It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong.

Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it finally launched its own worldwide, all-phones application store. It correctly anticipated a software market for smartphones back in the mid-1990s, when it was choosing the technology to fulfill this vision.

That was just one of the bets that came good. Leafing through old copies of WiReD magazine from the dot.com era, filled with gushing praise for Enron, Global Crossing, and er, Zippies, I was struck by the quality of the foresight in a cover feature about Nokia. (Have a look for yourself.) WAP didn’t work out, but I was struck by particularly Leningrad Cowboy Mato Valtonen’s assessment that “mobile is the Internet with billing built in”.

And so Nokia has been encouraging users to download applications for users. My ancient 6310i wants me to download applications. Every Nokia since has wanted me to, too. Seven years ago, the first Series 60 phone (the 7650) put the Apps client on the top level menu, next to Contacts and Messaging.

The problem is today, it’s Apple and BlackBerry who have the thriving third party smartphone software markets. For six months, punters have been bombarded with iPhone ads showing what you can do with third-party apps. And yes, it’s like Palm all over again, but they’re very effective. So if Apple’s store is the model, then what on earth is Ovi?
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…Read more at The Register

…Read more at The Register

The UK’s climate act is “all but certain to fail” and alternative approaches should be considered, according to a new study. The act commits the UK to cut its CO2 emissions by a third in just 13 years, and by 80 per cent by 2050.

Roger Pielke Jr is a professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and a visiting professor at University of Oxford’s Said Business School who has accepted the case for cutting carbon emissions. However, in a new journal article he says the Act is unrealistic, setting symbolic and therefore meaningless targets instead of practical policy.

A projected UK population of 82 million by 2050 would produce 80 per cent more than the CC Act’s target. Assuming modest growth of 1.3 per cent over the period, the goal becomes even more unrealistic.

“This level of growth would add another 440 Mt of carbon dioxide to the 2050 total, for a total of about 1,200 Mt – ten times the 2050 target. And in 2022 this rate of growth would add about another 135 Mt of carbon dioxide emissions, for a total of 738 Mt, approaching twice the 2022 target.” Pielke writes.
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The BBC’s environmental coverage has come under fire from a former science correspondent. Award-winning author and journalist David Whitehouse says the corporation risks public ridicule – or worse – with what he calls “an evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.”

Whitehouse relates how he was ticked off for taking a cautious approach to apocalyptic predictions when a link between BSE in cattle (“Mad Cow Disease”) and vCJD in humans was accepted by government officials in 1996. Those predictions “…rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data,” he writes.

“My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly.”

The Beeb wasn’t alone. With bloodthirsty glee, the Observer newspaper at the time predicted millions infected, crematoria full of smoking human remains – and the government handing out suicide pills to the public. Whitehouse feels his caution is now vindicated. The number of cases traced to vCJD in the UK is now 163 – and the only suicides were farmers who had feared their livelihoods destroyed.

Writes Whitehouse:

“Reporting the consensus about climate change…is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn’t believe them anymore.”

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Ed Richards cocked a sympathetic ear to the troubles of the commercial radio business yesterday – but the Ofcom chief could offer little in the way of instant pain relief.

With an end-of-life government meandering to its termination, and Carter’s Digital Britain review soaking up all the attention of bickering departments, he can’t set policy.

Largely as a result of their own greed, financial miscalculations and lack of innovation, large radio companies are suffering. They want to slash costs and merge. Richards, who was addressing the “Radio 3.0″ conference in London, listed his preferred solutions. One was to put more emphasis on news and local radio as a community information service. (You could almost hear teeth grind at that one). This was especially useful “during flooding or heavy snow” or other times of crisis. (The grinding continued).
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The music business has set up a lemonade stand outside its house and it’s giving away lemonade for free. Not surprisingly, people love the free lemonade, and the stall has drawn a large and enthusiastic crowd. The stand is called Spotify.

The business justifies this because it’s so easy for us to get their music for free elsewhere. With very little effort, you can obtain it simply by appending a magic word (‘torrent’ or ‘rapidshare’ usually do the trick) to the artist you’re looking for in Google.

Acquiring it may not be pleasant: doing so may help support a neo-Nazi with a grudge. But many people are prepared to hold their breath, because you can fill up your iPod or phone with music without paying any more than your monthly internet fee. That fee is a bit of a bummer – why can’t it all be free? – but a modest outgoing on a computer and an internet connection saves a lot of money.

The business looks down on this free and easy access to its assets quite understandably. Because if it’s all free, then investment in making sound recordings will evaporate. Only fools invest in businesses which aren’t going to make any money.

You’re following, I hope.

So to compete with businesses which don’t make any money and give away free music, they’re backing a business which doesn’t make any money, and gives away music for free. It’s genius.

But it gets better.

Read more at The Register

A study of P2P music exchanges to be revealed this week suggests that the ailing music business is shunning a lucrative lifeline by refusing to license the activity for money.

Entitled “The Long Tail of P2P”, the study by Will Page of performing rights society PRS For Music and Eric Garland of P2P research outfit Big Champagne will be aired at The Great Escape music convention tomorrow. It’s a follow-up to Page’s study last year which helped debunk the myth of the “Long Tail”. Page examined song purchases at a large online digital retail store, which showed that out of an inventory of 13 million songs, 10 million had never been downloaded, even once. It suggested that the idea proposed by WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson, who in 2004 urged that the future of business was digital retailers carrying larger inventories of slow-selling items was a Utopian fantasy.

The P2P networks are harder to quantify, but apparently show a similar pattern, where most of the action – and profit – is in the ‘head’. Each Top 100 CD on on PirateBay averaged 58,000 downloads a week, for example. Lady GaGa’s The Fame was downloaded 388,000 times in a week from PirateBay alone. Like its predecessor, the new study also finds that downloads follow a log-normal, rather a Pareto (or “power curve”) distribution as Anderson envisaged. The WiReD man had guessed the shape of the internet – and picked the wrong shape.

Read more at The Register.

Google, the nemesis of newspapers, was at the Congress yesterday, to turn a blonde deaf ear to their troubles. The company’s pin-up VP of products Marissa Meyer described quite a bright future to the Senate’s commerce committee – but it’s a bright future for Google, and people with a lot of time fiddling with their computers. Also testifying was creator of The Wire David Simon.

Let’s contrast how each of them addressed the crisis.

Meyer said Google’s policy “first and foremost” was to respect the wishes of content producers, but offered nothing in the way of new business partnerships. Instead, she gave them a short but haughty lecture on how they should present their stories – they should become more like Wikipedia:

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she said in her statement. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

So instead of publishing 50 stories a day, the implication is that publications should only publish 50 a year – tweaking those 50 constantly, in the hope they wriggle up through the Google search results. Yes, that’ll fix things.

She also said they should offer more scope for mash-ups. At both ends of the news chain, then, you have people fiddling – instead of writing (at one end) and reading (at the other). That’s very Web 2.0, and you couldn’t get a clearer statement that Google doesn’t really understand what news is for. (It’s merely the stuff that goes between the BODY tags, silly.)

The creator of The Wire and former reporter David Simon said he found the phrase “citizen journalism” Orwellian. He added:

“A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor – he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to social workers and firefighters.”

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Google, the nemesis of newspapers, was at the Congress yesterday, to turn a blonde deaf ear to their troubles. The company’s pin-up VP of products Marissa Meyer described quite a bright future to the Senate’s commerce committee – but it’s a bright future for Google, and people with a lot of time fiddling with their computers. Also testifying was creator of The Wire David Simon.

Let’s contrast how each of them addressed the crisis.

Meyer said Google’s policy “first and foremost” was to respect the wishes of content producers, but offered nothing in the way of new business partnerships. Instead, she gave them a short but haughty lecture on how they should present their stories – they should become more like Wikipedia:

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she said in her statement. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

So instead of publishing 50 stories a day, the implication is that publications should only publish 50 a year – tweaking those 50 constantly, in the hope they wriggle up through the Google search results. Yes, that’ll fix things.

She also said they should offer more scope for mash-ups. At both ends of the news chain, then, you have people fiddling – instead of writing (at one end) and reading (at the other). That’s very Web 2.0, and you couldn’t get a clearer statement that Google doesn’t really understand what news is for. (It’s merely the stuff that goes between the BODY tags, silly.)

The creator of The Wire and former reporter David Simon said he found the phrase “citizen journalism” Orwellian. He added:

“A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor – he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to social workers and firefighters.”

(more…)