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This Week in Lumps
#33 [08/01 - 14/01]

· So, The Consumer Electronics Show is over for another year, and Bill Gates is now a part timer. As he wanders around his office looking for things to do (one of them could be to start clearing out his 4 million spam emails) the thought must have crossed his mind about what a great year he could be missing out on. His Surface product could finally start taking shape, whilst the Xbox360 goes from strength to strength. So, following on from last week’s topic of predictions, guesses and imminent arrivals this year, here’s another look at what could be happening in 2008 in the world of technology.

BT Vision on the 360
You can imagine how this caught my eye: “Xbox? BT? I have those!” Yes, this is the news that BT is teaming up with Microsoft to offer its television service via the 360 console. This announcement falls in the same week that BT took a giant step forward in the world of broadband by announcing plans to install a network in Kent that offers speeds 20 times faster than the average UK household connection. Exciting times for BT customers, it seems.
The Microsoft deal will see on-demand films and sports content available later in the year via BT Vision, but will not be able to receive or record live TV. To get the service, customers will have to first subscribe to BT broadband. Sadly, this does mean that I have to wait another 5-6 months, just to how this deal pans out, and if it’s worthwhile. As someone who already owns BT broadband, and has been considering the TV package since its launch, I must admit that I’m now stuck between a rock and a hard place, as although I could be getting sport and film through the console, I’ll still be short of Freeview channels and, more importantly, something to finally kick my terrestrial TV channels in the bin. Analysts also spotted this flaw, one in particular said:

“People will have to sign up to a 12 month broadband contract and not all Xbox owners may want to do that. The fact that it cannot offer the Freeview content or DVR functionality of the dedicated BT Vision set-top box may also prove a barrier.”

Local Networking
2007 was the year of Facebook. You couldn’t do anything, see anyone or visit anywhere without hearing those immortal words “poked”, or “his/her status”, and then when we thought it couldn’t get any bigger, we found something even more irritating than the crazy frog: Applications. So will Facebook fall out of everyone’s favourite tabs anytime soon? It’s looking unlikely, but then again look how Myspace fell from grace so quickly. So what’s out there that can tame Facebook, and be the next big thing in outline networking?
Experts are predicting that this whole ‘social networking phenomenon’ will diversify next year, with the rise of smaller, “local” sites for a single neighbourhood, street or building. While Facebook is good for catching up with friends on the other side of the world, or country, whilst exchanging virtual pets or beers, a more local network setup could actually be a lot more useful. Enabling people to advertise or promote, they could help with anything from lost cats to trader recommendations. The BBC article added:

“They also have the potential to recreate the kind of community spirit we like to imagine existed in the days before we spent our lives glued to computer screens.”

The ZCam
This gizmo is essentially a 3D camera that can capture movement and gestures to control activities on a computer or TV screen. The company is showing off two big uses at CES: the first, like Microsoft’s Surface, shows how users could use gestures to open and close programs on their computer and move things around on-screen. The other use is as a games controller, rather like the motion-recognition used by the Wii, but without the need for a remote control. Instead, the ZCam will allow you to dictate the actions of your on-screen character through movement, but without having to wave a controller or wear special motion-capture suits and gloves. It will even allow you to combine your own 3D image inside the game, with your movements shown in real time. It’s nearly ready to leave the prototype stage, with the technology almost at 100%, So it should be expected to hit the market by the end of this year, with the price likely to be a bargain £70-ish.

So, goodbye CES, Hello Macworld. More on that in the weeks to come.

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· Channel 4 have started the year by trying to make us a bit more aware about what goes on our plates every evening, and with the help of Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall they just might do that. The trailers for the current season of food programmes, entitled The Big Food Fight, started over Christmas, and fortnight long season of shows starring three of the biggest and well known chefs you’re likely to see in a room together, Channel 4 hopes to change the way people of Britain think about their food.

The adverts are what initially caught my attention, not because of what they were promoting, or the way they were doing it, but because they had managed to get all three guys to film together. However, because of their frantic schedules (and not because of Gordons hatred for Jamie, or their inflated ego’s), it wasn’t possible to film all three chefs at once. Using the magic of modern telly, the trailer makes it seem as though they were all there at the same time. The extended trailer, despite this, is one of the funniest adverts I’ve seen in a long time.

Hugh’s effort so far has been the most eye opening. His contribution to the season is ‘Hugh’s Chicken Run‘, shown over three consecutive nights last week, in which he built three chicken farms in Axminster (one intensive, one commercial free range, and a community farm project staffed by volunteers), culminating in a campaign to encourage the eating of free-range instead of intensively-reared chicken.

Jamie followed this up in more graphic detail, with Jamie’s Foul Dinners, in which he used shock tactics and statistics to get his point across, with films showing the insides of battery cages, and little chicks on conveyor belts, and the chicks that weren’t up to standard being gassed, and also showed live demonstrations about the quality of eggs and chicken not just on their own, but also those that will end up in our ready meals. He also invited all the major supermarkets to show up and argue their points, with only the 2 showing up. Jamie said in an interview:

“As far as I can see, the British poultry industry is at an incredibly vulnerable point right now and if we don’t start making changes, like shopping differently, we might not have a poultry industry in 20 years time.“

Gordon’s contribution is this coming Friday, as he hopes to lead the nation in a live cook along event. The menu looking like this:

• Pan-roasted scallops with tomato & herb salsa
• Steak and chips with rocket & parmesan salad
• Chocolate mousse

It’s not too late to take part either, all of the details, including videos on preparation are on the Cookalong website on Channel 4.

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· It seems that over the next year or so, the word ‘social’ will take on a whole new meaning as far as technology is concerned. As I stated elsewhere in this article: 2007 was the start of the Facebook generation. Communicating with friends, a place for your photos, and a place to join and chat with like-minded people with similar interests, this is social networking at its (current) peak. Then there’s websites like YouTube, which specialises in social video media sharing, there’s del.icio.us which is social bookmarking, Flickr can be described as social photo sharing community… the list goes on. So where do browsers fit into all of this? They are, after all, the gateway to the whole Internet, and yet technology in this area seems to have slowed down over the last few years: You click on a site, look around, watch or listen to something, click somewhere else- all by your lonesome self. Earlier this week that I was to try one of the 2.0 alternatives that has had a few people talking: Flock. Upon reading an article last year on a PC World blog about how it had become the author’s favourite browser (even over Firefox), I started to sit up and take notice. More importantly, I wanted to have a try myself of this new creation.

The thing is, it isn’t new at all. In fact, history in this browser dates back to 2005, and the company has been teasing releases of a final product since then. In all fairness, initial reviews of the browser from that year seemed to highlight a promising venture, but that soon died away when the months rolled on and nothing greater arrived that a weak beta attempt. However now it seems to have got people’s attention again, including the Telegraph:

“Flock does all the normal stuff that other browsers do, but it also pulls content from a host of social-networking sites directly into your browser window, so that it’s all there at a glance; there’s no need to visit individual sites. Flock is a browser without the browsing.”

So when does it stop being a browser, and start being a homepage? Despite it’s obvious similarities to iGoogle, there’s arguments to say ‘never’; maybe it’s just simply a very clever browsing tool, even Flock’s creators have dubbed it a “social browser”, which will win its hearts amongst today’s tech-heads for sure. But it’s not just that, it’s the browser’s ability to ‘interact’ with the aforementioned social networking web services, such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and many more. Maybe this doesn’t sound as ’2.0 attractive’ as it really is; however on first try of the browser, I was slightly taken aback by it’s ability to recognise my accounts on Facebook, Livejournal, Flickr and also right here at WordPress. Without even asking it to, it introduced me to exactly what it can do, by syncing the accounts up so you don’t really need to keep jumping back to the sites to see updates or information.

“One of the best features is the People sidebar. Activate it, and you’ll never need to log into Facebook again… …You’ll be able to instantly see when friends have updated their profiles or added new content, and communicate with them through the browser, sharing content as you wish.”

My initial impression of Flock on using it for the first time is how much of an influence Mozilla Firefox seems to have had over it. It looks and feels much like its competitor (which isn’t surprising since it’s built on the same open source code), but this isn’t a bad thing at all. Which asks the question; How long before this technology is snapped up by Mozilla, and implemented into a browser people are familiar with?

That negative thought aside, I’m impressed by what it can do so far. Sure, it’s a little slower than Firefox, and to be fair to the company I have only just started using it; I’ve so much more little gems yet to find, and I’m confident that they do exist somewhere. It’s elegant and well-designed, and hopefully one which has a bright bright future. The next big social thing? Only time will tell.

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That was the week in lumps, a week in which: Pandora is no more for the UK, it was found that it could cost £25,000 to stop snoring, Last.FM and iGoogle will soon be optimized for the iPhone, Copying CD’s will soon be made legal, and what if Jeremy Clarkson was in charge of us all?

a bit of fun to close this week off: how long does it take to get from Here to There? 7 hours and 51 minutes apparently.

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