Tag: duncan geere
If your Sat Nav told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
Are you one of those lunatics that spends more time watching the virtual reality of your sat nav’s screen than actually looking at the road? You’re in company. Robert Jones followed instructions from his Sat Nav until half his car was dangling off a cliff.
He only stopped because a wire fence preventing him from getting any further – completely ignoring the fact he was driving down a dirt track three metres wide. The police have charged him with driving without due care and attention, and he describes the incident as a ‘nightmare’.
(via BBC)
UPDATE: 3 releases 80,000 names and addresses on its website
Mobile phone network 3 is in trouble today after an enterprising chap called ‘Dan’ (no relation to our Dan) stumbled across 79,035 names and addresses on their website. 3 rapidly took the list down.
Names and addresses aren’t exactly confidential – they’re available in the phone book – but most curiously of all, 3 claims that less than five percent of the info comes from 3 customers. That raises the rather thorny question of who the hell the rest of them are.
Any ideas? Drop us a tweet at @techdigest with your suggestions as to who these people might be.
BlackBerry launching TV streaming application?
Rumours abound that BlackBerry will be launching a TV streaming service next week that’ll let users watch their favourite episodes of TV shows from their handsets.
There’s scarce detail other than that, but it seems like it’ll be a flat-rate subscription per month for a service, it’ll use a device’s Wi-Fi connection, and multiple content providers have been confirmed.
Given BlackBerry’s current keenness on applications, this announcement wouldn’t be out of kilter with their overall strategy. It’s interesting that they’re avoiding 3G, relying on Wi-Fi instead. Just think of the shows as video podcasts, I suppose, and it all makes sense.
(via NewTeeVee)
iTunes variable pricing will hit on April 7th
Apple will soon be launching the variable prices that it was forced to accept from the major labels in exchange for DRM-free content, during the contract renegotiations earlier this year. If the LA Times is to be believed, the change will occur on April 7th.
It’s currently unclear how the pricing will be distributed, but most analysts expect newer and more popular songs to command a higher price, while back catalogue ends up heavily discounted. It’s also unclear how the public will respond to what will essentially be a price hike on the most popular songs.
I’d argue that iTunes has long been irrelevant to most hardcore music fans. They’re the biggest users of P2P because it’s the most efficient way of getting tracks that are otherwise unavailable. This change will impact on mums, dads, and anyone else that generally buys their music from Tesco, rather than independent record stores.
(via Digital Music News)
Independent Games Festival Awards Winners
The Independent Games Festival is a gathering of some of the finest minds in the fertile industry that exist outside the big games publishers. Several hits have come out of the sector over the past year, including World of Goo, Multiwinia, Braid and Tag: The Power of Paint.
The latter of that list, Tag, won the Student award, beating out 145 other entrants. Machinarium won the Excellent in Visual Art prize, and the Grand Prize went to exploration-based Blueberry Garden. Here’s the full list of winners:
Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Blueberry Garden, by Erik Svedang
Innovation (Nuovo) Award
Between, by Jason Rohrer
Excellence in Visual Art
Machinarium, by Amanita Design
Excellence in Audio
BrainPipe, by Digital Eel
Technical Excellence
Cortex Command, by Data Realms
Excellence in Design
Musaic Box, by KranX Productions
Best Student Game
Tag: The Power of Paint, by DigiPen Institute of Technology
Audience Award
Cortex Command, by Data Realms
D2D Vision Award
Osmos, by Hemisphere Games
Each winner walks away with $2,500, with the grand prize winner pocketing $20,000. If you’d like to play any of them, then this week only, Steam is offering discounts of between 10% and 33% off all its independent games.
(via BBC)
Twitter confirms that paid-for Pro accounts are on the way
Microblogging phenomenon Twitter has famously had difficulty monetizing its service. Recently, it added small, unobtrusive text ads, and now the company has confirmed that it’ll be offering paid pro accounts in the near future.
Founder Biz Stone confirmed the rumours to Business Insider, who suggest some of the features that might be offered for a price. A way to verify who really owns an account, a way to find out what people are saying about a company, and better analytics are all on the cards.
Freeloaders can rest assured, however, because Stone also confirms that there will always be a free version of Twitter available to businesses and individuals. The new features for sale will be solely add-ons. As for how much they’ll cost, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
(via Business Insider)
Microsoft on Games for Windows updates: It's not DRM, honest
Microsoft’s got an uphill battle going on with Games for Windows. It’s got to try and take Steam’s market share by battling Microsoft’s poor reputation among many gamers, while still keeping the major publishers happy, who’ve been working with Microsoft for years.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Ars Technica had a chat with Microsoft to try to find out what the company is planning – both in the looming update and also in the future.
First of all, the company wants to ditch the “DRM” tag. Claiming that DRM is designed to stop copying, not piracy, Microsoft is calling their new service “IP protection” instead. It all operates in the cloud – with games only working if you’re logged in and the account you’re logging in with has a license.
One potential consequence that Microsoft brings up is that game publishers could then happily publish their software for free download anywhere – even Bittorrent – so long as there was a central place for users to apply licenses to their account.
Of course this won’t work for offline titles. Gamers hate having to log in to an online service to play games that have no online components – just look at the reaction to GTA IV. Even so, there are few games released these days that don’t have some sort of multiplayer component, and many that are multiplayer-only.
Other benefits of this approach could be to put settings and savegames in the cloud, too. Gamers needn’t worry about adjusting mouse sensitivity, controls or other info in on several PCs – they just do it once and the game will adjust on any computer. Similarly, with save games you could theoretically go to a friends house and continue exactly where you left off.
All this raises the spectre of Steam, which is a competing distribution and gaming social network created by Valve. Its DRM is mostly accepted as a kind of ‘benevolent dictator’ system by gamers – they trust Valve not to screw them over, and Valve hasn’t. So far.
It seems unlikely that gamers will offer the same trust to Microsoft, due to the company’s reputation. It’ll be difficult for Microsoft to make things any easier, either – a suggestion that it could be tied into Windows 7 was met with a quick “Say hello to my friend, the Department of Justice.” response from the company, referring to the much-publicised spats with US government regulators.
What I’d like most from Games for Windows is interoperability with Steam. I want to be able to do everything I can do in Steam, including all the games I’ve bought on the platform, via Windows. That way, my choice of platform relies solely on the quality of the interface, not which publishers have done deals with which provider.
But I suspect that’s an idyllic goal. In reality, the chances of Steam jumping into bed with Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter, are near zero. They have the goodwill of the users and the big-name publishers. They don’t need anyone else. I’d argue that Games for Windows is simply a waste of Microsoft’s time.
What do you think? Are there any redeeming features to Games for Windows that Steam doesn’t offer? Perhaps the Xbox 360 matchup, but I’m not convinced that’s enough. Let us know what you think on Twitter by messaging @techdigest.
Last.fm bans third party mobile streaming applications
Last.fm has had rather a bad day for PR, making two very big, very bad announcements for its consumers. First of all, the company announced in a forum post they’re removing access to their API for third party mobile applications. That means that users of Mobbler on S60, Pocket Scrobbler on Windows Mobile, and FlipSide on BlackBerry devices will soon find themselves without a way of listening on the go.
The ‘official’ applications for the iPhone and Android will remain in action, which seems a little odd. If this is a licensing problem, surely the same rules are in place for whatever platform the content is delivered on? Relatedly, the service will also be stopping non-subscribers from accessing the radio APIs, simply because Last.fm wants more money.
Secondly, the company also announced in a blog post that it will begin charging for its previously free service outside of three countries – the UK, the USA and Germany. Customers anywhere else will be charged a fairly slim €3 per month for the service.
The company admits that the reason for this change is because it’s having trouble selling ads outside of these markets. The UK, USA and Germany all have relatively mature ad markets, where funding the service through advertising alone is possible. Outside of these countries, though, the company is having trouble.
What will remain free for all users is the scrobbling aspect of the site – where it charts your music taste and allows you to compare taste with friends and other users, as well as the social network that sits on top of everything. Although I’ve never pushed very hard to fill out my friends list on Last.fm, it’s grown incrementally over the years and now it’s not too bad.
I’m deeply disappointed that I’ll be losing access to Mobbler, even if it was a little rickety and didn’t work properly on the bus. Let’s hope that services like Slacker make their way over this side of the Atlantic sooner rather than later.
CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith, instructs protest group
The government is rather keen on the idea of creating a massive database that will store all your emails, texts, calls and internet use. It’s an idea that’s understandably raised a few eyebrows, even outside of privacy and consumer-based pressure groups. Even I’m a little alarmed about this one, despite generally not being that fussed about privacy issues.
In protest, some enterprising sorts have created a campaign called “CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”. On one day – June 15th – they want you to copy all your email correspondence in to [email protected], the idea being that they get so overwhelmed by a mountain of correspondence, so much of it inane and useless, that they realize it’s a rubbish idea.
Of course, it could backfire. On the FAQ section of the site under ‘is this legal?’, the organizers claim: “This is unclear. You personally are certainly at no risk from prosecution. But it is possible that if the volume of emails crashes the servers, it could be seen as a Denial of Service attack – although there is no precedent for such an attack coming from multiple people sending a small number of emails.”
There’s also a Facebook group, though as the Register points out, they’re fairly keen on keeping all your private data themselves, so you might just want to plump for the email option. Sign up on the website, right here.
“CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”
Twitter to be taught to ten-year-olds
The UK government announced today that it wants to teach Twitter in primary schools as part of a campaign to make online communication and social media part of the national curriculum. Kids will also be taught to use Wikipedia, how to blog, and proper typing skills alongside traditional handwriting skills.
The plans, which also remove the Victorians and Second World War from the primary syllabus, were going to be launched next month, but leaked early in the Guardian. Analysts and teacher groups have cautiously welcomed the moves, though they wonder why current trends are being given so much weight.
Personally, I’m glad that Wikipedia, blogging and proper keyboard usage are being taught – all of those are, for the moment, here to stay. I’m a little confused, though, as to why Twitter has been singled out. It’s not that revolutionary and, even speaking as a heavy user, it’s current prominence in the news is surely no more than a passing media fad caused by high-profile celebrities joining up. Students should certainly understand online communication, but I’m not convinced Twitter is the best way to show them.
What do you think? Tell us on Twitter – and no, the irony of that isn’t lost on me – @techdigest.
Guardian (via Techcrunch UK)
