With Facebook now sitting on $16bn after its flotation, will we see the massive social network do a Google and develop its own phone?With its flotation, many think that Facebook is now a juggernaut, sitting pretty on $16bn (£10bn) of cash and a valuation that started the day at more than $100bn.Friday's launch was fun (cue Zuckerberg's droll status update: "Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on Nasdaq") but there's a tendency to see stock market flotations as the culmination of a company's existence. That's a common mistake, like first parents being excited about the baby's birth, and forgetting it's the next bit that really matters.It has taken eight years to get here, yet it's easy to forget that this is actually just the beginning.What to expect now? Don't be surprised if the next big thing is a Facebook phone – running its own software and developed from top to bottom to involve you in the site all the time.Zuckerberg's team has been advised to do this directly, because it needs to reach the "next billion" internet users, and they are mainly going to be using mobile phones, not desktop or laptop computers. Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples' lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.When Google floated in 2004, everyone knew it was good at search, but they didn't think it would last. Microsoft was going to come after it, and anyway the founders' lack of respect for the investment banks (something Zuckerberg hasn't mimicked, hoodies aside) meant the float was not so anticipated.Yet, in the eight years since, Google has bought YouTube and made it the internet's biggest video destination. It has launched Android, the mobile operating system which now powers more than half the smartphones being sold worldwide.It has won millions of corporate customers for its Google Apps suite. The IPO, at $85 per share, was just the start: on Friday, Google's shares were $630.Similarly for Facebook, everything so far, and the money and public presence it now has, are just a beginning. It has more users now (901 million) than were using the internet at the end of 2004 (817 million); but the total number of internet users has meanwhile tripled, so rather than having 816 million potential new users, it has 1.38 billion. The potential market has nearly doubled.But can it carry on growing, or will it sputter out, like Myspace and Bebo?Ed Barton, director of digital media at the research firm Strategy Analytics, thinks that getting that next billion will be a significant challenge."Facebook depends on advertising, and I would highlight that the fastest-growing internet media markets are China and the Far East, India and Brazil," he told the Guardian."Facebook's potential is nowhere near as strong in those as it has been in the US. And in those markets there are often a number of locally oriented social networks already in place."China in particular, where Facebook has so far been banned, has many thriving social sites, as does Russia with VKontake claiming about 290 million users (compared to Facebook's 901 million).Barton doesn't think there's any risk of Facebook fading out where it's strongest, in the west: "In the places where it's already strong, it has a defensible position," he said, arguing that we "invest" in the networks we use, and don't want upheaval.So rather as Google cornered the market for internet search early this century, not by being the first but by being far and away the best, Facebook wasn't the first social network, but its management has been far better – and unlike Bebo (bought by AOL) or Myspace (bought by News Corporation) or Friends Reunited (bought by ITV), Facebook had no parent that could feel threatened by its rapid growth.So for some, it looks like a one-way bet. Andrew Schneider, a hedge fund adviser and CEO of San Francisco-based Schneider Family Office, was busy on Friday selling shares of Apple and LinkedIn on Thursday to free up at least $20m of cash for Facebook shares. "You've got 900 million users, and you've got real solid revenue, and the company is earning money," Schneider said.But the present limits to growth could be dictated by its heritage. Facebook was founded on a desktop computer in a university dorm room, and while it long since broke free of the latter, it's the former that prevents it reaching those 1.38 billion, and the next billion to come.That's because a growing number of internet users aren't going online through the PC, but through the smartphone. By next year, there will be more internet-capable mobile phones (1.83bn) than PCs (1.78bn), according to research company Gartner. Which is why analysts have been itchy about Facebook's stark admission that it doesn't make any money from mobile advertising: it's missing half the market.What's the solution? The Facebook mobile app isn't enough; people only spend a little time there, and showing ads on a mobile screen doesn't pay well. Horace Dediu, who runs the independent consultancy Asymco, spent a day at Facebook's headquarters a few months ago and told them to talk to Chinese smartphone manufacturers, create their own version of Google's Android (as Amazon and China's Baidu search engine already have) and start selling a "Facebook phone"."My recommendation was that they should do a handset," he told the Guardian. "Because it means they can control the user experience, and capture all the information that they might need to monetise the experience. For Facebook, they could offer it as making your life richer as a social participant."While there's no indication of whether Zuckerberg's teams will act on Dediu's advice, the rumours that Facebook is working on a phone have surfaced from time to time – most recently in April, when the Taiwanese news site Digitimes suggested it is working with Taiwan's HTC to build a device integrating all the Facebook functions, for release this autumn.Digitimes has a mixed record for rumours like these, but it would be a smart strategy.If that seems strange, consider that Google realised it needed to control mobile search or it would lose its dominance; hence Android. But Facebook can create a version of Android that doesn't rely on Google. (It could use Microsoft's Bing search engine – which some executives there offered to sell to Zuckerberg early in 2011; he demurred).Everything is in place for this mewling infant of the internet to turn into a real force, if it chooses. And Zuckerberg certainly will choose to.FacebookInternetSocial networkingSmartphonesMobile phonesMark ZuckerbergGoogleAndroidCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Rockstar has turned its ex-cop anti-hero into a credible character. So does it matter that he's also a frenzied killer?Max Payne is a troubled man. The latest instalment in his dark tale of loss and revenge sees the ex-New York cop taking on a job as a personal security contractor in Sau Paulo, Brazil. There, he becomes mired in a complex plot involving the wealthy clients he is protecting, a gang of paramilitary vigilantes and a shady special forces arm of the local police force. There is a lot of blood, a lot of pain.But here's a problem. Throughout the game's beautifully constructed narrative sequences, we see Payne going through agonies of recrimination and remorse; he's still haunted by the murder of his wife and baby by junkies; he questions his own motives as a DEA agent and then as a glorified bodyguard; he is disgusted by himself and his life. When the game begins he's effectively drinking himself to death in his filthy New Jersey apartment. He desperately seeks some form of salvation.Yet he is also an accomplished killer, capable of gunning down a room full of "enemies" in a matter of seconds. Through the course of the game he takes out hundreds of people with a variety of weapons, stopping only to pop painkillers and reload. But at the end of every action sequence, we return to the anguished Payne of the narrative, slamming back bourbon and regretting everything that has led him here. Somehow this shadow of a man is able to fly across a room with two machine pistols wiping out lowlife gangsters as though swatting flies. This isn't a failure of the game, as such – it's an astonishingly entertaining thrill ride that I've heartily recommended. But the slight disconnect between the shambling Max of the cinematic sequences and the athletic psychopath we control in the interactive sections is the latest example of a pervasive video game dilemma: the difficulty of marrying the narrative with the ludic. Back in 2007, the veteran game designer Clint Hocking wrote a blog post in which he created the term Ludonarrative Dissonance; he used this to describe a central failure of the otherwise brilliant game Bioshock. Hocking felt that while the narrative of the game wants the protagonist to be selfless in aiding Atlas, the actual mechanics of the game rely on self-interest and the pursuit of power. To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game's narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player's ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.The interesting thing about Bioshock is that, with the Little Sisters (and your ability to either spare or harvest them), the player is invited into the moral debate that the game proposes. However, Hocking points out that this element is so hopelessly skewed in one direction, it only serves to accentuate the dissonance between story and action.There are a few similar moral considerations in Max Payne 3; in a couple of scenes the story allows us to stop and make a decision on what our hero does next, but these do not directly impact the ongoing plot; they are isolated moral decisions – to shoot or not to shoot a wounded enemy. In a way, this is as much of a disssonance as the Bioshock problem: Max is filled with doubt and self-loathing and yet his in-game actions – at least as far as the flow of the story is concerned – are resolute and deadly. And Payne is in no way alone here. In most narrative action titles that require spectacular violence from the protagonist, the player is encouraged to both see the character as a rounded human in the story sections, but then treat them as a killing machine in the interactive sequences. Look at bespectacled geek Gordon Freeman in Half-Life. One minute he is chatting with his colleagues about complex science, the next he is beheading alien invaders with a crowbar. Indeed, Half-Life reveals a central irony of ludonarrative dissonance: to ensure the physical realism of the environment, Valve has allowed the player to attack other scientists – which is ludicrous to the story. However, games where players are unable to slaughter important non-player characters (ie, almost all RPGs) prompt a similar sense of disconnect and are equally ludicrous.This is a good problem in a lot of ways. It means developers are telling complex stories about characters who are ambiguous and troubled. The downside is, the conventional mechanics of action games haven't quite caught up. No one wants to play a game in which we have to guide Max though years of treament for alcoholism and grief. But is there a compromise? Naughty Dog, the creator of the Uncharted series, has recognised and grappled with this whole conundrum. Nathan Drake is depicted in the story sequences as a charming loveable rogue, but in the interactive sections of the games, he guns down hundreds of people. So which is the "real" Drake: the Drake of the narrartive or the Drake in the hands of the player? Is that Drake a psychopath?"Amy [Hennig, Uncharted creator] has a name for this," explained lead designer Richard Lemarchand at the GameCity festival last year. "She calls it 'the uncanny valley of narrative'. Her theory is, because the acting performances have become so good, it makes this issue of the game parts stand out even more."In fact, if you play through to the end of Uncharted 2, Amy references this issue. At the climax, the main bad guy Lazarevic says to Drake, 'You're no different to me. How many lives have you taken today?' We do think about it and we're always looking for creative ways to address that issue."So far, what the developer has tried to do is place Nathan in obvious and immediate peril at the beginning of every shoot-out. He never fires first, and even when he sneaks up on an enemy and snaps their neck, he's always in a situation of mortal danger. We must decide for ourselves if this "absolution by context" argument is adequate.There are, however, plenty of titles that stay on the right side of the ludonarrative problem, by exactly matching the story and game mechanics. Rocksteady's Batman titles are the perfect example – here, we know that the Batman we see in the cinematics is the same as we experience battling foes in the missions. There is no disconnect between the driven, single-minded character and his capacity for violence.Max Payne 3 is a very strong narrative experience. It hasn't taken the easy route of post-modern irony, smirking at the disconnect lying in the centre of the action (Bulletstorm did this beautifully, by the way) – it takes Max seriously. But when will we begin to see action games that present us with complex characters and difficult scenarios and then provide us with the gameplay elements to really explore these without dissonance? And given how enjoyable the Max Payne 3 experience is, do we even want that?Games are about control; it's fine to have a neurotic AI sidekick, but if we can't trust the avatar, does that just become annoying? The big reveal in Heavy Rain was built around our inability to guess the motivations of a complex and damaged player character, and many gamers hated that. Should we just accept that the people we play in games, and the people who appear in the stories, are sometimes different, and sometimes utterly incompatible?Shoot 'em upsGamesPS3XboxPlayStationKeith Stuartguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Social network to honour requests from users who do not want online behaviour recorded – unlike Google and FacebookTwitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data.Twitter announced that it will officially support "Do Not Track," a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.But some commentators have pointed out that the support also indicates that in the US the company presently does track where users go on the web through data collected from sites that have integrated Twitter "follow" buttons or widgets.Dustin Curtis, a web developer, pointed out that a posting on theTwitter blog on Thursday says that "We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies – including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube – do when they're integrated into websites. By recognising which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last 10 days."Curtis commented: "Twitter is recording your behaviour. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use. Right now, that data will make better suggestions for accounts you might want to follow. But what other things can it be used for?"Twitter clarified that it does not intend to use the "suggested user" or tracking feature in Europe at present.However the adoption of the Do Not Track system could alleviate those fears. Some browsers, including Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari, include a Do Not Track option that sends a line of code to websites indicating the user does not want to be tracked. But under current regulations, it is up to the website to honour the requests. Google has said it will implement a Do Not Track feature in its Chrome browser later this year.The Do Not Track announcement also coincides with Twitter's recent push to provide a more personalised service. Twitter says that when it recommends "tailored suggestions" based on a user's surfing history, it does not use the data for any other purpose."As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience," Twitter's director of growth and international, Othman Laraki, said in the blogpost. "For those who don't want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection."Twitter's support for the initiative was first announced on Thursday by Ed Felten, the FTC's chief technology officer, during a panel in New York. The microblogging site later confirmed Felten's statement, adding in a tweet: "We applaud the FTC's leadership on DNT."Mozilla praised Twitter's move in a blogpost and noted that adoption rates for Do Not Track have risen steadily, to 8.6% of desktop users and 19% of mobile users."We're excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the web," Mozilla said.Twitter's decision to get onboard with Do Not Track represents something of a balancing act for the six-year-old company, which has been closely scrutinised on how it can generate enough revenue to justify its multibillion-dollar valuation.Online tracking through bits of code embedded in websites known as "cookies" underpins the business models for many internet companies.Facebook, due to go public on Friday in the largest-ever US IPO, has been valued at $104bn, partially by investors who believe it can offer advertisers a platform for highly targeted ads based on perceived user interests. Google similarly generates billions annually by targeting ads based on what a user is searching for.Major online destinations that have endorsed Do Not Track include Yahoo, which said in March it would allow consumers "to express their ad targeting preferences to Yahoo" beginning this summer.Updated: added in clarification that "suggested user" system is not used outside the US.TwitterInternetSocial mediaDigital mediaPrivacyCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Dave Null is looking for a good free VPN (virtual private network) to ensure his privacy while using open Wi-Fi hotspotsLots of us surf using unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and where I live in the US, Starbucks doesn't require a pass code and the Wi-Fi is up 24/7 regardless of whether the shop is open. Are there any good free VPNs for privacy in such a situation? I'm using Cocoon with Firefox, but I don't have the means to compare it with alternatives.Dave NullA VPN, or virtual private network, creates a virtual "tunnel" of encrypted data running over the public internet. VPNs first became popular as a way of connecting different parts of a company without the high cost of leasing dedicated phone lines. Secure encryption was needed to protect corporate data, and one consequence was that nobody else – internet service providers (ISPs), snoopers etc – could see what sort of traffic was inside the data stream.Today, many individuals are using VPNs for the security and privacy they provide. Some people use VPNs at Wi-Fi hotspots to prevent snoopers from collecting private information. Others use VPNs at home as a way to get around ISPs and service providers blocking certain websites, which may include Pirate Bay, Facebook and BBC iPlayer. Of course, cybercriminals also use VPNs and anonymous proxy servers, though Tor might be a more likely prospect.The simplest type of VPN is one that runs at the application level, typically inside a web browser. In your case, this is Cocoon, which is available for different browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and different operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple's Mac OS X and Linux). The drawback is that it only protects what's in the browser. If you were to run another browser alongside Firefox, or a separate email program, the data from these other programs would not be protected by Cocoon's VPN.The most popular VPN for personal users – which I mentioned in response to your similar question in 2010 – is probably AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield. Like many other cheap or free VPNs, Hotspot Shield is based on open source OpenVPN code, so it encrypts all the internet traffic on your PC: every web browser, email program, and so on. It supports Windows, Mac OS X, and Apple iOS devices, with Android to come.The drawbacks with Hotspot Shield are that, as with Cocoon and some other VPNs, the free versions are supported by showing adverts, though you can avoid these by upgrading to a paid-for version. Hotspot Shield also switches your home page and default search engine, though you can switch these back. This can be annoying and has prompted some users to look elsewhere, but you can pay AnchorFree $29.95 per year for its Hotspot Shield Elite service, or if you use it for travelling, buy 20 one-day passes for $10.There are, of course, dozens of alternative VPNs, and there's a big list on the internet censorship wiki. The ones worth considering include SecurityKiss, CyberGhost, and It's Hidden. CyberGhost's servers are in Germany, and It's Hidden's are in the Netherlands, which may not suit US users. One of the features of a VPN is that your internet connection appears to come from wherever the server is based: it acts as your proxy on the internet. This can confuse websites that do a lot of geolocation and personalisation, such as Google, which will serve up versions in the local language. This can, of course, be useful. Europeans can use a US-based VPN server to watch videos that are otherwise blocked in our region, while those who live outside the UK can use a UK-based VPN to watch TV programmes on, for example, the BBC's iPlayer. Indeed, AnchorFree produced ExpatShield for Windows, so that pining Brits could get a UK IP and access content available only in UK from anywhere.If this kind of thing is important to you, then Hide My Ass! now offers a Pro VPN service that supports different protocols (so you can use OpenVPN for maximum security or PPTP to stream video, for example) and access to 247 servers in 43 countries. So, yes, you can actually get a fast IP address in Japan. However, the service costs $11.52 per month or $78.66 per year.The Best VPN Provider comparison website lets you select from dropdown menus such as Destination Country, Protocol and Price/Month to find potential VPN suppliers. However, it only suggests commercial services.Most if not all VPN providers have lots of terms and conditions that forbid you from doing bad things, including spamming, and say that they will co-operate with police and other authorities if required. If you plan to use peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as bittorrent, check that these are allowed under the T&Cs. Also check how long they keep records. TorrentFreak has a good article on Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?Using a VPN protects you from snooping in your local coffee shop and by your ISP, but the VPN provider is decoding your datastream and putting it on the internet, so it sees everything. It has to be a company you trust.Also bear in mind that while your ISP cannot see what is in your data stream, it can certainly see you sending lots of encrypted traffic to Hotspot Shield, Hide My Ass! or whatever. So much business traffic now goes via VPNs that I don't expect this is particularly noticeable, but ISPs could filter the obvious free VPNs.There's an increasing tendency for websites to use the https Secure Sockets Layer (SLL) system, shown by a padlock in the browser, and this already encrypts data to protect it from casual snoopers. However, the appearance of "session jacking" software such as the Firesheep add-on for Firefox means a VPN is probably a good idea when using public Wi-Fi hotspots for important data.But it's also a good idea to start getting familiar with VPNs because of government attempts to monitor people's internet use. If this becomes a reality in the UK, then perhaps we should all start using VPNs all the time. Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." The internet has more or less delivered that right, and using a VPN may be the simplest way to preserve it.InternetWi-FiPrivacyData and computer securityComputingWindowsJack Schofieldguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Popular social network valued at between $1bn and $1.5bn following a $100m round of fundingMove over, Facebook. Pinterest, the social site that lets people "pin" pictures and content to create collections of interest, has become the latest company to be valued at more than $1bn (£630m), following a $100m round of funding.While estimates of the effective valuation implied by the investment vary between $1bn and $1.5bn, they highlight the fact that Pinterest has already discovered a business model in which it collects an "affiliate" payment on purchases people make via the site.The new valuation is at least a fivefold leap in value since October 2011, when a previous financing round put it at $200m.The company has shot to stardom in the past few months to become the 16th most-visited site in the US, according to measurement company Alexa. In April it had more than 20 million users, up from 1 million in July 2011, according to ComScore, another ranking company.Its traffic soared after August 2011 when it was named one of the 50 best websites of 2011 by Time magazine, and by December it was getting 11m visitors worldwide a week, according to Hitwise.Now it has received a fresh round of funding led by the Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten, and with particiapants including its existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, and a number of angel investors.In October 2011 it received a $27m funding round that valued it at $200m. The site only opened for business in March 2010.Although the company has not disclosed its revenues, they are probably less than $10m according to modelling carried out in March by Rags Srinivasan, a strategic marketing expert. But with user numbers still growing fast, that could be advancing rapidly.A growing number of brands are using Pinterest to advertise their wares effectively for free, with the aim of driving sales via the displays. That could offer a future means for Pinterest to charge, either for position or visibility.However, legal experts have queried the site's liability for copyright lawsuits because it effectively allows the copying of images that are often copyrighted. While some brands may not mind if it drives sales, photographers and commercial organisations could be less pleased.Rakuten has invested in a number of online retailing companies around the world, including the British retailer Play.com."While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining," said Rakuten chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani."We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and Rakuten's model for e-commerce."In an interview with the FT, Mikitani revealed that he had also become an e-commerce advisor to the site, and said: "Having a good grasp of images is becoming more important for e-commerce. It's more straightforward and appealing to the instinct of human beings than text. That is the strength of Pinterest, I think."He added that Rakuten had wanted to fund the entire round, but Pinterest's board already had agreements with existing investors.He was enthusiastic about the prospects because, he said, traffic going to shopping sites from Pinterest would have high conversion rates [to sales] because people would have high interest in products.Of the copyright risks, he said: "I think, on the whole, they will overcome those issues. Their intention is not to damage any brand."Mikitani added that Rakuten-owned sites would in future use the Pinterest "Pin it" badge to add content."Pinterest is the future – we know we are going to have a more tight integration for all the e-commerce sites we have."PinterestInternetE-commerceTechnology sectorSocial mediaSocial networkingCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Search process tries to pinpoint context surrounding search term and will carry more graphical elements and pop-upsGoogle is revamping the way it handles searches in the United States to give users quick access to answers without leaving the page, the company said. The new search process is based on what Google calls the "knowledge graph" – meaning that it tries to pinpoint faster the context surrounding its users' keyword searches. "Over the years, as search has improved, people expect more," said Amit Singhal, vice-president of engineering at Google and the head of search, in an interview. "We see this as the next big improvement in search relevance." The redesign, which for now affects only US-based English language users, is gradually being introduced starting Wednesday on desktop, mobile and tablet platforms. Google plans to eventually expand the new search features outside the US, Singhal said, without specifying when. Many of the results will carry more graphical elements, compared to standard lists of search results, such as maps and pictures of related results, often in separate pop-ups. The idea is to let users easily discover what related material interests them and click through to it, Singhal said. The offering is the latest example of search companies moving away from offering a list of text-based links as search results. Last week, Microsoft's Bing unveiled a redesign that includes a "snapshot" column. Last year, Yahoo rolled out its "search direct box". Google is by far the leader in search, with 66% of the US market, according to Comscore. But it sees other sites such as Facebook as competition, as users there can poll their friends and acquaintances for information on various topics without leaving the Facebook ecosystem. Under Google's existing algorithm, a search for "kings" might pull up results for the ice hockey team, the basketball team, and the TV series, all on the first results page. On the revamped Google, a box will pop up in the top right-hand corner of the screen, giving users the option right away to limit their search to the desired meaning of "kings". For some searches, such as on prominent people, Google will automatically pull up a summary box with key information on that topic. The summary box will also appear on the top right of the page. A search for architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, pulls up the first line of his Wikipedia entry, plus dates of birth and death, thumbnail pictures of his best-known buildings, and thumbnail pictures of other architects people commonly search for. The upshot is that many users will end their internet search without leaving Google's pages, when in the past they might have continued to a site such as Wikipedia, which is collaborating with Google on the new search features. Google said it could actually drive more traffic to Wikipedia, which will be prominently linked to in the summary boxes. A Wikipedia spokesman said Google is using Wikipedia information in an appropriate way. The new techniques are based in large part on work done at online data collection Freebase, Singhal said. Freebase was developed by Metaweb, a company Google acquired in 2010. Google is also working on being able to better answer more complex questions such as "What are the 10 deepest lakes in Africa?" that require its algorithms to factor in several different criteria. But it may never be able to crack some users' toughest questions, such as "Does my hairstyle make me look fat?" which Singhal said was a real search question.GoogleUnited StatesSearch enginesInternetguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Newton was two decades ahead of its time, says the former Apple chief executive – and the future of healthcare will be driven by cloud computingJohn Sculley – the man who as Apple chief executive gave the world the Newton, which was the first glimpse of the "personal digital assistant" in the 1980s – can see a number of possibilities opening up before us.A world without work for millions who want it? A world where we can diagnose strokes or heart attacks well before they happen? A world of machines talking to machines? All are possible, even likely, because of cloud computing, which he sees as the next driver of huge social change.And he also has a clear idea of what the Newton really needed to succeed – and which of Apple's visions from the time really matches what we're seeing now."I'm an optimist," declares Sculley, now 73 but still deeply involved in technology. "You can't be an entrepreneur if you're not essentially an optimist, so I'm an optimist by nature." Cloud computing, has says, means that we're shifting from the growth of Moore's Law – a doubling every 18 months – to something even more exponential. "The curve is accelerating upwards, at a level that means that technologies are coming out that can do things that you couldn't even envision even two or three years ago."Robust data storage costs are falling too, from around $5 (£3.14) per gigabyte a year ago to 25c now. "The speed at which a lot of this technology is commoditising is unprecedented," Sculley says.Even so, he sees some areas for concern. First, imagine a world where computers have driven humans out of all but the highest-skilled jobs – so that driverless cars, automated factories and similar processes mean that the middle class that has for years been happily thriving on jobs that couldn't be done otherwise suddenly find themselves disenfranchised.Sculley admits he's not as optimistic about that. "The more we bring in these sophisticated technologies, the higher the skills of the people that are needed to be able to use it, and the fewer people we need in the workforce, so the issue is not about work moving to lower-cost workers, it's about automation replacing many of the jobs that we had counted on, particularly for our middle class in the past."The political gridlock in the US – caused by the warring demands of the Tea Party, which thinks government and taxation is destroying jobs, and those of the Democratic Party, which has been trying to drive growth by boosting the money supply – is one example. Another is the Eurozone, where the tensions between Spanish, Greek, German and French voters and their leaders is coming into starker focus as unemployment rises. "Those are the things that technology may not be able to solve, but it certainly is a consequence of technology, that the sophistication of automation is changing how work is done, and is changing the skill requirements of workers," says Sculley. "In many cases jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society."Even so, he does think that – as has happened previously – technology will throw up a solution. (In the early 1900s, the problems of horse manure in London streets threatened to overwhelm them; the car solved that – but, of course, eventually brought its own set of challenges.)On a more optimistic note, Sculley – who now works as a venture capitalist, and has investments in companies looking at healthcare – things that cloud computing is going to make a colossal difference to the quality of our lives. Healthcare in the US is a $2.6tn market, driven by insurers which pay doctors who often carry out procedures and expensive tests in order to avoid lawsuits. The problem is that healthcare costs are rising more quickly than inflation, incomes or tax receipts."Politicians are arguing among themselves as to who's going to pay for it," says Sculley. "It's completely unaffordable at its current growth rates, and the more I get a chance to understand health care, the more convinced I am that the problem is very solvable, but it's solvable through innovation, not through just governments trying to work out who pays for what."We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes – did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care. So it's not just about taking cloud computing and automating the healthcare system we have today, it literally means innovating and reinventing the health care system to make it it much more patient-centric.""Big data analytics" – the analysis of colossal amounts of data which could amount to terabytes of information – will change healthcare, he forecasts, from one where doctors are paid to carry out procedures, to one where they're paid based on keeping people well. (In that sense, it sounds like the longstanding Chinese principle where a doctor's quality is measured on how infrequently patients get sick, not how quickly they're cured.) And helping that will be computing that will analyse everything – even the levels of proteins in our blood. "I'm working with a company right now where we're doing this – you can track in real time peoples' vital signs and take that data, you can imagine that's massive amounts of data when you're tracking each individual in real time, the vital signs – it could be their heart, could be how much they weigh, could be their fluid retention, could be even tracking proteomics, which are protein changes inside the body."If you can take that data and then be able to analyse it, it means that the future of medicine is going to be able to make predictions and measure outcomes of patient health improvement at a level of accuracy and a level of personalisation that we've never seen before."All this, he says, will rely on the computing power brought together by the cloud: "It isn't just the compute power, it's that you can enable the big data analytics, in a specialised way. That's going to give us hope that what looked like insolvable problems like health care can be solved."Don't expect overnight change, but do expect change: " It may not be done in a few years," Sculley warns. "it may take five or 10 or 15 years to see the impact, but there's no question in my mind that it's going to have as big an impact on things like healthcare as personal computers did in empowering individuals and really created the productivity we've had for 30 years with knowledge workers."The cloud doesn't just stop with people, though. Imagine too a world where there are around 20bn internet-connected devices – but only around 7 billion people, as there are now. That's the forecast from various research companies for 2020."Having 20bn connected devices means that the majority of those connected devices will be machine to machine," Sculley explains. "It means we're just at the beginning era of very powerful sensors that can be built into clothing, that can be used for tracking almost anything that one can conceive and doing that in real time and using cloud computing to manipulate data which is going to be many many orders of magnitude larger and more complex that anything we've ever considered before."Speaking of connected devices, might one of the flaws in the Newton have been it lack of connectivity – something that now exists through mobile broadband? Sculley has, of course, had a long time to reflect on this."Well, I think the idea [of Newton] was right, it was just 20 years ahead of its time. So actually, a lot of people were able to see where the industry's going, the hardest part is to figure out when it's going to happen."In the case of the PDA, the idea was right – that the content and communication and computing were going to converge – but I think we greatly underestimated that we needed broadband, that we need far more powerful devices, that we needed something a lot more powerful in the background which we now know as 'cloud' to be able to handle the tremendous amount of data, and connecting people up through social networking. So it was a good idea, but it was just several decades too early." Was it then one of those projects that simply gets out of hand, and acquires a momentum that can't be stopped as it thunders into the market? "We never looked at Newton as being the seminal product. That was just one step along the way, You can get a much better view of the seminal experience if you go back – you can go to YouTube, i think it's 1988 [in fact 1987], a concept video we created called Knowledge Navigator."Indeed, Knowledge Navigator ) – from the days when Apple made concept videos – has become famous for prefiguring many elements we're now familiar with: tablet computing, internet search, voice control. It shows the internet as a graphical medium – predating the web, which hadn't yet been invented – and suggests effortless interaction with digital "assistants". Knowledge Navigator, says Sculley, "is really something we couldn't build at the time. But technically we could use special effects and be able to simulate what the experience would be like. That was 24 yeas ago and if you look at that, I think is pretty accurate, almost to the point of being uncanny as to what the experience of tablet computing and mobile devices have turned out to be like."Which leads to the obvious final question: how does he organise his computing life? Is he, to coin a phrase, post-PC? "I'm clearly post-PC," he replies. "I carry an iPhone, a BlackBerry, a [Samsung] Galaxy Note, and I carry an iPad. When I'm in my home office I use a Mac, so I think I'm more typical than not in using many, many different devices."The post-PC era doesn't mean the end of devices, he says: "It means you can be on any device that you happen to have, and everything basically is more and more connectible through the cloud."• John Sculley is giving the keynote address at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London on 12-13 JuneCloud computingAppleHealthComputingSmartphonesTablet computersCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
TalkTalk and BT the worst offenders in mystery shopping exercise that showed broadband companies often fail to offer a speed quote to potential customersBroadband companies are failing to offer a speed quote to potential customers in 41% of their sales calls, in breach of a code introduced last year to protect consumers.A mystery shopping exercise carried out for telecoms watchdog Ofcom tested how many broadband providers followed the rules by offering an estimated speed without prompting by the customer.TalkTalk was the worst offender, offering an unprompted quote in just 47% of cases, compared to an average across all providers of 59%. BT Total Broadband was the second worst, offering a quote in only 48% of calls.Since July last year, a voluntary code signed by all the largest internet service providers requires them to inform potential customers of their likely maximum speed, in the form of a range, as early as practicable in the sales process.This should happen well before customers are asked to place an order or hand over their financial details.The mystery shop, which involved 1,369 approaches online and over the phone, found that BT's agents only provided detailed speeds once the customer had agreed to proceed with an order.Customers need to receive the information in writing, in their online account details or be prompted to write down the quote.Both BT and TalkTalk have agreed to address the issue by amending their staff training and sales processes.A BT spokesman said: "Ofcom has suggested we should make a minor change to mention the speed quote earlier in the sales conversation, which we are happy to do and will implement straight away."Overall, Ofcom found that the level of compliance with the code has improved since our previous mystery shopping exercise in 2009."A spokesman for TalkTalk said: "No one enters a contract with us without receiving a speed estimate tailored to them. Anyone can log onto our website and get an accurate speed estimate, based on the capabilities of their phone connection."Speeds for customers on the same broadband package can vary widely depending on how far a home is from the local telephone exchange.Many broadband providers are now reluctant to advertise headline speeds, which means customers are dependent on individual quotes in order to compare services."If you are trying to get the best deal it is very difficult when there is such variability," said Ofcom director Claudio Pollack."What really matters is to be transparent to customers about what they are paying for, and give them the right to end a contract if what they get comes below that commitment."The best performers were Karoo – part of the Kcom group in Hull and East Yorkshire, which complied in 76% of cases – Sky at 72% and Plusnet at 67%.Overall, Ofcom found that the level of compliance with the code has improved since our previous mystery shopping exercise in 2009.Responding to Ofcom's research, Marzena Lipman, policy manager at campaign group Consumer Focus, said: "The most common problem for broadband consumers is ending up with a slower broadband speed than they expected."So, while it's good news there have been improvements, it is disappointing that this research shows many providers still aren't being as up-front with their customers as they should be."BroadbandInternetISPsTelecommunications industryTelecomsOfcomTelevision industryInternet, phones & broadbandConsumer affairsJuliette Garsideguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds