Category Archives: Technology

Share and share alike

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This morning’s Observer column…

If Google, eBay and two leading venture-capital firms have put £12m into Fon, they must think it’s a viable proposition. Maybe it is, but there are some tiresome details to be sorted first. To take just one obvious problem, Fon aspires to operate over a wide range of legal jurisdictions, each of which has its own ideas about this stuff. As I understand British law, for example, it is legal for me to share my wireless bandwidth with a neighbour, but it would be illegal for me to charge him a fee for the service. And I don’t know what the fine print of the agreement with my ISP says about sharing the connection. My guess is that it prohibits it, and I’m sure most ISPs will take a similar view.

Truly, the road to world domination is paved with petty niggles. Besides, as one wag put it last week, if you can do it with Wi-Fi, why can’t we do it with bathrooms. I’m thinking of setting up Pee.com. Subscribers can use bathrooms all over the world. Slogan: never pay to use a public toilet again. Wonder if Google would invest?

Computing’s energy problem

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We’ve known for a time that internet companies are increasingly worried about their power consumption and now, thanks to a conference organised by Sun Microsystems, it’s out in the open. Here’s a report…

With rising energy costs and server computers that now suck up more electricity than ever, power bills have become such a significant expense that they are forcing chief financial officers to take notice, said Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems Inc.

According to Papadopoulos, Google “has stated that power is (one of their) top operating expenses for the company”.

The Sun executive estimates Google already spends $100 million to $200 million on its energy bill each year and that number is likely to grow as it continues to add more computers to the Googleplex.

What nobody seems to be looking at yet, though, is the huge energy overhead implicit in conventional PC-based networking architecture. That overhead effectively represents a tax that is paid by every networked organisation — which is why we at the Ndiyo Project are very interested in the subject. It’s another reason for thinking seriously about thin-client networking.

FON: Share your WiFi connection

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Here’s an interesting idea…

FON is a Global Community of people who share WiFi. Share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and enjoy WiFi all over the world! FON: small cost, great benefit!

To become a Fonero, all you need to do is register with us on our website, have broadband connection, and download the FON Software onto your WiFi router. It’s that simple. Just share your connection and the rest of the Community shares back with you. Join FON and enjoy connecting from anywhere within the WiFi World.

According to the Press Release (which I found courtesy of New Google Blog),

Fon has secured €18 million (USD$21.7M) in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Google, Sequoia Capital and Skype. Index Ventures led the round. The company also announced that Danny Rimer (Index Ventures), Mike Volpi (Cisco) and Niklas Zennström (Skype) joined the board.

“There is perhaps no more important goal for the industry than helping to make broadband Internet access available around the world,” said Skype CEO Niklas Zennström. “FON has a great idea to help people share WiFi with one another to build a global unified broadband network, and we’re happy to lend support. Enabling more communities to tap into the power of the Web benefits us all”.

Three categories of user are envisaged. A Linus is any user who shares his/her WiFi in exchange for free access throughout the Community wherever there is coverage. At the moment, FON is only open to Linuses. In the future, however, FON will also be available for Bills. Instead of roaming for free, Bills are users who prefer to keep a percentage of the fees that FON charges to Aliens. And Aliens are those guys who pay to connect.

Hmmm… Wonder where they got those names from.

Thanks to Gerard and Imran for pointers to this.

The iTab

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A host of Apple patent filings have led to frenzied speculation — e.g. here — that Steve Jobs’s next bombshell will be a tablet computer that really works. I’ll believe it when I see it — not the tablet, but software that makes it do useful work. The computing tablet that’s more helpful than a Moleskine notebook has yet to be invented. But I’d buy one tomorrow if it existed.

The digital camera market

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From David Pogue, writing in the New York Times…

Big changes are in the photographic air. First, there’s the astonishing collapse of the film camera market. By some tallies, 92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital. Big-name camera companies are either exiting the film camera business ( Kodak, Nikon) or exiting the camera business altogether (Konica Minolta). Film photography is rapidly becoming a special-interest niche.

Next, there’s the end of the megapixel race. “In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,” says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon’s camera marketing group. “Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate. We can easily go up to a 13-by-19 print and see very, very clear detail.”

That’s a shocker. After 10 years of hearing how they need more, more, more megapixels, are consumers really expected to believe that eight megapixels will be the end of the line?

So, what’s next?

In no particular order, Pogue predicts:

  • Image stabilisers
  • Improved movie recording capabilities
  • WiFi connectivity to printers and computers
  • changing appearance — there’s no reason why a digital camera has to look like a film camera
  • Better batteries
  • Onboard GPS
  • Better screens
  • Smaller SLRs
  • Er, that’s it.

    • Tiffany sues eBay

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    The New York Times reports that Tiffany & Company is sueing eBay for facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods over the Internet. Undercover agents working for the company secretly bought 200 ‘Tiffany’ items in eBay auctions and found that 75% were counterfeited. The case will go to trial later this year. If Tiffany wins, the implications for eBay would be dire: imagine the costs of policing all those auctions.

    Posted in Web

    The end of Nikonography

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    This morning’s Observer column about Nikon’s plans to stop making film cameras.

    Nikon’s decision is as profound as the switch from vinyl LPs to CDs in the early 1980s. And the arguments which rage about the merits of analogue and digital photography have echoes of the debates about vinyl versus CD. Digital music is created by sampling the audio signal 44,000 times a second, and hi-fi buffs argued that this degrades sound quality. As someone who could never afford high-end analogue hi-fi systems, however, CDs seemed immeasurably better to me. 

    But then, I’m no hi-fi buff. I do, however, know something about photography, and there’s no question that digital images are currently inferior to analogue ones. At even moderate levels of enlargement, the differences are obvious. Areas of sharp contrast between light and dark are problematic for digital imagery (try a digital photograph of a leafless tree silhouetted against a bright sky); and colour rendition in low-light conditions can be wacky and ‘noisy’ (flecked with what looks like digital dust).

    But to average snappers, the images coming from a digital camera are as good as anything they ever got from film. In fact, they’re better, because more of the duds will have been snuffed out in the camera. They come in a much more convenient form – as files that can be emailed to friends and family or posted on Flickr. And although the camera may cost more to buy, subsequent savings on processing may compensate.

    So, for the average punter, film lost the argument with digital ages ago…

    Explaining free software to lay people

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    I’m very interested in finding way of communicating the essence of important technological issues to lay audiences. The advantages of open source software are readily obvious to techies, but opaque to anyone who has never written a computer program.

    So when I talk about open source software nowadays I find it helpful to talk about cooking recipes without mentioning computers at all. To communicate the importance of the ‘freedom to tinker’ that free software bestows on its users, for example, I invite people to ponder the absurdity of not being allowed to modify other people’s recipes for, say, Boeuf Bourgignon or fruit scones. I often make BB without using shallots, for example, and just chop standard onions into largish chunks. (It saves time and IMHO doesn’t materially affect the ultimate taste. And if a purist objects, I can always christen my modified recipe “Beef in red wine” and tell him to go to hell!)

    Similarly, to illustrate the difference between open source software and compiled binaries I compare Hovis bread-mix (“just add water”)

    with a recipe for baking bread.

    Most people grasp intuitively that the ‘open-source’ recipe gives you certain important freedoms that the ‘compiled’ bread-mix doesn’t.

    Now comes an equally homely way of communicating to a lay audience what a news aggregator does.

    A blogger compiled her own table of contents for several fashion magazines, mashing them up to make the one magazine she wanted (instead of the half-dozen ad-filled craptacular glossy anorexia advertisements that she had). If you’re struggling to explain the value of aggregators to offline people, this is a good place to start: magazines are often only 10% relevant to you, so what if you could extract the few good articles from a lot of mediocre magazines to get one really good magazine?