Into Tech

Not many people have heard of graphic designer Dennis Hwang, but he has millions of fans, and probably more than a billion people have seen his work. But the 29-year-old has a unique platform for his skills: he does the “Google doodles” – variations on Google’s colourful logo - that appear on the search engine’s popular home page.

The doodles that celebrate special days such as Christmas, Halloween and Google’s birthdays signal that Google is a different kind of company: a playful one. “It’s not a gimmick,” says Hwang. “It really grows from the core culture. It comes from the founders, Larry and Sergey, their quirky personalities and drive for innovation. At a time when the company logo is considered sacred, they’re saying ‘Let’s have fun with it’.”

I met Dennis in 2005 when he judged a Doodle 4 Google competition, which invited British schoolchildren aged four to 18 to design their own logo. It was a delight. Google’s office filled with kids, and 11-year-old Lisa Wainaina got to see her winning design on the Google UK home page.

“These kids are competition I wasn’t aware of,” quipped Hwang. “My job security just went out the window.”

In reality, doodling is a sideline, and started by accident in 1999 when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were going to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. “Sergey added a tiny symbol to the home page logo to communicate directly with the users,” says Hwang.

The next doodles were done by outside contractors, but then Brin discovered that Hwang was studying art at Stanford, as well as computer science. “He said: ‘Hey, Dennis, why don’t you give this a try’,” says Hwang. He did Bastille Day in 2000, and he’s been doing them ever since.

The staples are Chinese New Year, St Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. These are supplemented by major events such as the Olympics, where there can be half a dozen doodles telling a little story.

Painters are an obvious temptation for a graphic artist, and there have been doodles to celebrate the birthdays of Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Andy Warhol, MC Escher, Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, among others. But often Hwang surprises us: there have been doodles for Ray Charles’s birthday, Bloomsday, the transit of Venus, leap year and the opening of Google’s lunar office – on April 1. One 2001 doodle that attracted particular attention celebrated Korean Independence Day, and Hwang was interviewed for the Korea Herald. Although born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up as Hwang Jung-moak in Gwacheon, South Korea. “When I was at school, the teachers didn’t like my doodling habit, but my parents always supported me,” he says. “Something that used to be frowned on turned out to be my greatest asset.”

Hwang returned to the US in 1992 when his father was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and had to cope with the American education system while unable to speak English. He still made it to Stanford University, where Google was founded.

The doodles are produced on computer, but “everything I do is hand drawn”, says Hwang: “I have some tools and tricks to make it look as though it’s done on pencil and paper.” He’s been using a Wacom graphics tablet and a stylus for input, and adopted a Tablet PC so he could work directly on the screen. “That’s my secret weapon,” he says. “It shaves two to four hours off how long it takes to draw one.”

• Google’s doodle competition

When the console chips are down and folks are buying the fun, but not exactly powerful, Wii by the truckload, what do you do? Take a chainsaw to those prices is what you do.

Microsoft has knocked $50 off the cost of its Xbox 360 Arcade console in the US [arrgh] for now, something we caught whiff of last month.

At just $200 [around £100], it’s $50 cheaper than the Wii and considerably cheaper than the PS3. Over here, the Arcade costs £150 and the Wii £180.

Microsoft is hoping to start a big rush for the console in the run up to Christmas, especially now that the price has slipped below the magic $200 mark. In a statement the company said:

A pay as you go version of the Apple iPhone will go on sale in the UK later this month offering customers unlimited internet browsing for a year if they are prepared to top-up at least £10 a month and pay a whopping £349.99 for the handset.

O2 will be the first of Apple’s network partners to offer a pay as you go version of the phone and the news comes as Nokia today unveiled what it hopes will be the biggest seller at Christmas.

The first phone in its range of Nokia Comes With Music devices is also a pay as you go handset but is a lot more basic than the iPhone. For the price tag, which has yet to be set but will be between £100 and £300, however, users get free and unlimited access to 2.1m music tracks which they can keep even if they stop using the phone. Buying the same number of tracks from iTunes would cost over £1.6m.

The 3G version of the iPhone will go on sale on September 16 in O2 and Apple stores as well as from Carphone Warehouse. The basic 8GB version of the device will be £349.99 while the larger 16GB model - which can store about 4,000 songs - will be £399.99.

But for the price, users get a year’s worth of unlimited internet browsing, either using the O2 mobile phone network or its collection of short-range wireless broadband or wi-fi hotspots dotted across the country. At the end of the 12 months users will have to pay an extra £10 per month to carry on receiving unlimited internet access. The phone works on O2’s standard pay and go tariffs, which start at £10 top-up per month.

The price tag slapped on the pre-pay phone looks high when anyone willing to sign up for an 18 month contract, at £45 a month, will get a free 8GB version or a free 16GB version for £75 a month. But over the 18-month length of the contract a user of the basic “free” phone will pay £810, while over the same period a pre-pay user of the same phone - who will have to spend a further £60 to continue browsing the internet - will spend at least £589.99.

Contract customers, however, get extras such as visual voicemail and large bundles of texts and minutes which pre-pay customers will not receive.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone company, will launch an all-out assault on Apple’s iPhone today with a new range of phones that will give music lovers access to an unlimited service.

Anyone willing buy a Nokia Comes With Music pre-pay phone will be able to download up to 2.1m music tracks - about a quarter of the number available from Apple’s iTunes - onto their computer for no extra charge for 12 months.

Those tracks can be loaded onto the Nokia phone and after a year users will need to buy a new device in order to continue downloading new releases. In contrast to other so-called unlimited music services, however, if they choose not to buy a new device, they can keep all the tracks they have already downloaded.

They will still play on the user’s computer and handset, which will also still be able to send texts and make calls.

Nokia, which is hoping the phone will be popular this Christmas with parents seeking to make their children’s music file sharing legal, will today announce that the UK will be the first market to get Comes With Music.

The first phone will be its 5310 handset, although at least one more device will be announced in time for Christmas.

The company has signed up Carphone Warehouse, which has more than 800 shops, to stock the phone. Carphone Warehouse is also Apple’s sole independent stockist of the iPhone.

Nokia’s UK managing director Simon Ainslie believes the Nokia Comes With Music range will be “the number one selling product at Christmas”.

“This is a unique proposition. Nobody has launched an unlimited music service that allows you to keep your music with no catches,” said Ainslie. “What we are trying to do is bring back some value to the music industry from people who are not paying for music. There are a lot of parents who would like to legitimise their children’s purchasing of music.”

Already some internet service providers (ISPs) have sent letters to persistent illegal file sharers warning them that their activities have been noticed, having reached a deal with industry body the BPI. For many parents this will be the first indication that their children are doing anything illicit on the internet.

Nokia Comes With Music, which was first mooted last year, is a gamble for the Finnish handset maker, which supplies four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide. It risks further damaging Nokia’s already fraught relationship with many of the major mobile phone companies. Last year it provoked their ire by announcing its own suite of mobile services - under the Ovi brand - which operators saw as a direct attempt to undercut their relationship with mobile phone users.

In fact, Nokia does not yet have a mobile phone partner for Comes With Music. As a result anyone buying the phone will have to put their existing SIM card into it or sign up for a SIM-only deal such as O2’s Simplicity.

All five UK networks have held talks with Nokia about Comes With Music but none has found the service attractive - or lucrative - enough to sign up. All the operators have their music download services and see no reason to subsidise a handset that connects users with Nokia’s own music store rather than their own. But Nokia still hopes to persuade an operator to subsidise the cost of the phone, which is why it will not set the price of the first handset until next month. It is expected to cost somewhere between £100 and £300.

Nokia has decided to press on with its unlimited service because of the threat posed to its dominance of the industry by Apple, according to mobile industry insiders. Sales of the iPhone are still small - with analysts forecasting 45m will be sold by next year compared with a global market of about 1bn handsets - it could soon be made available on more networks as the original exclusive network deals it signed in the UK, France, Germany and the US come up for renewal over the next few years.

Nokia will pay the music companies a licence fee to make their catalogues available to customers and for the three major labels that have already signed up - SonyBMG, Universal and Warner Music - the service is another attempt to try and claw some revenue back from the illegal file sharers. But Nokia has yet to reach a deal with the UK’s host of independent music labels or EMI.

“Comes With Music is a way for Nokia to add extra value to its handsets and generate more stickiness for its brand,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. But Nokia has tailored the service to the economic downturn in its major European markets.

“The 5310 handset is definitely more aimed at the mid-tier of the market - this is not the high-end device that people were expecting to see for Comes With Music,” she added. “They are responding to the trend we are beginning to see in Europe of people switching towards the mid-tier because of the economic climate.”

Explainer: Music unlimited

Nokia Comes With Music is the latest attempt to make digital music pay by bundling the cost together with another service or product - in this case the cost of the handset. There are already numerous subscription-based unlimited music services such as Napster and MusicStation; even Apple is rumoured to be working on one for iTunes. Rather than charging a separate subscription, the Danish internet firm TDC has bundled the cost of unlimited music with its broadband service. BSkyB recently signed a deal with Universal that could lead to a similar service in the UK. In France, Orange has launched MusiqueMax, which allows users to download up to 500 tracks a month for €12 and keep them as long as they like. All these services have some sort of digital rights management (DRM) software that prevents tracks being played after a subscription expires or means they can only be transferred to certain devices. Nokia Comes With Music uses Microsoft DRM technology, so downloaded tracks cannot be played on an iPod. Others in the music industry believe the future of digital music lies in offering DRM-free tracks that can be played on any device. Such tracks are already sold by iTunes, Amazon and handset maker Sony Ericsson in the Nordic region.

Mobile screen savers can be some sort of animations, text, picture and a lot of other such patterns that you choose to have on your mobile when it is not in use for sometime. It can be an inspiring text in the form of a quotation, or a funny animation or may be a picture [...]

Remember those cool electric cars and bikes designed for toddlers that rich cousins and friends got bought for Christmas?

They were designed to trundle around the home or garden at a few miles per hour and while unlikely to cause any pile-ups, were far better than those stupid pedal-powered ones the rest of us ended up using, expending our energy like a bunch of chumps.

Love them or hate them, sat-nav devices are as popular as turkeys at Christmas but which is the best - or favourite - little travel friend out there?

Consumer review site Reevoo thinks it knows the answer and after extensive sifting through more than 5,000 customer reviews on over 130 different sat-nav devices, it has compiled a list of the most popular ones in use throughout the UK today.

The Top 5 reads like this:

BT has been busy with some surveys recently, rather uncharacteristicly reporting that 18% of consumers would like to be using a powered exoskeleton by 2012.

This is the same number that want on-demand access to personal media on any device, and fractionally higher than those who’d like a robotic assistant to help with day to day chores.

Wii Sports was a big hit last Christmas, with tech-savvy households gathering the family around the TV to compete in the various events.

This year Nintendo is planning another big release for such an occasion, but with the focus on being part of a virtual band.

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has come out with a study this week claiming that nearly one in four companies blocks employee access to social networks like Facebook and MySpace. It’s a good story, which is why you see various news organizations picking up the story and running with it. Of course, if this sounds kind of familiar, that’s because less than a year ago, some other company (this time it was a security company) came out with a report claiming that half of all businesses were blocking Facebook. Now, if you assume that both reports are true, then that would suggest that fewer firms are blocking Facebook than were last summer. Of course, chances are neither report is all that accurate. And, to be fair, the “headline” from the press on the second story was inaccurate: the actual study suggested that nearly half of all employees were banned from accessing Facebook. In theory, that could be true if a few large companies banned their employees from using the site. Either way, there are companies who probably ban Facebook at work — just like in the early days of the telephone there were those that banned telephones at work, and, more recently there were companies that banned email or the internet at work. Eventually, companies recognize that fearing communication tools tends to backfire. Embracing them tends to be a lot more productive.

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