It is of interest that Dell is now entering the market with a 5″ device that sits somewhere between a smart phone and a tablet. The Dell Streak, or Dell Mini as it will be called in the UK, boasts support for Adobe Flash and includes two cameras. On top of this the Streak will also include a MicroSD slot which means the device is expandable up to 32GB – something which both the iPad and iPhone don’t offer.

This Android based device will arrive in the UK next month so watch this space.

The report, released on Wednesday, suggests that of those families, about two million choose not to subscribe to broadband in areas where a reasonably good service is available. A poor selection of ISPs and a high overall cost were the determining factors for those families choosing to stay offline, according to analyst firm Point Topic, which released the report.

“One of the reasons they’re not trying [broadband] is because they’re unable to afford it,” Point Topic founder Tim Johnson told ZDNet UK on Thursday.

In addition, Point Topic estimated that 40,000 families with children live in areas where no fixed broadband service is provided. Another 1.4 million are in places where only slow broadband — with reliable speeds of less than 2Mbps — is on offer.

The locations with the poorest broadband adoption for families with children are countryside towns and cities where industry has collapsed, according to Point Topic. It named north-east Derbyshire, Aldridge-Brownhills and the valleys of south Wales as examples.

Johnson said he believes a lack of broadband in the home has both a financial and a social cost for affected children. Children without home broadband will earn less income when they enter the workplace, according to the report. It estimated that the eventual loss of earnings to the UK economy could be as high as £80bn a year.

The report also highlighted the difficulty children without home broadband can have in socialising with their peers in an increasingly digital world.

“Unless they leave the house, [children] can’t do their homework properly; they can’t join in the social world of their peers; and they can’t gain the internet skills and knowledge they will need to live comfortably as adults,” the report stated.

The government has introduced efforts to get low-income families online. In January, it launched a £30m Home Access scheme to provide free internet-connected laptops to disadvantaged children, providing a grant of up to £528 for families to spend with high-street computing and broadband providers.

In addition, it has set up the National Digital Participation plan, which is targeting the 12.5 million people that are currently offline and aiming to get them online by March 2014. A separate initiative — led by UK digital inclusion champion Martha Lane Fox — has the goal of getting as many people as possible online by the London Olympics in 2012.

Some schools are taking a more direct approach to providing e-learning resources to children. Broad Oak Sports College, a state secondary school in Bury, has provided a £140,000 Wi-Fi mesh network to give free internet access to 1,000 pupils.

The government already has plans to provide better broadband coverage across the country, and has pledged to provide super-fast broadband to the entire UK. Other major political parties have similar pledges.

Point Topic builds its model of broadband usage and adoption in the UK from public data, such as census information, and from datasets it generates from Ofcom statistics, BT figures and similar broadband industry data.

(ZDNet UK, 30 April 2010)

(TechNewsDaily, 19/04/2010)

Google AdWords

Google AdWords was launched in 2000 and allowed any person or business to access a new advertising space. By creating a self-service advertisement platform companies could target their customers very precisely and tweak and update adverts as and when they see fit along with an easy way to manage their advertising expenditure to boot.

Files sharing copy written materials

This issue seems to be as old as the Internet itself but Napster was sued in December 1999 by the RIAA for technically allowing the transfer of copy written material between its users and it shut down in July 2001.

In the years following many file sharing sites have gone a similar way, one of the most controversial being The Pirate Bay. The servers that run the site have been raided and in recent months, former owners have appeared in court and told to remove links, even though they no longer own the site after selling it in 2006. Prior to this the owners were found guilty of breaking copyright law and given a prison sentence along with a hefty fine. The site however has gathered much support and now a political party named after the site is the third-largest in Sweden.

Blogger Fired

Heather Armstrong was working as a Web designer in Los Angeles when she started writing about her company and co-workers in her blog, Dooce.com. When discovered by her bosses she was fired in 2002, possibly the first person to be fired for blogging.

You would think that people would learn from the mistake made by one person, but apparently not.

The Great Firewall of China

Many countries have been accused of censoring Internet content, the latest being Australia. However, it is China who have perhaps been the most notorious with Barack Obama openly criticising the so called “Great Firewall of China”.

Much of the censorship was uncovered around the time of the 2008 Summer Olympics and banned content includes news sources that include articles about police brutality and freedom of speech. The political and cultural debates are, as you would expect, for too vast to go into here but there is plenty of information on the subject and I would urge you to find out more:

• BBC Article
• greatfirewallofchina.org
• Wiki Article

Google Street View

Google Street View allows users to see a 360 degree photo of streets and they can navigate along them within the Google Maps functionality – but this caused worries over privacy.

In order to collect the images various cars with mounted cameras were driven around taking pictures, I even saw one in Scarborough! Within just two days it was alleged that many shady goings on were captured (not in Scarborough I must add) including “pedestrians picking their noses, police attending a fatality, a man climbing into an apartment block and a possible drug deal”.

Google tried to subdue concerns by explaining they have made it easy to flag inappropriate content and stated that they approached organisation such as drug treatment facilities and shelters before taking the images.

It must be noted that Google can remove or edit images though – as detailed in this article. Can’t think why though

Net Neutrality debate

Again another issue that we haven’t got the opportunity to go fully into here but Net Neutrality basically “prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination”.

It will affect everyday users as ISPs could effectively give preferential treatment to one website or service over another. For instance, people who regularly use bandwidth hungry websites such as YouTube could suffer as their bandwidth is reduced to service other customers. This ability to restrict traffic could also arguably hit competition as ISPs limit sites and services offered by competitors in order to promote their own.

For more information please visit – savetheinternet.com

Rage Against The Machine score Christmas number one

Social media prevails! Fed-up with X Factor’s dominance in the Christmas charts Rage Factor was set-up in order to get Rage Against The Machine’s track “Killing in the name of” to the top-spot at Christmas. On one level it was refreshing to see a genuine race for the top spot and see some original and controversial music prevail but I think it does much more than that. Various Social Media campaigns were set-up, firstly Facebook and then Twitter where people campaigned tirelessly and ultimately made it happen. It shows that the Web is truly staring to take on traditional media. Also don’t forget it was the first download-only number one…..hopefully the CD isn’t dead.

Google Books indexes copy written material

Sure as eggs is eggs every time a new medium starts to take off copyright rears its head as Google found out when it tied to index books and publications that were still under copyright. In 2005 a group of publishers and authors , including giants such as Penguin, tried to sue Google. Finally an agreement was reached that allows out of print books to be accessed digitally through Google or selected universities and libraries.

Facebook change Privacy Policy

For those of us who view such sites with suspicion and understand the damage they can do it was interesting to learn that early in 2009 Facebook updated their “Terms of Service”. The Terms of Service effectively allowed them to retain any content posted by users and ultimately claim ownership of it once it was posted – even if the account and content was deleted. After an outcry from their users, Facebook elected to revert back to their original Terms of Service but they have started to face fresh criticism. They are facing allegations of tricking users into sharing information with the wider web and search engines.

Iran and Twitter

There are more and more examples of social media sites such as Twitter enabling people to promote or change issues they feel strongly about. The internet users of Iran turned to the likes of Twitter to organise themselves and gather support for their views after the 2009 election.

The campaign reached beyond their supporters and moved into mainstream media all over the world – promoting the US Government to ask Twitter to put off a system upgrade to keep the service running.

In summary then it has been an interesting decade with plenty of talking points. As the Internet comes more and more into our everyday lives privacy and freedom of speech will continue to play a major role.

Oh and you can bank on Google to be at the centre of more storms in the next decade.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Save9!

Emerging super powers and developing nations drive innovation

Due to the rise of mobile technology people in areas that have not been able to get connected now can. For example the growth on Internet usage in Africa over the last decade has grown by over 1, 300%. All the new users have new needs and most exciting of all new ideas. Speaking at a recent conference, Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales said that the new cultures, languages and ideas would “mix and match in amazing ways.”

Location based social networks

We have seen many location based applications emerge on the iPhone and established ‘Web 2.0′ sites include location based services – for example GeoTagging on Flickr. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can contribute to any topic but that inevitably means a lot of information that isn’t relevant to a user at a moment in time. Give information a contextual quality, such as a location, means that relevant information should be easier to find and crucially more useful to the user.

As the decade progresses it is thought that this will emerge into a big industry, APIs such as those provided by Google for Google Maps and sites that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with open APIs, such as Trip Advisor enable useful applications and websites to be created.

Real-time search

It could be argued that this has started to progress and take off quite nicely, but it hasn’t quite entered everyday public use. As touched on in a previous blog post, real time search will help provide more relevant search result for users.

Magazine and Newspaper Apps

This topic has also been covered in a previous blog post but I believe we will see a lot more of these in the coming year. They have the ability to provide people with what they want, when they want it and most importantly it gives newspapers and magazines an opportunity to make money.

Someone…somewhere…will find an effective use for Google Wave

Google Wave has many detractors but as it rolls out to more and more users I think people will find it a useful tool, and that’s the point, it is a tool, it will not replace email (at least I hope not)!

Talking of finding a use we have a few ideas so watch this space.

So there you have it, we will check back in twelve months to see what happens!

I will leave you with a few other predictions from my colleagues:

• Simon predicts that the move to ban Google Analytics in Germany will fail
• Steve predicts that cloud computing will take off in a big way

As web developers we focus a lot on accessibility and usability. This story made me realise, that as web technologies have progressed (explosion of video, music sharing etc.), accessibility has struggled to keep up with it. Sites like YouTube effectively offer content that is predominately inaccessible by deaf users and that is obviously a major problem (I must point out that they have used captions for a while but users have to physically add them).

From our technical vantage point this is also an interesting development as processing speed will undoubtedly be an issue, it will be very interesting to see how quick and ultimately how usable it is. As with all accessibility measures that are put in place it also helps a much wider audience. Consider a user who doesn’t have access to sound or can’t hear it – mobile users in a crowded public place for example.

The solution was devised by a Google employee who is deaf himself. I think that acts as a reminder that it is usually possible to make things accessible and no amount of excuses or barriers will change that!

Update 25/11/09:

Thinking back to my dissertation, one of the major problems with video on the web was that of indexing and searching. Extracting content from video has always been difficult due to the amount of information stored in every frame. This technology could help this process as it enables speech in the video to be extracted and stored without taking up a lot of room. This means it is then searchable. Watch this space.

Pay Per View on the Internet has arrived but is it here to stay?

The upcoming football international between the Ukraine and England on Saturday is to be shown as a pay per view service on the Internet and not on TV – satellite or terrestrial.

The rights were sold to Setanta for the game but since the company collapsed the digital sport company Perform thought it best to stream the game online. The crux comes when you look at the price – £4.99 if viewers sign-up before midnight on Wednesday rising to £9.99 and the £11.99 the closer the games gets.

Cost will be a major factor as newspapers have found out when offering services online. The way TV differs from newspapers is that the content on newspaper website can be found elsewhere but as in this case the content can’t. Does that mean the take up will be large? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps for a World Cup Final but possible not for a qualifier.

There are various arguments for and against in this case but surely Internet Connection speeds in the UK are putting people at a disadvantage. You could argue that subscribing to Setanta did the same thing but at least people had a choice. In some areas it will be practically impossible to get good coverage due to these short-falls.

Video seems to be everywhere on the web but can they find away to capture the imagination of the Internet population? We will wait and see………….

It is predicted that by 2013 the annual revenues from services ‘upsold’ via mobile apps will total $14 billion. For those of you who actually download apps you are probably sitting there thinking “Well I am unable to choose what to eat, how to pay and how to ring my grandma, there might be something in this malarky”. But for those that aren’t the power of Apps are summarised by thousands of people on various sites, I will give you a few that are interesting but entirly subjective – the good, the bad and the ugly.

So how can an App benefit you or your business. All Apps aren’t a gimmick and some do have genuine uses. For example mobile apps can be downloaded that calculate profit margins, read PDFs and create spreadsheets. The list is endless and apps can be totally unique to your business because Apps can be built to work with your data.

Going beyond that they can actually make you money. You can sell the Apps but it is common practice to make Apps available for free and then make extended features available at a cost.

Apps have a variety of uses, our current favourite is ‘Tea Round’ , and below are a few links that may get you started:

• Apple
• Google Android
• Nokia