A Selection of TechyNews

For all their mesmerizing graphics and adrenaline fueled gameplay, it might come as a surprise to non-gamers that many of today’s most popular computer games are bogged down by downtime (I should know - I spent the better part of 1999 mining virtual ore in Ultima Online to become a master blacksmith, and enjoyed about 10 minutes of it). MMOs like World of Warcraft see epic battles punctuated by hours of wandering mostly empty wilderness, while FPS games often punish gamers for dying by making them sit out and watch their comrades go at it until the beginning of the next round.

Today GotGame is giving these gamers something to do during these bouts of boredom. The company has released Rogue, a web browser based on WebKit and Adobe’s AIR platform that integrates directly into most of today’s popular gamers, allowing users to swap between their game and the web with a single hotkey. Gamers will be able to check their Email, listen to Pandora, watch Hulu videos, or casually browse the web at their leisure, jumping back into the game within seconds whenever they need to (the browser supports opacity, so it’s easy to tell when you need to swap your attention).

It’s possible to accomplish similar multitasking by placing games in ‘Windowed’ mode (which doesn’t make them take up the full screen), but this makes games prone to crashing and poor performance. Conversely GotGame says that Rogue should run perfectly fine with most games, and should only slightly affect performance (though the effect will increase significantly if you watch Flash-based movies like Hulu).

While it may seem counterintuitive to non-gamers, GotGame Rogue is a great idea - I would have loved to have had it during my gaming years (instead I was forced to sit a TV next to my computer monitor). Provided the app is as stable as GotGame claims, it will probably do very well. Other players in this space include Xfire, which offers an in-game application for socializing with other gamers.

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Blue's News pointed out a report about a study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation which found that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children, teaching them basic technical skills and how to communicate in the Information Age. The study was conducted over a period of three years, with researchers interviewing hundreds of children and monitoring thousands of hours of online time. The full white paper (PDF) is also available. "For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise — labeled in the study as 'geeking out,' the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware. Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's telecom regulator won't stop Bell Canada from throttling P2P traffic on its retail and wholesale Internet services, but it will launch an entirely new inquiry into the big questions surrounding traffic management and network neutrality.

Read More...

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that online advertising revenues have been pretty much flat all year long. And the annual growth rate is less than half of what it was a year ago when it was 25.6 percent. To get a sense of the slowdown, look at the annual growth rates for each of the past five quarters:

3Q07: 25.8%
4Q07: 24.3%
1Q08: 17.7%
2Q08: 12.8%
3Q08: 11.4%

And remember, these numbers are just or the U.S. The global online advertising picture might be worse. Just tallying up the worldwide online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL—as I did a few days ago—suggests that annual growth in the third quarter was higher at 18 percent, but the sequential growth was slowing down faster (see chart below) at only 0.6 percent over the second quarter of 2008.

If these trends continue, the fourth quarter could see an actual decline in both U.S. and global growth.

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Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple’s iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes.

The way eMusic works is you pay a subscription of between $12 and $20 a month and then you can download 30 to 75 songs a month and keep them. You can also purchase songs above those limits, starting at $0.25 a track. eMusic has a catalog of 4.5 million songs, and is particularly strong in independent music. It currently has 400,000 subscribers, and the company expects to make $70 million in revenues this year.

That implies the vast majority of subscribers opt in for the basic $12 a month plan, which would net $57.6 million a year if that is what everyone paid. The difference can be accounted for by those people who opt for the more expensive land and additional downloads. And the best part of the business is that eMusic gets paid a guaranteed minimum no mater how few songs a customer actually downloads only pays the labels for the songs its customers download. So if someone doesn’t use up their allotment and only downloads 5 songs during a given month, eMusic pockets the money that would have gone to the and the labels pocket the money for the other 25 songs they could have downloaded. [Correction: The labels are not paid on a per song basis, rather they receive 60 percent of eMusic's total subscription and download revenues]

It’s a nice business because eMusic gets rewarded for customer laziness. And iTunes certainly needs competition, so I hope it keeps chugging along. But these numbers don’t bode well for the subscription music business ever rising up to challenge iTunes in any meaningful way.

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A new US privacy group aims to influence the policies of the incoming Obama administration.

Ofcom should focus on broadband accessibility for all rather than online regulation, according to the Guardian’s director of digital content, Emily Bell.

News release published 20|11|08

LONDON - The Government has admitted that further curbs on advertising would harm its plans to keep the economy moving in order to limit the impact of the recession.

No, they are irrelevance-resistant.

LONDON - Publicis has handed the reins of its UK VivaKi media unit to Adrian Sayliss, the chief operating officer of Zenith-Optimedia Worldwide.

• 90% of PC games are stolen. Which is why most publishers have given up on boxed PC games, it just isn’t worth investing resources when most people will just steal the results. Videos and recorded music now have broken business models. We must work hard to make sure this doesn’t happen to gaming. In the long run nobody wins from game piracy, not even the thieves.
• The mainstream press are beginning to notice just how recession proof video gaming is. This from USA Today: “Overall, sales of console game systems, software and accessories rose 26% compared to October 2007. Portable game sales dropped for the one month period, but total sales for the year are 7% ahead of 2007.” The video games industry grew an impressive 18% year-over-year in the first month of the critical fourth quarter,” says NPD analyst Anita Frazier. “With ten months under its belt, the video games industry is still poised to top $22 billion in annual sales in 2008″ — which would set another annual sales record.”
• Everton football club to use the game Football Manager to help them with their scouting. I’m a bit disappointed with this story, Sega could have explained more. At Codemasters we made a similar game, LMA Manager, and it involved us tracking a high percentage of all the professional footballers in the world. Not just their names, but also their strengths and weaknesses. So this is a fantastic tool for Everton to be able to use. Their manager, David Moyes, has a reputation of gaining outstanding results on a miniscule budget. With the Football Manager database he should be able to do even better.
• Nintendo say that 3rd party publishers don’t “get” the Wii. They think that a publisher’s best output should be on the Wii. Maybe, when they make it as capable as the 360 and PS3.
• Midway shares drop in value again and quite rightly. Soon people will be paying you to take them off their hands! This is a company seriously in need of some M&A activity.
• National Geographic get into video games. This should come as no surprise to readers here. The industry is heading towards being a ubiquitous media like, say, books. But far better.
• Google shuts down Lively. Mainly because nobody knows what it is. This is a failure of marketing, which really does seem to be Google’s big weakness. They keep introducing products that nobody knows about which is why search is still the vast majority of their business.
• Sony admit own stupidity. They say LittleBigPlanet would be number one at any other time of year. So why not launch it at any other time of year? This November congestion is bound to lead to products failing in the market. The stupidity of some game industry management is amazing.

Apple:
Apple TV: About Apple TV software updates  —  Products Affected  —  Apple TV  —  Refer the table below for Apple TV Software Update 2.3 features:  —  How To  —  AirTunes Streaming from Apple TV  —  Music can be streamed via AirTunes to Airport Express speakers or other Apple TVs in your house.

Digital television is spreading faster in Britain than in France, Canada, the US, Germany and Japan, according to research.

Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don’t see it.

It’s also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond what India’s version of Glue offers. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown.

For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of topics and using a two column instead of a three column design. They’ve also left out the search results altogether. In this example for Barack Obama, prominent links to Memorandum (a political blog aggregator) are also shown.

Yahoo says they won’t use Glue to replace search in the US. Instead it seems to be a useful content page that brings in data from lots of different sources on topics.

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Google’s just-released and much-publicized update to their Google Mobile iPhone app features some very clever interaction design for the voice search feature. There is an on-screen button you can tap to initiate a voice search manually, but, as illustrated in their example video, you can initiate a voice search just by lifting your iPhone to your ear.

In order to trigger this automatic voice prompt, you must:

1. Move the iPhone.
2. Trigger the proximity sensor next to the speaker at the top of the iPhone.

You need to do both, in that order.1 The voice prompt is never triggered by motion alone, nor by covering the proximity sensor without first having moved the phone. The only way it is triggered is by moving the phone and then triggering the proximity sensor. It’s very clever, and the resulting user experience is very nice.

But here’s the intrigue: There is no public API in the iPhone SDK for using the proximity sensor in this way.

As you might imagine considering the number of accelerometer-driven games in the App Store, there are plenty of public API calls to access data from the iPhone’s accelerometer. But the only thing apps can do with the proximity sensor is turn it on and off. When the proximity sensor is on, the screen turns off and stops accepting touch input when you cover the sensor (typically with your head, when holding the phone to your ear to, say, make a phone call, but you can just as easily trigger it by covering the sensor with your finger). By default, the proximity sensor is turned off, and the overwhelming majority of apps leave it that way.

If you’re a registered iPhone developer, you can read the relevent documentation for the proximitySensingEnabled property in the UIApplication Class Reference. An app can check the status of this property (is it on or off?), and can toggle it, but that’s it. After an app has turned the proximity sensor on, the app never finds out when or if it has actually been engaged. There is no way for an app to be notified when the proximity sensor has been triggered.

No way, that is, via the public APIs.

If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.

So, (a) Google Mobile is using a private API, and (b) to my knowledge, there is no way to duplicate the behavior of Google Mobile’s “just lift the phone to your ear to trigger the voice prompt” feature using only the public APIs in the iPhone SDK. Needless to say, using private APIs violates the iPhone SDK Guidelines. A developer that plays by the rules cannot do what Google is doing.

I can think of three explanations for how Google got away with this:

1. Whoever at Apple approved this Google Mobile update did not realize that it was using the private proximyStateChanged method.

2. Whoever at Apple approved it knew that it used a private API, but approved it anyway.

3. Google sought and obtained permission from Apple to use this method.

I do not believe #3 is the case. I’m pretty sure that the App Store approval process is as much of a black box for Google as it is for everyone else.

That leaves #1 and #2, either of which suggests that the Google Mobile team followed the adage that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. If this is the case — if — it might explain why Google started publicizing the voice search feature several days before it actually appeared in the App Store. The publicity from John Markoff’s feature in The New York Times put pressure on Apple to accept the app. If there was any internal debate within Apple about whether to allow this, it might explain why the app took several days longer to appear in the store than Markoff’s story indicated Google expected.

#1 is possible. There is no technical barrier that prevents a third-party iPhone app from making calls to private APIs, and I have heard that several apps that do so have slipped past the App Store approval process. But I would presume the Apple employees who examine App Store submissions are well-versed regarding which hardware features are exposed through the official public APIs.

If it’s #2, though, this stinks. Third-party iPhone development is purportedly a level playing field. If regular developers are forced to play by the rules, but Google is allowed to use private APIs just because they’re Google, the system is rigged.

So here’s to hoping that it’s #1. Even in that case, the situation just highlights the problem that a lot of cool features are behind the iPhone’s private APIs — private APIs which Apple’s own apps make full use of. I understand the reason why the developers of Google Mobile used this method — without it, the feature isn’t possible (and, frankly, the proximity sensor isn’t of much use). The downside to third-party use of any private APIs, however, is that private APIs can change or vanish in future iPhone OS updates, which situations inevitably lead some users to be outraged that Apple doesn’t support the unsupported.

My thanks to Robert Marini for assistance researching certain of the technical aspects of this article, including going so far as to build an iPhone app to test whether any documented application delegates are triggered when the proximity sensor is engaged. (The answer is no.)

1. This explains why, if you turn on Google Mobile’s off-by-default setting to allow the UI to rotate, the automatic voice search prompt is disabled. By default Google Mobile tracks motion to see if you’ve moved the phone to your ear; turning the UI rotation option on means it instead tracks motion to see if the display orientation should be changed. It apparently can’t do both at the same time. ↩

Joan Bakewell: Swearing, protests and controversy are nothing new. But shared values have been lost, and with them good judgment

In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.

This is most likely to occur in the UK as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world's fastest adopters of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of "friends".

The British love of camera phones, social networking and even digital video recorders and digital televisions - there are more per capita in the UK than anywhere else, even the US - is revealed in research by the communications regulator Ofcom published today. It paints a picture of an increasingly tech-literate nation, with a strong desire to keep in touch, that is now spending almost twice as long on the internet as it did in 2004.

Prof Simeon Yates, director of the Culture, Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) at Sheffield Hallam University believes that British consumers - especially younger ones - have wrapped the mobile phone into their lives in a way that is less pronounced in other countries.

"One of the things that is becoming clear is that for a lot of reasons British people, especially those under the age of say 40, have got used to using their mobile phones for communication, whereas in the US they are used to using their computer and in Japan they still use their phone in a different way."

The Japanese, for instance, are hindered by their language which makes composing a text message a rather cumbersome process. Many Americans, meanwhile, grew up with free broadband access, as it came bundled with cable television.

In the UK, the ubiquity of mobile phones has accompanied the explosion in social networking. Despite their reputation as being reserved, the British seem more and more willing to share everything online. Ofcom's latest International Communications Market report shows that 50% of British internet users access social networking sites, up 11 percentage points on last year and second only to Canada.

Increasingly, Britons use mobile phones to tell friends what they are up to. "For an awful lot of people, the mobile phone is core to maintaining their relationships with people," says Yates. "They are trying to maintain very large but slightly ephemeral social networks, which are bigger than the networks we used to try and maintain, and one way to do that is to send little moments of contact: 'here's a picture of me at a concert', for instance, and it does not require any conversation to follow."

The sheer size of the US market means it tops the global league for doing this - with 4 million Americans regularly accessing social networking sites on their phones - but the UK is in second place.

The Ofcom report shows there were 121 mobile phones for every 100 people in the UK last year, the second highest market penetration among the world's seven top economies - excluding China - after Italy at 154%. Italians regularly have one pre-pay phone for work and one for personal use while 40% of households in Italy have no fixed line at all, compared with about one in 10 in the UK.

Britons used those phones to make a total of 99bn minutes of calls last year, compared with 52bn in 2002, and send an average of 972 texts each, up from 708. American mobile phone users topped the calling league with 2.1 trillion minutes last year, but Irish mobile phone users sent the most texts, composing 1,848 each, or 154 a month, up from 118 a month in 2002.

Asked whether they use their mobile phone as a camera, 59% of Britons surveyed by Ofcom said they do, compared with 58% in Italy and 52% in Japan.

The dramatic growth in mobile phone use helped the global communications market grow 6.1% last year, to £876bn.

The report also shows that British internet users are spending more and more time online, currently 839 minutes a week, up from 385 minutes in 2004. British internet users are only outpaced by their American counterparts who now spend 913 minutes a week glued to their screens.

• Mobile phones
• Internet
• Internet, phones & broadband
• Digital media
• Ofcom
• Consumer affairs

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