Tech startups that can truly be considered game-changers are rare – especially in Shoreditch. The more hype that the Silicon Roundabout “leisure startup” scene receives, the more painfully apparent it is that the emperor has no clothes – see these comments for example. Which is a pity, for less attention is paid to genuinely creative British tech startups.

I’ve rarely seen something as startling as Muvizu, the PC software from Digimania which allows a seven-year-old to start creating something a lot like Toy Story. The startup emerged from the ashes of the DA Group, which was previously Digital Animations. New investors took over the ashes and had an idea.

Perhaps the 3D power of games engines such as Unreal could be put to make a genuinely easy-to-use, consumer-level animation software. The development team had the chops for this; it was the team behind animated newsreader Anna Nova, for those of you who remember the first dot.com boom. And so Muvizu was unveiled two years ago.

You can get a glimpse of what you can do with it from this video – our sister site Reg Hardware reviewed it recently here.

It’s still a tiny startup in Glasgow, with a core team of half a dozen developers, but since then it has added a clutch of features: you can build your own models and characters, edit timelines, move cameras, create custom textures, and introduce anti-aliasing. Huge libraries of animations and art assets are now available. You can’t import your own characters – but you can customise with textures.

It has notched up 138,000 downloads since August 2010, CEO Vince Ryan tells us. Muvizu took a community approach – and it is a lively place for users to share and swap assets and collaborate. It’s useful for anything from 30 second funnies to in-house training videos.

But with no visible revenue, I was curious to see how Muvizu was paying the rent. Long-term it makes an enviable acquisition target for an Adobe or a Google – but for now it’s looking to collaborate with animation companies, toy-makers or TV companies that want to extend their brand to their fanbase, allowing them to knock together their own stories and content.

A new version is due on 19 December.

There were many other clever things about it, such as a very slick integration of music news. But the killer feature, one that made it unique, was that you could also drop songs you liked into a little box, and keep permanently. This was genuine P2P file sharing. There were no strings attached – no DRM, no expiry, no locker (your stash was your hard drive) and no additional fees for this feature.

And it was all legal.

The truly remarkable thing was that it wasn’t some UI designer’s fantasy, a mock-up created in his bedroom, but a real service backed by one of Britain’s biggest ISPs. This was the original Virgin Media Music Unlimited. Virgin had invested millions in it, with dedicated servers installed around the UK to bring this world-beating British innovation to the masses.

And then, weeks before it was due to go live, two of the suppliers in the music industry got cold feet, obliging Virgin Media to put the project permanently on hold. As with News International’s Project Alesia, the original VMMU was a great glimpse of the future from the vantage point of the present. It’s a future that will certainly come, but currently it seems a long, long way away.

Last night Facebook unveiled shared music streaming, so friends can listen to the same stream and comment on it. But that’s it. The deep music integration that Virgin Media valued is still missing.

As is something else rather important.

There is no new money is coming into this system.

The potential income available to Facebook remains the same as before, but it’s now divvied up between one more tier of suppliers, who, in turn, divvy it up between lots more people. Analyst Mark Mulligan writes today that “Facebook has made itself into a cable company for music services”, which is quite astute; it’s a platform, of sorts. But if business means creating value, and value creation means getting people to open their wallets for something new, then this really isn’t a “business” at all. It’s a pretend one.
Engineering works

This week Rory Sutherland, in his ever-excellent Wiki Man column in the Speccie, laments that the media is obsessed with communications technology at the expense of highlighting engineering innovation in the physical world.

“Steve Jobs has sometimes been described as the 21st Century’s answer to Edison, but perhaps we need a 21st Century answer to Brunel,” he writes.

He’s right – and it’s actually a lot worse than he thinks. For years I’ve been lamenting the lack of engineering values on the web itself – which many moons ago I described as “a bunch of presentation-layer people attempting to solve infrastructure-type problems”. The result today is the Shoreditch “tech scene”, in which nontrepreneurs stroll between endless “meetups”, avoiding the nasty particulars of creating value, being original, or ever solving a technical problem.

A step in the right direction would be Brunel-type thinking for how to make digital networks better, because half of the internet we need is still missing. It hasn’t been written. The net currently lacks the convenience of many aspects of every day life – and the half that’s missing are payment platforms, credit systems and deep supply side reform of businesses around these. These in turn address lots of deep problems, such as risk and liability and pricing, and allow people to create something with a lot of consumer convenience.

But what Rory really identifies, I think, is more than just sociological, a case of the wrong people being employed across Shoreditch and beyond. What he highlights is a desperate lack of optimism and ambition across capital investment, entrepreneurship and engineering. To make VMMU work required enormous challenges to be met. And a lot of cojones by almost everyone involved, from music suppliers (labels and publishers), the service provider MSP, and the retailer Virgin, who had to worry about liabilities and was ultimately unable to overcome them.

That ambition seems to be absent.

And in its absence, we still have to coo and gasp about how marvellous it is to have music streaming from a widget on a social network. ®

Dull people will always cheer a bold experiment that goes wrong. After July 2001, Apple’s design team never again attempted anything as daring or distinctive. It has produced beautiful designs, and unarguably influenced consumer technology design more than any one else.

But essentially, its computer designs are variations on the same theme. The professional laptops have continued in their rectangular, razor-like way. Even the iPad looks very much like how you’d expect a media slate to look like, for example.

But the Cube was different. The Cube looked like Buckminster Fuller talked; the Cube looked like it might have fallen to earth from an advanced civilisation, eager to escape orbit and looking to throw some ballast overboard. Or like a millionaire had given a mad bloke on a bus an unlimited budget.

“Hello. You look like you’ve done a lot of LSD. Well, here’s several million dollars – go and design a computer, any shape you want. Just make sure it hangs upside down.”

We don’t have enough of this sort of thing – Apple’s design is clever but it’s now conservative, and this conservatism seemed to set in a decade ago. (Although the plans for its new corporate HQ complex show signs of the same daring and ambition).

I’ll confess here that I loved the G4 Cube and still do. Until a couple of years ago, one was chugging away on my desk in the Reg office – it literally chugged – and another had a stint tethered to the home HiFi.

I’ve had five Cubes in all, although only two were healthy enough to do any work. I can’t part with the fifth. In a few years it will be hauled out of storage to power a child-friendly Firewire keyboard or Pangea Software’s Bugdom (“Ladybug” is already a hit with one of my toddlers).

Cubes evidently fascinate Steve Jobs, too. The first Mac was a near Cube, and his first NeXT machine was perfectly cubic. When Apple launched its flagship New York retail store, you can guess what shape it was.

What was it all about?

Unveiled at the height of dot.com exuberance, the Cube was the “fifth” product in a four product portfolio – the first of several paradoxes (we will explore a few more) and surely a sign something wasn’t quite right. It didn’t fit from the start. The new marvel was launched alongside three new matching monitors, two LED and one CRT, a new design of keyboard and mouse (not exclusive to the Cube) and Harmon Kardon produced a three-piece speaker to match.

The product wasn’t a cube – the actual computer was an eight-inch cube, suspended in a thick, but clear ten-inch housing. Like Skylon, the essential design conceit was to give the impression of the thing floating above the surface.

In a typical Jobs touch, there was no mechanical switch visible on any surface (although there was a tiny “programmer’s” reset switch underneath). The innards of the machine were one central core, which lifted right out very simply in one piece. And it was designed to operate without a fan: a convection system drew in air from a desk-level opening at the rear, and distributed it out through the grill at the top.

A silent supercomputer is what Apple emphasised. And it was priced accordingly. The Cube came in above the price of the cheapest professional PowerMac, using the latest G4 processor that had only just trickled onto the market the previous fall, at $1,799.

A faster model available only through the online Apple store (Apple had no retail stores back then) was priced at $2,299. Sans monitor. The cheapest PowerMac, announced the same day, cost $1,599.

The Riddle of the Cube

It emphasised minaturisation, but it was actually quite a formidable beast. It demanded to be placed in view – which meant being placed on a desk, and from there it dominated its space.

It was harder to hide the peripherals, too, which inevitably detracted from the clean lines emphasised in the video above. It also hid a hefty secret – a very large (but naturally well designed) power brick dangled on the floor underneath.

As for the vaunted silent operation, well, the intentions were right, and the execution was mostly brilliant. In the Cube’s original configurations, it didn’t need a fan, and it didn’t overheat. Users though, expecting the first version of Mac OS X to drop at any moment, clamoured for the model with the more powerful ATI Radeon 32GB VRAM graphics card – which did have a fan, and a fairly audible one.

There was a bigger problem.

The designers seem to have overlooked the spinning disk drive which transmitted vibration down directly through the plastic, into the desk – making it almost as obtrusive as a desktop machine. You felt the Cube up through your elbows.

The story is now well known of how cracks appeared in the casing, and the press gleefully ran with the story. Apple denied them, explaining they were “mould lines”. What was harder to live with was the power switch.

In theory, you simply placed your finger on the smooth plastic, over a static capacitor concealed within. In a forerunner of the iPhone screen, it was activated using the body’s static capacitance. It could be easily activated by accident – but worse, it responded to light and heat as well as human bodies.

Our publisher was unfortunate enough to decide to put it in a conservatory, where it turned itself on and off as it pleased. Years later it would do the same thing for me in San Francisco. It was never rectified – you had to seal off the sensor underneath with some masking tape..

The press marveled at it, and the Cube began to appear on reception desks at design studios, advertising agencies and dot.coms. Clones began to appear.

But by October it was clear sales were poor, and Apple was offering refunds to bring down the price, effectively throwing in a monitor for free. Apple blamed a poor quarter on lower-than-expected Cube sales. By early 2001 the dot.com bubble was bursting, throwing the economy into a recession. Less than 100,000 Cubes had been shifted.

In March 2001, MacUser reported the team had been disbanded. MacWorld reported that was buying back Cubes from the retail channel, quoting a CompUSA salesman as saying: “When you sell only a couple of Cubes in a month, no price decrease in the world will matter.”

On July 3, Apple put out a statement confirming that it had decided “to suspend production of the Power Mac G4 Cube indefinitely”. Apple wouldn’t put out a headless Mac until 2005, with the Mac Mini. But this was aimed at the budget buyer, used laptop parts rather than premium components for performance, and had none of the style of the Cube. It was designed to be ignored, and not the centre of attention.

What went wrong?

f it had launched a year or two earlier, in the insane spending spree of the dot.com era, it may have been a different story. But Apple’s marketing suggests it too was nervous about the appeal.

The five-minute promotional video introduces it as a “super computer” – and the original press release emphasised a “Pentium-busting” performance. But it was no more of a “super computer” than its G4 siblings in the PowerMac line. This suggests a lack of confidence in the design – Apple felt it had to be utilitarian, too.

Pulling out the reactor core

It hadn’t helped that Apple had missed the Napster era. PCs came with CD burners while Apple insisted machines were sold with DVDs or CD drives. Apple certainly made up for it in 2001, starting with the “Rip Mix and Burn” campaign – and version 1.0 of iTunes. And it never forgot the importance of music – creating the digital music retail market in 2003, where labels had failed.

The problem was that Apple’s customer base was really bifurcated into two camps back then – students and consumers who wanted an all-in-one, and looked for value, and the professionals who expected to expand their machines. The Cube was too expensive for the former, and too restrictive for the pros.
Getting Cubic now

Yet the unworldly design created a fiercely loyal fanbase who supported the market for add-ons. A succession of strong CPU upgrades, from Powerlogix, Giga and Sonnet, which took the Cube up to dual 1.7Ghz G4. There were also beefier, Quartz Extreme-capable graphics cards made available. Third parties even manufactured larger cubic cases – these were needed for the fans and cooling systems.

The community lives on and gathers at Cubeowner.com, where the affection for the machines is evident. Do check out the galleries.

In the UK, you can pick one up for anywhere between £100 and £150 on eBay. The expansion options are limited, ruling out USB 2.0 cards for example, and you’ll be stuck with a Parallel ATA drive that needs special drivers for drives larger than 120MB. But it will still run Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger well enough to get some work done. The problem is the bus speed is constrained; at 167Mhz it’s ten times slower than a 1Ghz CPU, for example.

My first Cube was late adn DOA, and so was the second. Its replacement arrived two months later, spluttered for three weeks and then expired. All were motherboard blow-outs. It was enough to repel anyone but a fanatic from demanding another, so I didn’t.

It was 2006 before I picked up a cheap Cube that had been upgraded to a noisy 800Mhz G4 with thanks to Sonnet. But it did great service for a couple of more years. You just had to leave a note on the desk reminding people not to leave their newspaper on the grill …

The Cube remains a quite bonkers, and quite brilliant expression of a particular design – a really outrageous statement. There was no reason it should ever have been cubic, let alone suspended in mid air. It should never have been made – we should be glad it was. ®

At a typically oversold launch event yesterday, Zuckerberg complained about the “friction” generated by having to compose a simple email. You had to type a subject line in, he said, incorrectly, making people wonder if he’d ever used email himself. It’s too formal, he concluded. The poor love – I’m surprised he hasn’t thought about suing the developers of POP3 for emotional distress, as well as repetitive strain injury.

The Facebook plan is to integrate email and SMS into Facebook, into one great big inbox, which will be stored forever. And which will naturally drown people who are not on Facebook under a tide of real-time chaff – Web2.0rhea, as we call it here.

The irony here is that Facebook is already a privatised messaging platform. It has got to where it is on merit, I think – it is a rich and nicely implemented UI. Ordinary people think of it as a quite natural “upgrade” to the Hotmail and Yahoo! mail services that they were using 10 years ago. These gradually got inundated with spam and special offers. Maybe Facebook will too, but for now, “communicating” means stopping at Facebook first – because people’s friends are there – and then (more wearily) logging into Hotmail and wading through the promotional coupons, special offers, bogus solicitations to login to your bank account, and Viagra advertisements.

It might strike some people as unfair to think of Facebook as the new Microsoft. People, who’ve drunk the liberation theology Kool Aid of Web 2.0 suppose that the web is a kind of Garden of Eden, where startups are always bright and inventive, where disputes are set aside, and where the good guys generally win.

Microsoft liked to keep its email protocols proprietary, of course. Outlook email is just bog-standard email protocols, wrapped in overly complicated and non-standard DCE/RPC calls. Hotmail and Exchange Server used another internet protocol, WebDAV, which while not as impenetrable still required some work to talk to. Facebook hasn’t had to do it at all. It already has a critical mass of users, which is essentially a privatised address book.

(I’ve railed against the paucity of email clients recently – I realise it’s a minority pursuit, and protocols haven’t evolved as fast as the web services. But from your response – 70 emails on a Sunday – I know I’m not alone in ruing this a little).

Don’t count your pokes

However I fear that hubris is Zuckerberg’s middle name, and things may not go as smoothly as Facebook hopes.

Typically, Zuckerberg hasn’t thought through the implications of the integration for people who aren’t like Zuckerberg (and think subject lines are mandatory, and adding a salutation (“okthxbye”) creates “friction”.

The major design error is supposing that people value all communications equally, at the same flat level, and that messages from the boss who sends one every six months are of equal importance to the Twittering ex-colleague who sends 45 a day.

Each communication medium we use has different norms, and of course different levels of privacy – something Facebook emphatically brushed aside yesterday. How will Facebook acknowledge this? Perhaps it will hire some more UX gurus and give email a slightly different hue of some pastel shade in the inbox. That’ll fix it.

Facebook’s “social inbox” is anything but. It doesn’t really help people on the outside reach people on the inside. It doesn’t help Facebookers manage their communications with people on the outside. It’s another argument that because Web 2.0 designers don’t understand the subtleties and contradictions of real human relationships, they can’t create software that helps real people.

In the last century, an intellectual fashion swept out of psychology, where it had been born, into policy making. BF Skinner was a utopian who believed man could be changed for the better. He suggested we were the results of our conditioning, and our behaviour could be trained, much as rats can be trained to urinate on command. “Behaviourism” had great appeal to politicians, as well as advertisers. It was a nasty “-ism” that fell out of favour for several reasons. One of these was Skinner’s insistence that we are incapable of constructing our own environment.

Web 2.0 sees the return of behaviourism, but with a smiley face. It forces us to respond in a limited numbers of ways. But we continue to choose our mediums, and construct our own environments. Zuckerberg has made the same mistake as Skinner.

Earlier this year, Google tried to turn Gmail into Facebook. Facebook is trying to embrace and extend email. Is it wicked to wish that both of these data-hoarders learn a vital lesson from this?

Read responses to this article in our Mailbag.

So what does Opera plan to do with this trove? First, let’s have a look how it came about.

Cache riches

Six years ago, two Opera engineers came up with a way of saving mobile operators money, by compressing web pages and sending them over slow, high-latency 2G cellular links in binary chunks. WAP had tried to do the same thing with WSP, but nowhere near as efficiently, and WAP required websites to created content in the WML format.

Opera’s insight was that CPU time on servers was cheap, but on a humble mobile phone, CPU and bandwidth were very expensive. A web page may need to talk to 20 other servers, and some of these need to talk to other servers. This bricolage then needs to be reassembled locally, a task that has increasingly taxed CPUs over the years. (A CSS file contains conflicting positioning information using several co-ordinate systems – these are resolved locally.)

Opera initially offered the technology as a caching proxy [1] to operators, called Mobile Accelerator. Then it decided to offer it directly to end users, via a new small lightweight browser [2] that talked directly to a proxy hosted by Opera itself. The Opera Mini client could run on all kinds of phones and its popularity grew and grew. Opera’s servers, which were originally in its downtown Oslo HQ, had to be moved outside, and soon became a major server operation. You can see it pictured here [3].

Now compare Google’s “transaction engine” with Opera’s “transaction engine”, and the Norwegian’s offering looks potentially very valuable indeed. Users spend far more time passing through the mobile cache than they do on Google. As well as searches, it contains destinations – news pages, social networking pages and emails. That’s what behavioural advertisers want. This wouldn’t be hard to do, and would involve injecting an advertisement into the binary stream that trickles into the Mini browser. But it’s also precisely what makes it a No Go zone for the company, says Opera.

Because its users trust Opera with such intimate information, the company feels it can’t engage in any Phorm-like behavioural exploitation. Break the bond of trust and they’ll destroy the business. Once upon a time, Google had a similar philosophy – Don’t Get Too Creepy Today (I may have mis-remembered that). Even Google does behavioural advertising now, but it’s very careful not to use the b-word [4].

In addition, Opera doesn’t feel it needs to. Opera has a few ideas on how it will make money in the future however, and some are evolutions of what it does today. So we’ll examine these for a second, before looking at what it’s got planned.

Auctions speak louder than (key)words

Today Opera’s income comes from three streams: licensing and royalties in one stream, income from active users and transactions in another stream, and “internet economy” income such as driving referrals to search engines as a third. The latter, by the way, is what keeps Mozilla afloat. So mobile networks pay to use Opera’s server technology because it saves them bandwidth, and improves the end-user experience.

Opera believes the future is transactional, which today amounts to less than 10 per cent of web advertising. So it’s sitting tight and waiting. It’s got an interesting trick up its sleeve, though.

You might think of the pipe between Opera and the user as a private channel. It’s tempting to inject ads into that binary stream, behavioural or otherwise. Instead it’s doing something subtly different. Opera is going to allow advertisers to compete with other ad networks for ordinary web pages. In January, Opera acquired AdMarvel, which it maintains with its own brand [5]. AdMarvel has an unusual approach. It isn’t a conventional ad network, but rather performs arbitrage on competing ad networks, to allow advertisers to find the most effective properties for their ad spend. AdMarvel will swap out a Google advert for a rival ad network.

How it works today: advertisers bid on an ad network for keywords.

This puts it on a collision course with some of the most powerful forces on the web. Ad networks hate arbitrage, even though it’s a valuable market function that lowers the cost of advertising for ordinary people. Google all but bans it, periodically kicking out publishers who it suspects of the practice [6]. Google (and other ad networks) would rather you thought of them as “auctions”, which are ersatz substitutions for the pure market.

Opera introduces competition between ad networks for keywords

But we’ll never know the true value of a keyword on a given day, at a given time, unless the ad networks are made more transparent. It’s not a question of if, but when, the doors are blown off the keyword auctions. Whether it’s Opera that pushes the plunger remains to be seen.

The value of your cache

Critics might point out that Opera’s mobile web cache is restricted to certain markets – markets where mobile browsing is cheaper than landline internet access. When these mature, eventually landline will be cheaper, and the value of the cache will diminish. A similar argument is that once markets mature they buy “real” web browsers, such as the rich applications found on the iPhone and Android, and have less need for the mobile version.

There’s merit to both arguments. But it assumes Opera will stand still. Today, Opera Mini offers users a blazing fast experience on the iPhone that makes the native built-in web browser – which is excellent – feel painful. The fundamental technology reality is that it is cheaper to render on the server. For many instances this will continue to be true, provided that Opera continues to innovate and add value. Even on the fastest wireless network you can find – try loading a page on each, and then hit the back button.

I was hugely impressed with the patience and quiet, understated confidence of Opera on my visit. It reminded me of visiting Google 10 years ago, but without the self-conscious goofiness. And so it may not be in keeping with Opera’s heritage to pick a bloody fight with Google. Then again, it may succeed without having to. As we’ve seen with the EU browser ballot, Opera is a pretty tenacious fighter itself. ®

Links

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/10/opera_mobile_accelerator/
2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/30/opera_strategy/
3. http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&bid=3
4. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/11/google_behavioral_advertising/
5. http://www.admarvel.com/
6. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/070521-110658

Perhaps it is. Even deep Greens are dropping long-standing objections [1] to nuclear power generation. I got in touch with Imperial’s Professor Robin Grimes, who recently co-authored a Science paper with William Nuttall indicating how the nuclear industry could re-emerge. Here’s an interview that encompasses the current state of play, and some ideas about how the next 40 years could take shape.

Professor Grimes disagrees that nuclear has been moribund – it just seems that way in the UK and the USA, he says.

“We’ve been in stasis. Only in the last five years has the amount of power generated by nuclear started to decline. It’s not as catastrophic as has been described. While we’ve not been building new reactors here, in Asia, they have been, and the [North] Koreans and Japanese, and China and India, are ramping up. There’s been a shift of activity from the west to the east. The number of reactors has increased.”

Ten new nukes are planned for the UK, with the first becoming operational in eight years. The problem here is one a skills shortage, caused by an ageing skills base. You need “Squep” people (suitably qualified and experienced) to monitor the safety of the facilities. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, the enforcement arm of HSE’s Nuclear Directorate, recently acknowledged this by raising pay rates, hoping it could hold back the ageing experts from early retirement, or even lure them out of retirement.

Top 10 Nuclear Nations (2009) by operational output – Source:IAEA

“I’m not sure if we can call it a Lost Generation, but it almost feels like one,” says Grimes. “We are in significant danger of losing the real experience as the skills base is built up again,” he says. “The amount of activity has started to increase dramatically, but they’re inexperienced.”

A look at the third-generation nuclear technology on offer shows incremental improvements, and bears out a clutch of new ideas. The latest reactors are smaller and more modular. The design focus is on passive safety features, and using materials that are radiation resistant.

Examples include the AP1000 [2] from Westinghouse, Areva’s EPR [3] (Areva design).

Unlike today’s thermal reactors, the Generation IV designs currently on the drawing board, take in the whole fuel cycle as part of the design concept. The reactor burns get rid of the highly radioactive nasties – including plutonium and the minor actinides [4]. In their Science paper, Grimes and co-author William Nuttall write that “some of these options could sustain power production for more than 1000 years”.

Surprisingly, the current vogue over the past five years has swung towards smaller reactors – below 1GWe (Gigawatt-electric) output. Why, I wondered, go for smaller plants when the planning process is so long and site acquisition is so expensive? Why not just build a big one?

Top 10 Nuclear nations (2009): number of reactors – Source: IAEA

Grimes says: “It depends on how much you need. There’s little point producing 1GWe when you only need a 10th of that, 100MWe.” Westinghouse’s AP1000 is, as the name suggests, a 1GWe station, but it started off as a 600MWe design.

Costs

Nuclear is unchallenged when it comes to producing baseload electricity, but controversy rages over the true long-term cost. Grimes acknowledges that CO2 reduction targets help enormously.

“I don’t see nuclear as something that produces all your electricity, it’s a mix, and getting the balance right is crucial,” he says. “It’s going to be different for different countries; I imagine we’d want to build a lot of wind turbines, but we’re going to need nuclear as a our baseload capacity – and a lot of it.”

Disposal costs will fall by the time the Generation IV reactors come online.
Nuclear energy facilities under construction, measured by output (MW). China has 24 underway and Russia 11.

Source: IAEA

“My personal opinion is that a complete recycle, with complete reuse of uranium and plutonium and the minor actinides is feasible, but it leaves us with a 300-year problem.”

Which is a major improvement, of course. Currently some of the isotopes in the actinides have a half-life of 100,000 years. We should remember where we left stuff 300 years ago, particularly if it’s radioactive.

Readers regular raised a couple of fascinating developments in nuclear research. What did Grimes make of them?

One is using the thorium fuel cycle. Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium. India is the biggest backer of thorium reactors. Grimes took a visit a year ago to have a look [pdf [5]].

Thorium: There’s a lot of it about

Thorium, however, doesn’t have a fissile isotope, which complicates things a bit: you have to breed the artificial isotope uranium-233. Grimes points to another advantage.

“Because you’ve started with a lower mass isotope number, you produce less of the higher atomic number isotopes – plutonium and minor actinides – than you do with a uranium-plutonium cycle.”.

“It will happen, because India wants it to be so. It has a lot of thorium, and not a lot of uranium. So that will allow us to get over the technology barrier; it could well be that it’s a sensible and viable option.”

Another factor comes from a quite unlikely source. Norway has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world, thanks to North Sea oil, and has reaped the benefits of hydroelectric power. But Norway discovered it may also be sitting on one of the world’s largest supplies of thorium oxide.

Pebbles: The ‘politically correct’ reactor

Eco-friendly? Koeberg’s PBMR project never got off the ground.

Another remarkable innovation in nuclear energy is the pebble-bed reactor [6], variously described as the ” politically correct atomic reactor [7]” [pdf], or the nuclear power plant you could leave in the hands of Homer Simpson.

The idea isn’t new, it was first demonstrated in 1967. But with traditional concerns about nuclear plants (such as meltdown) made moot by the inherently safe design, it’s curious that pebble-bed designs are not common. It seems they should be as common as neighbourhood transformer stations. (Reactors used in nuclear-powered icebreakers are as small as 35MWe.)

South Africa last month signalled it would end its 11-year PBMR [8] (Pebble Bed Modular Reactor) project, shedding most of the 800 staff working on the project.

China and Germany continue to develop designs similar to the PBMR.

“It’s always the bridesmaid,” says Grimes. “I’d like to see it developed. As scientists, we need that flexibility of technologies going forward. PBMR is inherently safe and it’s modular. But the small LWR reactor designs are also modular in the same way, and in terms of safety, the AP1000 has equivalent safety features such as passive cooling. The advantages of PBMR are definitely starting to be clear in the LWR design. That’s taken the wind out of its sails.”

“In a traditional reactor design, the decay heat – once fission has been turned off – is enough to destroy the reactor core. There are two things you can do – even if you lose your water, you can have a passive water volume that flows through the reactor from big tanks on the roof. You don’t have to do anything – it’s a passive process. Even though water’s running out, it’s removing the decay heat. It is exponential decay – so the residual amount of heat is no longer a threat. However there are additional features – natural convective processes that keep water moving around outside and keep the vessel cool. It’s really simple.”

Nuclear still leaves proliferation problems, but as Grimes points out, “nothing is proliferation-resistant, there are just degrees of it.”

And fusion?

“Sure it’s possible. JET [9] has been a great success, there’s no question. But JET is a long way from a commercial reactor; even ITER [10] is a long way from a commercial reactor. We need an entire generation of fission reactors with 60-year lifetimes.”

Nokia has also torn up the OS roadmap, and will speed up the delivery of new functionality to users in chunks, as and when it’s ready, instead of in milestone releases. In less prominent statements, Nokia has clarified what had become a very confusing development picture.

Eighteen months ago, the Symbian Foundation’s David Wood (who has now left the organisation) announced that Nokia’s Avkon code, the UI for S60, would be deprecated and a widget library called Orbit for Qt would take its place. A comment left on Nokia’s official blog here, says it is dropping the Orbit in favour of Qt Quick. Qt Quick is a declarative language for describing user interface layout. But Avkon will be retained for backward compatibility.

Sun’s Java boss Rich Green joined Nokia in May to try and sort out the mess. It’s much less of a mess now, and the decision to step off the milestone treadmill should fulfill the long-standing criticism that Nokia works too slowly. That’s a valid one – it’s almost two years since Nokia acquired Trolltech, and shortly afterwards declared Qt as the API to write to across its two platforms. Only last month did developers receive the tools with which they could (kind of) do the job.

Elsewhere, as we reported, Nokia is taking an axe to its Ovi and Symbian development, promising to streamline it and implying that more work will take place in house. There are cuts, and the future of the Foundation must now be debatable.

As for the Symbian APIs being cruel and inhumane? After I described Symbian as “good system design”, several people emailed to tell me that I was very, very wrong.

One experienced industry source pointed out this example.

“Symbian is the only platform that has to spend one day teaching people how to use strings before they can code in it. The approved method is that you create an HBufC (a Heap allocated, BUFfer that is Constant), then Call Des() on it (which returns a TPtr – a pointer to a writable descriptor),” he says.

“So writable strings in memory, and constant? Blows your mind.”

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The report is very long on detail and short on opinionising – and for those of you fascinated by technology and bureaucracy, something quite interesting emerges. What we learn is that the company’s current predicament was fated in 2003, when a re-organisation split Nokia’s all-conquering mobile phones division into three units. The architect was Jorma Ollila, Nokia’s most successful ever CEO, and a popular figure – who steered the company from crisis in 1992 to market leadership in mobile phones – and who as chairman oversaw the ousting of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this year.

In Ollila’s reshuffle, Nokia made a transition from an agile, highly reactive product-focused company to one that managed a matrix, or portfolio. The phone division was split into three: Multimedia, Enterprise and Phones, and the divisions were encouraged to compete for staff and resources. The first Nokia made very few products to a very high standard. But after the reshuffle, which took effect on 1 January 2004, the in-fighting became entrenched, and the company being increasingly bureaucratic. The results were pure Dilbert material.

For example, have a look at the section which starts here, with “A novel application or feature has been dreamed up that should end up installed in a phone a year from now. This is the beginning of a long day’s journey to nowhere.”

Innovations produced by the R&D department and designers could no longer be implemented quickly – one example should have taken just a couple of weeks, but instead took months to be incorporated into phones.

Executive managers interviewed note how the result was a large number of indifferent products.

Another consequence was also predictable. It’s what political writers call the most morally corrupting effect of bureaucracies: nobody takes responsibility. With the three divisions covering their own backsides, nobody wanted to make the long-term strategic investments necessary to keep platform software up-to-date. This resulted in the Symbian user interface being neglected. Nokia had developed a touch screen UI called Hildon, which became Series 90, starting in 2001 – and that should have been the basis for Nokia’s iPhone competitors today. But it was canned in 2005.

“We produced a quite enormous number of rather average products. It would have been smarter to make fewer – and better,” says one interviewee.

The masterplan was ripped up by Ollila’s successor, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, in 2007, but by then the units had become enormously wealthy fiefdoms, and many of the problems remained. Lots of people could veto a decision, but the leadership required to drive one through was absent. Nokia’s product pipeline all but dried up in 2009.

There’s plenty here that will ring true to Nokia loyalists over the past five years. As the journalist Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen notes, Nokians fought each other harder than they fought the competition. One example we commented on at the time was the battle between N and E series, each the output of competing MultiMedia and Enterprise fiefdoms.

Until OPK finally called time on the scrap, the enterprise E series phones were denied the best imaging features of the consumer multimedia range. The N series users were denied MailForExchange, and SIP functionality. Yet many N series customers also used their phones for business, at enterprises with Microsoft Exchange corporate email, and they made use of VoIP.

Nokia’s core best-selling line S40 was neglected. Several Nokians have pointed this out to us – in internal commuications, the company lauded its high-end Symbian multimedia devices but barely acknowledged the success of its feature phones, which brought home the revenue.

One wrote to us recently:

“About four years ago one of the S40 ‘phones achieved a major feature milestone and got one lacklustre paragraph in the internal newsletter; by comparison an S60 offering had been reduced from a ridiculously high Field Failure Rate to something just risibly high. But from the pages of congratulatory wanking you’d have thought that the damn thing had achieved sentience.”

It’s telling how many products Nokia released during 2006 and 2008 which were almost great, but which had correctable flaws – and how these died of neglect once on the market. Many of these devices had one feature in particular that could have brought wider success with just a small revision. A product-focused company would do this, but a matrix-focused one wouldn’t – it was an extra cost.

One example is the Symbian-based 6220 Classic phone. This was a small, fast, functional and competitively priced phone, and also had a Xenon flash, giving much greater depth and quality in dark conditions – a rare feature that imaging customers cried out for. But it also had a hard-to-use and unreliable keypad, which broke frequently. A tweak to the keyboard would have helped – and would certainly have been introduced after a few weeks in the old Nokia organisation, based around product teams who took a real pride in their work.

The portfolio culture has also resulted in some inexplicable design decisions that ripple across today’s handsets. Between the end of 2007 and autumn 2008, two of Nokia’s most successful and popular enterprise phones – the E51 and E71 – were released. The design was a large part of their success. But for an encore, in 2009 Nokia released successors with a severe design defect, the E52 and E72.

Both phones feature a “Backspace” key perched precariously over the right softkey on one side, and the “Terminate Call” key on the other. It looks elegant. But the Terminate Call key forces the phone to Terminate the application in use. All but the nimblest fingers would hit the key by accident. If you were writing a text, then, and made a tiny slip, you were catapulted back to the home screen, without warning, with the text or email message several clicks away in the Drafts folder. I use an E52 – and it’s almost the perfect candybar business phone.

But because the flawed key design, with the floating backspace, is part of Nokia’s 2010 “design language” for 2010, the flaw is replicated across several devices – including, now, the C3 and E5.

There are exceptions to the matrix. Nokia’s N95-8GB is the best example of what Nokia can do when the gears mesh, and the organsation focuses on product quality – although it followed a painful time with its predecessor the N95, which took over six months to stabilise. The 8GB was brought to market quickly while it was still ahead of the competition, and saw improvements in almost every department; the phone’s robust design gives users terrific service even today.

Maemo and the Nokia Internet Tablet devices were subversive projects that also managed to survive the infighting – and might possibly save the day. (And they must – as I wrote last week, there is no Plan C.)

The article also notes goodwill towards Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, to restore Nokia’s competitiveness. As he doubtless knows, a savage axe will accompany the restructuring. But as the Con-Lib Coalition is discovering, bureaucracies are much harder to dismantle than anyone realises, and you need a positive vision to go with the bloodshed.

Related Link

Helsingin Sanomat [in English]

Read more at The Register…

Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register