Category Archives: Observer

VoIP: Very over-Inflated Price

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This morning’s Observer column…

First of all, an apology. In previous editions, this column may have suggested that VoIP (internet telephony) stood for ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’. Now it turns out that it is, in fact, an acronym for ‘Very over-Inflated Price’. The proprietors deeply regret this error and hope that it has not caused any reader to make foolish investment decisions.

This matter was drawn to our attention by an announcement made last week by eBay. The company reported that in the quarter just ended, it will take £700m in write-offs and charges related to Skype – for which two short years ago it paid £1.3bn in cash and stock, plus what was enigmatically described as ‘a potential performance-based consideration’ estimated by industry sources at £750m. That’s £2.75bn in total…

I also wrote a short piece on the Wikipedia-obituary kerfuffle.

Taking people at their Facebook value

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This morning’s Observer column…

To the old question: what are friends for? we must now add: how much are they worth? This is topical because rumours abound that Microsoft is contemplating buying a stake in Facebook, the social networking site. The really interesting bit is the arithmetic. Microsoft is supposedly contemplating paying between $300m (£147m) and $500m for a 5 per cent share. If true, this suggests that its advisers put a value of between $6bn and $10bn on Facebook. Google is also reported to be sniffing around, raising the prospect of a bidding war for a website which essentially enables people to post embarrassing photographs and impress acquaintances with accounts of their busy lives…

Ad Blocking and the future

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This morning’s Observer column…

I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…

You can have any gadget you like so long as it’s an iPod

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This morning’s Observer column, which has items about Apple, YouTube and Facebook. Sample:

The release of the new iPod range provided an insight into the company’s technical strategy. At the top of the line is the iPod Touch, which looks, feels and operates like the new phone – except that it doesn’t make or receive calls. It is, as one wag put it, ‘a de-phoned iPhone’. A better way to put it is that the iPhone is an iPod that makes calls. The music player is at the heart of Apple’s technological strategy, which leads to the thought that the company’s next laptop will be an iPod masquerading as a tablet…

Facebook’s little privacy problem

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This morning’s Observer column…

Aw, isn’t that sweet? The nice folks at Facebook are anxious to ‘help more people connect and find value’ from their social networking site.

Let’s see how that will work in practice. Someone types ‘John Smith’ into Google – and up comes his Facebook public search listing. To find out more about this fascinating chap, however, the searcher has to either log into Facebook (if s/he is already a member), or subscribe to the service if s/he is not. Either way, the searcher is lured into Facebook’s walled garden.

Does this help John Smith ‘find value’ from Facebook? Well, maybe – if he’s desperate for his personal details to be accessible to anyone on the web. But the main beneficiary of this erosion in users’ privacy will be the company that operates Facebook, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Of course, Facebook’s owners protest that members can avoid this by adjusting their privacy settings. But you only have to look at a few Facebook profiles to see that most subscribers either don’t know how to limit the amount of personal information that is displayed on their profiles, or simply cannot be bothered. So, coming soon to an office near you: some really embarrassing job interviews…

The Porsche and the lawnmower

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s an odd way to start a revolution, to put it mildly. The iPhone is a lovely piece of kit – in effect, a sleek, powerful personal computer running an industrial-grade operating system. It has the capability to be a really disruptive device in an industry that badly needs disruption. But it comes shackled to an unpopular, low-tech mobile network. So acquiring one is like buying a Porsche engine and fitting it to your lawnmower. People figured out quickly that you could cancel AT&T’s internet service to get its browser to work only via wi-fi; but you couldn’t use it on any other mobile phone/data network. (And still had to pay the 18-month AT&T subscription.) This was not a fundamental technical limitation of the device, but a technological shackle designed by Apple to drive business to AT&T…

The Ides of August

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This morning’s Observer column…

Irish Novelist Edna O’Brien once wrote a novel called August is a Wicked Month. Tell that to the folks who run Skype, the internet telephony service that 200 million people worldwide now habitually use for voice calls and instant messaging, and you’ll be rewarded with rueful nods….

The beauty of Plain English

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This morning’s Observer column…

‘Political language’, observed George Orwell in his great essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Much the same applies to the output of the public relations industry. One of the most important public services that mainstream journalism can provide, therefore, consists of decoding PR-speak: translating its half-truths, unsupported assertions and evasions into plain English…

This column is really a celebration of John Gruber’s lovely translation of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’.

Orwell would have loved it.

Common sense about Facebook

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This morning’s Observer column…

There’s an ancient adage in the computer industry – it may have originated at Microsoft – which says: ‘Always eat your own dog food’. What it means is that if you are writing software other people are going to use, then you must use it yourself. If you’re going to ask other people to commit their time, data and perhaps even sanity to using your product, you should take the same risks yourself…

Bone up on your Mandarin

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This morning’s Observer column…

First, the numbers. China has 137 million users (compared with about 190 million in the US), but the online population is increasing at such a rate that in about two years there will be more Chinese than Americans on the net.

Within China, however, there’s a deep digital divide: Chinese users are overwhelmingly urban, young and male. A third are students, while a further third are business users. The deepest divide is the urban vs rural one; internet penetration among city dwellers is 20 per cent, compared with only 3 per cent for rural districts. (The comparable US figures are 70 per cent and 61 per cent respectively.)

Given that China’s rulers see the net as a critical enabler of development, a key policy issue for the regime is how to bridge the urban/rural gap. Fallows cites research suggesting that the two big obstacles are lack of connectivity and a huge skills deficiency…