Wii, accompanied by a blizzard of statistics designed to dispel the false assumption that it was now losing ground to its rivals. More games had been sold for the Wii than for any other console in a comparable period, Wii users played more game than other gamers, and the new crowd it had attracted certainly didn't just play a bit of Wii Sports or Wii Fit and then give up on it.

Fine, but we hadn't come to hear about the Wii, we wanted something new, and that of course was the Nintendo 3DS, the first 3D handheld games console. it seems an amazing feat of technology, promising not only 3D games but a camera which takes 3D pictures and the ability to show movies like Avatar without the need to wear special glasses.

"Wow" went the crowd but I couldn't help returning to what Mr Fils-Aime had said about the importance of the experience rather than the technology. We will have to wait and find out just how much 3D adds to the experience of playing or viewing on the small screen of a handheld console - but I'm just a little sceptical.

But what do I know? I contacted a real expert, my son, who is now a student and had watched the Nintendo press conference from his college room while revising for exams. He wasn't convinced that many of the new games would interest the casual audience that had been attracted by the likes of Wii Sports - but he was impressed by the new handheld console:

"The 3DS looks very exciting. It seems like they're trying to head off Apple, who've been trying to get into the game market with the iPhone and iPad. I'll definitely be getting one!"

Hmm, top quality analysis I'm sure. But wouldn't the meagre resources of a student be better spent on books - and maybe beer - than yet another gadget that will be obsolete within a couple of years?

Still we've seen over the past few years that Nintendo seems to have a better understanding of what gamers new and old really want from the experience than Sony, Microsoft or ageing technology journalists. So parents beware - next Christmas, or whenever the 3DS goes on sale, expect to be standing in a long line or spending many hours online trying to get hold of another must-have present. 

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Los Angeles: E3 is gamer heaven, and also many people's idea of hell - a hall filled with deafening sounds and searing lights with sweaty crowds jostling to get to the stands.

But much of the real action takes place away from the Los Angeles Convention Centre. In hotel rooms across the city, developers are holding meetings with publishers and hoping they will come away just a little better placed to weather the uncertainties of an industry continually rocked by turbulence.

It was in the calm surroundings of a Japanese garden on top of a downtown hotel that I met one such developer. Philip Oliver and his brother Andrew are the co-founders of a great British success story, Blitz Games Studios. Over the last 25 years, they have built a business which has somehow managed to survive as an independent developer while just about all of their peers in the British games industry have fallen into foreign hands.

They now have a diverse stable, from arcade to casual to mature games, but it's family games, many based on popular American television shows, which are now proving their biggest money-spinners.

The company brought 10 of its 220 strong workforce over from the Leamington Spa headquarters and was preparing for battle, with meetings aplenty and a whole lot of networking to be done. They were in a bubbly mood, preparing to unveil a whole series of titles for use on Microsoft's new Kinect system, unveiled on Sunday evening.

As we sat at a table in the rooftop garden, squinting at laptop screens and mobile phones, the brothers enthusiastically pulled up videos of one game which involves a kind of acting karaoke, where players put themselves into scenes from famous movies.

Another, based on the a popular American TV show called The Biggest Loser, encourages players to get fit and lose weight, with their exercises scrutinised by the on-screen presenters.

But then things turned serious, as we talked about the rocky finances of the industry. Second-hand games, and the rise of casual gaming - simple games which cost little or nothing - are putting pressure on everyone's margins. Blitz's Philip Oliver was among those who lobbied the Labour government long and hard and finally won the promise of tax relief in the March Budget. Now he's telling the new government that support is vital:

"We compete internationally for games contracts - other governments around the world are actually subsidising their local developers and that puts us at a disadvantage."

Tiga, the body which lobbies on behalf of British developers rather than publishers, is also stepping up its lobbying with a report claiming the games industry can help fuel an export-led recovery in the UK. It says its research shows that 91% of British developers export, and have ambitions to sell even more overseas. Like every other industry pressing for government help, the games business claims tax relief will pay off in the long run. Tiga says its research shows that over five years the relief will generate an extra £415m in tax receipts for the Treasury.

Those figures, which sound remarkably precise, are obviously pure speculation - who's to say what other governments will do for their games industries if the UK joins the tax-relief party?

Blitz admits it would rather no country got government help - but if everybody's doling out cash, it wants a fair share for the UK.

By 0800, having finished our filming and grabbed a coffee, Philip Oliver and the Blitz team were heading out of their hotel to sell their wares. With government help still a distant prospect, British games developers are going to need to work long hours to keep ahead of the competition.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Los Angeles: If you want to see the future, head for a games convention.

The computer and video games industry has poured billions into innovation over the last decade, particularly since it became a new front in the battle for the home between giants like Sony and Microsoft.

They used their Playstation and Xbox platforms to experiment with rival high-definition video systems; Sony's Blu-ray won that battle.

At this week's E3 event in Los Angeles, both companies are unveiling innovative ways of interacting with their consoles. In that mission, they are trying to steal a march on Nintendo which proved with the Wii that new ways of playing games could be just as important as fancy graphics.

Microsoft last night unveiled the results of Project Natal, the hefty research project which promised to turn the bodies of game players into human console controllers.

It will now be known as Kinect, and is scheduled to hit the shops in November, just in time to give the video games industry a much-needed boost in pretty hard times.

The launch had lashings of Hollywood razzmatazz, with a bevy of stars parading along a red carpet into a performance by Cirque du Soleil. For some reason I still can't quite understand, I found myself interviewing Jack Osborne about the future of gaming.

Anyway, down to business. The system centres on a sensor which you place above or below your TV - it has three cameras plus voice recognition built in, so it knows an awful lot about who you are, how far away you're standing and how you are moving.

We filmed Kinect just before the celebs flooded in to have their go, and I got a chance to play a couple of games. One involved steering a dinghy down through the rapids, another was a hurdle race, one of a series of sports games.

It was an enjoyable, if sweaty, half-hour, and I could certainly see the attractions of throwing away the control and just flinging yourself at the game.

But I was not quite convinced that Microsoft's technology would deliver for hard-core gamers. It seemed to work well on fun Wii-like games where you didn't need too much precision - I'm not so sure how whether it would deliver on a first-person shooter.

I've also had a go on Sony's Move motion control system, which is unveiled on Tuesday. Sony's solution is much less radical. It has retained the controller, now adorned with glowing spheres which interact with a sensor unit on the television.

This makes the whole experience less physical than with Kinect, but it also delivers a lot more precision. Sony showed us a table tennis game which seemed to mimic the real thing much more closely than I have seen elsewhere.

But everyone in the games industry, and particularly the developers, is hoping that these innovations get gamers excited enough to start spending money again.

They might prefer to see new consoles; failing that, an accessory which obliges the customer to get some new games may just do the trick.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Earlier this week I wrote about the struggle that the UK's mobile networks were having to provide the kind of service that smartphone users demand.

Now one operator has acted to try to control the flow of data across its network.

O2 has unveiled new smartphone tariffs, in preparation for the imminent arrival of iPhone 4, and the company has abolished the unlimited data allowance that was seen as a key feature.

Now the operator's monthly contracts will include a set amount of data - 500MB for a £35 two-year contract, 1GB for the £60 a month tariff.

Already some users are crying foul, and threatening to move to other networks. But maybe O2 won't be too unhappy if it does see some desertions.

It is claiming that 97% of its smartphone users will see no impact from these changes because they do not use more than 500MB a month, indeed it says they may even see an improvement in their service.

Why? The implication is that just a tiny majority of bandwidth hogs are using vast amounts of data, watching streaming video or playing online games. They are making the network less stable, and if they leave then things will improve.

Just to put this in perspective, mobile data use only really took off in the UK when unlimited tariffs arrived - before that everyone was terrified with some justification that they could pile up huge bills.

So will O2's move which seems likely to be followed by other operators - signal an end to the mobile data explosion we've seen in the UK in the last couple of years?

The mobile industry believes not, and there is a sense of relief that someone has made the first move.

One industry analyst, Thomas Wehmeier at Informa Telecoms, argues that unlimited plans were unsustainable:

"Whilst consumer appetite for mobile data seems unlimited, one thing that most definitely is not unlimited is spectrum. Spectrum will forever remain a resource both short on supply and high in demand."

In other words, there is a limit to the number of mobile super-highways you can throw open, but no limit to the traffic wanting to drive along them if you don't apply some road tolls.

That all sounds logical enough. But O2 has been telling its customers that it was the speedy network for smartphone users. Having applied the brakes, it must now show that it can deliver a decent mobile surfing experience for those who stay loyal.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

If you work in the broadband or video games industries in the UK and want to know where government policy is heading over the next five years there are two men you need to know - Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey.

The culture secretary and his digital minister - at least I think that's what we call Mr Vaizey, were at a trendy London new media club yesterday to give a first glimpse of their policies.

We did not learn much that was new to anyone who had read the Conservatives' technology manifesto before the election. But there was one very bold pledge on broadband and some rather dispiriting news about tax relief for the games industry, promised by the last government.

Jeremy Hunt repeated the mantra about broadband that we've heard from just about every leading politician in recent years - that a superfast network is vital to our competitiveness and that we must be watchful in building such a network that we do not let a new digital divide emerge.

He made it clear that he thinks the market will do the job, with a little prodding from regulators to free up existing infrastructure and perhaps some cash from the BBC licence fee. But he did announce that he would trial this theory with three rural broadband market testing projects.

The jaw-dropping line in Mr Hunt's speech, however, was his pledge that Britain would have "the best superfast broadband network in Europe" by the end of this Parliament.

That means by 2015, with the spending of a maximum of £300m of public money, the UK will have soared to the top of the European broadband league.

I had a look at a recent study of global broadband performance by Cisco and Oxford's Said Business School to see how far we need to go to achieve this goal.

It puts the UK in 17th place in Europe, far behind the likes of Sweden and Switzerland, with even Slovenia and Latvia ahead in the table. So to use a football metaphor, Mr Hunt is in the position of the manager of West Ham, promising to win the Premier League within five years, without a big budget for new players. Even Hammers fans may see that as a little optimistic.

On tax relief for the games industry Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey had warm words but then made it pretty clear that it would not be arriving in a hurry.

There was talk of the need for approval from Brussels, which could take up to two years, and more importantly of the battle to get the plan past the Treasury.

ELSPA, which lobbies on behalf of the UK games industry, put out a desperately cheerful statement welcoming the fact that Mr Hunt had not ruled out support, and hoping for help in the emergency budget on 22 June.

But the Chancellor George Osborne could have other priorities than helping out the makers of Grand Theft Auto and the like. Just like West Ham fans, the games industry bosses may need to be patient over the coming years.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

So yet another smartphone is about to hit the stores promising unlimited mobile connectivity.

The iPhone 4 will do many of the things that Android phones like the HTC Desire can already do - multitasking, flash photography - and Steve Jobs is even promising video calls, apparently convinced this will keep his firm ahead in its increasingly bitter smartphone battle with Google.

But remember the first 3G phones in the UK, and how video calls were supposed to be the killer app when they launched? They never took off, perhaps because the 3G networks were just not up to it back then.

The iPhone may deliver a better experience - but only over wi-fi for now because Apple hasn't persuaded the networks to play ball. Which brings us to the real problem with all of these smartphones right now - the technology on the phones is still moving ahead faster than the networks on which they run.

I am writing this from a business park on the fringes of Oxford, a place where you might expect to have great connectivity. Yet my phone tells me that it is struggling to get any kind of signal, yet alone the 3G I need to make use of its advanced capabilities.

Now that might be due to the fact that I'm currently using an iPhone 3GS, a device which is notoriously bad at getting a phone signal - it's a nifty little computer, but surprisingly poor at making calls. That is something which Apple promises to remedy with the new antenna on the latest model.

But even my mobile broadband dongle on a different network is barely managing to get my laptop online. Across the UK, and not just in remote areas, people using all kinds of devices on all sorts of networks are still grumbling about the struggle to get connected.

Of course the problem is that 10 years after we were promised that 3G phones would let us roam the web, make video calls and play online games on the move, we have all started to use these capabilities with a vengeance. And it turns out that the networks aren't ready for all that traffic.

It did not matter when clunky old phones with poor interfaces meant the mobile web was not worth the effort, but now millions of people are trying to drive what are the mobile phone equivalents of Ferraris down traffic-choked country lanes.

What makes it even worse is that the networks still give very patchy information about their coverage. I have just checked a place near my home where I know that one network's coverage is extremely poor - and its map tells me that it's of a high quality, good enough for video calls.

I sense from the messages I get that a consumer revolt about the state of 3G is on the cards - the more we are promised in the way of futuristic services by phone manufacturers, the greater the anger from customers who pay up only to find the network cannot deliver.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

What's the point of a library or a librarian in the digital era? Who needs a physical space for books and archives, and librarians to police their use, when all that material will soon be available to anyone with a decent internet connection at the click of a mouse?

On a visit to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth last week, I got a few answers to those questions. This is one of the UK's copyright libraries, able to ask for a copy of every book, newspaper and magazine published in the UK. It is housed in an imposing 1930s building perched above the west-Wales seaside town, and is home to collections of paintings, films and television programmes as well as as ancient and modern Welsh texts.

Like other such institutions, it is struggling to find a role in the digital age. The numbers turning up to visit the library and use its facilities are falling, and while millions are coming to its website, there's a sense that these are casual passers-by, and the value they get from the site is hard to measure.

The National Library is not however just sitting back and waiting for a graceful demise. It's plunging with enthusiasm into a massive digital project which could give it a sustainable future. A third of the staff now have roles in this project, so there's now a range of perhaps unfamiliar job titles, from Imaging Officer to Metadata Manager.

What they are engaged on is extremely ambitious, as Andrew Green, the Welsh-speaking Yorkshireman who runs the place, explained to me as we toured the building. The idea is to give free online public access to as much as possible of what he describes as "the printed heritage of Wales" from the 16th Century to the present day. So every book, periodical or pamphlet could end up online.

In a large room at the top of the library, I got a glimpse of the extent and the cost of this task. An imaging officer - I think that was her title - was carefully scanning page after page of a bound edition of a 19th-Century Welsh newspaper. The scanner used for this task was imported from Germany at a cost of £80,000, but the process doesn't end there.

The next stage involves OCR - optical character recognition - to turn the scan into machine-readable text. Then the output needs to be proof-read, and here there's the possibility of repeating a crowd-sourcing experiment used by an Australian library, which got the public to proof-read scanned texts, and found many people competing to do the most edits.

The National Library of Wales is also involved in a project which helps community groups - schools, sports clubs, even families - scan their archives and make them available online as a kind of living history document. The end results of this massive digitisation project could be an invaluable resource for historians, and for anyone interested in the culture of their country. But this will not happen in a hurry, partly because the money has to come from increasingly scarce public funds, but also because much of the work involves cutting through the complex thickets of copyright.

There is an elephant in the room for this and other mass digitisation projects by libraries around the world, and it is called Google Books. The arguments about the search giant's plan to make millions of out-of-print books from around the world available online are too complex to go into in this post; suffice it to say the project is far more ambitious than anything that could be carried out by a individual public-sector institution.

So why does not Andrew Green just hand over his digital plans to Google, and let a commercial company bear the cost rather than the public purse? The librarian puts powerfully his case against the privatisation of our printed heritage. "The people of Wales own this collection, they have paid to build it up over the years, why should it just be handed to Google?"

He points out that commercial companies - even those as powerful as Google - can come and go, while the National Library of Wales is likely to be around in the 22nd Century.

The librarian believes he has found a new cause for his profession, to give a secure home to digitised texts produced with the highest quality standards and available freely to all. "These are huge benefits," he says, "and should be fought for by all of those who care about unimpeded public access to knowledge." Google beware - the librarians are getting cross, and they are quiet but patient people.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

It's the revolution that has failed to happen. A couple of years ago it seemed that internet telephony - Skype and the like - were going to prove hugely disruptive to the mobile industry, ushering in an era of free calls and forcing mobile operators to change their business models.

At Barcelona's Mobile World Congress, manufacturers like Nokia talked excitedly about putting Skype on the latest handsets. Operators, perhaps fearing that their income stream from calls would dry up, seemed less excited.

As well as Skype, a number of services such as Fring, Jajah,and Truphone started offering apps on smartphones which, in theory, made it possible to make free calls with ease from around the world. Having tried a number of these apps myself, it's my impression that they have failed to deliver the ease of use that would make them a mass-market proposition and hence a real threat to operator revenues.

At home it has made little sense to make Voip calls, unless you are a pay-as-you-go customer - anyone who has a monthly contract will already have paid for lots of ordinary phone calls, so why use a more complex alternative? Abroad, it seems more sensible - until you realise that you can only make calls over a wireless network, which in many places are only available to paying customers.

But now Skype has come out with an update to its iPhone app which, at first sight, could prove a real breakthrough. The key aspect is that it now allows calls over a 3G network as well as wi-fi. Not only can iPhone owners make calls via 3G to other Skype users - but they can also call mobiles and landlines around the world, with the promise of very low rates.

What's more, the audio quality of the calls is massively improved with what Skype describes as CD-quality sound. As someone who is always on the look-out for new ways of doing live radio broadcasts, this immediately piqued my interest - and a Skype call to the BBC control room confirmed that the audio was up to broadcast standard.

So if it's so good, why have mobile operators like O2, Orange and Vodafone allowed this app onto their networks in the UK, with its potential to show their customers a cheaper way of calling? Russ Shaw, general manager for Skype Mobile in Europe, said they had had no complaints so far, and his theory is that the mobile industry is learning to live with his company:

"We've found with the operators that we've worked with that it helps drive smartphone take-up, and that the Skype customers tend to spend more on other services."

Russ told me I was wrong about the company's failure to date to make a real impact on the telecoms industry - he pointed out that that 12% of international calls now go via Skype, and although the vast majority of that traffic is on the desktop, mobile use is now really accelerating.

But there's one catch which could make consumers wary about mobile Voip calls - and operators all too happy to see them take off. I noticed after making a 3G call to another Skype user that two minutes online consumed over 1Mb of data. That's fine on my unlimited data plan in the UK - but would cost me £6 in the United States. Not such a great deal.

So you can see why mobile operators may resist pressure to cut international data charges. For now, internet mobile phone calls only pose a limited threat to their revenues because the sums don't quite add up for consumers - if the cost of data roaming plunges, they will become no-brainers.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?