Feb
18

Faces

FacesFebruary 18th, 2013Comments Off

Europe’s flagship effort to limit greenhouse-gas emissions faces an existential threat as the price of emissions has fallen dramatically, eroding an incentive for industries to pollute less and forcing policy makers to weigh environmental priorities against economic concerns.

With the cost of emitting carbon dioxide often around €5 ($6.70) a ton—a third of what it was 18 months ago—utilities in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland are reconsidering plans to phase out coal-fired plants.
On Tuesday, the environment committee of the European Parliament is set to vote on a proposal that would allow the European Union to delay the release of 900 million emissions allowances to the market by about five years in an effort to keep the price of permits from falling further, and eventually push it up.

The faltering of the market—known as the EU Emissions Trading System, or ETS, which like cap and trade programs creates a cost to pollute and rewards low emissions—is calling into question its effectiveness as a model of addressing global warming and encouraging the development of alternative energy.

Feb
17

Expensive

Apps available, ExpensiveFebruary 17th, 2013Comments Off

Making it more expensive to pollute by requiring companies to buy emissions permits is central to the EU’s goal of reducing emissions by 20% in 2020 from 1990 levels. But it would also be an unwelcome drag on a struggling economy.

That has turned decision-making on the permit scheme into a tug of war between those most concerned with sparking growth and those arguing that the EU shouldn’t lose sight of longer-term environmental goals.

“There is a disparity between the economic priorities and challenges that Europe is facing and reaching more aggressive emissions reductions,” said Divya Reddy, a Washington-based analyst for Eurasia Group who follows climate change.
Among those arguing most loudly for the primacy of economic concerns is Poland.

Polish Environment Minister Marcin Korolec said his government opposes any effort to increase the price of permits, saying that would make electricity more expensive and threaten the country’s economy, which is experiencing a sharp slowdown in growth and rising unemployment.

“The ETS was designed as a market mechanism. I believe that it should continue to be operated based on market rules,” Mr. Korolec said.

European Parliament members have been discussing the matter and looking for compromises, a parliamentary aide said, adding that the measure is expected to pass. If it does, the full Parliament must vote on the plan—something likely to happen in the spring.

If the panel rejects the proposal to withhold the allowances, and it later dies in parliament, the price of emissions permits would likely fall below €1 per ton and the market would cease to act as a serious long-term deterrent to polluting, according to Virtuse Group Suisse, a trader of the allowances.

Over the past five years, the price of permits has dropped from a high of €28.70 a ton before the global financial crisis started in 2008 to below €3 a ton last month when the European Parliament’s industrial committee rejected the plan to delay allowances, in a nonbinding vote.

Slowing industrial production and electricity consumption linked to Europe’s widespread economic troubles have significantly decreased demand for permits in a market already burdened with oversupply.

Feb
16

Trader

Internet, Internet innovation, TraderFebruary 16th, 2013Comments Off

Jan Pravda, director of Pravda Capital Partners, a trader of the allowances, said that the ETS is also struggling because European manufacturers could move operations to countries that lack emissions trading systems, such as China or the U.S. He added that flaws in the system led to theft of allowances, value-added tax fraud and other abuses. The European Commission said it is taking steps to resolve these lingering issues.
The question is: How deep will the cuts in the number of allowances have to be to get the market functioning effectively again?

“Temporarily taking 900 million tons off the market is too little too late,” Mr. Pravda said. “The real oversupply is several billion tons and this ‘backloading’ isn’t taking supply off market but shifting it in time.”Environmental activist groups Climate Action Network and Greenpeace argue that 1.4 billion planned allowances need to be withheld and an additional 2.2 billion outstanding permits should be canceled.

One possibility is for the EU to set minimum prices for permits, an approach taken by California, which held its first auction for emission allowances in November. The average price was $10.09 per ton, just above the $10 minimum price. The minimum price will rise 5% each year and be adjusted for inflation. In 2013, for example, the minimum price for a ton of emissions is $10.71.

Ms. Reddy of Eurasia Group said that a minimum price could prevent another crash. “But from a political perspective it looks unlikely,” she said.

What happens could well come down to a decision by Germany, which has roughly half of the votes needed for a blocking minority that could prevent any changes to ETS. But German leaders appear split.

Peter Altmaier, Germany’s environment minister, supports the reduction of carbon allowances, while Economics Minister Philipp Rösler is against any plans that would lift power prices.

Mr. Rösler’s main argument against the plan is that it would threaten competitiveness and jobs, an Economics Ministry spokeswoman said.

Feb
15

Infotel

Infotel, link, Market and bringFebruary 15th, 2013Comments Off

India to Allow Internet Firms to Offer Voice Services.

India’s Telecom Commission has decided to allow companies which have licenses to provide broadband wireless Internet to also offer voice telephone services by paying a fee to the government.

Companies with licenses for broadband internet will have to pay 16.58 billion rupees ($307 million) for a permit to offer voice telephone services across India, Telecom Secretary R. Chandrashekhar, who is also the commission’s chairman, told The Wall Street Journal Monday.
The commission is the highest decision-making body on policy issues within India’s Department of Telecommunications.

The decision is likely to help Reliance Industries Ltd.’s 500325.BY +0.29% telecommunications venture, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., which holds licenses to provide broadband wireless Internet services.
Voice services contribute more than 85% of Indian telecom operators’ revenue, but Internet services offer higher margins.

Reliance, India’s biggest company by market value, paid 48 billion rupees in 2010 to buy a 95% stake in Infotel Broadband, which owned radio waves for broadband Internet services.Infotel Broadband has since been renamed Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Jan
19

Metric

Metric, Processing, Qwerty control, Wrap-up Sony Xperia, YammerJanuary 19th, 2013Comments Off

The internet’s weakest links.

If you think the most vulnerable regions are autocratic regimes or civil war zones, think again. Many countries or regions are at severe risk of disconnection. Here’s why.
How many phone calls does it take to kill the internet? It seems like an odd question to ask about a network once thought to be strong enough to withstand a nuclear attack. However, first-strike mushroom clouds aren’t the biggest threat to the internet anymore. Just ask the citizens of Libya, Egypt and Syria: nations whose connections have been recently severed, albeit temporarily.

But if you think that the internet’s most vulnerable regions correspond to autocratic regimes or civil war zones, think again. Following the Syrian blackout in late 2012, Renesys, a consultancy that specialises in monitoring and mitigating risks to connectivity, created a map ranking every country’s “risk of internet disconnection”. They found resilience has little to do with the presence or absence of jackbooted thugs: Belarus is at “significant risk” of internet disconnection, while China – which blacked out the entire province of Xinjiang for ten months in 2009 and 2010 – is rated at “low risk”.

How can this be? Renesys simplified the question of global internet resilience by tracking one metric: the number of so-called “frontier” internet service providers (ISPs) that a country has. A frontier ISP is one that maintains connections or gateways to the global internet at large, not just to its own domestic network. “Not all ISPs have or need connections to the outside world,” says Jim Cowie, chief technology officer and co-founder of Renesys. “Comcast, for example, only sells internet service in the United States.”

Jan
18

International gateways

AT&T, Citigroup Outlook, ICANN, International gateways, NaspersJanuary 18th, 2013Comments Off

It’s this number of international gateways, then, that captures how difficult it would be to snuff out a country’s internet pulse. Disable them, and the global web goes dark. The more gateways there are, the more difficult it will be to neutralise all of them.

Even sophisticated, highly networked countries can be at risk of a blackout if their digital frontier has a paucity of global connections. “Iran is a good example of this,” says Cowie. “Iran was one of the countries that came to networking really early – they have nearly 100 ISPs all over the country. But very few [of those] are internationally connected ISPs by design.” Renesys’s map places Iran in the “significant risk” category, one of 72 countries and territories with “fewer than 10 service providers at [the] international frontier.”

One advantage in using frontier ISPs as a proxy for internet resilience is that it cuts through any biases from news reports about blackouts in developing world nations. “It doesn’t matter whether the damage comes from politics or war or a meteor strike hitting the wrong building,” Cowie says. “Vulnerable is vulnerable.” Any country with just one or two connections to the global internet has a clear point of failure. By this measure, Syria and Libya are as much at “severe risk” of disconnection as Greenland.

Jan
17

Leaky bucket

Chrome, Display Sony Xperia, Google Nexus 7, Google TV interface, Internet, Internet innovation, Leaky bucket, Performance Sony Xperia, ProcessJanuary 17th, 2013Comments Off

‘Leaky bucket’

But mere physical connections don’t paint a full picture of a country’s disconnection risk. Outside of a massive solar flare or electromagnetic pulse, unplugging a country from the global web may be an organisational problem more than anything else.

Would you expect Afghanistan, sundered by war for decades, to be at less risk than its relatively stable neighbour Iran? Probably not, but it is as likely to lose the internet as India, the world’s largest democracy. It turns out that the very circumstances that make Afghanistan a near-failed state – regional fragmentation and a central government unable to control local warlords – also make it impossible for Kabul to systematically clamp down on Afghanistan’s motley hodgepodge of globally-connected ISPs, which are powered by “various satellite providers, as well as by Uzbek, Iranian, and Pakistani terrestrial transit,” according to Renesys.

Jan
16

Organisational inertia

Market and bring, McAfee, Naspers, Nokia accounted, Nokia long goodbye, Organisational inertia, Organisational nature, Performance Sony Xperia, Process, Processing, Qwerty control, Samsung Galaxy S III, Software Sony Xperia, Sony Xperia, Uncategorized, Verizon, World Conference, Wrap-up Sony Xperia, Yammer, YouTubeJanuary 16th, 2013Comments Off

This organisational inertia is also what makes Renesys deem China at “low risk” of internet cutoff. Beijing’s autocrats would have to make too many phone calls to too many frontier ISPs across their vast domain, says Cowie, to make a bona fide internet blackout very practical. And that’s just the official global connections. “There are a lot of independent, unlicensed connections; foreign companies [doing business in China] have VPNs” that connect them to their home countries, Cowie says. “I’d have to believe it’d be a leaky bucket.”

Not everyone agrees with Renesys’s sanguine assessment of China’s disconnection risk. “It doesn’t seem to be accurate,” says Adam Segal, an expert on Chinese technology and cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Given everything we know, there’s no reason to believe the [Chinese] ISPs wouldn’t fall into line if the government said to shut down.”

Segal cites the blackouts in Xinjiang and Tibet as evidence of China’s ability to flex its organisational muscle over its frontier internet connections. Chinese ISPs are already accustomed to constantly filtering and censoring all global web traffic; “they know that if they don’t do it, they won’t be in business any longer,” Segal says. “Unless society has completely broken down there, it’s hard to imagine that a company would balk [at a cutoff order].” So while it might take a lot of phone calls to cut China off from the web, those calls could go through rather quickly.

What’s more, the result probably wouldn’t even look like a blackout at first. “The Chinese don’t want to be considered in the same category as Syria and Egypt,” Segal explains. “They have to maintain a story to their users that they have an open internet, so what they get instead are incredibly slow load times. They very rarely will get blocked.”

Jan
15

Organisational nature

Google Nexus 7, Google Play, Google TV interface, ICANN, Internet, Internet innovation, Internet life, link, Organisational natureJanuary 15th, 2013Comments Off

Postcode problem

The organisational nature of resilience extends into the purely digital realm, as well. After all, at its most fundamental level, the internet is just information: a set of open, mutually agreed-upon standards called TCP/IP. Those protocols connect the “autonomous systems” that make up the so-called “network of networks” we call the global internet. This is made up of tens of thousands of these autonomous systems; countries have them, and so do large organisations and companies. “If IP addresses are like street numbers for individual computers, autonomous systems are a bit like postcodes,” explains Jon Graham-Cumming, an author, programmer and cybersecurity expert at Cloudflare. “They are how one network says to another, ‘I am the place to go if you want to reach Belarus, or the BBC.”

In the case of Belarus – the only country in Europe marked “at significant risk” of internet disconnection according to Renesys – “there is a single ‘postcode’, controlled by a state-owned telecom company, that connects to the rest of the world,” says Graham-Cumming. “If you had control of that, you could cut the country off.” These “postcodes” aren’t secret, either – the internet wouldn’t work if they were. Belarus’s is 6697.

To the other autonomous systems and routers connecting the global internet, this single four-digit number represents Belarus’s entire existence. And removing it would be trivial, says Graham-Cumming: “You’d go to the telecom company, and a command would be typed into the routers, saying 6697 doesn’t exist anymore, or that it’s empty. Because the internet operates by cooperation, the other routers would say, ‘OK, thanks for the update.’ And you’d be gone.”

Much like a neutron bomb wiping out life while preserving physical property, neutralising an autonomous system’s address can “delete” portions of the internet without making costly or irreversible changes to network infrastructure. “If any country wants to cut [itself] off, it’s all done on the command line, and you can leave it all running,” Graham-Cumming says. He suspects this is what happened in Syria – although, as Jim Cowie adds, “we won’t know for sure until the war’s over and we can talk to the network engineers.”

Jan
14

Market and bring

Apps available, AT&T, Cameras Sony Xperia, Chrome, Citigroup Outlook, Design Sony Xperia, Display Sony Xperia, Facebook, Market and bringJanuary 14th, 2013Comments Off

Which brings us to a mirror version of the question posed at the beginning: how many phone calls would it take to strengthen the internet? In the case of Bahrain, a tiny island monarchy in the Persian Gulf, it took several decades. “For many years they had a single telephone company largely owned by the government,” says Cowie. “But they wanted to become the financial centre of the Gulf, so they started a 30-year plan to open up the ISP market and bring in as many competitors as they could.”

Today, Cowie says, Bahrain has “about 10 providers that can all connect to international ISPs.” That’s not anywhere as resilient as the United States or United Kingdom, but it is enough to put Bahrain at “low risk” of internet disconnection alongside India, China, Mexico and New Zealand.

In Africa, where much of the continent is at severe risk of disconnection, similar network robustness could develop even faster. “Africa is the fastest-growing continent in terms of internet presence: more autonomous systems are joining every year, and countries that once only had satellite connections [to the global internet] are investing in fibre-optic cables,” says Cowie.

In another 30 years, will a world map of internet resilience show every country at low risk? That’s about as likely as world peace breaking out. But knowing how many phone calls it would take to kill the web – and where – can at least help point out where this “network of networks” still needs more shoring up.

Jun
26

Google Nexus 7

Google Nexus 7June 26th, 2012Comments Off

Google Nexus 7 rumor roundup.

It’s been just one week since Microsoft debuted the Surface, the first tablet that not only runs on Windows software but bears the company’s branding.
Now, reports abound that Google is about to make a similar move on Wednesday at its annual I/O developers’ conference by unveiling a tablet called the Nexus 7. Though a slew of mobile devices from different manufacturers run on Google’s Android operating system, this would be the first tablet to be produced partly by Google.
Gizmodo Australia reports that it has seen a “training document” that outlines the gadgets specs and features. Here’s a roundup of what you might expect from the device:

Price: Gizmodo Australia reports that the 8GB version of the Nexus 7 will cost $199. At that price point, the launch seems to pose a direct challenge to Amazon’s similarly low-priced Kindle Fire, rather than Apple’s more costly iPad. The price of the Microsoft Surface has not yet been announced.

What it looks like: An apparent image of the device is available on Gizmodo’s site. If it looks familiar, PC Magazine says that’s because you’ve already seen it. That report says that the device Google will showcase on Wednesday is the same one revealed by Asus and Nvidia at CES in January.

Operating system: Gizmodo says that the Nexus 7 will run on the whimsically named Jelly Bean, the newest iteration of Android. It is not clear how Jelly Bean would differ from the current Ice Cream Sandwich. An earlier report from The Verge says that Jelly Bean is slated to be version 4.1 of the Android OS, which seems to suggest it might not be an especially big leap forward from today’s 4.0 platform.

Size: Gizmodo’s report says the tablet will be 7 inches, but it’s not clear whether that means the entire device will be that size or just the display screen. Either way, it puts it in the same range as the Kindle Fire, which is 7.5 inches overall and has a screen size of 7 inches. Both devices are markedly smaller than the 10.6-inch Surface or the 9.7-inch iPad.

Features: The Nexus 7 is rumored to come with a 1.3Ghz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera and nine hours of battery life. Its expected screen resolution of 1280 pixels by 800 pixels would trump that of the Kindle Fire.

Jun
26

Nokia long goodbye

Nokia long goodbyeJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Nokia workers in Salo thought chief executive Stephen Elop signalled that their plant, Europe’s last major mobile phone factory, would survive when he visited in February, but last week he announced its closure anyway.
This final chapter in Nokia’s long goodbye to manufacturing in Finland will claim about 850 jobs, on top of 1 000 announced earlier in the year, and rob the town of 90% of its tax revenue.
Once the world’s dominant cellphone provider, Nokia has been bested in a smartphone war by Apple and Samsung and other phones running Google software. It is also losing share in the market for more basic phones.
Its strategy to reverse its fortunes, abandoning its own Symbian smartphone software in favour of a largely untested alternative from Elop’s former employer Microsoft, has limped from setback to setback.
Sales of Nokia’s new Windows Phone models, the Lumia series, have been slow to pick up, while the bottom has fallen out of the market for old phones running dead-end Symbian.
As recently as this week, Microsoft revealed that a new version of its software won’t run on the existing Lumia range, and a Wall Street analyst said the software giant was looking at making its own phones in direct competition with its new partner.
Over two years, workers at Nokia have become familiar with bad news, but are still not inured to it.
“During my whole time, 15 years and 10 months with Nokia, someone was always saying Nokia will abandon Finland. But it was still a surprise,” said Katja Taskinen, who took a buyout offer in an earlier round of cuts this year.
Rivals have long been focused in Asia, and analysts had said Nokia should do the same, but the workers believed they had been made an exception.
“We were promised continuity,” said Anne Malm, head shop steward of the Salo plant, which was set up in the 1970s and often held up as a model for other Nokia factories around the world.
“Salo is where it all began. Salo has been the benchmark. If there were troubles at other factories, Salo has been the place from where teams were sent to extinguish those fires.”

Jun
26

Nokia accounted

Nokia accountedJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Some are hoping for government intervention.
“The government promised us that they’ll use all the instruments available to help us,” said Antti Rantakokko, Salo’s mayor.
Jukka Roos, a local member of the Social Democratic Party and former lawmaker, said the government should not allow the country’s flagship technology company to make such drastic cuts.
“The government and unions should react and put pressure on Nokia,” he said. “What the hell are they doing?”
At its peak, Nokia accounted for around 4% of Finnish gross domestic product and supported an ecosystem of suppliers and technology startups in an economy previously focused on forestry and metalworks. Now it accounts for less than 1%, according to analysts.
Its problems have had a knock-on effect on Finnish electronics companies, including Elcoteq, which filed for bankruptcy last October after Nokia turned to cheaper Asian suppliers.
In Salo, local unemployment is around 11%, already above the national average of 8%, and the city expects it to spike to around 20% once the Nokia jobs go.
The government has said it will accelerate an existing programme in which it plans around €300m in capital spending and tax breaks for research and development during its term, which ends in 2015.
But beyond that, there was little Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen could promise when he visited Salo recently. He had cancelled a trip to a United Nations conference in Brazil to visit Salo and Oulu, another town affected by Nokia layoffs.
“I completely understand the outcry,” he said. “But we also have to keep in mind that Nokia brought us enormous wealth in the past.”
He rejected suggestions that the state should buy Nokia shares, which have fallen over 50% since the start of the year.While the state holds stakes in companies considered crucial to its national interests, including forest and chemical companies, and is a majority shareholder in airline Finnair and energy company Fortum, owning shares doesn’t help beat global competition.
While Finland is one of a dwindling band of triple-A rated countries in the eurozone, its exports have been declining, with old industries like forestry also struggling to compete with lower-cost rivals.
Its current account slipped into the red last year, and the central bank expects the deficit to continue through at least 2014, by which time analysts say Nokia could be short on cash if it continues to burn through reserves at the current rate.
While analysts have begun to think the unthinkable, Finns find it hard to contemplate the loss of a company that has become integral to national pride.
Harri Niinisto, coincidentally a cousin of Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, also a Salo native, remains hopeful, though he took a redundancy package from Nokia this year and set up his own consulting firm.
“At the moment, we can’t see what will end up happening,” said Niinisto. “Still, I want to keep believing in Nokia.”

Jun
26

Naspers

NaspersJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Naspers internet head dies.

Cape Town – The head of MIH and Naspers’ internet operations worldwide, Antonie Roux, has died.
He was 54.
Roux died on Sunday in a hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, after undergoing cancer surgery.
Roux was also a founding member of M-Net.
He had worked for Naspers [JSE:NPN], Africa’s largest media company, for over 20 years beginning from junior technician right until he became the chief executive officer and director of MIH Holdings as well as the CEO of Naspers Internet Operations at the time of his passing.
His excellence and contribution to the company were recognised when he was awarded the Phil Weber Award in 2008, the highest accolade in the Naspers Group.
Ton Vosloo, the non-executive chairperson of the Naspers board, told Die Burger that Roux was a pioneer in the internet space. “He was one of the big builders of the new media, “ Vosloo said.
Naspers CEO Koos Bekker said Roux’s main characteristic was his exceptional lust for life. “He was curious about everything and anyone; very loyal.
“He was one of the few people worldwide that made a seamless transition from print media to television and the internet.”

Jun
26

Sony Xperia

Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Can Sony Xperia ion measure up to its competitors?

It’s been over five months since we first saw Sony’s Xperia ionfor AT&T, an Android device with LTE and a lot to prove. The Xperia line hasn’t had much success here in the US, thanks in no small part to delayed launches and underwhelming hardware. The Xperia ion continues that late-launch trend, but the hardware has specs that indicate that Sony is aiming a little higher than your standard mid-range Android phone, including a 720p display, 12-megapixel camera, and the aforementioned LTE. In a more perfect world. Sony’s Xperia ion would complete a trifecta of flagship AT&T Android phones, taking on the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III.

The problem with that storyline is twofold: first, in the long months since Sony announced the Xperia ion, both HTC and Samsung have announced and shippedtheir top-tier Android smartphones, each with significant advantages. Second, the software here is one-generation behind, running Android 2.3.7 instead of Ice Cream Sandwich. The Xperia ion has some very stiff competition — can it measure up?

Jun
26

Design Sony Xperia

Design Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Hardware/Design

The best word to describe the Xperia ion is “substantial.” While it’s certainly a far cry from the gargantuan Samsung Galaxy Note, there’s no getting around the fact that a 4.6-inch screen will mean that the phone feels quite large in the hand. Unfortunately (and unlike some other recent large-screened phones), the Xperia ion also feels big in the pocket. It’s 0.46 inches at its thickest point, which is right in the center of the phone and runs from top to bottom thanks to its domed design.

The substance also comes from the Xperia ion’s weight (4.9 ounces) and overall aesthetic, which is more industrial and aggressive than most any other phone on the market. The soul of the Xperia ion is the black, brushed aluminum, curved rear-panel. What would otherwise be a perfect symmetry around the center line of the camera, flash, speaker, and logo is artfully broken up on the left and right side by long rail to house the buttons and the port cover (under which you’ll find the microUSB and HDMI ports).

The top and bottom of the rear of the phone are plastic, the former slides up and off to reveal the SIM card slot and the microSD card slot. The edges of the phone angle slightly inward towards the perfectly flat, glass front. Up top is a centered 3.5mm headset jack, while all of the buttons are on the right side — power, volume rockers, and a dedicated camera button.

The physical buttons are small but easy to find and press, but the same can’t be said of the soft buttons on the front. Unfortunately, the touch targets for the menu, home, back, and search buttons are very small, situated between small horizontal lights and the screen. This makes for very small targets and, what’s worse, you need to tap above the smal horizontal lights instead of directly on them. The buttons are also not backlit, so you will need to memorize their positions to hit them in the dark.

Jun
26

Display Sony Xperia

Display Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Display

The Xperia ion’s display is a 4.6-inch, 720p (1280 x 720) LCD panel. As is Sony’s wont, it has thrown a couple of branded terms on the display, calling it an “HD Reality Display” and adding in the “Mobile BRAVIA Engine.” The former is a catch-all term for the pixel density (342ppi) and the closeness of said pixels to the surface, while the latter refers to the various filters and color management tweaks Sony applies to images and video.

I certainly don’t have any major gripes with the screen — in fact it’s easily amongst the best phone screens I’ve seen. It has excellent viewing angles, sharp text, and great color fidelity. My main complaint is that whites are a little toobright, making some images look a little washed-out at even medium-low brightness. The natural fix is to ratchet that brightness down, which does the job but also reveals the curious decision to forego an “auto” setting.

Toggling the Bravia Engine setting on (though it’s on by default) does result in nicer looking images and video in the gallery app. Primarily, it appears to crank up the contrast and sharpness — it might seem like a gimmick, but at least its a gimmick that makes media look slightly better to the average user.So while there’s a lot to like and nothing major to complain about with the Xperia ion’s screen, it’s also (and this will be a theme I’ll be returning to over and over) stacked up against competition like the iPhone 4S and the HTC One X. Each of those phones bests the Xperia ion’s screen by slim margins, though to be fair it’s simply because they’re best-of-breed in the smartphone world. That’s not a knock against the Xperia ion, but it does reveal that it takes more than a well-executed screen to stand out right now and compared to those phones, the Xperia ion doesn’t.

Jun
26

Software Sony Xperia

Software Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Software

And now we’ve come to it: the reason you should not, unless it gets updated, purchase the Sony Xperia ion. At launch, it is running Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread instead of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. In June 2012 (and less than a week away from the presumed announcement of the next version of Android), that’s simply unacceptable. If Sony’s excuse is that it needs to take the time to update its skin for ICS, well, I’m afraid that dog doesn’t really hunt. Other Xperia phones outside the US have already received an ICS update and, frankly, Sony’s skin here is lightweight enough for it to be properly called a “skin” (as compared to Sense or TouchWiz, which go much deeper into the OS).

Sony has been much more public with its ICS upgrade plans than most other manufacturers, going to far as to post beta builds for other phones. With any luck, that trend will continue and the Xperia ion will receive an upgrade to Android 4.0 in short order (Sony called the Xperia ion “ICS upgradable). However, whatever Sony’s best intentions are, the state of Android is still such that you shouldn’t buy a phone with the expectation of timely updates to the latest OS. What’s even more crazy-making about the situation is that Sony unveiled the Xperia ion in January, nearly six months ago.

Setting that deal-breaker aside, the Xperia ion’s software is mostly innocuous, though it does still have a few poorly-thought-out changes. Like other smartphone OEMs, Sony has learned its lesson when it comes to overbearing skins and pared back the customizations to a few aesthetic tweaks and custom software enhancements. The homescreen isn’t much different from stock Gingerbread, with some specialized Sony widgets and a pinch-to-toggle overview that floats your widgets on a single screen.

Sony has also included something called “Liveware manager” which allows you to launch apps based on accessory actions like plugging in a charger or a headset. It’s a very bare-bones kind of automation, but the ability to automatically launch the clock when plugging in the charger is convenient enough to make me wonder why it isn’t a stock feature. There’s also the Timescape app and widget, which is a social aggregation tool with a floating, “river of tiles” look that’s blessedly siloed into this single app instead of covering the entire skin. Sony has also baked in some basic Facebook integration.

Jun
26

AT&T

AT&TJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

As far as software from AT&T is concerned, it’s present in the form of the half-dozen usual apps like “AT&T FamilyMap,” “Live TV,” “AT&T Navigator,” and a couple recent entries into the carrier’s ecosystem. The first is “AT&T Ready2Go,” which attempts to help you set up your phone over the web browser on your desktop instead of on the phone itself. In my testing I wasn’t able to get it to work properly, but that may simply be because the phone wasn’t officially out yet. The second app is “Messages,” which is something like Google Voice but simply for your AT&T number, combining SMS, voicemail, and your call log into an app that can be mirrored into a website you can visit from your desktop. It’s a little strange to see AT&T essentially re-inventing the phone wheel here, but fortunately it (like most of the rest of AT&T’s software) can be easily ignored or uninstalled.Getting into the PIM apps, Sony took a pretty good thing and ruined it simply for the sake of making changes. AT&T inserts itself into Contacts by making Yellow Pages Local Search the first item on your list. Sony customized the stock Android calendar, but to what end I’m unable to fathom. A moderately busy calendar (such as mine) becomes both unreadable and unusable — anytime you have more than four all-day events, the text identifying them disappears and you’re left trying to tap the thinnest touch-targets imaginable to see what you’re missing.

On the positive side, the Xperia ion is PlayStation Certified, though I wasn’t able to test the limited PlayStation library on my review unit. You should also have access to Sony’s Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services, if you are the rare person who’s bought into those ecosystems. Plugging the Xperia ion into a Bravia TV via an HDMI cable will also unlock a TV launcher.

Jun
26

Performance Sony Xperia

Performance Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Performance /Battery Life

The Xperia ion is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, but unlike most other LTE phones in the market it’s using an MSM8260 Qualcomm S3 processor instead of the S4. That said, I didn’t have much to complain about with the speed of the device, it’s no screamer but presented less than the average Gingerbread phone in the way of lag or even poor scrolling performance. The only problems I had shooting bad guys in Shadowgun, for example, were borne of my own gaming deficiencies, not of any problem with performance. The benchmarks bear this out, matching my experience that the Xperia ion performs decently given its last-generation processor but still doesn’t compare to the top-tier on the market today.
The Xperia ion also surprised me with its battery life. The non-removable 1,900mAh battery comported itself well-enough to last me through a day of moderate usage, though with heavy LTE usage I was reaching for the charger as the sun went down. That’s pretty much par for the course these days, but I expected worse given the processor and power-hungry LTE.
Sony incudes a “Power Saver” app that lets you quickly toggle off radios and data, toggle yet again when you reach 25 percent, and also toggle settings depending on a timer. I’d like to report that none of it will be necessary, but the non-removable battery likely means that some power-management will be in your future if you purchase this phone.

Jun
26

Cameras Sony Xperia

Cameras Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Cameras

Sony’s Xperia ion has a 12-megapixel camera around back and a 720p front-facing camera. If you are still holding on to the quaint idea that “megapixels” are an accurate metric of a camera’s quality, let the sample images from the Xperia ion disabuse you of that notion once and for all.
Although I’m far from an expert on camera sensors, it seems fairly clear that Sony has simply tried to pack too much into too small of a space — the 12-megapixel sensor handles itself decently in good light, but in low light there’s enough grain to fill a small beach. Even in bright sunlight, there’s some noticeable noise, though with a steady hand you can get some good shots.
On the other hand, colors are accurate and vibrant — I never had to bother digging into the menu to adjust the white balance. Close-up shots (again, with good light) also appear to come out much better than landscapes. To be fair, it’s probably best to consider the Xperia ion to be a mid-range phone and in that context I find the camera to be acceptable. It’s simply an aggravating oversight considering that the Sony Xperia P’s 8-megapixel camera is a sterling example of how to do a camera on a mid-range phone.
The camera button is a two-stage button, and it also can launch the camera directly from the lock screen. You can turn on tap-to-focus if you like, as well as adjust metering, exposure, image stabilization, and more. The interace requires tapping the menu button to toggle most options, but once you get your bearings there’s a remarkable amount of control available.
The front camera is quite good as far as front-facing cameras go, and the 1080p video is passable if not brilliant. As you can see in the sample footage below, the stabilization is not as forgiving as I apparently need.

Jun
26

Wrap-up Sony Xperia

Wrap-up Sony XperiaJune 26th, 2012Comments Off

Wrap-up

It might be a little unfair to compare the Sony Xperia ion to current flagships on AT&T, namely the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III. Both of those phones cost twice as much on-contract as Sony’s offering. However, over the life of a two-year contract that $100 difference looks much less enticing. Even so, for the same $99.99 you can get a Nokia Lumia 900 or a Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket, both of which offer LTE and better cameras (albeit with lower screen resolutions and equally dated software).

The Xperia ion feels very much like it could have been a flagship phone had it been released earlier, but instead it is solidly in the mid-range. Mid-range phones are all about compromise, and the Xperia ion is definitely compromised. It’s hard to escape the thought that the compromise Sony made here was cutting the price because it couldn’t release what might have been a flagship phone in its original “Spring” timeline. Even if that’s not the case, it’s simply not a good bet to buy a brand-new Android phone with Gingerbread as the base OS. There are enough good parts to the Xperia ion to make me believe that Sony has the ability to seriously compete in the high-end smartphone market — but it certainly hasn’t done so here.

Jun
25

Verizon

VerizonJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Verizon spectrum deal wins over critics, T-Mobile.

Verizon Wireless said Monday that it will swap spectrum with T-Mobile, a move analysts say will help the wireless giant gain approval for a separate spectrum dealwith cable firms.
Under the agreement, Verizon will give T-Mobile spectrum that covers about 60 million people. T-Mobile, in exchange, will give Verizon spectrum covering 22 million people along with cash. Both companies will use their new spectrum holdings to expand their 4G high-speed Internet networks.
The companies said the spectrum is in the AWS, or Advanced Wireless Services, band. Financial details weren’t disclosed.
Importantly, the deal removes an obstacle to Verizon’s $3.6 billion bid for spectrum from cable giants Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Bright House.
In fact, the deal is contingent on the approval of Verizon’s deal with cable firms. The spectrum Verizon will transfer to T-Mobile will come from the cable firms.
T-Mobile has complained to regulators that the deal between Verizon and cable firms would make the wireless market less competitive and allow Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless provider, to rush even further ahead in the race for wireless consumers.
T-Mobile, the fourth-largest wireless carrier, has complained that it has few options for a path forward to compete with the biggest carriers, who have more spectrum and better coverage.
Analysts said the move will help alleviate concerns by regulators, who may be getting pressure from Congress to ensure that Verizon’s deal with cable companies doesn’t harm consumers.
“We think (Verizon) was either proactive in reaching an agreement with T-Mo or encouraged to do so,” said Kevin Smithen, an analyst at Macquarie Securities. “Either way, this is likely a win-win for both companies.”

Jun
25

Samsung Galaxy S III

Samsung Galaxy S IIIJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Samsung Galaxy S III could sell more than 10 million units by July.

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest handset maker, said the Galaxy S III will help mobile earnings surpass the first-quarter record, after users responded more positively to the latest smartphone model.
“We’re getting far better feedback on the model overseas than what we experienced with the Galaxy S II,” J.K. Shin, head of the Suwon, South Korea-based company’s mobile-phone business, said at a briefing in Seoul today. He didn’t elaborate or provide a specific second-quarter forecast for the mobile unit, which posted record first-quarter profit of 4.3 trillion won ($3.7 billion).
The Galaxy S III, a rival to Apple Inc.’s iPhone, will probably sell faster than its predecessors and pass 10 million units by July, according to Shin. The model goes on sale today in South Korea after being introduced in the U.S. June 21, and is the latest in the Galaxy series that helped Samsung regain leadership in the $219 billion smartphone market from Apple in the first quarter.
Samsung dropped 4.2 percent to 1,132,000 won at the close of Seoul trading, while Korea’s benchmark Kospi index fell 1.2 percent. Taurus Investment & Securities Co. cut its forecast for the company’s second-quarter operating profit, citing weaker- than-expected demand for products including televisions.
The electronics maker sold more than 50 million units of the previous two Galaxy S models globally in the past two years.
The company sold 93.5 million handsets in the first quarter, 36 percent more than a year earlier, Strategy Analytics said April 27. Nokia shipped 82.7 million, down 24 percent, and Apple sold 35.1 million units, an 89 percent gain from 2011.
Samsung sold 44.5 million smartphones in the three months ended in March, according to the researcher’s data.
Separately, the company is investigating a complaint from a Galaxy S III owner that the phone overheated and burned its lower end, Shin said. An initial probe indicated that the damage wasn’t caused by a battery explosion, he said.
The scorched handset was mounted in a moving car when a white flame, sparks and a bang came out of it, the phone’s owner in Ireland said in a June 20 posting on an online message board.

Jun
25

Facebook

FacebookJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Facebook to offer ‘Find Friends Nearby’ app for mobile, reports say.

Facebook has built a new app that allows users to easily connect on the social network to people who are in their physical vicinity, TechCrunch reports.

The new feature is called Find Friends Nearby, and if a Facebook user logs into it, he or she is able to see a list of other Facebook users who are in the area and are using the same app.

Facebook hasn’t made any official announcements about the program, but a Facebook engineer named Ryan Patterson told TechCrunch how he foresees people using the product.

“For me, the ideal use case for this product is the one where when you’re out with a group of people whom you’ve recently met and want to stay in contact with. Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction,” Patterson said.

If you’re eager to test drive the app, several news outlets have reported it’s available by visiting fb on your smartphone. (It should be noted, however, that attempts by The Washington Post to access the app, once on an Android phone and once on an iPhone, were not successful.)

And if you’re not so keen on the idea of getting a friend request from the random guy standing next to you at the bus stop, fret not. Reports say you have to opt in to use the service to enable others to find you.

This wasn’t the only change to Facebook’s offerings that the blogosphere took notice of Monday.

Forbes noticed that the social network had replaced users’ e-mail addresses on the “Info” or “About” tab of their profiles with an facebook e-mail address. For those who have established a vanity URL for their Facebook pages, that means the e-mail address mirrors their Web domain name. (For example, someone whose Facebook page had the address facebook ).

For those who had not signed up for a custom Web address, the new e-mail address is an apparently random (and undoubtedly hard-to-remember) sequence of numbers.

If you prefer to display the e-mail address that you put in your profile rather than the one that Facebook selected for you, LifeHacker provides some useful and simple instructions for making the change.

Jun
25

Yammer

YammerJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Microsoft buying Internet startup Yammer for $1.2Bю.

Microsoft is buying Internet startup Yammer for $1.2 billion in an attempt to bring Facebook-like sharing features to its widely used suite of business software applications.Yammer specializes in creating private social networks so employees within the same company can keep tabs on what colleagues are working on. That’s similar to how Facebook’s online social network allows friends and families to track what’s happening in each other’s personal lives.The deal, announced Monday, comes nearly two weeks after word of Microsoft’s negotiations with Yammer first leaked out in published reports.The acquisition represents Microsoft’s latest attempt to adapt to a major shift in the technology industry, one that is fueling demand for more Internet-connected services and social-networking tools.The upheaval is threatening to marginalize Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, and ultimately diminish the amount of money coming in from sales of its Windows operating system and a wide range of applications designed primarily for personal computers.As part of its effort to remain relevant, Microsoft paid $8.5 billion last year for Internet video chat service Skype in the largest acquisition in its history.

In another bold move, Microsoft last week unveiled its own tablet computer, Surface, to compete with Apple Inc.’s iPad. Microsoft has designed Surface to run on the upcoming Windows 8, the biggest change to the company’s operating system in nearly two decades.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is counting on Yammer’s sharing tools to ensure that long-established Microsoft applications, including its word processing and spreadsheet programs, remain vital components for getting work done. Google Inc. has emerged as a threat with a toolbox of similar programs that run primarily over the Internet rather than on individual machines.”Think of Yammer as a fundamental part of our Office family,” Ballmer said on a Monday conference call.Microsoft will have much of the same autonomy given to Skype since that deal closed eight months ago. Yammer will continue to be run from its San Francisco headquarters by its co-founder and CEO, David Sacks. It will also continue to provide its services separately from Microsoft’s offerings.

Microsoft did not give a time frame for when the deal should close.

Gartner Inc. analyst Larry Cannell said Microsoft’s latest acquisition was smart and reflected “a recognition that the social capabilities in Microsoft’s products have been deficient.”

Investors couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the deal on another somber day for the stock market. Microsoft’s stock fell 82 cents, or nearly 3 percent, to close at $29.88.Although other companies such as Jive Software Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are building social networks for businesses, Yammer shares the most DNA with Facebook Inc.

When it started in 2008, Yammer raised its initial funding from Peter Thiel — Facebook’s first major investor. Thiel formerly worked with Sacks while they were both executives at PayPal, an online payment service that eBay Inc. bought for $1.5 billion in 2002.Sean Parker, the former Facebook president depicted by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” also sits on Yammer’s board of directors. Parker still owns a 4.6 percent stake in Facebook currently worth about $2.2 billion.Microsoft has its own financial ties to Facebook, having invested $240 million in the social network in 2007. After selling $250 million in stock in Facebook’s initial public offering last month, Microsoft still retains a 1.7 percent stake worth about $840 million.Yammer has relied largely on word of mouth to attract more than 5 million registered users at more than 200,000 companies worldwide.

The service depends on employees to use its free tools to set up a private network within their company. Once the network is getting wide usage, Yammer then tries to sell more sophisticated features to the companies.

As a privately held company, Yammer hasn’t disclosed its revenue. In a Monday note about the Microsoft deal, Nomura Securites analyst Rick Sherlund estimated Yammer’s revenue at $15 million to $20 million last year.The company has been expanding so rapidly that it had been considered a prime candidate to pursue an IPO by next year.The stock of Yammer rival Jive Software has gained 65 percent since it went public six months ago, though it fell 74 cents Monday to close at $19.75.

The IPO market has gone into a deep freeze since Facebook flopped in its closely watching stock market debut last month. Instead of soaring as had been widely anticipated, Facebook shares plummeted during the first few weeks of trading. Although the stock has rallied recently, it remains 16 percent below the IPO price of $38, which had minted Facebook Inc. with a market value of $104 billion. Facebook shares dropped 99 cents, or 3 percent, Monday to close at $32.06.Sacks said the frosty conditions in the IPO market didn’t influence Yammer’s decision to sell to Microsoft. The negotiations between the two companies began before Facebook’s IPO, according to Saks and Ballmer.”Our thinking was based on the fit with Microsoft and the fact that we think Microsoft is a great partner for us in expanding the service and taking it to the next level,” Sacks said.The sale will provide a hefty return for Yammer’s early backers. The startup has raised about $142 million in venture capital.

Jun
25

ICANN

ICANNJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Internet group suspends system for deciding review order for new suffixes.

The organization in charge of creating hundreds of additional Internet address suffixes to rival “.com” has suspended the Web-based system it set up to help decide the order in which it will review new address proposals.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers shut the system indefinitely over the weekend after confirming reports of “unexpected results.” ICANN said network delays and the system’s response to “differing circumstances” caused problems.

Even before the technical issues emerged, participants had complained that the system, described as digital archery, was overly complicated. People proposing a new suffix had to specify a target date and time, and then return to the website at that time to hit a “Generate” button as close to the target as possible. Those with the closest matches would get their proposals considered first.ICANN suggested that the suspension might be permanent given the complaints. Besides investigating the technical problems, ICANN said it “will continue to listen to community comment” and will consider any information gathered.

Even with the suspension, ICANN said it would be able to make preliminary reviews of the proposals.

ICANN has received 1,930 proposals for 1,409 different domain name suffixes, including “.love,” ‘’.google” and “.music.” It will be the largest expansion of the Internet address system since its creation in the 1980s.

The digital archery system’s troubles are the latest technical problems to hit ICANN, which is in charge of coordinating much of the technology behind the Internet’s addressing system.

This spring, ICANN suspended access to its system for letting bidders submit proposals, after it discovered technical glitches that exposed some private data. That took more than a month to fix and restore.

After the proposals were unveiled this month, ICANN briefly suspended access to some of the documents on its website after inadvertently publishing the postal addresses of some individuals — information that was meant to be private.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Jun
25

Internet

InternetJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Hearing begins into Manitoba judge whose naked photos ended up on Internet.

An inquiry into a Manitoba judge who appeared in sexually explicit photos on the Internet has opened with arguments over who should have standing.
The Canadian Judicial Council is investigating Justice Lori Douglas, who is accused of sexually harassing Alexander Chapman and of undermining confidence in the justice system.
Chapman’s lawyer has asked for standing at the inquiry, which would give him the right to question witnesses and make submissions.
Two other individuals, including a Winnipeg blogger, are also asking for standing.
Douglas has stopped hearing cases pending the outcome of the inquiry.
She has said it was her husband who harassed Chapman and who posted the photos without her knowledge.
The inquiry is meant to determine if Douglas should be removed from the bench.
She is facing four allegations that basically boil down to one question: Can a judge whose husband took explicit pictures of her and uploaded them without her knowledge to the Internet be penalized for the very existence of the photos?
According to one law professor, the answer should be no.
“Based on the information that I have, I think she’s done nothing that should warrant her removal from the bench,” said Karen Busby, a law professor at the University of Manitoba.
“It is troubling that a judge could be removed because she has been victimized by others or has participated in a common and lawful activity — even if that activity is disturbing to some.”
The judicial council panel, which includes the chief justices of Alberta, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, is investigating Douglas’s behaviour before and after she was appointed to the bench in 2005.
The inquiry was launched after Chapman filed a complaint in 2010 that he had been the subject of a strange sexual plan seven years earlier. He said his divorce lawyer, Jack King, had supplied him nude photos of King’s wife, Douglas, and had asked him to have sex with her.
Douglas was a lawyer at the time. She was later appointed a judge and rose to the position of associate chief justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s bench, heading up the family court division.
King admitted in March of last year that he solicited Chapman to have sex with his wife, supplied the photos and arranged two meetings at a bar between himself, Chapman and Douglas.
But King has said he acted without his wife’s knowledge and all parties have agreed that Chapman never had sex with Douglas.
Later in 2003, King paid Chapman $25,000 to settle a sexual harassment claim. Part of the deal was that Chapman return the photos and not discuss the matter openly. But Chapman went public in 2010, saying he could not keep silent any longer and the photos reappeared on the Internet.
Douglas is facing four allegations:

• that she sexually harassed Chapman.

• that she failed to disclose the issue when she was screened for a judicial appointment in 2005.

• that she didn’t fully disclose the facts to the independent counsel leading the inquiry.

• that she has undermined confidence in the justice system and her ability to act as a judge.

None of the allegations have been proved.
Douglas has denied all the allegations. Through her lawyer, she has told the panel she is the victim of “unimaginable betrayal” by her husband and a “despicable” scheme by Chapman.
She has also answered suggestions that she wasn’t upfront about the matter when she was appointed to the bench by saying the appointments committee — as well as Manitoba’s chief justice — were aware of the photos.
Public inquiries into judges are rare. The judicial council has held them nine times across the country in 40 years. It has only once recommended that a judge be removed.
In 2009, the council recommended to the federal government that Paul Cosgrove be removed as a justice of the Ontario Superior Court due to incompetence and abuse of his powers.
Douglas is not being questioned about her activities in the courtroom. It is her private life, as well as her dealings with the appointments committee and the inquiry’s independent counsel, that will be under the microscope.
The hearing is expected to continue off and on until the end of July.

Jun
25

Qwerty control

Qwerty controlJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

The NSZ-GS7 is all about the remote control, because Google TV’s complex approach to controlling video content demands more than  the three buttons seen on the Apple TV remote. This one’s barely bigger than a normal one, but it packs in a trackpad and Qwerty keyboard. It’s mercifully much smaller and simpler than the enormo-remote that comes with the original US version of Google TV — the NSZ-GT1. But it’s still a polar opposite to the minimalist Apple TV.

On the front, there’s the usual number keys and the traditional red, green, yellow and blue buttons that you haven’t used since they got rid of Bamboozle on Teletext. The remote sports a D-pad to click up and down, left and right, and a small trackpad for finer movements. One clever touch is that the trackpad lets you pinch finger and thumb together to zoom in and out, like on a smart phone touchscreen. It’s a significant improvement over the NSZ-GT1.

Flip the remote over and you discover the Qwerty keyboard. It’s a decent size, and the remote is chunky enough at each end to grip comfortably. The remote contains an accelerometer, so it knows which way up it’s being held, so it won’t register any accidental button presses on whichever side is face down at the time. And when it detects you’ve flipped it over, the keyboard lights up softly to help you type without disturbing the cosy ambiance of a darkened living room.

If you own an Android phone, you’ll recognise the home, menu and back buttons. The home button calls up the home bar of app shortcuts, the menu button brings up a menu for whichever app you’re using, and the back button takes you back a step. Also on there is a picture-in-picture button, which puts live TV in a window on top of the app you’re using.

You can set the remote to become a universal remote, controlling your TV’s volume and other settings. The Sony 3D Blu-ray Player with Google TV also has a voice-control button and mic to talk to your telly.

As well as the dedicated remote, there’s the Sony Media Remote app available for iOS and Android that lets you control your TV with your smart phone or tablet.

If you want to benefit from a bigger screen, you can throw whatever you’re looking at on your phone or tablet to the TV. You can do the reverse too if someone wants to watch telly, taking the app on the TV and carrying on what you were doing on your tablet instead.

The double-sided approach works pretty well. But while it may be the simplest Google TV remote yet, it’s still more complicated than any other home theatre remote. Non-techy types are likely to be overwhelmed, which could be an issue if everyone in the household will be using it to watch telly.

Even if you are clued up on tech, the remote is not the best for simply watching TV. The most often-used buttons for this — play, pause, volume, channel — are relegated to small buttons on the bottom or rockers on the side, rather than being granted central positioning.

Jun
25

Google TV interface

Google TV interfaceJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

No matter how good the NSZ-GS7′s hardware is, it’s running Google TV — which is still buggy, confusing and not nearly as functional as it should be. Even with a relatively limited reviewing time in the US, they encountered frequent glitches with Google TV (if you’re using this box every day at home, you could find yourself spotting even more niggles). Within the first few hours of testing the NSZ-GS7, the following problems were encountered:

1. The NSZ-GS7 froze the second time it was switched on, requiring it to be unplugged to get it working again.

2. Having downloaded a highly-rated podcast app from Google Play, the first time it ran, it rebooted the device when the reviewer tried to search on it and it made horrible screeching noises. It crashed and rebooted the second time this was tried too.

3. While it’s not yet available in the UK, Google Music wouldn’t work on the NSZ-GS7 — it only ran via the Chrome browser, which means remote buttons like ‘pause’ didn’t work.

4. Other frustrations included getting kicked to the Chrome browser when trying to play Amazon content, because there’s no dedicated Amazon app.

We’ll have to wait and see how apps and services integrate in the UK, and if we pick up on any more bugs, we’ll let you know in the updated review.

Google TV as a concept is still compelling, but it’s no longer ahead of its time. The Xbox 360 has great cross-platform voice search, with tons of supported apps. If Google TV wants to catch up, it’s running out of time.

Jun
25

Google Play

Google PlayJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

To get more apps, fire up Google Play, the online app emporium for Android. At the time of launch there are around 150 apps optimised for Google TV, including IMDb and Twitter — no better than any other smart TV app store, but much more likely to grow.

Types of app include international TV apps such as YuppTV, which lets you watch Indian channels, or TV-optimised versions of popular sites, such as the GuardianTV app that displays the latest stories from the Guardian newspaper. Or there’s CNBC Real-Time, an app that saves the stocks and shares you own then only shows you business news related to those stocks.

One app that points to potential nifty uses for the technology is the PokerFun app, which displays the poker table on the TV but displays your cards on your phone and on your friends’ phones. Clever stuff.

A BBC iPlayer app is expected soon, but in the meantime we tried the service through the browser and it worked great. Netflix and Lovefilm are nowhere to be seen, but they probably won’t be too far behind.

Jun
25

YouTube

YouTubeJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

If you’re not impressed by what’s on TV, fire up YouTube. A simple sidebar filters videos by featured, popular vids, live videos of stuff happening now, a search option, and My YouTube. In My YouTube you see your favourite clips, movies you’ve rented, subscriptions to your favourite YouTubers’ channels, and a playlist of related videos.

Whenever you watch a video, there’s loads of options to go onto the next thing. A pop-up bar at the bottom lets you scroll through the clips in a playlist, see related videos, or see more vids from the person you’re watching. And if you want to search for something else, just start typing and the search box will appear, complete with automatic suggestions as you type.

The Photos app syncs with Flickr or your Android phone to back up your snaps online and browse them on your telly.

Jun
25

Chrome

ChromeJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

To browse the web, fire up Chrome. Use the trackpad on the remote control to move the cursor around the screen and click on links, or use the up and down buttons on the D-pad to scroll up or down. Move the mouse to the top of the screen and the URL bar appears, where you can type in the address. When you start typing, suggestions appear beneath, including bookmarks and previously visited sites.

One disappointment is that at first, Chrome on Google TV doesn’t sync with your Google account, so it doesn’t sync your bookmarks and browsing with your computer and your phone.

But one very cool thing it can do is show you live TV in a pop-up window as you browse. You can resize and move this picture-in-picture window and keep watching while you browse.

You can watch the match while browsing the web to see player stats; you can put The Only Way Is Essex in the corner of the screen while reading Twitter’s reaction to Joey’s latest escapade; you can keep a film playing while reading about its production on IMDb. Or you can just hit Facebook or surf the net without turning off whatever you’re watching. For me, that’s the killer feature of Google TV.

In the US review, Chrome provided the most enjoyable experiences of using Google TV. It was possible to stream full episodes of shows through the browser, which isn’t possible on most mainstream devices, even though it’s a slight hassle to navigate the website on your TV. Watching full-screen videos on Vimeo was great too.

Jun
25

Apps available

Apps availableJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

So to start, press the home button on the remote control, and a home bar pops up at the bottom of the screen, covering only a thin strip of the screen and barely distracting from the show you’re watching. The home bar contains shortcuts to your favourite apps, which you can move around or swap in different apps.
The default includes YouTube, web browser Chrome, app store Google Play, your Photos, and the Sony Entertainment Network multimedia store.
These core apps are among the 150 Android apps that have been optimised to make the most of your telly’s big screen. More apps will follow, so you’ll be able to use an app on your phone and on your telly too. Opening each app makes them take over the screen, just like when you open an app on your phone. If you want to see all the apps you’ve downloaded, there’s a full-screen list of all your apps too. Scroll down and select the one you want, just like on your phone.

Jun
25

Internet life

Internet lifeJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Internet life in spotlight at global TED gathering.

The TED conference, known for taking an innovative look at cutting-edge issues, will delve into whether the Internet is making the world more open or closed at a gathering in Scotland on Monday.The theme of this year’s TED Global will be “radical openness” as talks on and off stage in Edinburgh explore the implications of crowd sourcing, blogs, smartphones and other culture-changing features of the Internet Age.”Is the world more open or not?” TED Global curator Bruno Giussani asked rhetorically while discussing the concept-shaping presentations and discussions at the coming event.”You have forces going in both directions; what are the implications for society, governance and us as individuals?”

Specifics of talks at the five-day gathering were kept secret, but the eclectic line-up of speakers ran a gamut from US Navy Admiral and NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis to Chinese blogger Zhao Jing and singer Macy Gray.

In trademark TED style, each speaker is challenged to give “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes.Those slated to take the stage include a bio-fuel guru, the founder of a startup that lets people rent their vehicles to neighbors, a film visual effects maestro, and a musician who became a sensation by turning the Google+ social network video “hangout” sessions into interactive concert venues.”People who are pushing the boundaries will be looking at the impact of technology and what it changes,” Giussani said.The talks will cover “anything from designing for the bottom of the pyramid — poor people in developing countries — to how technology is used by (hacker group) Anonymous or governments,” he said.Talk topics will include a criminologist’s study of “future crimes” — offenses that haven’t happened yet — and the invention of a camera that can see around corners.

Organizers of the prestigious annual conference in California in 2005 launched a global version of the event imbued with a more international mindset and attention to world affairs.”While the TED conference in California represents the roots and core of TED, TED Global represents the expansion of the wealth of ideas around the world and bringing that community into the conversation,” Giussani said.TED’s long-stated catchphrase is “Ideas worth spreading.”Issues in play at the conference are expected to include how best to get Internet technologies into the hands of “the next billion people” and whether governments have what it takes to keep pace with Internet-driven change.”We are certainly not the ones to tell you how the future is going to be,” Giussani said with a smile.”This is about creating the space for collective, creative and constant brainstorming about how we are going to get there.”Along with political figures, scientists, technologists, dancers, authors and scholars, TED Global promised to include surprise presentations focused on “digitally driven openness.”Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conferences started 28 years ago in California as annual enclaves where elite thinkers got together to explore life from challenging or unusual perspectives.The nonprofit Sapling Foundation behind the conferences began making recordings of talks available online as podcasts in 2006, then began streaming videos free at a TED.com website the following year to reach a global audience.TED talks have legions of followers on the Internet and have been broadcast on television stations around the world.

Jun
25

World Conference

World ConferenceJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Secret negotiations among dozens of countries preparing for a United Nations summit could lead to changes in a global treaty that would diminish the Internet’s role in economic growth and restrict the free flow of information.

The U.S. delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications to be held in Dubai in December has vowed to block any proposals from Russia and other countries that they believe threaten the Internet’s current governing structure or give tacit approval to online censorship.

But those assurances have failed to ease fears that bureaucratic tinkering with the treaty could damage the world’s most powerful engine for exchanging information, creating jobs and even launching revolutions, according to legal experts and civil liberties advocates who have been tracking the discussions. Social networks played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings that last year upended regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

Russia, for example, has proposed language that requires member states to ensure the public has unrestricted access and use of international telecommunication services “except in cases where international telecommunication services are used for the purpose of interfering in the internal affairs or undermining the sovereignty, national security Relevant Products/Services, territorial integrity and public safety of other states, or to divulge information of a sensitive nature,” according to a May 3 U.N. document that details the various proposals for amending the treaty.

The wording of this provision could allow a country to cite a U.N. treaty as the basis for repressing political opposition. The provision also appears to contradict Article 19 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says people shall have the right to access information “through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

An amended treaty would be binding on the United States if it is ratified by the Senate. But approval is not automatic. The treaty is sure to be scrutinized by lawmakers wary of its potential impact.

The U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union, which oversees the treaty, does not operate like the U.N. Security Council, where the United States has the power to veto resolutions to which it objects. The ITU works on a consensus basis. Proposals can be stopped from serious consideration if enough countries voice their objections. More than 190 nations will attend the Dubai conference and the U.S. delegation is seeking support for its positions at the preparatory meetings that will continue until the conference convenes.

“It is important that when we have values, as we do in the area of free speech and the free flow of information, that we do everything that we can to articulate and sustain those values,” Philip Verveer, deputy assistant secretary of state and U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy, said in an interview.

Jun
25

Process

ProcessJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

The drafting and debating of proposals in preparation for the Dubai conference have taken place largely behind closed doors. Public interest groups have criticized the process and said it runs counter to development of sound public policy. In response to calls for transparency, two research fellows at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center launched the Web site WCITLeaks.org earlier this month as a way to make documents that have been leaked to them by anonymous sources available publicly.

The negotiations have sparked rumors that the U.N. and the ITU are plotting to take control of the Internet from the loose coalition of nongovernmental organizations that establishes Internet policies, standards and rules, they said. The ITU’s secretary general, Hamadoun Toure, has called the takeover rumor “ridiculous.”

The ITU said the preparatory process is open to all member states as well as hundreds of private sector and academic organizations. The member states, not the ITU, determine the rules of participation and are free to share Relevant Products/Services documents and information as they see fit, the agency said in an emailed statement.

The treaty, known formally as the International Telecommunications Regulations, was developed in 1988 to deal with global telephone and telegraph systems that were often state-run. The conference in Dubai, which is being run by the ITU, will be the first time in more than 20 years that the treaty is being opened for revisions.

Independent organizations, including the Internet Society, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the Worldwide Web Consortium, for years have served as the Internet’s governing bodies. They handle core tasks like network and domain name administration and make decisions based on input from the public and private sectors. This system allows the Internet to evolve organically and react rapidly to changes in technology, business practices and consumer behavior, according to open Internet advocates.

Yet for countries still grappling with how communications have been transformed by the Internet, ITU and the treaty are viewed as the best avenues for plugging themselves into the global information economy . For developing nations that don’t have an effective broadband infrastructure, bureaucratic and regulatory measures can allow them to benefit financially from the traffic that crosses their borders.

Jun
25

Internet innovation

Internet innovationJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

But treaties are static instruments that often are unable to adapt and adjust to the fast pace of Internet innovation, said Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager for public policy at the nonprofit Internet Society. “Further, we do not believe that we should simply take the 1988 regulatory model that applied to the old telephone system and apply it to the Internet,” she said.

A proposal offered by a European association of telecommunications network operators would put pressure on content providers such as Google, Facebook and Netflix to offset the costs of delivering Internet traffic to end-users. Traffic increasingly includes bandwidth-hungry video, and the proposal from the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association essentially argues that the investment needed to expand and improve data delivery should be borne by the operators and the content providers.

Verveer called the proposal unworkable and said it would have unintended consequences, such as blocking Harvard, MIT and other universities from putting courses online at no cost to users in places where access to education is already limited. “If it became necessary to pay in order to make these courses available, they would predictably become less available, which would be very unfortunate,” he said.

Jun
25

Processing

ProcessingJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Even what appear to be minor alterations to the treaty can have far-reaching consequences. A coalition of Arab states has proposed expanding the treaty’s definition of telecommunications by adding the word “processing.” The change, if made, would “essentially swallow the Internet’s functions with only a tiny edit to existing rules,” Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, said late last month at a congressional hearing.

The threat to Internet freedom won’t come in the form of a “full-frontal assault,” McDowell said at the hearing, “but through insidious and seemingly innocuous expansions of intergovernmental powers.” His warning resonated with members of the House Energy and Commerce communications and technology subcommittee.

Several lawmakers questioned Verveer, who also testified, and McDowell about the relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Toure, the ITU’s secretary general. Their fear is that Putin, who long has pushed for centralized control of the Internet, will use his allegedly close ties to Toure to accomplish that goal. Toure, a native of Mali, received advanced degrees in electronics and telecommunications from universities in Moscow and Leningrad.

“Is this relationship a concern?” asked Republican Rep. Greg Walden, the subcommittee’s chairman. “What steps are we taking to be able to counterbalance that relationship?”

Verveer told Walden he has no doubts about Toure’s honesty and fairness.

But McDowell struck a more ominous tone. Putin’s “designs” need to be taken very seriously, he said, and urged proponents of Internet freedom to be on guard for “camouflaged subterfuge” that could threaten the Internet’s future.

Jun
25

Citigroup Outlook

Citigroup OutlookJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Internet Stocks Lead Rout on Citigroup Outlook: China Overnight.

Internet companies led declines in Chinese stocks traded in the U.S., sending the benchmark index to the lowest level in three weeks, after Citigroup Inc. (C) reduced its expansion estimate for Asia’s biggest economy this year.

The Bloomberg China-US Equity Index (CH55BN) of the most-traded Chinese companies sank 2.6 percent at the close of trading in New York to 87.91, the lowest since June 5. The index has declined 2.4 percent in 2012. Online video-sharing websites Youku Inc. and Tudou Holdings Inc. tumbled more than 6 percent while Qihoo 360 Technology Co., a computer security software developer, fell to a four-month low.

Citigroup cut its forecast for China’s 2012 gross domestic product to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, citing a slowdown in domestic activity in the second quarter and further weakening of European demand. German Chancellor Angela Merkel hardened her resistance to euro-area debt sharing, raising concern the summit this week will fail to tame the region’s crisis. Former central bank adviser Li Daokui said yesterday China won’t reduce interest rates as frequently as banks’ reserve ratios.

“The sentiment continues to be extremely negative and people continue to reduce risk,” Jeff Papp, a senior analyst at Oberweis Asset Management Inc., which manages $700 million, said by phone yesterday from Lisle, Illinois. “GDP growth is being ratcheted down in China given some of the weak data we’ve seen this year.”

The iShares FTSE China 25 Index Fund, the biggest Chinese exchange-traded fund in the U.S., slid 2.2 percent to $31.83, the lowest level since October. The Shanghai Composite Index (SHCOMP) of mainland stocks fell 1.6 percent to 2,224.11, a five-month low. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of U.S. shares decreased 1.6 percent to 1,313.72.

Hard Landing

An escalation in the European debt crisis may cause a hard landing in China as weaker external demand erodes the country’s growth by nearly 1 percentage point, Shuang Ding and Minggao Shen, Hong Kong-based analysts at Citigroup, wrote in a report dated June 22.

Youku (YOKU), China’s most popular online video website, sank 6.9 percent to a one-month low of $21. The company announced on March 12 a plan to acquire smaller competitor Tudou in a stock swap deal currently valued at $825 million. Tudou lost 6.3 percent to $32.56. The transaction is expected to complete in the third quarter after the approval of shareholders, the companies said in March.

Beijing-based Qihoo, which also develops computer desktop applications, extended its slump to a fourth day, tumbling 4.5 percent to $17.11, the lowest level since February.

NetEase, 21Vianet

51job Inc. (JOBS), an online recruiting service provider based in Shanghai, dropped 3.6 percent to a five-month low of $43.98. NetEase Inc. (NTES), operator of China’s second-largest online games website, sank 5.4 percent to $56.50, the most since Dec. 21.

21Vianet Group Inc. (VNET), a Beijing-based Internet data center services provider, declined for the first time in nine days, retreating 5.3 percent to $11.35.

The central bank cut interest rates on June 7 for the first time since 2008 following three reductions to the reserve requirement ratio for banks since November.

China won’t have “aggressive” declines in interest rates and investors will “sit on the sidelines” until they see China’s economic recovery, Jing Ulrich, managing director and chairman of global markets for China at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said at a conference in Hong Kong yesterday. Banks are willing to lend but demand for loans is weak, she said.

Melco Drops

American depositary receipts of Melco Crown Entertainment Ltd. (MPEL), which operates casinos in Macau, the only Chinese city where they are legal, tumbled 4.1 percent to $11.34, the lowest since June 15. Gabriel Chan, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG in Hong Kong, lowered Melco Crown’s 12-month price target to $16.80 from $17.55 while maintaining an outperform rating in a report yesterday.

Elong Inc. (LONG), a Chinese online travel company whose largest shareholder is U.S.-based Expedia Inc. (EXPE), fell 6.5 percent, the first decline in three days, to $11.09.

Jun
25

McAfee

McAfeeJune 25th, 2012Comments Off

Teens deceiving parents on Internet use: McAfee survey.

Teenagers are increasingly deceiving their parents about where they go and what they do online, security technology firm McAfee said Monday in its latest survey on young people and the Internet.
A teenager uses a computer in 2007. Teenagers are increasingly deceiving their parents about where they go and what they do online, security technology firm McAfee said Monday in its latest survey on young people and the Internet.
In a statement, McAfee said nearly half of the American parents it surveyed thought their adolescents told them everything they did online, and that they felt in control when monitoring their youngsters’ online conduct.
“However, the study reveals that teens deceiving their parents are on the rise, as over 70 percent of teens have found ways to avoid parental monitoring,” it said.
That compares to 2010 when 45 percent of teens said they had hidden their online behavior from a parent, said McAfee, which bundles parental controls into its anti-virus software programs for home use.
Clearing the history of an Internet browser, or closing or minimizing a browser when a parent walked into the room, were the most popular ways of fooling mom and dad, McAfee said.
Others included hiding or deleting instant messages or videos, lying or omitting details about online activities, using a computer that parents don’t check, and using an Internet-enabled mobile device such as a smartphone.
“This is a generation that is so comfortable with technology that they are surpassing their parents in understanding and getting away with behaviors that are putting their safety at risk,” said McAfee online safety expert Stanley Holditch in the statement.
McAfee went online itself to interview 1,004 young people aged 13 to 17, and 1,013 parents of teenagers, in the United States between May 4 and May 29. The overall margin of error was 2.2 percentage points.
The survey also indicated that 43 percent of teenagers had accessed simulated violence online, 36 percent sexual topics online, and 32 percent nude content or pornography online, “despite their awareness of online dangers.”
It also found that 15 percent of teens had hacked a social network account, 16 percent acknowledged looking up school test answers on their smartphones, and 20 percent ended friendships as a result of a social network account.

Aug
01

LinkSedo – a system of purchase – sale links

linkAugust 1st, 2011Comments Off

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