TechRadar: All News Feeds

Plastic Logic unveils future of e-newspapers

Adam Hartley — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:53:00 GMT

You might be slightly peeved to hear that current-gen e-readers are already being superseded, if were one of the lucky few that bought themselves a new Sony eBook from Waterstones last week.

"The electronic newspaper, a large portable screen that is constantly updated with the latest news, has been a prop in science fiction for ages," reads a report in the New York Times.

"It also figures in the dreams of newspaper publishers struggling with rising production and delivery costs, lower circulation and decreased ad revenue from their paper product."

Plastic paper logic

Plastic Logic's new device, to be shown off at an emerging tech trade show in San Diego this week, has a screen around two and a half times the size of Amazon's current model Kindle e-reader.

Plastic Logic's new e-reader's screen measures an impressive 8.5 x 11 inches, is Wi-Fi compatible and capable of browsing docments in PDF, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It's due for commericial release at some point in 2009.

Richard Archuleta, the chief executive of Plastic Logic, told the NY Times: "Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers is what everyone asks for," Mr. Archuleta said.

TechRadar has contacted Plastic Logic for further info, so we should hear more on this soon…

US news industry backing

Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media (owner of 16 daily newspapers, including The Houston Chronicle, The San Antonio Express and The San Francisco Chronicle) added:

"We are hopeful that we will be able to distribute our newspaper content on a new generation of larger devices sometime next year." While he would not say what device the company's papers would use, he said, "we have a very strong interest in e-newspapers. We're very anxious to get involved."

The New York Times is one of a few newspapers already available on Amazon's Kindle ($14 a month in the US), similar to the cost of other papers.

Michael Zimbalist, VP for research and development operations at The New York Times said: "We expect to experiment on all of these platforms. When devices start approximating the look and feel of a newspaper, we'll be there as well."

Legit DVD ripping finally arrives

Patrick Goss — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:09:00 GMT

The chance to legally rip your DVDs to your computer's hard drive has finally arrived after years of frustration, with Real, of Real Player fame, releasing Real DVD.

Although plethora illegitimate options exist for ripping DVDs into digital files for playback, Real DVD should take all the metadata, menus and the existing CSS protection and make it available on your hard disk.

However, aside from the hefty 4GB file size, there are a few downsides to Real's latest product – not least the fact that the files will not only keep their CSS protection, but also have Real's DRM as well.

DRM it

The upshot of this is that the files will not be transferable to your portable media player, and will be locked to five PCs and an individual user. Of course, that means that a laptop is the only way to watch these legitimate files on the go.

Real's Eric Fox told Ars Technica: "We don't modify or change the files in any way. We basically make a 'carbon copy' from the disc to disk. We never modify, compress, or change the content."

"We licensed the DVD technology for a legal right to play back DVD content," Fox adds when asked how Real got away from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). "Our second layer of DRM doesn't hurt, either."

Of course, this utility – which is going into beta and will apparently be priced at around $30 (c£15) – is a long way from being able to treat your DVDs like you do your CDs, where burning them to your device of choice for playback is perfectly acceptable practice.

Indeed, it all seems a little bit late, given the other non-sanctioned but unrestrictive programs, but maybe it's a sign that the film industry is coming around to the idea that people don't just want hard copies of their media.

MP slams EA for irresponsible PR

Adam Hartley — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:38:00 GMT

You may remember that Electronic Arts took over the Last Stop garage in Finsbury Park last Friday, in a headline-grasping PR stunt, giving away £20,000 worth of free fuel to 'launch' the game Mercenaries 2: World In Flames.

EA turned the innocent North London petrol station into something resembling a warzone, dressed in full military camouflage with an army jeep on the forecourt and assistants dressed as soldiers with replica machine guns. Local residents were, unsurprisingly, said to be be 'alarmed and dismayed' at the stunt.

As PR stunts go, whether you think it irresponsible, misjudged or plain genius (as most PRs we spoke to seemed to think) it achieved one thing – it got EA in the news.

Whether or not those headlines will somehow translate into actual sales of the game is, of course, another thing entirely…

Police and local MP unhappy

The Met were not entirely happy with the computer games' publishers antics and an EA spokesperson told TechRadar at the time : "From an environmental point of view it might be irresponsible, but it's not for us to get bogged down in it all – it's just meant as a goodwill thing."

Now that the dust has (almost literally) settled, local MP Lynne Featherstone, Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green has slammed EA's PR team, telling The Associated Press:

"Trying to recreate Venezuelan-style fuel riots on the streets of London is completely irresponsible and downright dangerous.

"Whilst a lucky few might have got some free petrol, hundreds of local residents have faced misery on their daily journeys this morning. They deserve an apology for being the victims of such an ill-thought out media stunt."

Vodafone wants you to text from Facebook

Gareth Beavis — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:34:00 GMT

Vodafone's Facebook-lovers will soon have a new way to send messages from the popular social networking site: text message.

Using the 'Connect To Friends' application installed on a user's Facebook profile, users can now send messages to friends both on and off line instantly.

Vodafone is offering 25 free text credits to new users of the service, with costs of 10p per text and 30p per picture message occurring thereafter.

Text connect

Recipients can also reply direct to your mobile phone, as your number is linked on the message. So you can't really ditch the handset if you want to be in two-way communication, sorry.

The service is currently being offered as a trial at the moment, and is only available to Vodafone pay monthly or PAYG users, but does allow text credits to be bought in bulk, allowing some decent savings.

Then again, you could just use your mobile phone... saves a lot of effort really.

High-resolution Google satellite launched

Gareth Mason — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:51:00 GMT

A Google-branded satellite that can record sharp images of tiny areas of Earth was launched on Saturday in the US.

The Delta 2 rocket successfully carried a GeoEye-1 satellite towards its polar orbit from which it will circle the earth a dozen times a day from 681km in the sky.

The Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, witnessed it being shot into space. The satellite will supply information for the company's mapping services as well as environmental, agricultural, and more ominously, defence purposes.

The satellite, which cost half a billion dollars to build and launch, was fired into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Pin-sharp detail

According to the Associated Press, the satellite can detail areas in black or white as small as 'a baseball diamond's home plate' up to an area 'the size of Texas' in a 24-hour period, or an area the size of New Mexico in colour.

For non-American readers, this means that the satellite can identify a small black-and-white shrubbery within an area six times the size of Wales. Or record all of East Anglia in detailed colour.

Do you want to know that much?

Apple finally admits Brit invented iPod

Marc Chacksfield — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:44:00 GMT

An ongoing battle to find out who is the original inventor of the technology behind the Apple iPod has come to a head, with Apple 'admitting' who the original inventor is.

Kane Kramer, a British inventor who has always claimed he came up with the 'iPod' idea nearly 30 years ago has told the Daily Mail that the company has acknowledged his part in the making of Apple's revolutionary MP3 player, after the company flew him in to testify in an ongoing lawsuit with Burst.com.

10 hours' questioning

In an interview with the paper, Kramer says: "I was up a ladder painting when I got the call from a lady with an American accent from Apple saying she was the head of legal affairs and that they wanted to acknowledge the work that I had done.

"I must admit that at first I thought it was a wind-up by friends. But we spoke for some time, with me still up this ladder slightly bewildered by it all, and she said Apple would like me to come to California to talk to them.

"Then I had to make a deposition in front of a court stenographer and videographer at a lawyers' office. The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it."

Destpite the admission, Apple has yet to give Kramer compensation for loss of earnings. He has received only a consultancy fee.

What Kramer actually invented back in 1979 was a way to store 3.5 minutes of music on to a chip, coined the IXI.

Although the capacity of the chip was minuscule, he believed that storage capabilities would improve in time.

Kramer, who is currently facing financial difficulties, tried to patent his device 20 years ago, but could not afford to do so. He is hoping that Apple's 'admission' means he will get some sort of compensation.

Nokia Tube to be released on 8 October

Gareth Beavis — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:58:00 GMT

An 'informed source' has set the internet rumour mills grinding into overdrive after information has emerged stating the Nokia tube will be released on 8 October.

Now, this would have to be one of the quickest turnarounds of a product from a mobile phone manufacturer ever, and especially bizarre in the case of Nokia, which traditionally allows around three months between announcement and shipping.

But with secrecy over new products reaching fever pitch in modern times, companies have started to shorten the time between announcement and release.

Dark appearance

And it's not like the Tube hasn't had a marketing push... its appearance in The Dark Knight film, coupled with around a billion rumour articles (and yes, we're aware this is one of them too) has meant the public has a good a idea about the device and what it will do.

However, the latest info from JustAMP Blog is that this will run the S60 5th Edition platform, and don't forget... it will be named the Nokia XpressMusic 5800. Yes, we're still really, really upset about the stupidity of the name too.

Sony trumps Nokia as Asia's fave brand

Gareth Beavis — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:00 GMT

Sony has usurped Nokia as Asia's favourite brand according to a survey of Asian shoppers.

However, it's the parent consumer electronics firm that the Asians were clamouring for, not the ailing Sony-Ericsson mobile brand, with rumours of a split gaining pace at the moment.

Conducted by market research group, TNS, the results also show a survey dominated by consumer electronics firms.

Top dogs

Sony took top spot in the survey, ahead of brands such as Canon and Nike. TNS curried the opinion of around 3,600 people in 10 different territories, including Australia.

Coca-Cola and Google predictably came top in their respective categories, with strong showings from Apple and Hewlett-Packard, representing the emergence of consumer tech in an evolving Asian market, in particular China.

TechRadar wasn't mentioned in the list for some reason, but it's obviously just a matter of time before Sony starts looking over its shoulder...

In Depth: When your web posts come back to haunt you

Jon Thompson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:02:00 GMT

Views expressed online can land you in trouble at work. Take the case of CNN Producer Chez Pazienza. While recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumour the size of a pinball in 2006, Pazienza decided to start a blog to record his thoughts, brush up on his writing skills and generally pass the time during his recovery.

Focusing on pop culture, politics and the media, Pazienza's blog at www.deusexmalcontent.com quickly became a hit with a growing readership. He never divulged anything to link him to his employer, but someone back at CNN discovered his blog, knew who he was and became increasingly unhappy. Pazienza continued writing his blog after returning to work, until one day his boss called.

Pazienza was told that certain opinions had surfaced online with his name attached. This much he was happy to admit, as he writes at The Huffington Post.

A day later, Pazienza was fired. Human Resources pointed him to a line in the company handbook that said any writing for a "non-CNN outlet" had to be run through their Standards and Practices Department. This vague statement, it turned out, applied to blogging as much as other forms of publishing.

While checking that employees aren't embarrassing their employers is one thing, many companies are using Google to see what job candidates get up to in their spare time. If they find something they don't like, it can directly lead to the rejection of the candidate. This practice has spawned a new buzzword in recruitment circles: the 'NetRep' or network reputation.

Job hiring decisions

According to the results of a survey released by business networking site Viadeo, it's becoming vitally important for employees to maintain a good NetRep.

The survey of over 600 employers and 2,000 job seekers revealed that one in five companies have deliberately searched for personal information about job candidates on the web. Of those, 59 per cent said the findings influenced their recruitment decision. The survey also discovered that a positive online reputation will actually enhance someone's chances of landing a job.

Of those respondents seeking jobs, just under half of those aged between 18 and 24 had posted personal information on social websites. 54 per cent of the same age group also admitted that someone else had posted pictures of them online with or without their permission.

"These results should act as a wake-up call to anyone who has ever posted personal information online," says Peter Cunningham, Viadeo's UK Country Manager. "When people who are not the original intended audience – such as potential employers – find this information, it can have a major impact on their decision making process."

The survey said that 13 per cent of companies had found positive information about candidates online that had affected hiring decisions, such as discovering that candidates had more to offer than they thought. Some, however, gave reasons for not hiring people ranging from a MySpace page boasting of excessive alcohol use to finding the candidate on the local police wanted list. "People must manage their NetReps closely," advises Cunningham. "Online information must be tailored to work to their advantage."
"If you're chasing a job you really want, it's important to be aware of how you've portrayed yourself online," confirms HR consultant Gary Simpson. "It's perfectly legal to run a background check on you without your permission if all the data is in the public domain."

Information placed online isn't just affecting people's employment opportunities. For the budding fraudster orburglar, what seems like a trivial titbit of information could be very interesting indeed.
Burglary threats

Recently, an increasing number of families are getting online with their own web domains, with each family member having their own page to post achievements and coming plans. This all sounds perfectly innocent until you consider that the announcement of a family holiday also tells the world that your property will be unoccupied during a certain period.

In addition to this, unwisely cropped photographs posted to the family website can also show what you have that's worth stealing, the layout of the house and soon. Even if your family homepage doesn't carry your address, it can still be shockingly simple to find out exactly where you live.

Simply pay a visit to an online 'who is' service such as the one provided by www.who.is. This and similar sites give full details, including a billing address, of registered domains. Enter yours, and if you haven't taken the simple precaution of using a PO Box number as the billing address, your impending holiday might be instantly linked to a property at an address that will be left unoccupied on known days. Luckily, some domain registration companies use their own address in these fields, but it's always worth checking. Some family home pages and domain registration records even carry a home phone number, which could be ideal for mounting a tentative telephone phishing scam, or at least making sure that there's no one home.

Posting your family tree on your domain is a great way to discover missing relatives. It's also an increasingly good way of letting a growing band of genealogical researchers know you exist. For a percentage of the proceeds, such researchers will put you in touch with solicitors holding wills to which you're a beneficiary.

While this may land you an unexpected windfall, for the fraudster, your online family tree could be a gold mine. Dates and places of birth and mother's maiden names are the basis for traditional questions asked by a range of call centres instead of easily forgotten passwords. Matching these up with a street address provided by a whois service might end in a major case of identity theft. And family home pages are by no means the only places to check when assessing how much information people can gather about you.

Social site profiling

Social networking sites are agreat way to meet new people, catch up with old friends and stay in touch. Increasingly, however, they're also becoming a resource for profiling people. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and Friends Reunited,are all prime hunting grounds for those looking for background to the lives of others.

By displaying personal details and the hometown of each page owner, it's fairly easy to positively identify someone on a social networking site. Because of this, it's a good idea to either keep your profile private or be deliberately vague about yourself.

Your page is also useful in helping people build a comprehensive network of your acquaintances. A potential employer might make unfair assumptions about your character based on those you connect to. You might have a good NetRep, but what about your friends? Sometimes it pays to do a little pruning.
There are quite a few other places online where you may want to consider editing your presence, too.Take Amazon and its wish list facility. Designed as a way to alert friends and family to potential gifts they might like to buy you, could yours be telling strangers too much?

From the main Amazon page click on the wish list link. Enter a search pattern, a name or email address. After pressing return, you can further narrow your search by entering a location. When setting up such lists, the idea is that you can add in unique details about yourself so that people can be sure it's you they're buying for. Unfortunately, in doing so, you could also be giving identity thieves a head start.

Adding details such as your date of birth, a pet's name, your favourite football team and so on will identify you to your friends, but you've probably also given out your location. When added to information from other sources, such as the electoral roll, this could also be enough for someone to take your identity by stating your address and providing answers to supposedly secret security questions. A more secure way of identifying yourself is to state an achievement or a nickname in your wish list – something only useful to those who already know you.

Intelligence gathering

Online profiling with data freely placed into the public domain doesn't require a warrant to collect, and intelligence services collect it enthusiastically. The respected Christian Science Monitor newspaper reported in February 2006 that the US government was already developing systems to mine the data trails we leave in cyberspace. It's also thought that the amount of data collected by the US National Security Agency grows by as much as four million gigabytes per month. However, how difficult is it to mine data in this way?

In January 2006, developer Tom Oward posted an article to www.applefritter.com called 'Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists'. It described how he produced a tool capable of turning a set of search terms into a list of Amazon customers with a desire to read certain books. In some cases, he could even find addresses and phone numbers.

Oward began by searching for all users with 'Edgar' in their names before downloading their wish lists. Next, he added functionality to search these lists for book titles, ISBNs and authors. He then further expanded the script to allow him to place multiple search terms in a file. After having some fun finding people who wanted to read titles such as Brave New World and 1984, Oward augmented his script to access location information given freely by the creators of the original wish lists to identify themselves to gift-buying friends.

Finally, he interfaced the script to Yahoo's People Finder. In cases where People Finder returned just one hit, he realised he was obtaining the real street addresses and even telephone numbers for wish list owners. Finally, thanks to Google, it was then possible to display a map or satellite image of the area in which the owner of a selected list lived. This sort of detail information would be everything needed to 'keep an eye' on an individual.As mentioned earlier, for peace of mind, it pays to identify yourself in a way that only your friends will understand and recognise.

Web rage

Employers, criminals and intelligence agencies are not the only people who might either misinterpret or use what you put online against you. Although inmost cases it's perfectly safe to have a so-called 'flame war' (a prolonged and heated argument) with someone online, sometimes people may translate words on a screen into real world actions with disastrous consequences.

After a frank exchange of views, insults and finally threats online, Gibbons from Bermondsey tracked his 'opponent' Jones to Clacton using personal details that Jones had placed online. As the judge reportedly said during Gibbons' subsequent trial for unlawful wounding, "It is accepted by the prosecution that Mr Jones taunted you and dared you to go to his house where you would be greeted with weapons."

Gibbons and another man did just that. In December 2005, they travelled the 70 miles to Jones' home, armed with a pick axe handle and a machete. Jones armed himself with a knife before opening the door, and during the ensuing fight, Jones was beaten with the pick axe and cut on the neck.

Gibbons pleaded guilty in exchange for the prosecution dropping charges of attempted murder and issuing threats to kill. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

According to a recent magazine article on the BBC's website, UK police forces now routinely trawl the net, actively looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Beginning some years ago with the hunt for child pornography, they now search for far more. Sometimes, it's a member of the public who alerts them first.

Take the case of 18-year-old motorist Danny Hyde of Stowmarket. He posted a video to YouTube last summer showing him driving his car along the A14 near Ipswich at 130mph. A member of the public recognised Hyde and sent the video anonymously to Suffolk police, who arrested him and charged him with dangerous driving. In February this year, he received a four-month suspended sentence and 210 hours of community service, as well as being banned from driving for 18 months.

Hasty opinions

The case of Gibbons and Jones demonstrates why it pays to think before posting inflammatory views in a live chat room. However, this can also apply to the less interactive world of web forums, not only because of potential consequences but also because, unless the forum owner has taken precautions, it's likely that Google will be able to see your posts – and therefore index them. This makes forums another very useful source of information for anyone trying to profile you, your online behaviour or your views.

Millions of forum conversations are started and added to each day, and heated arguments often break out. Many forum users have read enough bitter and prolonged flame wars over the years to know not to rise to the bait, so they don't bother getting involved. To an outsider such as a prospective employer, those who do become involved inflame wars might seem pathologically obsessive and malicious.

Though your user name might not immediately give your identity away, the things you write about and the personal details in your profile could. Many posters also use an identifying image of themselves when they post, and take the same distinctive user name for a number of different forums. This makes positive identification and subsequent cross-referencing simpler, especially if you also post details about your everyday life.

If you're an active and outspoken member of a forum that discusses local matters, it could be even easier for other locals – and indeed potential or current employers – to track you down from a combination of the geographical details you post, your stated age, user name and so on. A link to your personal homepage in your profile will also confirm your identity.

If you're worried about what you might have posted to a forum, it pays to 'ego surf' by typing your own name or forum user name into Google. If you find anything that shows you in a bad light – perhaps an angry post written in the spur of the moment, or a somewhat controversial post stating an opinion that you no longer share – then go back and edit it.

You could also contact a moderator at the forum in question, asking him to delete the offending threads,explaining that you regret your posts. Forum administrators and moderators, especially those associated with forums that rely on advertising revenue to pay the running costs, are usually pleased to help out with such requests.

The information people find about you online is who they believe you to be. To a potential employer, it may make you an unsuitable candidate; to the police it may make you a criminal; to a criminal it may make you a soft touch; and to the security services, it may imply that you're a threat to national security.
It's becoming a sad fact that the freedom to express yourself online is really the freedom for others to form an opinion about you based on limited information. For that reason, it's very wise to think before you post.

First published in PC Plus, issue 273

Internet stars unite for HBO web comedy

Marc Chacksfield — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:41:00 GMT

HBOLab, the web-based offshoot of HBO, has announced it is to create a new comedy featuring some of the most well-known internet sensations.

The show will be a 10-episode scripted comedy, titled Hooking Up. Even though, Hooking Up will have its own website, Hookinupshow.com, you will also be able to watch it on MySpace and the video-sharing site that made most of the show's stars (web) famous, YouTube.

Premieres 1 October

The show is set to premiere 1 October, and will feature the likes of lonelygirl15 – star of the popular but fake web diary of the same name – sxePhil, whose irreverent comments on the world have made him one of the most famous YouTubers, and KevJumba, YouTube's most subscribed-to comedian.

Plot-wise, Hooking Up centres round the group of web wonders who enroll in a university where (mis)communication is done purely on the web, through IM, emailing and the like.

While there's room here for a look at how the internet has changed the way we interact with each other, somehow we think the show isn't going to be a Douglas Coupland-swipe at the Google age; instead aimed at the same folks that made its characters stars in the first place.

Sony's SingStar boss jumps ship for Atari

Adam Hartley — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:24:00 GMT

Sony Computer Entertainment's SingStar boss Paulina Bozek is leaving Sony to work with her former boss Phil Harrison over at Atari.

Bozek will be heading up a new online game studio at the firm.

"I am very excited to be joining Atari at this pivotal time for both the company and the industry," said Bozek.

"There is a huge opportunity as gaming platforms become more ubiquitous, more connected and attract more mainstream audiences. Atari has a great vision for the future and I can't wait to start realising that vision in new products and services."

Sony nil, Atari two

"This is a significant step in expanding Atari's online game development capability," said Phil Harrison.

"Paulina is one of the industry's most respected creative leaders with an outstanding track-record of commercial and creative success and I'm delighted that she will bring her unique vision, consumer insight and proven ability for creating amazing entertainment experiences to Atari."

In Depth: Get the web's best apps on your desktop

Karl Hodge — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:10:00 GMT

Prism – the 'distraction free browser' currently bubbling away in the Mozilla Labs – takes your favourite websites and turns them into configurable desktop programs. As the line between desktop and online applications begins to blur, Prism gives you a way to create individual shortcuts to the web services you use habitually. Instead of opening in a browser window with back and forward buttons, an address bar and bookmarks, applications have their own frill-free window.

What's more, you can change the look and layout of that window to suit your needs. The only real restriction is that you still have to go online to use them.

Making applications

The pre-release version of Prism (designated 0.9) is available for Mac, Linux and Windows in two versions; a standalone installer and a version that works as an add-on for Firefox. We used release candidate 2 for the practical parts of this article, running on Windows XP.

Using Prism to create apps from websites is very easy. Launch Prism and a dialogue prompts you to enter the URL for the site you want to convert. Alternatively, use the Firefox add-on version, navigate to a site you want to run in Prism then choose 'Convert Website to Application' from the 'Tools' menu. This time the URL is automatically filled in for you.

Let's try this with online image editor Splashup (www.splashup.com). Launch Prism and enter the URL 'www.splashup.com'. In the Name field type 'Splashup Photo Editor'. Immediately below that you have the option to include various browser elements. In this case we'll leave all of them un-ticked except for 'Enable Navigation Keys'. That way, if you get lost in the application you can still go backwards and forwards through the 'site'.

You can also ask Prism to create a shortcut to your application. This is a good idea – as we'll see in a minute. Tick the 'Desktop' box for now.

Click 'OK' and take a look at your desktop. You should see a new icon labelled 'Splashup Photo Editor'. Give it a double-click and the Splashup site is launched in Prism. There are some further menu-based tweaks you can make to the configuration. Click the 'Commands' icon at the bottom right of the window. The 'Tools' menu enables you to make Firefox add-ons available to Prism applications, while 'Print' and 'Page Setup' are self explanatory.

Try clicking the 'Jump straight in' link in the Splashup window. The application launches in a new Prism window – not a new Firefox window. Prism renders pages and parses code just like Firefox, but without the frills. Now, let's take a closer look under the bonnet.

Configuration files

Return to the desktop icon Prism created for your application. Right click on it and choose 'Properties'. You'll see a very long shortcut path for the application. This gives us some crucial clues to how Prism works. The shortcut invokes Prism, which in turn sends a call to configuration data stored in a special 'WebApps' folder. Start Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder 'WebApps'. You should find a directory named 'splashup.photo.editor@prism.app' within. Open it and you'll find a couple of initialisation files.

If you open the file 'webapp.ini' in any text editor, you'll see a set of simple configuration parameters analogous to the choices you made earlier. There are a couple that aren't available through Prism's menu interface too – like the 'sidebar' attribute. Any of the parameters here can be changed. The binary parameters can be set to true or false, and the text strings replaced by anything you choose.

Here's something more intriguing. Select all the files in the 'splashup' folder and hold down [CTRL], then click and drag a copy of those files to your desktop. With the copied files still selected, right-click and choose 'Send to | Compressed (zipped) Folder'. This creates a ZIP file on your desktop. Select and rename the file to 'splashup.webapp'. The file's icon changes to show that it's now associated with Prism. You've just created a 'webapp bundle' – a portable application version of a website converted for Prism. Double-click on the freshly minted icon and Splashup will launch in a new window.

Adding styles

This webapp bundle is very bare.Prism supports further configuration files that can be used to customise converted sites into personal applications. CSS styles can be amended using a file named webapp.css and JavaScript behaviours added with webapp.js.

Here's an example. Go to YouTube and turn it into a Prism webapp. Next, open a text editor and type in the following code: body{font-family:Times New Roman, serif;} Save the file as 'webapp.css'.

Navigate to 'Documents and Settings | username | Application Data' and find the 'WebApps' folder again, wherein you'll discover the YouTube folder for the site you converted earlier. Open it, then drag and drop the file 'webapp.css' to the folder.

Now, launch the YouTube Prism webapp and all the text should now be formatted with Times New Roman rather than Arial, the usual default font. To find further CSS changes you could make, install the Web Developer toolbar add-on in Firefox and select the 'Edit CSS' option. This gives you access to the CSS file for the site you're browsing, enabling you to pinpoint which classes you can edit and override using webapp.css in a Prism bundle.

JavaScript functionality

Now that we're editing bundle elements, let's backtrack a bit and return to the 'webapp.ini' file that we looked at earlier. This time, we're going to edit a configuration file to create a mashup of two applications – using an idea first mooted by Prism developer Mark Finkle. This time we'll start with a bundle we made earlier. Find the gmail.webapp bundle on the cover disc. Drag a copy to your local machine and rename it 'gmail.zip' – then extract the contents.

Open the extracted folder and find the file 'webapp.ini'. Set the sidebar parameter to 'true' and save the file.Start a new document in a text editor and add the following code: function startup() {host.sidebar.add("Chat", "http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout");host.sidebar.visible = true;}.

Save this code as 'webapp.js' in the same folder. This snippet of JavaScript passes the content of a URL direct to Prism's sidebar. This has the same result as defining a URL in the main configuration file webapp.ini, except that we're targeting an object within the host application rather than the main window. The URL we pass could have been anything – an alternative navigation list, another website or application. In this case, it's Google Chat.

To finish off the web bundle, select all the files in the folder and right-click, choosing 'Send To | Compressed (zipped) Folder'. Rename the ZIP file 'gmailchat.webapp'. Double-clicking on the newly created application you'll be prompted to log in to a Prism created mashup of Gmail and Google Chat.
Prism is a simple and powerful method of bridging the gap between desktop and web applications. With these tips and tweaks, you can bundle your own versions of popular web services either for your own use or for distribution online

Fibre-optic Britain could cost £30bn

Patrick Goss — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:57:00 GMT

The cost of getting every UK home onto fibre-optic super-fast broadband could be close to £30 billion according to the government's broadband advisory group.

With increasing numbers of Britain's population now looking to receive much faster connections, the government's Broadband Stakeholder Group has put the cost of rolling out fibre-optic cable across the country at between £5.1 billion and a staggering £28.8 billion depending on what technology is used.

"This is the most comprehensive analysis produced to date on the costs of deploying fibre in the UK," said BSG chief executive Antony Walker.

"The scale of the costs looks daunting but the report does shed light on how some of these costs can be reduced and what the likely extent of commercial rollout will be.

"It should focus minds of commercial players, policy makers and regulators on the potential solutions to these challenges."

Arterial surgery

The cheaper solution would be to overhaul the national infrastructure with fibre to the cabinet – essentially enhancing the main arteries but leaving the connections from the junction to the home as traditional copper.

However, the price rises massively if point to point fibre is used, linking in each individual home, especially in rural areas.

The BSG believes that use of existing telecommunications ducts and the use of things like water pipes or even overhead cables could cut that figure, but the true price of bringing the UK's communications into the 21st century is becoming apparent.

In Depth: 12 life-enhancing programs for your Mac

Hollin Jones — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Since computer technology became an integral part of our lives it has gone from being purely a functional tool to something we use for social interaction, leisure and personal pursuits. Social networking is the most obvious example, with sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo enjoying huge popularity.

Wallet

Tools for blogging, tracing your family line or sharing pictures, videos and diaries online are also commonplace. There are many other small applications for the Mac with specialist aims, too, including improving your sleep, tracking travel news or streaming webcam images to your Desktop. You'll find almost all the programs mentioned here on your DVD, plus links to the developers' web pages.

$15, Mac OS X 10.3.9+
Managing passwords and numbers can be tiresome. Enter Wallet, an elegant manager for sensitive data such as passwords, serial numbers and credit card numbers. Using 448-bit Blowfish encryption, Wallet integrates with .Mac, Backup and iPods, as well as featuring a password generator and Dashboard widget for access.

Pzizz
$30, Mac OS X 10.4+
Here's an app for insomniacs! Pzizz is an intriguing little program that uses a mixture of randomly generated and chosen sound effects, textures, and soothing, recorded speech to aid restful sleep. Choose whether you want to be energised or relaxed and the software will create a suitable soundtrack accordingly. Soundtracks can be exported to iTunes. It's an interesting solution for those having sleep or energy problems.

Miro
Freeware, Mac OS X 10.3+
Miro is a free video player and online streaming program. As well as being able to open video files locally on your Mac, it's able to search and play videos from YouTube, Google, Yahoo and many more. It also supports video RSS feeds so that you can subscribe to online channels, auto download and deletion after a set period, watch folders, and full-screen display of practically all major video formats.

Gizmo
Freeware, Mac OS X 10.3.9+
Like Skype, Gizmo is a cross-platform internet telephone solution that uses your mic, speaker and broadband connection to make calls to other computers running Gizmo. Calls to computers are completely free, or you can make or receive calls to regular phones at competitive international rates. The software can also record conversations, transfer files, instant message, show users on a map and group chat! So, what are you waiting for?

MacFamilyTree
$49, Mac OS X 10.3.9+
Mapping your family history traditionally involved taping together huge amounts of paper on a large table. MacFamilyTree is based on the Gedcom Standard for the international exchange of genealogical data, and lets you add photos, video and sound, and upload family trees to the web. Specially designed to deal with family data like relatives, places and dates of births and deaths, it's an elegant solution.

EarthDesk
$24, Mac OS X 10.4+
EarthDesk replaces your Desktop picture with a real-time image of the Earth's surface, including sun, moon and cloud cover. It supports multiple monitors and 11 types of view, with political and satellite images. With a broadband connection, EarthDesk hooks into data sources across the world, ensuring what you see is accurate.

FlickrExport for iPhoto
£12, Mac OS X 10.3+
We all know only too well that saving photos out of iPhoto to a folder, and then uploading them one by one to Flickr is a tedious process. Luckily, there's FlickrExport, a plug-in which, once installed, appears as an option on export from iPhoto, and can send pictures straight to Flickr. What's more, it supports batch-setting of titles and tags, automatic resizing and automatic assigning to a collection. Overall, this app could prove to be a huge timesaver.

Sofa Control
$15, Mac OS X 10.4+
Most new Macs come with an Apple Remote Control. By default, its functionality is rather limited, so how can you extend it? By using Sofa Control, which lets you control a wider range of applications including Keynote, PowerPoint, Safari, Preview, VLC and more. It's fully customisable, and supports other system functions too, such as the volume, sleep time, zoom and display settings. Combine this tool with the Remote and you'll have more control than ever.

Last.fm Radio Player
Freeware, Mac OS X 10.4+
Last.fm is a website designed to help you discover new music online and interact with others who share your tastes. You can search for and stream music online, but the most interesting feature is the Radio Player, a free download that streams music, pictures and artist information over the net to you, either on demand or based on your listening habits. It's a great way to discover new music.

Our favourite everyday tools

Delicious Library
£40, Mac OS X 10.3+
Delicious Library is a cool cataloguing tool that lets you index books, CDs, DVDs and games. Connect a webcam and the program scans its barcode, then retrieves all the relevant info about that product from the internet. With support for voice and Spotlight searching, iPod sync and even library-style checkout functions for lending items to friends, it's a powerhouse.

Blogger widget for OS X
Freeware, Mac OS X 10.4+
Blogging is well-established, but the act of logging into Blogger and reaching the compose page is tedious. Use the Blogger widget instead: just type or paste your text into it and post directly to your blog without opening a browser! It supports HTML tags and saving as draft for later editing. Download it here.

Facebook exporter for iPhoto
Freeware, Mac OS X 10.4+
Editing, tagging and exporting images before uploading to Facebook can be a drawn-out process. This plug-in appears in iPhoto's Export panel, and lets you select multiple images, pick or create a new Facebook album and add captions to the images prior to upload. You can also tag friends so the pictures arrive at your Facebook account already formatted.

Exclusive: ILM: Pushing the FX envelope

John Brandon — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:30:00 GMT

High-end computing projects don't happen in a fantasy realm where someone waves a wand and a fully formed project bursts forth with just the flick of a wrist.

Just ask Tim Alexander, the Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, based near downtown San Francisco. It was Alexander's team who figured out how to make the swirling mass of particles look massive and yet finely detailed at the end of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, employing new techniques for particle displacement.

In this exclusive interview with PC Plus magazine, Tim Alexander of Industrial Light & Magic goes beyond the magical features for specific theatrical releases. He delves into how ILM stays ahead of the curve in digital effects, the challenges they face in making effects look realistic and amazing, and even the software used to create them.

What do you consider some of the major achievements from the last couple of years?

Tim Alexander: The major development in the past couple of years has really been water. I would say that's where a lot of companies have focused. It's where we have focused, especially with movies like Pirates and Poseidon. Transformers was also pretty (much been a) breakthrough for us. That's more of a hard-surface model show, but I think that as an industry, water has been the thing over the past couple of years.

I think that the more organic type of visual effects or simulations is probably where the next big breakthroughs lie. Like fire – things that we still have difficulty making on the computer that are still better to go out and photograph. Although you can't always go out and photograph everything that you want, which is why people come to us.

What evolutions in computing have helped you to push forward with effects?

TA: Over the past few years, the workstations at our artists' desktops have changed from single-processor to dual-core and quad-core, and now the higher-end video cards allow us to harness that power. So we make sure that all of our in-house software is hardware-accelerated, start doing simulation art as well through hardware acceleration and then additionally use that hardware acceleration for technologies in games as well, for doing fast previewing, that type of thing.

That's what we want – to enable the artist to be able to use those types of technologies. We need large amounts of RAM too, so most of our machines now have four cores with 16 gigs of RAM.

What about 64-bit computing? I know Photoshop is still 32-bit – is that a problem?

TA: Not really. A lot of the software that we use is Linux-based, and pretty much every vendor we deal with as well as our internal software is 64-bit. The exceptions to that are compositing programs like Shake, which is now out of development and never hit a 64-bit build. The artists that need programs like Photoshop on their desktops have Windows machines. And typically they're not dealing with large data like the Linux users. So 64-bit computing is not an issue.

What kind of Linux software are you using?

TA: Our internal software is Zeno, which started out as our matching tool. We would use it to duplicate the on-set camera in the computer so we could put CG characters into a shot and make sure they're tracking to the ground plan. It's grown from that and now we use it for almost all aspects of our work. We typically don't model in Zeno. Modelling is done in Maya or Alias or programs like Brush.

Once you get past that point, all the creature development work – like putting muscles in creatures, water simulations, hard body simulation – is done in Zeno. Lighting is done in Zeno. Rendering is done through Zeno using Renderman – which is another example of a Linux application that we use.

It's obviously not to save money, so why do you use Linux tools?

TA: Linux has traditionally been more scalable for the type of work that we do. We've always been Linux-based back to the SGI days, and we've kept with that.

How are you using dark fibre?

TA: Internally, we use dark fibre to communicate externally. We have dark fibre going up to the Skywalker Ranch and Big Rock, which is the other facility there. So it's used for communicating between the companies that aren't right next door to each other. We use a very similar pipeline to some of the work that they're doing up at the Ranch and so we're able to share files as if they are on our same server.

We also have a facility over in Singapore and we're able to access their disk as if it's local. It's really great. It's kind of slow and there's a lot of latency involved, but we're able to change over into their shop directories and see movies and that type of thing.

Looking back 30 years, what do you think ILM's contribution has been to movie making?

TA: Huge [laughter]. Obviously, I'm biased because I work here, but even when I was working down at Disney, we would take field trips to go see the work that ILM was doing. There have been so many moments in ILM's history where there's some sort of breakthrough. The big one for me was Jurassic Park. I wasn't working for ILM at that time.

We all went to see Jurassic Park and we were like, 'oh man, I don't know what we're doing, but they're doing something completely different'. And it still holds up today. You see those dinosaurs and you still buy them. It's that kind of thing that I think ILM has made huge contributions to. We aspire to try and recreate that Jurassic Park moment in movies that we're working on today, so that 30 years from now it still looks awe-inspiring.

That's an interesting point. I talked to the CTO at Disney and he was talking about the scene in National Treasure where Nicolas Cage jumps off the bridge. He said it was a combination of a model and digital effects. Do you do things like that too, or are you moving more towards all digital all the time?

TA: It's both. We still look at a shot and say 'it's way better to do the miniature'. There are a lot of situations that are better done that way – you get a more realistic effect. So we definitely keep our eye on those. As the technology's progressing, we find that we can do more and more of those types of effects on the computer.

Sometimes, it isn't just the technology factor. On Star Wars: Episode Three, we had to use miniatures because we didn't have enough time or people to build everything on the computer. It was better to spread out the work so that it would look good and hold up. So you have to look at what's going to look best, but you also look at what resources are available.

Give me a picture of what it's like to work at ILM. What's a typical day like for you?

TA: It's an exciting environment and every show runs a little bit differently, but typically I come in in the morning, get together with the artists and look at their shots – what ran the night before. This is where our processing power comes into play: we can run a large number of hi-res shots overnight and see the results in the morning.

We have a lot of people working behind the scenes overnight to make sure that the shots run so that when we come in the next morning we have something to look at. That's really the beginning of the day. We look at the shots, comment on it and give people some feedback and a direction to go in. And then most of the rest of the day is involved with getting into meetings with the artists over larger issues like if we're not really sure quite how we're doing this type of shot yet.

We'll get everybody together, talk about it and try to figure out how we're going to do the water for that shot or the fire for that shot or something like that. It's a pretty free-form environment. There's no hard-and-fast rule imposed by the company on how it's supposed to run.

I think we run well and efficiently because we've been doing it for years and there's nobody saying "at 9am you have to be here in this room to do this thing and then at 10am you're going to be over here". It's really dependent on the makeup of the show, the people involved and what the work is like.

Why do you have to do the shots overnight, and when will it be much more instantaneous?

TA: We're striving for hardware acceleration techniques so we can pre-visualise much faster. We're still at the place where a large water simulation could run over days. We multi-process our simulations with 16 processors, sometimes up to 32. You start getting diminishing returns at a certain point because you're pushing so much data around that it starts becoming more of a data flow problem than a processing power problem.

Everyone needs to go home because we need the hours to process the data and to make images. Obviously, we want to strive to get as much real time as we can, and that's why the company as a whole is trying to combine what we're doing at LucasArts and what we're doing at ILM. We're trying to bring those technologies together so that ILM can benefit from the faster techniques that Arts is using and maybe Arts can benefit from ILM's look and feel.

Where do you think you are on the continuum with movies and games both looking pretty realistic? Are you still way ahead?

TA: I would say that an audience member who is going to go pay 10 dollars in the movie theatre would think that video games are not realistic enough for the work that we're doing. Even just in terms of organic effects in video games – and I play a lot of games so I've seen a lot of them. Uncharted [on the PS3] was one that I've played recently that has a lot of fire effects and those types of things.

They wouldn't hold up in a long shot. You know, even if you had a shot that is going by pretty quickly a lot of that stuff wouldn't hold up. At times we try to find that balance internally – like if we're going to go do a huge fire scene that's only on-screen for like a second, can we just do something quick and easy there?

But I do see the technologies converging and I think for the appropriate type of movies right now, you could do a full CG movie that wouldn't bother anybody. However, I think that mixing live action with video game qualities would be obvious at this point. There's just a level of detail that we even struggle to achieve sometimes with huge numbers of processors and hours and hours of rendering time.

Is there a difference between the digital effects you'd do for what I would call a captive audience, meaning that they're sitting there kind of chained to it, and effects for the movie goer?

TA: Yeah, I think so. And hopefully I'm not interpreting incorrectly, but with World of Warcraft or something, you're creating a much larger environment that's more free form. You're allowing people to explore in it and make their own decisions, so you sort of have to build for all angles.

You also have to create an environment that people will be able to sit in for hours and hours on end. Often what we do here at ILM is sort of build to camera – so we're kind of like a movie set or a theatre where you go behind the set and all you see is boards. When you're sitting at the computer, you have to think about it from all angles. Now what that means is you can't get as much detail as you might get with film.

And again, that's changing. I mean, video games are getting way better looking and much higher end. But you have to pick a level of detail that you can achieve for the size of your environment and how much you want people to be able to explore. And we don't do it in real time. We don't have to let people choose. The director gets to choose where they want people to go and then we dress for that angle.

Do you think LucasArts and ILM will some day merge and become one company creating both assets?

TA: I think we definitely have a goal to be working together and making games that are better and making films that are better – and maybe some day those will converge and we'll have a new media type that nobody's seen yet. In terms of immersion, I think what games have going for them is the whole online experience, actually interacting with people and making friends online. It becomes much more of a social thing versus going to a movie, where you're not talking with people, you're getting more of a story.

I think some video games recently have been pretty amazing at conveying story while letting you play. Uncharted is a good example of that where you almost feel like you're watching a movie while you're playing the game because they're putting you into the major drama.

You mentioned the term 'hard-surface model'. Can you describe what that means?

TA: That's typically something that doesn't have a deforming surface, like a car or a spaceship. We could blow those up or dent them or whatever, but typically we refer to hard surfaces as anything that you wouldn't normally see deforming. We have modelers that specialise in hard-surface modeling and modelers that specialise in organic modeling. They're different skill sets – the ins and outs of organic creatures versus hard surfaces where you're dealing with how surfaces curve and catch the light.

What's the future for effects? You mentioned fire and water. Is one of the challenges mixing two different renders?

TA: I think so, definitely. I also think large-scale environment work is a challenge for the future. Being able to realise large environments in the computer would be extremely helpful for a lot of shooting or cinematography. If you have to go on location for three months to shoot in a jungle, it's going to be really expensive. Some day we could create that in the computer.

Then you can give the director more flexibility to change camera angles and that type of thing. I'm not suggesting that we just do everything on the computer because there's something about having a cinematographer looking through the lens, understanding the beauty of a shot and how to shoot it. If we could some day get everything on the computer, you'd have to figure out some way to get the cinematographers and directors to be able to apply their craft to it.

Where are we on conquering 'the uncanny valley'?

TA: As an industry, we tend to fall into the valley a lot. Over the past few years, there have been moments where I've looked at an effect and been like "oh my, I had no idea that that was fake". An example is the baby from Lemony Snicket.

We did a full CG baby and there are a few close-up shots that really are amazing. But then there's a couple of other shots of the baby where you can tell that it's not quite there. So as an industry we do hit it, we do get to that reality point, though we fall into the valley. It's a little hit or miss; there's no formula for it yet.

Is it that you think it looks real on the computer screen, but then when you see it in the movie theatre it looks different?

TA: Our team aren't afraid to ask questions. We have a whole art department who help the artist and effects supervisors try to figure out why something's not looking right. There are many checks and balances in place for us to try to put out the best most realistic looking product that we can.

If you have somebody running across the screen and you're watching it this big versus this big [motions small and big with hands], it makes a difference to how you perceive how fast that object is moving. So being able to view it at different scales is really important.

In Depth: Make a laptop cooling stand

Neil Mohr — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Laptops might have been designed with portability and long battery life in mind, but they weren't designed for comfort. Use a laptop on your coffee table for more than five minutes and you're transformed into a warped and twisted, hunchbacked visage of a human being, proclaiming thanks that she did, indeed, give us water and the internets.

What we need is something that raises and angles your fine laptop into a more human-friendly angle. And while we do thank the clever clogs for pointing out a book shoved under the back of the laptop would do just that, it's hardly what we'd call an elegant solution as we try and raise ourselves above the level of tramp.

As it happens it's easy enough to grab an acrylic sheet and bend the two ends to produce an effective custom laptop stand. You just need to vary the height of the back-end to adjust the angle. If you're running a performance laptop then it's easy to add cooling, via an extra case fan powered off a USB port.

An A3-sized acrylic sheet should be fine for most laptops enough. We've opted for a 3mm thick sheet that costs less than £3, but for laptops over 3kg, use a sheet 4mm thick.

What you will need

A3 acrylic sheet

Case fan

USB cable

Protective gloves

Hot-air paint stripper

Soldering kit

Clamps

Workbench

Wire wool

1. At its heart this make is superbly easy, but due to the hot- air gun, we'd recommend a workbench.

2. Make sure you get a decent-sized acrylic sheet, we'll need about 7 to 10cm for the rear fold and 3 to 5cm for the front fold then 20 to 30cm for the main section. As it turns out an A3 sheet is about right and widely available on eBay.

3. Measure and clamp the sheet in place and peel any protective plastic well out of the way. Pop on protective gloves and use the heat gun on a 'cool' 300°C setting. Evenly heat the sheet where you want the fold. This will take a good few minutes.

4. Once you've made the back fold. Do the same for the front. We bent this completely back on itself to make a comfortable fold if we rest it on our legs.

5. That could be it right there, but we're going to add extra cooling. Flip the laptop over and mark out where the cooling vents are, drill/cut slowly otherwise you'll crack the plastic.

6. Take an existing USB cable and strip a suitable length of cable.

7. Choose a low-power fan as it'll only be supplied with 5v rather than the required 12v. Solder the black and red connections together.

8. To make a neat finish, counter sink screw holes in the plastic, so the fan screws will be flush.

9. Our final touch is to add a strip of silicon rubber or you could use rubber pads to stop the laptop from slipping.

10. Done!

In Depth: Happy 10th Birthday Google!

Dan Grabham — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Today sees Google, Inc., hit its tenth birthday. To mark the occasion we've run a whole series of articles providing new insights into what it's like to work at Google as well as exclusive tips and tricks to help you search smarter.

To kick off, we trawled our collective memories (those are the things we used to have before Google) and drawn up a list of the search engines we used to rely on in those dark pre-Google days. Take our Life before Google quiz and see how many you remember.

Tuesday saw us bring you 101 Google Tips, Tricks and Hacks. It's the ultimate find-things-fast list, and whether you're a Google pro or you just type random words into the search box and hope for the best, you'll be searching smarter once you've read this. Add your own tips in the comment box and help us compile the list of all lists!

Google also chose this week to launch its own web browser, called Google Chrome. For the full lowdown, check out our article 20 things you need to know about Google Chrome. For Mozilla's take on the launch, read our interview with Mozilla's European head, Tristan Nitot. And for a web developer's take, see what Marcus Dyson, CEO of leading UK web developers, eleventeenth has to say.

Is Chrome more than just a web browser, though? Dan Grabham thinks its all part of a bigger plan. And over on the Editor's Blog, Nick Merritt lines up the companies that are going to be less than happy to see Chrome arrive on the web.

Wednesday featured a fascinating insight into how Googlers use their 20 per cent time - the scheme that allows Google's engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't part of their day-to-day jobs.

We also posted more on Google Chrome, including our hands-on Google Chrome review and 30 essential Google Chrome tips. We also pitted Google Chrome against IE8 beta 2 and Firefox 3.1, and then test Google Chrome against Opera and Safari.

On a lighter note, we took a look at how different the web and the world around us would be in a world without Google and examine five jobs you never thought would exist at Google. Really. We've talked to the chef. We've quizzed the guy who Googlifies the office, too and more besides.

To round off Google week, we've profiled some of the work that is going in in Google Labs. Read about how search is evolving in Secrets from Google's Labs.

We hope you've enjoyed reading our Google week coverage as much as we've enjoyed writing it!

In Depth: Secrets from Google's labs

John Brandon — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Google has become a behemoth of innovation and a harbinger of intellectual capital.

Yet, despite its obviously self-written Google Finance summary that says it "maintains an index of websites and other online content," the company is actually a dual-purpose entity. It's a very successful experiment in social engineering (where people flock to its Internet properties) and a vast advertising network (where those same people see countless ads).

Google has tapped – like no other company – the power of several million or perhaps billion sites that serve its ad links, usually for free. It's an amazing concept: if you build powerful and useful tools and establish your company as an Internet oracle, you can attract millions of people to your advertising network and fuel even more innovation. If it fails at innovation, people will stop using its ad system and its revenue could start to fizzle out. We're here to tell you: that is not going to happen, because we have seen the future of Google in the form of its ongoing research projects.

Universal 'one-box' search

Universal search – or 'one box' search – has to do with how the company presents search results. In 2007, in a subtle yet important change, Google shifted from presenting just text links to more universal results that include photos, news, blog entries, video and even book excerpts.

David Bailey, a Google engineer, says they are experimenting with the algorithms for universal search. For example, if you use the term 'Martin Luther King' you may see more archival information, such as book excerpts and far fewer news reports. If you search for a movie star, you may see more news, YouTube videos or photos. The implication here is that Google is categorising through artificial intelligence: during the split second that the company analyses its database of web indexes, it's also analysing the term, figuring out how to present the UI so it's more focused on images, text or video. Yet, it's going deeper than that. For video, as an example, it's analysing the file size, codec, star ratings and other data to determine the best video results.

Google has also moved away from 'operators' such as 'movie:iron man' that dictate results. Power users can still use this search syntax, but Google automatically looks at your search term (for instance, 'Iron Man'), knows it's a recent movie and so presents showtimes and reviews. Universal search is also becoming more 'web 2.0' aware and crawls through details such as Yelp.com restaurant reviews or Zillow.com home prices to present more detailed results. "A big part of my job is to shine a spotlight into all these remote corners of the web," explains Bailey.

What is actually happening with universal search is that Google has an index of each category for photos, web, blog entries and so on. These indexes are database files almost continually updated by crawling the web and searching through millions of URLs. In a very real sense, the heart of the company – these indexes – depend on the processing power of the Google server farms that crawl the web. Bailey says that this confluence of categorisation requires more and more data centres, more electricity and more processing power as the web continues to expand. At the moment it's hard to see what the end result of universal search could be, because it will continue to evolve and become more intelligent.

Language translation

Most of Google's efforts in translation have revolved around 'language pairs' – the translation from one language to another. It has focused on two areas: developing new language pairs and improving the algorithms used for translating pairs.

As for improving existing language pairs, the main challenge has been in understanding idioms and emerging language use (an ongoing battle), but also breaking down sentence structures using artificial intelligence. For example, in English, a verb might come at the end of a sentence, whereas in Japanese it might come at the beginning. When languages have similar historic roots, such as French and Spanish, the language pairing is easier.

With Japanese and Korean, for example, the project goal is to accumulate more and more data about the language which is more difficult to translate. The more data it has about a language's morphology, the easier it can translate it into other languages.

Developing new language pairs – such as English to Finnish – is even more difficult. The most difficult languages to pair are those that have a vast morphology (the units of language and how they fit together to form into meanings). The Finnish language in particular has a rich morphology where one word used with another can form into an expression that has inherent meaning, such as race or gender, which the individual words do not have.

These word pairs are complex and the more processing power you throw at the problem, the more accurate the results. Google operates two translation engines, one for public use that is faster but less accurate, and one internal (and experimental) engine that runs slower and is more accurate. The internal project runs on faster server farms, has richer data sets and uses better algorithms. "Putting more data into the system makes language translation better," says Franz Och, a Google research scientist.

It's interesting to note that machine translation is less about human knowledge of a language and more about data collection. Few members of the Google translation team can actually speak the languages they are translating, but they are very good at collecting the morphological data. In the end, translation is a major test of data collection and software programming prowess, and will continue to evolve – making it easier for users to both learn and use a language in their daily lives.

Computer vision search

Computer vision is one of the most difficult problems in computer science. The idea is to have a computer analyse an image and recognise it through artificial intelligence.

The implications are profound: if a computer recognises images, it can process them more accurately. Think of a bank account. If a computer could analyse a live video of you and verify your identity, your account would be much more secure. At Google, computer vision is less about security and more about indexing the image data. Today, when you search for 'Lindsay Lohan', the results presented are based on metatag data attributed to photos of the starlet. Some of those attributions are wrong, which is why sometimes results are returned that are inaccurate.

Computer vision, conversely, analyses the space between the eyes, nose shape, forehead width and other data, and compares them to a reference image. This analysis applies equally to video and photos and it's much more accurate. In a demo at Google, Shumeet Baluja – a Google research scientist – showed how a computer vision search for George Bush returned a series of videos of the US president's recent speeches.

One implication of computer vision search – once it evolves beyond a simple recognition phase – is that you could then categorise the results. Google is focused only on detection today, but its mission is all about categorisation. Computer vision will aid the company in building a library of searchable images and video beyond just text descriptions and metatags.

The first step in computer vision search is to analyse a database of millions of videos and images to see if there is a face. Baluja says most of its resources in computer vision are currently dedicated to just detection: is there a face? The next step is to perform the pattern matching against the reference image or video.

The company uses multiple approaches to detection: comparison to the reference, analysis of the image itself and comparison against other search results. A 'classifier' gathers all statistics describing an image, such as skin tones, shadows, facial hair and other attributes. These classifiers are fed into what Baluja calls 'visual rank', which determines the accuracy of the search. They decide which images form the basis for what the person normally looks like. That's why, in the Lindsay Lohan search, a cartoon of her might appear much lower in the search results.

Eventually, Google will apply its computer vision research to more than just faces. For example, Baluja explained that they plan to use a visual search system for products. When you type the search term 'Apple iPhone', you might want to see a computer vision search that shows the device in use in the field, the iconic image from Apple or the cartoon images where people make fun of the 'Jesus phone'. Baluja says they are agnostic about the kind of images they are searching, but the main goal is to provide results that they think its customers want, which could in turn raise advertising revenues.

Google Android update

Android is the most important project at Google. Part software platform for mobile phones and part third-party development initiative, Android could dictate the future of Google.

More and more users are searching the Internet from their phones, and the phone itself is evolving into a computer platform. In the future, there may be no desktop or laptop computers; instead, the only computer you use could be your phone, especially once computer scientists figure out complex issues as speech-to-text recognition, cell phone video projection and virtual keyboards.

Google knows that this platform shift will happen and it has chosen to be much more involved in the core architecture. It's interesting to note that Google fans were disappointed when they realised Google will not be releasing an Apple iPhone competitor. Yet, it turns out Google has much loftier ambitions: to deliver the OS for future computers.

In another interesting twist to the story, Android itself is not a fully functional OS with all the applets and features you would ever need. Instead, Google has tapped a much more extensive resource of third-party developers. The model is similar to the one Nokia uses with the Symbian OS (which it just squired) where the most innovative applications are all user created. Its recent developer challenge led to some amazingly innovative apps that can determine your location and help you find a taxi, feed weather information to your location-aware device or let you search for movie showtimes.

The Android platform is a departure from the hub and spoke model of the iPhone. There is no home screen. Instead, all apps can run concurrently and are 'application aware'. You can click on a contact and click an option to see a map of where that person lives, dial their mobile phone, copy the data to a clipboard or browse for it on the web. Applications can share information between them as well: a contact program can pull information from a spreadsheet.

Oddly, while every other Google project involves hard factual data and some interesting implications for real world use, most of the Android project seems to depend on the users to tap the power of the OS. For example, when we spoke with Erick Tseng, the Android product manager, he could not quantify for us whether Android would support multitouch (where you can zoom in or pan across an image using your fingers) or haptics (where the device provides a tactile response).

Instead, he says the developer community would have to develop those features. Tseng wouldn't let us see an Android phone, although he did say that he has been using one 'for months' as his primary phone. It's possible that Google has deferred all of the power and capability of Android to the user base, which would be disastrous.

The platform seems to be less a competitor to the Blackberry or iPhone and more like a marginal gadget such as the Chumby Wi-Fi radio, which also relies almost entirely on user-created open source apps for innovation. Many of these apps are clunky and poorly designed. Still, the results of the development challenge reveal that there is hope for the platform, even if the specifics are still sketchy. Google has been saying for some time that the first Android-powered devices will ship by the end of 2008.

There's another major challenge in store for Android, however. If the OS does support innovative APIs for multitouch, haptics and other features, and if the developer community creates some truly innovative apps, Google must also contend with the complexities of dealing with mobile phone carriers.

In most cases (other than the Apple iPhone), carriers dictate not only what services are offered on a phone, but which software. For example, on the Motorola Q in the US, Sprint dictates exactly how you can download and use a ringtone. You can't just download any ringtone and use it on the phone. Google seems to think that mobile carriers support open-source software just as much as it does, which is not true.

Energy initiatives

Google's energy initiatives are clearly designed to be an example. Some, in fact, seem a bit superfluous or over-the-top in terms of practical implications. For example, any employee can 'check out' a hybrid car – located in an openair shade port that is itself powered by a solar array on the roof – for a few hours. Considering there are just a handful of cars but the company has over 19,000 employees, it's hard to see how the hybrid car strategy is anything but an example to help encourage environmental awareness.

Similarly, six buildings and two parking garages at Google have solar arrays on the roof. In total, 9,612 panels provide about 1.6 megaWatts of power. They provide about 30 per cent of peak power usage, so it could be said that two out of every 10 computers is powered by solar energy.

The reason the arrays only provide 30 per cent of the total power has to do with the energy density of the office buildings. It's much higher than that of a typical home due to how many lights are on all day and the number of computers and other electrical components running.

Google App Engine

Looking back in time decades hence, it might be possible to say that Google officially built 'the computing cloud' on April 7, 2008. That's when the company released Google App Engine (formerly known as Big Table), an infrastructure for companies to host their applications on the web instead of internally.

There are several advantages to the cloud: easier maintenance, reliable archives, anywhere access and a common UI. Of course, App Engine also has a few intangibles and disadvantages, including privacy concerns when a company hands over its data to a web host, offline access (which Google counteracts with Google Gears), speed of access over the Internet and such hard to predict factors as programming environment.

Pete Koomen, the product manager for App Engine, says the project has been underway since the summer of 2007. When we talked to Koomen, it was unclear whether the company even had any customers using the project. "The motivation behind App Engine is to combat the challenges of developing applications," says Koomen.

"When you decide to build an application, you have to define and provision machines, configure SQL and Apache, configuring files – none of this is rocket science, but it takes time and money. The second challenge is when an app starts to get traffic it's difficult to scale – with SQL for example, you might have to shard up machines, de-normalising data – and a lot of this is not taken into account when they first start out."

Koomen says App Engine is the result of Google itself bundling and scaling applications – a trial by fire, so to speak – which benefits from its distributed server architecture. Essentially, this means any app will run with the resources it needs at the time of operation and scales automatically. Failover, load balancing and distributed data stores (data split over multiple machines) all contribute to the scalability. Developers can use Google authentication and email APIs.

Today, it runs only on Python, but Google is working on expanding the language offerings quickly. So far, most of the activity in the App Engine project has been related to research docs and requests submitted by users – it's still unclear exactly who is or will be using it, especially in light of the success of Amazon web services like EC2.

How many of these projects will be a raging success for Google is hard to tell. Android seems like it's an early platform that is untested and carriers may decide to abandon ship. Machine translation and computer vision are ongoing projects, but early demos for visual search show promise.

Universal search is a fully functioning part of its search platform today that is already evolving. These projects are key to understanding Google's future and legacy in technology – which is sure to be great indeed.