The popularity of X Factor means that it has already become watercooler talk across the UK, and, as is so often the case, a major feature in the most watched list of YouTube.

So, as the fallout from the first week continues, TechRadar wondered just how accurate the internet proves to be when the winner is announced in December.

A brief trawl through the figures on YouTube gives our first chance to draw some early conclusions.

Johnson dominant

First of all, Danyl Johnson – already a worldwide internet hit for his first audition – is a clear winner in terms of view for his first live appearance.

His rendition of And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going by Jennifer Hudson has attracted a fairly hefty 470k views.

To put that in context – it is nearly twice as many as the next viewed video – which is teenage Joe McElderry (261k). Third place goes to Jamie 'Afro' Archer with 237k narrowly ahead of Dagenham's finest Stacey Solomon (236k).

Bringing up the top five is Lucie Jones (who we are told with startling regularity is from a 'Small Village In Wales') and 200k views.

Read more

Michael Marshall Smith is the best-selling author of sci-fi classics Only Forward, Spares and One of us and, writing as Michael Marshall, the Straw Men trilogy, The Intruders and Bad Things.

I know that giving a voice to the man and woman in the street is supposed to be one of the web's greatest triumphs, but there's nothing like reading 'customer reviews' to make me want to let off all the nuclear weapons in the world.

I would love to be able to turn these reviews off, to hide them on Amazon and iTunes and everywhere else, but I can't. We've all been empowered to 'have our say', and the universe is stuck forever with screen acres of the illiterate bleatings of people who've come to believe that having a forum is the same as possessing an opinion worth uttering, and who spew their bile with the pompous self-righteousness of the boring and self-obsessed everywhere.

And of course I don't mean you, dear reader — I'm sure your reviews are all terribly well-struck, insightful and charmingly apposite. I mean… all the rest of them.

Read more

Andrew Oliver is CEO of the UK's Blitz Games, developer of the world's first fully stereoscopic 3D game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Most people tend to see 3D as a bit tacky. A bit '60s. A bit faddy. Actually the first 3D film came out in 1922, and the technology is far from new. And yes, there was a resurgence (of a sort) in the '50s and '60s but most people are simply unaware of the recent phenomenal improvements in 3D technology.

In fact, one of the biggest problems we're coming across at Blitz Games is that people are failing to see the sheer progress made with this technology over the last 87 years and also failing to understand what it can do now.

Back in the so called 'golden age' of 3D cinema in the '50s film-makers still used two projectors to create 3D images, which effectively destroyed the quality of the picture in the process.

The much more recent IMAX films were a step in the right direction, but still used analogue technology and were a far cry from the results we're now getting with stereoscopic Digital 3D.

Read more

Peter Zieleman is the Managing Director of eBook manufacturers, BeBook

In the last decade electronic ink (e-ink for short) screens have been invented, enhanced and implemented in dedicated electronic book readers or eReaders.

Nowadays there are devices which have the same characteristics as paper printed books, but with some important twists. The downsides are the lack of 'feel' and 'smell' of paper, but advantages are the greatly improved portability (take thousands of books on holiday) and the possibility to change the appearance of a book to your liking (changing font size or type) amongst a lot of other things.

When we at BeBook first noticed an early prototype of an e-Ink screen on the CES showfloor in Las Vegas a few years ago, we were immediately convinced that the tech was the future of book reading. We realised the book industry was on the verge of a total makeover.

There are clear parallels with the changes in the distribution of recorded music in recent years, which has transitioned from vinyl records to CDs which to MP3s, within less than a 20 year timespan.

Read more

"There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip". (Old English Proverb)

If you believe everything that Wikipedia tells you (and of course I do), it owes its derivation to an Ancient Greek tale in which one of Jason's Argonauts returns home, is about to knock back his first vino when he's whisked off to hunt a wild boar. He's killed, and never gets to quaff the wine.

When you're examining the many things that can go wrong with gaming 'in the cloud', you begin to wish it was only wild boars you had to worry about.

"Gaming in the cloud" - we're talking here about laudable projects like OnLive and Gaikai. In a nutshell, the idea is you connect via the Internet to a server which runs the game itself, and sends the already rendered video and audio back to your computer (or console, or dumb terminal) in response to your gameplay controls.

A compelling proposition, annoyingly flawed

It's just so compelling. Solves DRM issues, means you don't have to spend out on an expensive gaming PC or high-end console - it's all in the cloud. And perhaps, sadly, pie in the sky.

Read more