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Will Spotify change the music biz?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 26 Feb 09, 16:17 GMT

In the last couple of days, I've talked to three people about the future of music - the head of digital at the world's biggest music label, a very wired music consumer, and an executive at a fast growing new streaming service. I asked them all the same thing - will the arrival of that new service Spotify change the music industry?

Unsurprisingly, Roberta Maley from Spotify was convinced that this was a game-changer, not just another me-too service. She did give me some new figures on its growth - 250,000 UK subscribers, 800,000 worldwide, with Sweden and Spain the biggest markets.

But she was less forthcoming about two vital issues for the future of the company - the split between those who listen to the ad-supported service for free and those who pay for an ad-free service, and the possibility that users could listen on the move. Spotify is keen to have a "mixed economy" with new arrivals drawn in by the free service then migrating to the 拢9.99 per month subscription deal to avoid the ads.

Right now you only hear one thirty second advert every twenty minutes, as compared with 12 to 14 minutes per hour on commercial radio, but Spotify plans an increase to two and a half minutes per hour soon. The trick will be to have enough advertising to make some money and convince existing users it is worth upgrading to the premium service - but not enough to put off those trying out Spotify for the first time. Roberta wouldn't confirm the story that Spotify is working on an iPhone application - I understand some work has been done, but mobile music is still some way off.

Rob Wells is Senior Vice President, Digital, for Universal International - in other words he is in charge of making sure the world's biggest music business finds a way to prosper in a digital age which has so far been pretty disastrous for his industry. When we spoke over a Skype connection to Los Angeles, he seemed pretty enthusiastic about Spotify - but keen to put it in the context of a whole range of new services, such as Nokia's Comes With Music and Sky's upcoming broadband service. He says consumers are changing, "away from the per-transaction model, where they buy a body of work, and into a subscription model where they pay for access to all music. That subscription could be bundled into the cost of a mobile phone contract or a broadband connection."

He was obviously keener that Spotify users upgrade to the premium service - the labels earn a bigger share of the revenue that way - but was also hoping that a free service would wean music fans off the file-sharing habit. "The consumers are already familiar with not paying for their music when they download it off the internet. So we have to do more and more interesting deals to make them listen to music in a legitimate format where we earn revenue."

But it is Dan Moon whose views really matter. He is the very model of a modern music fan. He has put all his CDs away, and has about 30Gb of music stored on his laptop, which he streams over his wireless network to an amplifier and then to a pair of big speakers in his attic flat in London's Maida Vale. But he has also started using Spotify, mainly to explore some new music rather than listen to stuff he already knows.

Dan says he used to go to file-sharing sites when he was a teenager - but now prefers to buy his music in the form of downloads from iTunes to be sure of a quality product. He's not entirely sure whether Spotify will kill file-sharing: "If I were a heavy file-sharer, there would be a pull on the usability front. Spotify looks nice, quite pretty, while file-sharing is a bit laborious." But he says it's difficult to beat the likes of Limewire on one front: "There isn't a better model than free - with file-sharing there's no adverts either." And the fact that he can't take his Spotify music with him is another downside: "When I'm on the tube there's no Spotify. I'm quite tethered to my laptop. It's not portable."

Spotify won't change the music industry on its own - and still has to prove it can attract both a big crowd and a lot more advertisers. But, along with a host of other new services, its arrival does seem to herald a change in the way we view music. Rob Wells of Universal thinks the fact that his industry has cut deals with the likes of Spotify shows that it has turned a corner: "These new deals show that the industry is maturing, the market is maturing and consumers are willing to pay for music."

Maybe. But let's wait and see what happens with the new U2 album, "No Line on the Horizon", so important to the revenues of Universal. You can stream it on Spotify, you can pay for a CD or download - or you can go and get it from a file-sharing site for nothing. The choices music fans make will show whether an ailing industry really has found a profitable way forward.

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Who profits from the App Store?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 25 Feb 09, 10:03 GMT

You will struggle to find a happy shopkeeper right now - but I've just met one. His name is Eric, and he has good reason to be contented. After all his store only opened in July last year, but has already sold 500 million products, and its deal with its suppliers means it gets 30% of the revenues. And as the store is in cyberspace, it is cheap to run and most of that revenue is profit.

I'm talking, of course, about Apple's , which has created a whole new industry of mobile application developers. Yes, I know that and users have been able to install applications on their phones for years - but the figures show that it was only the arrival of the iPhone which sparked real interest from both users and developers.

The company called me in to the Apple Store on London's Regent Street to meet Eric Jue. His title is "Senior Product Manager for iPhone", which I think means he minds the Apps Store. Eric was keen to give me a sneak preview of some upcoming applications - all of them games, which apparently account for 25% of downloads.

They included Sway, where you climb across a wall until you fall off, and Zen Bound, where you wrap a rope around a 3D object and paint it different colours. "Why?, I asked. "It's a game - it's a zen thing", came the answer. I was more impressed by something called WordFu, a sort of cross between Boggle and Scrabble, in which you race to make words in two minutes, and can play against a friend if you both happen to have an iPhone on the same wireless network.

All of these were relatively simple affairs made by tiny firms, with a handful of staff. But businesses like the games giant EA are also weighing in. Eric Jue showed me a version of their Tiger Woods golf game, due for release in the summer, with some pretty stunning graphics, evidence that the iPhone is being taken seriously as a gaming platform.

I'd come armed with questions about some notable gaps on the shelves of the apps store from users and developers who wondered whether Apple was deliberately blocking admission to some ideas. For instance, where are the sat-nav applications? Google maps doesn't really quite do the trick if you're driving because there is no voice guide. Will Apple allow music services like Spotify to offer mobile applications, risking iTunes sales? And does Apple make it easier for big developers to get their applications through than the smaller developers?

Eric Jue insisted that any idea was welcome, as long as it met Apple's terms and conditions - only something that might seriously offend would be refused. He said there was a level playing field. "Everybody has the same tools - whether you're a bedroom developer or you're EA Sports with a big budget. The public decides whether it's a success or not."

Among the biggest successes are the Ocarina, which turns the iPhone into a musical instrument and has reaped big profits for its creators, who include a Stanford professor of computing and music. But is it really that easy to make your fortune from mobile phone apps? Not according to two British developers.

Jeremy Rayner, who describes himself as a "hobby" developer says he developed his game "Rabbit Run" on his train commute from Hastings to his day job in London. It sells for 拢1.19 and after Apple's 30% and the tax is deducted, he ends up with 50p. "Initially, I got about 30 downloads a day, but that's now down to about one a day." So an income of 50p a day? "Yes, but that's 50p I didn't have before." Mr Rayner says he's glad to get on the same platform as giant firms, but does wonder a little how he might promote his game a bit better.

Riccardo Ettore has been developing Apple software for more than 20 years, but again he does it in his spare time from his job as an IT administrator. He has a range of iPhone apps, including Big Ben, which puts the famous clock face onto the phone, and - perhaps more useful - Tapit4me, a so-called snippet expander which allows you to tap out whole words from abbreviations, making it quicker to use the iPhone's touch keyboard.

Mr Ettore says it's getting harder, not easier to make money, as the field gets more crowded." In the early days people just downloaded anything. My first application, a xylophone, got 200 downloads on its first day." He thought Big Ben was going to be a big money spinner when a free version was downloaded 3000 times in a couple of days, but when he started charging 59p, just 20 people a day thought it worth paying. "What seems to be happening is that most people expect all applications to be free," he laments. "You hear all these incredible stories like Ocarina, but it's like buying a lottery ticket."

Still, both of these hobbyists seem happy enough to keep on churning out applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch for little or no return. And Apple is even happier - all those tiny amounts earned by the "long tail" of App Store developers add up to a big fat profit for the shopkeeper. And even if users gradually decide that most apps are not worth paying for, Apple will have succeeded in getting a lot of software which makes the iPhone more useable for nothing.

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Can we block child abuse sites?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 23 Feb 09, 10:05 GMT

Children's charities are and the internet service providers of a failure to ensure that all domestic broadband users cannot get access to sites showing child abuse images. This is a battle over the merits of self-regulation versus legislation.

But it's also another row over the , the charity which has been acting as a self-appointed - if widely supported - policeman of child abuse sites for many years. Last December the IWF was widely criticised for blocking a Wikipedia page about the 1976 Scorpions' album Virgin Killer because it featured a naked young girl. The IWF quickly reversed that decision - but web libertarians saw the incident as evidence of internet "regulation creep".

The big ISPs all use the IWF's list of banned sites, which is updated twice a day after the charity's staff examine questionable sites reported to them by members of the public. The process, as we discovered during the Wikipedia row, is automatic. Once the ISPs have signed up to the list, then whenever their users click on any link, that URL is checked against their list, and customers get a "website not found" error message if there is a match.

But why has a minority decided to opt out - or rather not opt in? The told me that cost was an issue - the system was potentially probitively expensive for smaller ISPs to implement, in particular those that mainly served business customers with just a few domestic users. I'm still not clear why that should be the case and indeed the one company I've spoken to which doesn't use the list cites completely different reasons.

That company was Zen Internet, a small Rochdale-based ISP with a reputation for great customer service (in the interests of full disclosure, I'm a customer). They provided me with this statement: "Zen Internet has not yet implemented IWF's recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness. Our Managing Director, Richard Tang, is going to meet Peter Robbins the Chief Executive of the IWF to discuss these concerns."

I was also pointed towards the work of Dr Richard Clayton, a Cambridge computer scientist who has been a long-term critic of aspect of the Internet Watch Foundation's work. He has written at length about technical aspects of the blocking system - but his overall conclusion is that the blacklist is just a waste of time. Why? Because most of this material is held abroad and the IWF is ineffective about getting it removed.

He told me that, if the aim was to stop people coming across these images by accident, then the system was a failure because that didn't happen anyway: "This material tends to be held on paid-for sites or is held by people who don't publish it to the world because they don't want to get arrested."

Dr Clayton's view is that the big ISPs use the system because they've been pressured to adopt it, but smaller firms are perfectly justified in opting out. "Everybody thinks they've done something by blocking this stuff but in practice it makes very little difference to who sees it and it's quite expensive."

For its part, the Internet Watch Foundation says it has neither the powers nor the resources to act as a global policeman. The charity says the only real solution is to remove the offending material at its source - but it insists that its list is part of a "layered approach" which can disrupt the activities of the child pornography merchants and protect innocent users.

The charities want the government to get heavy with the 5% of ISPs who are refusing to adopt the Internet Watch Foundation list. "The idea that blocking child pornography is an optional extra we do not accept," one charity official told me. "It is technically possible and should be counted as the cost of doing business in the United Kingdom." But Richard Clayton suspects that a mood of realism has infected ministers, who will be satisfied with 95% compliance by the broadband providers: "The government has seen sense," he told me, "and has decided that legislation is inappropriate."

It would be hard to find anyone who thinks that blocking access to images of child abuse is a bad idea. But getting agreement on how to set about that task is a whole lot harder.

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Has MySpace lost its cool?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 19 Feb 09, 11:29 GMT

I'm not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of , was jet-lagged, having stepped off a flight from Los Angeles that morning into a punishing schedule of interviews and the launch of a new mobile offering. Then I arrived to interview him for radio - and to point a video camera at him for this blog:

I spent half an hour suggesting that MySpace just wasn't cool any more. To his credit, he didn't lose his cool - just kept on insisting I was wrong to suggest that he'd been left standing by Facebook.

There are all sorts of ways of comparing the audiences of social networking sites. I quoted Nielsen figures, showing that Facebook's global users now numbered 110 million, compared with the 83 million using MySpace. Chris DeWolfe punched back with figures showing MySpace had 76 million US users and 135 million worldwide, but the number he was really keen on was one from Comscore showing the average MySpace user in the US spent 266 minutes on the site each month, around 100 minutes more than Facebook users. But whatever you think of Nielsen or Comscore the trend seems clear - Facebook has been gaining on MySpace, particularly outside the US, and looks to be the social network with momentum behind it.

Ah, but here's the key difference, according to Mr De Wolfe - MySpace makes money. Good point. From the start, the site was focussed on profits and once it joined Rupert Murdoch's News Corp stable, telling the boss it was all about eyeballs, not the bottom line, was never going to wash. So MySpace's CEO says it has been profitable throughout its history - and he reckons it is the only social network making money. In its most recent results, however, News Corp reported a drop in revenues from the division which includes MySpace, blaming it partly on the cost of launching the social network's new music offering.

Like almost every Web 2.0 company, MySpace depends almost entirely on advertising for revenues and, whatever anyone said a few months ago, online advertising isn't recession-proof. "It's certainly got softer" was how Chris DeWolfe described the advert market, but maintained that his business was holding up better than others.

Fashion, however, is everything in this area. The first social network to take off in the UK was Friends Reunited, which ITV bought for 拢120 million in 2005, when it was already going out of fashion, and is now apparently trying to offload for a lot less. I'm too old to tell whether MySpace has lost the cool factor but a teenager of my acquaintance was pretty forthright in his verdict: "It's dead. Nobody I know uses it any more."

But at least it discovered a business model before the bad times came - unlike some networks that are seeing tremendous growth in traffic but have precious little revenue to show for it. As Chris DeWolfe said, gathering himself for a punchy soundbite at the end of our radio interview: "Time will tell whether they can figure out how to make money - we have."

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Mobile Spanish lessons

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 18 Feb 09, 10:33 GMT

A couple of days at the Mobile World Congress have passed in a blur of new handsets and over-excited press releases, but I've learnt a few things.

I now know, for instance, that Barcelona is a city where you can still smoke in the bars and you can make mobile calls from the Metro - a place somewhere between the past and the future then. But I've also learnt a few things about the mobile industry.

It's about the networks

I guess we're all going to have to get our heads round LTE, Wimax and 4g, because the big news over the next few years is going to be about that boring back-end stuff that phone customers don't care about. The jargon probably doesn't matter to mobile internet users either but their experience is about to get a lot better.

Mobile networks are getting faster. I've been using a 3g dongle here delivering a reliable 2Mbps, but a trip around the city in an LTE-enabled van, watching high definition television beamed over the network, showed me a whole new world.

Now we've learned to be sceptical about promises of technological advances from the mobile industry - a decade after its arrival 3g is only now making a real impact - but I do expect that in a couple of years I'll be surfing much faster on the move than I do currently at home.

VOIP isn't rocking the mobile world

The idea of free calls over the internet - or Voice over IP in the jargon - has been all the rage for years now, threatening to rock the fixed-line telecoms industry and now the mobile world.

At the show, Nokia announced a plan to put Skype on new handsets, and 3 has had some success in the UK with its Skype phone. But I'm sceptical about this, having tried out a couple of VOIP apps on my phone.

Fring and Truphone both look good - but only really work when you're on wifi. Getting a solid wifi connection is still a struggle outside - I've got one in my hotel room, but I've also got a laptop which is far better suited to making calls.

Truphone has an option called "Truphone Anywhere" for use away from wifi, but when I slowly cranked it into action, up popped a warning that it would not save me money when calling from abroad. Fully integrated Skype on a mobile may be a different proposition - but how happy are operators going to be with Nokia's plan? I wouldn't mind betting that those "free" calls on an N97 will turn out to be rather hard to make.

Mobile kills the digital camera?

The idea that we will have one converged device that will do everything has been over-hyped - but surely the time is coming when we can forget about carrying both a simple digital camera and a phone?

This week Sony Ericsson launched a 12Mp phone, and 5Mp seems to be just about standard - with a decent lens and flash that should be enough for most people. Keen photographers will want a digital SLR - but the days of the standalone compact camera may be numbered.

Where is the power?

The single most eye-catching announcement out of Barcelona was the plan unveiled by the GSM Association for what it called a Universal Charging Solution - or what you and I might call one damn power adapter that will charge any mobile phone.

Having travelled here laden with three phones and three different adapters, I can't wait. But why is it taking so long. When it comes to software the industry is already delivering cross-platform applications to customers - but they'll have to wait until 2012 for the universal charger, and don't bet on it arriving then.

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Palm and HTC hope to do magic

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 17 Feb 09, 16:29 GMT

I've seen two new phones in today, and they're both devices on which an awful lot hangs. One may make Google's Android operating system go mainstream, the other could determine whether Palm, one of the pioneers of the PDA, survives into the converged future.

First the G2 - whoops, it's not called that. While the first phone, T-Mobile's G1, was heavily branded with the Google name, this time both Vodafone and the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC (also behind the G1) are determined to get their names out there.

and at first glance, it is just a slightly more elegant version of the G1. What is different is that there is no slide-out keyboard - this time you are entirely dependent on the touchscreen interface, except for a little clutch of buttons at the bottom of the screen.

I only had time for a quick play, but the screen seems pretty responsive and the on-screen keyboard no more of a pain to use than the one on Apple's iPhone. There is a 3MP camera, without a flash, and it's clearly not going to be the phone for someone intent on giving up their digital camera.

But what matters is the software, and the possibilities that the Android platform opens up for developers. As with the G1, it is easy to find your way around the phone, surf the web, and launch applications - I noticed the one I used had apps for and .

HTC's Chief Executive Peter Chou and Patrick Chomet of Vodafone performed a double act at the press conference, and while there was some mention of features like Google Streetview, their key message was that this was a simple phone aimed not at the geeks and early adopters but a wider public.

Incidentally, one rather cross correspondent to this blog has commented that we have failed to differentiate between smartphones and the mass market. Well I think the boundary is increasingly blurred. A couple of years ago any phone that could do e-mail was considered "smart", now any handset that can't looks pretty dumb. Now Vodafone wants to convince a broad range of its customers that they need a phone which is, in effect a mini-computer.

Those consumers will also be able to choose a phone made by the company that set the standard for PDAs and early smartphones, then watched as others came along and took the market away. At least they will once Palm's new Pre makes it to Europe, after its American launch in the first half of this year.

The Pre was actually but this was my first chance to get my hands on a device that's received rave reviews from the bloggers. Mind you, there was some nervousness on Palm's part about my fat fingers actually touching their sacred object - the company told me that it would rather I let a demonstrator show me round.

But I did get to hold it for a few seconds - long enough to find out that it is both lighter and smaller than you-know-what. Yes the inevitable comparison will be with the iPhone and this does look a worthy competitor.

The touchscreen is if anything even better than that on the iPhone or the HTC Magic - and there's a keyboard just about big enough to be useful without making the device clunky. The Pre also has some of the missing links that are annoying about the iPhone - proper bluetooth, cut and paste, easy switching between applications. What it shares with the Apple device is an under-powered camera - just 3MP again - and a lack of video capture, though that may come. It should eventually have Flash too, following an agreement with Adobe. That means you will be able to play video in a browser window, something you can't do on the iPhone.

So two phones from companies that really need them to be hits for different reasons. Vodafone has failed to hitch its name to any stand-out product lately - the Blackberry Storm has been more of a squall. And for Palm the stakes are much higher - it has developed a whole new operating system for the Pre and if the phone doesn't win plenty of fans, then its makers might not be around in a few years' time.

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Game-changers - Google or Apple?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 16 Feb 09, 16:18 GMT

Two years ago all the talk at the Mobile World Congress was of the imminent arrival of the Apple iPhone, and how it was going to change the industry. One year ago, all the talk was of Google's open-source Android operating system, and what a radical impact that might have. In each case, the big established players blew a collective raspberry at the thought that these upstarts would rock their world - so how much has changed?

However often it is pointed out that the iPhone has only a tiny fraction of world handset sales, a walk around the halls here provides plenty of evidence of its influence. Touchscreen phones are everywhere - and although early versions appeared pale imitations, some of them now look as good as the original, and have a lot more firepower.

A case in point is Nokia's N97, a touchscreen phone with a very neat slide-out keyboard. When I went to interview Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki, we had a photographic face-off - his N97 versus my iPhone (I have brought a Nokia N95 and a Blackberry with me too, by the way). He was the clear winner, and the phone, which hits the shops in the summer, looks pretty good, as you can see here in my picture of him taken with my iPhone. Just below, is his photo of me with the iPhone. What I couldn't tell was just how much Nokia has improved the software on the phone to make it more intuitive.

And it's on software that Apple has really made a big impact. Ever tried to get onto the web with an N95? I found it too much of a struggle to bother, with this or other phones, and the statistics show that it was only the arrival of the iPhone which encouraged many users to see their phones as surfing devices.

Would we have seen the by both Nokia and Microsoft today if Apple's Apps Store hadn't shown there was a latent demand for useful, wacky or even totally pointless things to do on your mobile?

But what about Google? This show got underway with just one Android device - T-Mobile's G1 - on the market. As I arrived this morning, I saw a picture on the front of the show magazine of a new Android handset made by Huawei. I rushed to the firm's stand - and was turned away. But returning a couple of hours later I found the new Android behind a glass screen - it appeared to be a non-working prototype looking rather similar to, you've guessed it, the iPhone.

When I caught up with Google's mobile chief Hugo Barra, I asked him whether he was disappointed that Android hadn't yet taken over the world. He insisted that the hundreds of applications now being built for the new operating system proved that it was going to be very popular with all sorts of manufacturers - but pointed out that as it was an open-source system, he'd be the last to know what was in the pipeline because nobody needed to tell Google.

I am hearing rumours that a major operator will unveil its own Android handset on Tuesday - but it does seem that it's still too early to judge whether Google really has changed the rules of the game for this industry. Whereas Apple, with its very far from open operating system, seems to have everyone dancing to its tune.

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Going mobile in Barcelona

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 16 Feb 09, 09:02 GMT

If you fancy a couple of days in Barcelona right now, my advice is to forget it. The flights are full, a hotel room will cost you a fortune, and the place is full of geeky types talking a strange language - LTE, MVNO, HSPA - and pointing excitedly at the tiny screens in their hands.

This is the week , and the thousands gathered here are even less interested than normal in the glories of Gaudi, or a ramble down the Ramblas. For only the second time in its history the mobile industry is bracing itself for a year of contraction, with handsets sales forecast to drop.

But that doesn't mean that innovation has come to a halt - quite the opposite, with everyone even more desperate to prove that their handset or service can really bring something new to the table. So what are we hoping to see? Here's what's on my list:

Handsets

It seems using a mobile just to make a call is now very old hat, so expect more all-singing all-dancing phones-that-think-they're-computers. Sony Ericsson jumped the gun last night, with a phone combining a Walkman with an 8.1-megapixel camera, but Samsung may trump that with a phone which shoots video in HD (er, why?). There will be yet more touchscreen iPhone lookalikes - I'm interested in getting a look at Nokia's N97 and the Palm Pre which I've heard are the best efforts yet at knocking Apple from its smartphone perch. Energy efficiency is another theme, with a couple of solar-powered handsets on display. And at long last we may see a second Android phone based on Google's software platform - T-Mobile's G1 has had the field to itself so far. At the other end of the complexity spectrum, there is even wild talk of a Lego phone, which must be some kind of retro joke aimed at the yuppies who wielded those "brick" phones in the '80s.

Software

Now that just about every phone is a smartphone, it is the software that is becoming the differentiating factor. I spent yesterday evening at a preview event for some of the smaller exhibitors and just about every one seemed to be in software, not hardware. Turning voice messages into text may be one theme - Britain's Spinvox may see itself undercut by others doing a similar job at a lower price. Location-based services are another - but then again, the mobile industry has been selling the idea of arranging your social life via a mobile Google map for years, and I've sill not met anyone who does it.

As the High Street closes down, a whole new range of shops is opening up in the internet cloud, with Microsoft and others rushing to imitate Apple's iPhone Apps Store. Expect a flood of hopeful developers promising to turn your Nokia or your Windows Mobile into a musical instrument or a games arcade.

Mobile Money

No, not just the outlandish amounts of cash your operator charges you to surf the web whenever you leave the country, but the use of mobiles as "digital wallets", allowing users to pay for small items without cash. This has been a long time coming, but on this site, the convergence of two technologies - contactless cards and advanced mobile phones - could now spark a revolution in the way we pay. It's already happening in developing countries, where many people without bank accounts are now using phones to transfer money - I'll be looking out for more signs of the spread of mobile money.

Mobile Broadband

If 2008 was the year of the dongle, expect a whole lot more progress on the mobile broadband front this year. I've already met one firm selling a device which takes a 3g signal and turns it into a portable wi-fi hotspot that you can share amongst a number of users in the home, the office - even in the car. But we're now moving beyond 3g to much faster networks, and Barcelona will be the scene for a battle between two rival technologies - LTE and WiMax - the backers of which believe that they provide the answer to the wireless broadband future.

There - in just one sentence I've used enough mobile industry jargon to convince anyone to steer clear of Barcelona this week. But I will try to decipher what they're talking about in the halls of the Mobile World Congress and pass on a translation to you.

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A Royal web event

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 12 Feb 09, 17:45 GMT

For Britain's technology crowd, Buckingham Palace is rather far from their usual beat. But inside the Palace at lunchtime, you would have found senior people from Google, Apple and AOL, assorted professors of computing, web entrepreneurs (from Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com, to Michael Smith of Firebox), and just about anyone else who you'd normally find at a techie networking event. Oh, and a motley crew of technology journalists, including yours truly.

We were here to meet royalty - not just the Queen, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web and probably the only person for whom the technology world has unalloyed respect. Sir Tim was on hand to unveil the relaunched royal website, .

The website was born back in 1997, which now seems relatively early in the history of the web. It has now undergone major renovations, with far more video and more opportunities for interaction, including a Google map which allows you to track royal visits to your area.

At this stage you cannot email the Queen and there is no evidence that Her Majesty wishes to blog or join a social network. I do gather, however, that at least one member of the royal family is considering starting a blog.

Sir Tim gave us a brief history of the web and the royal site - and then handed over a remote control device to the Queen. After Her Majesty pressed a button there was a brief hiatus - and suddenly we were seeing the "surprise" element of the website, what the Palace is calling "virtual rooms". High-resolution pictures shot inside Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace will now allow visitors to get a look around.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee hadn't actually knocked up a new website for the Queen. That was the responsibility of Emma Goodey from the Royal Household. I asked her whether she had some ornate title - Her Majesty's Webmaster? - but I'm afraid she doesn't. She told me that there had been months of effort, much of it involving working out just what it was that drew members of the public to the website and kept them there. "We didn't want to make assumptions about what people wanted - we wanted to go out there and find out".

So far, it seems to have done the job, with heavy traffic to the new site. When I looked mid-afternoon, the "virtual rooms" were not yet visible - the Palace told me that it was waiting for a bit of a lull before putting the bandwidth-hungry material up.

I grabbed a quick chat with Sir Tim to get his views on good website practice - for royal families, governments and other public bodies.

The technology crowd at the launch seemed impressed by the new site, but they were not going to miss the opportunity to do some heavy networking, swapping rumours about other businesses and boosting their own. One executive from a social networking site told me they were about to have a "fabulous" relaunch, another told me that his interior design website was worthy of an hour long television programme.

And I think I may have achieved my own technology breakthrough - from inside the Palace. And I sent a of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Twitter just before the event got underway. Members of the Buckingham Palace press office told me they were pretty sure that this had never happened before. But I think we can be pretty confident that, whatever the technological progress made by the royal website, we won't be seeing tweets from the Queen.

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Spotify versus last.fm

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 11 Feb 09, 14:22 GMT

If you want music streamed to your computer for free there's already a big choice. As the ailing record industry thrashes around in search of a viable business model for the digital age, all sorts of deals are being done with new online services.

The latest to make a splash is called . It started in Scandinavia last year, began offering invitations to some British users a couple of months ago, and this week opened its doors to anyone in the UK who wants to come in. On the face of it, this is quite a compelling offer - millions of tracks that can be streamed to you, quickly and efficiently, for nothing. The catch is that, unless you shell out for a monthly subscription, you have to listen to an advert after every few tracks.

So, in this crowded field, who is the main opposition to Spotify? Judging by the people who've messaged me, it's . The streaming, "scrobbling" social music network (I always find it difficult to describe) has been going for six years, and a couple of years ago fell into the arms of America's broadcasting giant CBS for a tidy sum. Though it is unclear whether CBS has succeeded in turning it into a major money-spinner, last.fm continues to develop, appearing on new mobile platforms and offering new music.

So how do they compare? A few facts, figures - and comments from users of each service:

last.fm

The company tells me it has 25 million users worldwide, and they have access to over 7 million tracks. For users, the emphasis is on discovering new music, rather than simply playing stuff they already know.

And its supporters are pretty passionate about it: "Far better for recommendations than Spotify," one told me. "I'm a happy last.fm user and I do not see the point in investing time to build a new playlist," said another. And while it has text adverts, users seem happy that there are no audio commercials: "I had a quick look at SPOTIFY and couldn't see why I'd use it over last.fm and that's free and ad free."

Spotify

This young company is still pretty coy about figures, though it says that it has a third of a million users in Sweden, and there has been a big rush of new users in the UK since it opened to all-comers on Tuesday. It says it has licensing deals with all the big record labels and a number of independents - and a quick search seems to show that most artists are well represented. Mind you, last week it had to remove some tracks after a licensing dispute with some of the labels, a reminder that music rights remain a minefield in the digital world.

Spotify, too, has already attracted some enthusiastic fans: "Spotify is the business (last.fm unceremoniously abandoned!)", one told me." Another said: "I just prefer spotify, quality seems better."

In the end it may come down to a judgement about what kind of person looks for music online. Someone from last.fm told me he thought Spotify users were probably older and more settled in their ways, "people who already know what they like" - whereas the last.fm crowd is younger, more edgy, and more inclined to see the service as a social network.

Is there room for both services? While they both hope to make some money from steering people towards paid-for downloads, it looks as though their finances really depend on advertising. Last.fm, safe in the embrace of a giant parent, can be reasonably relaxed. But Spotify needs to attract a big crowd in a hurry - and convince increasingly picky advertisers that it's a cool place to hang out.

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100Mbps broadband - who needs it?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 10 Feb 09, 14:39 GMT

I'm writing this from the fastest domestic broadband connection I've yet experienced. It's at a in Wembley in north London which lured me here with the promise of 100Mbps.

From their show flat with a view of the roof of Wembley Stadium I've so far managed to do a live radio broadcast via fast broadband - though my PC crashed and needed rebooting minutes before I had to go live - and we're also trying to broadcast live TV over the net, though here we're being slightly hamstrung by the limitations of our broadcast software.

While this housing development has been wired with fibre from the start, and residents have access to phone, broadband and TV over the network, nobody is actually being offered a 100Mbps subscription.

Instead residents pay for an 8, 16 or 32Mbps service - but then can press a button marked "boost" to get their speed up to 100Mbps. That costs them 拢1 for 30 minutes. It seems the developers aren't convinced there is yet a real demand for 100Mps. They have "future-proofed" the homes, but if you want to spend a lot of time in the internet fast lane the bills will mount up.

What the developers Quintain tell me is that for plenty of residents 32Mbps at around 拢30 a month is more than enough. For some of the students who live here, that means they can also get by without a television, using the 91热爆 iPlayer and other online services for all their viewing needs. I didn't inquire too closely whether they had got themselves a television licence.

We pressed the boost button - and revved up to "100Mbps". A quick speed test proved pretty impressive. I got 78Mps downstream and as much as 50Mbps upstream, meaning I could have sent my video files to the 91热爆 in seconds rather than minutes. And nobody really expects to get right up to the advertised speed, do they?

But showing just what fast broadband could do proved tricky. There had been some rather over-excited claims that it meant you could download a movie in seconds, which was obviously untrue. But we tested it with Apple's iTunes, attempting to download a 1Gb movie. We got a message telling us that would take 20 minutes, so we stopped.

A helpful network engineer from the organisation running the service told me that even if you were getting out onto the internet at 100Mbps, you would find the brakes being slammed on once you hit Apple's servers. "iTunes has a limit on the speed at which you can download," he said. With very few people able to go that fast, it's apparently not worthwhile catering for them.

So we turned to the good old iPlayer and downloaded a programme. The latest edition of "Who Do You Think You Are?" is an hour long and is a 341Mb file. We had that downloaded and playing within a minute - pretty impressive. (By the way, you may notice that on the tape the man from Quintain ends up clicking on the stream rather than the download but I can assure you that the file was there - I had a go after him and downloaded an episode of Top Gear in under a minute too).

This kind of speed will only spread slowly across Britain - it's relatively cheap to lay fibre into new homes, but costs a fortune to dig up the streets and bring fast broadband to everyone.

But from what I've seen in Wembley, fast broadband will mean big changes to the way we view - and make - television.

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Are you still reading?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 9 Feb 09, 09:34 GMT

I took a short train ride on Saturday to a local shopping centre, and in my bag I packed a book to while away the quarter of an hour in each direction.

Sadly, the book never emerged from the bag. I was too busy with my internet-connected mobile phone: sending messages to friends; reading articles after clicking on links they'd sent; even looking at a couple of pages of a Sherlock Holmes story which I have stored in an application on the phone.

Which brings us to - is the internet killing the book? It's an appropriate time to ask, as Amazon prepares to unveil the latest version of its , the Kindle 2.

It strikes me that there are two separate issues: the impact of new technology on the publishing industry and the change in readers' habits caused by the arrival of a flood of online material.

So is the Kindle going to be the iPod, symbolising the moment all publishers had to get with the digital revolution or see their businesses submerged under a wave of piracy? No, because there is no evidence that book sales are declining in the way that CD sales have throughout this decade. In the United States, there was a steady if unspectacular rise in book sales between 2002 and 2007, with quite a shift from the high street to online bookshops.

In the UK, according to the , the value of book sales grew from 拢2.7bn in 2004 to nearly 拢3bn in 2007. Again, pretty slow growth, but a lot healthier than what happened to the music market over the same period.

In 2007, the UK music industry's total sales - including digital - amounted to about 拢1.4bn, down from nearly 拢2bn three years before. Sales of "digital" books are so low that they do not feature on the publishing industry's charts. The book market is not falling off a cliff - even if the bestsellers' list is full of celebrity biographies and cookbooks - and there is no urgent pressure on publishers to go digital.

Electronic books - from the Kindle to the Sony reader to the "Stanza" application on the iPhone - are gimmicks right now, beloved of early-adopting geeks, rather than the mainstream playthings that MP3 players have quickly become. And there is no obvious reason why that should change quickly.

Music is, like it or not, an art form that can be enjoyed part-time, on the move, while doing something else. But it's difficult to read a book while engaged in another task, although I've occasionally found myself walking into lamp posts while engrossed in the final chapter of a compelling novel.

And perhaps it is fiction that will survive best in its analogue form in the digital age. Factual and reference works, which you may want to dip into rather than read all the way through, are ideally suited to online access. Has anybody ever read a whole dictionary or encyclopedia? But a successful work of fiction is something you dive into, leaving the outside world to get on with its business.

The biggest threat posed by new technology is to the attention span of the reader - the syndrome. The argument goes that there is so much information online that we flit from link to link, without ever reading more than the odd paragraph.

It certainly rings true to this reader. I returned recently from a week's holiday where, with limited internet access, I managed to get through 400 pages of a pretty heavy book. Since getting home, I've barely managed ten pages a day.

But perhaps I'm the exception, and most of you are more diligent readers? Or maybe you didn't make it beyond my first paragraph?

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What happened to the $20 laptop?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 6 Feb 09, 09:40 GMT

The week began with a great story. The Indian government was going to build a $20 (or maybe even $10) laptop, finally bringing cheap computing to the masses, in a manner which had eluded projects like .

The only problem was that the "$20 laptop" turned out to be no such thing - it's not a laptop and it's not clear exactly what it is, when it will appear or what it wil cost. But the world's technology journalists fell for the story - along with the - so how did that happen?

It was all triggered by an article in the on Monday. This claimed that the device would be launched at an education event on Tuesday, and compared the $20 laptop to India's $2000 car - although that too has so far failed to appear, some years after it was promised. The FT's article went round the world at the speed of light, and my editors - and I suspect others - were soon asking why we hadn't got the story.

But on the Tuesday, when the press conference happened in the town of Tirupati, the miracle gizmo turned out to be a prototype of a handheld device, rather than a laptop. The aim of the device, under development by local universities, was to use technology to bring education to millions of new students across India.

And the price? Well, that was pretty unclear. It might be $20, it might be $10, depending on production volumes, and presumably the level of government subsidy. The to have emerged appears to show a solid white rectangular object, without a display or a keyboard.

I've spoken to the author of the FT article, James Lamont, who told me that reports about a laptop had actually surfaced first in the Indian press last week after a briefing by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. It appears that the ministry official, perhaps not technically aware, used the word laptop in that briefing to describe an e-learning device.

That was enough to turn an interesting educational initiative by the Indian government into a story that sparked worldwide interest amongst the techie community. Now it has turned out to be less than it appeared, many of my fellow journalists and bloggers have reacted with contempt. talked of "purposeful misinformation" by politicians seeking re-election, while the quoted a university researcher as saying "The entire world was watching. This act.....has shamed the nation."

But perhaps this is a little unfair. The Indian government, James Lamont told me, is faced with a massive educational challenge, needing to create as many as 1500 new universities over the next six years. It seems to be deadly serious about using technology to bridge its educational gap.

The price of computing is coming down - though $20 seems a bit of a stretch, with component makers rushing to explain that you won't even get a screen for that price. And aren't we getting hung up on the idea of a laptop? It is mobile phones that are really proving to be the transformational technology in developing countries. If Indian researchers can come up with a $20 mobile internet device to put millions of students online, then they really will deserve global headlines.

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Facebook is Five

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 4 Feb 09, 10:22 GMT

Happy Birthday, . You've , and you're still standing on your own two feet.

That is a pretty good achievement for a little website started in a bedroom by a student. Mark Zuckerberg has defied those who advised him to sell up when the going was good rather than forging ahead on his own.

And for those, like me, who've tired of Facebook and moved on to another social network (I won't mention it because I know it's beginning to bore some of you), it is worth looking at the latest figures to remind ourselves of the extent to which Mr Zuckerberg's creation now dominates its young industry.

Eighteen months ago, when the London media became somewhat obsessed with Facebook, it was growing rapidly but was still way behind in terms of its total audience. Even 12 months ago, according to Nielsen Online, Facebook had a global audience of 38 million compared to MySpace's 78 million - although in the UK it had already grabbed the number one spot. But by the end of 2008, Mr Zuckerberg's network had nearly trebled, with 110 million people using it worldwide, while MySpace had barely moved at all, up to 83 million.

In the UK the figures are even more startling. Facebook has more than 17 million users, three times as many as MySpace, and people spend more time on it than on any other site. Networks with professional rather than social aims, such as , are also growing rapidly, but are minnows in the wake of the Facebook whale.

So who are all these people in the poking crowd? Well, it seems that at least in the UK just about anyone between 15 and 25 feels obliged to have a Facebook profile.

I've been talking to some students in Bristol, who seem almost addicted to the network. Joe Gilder, now the communications officer at Bristol University students' union, admitted he was amazed that he'd got through his degree, so much time had he spent just mucking around on Facebook.

"I used to spend at least three hours a day on it which I called revising," he told me. "For me it's the most important thing around. I know exactly what's going on everywhere through my Facebook profile." His verdict - and that of others I spoke to - was that it was almost impossible to live the student life without Facebook.

But how is Mr Z getting on with turning all this obsessive devotion into money? He certainly hasn't taken the easy way out. The MySpace founders got out rather rapidly, selling up to the Murdoch empire. was bought by ITV. And most impressively of all, tied the knot with AOL for $850 million a year ago.

All of those deals now look pretty smart. AOL has denied recent reports that it's now looking to shed Bebo at a loss, but you can't help thinking that anyone who bought a social network before the global downturn really began to bite is now feeling like someone who took out a 100% mortgage on a London house in 2007. While those who sold the houses - and banked their winnings - are feeling, well, somewhat smug.

Social networking is one trend that shows no sign of going away. But it is proving surprisingly hard to "monetise", with users deeply suspicous of any attempt to insert marketing messages between them and their friends. Still, according to the , just five days after Mark Zuckerberg launched "thefacebook.com", he "did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue".

So, as he lights the candles on the birthday cake, maybe it's enough for him just to have created something that has changed the way millions of people communicate.

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A hi-tech snow event

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Feb 09, 15:29 GMT

The heaviest snowfall in south east England since the early 1990s has brought out the best in the most technically-aware sections of the population - or the worst, if, like many in other parts of the country, you think this is just an excuse for soft Southerners to stay at home putting their feet up.

From late on Sunday, social networks - particularly Twitter - were alive with excited speculation about the arrival of the snow. Then on Monday morning, there was a new rush of information and photos, with useful detail about transport problems, school closures, and local snow conditions. I set off for school with a child this morning - and when we arrived. Rapidly, more information came my way advising me on how I might get to work. The web was working in a useful collaborative way.

But Ben Marsh went one step further. He's a web developer who was hanging around on Twitter on Sunday afternoon. "I was looking at snow-related posts. Someone had suggested putting a postcode and a rating of how much snow they were getting next to the #uksnow tag on Twitter. Someone else said it would be really nice to see that on a map, so I thought let's give it a whirl."

By Sunday evening he'd finished it, and as soon as he put a link to advertise it, began to take off. Now it's receiving reports from across Britain - and Northern France - giving details of snow conditions, plus the occasional picture.

Technology hasn't just made it easier to communicate about the effects of a weather emergency; it has probably lessened its economic impact. Plenty of people appear to have decided it is better to work from home rather than risk taking to the roads or public transport - just stick "working from home" into the Twitter search box to find out.

Some may be skiving, but others insist that the arrival of broadband has meant they are as effective at home on the laptop - or even more so - than they would be at their desk in the office. While I have manfully struggled my way into the office today (okay, I only live five miles away), I've found myself speaking to plenty of people on the phone who are working from home, without any apparent impact on their ability to do business.

Among them is Ben Marsh, who besides knocking up that map, has been working away for his web development firm from home. "I've got remote access, I'm straight in - and I've got everything here," he told me. And before you ask, Ben is not a soft Southerner - he lives in Derbyshire and getting to his office in Derby just hasn't been possible.

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Google's 55 minute crisis

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 2 Feb 09, 10:21 GMT

It was the weekend which shook Google to its very foundations... possibly. All around the world, users of the search engine which prides itself - and has built a multi-billion dollar business - on providing the best, most useful answers to every query were greeted with a message warning that "this site may harm your computer".

The same text was pasted next to every search result - for everything from Aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. In effect, Google was warning users that the entire internet was sick and shouldn't be touched with an electronic bargepole.

Panic spread as the global web community told each other about this apparent breakdown. Google eventually fixed the problem, of a list of malicious sites somehow ended up including every web address, instead of one specific URL. But what a textbook example of a corporate disaster allowed to rage out of control...

...hold on a minute. The entire incident lasted just 55 minutes. And if you were on the West Coast of the USA, where Google is based, you are unlikely to have been affected, because it started at 0630 your time on a Saturday morning and was over by 0725. So why all the hoo-hah?

Well, news spread like wildfire around the blogosphere - or more accurately the Twitterverse - as everyone seemed determined to pass on their panic, along with rumours that Google's Gmail was also misfiring. So far. more people knew about the "may harm" incident than were affected by it. I got off a plane on my way home from a holiday on Saturday afternoon, asked online whether I'd missed any big tech stories, and was bombarded with messages about the Google crash.

So what's the verdict on the importance of this incident? decided that Google could have done better, awarding the company just 5 out of 10 for its handling of the crisis and accusing it of failing to respond as quickly as it could have done. That seems a bit harsh - it sounds like someone was hauled out of bed in Mountain View at 0645 on a Saturday to tinker with the engine, and got it sorted straight away. But it does go to show how rapidly you need to react to a crisis in a world where your mistakes will be the subject of web chatter within minutes of them happening.

Two Twitterers gave rather different views of Google's 55 minute crisis. , perhaps not completely seriously: "kennedy, lady di crash, and now #googmayharm! Everyone will remember what they were doing". : "small message under Google search results brings Twitterverse to a halt. Real world curiously unaffected!"

And the other thing to remember is that while the web's reactions may be fast, and its gaze intense, its attention span is very short. In Britain at least, a temporary problem with a search engine has been eclipsed by the arrival of snow. is the tag attracting thousands of comments on Twitter - and I suspect it may take a little longer than 55 minutes to sort that out.

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