Into Tech

About four years ago there were all sorts of rumors that Google was getting ready to enter the browser wars with its own offering, most likely built on Mozilla’s code. However, after years of nothing (and an increasingly close relationship between Mozilla and Google), many had thought that idea was dead. Apparently not. After some leaks of a comic book (a comic book?!?) detailing the new Google browser found their way to the web, Google quickly admitted that it is, indeed, getting into the browser business, releasing a brand new open source browser, called Google Chrome.

Rather than being built on Mozilla, as many expected, it’s been built on top of WebKit, which is also the core of Apple’s Safari browser — but which Google was also using for its own mobile browser. In the end, this isn’t all that surprising. While many will interpret it as Google trying to take on Microsoft in the browser market, in reality, this is probably a lot more about Google trying to help everyone move beyond the operating system market. As we first suggested four years ago when rumors of a Google browser first came around, Google knows that the way to beat Microsoft is to become the operating system for the internet, and you do that by relegating the actual OS obsolete. And, these days, the path to doing that is through the browser.

So, yes, this is a shot at Microsoft — but not at Internet Exporer. It’s a shot at Windows.

That doesn’t mean Google Chrome will be successful, but a quick look at the features itself show that the features it highlights (being able to run apps separately, better memory management, etc.) are the sorts of things that allow people to make browser-based apps much more useful, rather than feeling the need to rely on client-side applications. People have predicted for years that we’re getting closer to a world where all computing can be done over the network, and it looks like Google is trying to push that process right along.

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Passengers on London Underground could be using their mobile phones to get through the ticket barriers and even pay for their lunch within the next two years, after a successful trial of technology in the capital by O2 and Transport for London.

The mobile phone company integrated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard Visa card into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers who spent six months using the phone as a mobile wallet.

They made more than 50,000 tube journeys, either by putting their existing travel card on the device or topping up their pre-pay wallet at machines in underground stations, and bought items from shops such as Eat, Yo Sushi and Krispy Kreme. The phones also gave users access to the VIP section at the O2 arena and the Wireless festival in Hyde Park.

Claire Maslen from O2 said the trial was so successful that the company was trying to put together a consortium to launch a full service within two years, well in time for the London Olympics in 2012.

“The Olympics are an obvious target to aim for, but I think that is a very conservative timeframe for a commercial service,” she said. “We would hope to have something up and running much sooner than that.”

While it may seem ridiculous to turn a mobile phone into a bank card, research has shown that people realise they have lost their phone much sooner than their wallet.

The O2 trial used near field communications (NFC) technology. The Oyster card is an obvious example, but bundling travel cards with a mobile e-wallet, which users can top up from their bank account and use to pay for items under £10, have been mooted for several years.

In Japan, such phones have been in use for more than four years. The Japanese railway network has been using the technology since 2001 and millions of cards have been issued. But the technology used in Japan is based on Sony’s FeliCa chip technology, which is different from that used in the O2 trial and by Transport for London for the Oyster card.

Philip Makinson, at industry experts Greenwich Consulting, said mobile wallets had fallen down in the past because of the number of people needed to make any system viable.

“It requires cooperation, not just between handset manufacturers and network operators but third parties such as Visa or Mastercard and banks and retailers. To reach critical mass you really need to have at least three of the big operators to be involved or there is not enough in it for the likes of Transport for London or Nokia,” said Makinson.

Several of the UK’s five mobile phone networks are understood to be interested in mobile wallets.

“There does seem to be consumer demand for it, people are saying they want to carry less stuff around with them,” said Makinson.

The results of the O2 trial show that people like using a mobile phone to do more than send texts and talk.

Nine out of 10 of O2’s testers were happy using NFC technology, with convenience, ease of use and the status of having such an innovative device cited as benefits of the service.

Top of the testers’ wish list was using their mobile phone as an Oyster card, with 89% saying they would use it. The trial showed that having Oyster on a mobile phone led users to make more journeys on public transport.

More than one in five who used pay-as-you-go Oyster on their mobile phone reported that they made more journeys on public transport during the trial. More than two-thirds of users said they found it more convenient to use their phone than a standard Oyster card.

More than two-thirds of testers also said they would be interested in having the Barclaycard Visa payWave feature on their mobile.

Crucially for Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker and one of the companies involved in the trial, 87% of the testers said the ability to use Oyster on a mobile phone was likely to influence their choice of phone.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are about to get some real competition today when Google releases the beta of its Chrome browser in 100 countries.

The browser has been coming for some time but the company inadvertently leaked its impending arrival with a promo ‘comic book’ at the weekend and has since come out and confirmed its plans.

Google claims Chrome is a ‘fresh take on the browser’ and that it has been built from the ground up to deal with today’s Web applications and multimedia-rich content better than its rivals. Chrome’s look is described as ’streamlined’ with all of the focus being on getting you to the content you want, fast.

Google said on its blog:

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.

Now you can take that round-the-world trip from the comfort of your home, and see not just the obvious tourist sites but people having parties or playing with their kids in the back garden. All you need is a web browser and Earth Album – an online photo album that covers the whole world.

Earth Album doesn’t actually have any of its own photos, of course: it takes them from Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Nor does it have a map of the world: it uses Google Maps with a hybrid satellite view. What Earth Album does is take these two giant internet properties and link them together in what’s called a mashup.

It’s easy to use. You start with a map of the world and zoom in on the area you want. Earth Album takes any Flickr photos associated with that place – perhaps by geotagging – and displays them in a scrolling strip across the screen. You can click on any photo to see a larger version, along with its caption, if it has one.

The results vary according to what’s available. If you focus on a small or desolate region you may not find anything. Zooming out increases the chance of finding at least a few images, and the country-level views have some stunning images. The major cities and tourist spots are well covered, as you’d expect, but some areas are very badly served. Google Maps’ coverage of Georgia, for example, is poor, and it can be hard to find many photos except for Tbilisi.

There are shortcuts, and you can find a place by typing in the name or entering an address. If you want London Ontario, Paris Texas or Boston Lincs, you have to be specific. Curiously, York takes you to New York instead of the city in Yorkshire.

You can also search by keywords and find things like mountains and sunsets. In this case, Earth Album seems to be picking up cues from titles and captions.

There are one or two annoyances. The main one for me is the scrolling of the picture selection. This works well as you go from right to left, bringing up more photos, but clicking the left arrow takes you right back to the beginning. This seems bizarre on a site that has been around for two years.

A very minor complaint is that there should be a more obvious way to jump from any photo to its home on Flickr (clicking the title works). Flickr often gives you the background to a picture, and access to a stream of related images.

Earth Album’s results may seem somewhat voyeuristic, because they can include personal snaps taken at parties and weddings, at work, at home or in pubs. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see the same sort of snaps from Santiago, Singapore, Sapporo and similar places. In the end, Earth Album is giving us the chance to see and share our common humanity, and that must be a force for good.

If you have ever tried to do a free reverse cell phone lookup, I am sure that you have suffered more than a little bit of disappointment. You go to a reverse cell phone directory that claims to be free, and then you find that you have to pay for the results. So the real [...]

Apparently, the head of the British Cartographic Society is no fan of Google Maps. She’s complaining that Google Maps doesn’t include the additional geographic information that makes maps so great, claiming:

“We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”

Except, that’s not quite true. After all, Google Maps allows all sorts of overlays and additional info. With Google Maps you can also get the satellite view, which is likely to give you a much greater feel for a place than a map. And, of course, many areas have the “Street View” feature as well — again, providing a much greater feel for a place you’ve never been. As for certain landmarks and such not being added to Google Maps, more seem to be added every day, and with Google letting people add their own information to maps as well, it’s only going to get better and better.

If anything, it seems like this guy is complaining not because Google Maps isn’t useful, but because she’s afraid that the need for traditional cartographers may not be as strong (which I doubt will actually be the case). Besides, if she’s so worried that certain information isn’t included on Google Maps, why not create a mashup overlaying all the info she feels has been left out — because that’s rather easy to do with Google Maps.

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The LG Secret is a Mobile Phone with extraordinary characteristics, one that rivals anything on the market today. From its design to the materials used in building it, it is special. It is beautiful to look at and wonderful to use. It truly is the next generation of phones. Why is it so special? Every [...]

This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the Wall Street Journal is noting that some bands and some record labels are avoiding putting music on iTunes (or in some cases, pulling music off iTunes) in an effort to force people to buy the full album, rather than just a few tracks. There are plenty of reasons to dislike iTunes, but it seems hard to believe that this does anything positive for the bands in question. The article quotes Kid Rock’s manager, who compares apples to oranges, by pointing out that people who are on iTunes sell more single songs than albums, but that’s rather meaningless in comparing to an artist (like Kid Rock) who’s not on iTunes at all. Not putting your music where people want it is only going to piss them off.

Hell, even record industry execs are getting frustrated by bands not having their singles anywhere that can be downloaded legally. And, yet, the sister record label to the one that employs the annoyed exec above is experimenting with an even more annoying proposition: pulling popular songs from iTunes after they’ve become popular, to see if it gets more people to buy the CD.

Honestly, is it really that hard to understand the concept of providing the customer what they want in a convenient manner?

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A judge has ruled that online video hosting site Veoh is not guilty of copyright infringement for videos uploaded by its users. The judge made the proper ruling here, noting that the DMCA’s safe harbors protect Veoh. The lawsuit was brought by adult video entertainment firm Io, who was upset that Veoh’s users kept uploading clips from its films. As the judge properly noted, Veoh follows all the rules necessary under the DMCA to avoid liability (this doesn’t mean that the individuals doing the uploading aren’t liable, however).

While this may seem like a small case, it is quite similar to Viacom’s infamous lawsuit against YouTube/Google. Considering that YouTube follows the DMCA’s rules in a similar manner to Veoh, this ruling suggests that YouTube is also protected by the DMCA safe harbors, just as many had stated from the beginning. The key issues raised by Io (and also raised by Viacom) is that these sites lose their DMCA safe harbors because they take action on the content, often transcoding the content from one format into flash. However, the judge in the Veoh case trashed that argument pretty easily:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the third party software… But Veoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users

The folks over at Google are, understandably, pretty happy about this ruling, which confirms their position that YouTube is protected: “It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights.”

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