Closing the Gates after Bill

Bill Gates launches Internet Explorer 4 in 1997

Microsoft's diminished influence is testament to Bill Gates' success, says Bill Thompson.

The publicity surrounding Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft should not obscure the fact that he is still deeply involved in the company he founded in 1975.

Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie may now be in charge, but they were chosen by Gates, worked with Gates and are still answerable to Gates.

After all he remains company chairman and a major shareholder, and he will be working as an "advisor" on special projects.

Gates also played a major part in setting Microsoft's strategy for the next few years, as it continues to try to figure out how to convert its enormously profitable operating system and office software business into something that can generate money as we all move applications online and look for stripped-down, secure and reliable operating systems on our desktops, laptops and handheld computers.

So it isn't quite the end of an era, even if less of his time and concern will be spent on Microsoft matters as he makes the transition to being a global philanthropist through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As a programmer, trainer, web developer and writer my professional life has certainly been shaped by Bill Gates and the choices he made for Microsoft, right back to 1985 when we used the Multiplan spreadsheet for the accounts at Bensasson and Chalmers, the software house in Cambridge where I had my first programming job.

One-time rivals

I remember seeing Windows 1.0 for the first time running on Apricot hardware at Anglia Business Computers and thinking it was a lot less useful than GEM, the earlier graphical environment from Microsoft's one-time rivals Digital Research, and a lot less flexible than the Macintosh Finder.

But even back then Microsoft knew how to learn from mistakes and improve a product release by release until it did what was needed.

Throughout the 80s and 90s I kept up with the new releases of Windows and Office, partly because I felt I needed to understand them and partly because everyone else was doing the same.

Once Internet Explorer became the dominant web browser then anyone working on the web had to take account of its many peculiarities, non-standard extensions and broken features, with all the pain of trying to make sites work on multiple incompatible browsers.

But things have changed. Microsoft's presence in the mobile world, IPTV and gaming remains important, as are many of the technologies coming out of its research labs, but what Microsoft does or doesn't do is now less central to the continued development of the networked world.

Clearest example

The clearest example is Vista, the latest version of Windows and the release that was supposed to change the world.

It may be more secure and more stable than Windows XP but the many differences between Vista and its predecessor, especially systems administration, have created a massive barrier to upgrading. My sister bought a new home computer with Vista pre-installed and has regretted not specifying XP ever since.

A few friends work in companies that use Vista, but the majority have not yet upgraded, and when I installed Windows on my desktop Mac this weekend I chose an old XP license because I don't need the features that Vista offers.

Yet when Windows 95 was released I queued up to buy a copy from PC World, knowing that an understanding of the operating system was vital for my work as a consultant, commentator and critic of technology.

In the 1970s and 1980s IBM dominated the computing industry and their moves were observed by those working in the field with the sort of attention that the US State Department devoted to the Kremlin.

The world that Microsoft helped create on the back of IBM's own personal computer architecture gradually eroded its importance, and even though IBM is large and profitable its strategy no longer shapes the computing industry.

New monarch

Now the same thing is happening to Microsoft.

When the EU fined them £680m over their anti-competitive practices the general feeling within the industry was one of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in seeing a bully laid low.

Few thought there was any need for the EU to change the way Microsoft worked because it no longer mattered in the way it had done back in 2000.

It's easy to see Google as the new monarch, and any software developers with a good idea for a new tool, service, program or utility must now be wondering how they will compete with Google in the way that companies developing disk utilities and office systems wondered about Microsoft back in the 1980s.

But just asking "what would Google do?" is no longer enough. When IBM and Microsoft were dominant the computing industry was just that, an industry that stood slightly apart from other parts of the economy and was, because of the rate of technology innovation, relatively unregulated compared to more mature sectors like cars or steelmaking.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev using his power as head of state to dismantle the Soviet Union, Gates used Microsoft to give us one computer on every desk - in offices and schools if not yet at home - and allow the internet to penetrate every one of them.

Windows may not have been the best possible operating system, but it was good enough to build on, usable enough to show us the possibilities of networked computing, and cheap enough (or easily pirated enough) to spread even to developing countries.

Now we have a global networked economy in which information and communications technologies are central to all areas of activity and cannot simply be separated out or left unregulated. Microsoft may no longer be dominant, but not even Google can rule the world that Gates has built.

I wonder if that will be enough for him?

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Court fines eBay over fake goods

The French court case began a year and a half ago

A French court has ordered eBay to pay 40m euros (£31.6m; $63m) to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing online auctions of fake copies of its goods.

LVMH said eBay's French site had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeit bags and perfumes.

The brands affected include Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy.

An eBay statement said LVMH was trying to "protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice" and added that it would appeal.

'Illicit'

The case against eBay in a commercial court in Paris was brought jointly by six brands belonging to the LVMH group.

Louis Vuitton Malletier, the group's handbag and luggage section, and clothing brand Christian Dior Couture accused eBay of "negligence" in allowing illegal copies of their goods to be sold in online auctions.

Four perfume brands - Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy - sued for what they called "illicit sales" of their products.

They alleged that even auctions involving their legitimate perfumes were illegal, because only specialist dealers were permitted to sell them.

The court barred eBay from selling the four perfumes in future.

LVMH spokesman Pierre Godet welcomed the decision, telling French news agency AFP that it "protected brands by considering them an important part of French heritage".

'Uncompetitive'

But Vanessa Canzini, an eBay spokeswoman, said: "If counterfeits appear on our sites, we take them down swiftly, but today’s ruling is not about our fight against counterfeit.

"Today’s ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers everyday.

"We will fight this ruling on their behalf; we will be seeking leave to appeal.”

According to the judgement, eBay must pay 19.28m euros in damages to Luis Vuitton Malletier, 17.3m to Christian Dior Couture and 3.25m to the perfume brands.

The BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris says the ruling is seen as a landmark, because it could oblige eBay to rethink its business model.

Until now, this has been built around the simple notion of bringing together buyers and sellers, with minimal supervision from the company.

The penalty is the second in a month imposed on eBay by French courts.

On 4 June, a court in the eastern French city of Troyes found the auction site directly responsible for the sale of fake Hermes bags.

It imposed a penalty of 20,000 euros jointly on eBay and the woman who offered the bags for sale

Rhapsody embraces MP3 music files

Rhapsody makes the move to MP3

US digital music service Rhapsody is the latest company to embrace MP3 downloads without copy restrictions.

Songs from all the four leading record labels - Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner - will be available in the digital format.

Rhapsody joins Napster and Amazon, who have all started offering MP3 files in recent months.

"We're no longer competing with the iPod. We're embracing it," said Neil Smith, vice president at the firm.

Until recently, Rhapsody, which is owned by Real and MTV, had focused on a subscription service, which allowed users to stream an unlimited number of songs for between $13 (£6.50) and $15 (£7.50) a month.

Streamed songs

Rhapsody's streamed songs do not play on Apple's iPod, the world's most popular MP3 player.

The subscription service will continue to run alongside the MP3 download store.

The majority of MP3 tracks will cost 99 cents (50p), while albums will sell for $9.99 (£5).

The shift comes as the British record industry announced that digital sales were going "from strength to strength".

The BPI reported that digital formats now account for about 85% of all UK Top 20 singles sales.

More than 200 million downloads have now been sold in the UK since the launch of the first mainstream stores in early 2004. In total, digital formats now account for 8.6% of all UK record company sales income.

Firefox aims for download record

More than one million people have pledged to download Firefox 3.0

Version 3 of the popular Firefox web browser is going on general release on 17 June.

Wide take-up of the new version would further boost the market share of the browser which is currently used by about 15% of net users.

With the release, Firefox developer Mozilla is attempting to set a record for the most downloads over 24 hours.

"It's a global effort to make history," said Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla.

Net gains

The attempt to break the record will begin at 1800 BST.

"There is actually no record for the greatest amount of software downloaded in one day, so for 24 hours from the moment we push the bits live, that's when the countdown starts," he said.

Mr Kim said Mozilla had no specific target for the number of downloads it would like to achieve on the day but racking up five million would be "awesome".

By comparison, Firefox 2.0 registered 1.6 million downloads on the day it was made available on 24 October, 2006. More than 1.3 million people have pledged to download the new version on 17 June.

WEB BROWSER STATS Internet Explorer - 83.27% Firefox - 13.76% Apple Safari - 2.18% Opera - 0.55% Netscape - 0.14% Source: OneStat Behind the scenes of Firefox 3.0

New features in Version 3 include automatic warnings when users stray onto webpages booby-trapped with malicious code.

Also in Version 3 will be "Smart Location Bar" that lets people return to places they have visited even if they have not bookmarked them or cannot remember the full web address.

Firefox 3 will work with Windows 2000, XP and Vista and some non-Windows operating systems including Linux.

Mozilla is not alone in marking the release of the new software. According to the Mozillaparty website more than 566 celebrations are planned for when the software becomes available.

Market battle

Firefox first appeared in early 2004 and since then has steadily eroded Microsoft's hold on the web browsing world.

Although firm statistics are hard to gather Firefox is currently thought to be used by about 15-17% of web users.

In some territories the percentage of Firefox users is far higher. For instance, according to market analysis firm OneStat, 27.23% of German web users browsed the web with Firefox in February 2008. Most of the rest (67.63%) used Internet Explorer (IE).

"Firefox is making very steady encroachment in to the market," said Adam Vahed, managing director of OneStat UK partner Apache Solutions. "It's a very serious contender to the world domination of IE."

He expected there to be great interest in Firefox 3.0 because most users of the browser tend to upgrade to the latest version as soon as it comes out.

By contrast, he said, many people were still using very old versions of IE. According to browser stats gathered by Chuck Upsell about 35% of IE users are on version 7 and 35% use version 6.

Mr Vahed said Firefox was generally popular with more "tech-savvy" web users and they turned to it because using it meant more webpages appeared as their designers intended.

"It's still very much the case that Firefox is way ahead of IE when it comes to standard compliance," he said.

IE's lack of compliance with web standards can make some webpages look very odd, he said.

But, he added, IE7 was better at respecting standards and IE8 is expected to go further.

The second test or "beta" version of IE8 is due in August. The improved standards compliance means that anyone using it might find that pages tailored to work with the quirks of IE7 will now seem broken.

Intel boss answers your questions

Intel is making chips smaller and more power efficient

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini answers your questions about the future of computing and the chip making firm. BBC News Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones put your questions to the firm's leader.

Q: The first question comes from Bill Currie, in Hong Kong. He asks if we really need all the power in today's computers?

Paul Otellini: The PCs that we're using today are 32 times more powerful than the ones we first started with.

I've been in this industry long enough to remember when we first brought out the 286, someone said, who needs all that processing power - what are you going to doing with it?

And then a generation later, it was, I need a 386, then I need 486 and a Pentium.

I think the real simple answer is that the applications; the things that we're going to do on computers continue to need more and more performance - more and more compute power to be able to give us what we need.

And it's not so much it will run your spreadsheet any faster, it's that the Web is going to become increasingly immersive, increasingly visual, increasingly graphics intensive - increasingly photo-realistic kinds of things for social networking.

The kinds of applications that you'd like to have to that will make PCs easier to use also need more performance. For example, speech - wouldn't it be great to be able to talk to the computer, have it understand you and have it do what you want, as opposed to typing or any other kind of interface. That takes far more than 32 times more performance than you have today.

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS What kind of computers do you envisage being used in 10 to 20 years time

Q: Now, Cameron Solnordal, in Melbourne, Australia takes that on a bit and says what kind of computers do you envisage being used in 10 to 20 years time, if Moore's Law continues? Will the devices themselves change radically?

Paul Otellini: The cell phone will get smarter and smarter - I think everyone accepts that they're going to become nothing more than a very portable computer - that requires more performance.

So I see the computers of tomorrow just taking everything that has electronics in it and allowing those machines to have internet access.

So your automobiles, industrial control, your phones, your home heating systems will all be connected to the Web to allow you to either gather information from them, to run them more smartly, or to become just much more efficient.

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Intel Chief executive Paul Otellini answered user questions

Q: We've got a question about the Atom chip from Lee Setford, from Portsmouth, Hampshire: With increasing focus on the green aspect on computers, do you believe that Atom competes with the latest super energy-efficient processors in terms of price and performance?

What's that going to do - what's the importance of that?

Paul Otellini: Well Atom is aimed at a whole new class of applications and new class of machines and it's the first time we've ever really done a product that's power optimised for these new devices.

Q: Can we have a look at one?

Paul Otellini: What we've done here is we've designed something that has very good performance; it's about as fast as the fastest laptop in the world was just a couple of years ago but very low power, so it saves energy, it goes into low-cost devices - it will also go into handheld devices.

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS Should Intel be forced to share knowledge with AMD?

Q: Let's move on to the competitive field that you're in. Neil Dowdall from Holland wonders whether the current situation in the market is healthy - Intel is so far ahead of AMD in terms of technology and price that one could say it's a monopoly like Microsoft. Should you, Intel, be forced to share knowledge with AMD? Paul Otellini: I don't think so. His observation is correct, his memory may be a little short though.

A couple of years ago we were being criticised for being behind them and one of the things I've seen in this industry over three decades is that there's a lot of giving and taking in terms of competitive lead and in the semi-conductor industry participants never take their position for granted - if you did you'd be out of business.

Q: Another question on competition - new competition - John Wayne, from Llanharry, Mid Glamorgan: Are you worried about Sony's cell chip challenging your dominance of the market?

Paul Otellini: As they would say, it's interesting architecture. It's a many-core architecture. The problem that I see with that architecture is two-fold: the way it requires a whole new set of applications and it's a very difficult architecture to program.

Q: On the wider economic background, of course hard times in America at the moment. Gonzalo Zavala from London asks: How do you expect Intel will be affected by a recession in America?

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS How do you expect Intel will be affected by a recession in America?

Paul Otellini: Well, 75% of our revenue is not in the US today. Q: The global economy is not looking that brilliant either is it?

Paul Otellini: Well, it's not bad. It may not grow as much as fast as people thought it would a year ago for 2008 but much of our sales in the last few years and much of our sales growth have been in emerging markets; in China and India, South East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. I don't see those going into any kind of recession - at least I haven't seen any projections of that so far.

Q: John Riley from Northampton in England asks: Why can't PCs turn off and on, just like a television does? Do they have to keep going through that boring boot-up which takes ages?

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS Why can't PCs turn off and on, just like a television does?

Paul Otellini: I don't suppose I could tell him to ask Bill Gates that question! Quite seriously - I don't re-boot my machines anymore unless there's a reason - a new application I want to load or something or an upgrade kind of thing.

My laptop turns on and off like a television - when I want to use it I open the lid and it is there - it wakes up - and I close it when I'm finished. That's the way they should be and that's the way they are today. Most people don't need to re-boot their machines every week or indeed every hour.

Q: Neil Moss, from Edinburgh asks: Why does my two Gigahertz dual core PC take longer to open my email and word processor than my machine of 10 years ago, which ran at 1/200th of the speed?

He again thinks modern software has slipped into, what he calls, a do less with more ethos.

Paul Otellini has been with Intel for 34 years

Paul Otellini: Without knowing what he's running on that machine, it's pretty hard to diagnose it.

Q: But don't you think that is a common theme?

Paul Otellini: No.

Q: There is frustration amongst a lot of users that they are getting more and more powerful machines that don't necessarily do things that much better than they did 10 years ago.

Paul Otellini: I disagree. Take what people do today - I don't know if you have children, I do - my daughter spends all of her time with photographs, with videos and so forth. You couldn't even run those on a PC of five years ago. You want to do some photo editing - try doing that on a five year-old machine versus a dual core machine.

Q: Now we've got a couple of questions about Wimax which of course is a technology which has promised much but not delivered a lot yet in terms of giving people access to broadband over a wide area. They're both from the developing world. Philippe Thai from Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and Rawaz Rauf from Iraq.

They both really want to know what Intel's investment in Wimax is going to mean for them - whether it's going to bring big changes?

Paul Otellini: We're incorporating Wimax into notebook starting this year. It starts going into handheld devices, starting next year. There are 120 deployments around the world today - it is starting to move as countries and cities are starting to get populated. So I think you'll sit here a year from now and you'll have tens of millions of subscribers and you'll move to hundreds of millions of subscribers say two years later than that - that's pretty good.

Q: Femi Alla from Lagos, Nigeria wonders why they haven't heard more about the Classmate which is your rival to the one laptop per child project. Is it going to go any further than the couple of schools where she says the concept was demonstrated and which gave both projects a lot of media exposure?

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS Why haven't we heard more about the Classmate PC?

Paul Otellini: We are quite happy with where we are at; we're now in our second generation of the product - there are a lot of large contracts. At the end of the day though, this is really focused on getting school districts affordable computing and that gets down to budgets and how fast people want to deploy them. I'm happy with where we are with the product.

Q: Nicolas Negroponte who runs the one laptop per child project has been very harsh about Intel's attitude, claiming that you acted in bad faith and basically attempted to drive them out of countries like Nigeria. What do you say to that?

Paul Otellini: I think I've used this word with your network before - I think it is hogwash. We didn't do anything that drove him out of anything. We competed fairly for the business and it is a different computer model.

The two basic machines are approached, dealing with the problem of getting children laptops, differently. Ours is focused on working with teachers and having a teacher-driven education environment. OLPC is focused on, give the kids a laptop, turn them on to the internet and let them go.

We happen to think that the teaching model that works for teachers is a better model. Our laptop ships with teacher-control software; so teachers can control what the kids are doing in class and be able to manage the process. It's a whole different thought process.

Q: Do you think their model will survive? Can both models survive?

Paul Otellini: I don't see why not; we're having some success with ours and they're having some success with theirs. I think it gets down to what do the school districts want to do and when a school district chooses one versus the other, it doesn't mean that the other one is wrong, it just means that they've made a different choice in terms of the education profile they want to apply.

YOUR QUESTIONS FOR INTEL BOSS How much longer do we have to listen to that incredibly annoying anthem every time someone mentions an Intel chip?

Q: Moving on to one slightly quirky question here: Chris Barker, in Otley, West Yorkshire: How much longer do we have to listen to that incredibly annoying anthem every time someone mentions an Intel chip?

Paul Otellini: Well I'm quite fond of it. So as long as I'm around I think we'll listen to it. Billions of people around the world have heard that bong and it identifies commercials with the company that is providing the technology inside it and I think it's a very effective campaign.

Q: A couple of personal questions: Ibrahim Faisal from the Maldives wants to know about your personal technology. What kind of laptop do you carry?

Paul Otellini: It depends on what I'm doing. I've got a Centrino Pro machine that I carry around with me for business and I've got a Mac I use for my photos at home.

Q: Are you equally comfortable with both? You must have a difficult line to tread on the Mac versus PC battle these days.

Paul Otellini:Not really. Both sides are customers so we're quite happy with that and actually I've enjoyed learning how to use a Mac, it's something I never did in the first part of my career and it's nice seeing what both sides can do because I do different things with different machines.

Q: So it's a Mac at home, PC at work kind of split is it?

Paul Otellini: Yes because our corporate environment is all PC-based and the technology we've embedded into Centrino Pro, includes security and manageability features that I think are very important for enterprises like Intel.

Q: What about your email? How in touch are you?

Paul Otellini: Oh, I'm 24/7.

Q: Is it BlackBerry? Is it on your phone?

Paul Otellini: I've a BlackBerry. Most of it I do on my laptop because the BlackBerry is nice when you're walking down the hall or something but given the amount of email I have, I need a pretty good keyboard to be able to keep up with it.

Q: Do you ever feel that you'd like to be disconnected from the internet for 24 hours?

Paul Otellini: No. I am not one of those people. It's pretty hard for me to disconnect from my job for 24 hours let alone the emails. Emails are the way we run the company; it's the way I talk to friends and customers, so it's something that I like to do. If I go away for the weekends sometimes, I may turn it off - but not too often.

Q: You're an addict, would you say?

Paul Otellini: I don't think so - maybe all addicts say no but I don't think so because it's my choice at the end of the day.

Q: Finally, Wes Ramsay from Tennessee in the United States wants you to look to the future and say one day you'll retire, what professional accomplishment will you look back on with the greatest sense of satisfaction and what about a personal accomplishment?

Paul Otellini: I'm not done with my career yet, so it's hard to project what you're going to be most proud of.

But to date, I think I'm happiest with the fact that I've been at a company for 34 years now that has changed the world inside the timeframe of my career and I've had something to do with that.

It's not often that corporations can say, with legitimacy, I changed the world because of what I do the world's a better and different place.

Intel: More than just chips

Intel, the world's biggest maker of silicon chips wants everyone to know that it can do more than just make chips.

Even though this product makes billions for the business, Intel's chief technology officer and head of research Justin Ratner told the BBC that it wants to change the image people have of the company.

Intel is trying to change the way the public views the company

"The public perception of Intel as an innovator has been really limited to

'oh yeah there's that sticker on my pc and there is an Intel thing in there'.

"What we generally do is ubiquitous but most people aren't aware of how our inventions have changed the world."

And to drive the point home, the Silicon Valley company opened its doors to journalists to show off a myriad of projects that its researchers believe will go on to have an impact on our daily lives.

Over 70 projects ranging from healthcare to visual computing and from wireless mobility to the environment are just some of the areas where the company is investing part of its $6bn in research.

"The sampling of projects on display here, and the doubling of our R&D investment over the past 10 years, will speed scientific discovery, improve health care, better the environment, advance visual computing and bring a rich and wireless internet experience from the device of our choice anywhere in the world," boasts Mr Ratner.

INTELLIGENT PHOTO AND VIDEO SEARCH

Digital cameras have turned most of us into snap-happy photographers. The problem is we tend to upload the images onto the computer and leave them there in an untidy jumble. The same with video.

Intel's China Research Centre believes its intelligent photo and video search technology will help us organise our photo and video libraries into useful albums.

Lin Chao says the software they have developed "uses microprocessors to mine pictures and videos for common key factors.

Researchers boast a 98% success rate in recognising people's faces

"The statistical algorithm is a probabilistic system that finds correlations between the different points of an image. The points can be mapped on animals, faces or cars, the key aspects of the concept. Then it will statistically go and classify these key points to see if they are relevantly correlated to each other," he says.

The easiest image to search for in pictures or video is a face.

The software finds the face in a picture, plots 68 points to work out face alignment and finally checks five major regions to show the forehead, eyes, eyebrows, nose and a mouth.

Then by identifying the image as, say, your mum or dad, the technology can rifle through your messy library and find matching pictures allowing you to group them together into neat easily accessible albums.

ADVANCED MEDICAL VISUALISATION

An estimated 655,000 people die of colon cancer throughout the world per year. But early detection and diagnosis can help save lives.

Intel has partnered with Phillips Healthcare in a joint project taking place in Haifa, Israel, to improve detection and diagnosis rates.

Colon cancer is the third most common type of cancer in the Western world

At the research day, Zvi Danovich demonstrated a virtual colonoscopy application that shows an interactive model based on information from ct scans.

By optimising the image using nanometers and vectorisation, Mr Danovich was able to produce clearer and richer images faster than the old application.

"Our rendering runs almost twice as fast as the Phillips application showing double the number of frames per second," explained Mr Danovich.

"I am happy that this is my achievement to the world of medicine."

COMMON SENSE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSING

The power of the people is at the heart of a project aimed at influencing decision makers over environmental policy.

Armed with mobile sensing devices, members of the public can collect data about the air quality in their local area and feed it back to a central base to be collated.

Alison Woodruff of Common Sense says by kitting out ordinary people with these mobile devices, they are able to "empower the everyday citizen as well as provide useful information about air quality."

Using wireless sensors the public can monitor their local environment

She says typically such readings are taken by officials at a small number of locations and what Common Sense does is get a lot of readings from a lot of places.

This, claims Ms Woodruff, "makes the data more powerful."

At the moment the group is working with San Francisco street sweepers on a pilot project testing the device and working out how best to use the information that is gathered.

Ms Woodruff says the next stage is to "get the device into the hands of concerned citizens and develop community software so people can analyse the information and work out how to use it to influence policy".

For Intel, she says the value in the project is finding new and interesting applications for mobile devices.

RAY TRACING

Every day the quality of games are inching towards mirroring the real world. Ray tracing technology is one way Intel believes it can deliver a richer more rewarding experience than before.

The technology is already used in Hollywood most recently in the Kung Fu Panda movie, but researcher Daniel Pohl told the BBC: "Ray tracing in games is still a research project but it represents the next big thing."

This technique is used a lot in Hollywood, but not in gaming

Ray tracing works by using computational modelling to simulate light rays in a 3D scene.

What that means, says Mr Pohl, is that "You can add a lot of nice special effects like reflections on water or in a mirror, some of the hardest things to do in a game.

"We are moving towards photo realism and modelling how things work in nature. It's about making the game look more realistic and exciting."

He acknowledges however that the final product is several years away.

ROBOT BARKEEP

For years we have been served up the promise that robots in the home would become our little helpers. It hasn't happened but Intel researcher Siddhartha Srinivasa believes the so called robot barkeep he has been working on is a significant step towards that goal.

Using motion planning and manipulation algorithms as well as cameras, the robotic arm on display picked up black mugs and put them on a dishwasher rack.

Robots that make coffee and do the laundry are at least ten years away

A fairly simple action, but from a robotics standpoint very complicated to achieve. Mr Srinivasa told the BBC: "This is the cutting edge of robotics research designing a robotic arm that can move at human speeds.

"The arm doesn't know where the mug is so it has to search for it, then it has to work out how to pick it up and then how to place it on the rack without colliding with anyone or anything."

It might not be Earth shattering but Mr Srinivasa says it hints at what is possible tomorrow.

"We want to free robots from the factory floor and bring them into people's homes. Versatility is key. We envisage robots being able to do the dishes, put the toys away, make a cup of coffee and be a real help around the house."

MOOD PHONE

Everybody copes with the stresses and strains of the day in different ways. But now Intel researcher and psychologist Margaret Morris has developed what she calls the mood phone to help deal with the highs and lows and keep us mentally healthy.

Ms Morris, who is a psychologist, says: "We translated clinical dialogues into touch screen experiences on your mobile phone as prompts to make you check how you are feeling."

This, Ms Morris says, is all aimed at "enabling people to tune into early signs of distress before they end up screaming".

There are she says physiological signs of stress like a drop in heart rate variability and changes in blood pressure which can be detected by the phone.

The 'mood phone' will contact you to ask how you are feeling

When any of these change, the phone can be programmed to ping you a message and simply ask if you are alright. It can also suggest coping strategies like doing some breathing exercises or taking a walk.

The aim is to stop you in your tracks for a few seconds and force you to listen to what is going on inside your head and your body.

Ms Woodruff says the project is "about helping people become saner, healthier and happier human beings."

Mobile video - are we getting there?

Ever wanted to find a new way of annoying fellow passengers on the train? Well try shouting "Hi, I'm on the video!" very loudly at your mobile phone. That's what I've been doing for the last couple of hours on a train from London to Newcastle.

Why? Well it seemed a good place to conduct an experiment. I've been toying with all kinds of mobile and web video applications over the last year - from Flixwagon to Qik, from Seesmic to Ustream. None of them seemed to deliver the combination of flexibility, ease of use, and acceptable picture quality that I was seeking.

Then I read a post by West Coast uber-blogger Robert Scoble claiming Kyte was the one that was going to sweep all others aside. Now I'd tinkered with Kyte last year and lost patience but when I returned to its site I found that it was boasting a whole new platform with the promise of delivering video from anything from a webcam to a mobile phone - with easy viewing also available on mobiles.

After downloading the application onto my mobile phone, I had a go with posting some video - the trouble was that it only seemed to deliver a 20 second chunk before stopping. So I went to Twitter and posted "Not sure about kyte.tv." Such is the power of the social web that a PR man was emailing me within hours to tell me just how wonderful Kyte really was.

Hence the trial. As we left King's Cross, I began trying out four different mobile video solutions. First Seesmic - with a video recorded on my laptop's webcam and then uploaded via the free wi-fi on the train. Then I began to punish the mobile phone - and my fellow passengers - with short video messages using the Flixwagon, Qik, and Kyte applications I had downloaded onto the phone previously.

Both the Qik and the Flixwagon applications promise "live" streaming of your video - rather risky when you could be brained by an irate bystander midstream - but in practice "live" means a delay of a couple of minutes while it chugs across the 3G connection to the web.

At the moment, the Kyte application allows me to record a short burst, then decide whether to upload it - though apparently live streaming is in beta testing right now, and according to Robert Scoble, will sweep all other applications aside.

So what do the results look like? Well as I write from the train I'm not entirely sure, though you should be able to judge by following these links on Seesmic, Flixwagon, Qik and Kyte.

The quality and usability of all of these services still has a long way to go - though more sophisticated handsets and improving mobile bandwidth are helping - but the big question concerns the audience. Why would anyone want to watch dodgy bits of video of my train trip - or your walk with the dog?

The answer can be split into two - the micro and mass audiences. As these tools become common it may become as normal for you to broadcast video of your journey home to your loved ones as it is to shout "I'm on the train" right now - dreadful prospect though that is.

But there is also great potential to combine mobile video with tools like Twitter to enable anyone at a newsworthy event to broadcast to a mass audience. Last night, for instance, I was keeping up with Euro 2008 on the journey home by searching Twitter messages containing the word "Austria".

Now if a Twitterer in the crowd had been using one of the mobile video applications I could have also received an instant video playback of the goal. Which raises all sorts of questions for professional broadcasters...

I must now put away my mobile and let my fellow passengers get some peace - but do let me know what you think of the likes of Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, and whether you think we'll all be broadcasting from our mobiles within a couple of years.

Peru's 'copper mountain' in Chinese hands

At 15,000 feet (4,572m), Mount Toromocho, 86 miles (138km) from Lima, is comparable to any mountain in Europe.

The Chinese company stands to make a huge profit on its investment

It gets its name from its shape - The Bull With No Horns. And it is composed almost entirely of copper ore: two billion tonnes of it.

It could become the most productive copper mine anywhere on earth. Now it belongs, in effect, to China.

When open-cast mining begins, in three or four years, a Chinese mining company, Chinalco, will send the copper back home to be turned into electrical wire.

The plan is to use it to carry out the electrification of the whole of China.

Bargain

The Peruvian government is happy with the $3bn (£1.53bn) that Chinalco will invest in the Toromocho mines.

The Chinese will be even happier. They have got themselves a bargain.

The copper Chinalco extracts from Toromocho will cost something like US$410 (£210) per ton. Today, the price for copper on the London Metal Exchange was $8,255 (£4,220) - 20 times more.

Chinalco stands to make a 2,000% profit on its investment.

An entire town is being moved to make way for the Chinese mine

There is only one problem. In order to dig out the copper ore, the company will have to shift the inhabitants of an entire town, and move them across the valley.

Morococha is a poor and depressing place. Many of the inhabitants lead the most basic of lives. But that makes them all the more willing to accept the compensation which Chinalco is offering.

Two thousand dollars plus the promise of a small house or apartment is a powerful inducement if you live in a shanty with an open fire.

In a referendum last year, more than half of the inhabitants voted to accept.

Of the minority who voted against, some just wanted to be left alone where they have always lived.

Others felt that Chinalco was getting much too good a bargain. In other words, that Morococha's people were selling themselves short.

"What we're being offered for our houses is derisory," one of the organisers of the No campaign told us.

He wanted to drive a much harder bargain.

Perhaps, in the interests of harmony, the Chinese will offer more.

But not very much more. There are no other potential buyers. Chinalco has the field to itself.

That, in a way, is the problem for countries like Peru.

Cash offer

Of course they would like to get more for their raw materials. There is often an instinctive dislike of China's bargaining methods, and the high-handed way many Chinese companies operate abroad.

But there is no serious alternative. China is buying up raw materials all around the world, paying for its shopping spree with its vast reserves of foreign currency.

Often, as with Toromocho, the Chinese are successful because they can put the cash on the table. Three billion dollars is a very large amount of money for a relatively poor country like Peru.

China has become a dominant player in Peru's mining industry

During his disastrous term in office from 1985 to 1990, President Alan Garcia set out to challenge the world's richest countries and the power of the big multinational corporations.

It was a disaster. As a result Peru went through a period of economic near-chaos.

Two years ago, surprisingly, he managed to get elected again - only this time he cuts a very different figure. He has become the friend of international business.

China offers Peru cash, and it is prepared to give Mr Garcia its political support. You can see why he would be interested.

Some Peruvians, just like the critics of Chinalco's offer to the town of Morococha, think President Garcia ought to get a better deal from the Chinese.

But Peru is not a rich country. He is perfectly pleased with the bargain the Chinese are offering.

So are the Chinese

Space cameras to monitor forests

Plans to use a state-of-the-art camera onboard a satellite to monitor deforestation levels in Africa's Congo Basin have been unveiled.

The high resolution RALCam3 camera, designed and built by UK scientists, will provide the first detailed view of the area's rate of forest cover loss.

The project is part of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, a £108m joint-initiative by the UK and Norwegian governments.

The fund aims to curb climate change by preventing deforestation in the region.

Speaking at the launch of the scheme, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "We are pledging to work together to secure the future of one of the world's last remaining ancient forests.

"Preserving our forests is vital if we are going to reduce global emissions and tackle climate change."

Ecological hotspot

The Congo rainforest is the second largest in the world, containing more than a quarter of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest.

The UN warns that two-thirds of the Congo rainforest will be gone by 2040

It is also home to more than 50m people, and supports an estimated 10,000 plant species, 1,000 types of birds and 400 different kinds of mammals.

A UN study warned that unless action was taken to tackle deforestation in the region, more than 66% of the rainforest would be lost by 2040.

The high definition camera will be made by a team at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

"We're delighted to be involved in this very important and timely project," said Nick Waltham, head of RAL's Imaging Systems Division.

"RALCam3 will provide 10-metre per pixel ground sampling from an orbit of 650 km (400 miles) altitude," he told BBC News.

"The image [width] is 88km (55 miles) thereby enabling large areas of the terrain to be imaged in one satellite pass."

Dr Waltham said the system would also have other applications, including surveillance of environmental change and offshore pollution.

The camera is one of the first projects to be supported by the fund, which is headed by former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai.

"The Congo Basin Forest Fund is a joint response to a global problem whereby an innovative and consensual mechanism has been embraced," Professor Maathai explained.

"It involves various partners committed to preserve and protect one of the most unique ecosystems in the world."

The fund, which has received an initial £58m (73m euros) from the UK government and £50m (63m euros) from the Norweigan goverment, will support anti-logging projects in the region until 2012.

Small is beautiful and lasts longer

The holy grail in the world of technology is achieving optimum battery power.

In the go go go lifestyles that so many people lead today, the ability for our pdas, ipods, smart phones, mobiles and notebooks or laptops to keep powering through the day is crucial. But the truth of the matter is that we are still connected to the wall socket and the battery life on all our fabulous gizmos just doesn't go the distance.

And all those little extra things we do to preserve the battery like dimming the backlight and powering down when not in use really doesn't make that much of a difference.

Well now the graphics company Nvidia thinks it has the solution to all these annoying problems in the shape of a 'complete mobile computer on a chip' called the Tegra.

The official launch of the new processor took place at the Computex show in Taiwan, but execs at the Santa Clara company gave the BBC a look at the thing in action before showing it to the world.

Michael Rayfield who is Nvidia's general manager for mobile business told me "Clearly the future is about visual computing. As screens get larger that's what we do for a living and the thing they really need is extreme battery life and none of the solutions to date have allowed that."

And he basically said the shrunk down laptop known as a notebook just doesn't cut it in providing productivity functionality along with entertainment functionality. In other words the marriage between an iPhone and the BlackBerry.

"Notebooks have done a great job of being mobile computing devices, they are highly productive and are very powerful. But they are basically a dehydrated laptop and you can't get very far from a wall outlet. They run for a couple of hours and you need to plug them in or if you run them longer you trade functionality."

To drive his point home he did a simple comparison test. The Tegra versus the Diamondville low cost mobile chip designed by Intel.

Size is all in this battle for the mobile internet devices space.

Michael pointed out some facts and figures. The Diamondville is a three chip solution which is just shy of 2000 square millimetres. Tegra is a single part at 144 square millimetres.

This is vital maintains Michael because it means the Tegra has "the flexibility to fit whatever shape device I want from an ipod to a regular media player to a tablet or mobile phone."

Next comes the real killer app. He claims playing a video on a Diamondville or Atom driven device will give you four hours of screen time versus the Tegra's 26 hours. For powerpoint or viewing files its one hour against 10 hours.

"We are 10 times smaller and last up to 10 times longer. It's a full internet experience. You can search the web, work on your powerpoint document, listen to your favourite music and watch videos" explains Michael.

"It's all about doing everything for a full day on a single charge. You've got all day power."

Next up was Stuart Bonnema, the comany's technical marketing manager with a gizmo to test the amount of power each device was using.

Doing nothing, the Diamondville was chewing through 10 watts of battery power with the backlight off. When Stuart fired up a movie, Cars in this instance, the number of watts went up to 13.

For the Tegra, it burned one watt just sitting there and 1.3 watts playing the Hancock movie. And that was showing a 720 pixel movie compared to just standard def on the Intel chip.

Now I know this all sounds like a huge advert for the Tegra but the thing was pretty impressive in action. The picture quality on the Tegra eight inch screen compared to the notebook's four inch was a world apart. And so was the action.

On the Diamondville chip, the movie juddered as it tried to upload the code and play the action scenes. In part it semi froze and jumped frames. The Tegra try out went smoothly.

"The thing that has kept the mobile internet device between a cell phone and a notebook computer from being successful in the past is that there hasn't been a good architecture to build around it" says Michael Rayfield,

He says the company has invested a lot of money in the Tegra which was built from the ground up with the help of between 500 and 600 engineers who worked on it for exactly 365 days.

"The sky's the limit on this next computer revolution" an enthusiastic Michael told me.

He reckons devices armed with the Tegra processors will be on the market in time for Christmas with a base asking price of $199 (£100).

And there will be a lot of competition among companies trying to dominate this space.

Intel's boss Paul Otellini agrees a lucrative market awaits valuing it at around $40 billion in a couple of years. His firm, which is the world's No 1 chipmaker is planning to update the newly launched Atom chip next year with one called Moorestown.

Also entering the fray are Via Technologies of Taiwan which will soon release its Nano processor aimed at the same market, as will Eee Pc, Qualcomm Inc, Texas Instruments Inc and Samsung Electronics.

And all of this is great news for us the consumer. With more competition not only are we likely to end up with a high grade device, but also one that we can afford.

The Yahoo Romcom

The Yahoo soap opera seems to get a new plotline every week and is in danger of moving from melodrama to farce. To recap for latecomers to this romcom:

"Previously on "The Search for Love", Microsoft fancied Yahoo, which played hard to get, and flirted with Google. Microsoft walked away in a huff, only for Yahoo to say it had been hasty, and might well have walked up the aisle if only its suitor had been a little more generous. Then Microsoft said it might be interested again after all, although only in a more "open" relationship."

But tonight came sad news for friends of the star-crossed lovers."Yahoo and Microsoft no longer speaking" was the headline on one technology blog. Yahoo put out a statementrevealing that there had been an irretrievable breakdown. Microsoft had said it was never ever going to marry Yahoo - and Yahoo had no interest in a more limited relationship, involving handing over search because that "would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future."

Instead, though, Yahoo appears to be throwing itself at Google. In the latest enthralling episode, just hours after the Microsoft break-up, the two firms announced a new advertising partnership. Jerry Yang's company explained:"The agreement enables Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo!'s search results and on some of its web properties in the United States and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, giving Yahoo! the ability to display paid search results from Google, other third parties, and Yahoo!'s own Panama marketplace." So, let's be clear, just because we're getting into bed with Google, it doesn't mean we're not free to play the field.

I'm not so sure that the competition watchdogs are going to see it that way. Alarm bells were already ringing on Capitol Hill over Yahoo's "limited" trial in April of Google's technology, with talk of congressional hearings. And the Microsofties are keener than ever to paint themselves as minnows in the world of search advertising faced with Google's 800lb gorilla. "We only have 4% of the search market, so we just don't compete" said one.

Harsh words too tonight from sources at Microsoft about why they lost all interest in buying Yahoo. "It's an underperforming business whose staff are all heading for the hills," was the gist of the message from Redmond.

Wall Street seems to agree. Yahoo's shares fell more than 10% after the collapse of the Microsoft talks - though the market closed before the statement about the Google deal. And it's hard to imagine that advertisers will see the Yahoo/Google love-in as a happy ending. It's corporate lawyers who will be sending flowers to the couple - they can expect plenty of business as regulators around the world start asking searching questions about competition in online advertising. Tune in soon for another episode, but be warned, there could be tears before bedtime.

Facebook over? Only in Islington

Facebook has made it to number one in the world's social networking league. That at least is the verdict of comscore, which says that a year of extraordinary growth has pushed Facebook ahead of MySpace in terms of users.

Which may come as something of a surprise to those who got excited about all that poking and scrabbling during a brief flirtation with Facebook last year - but thought it had gone the way of the hula hoop and CB radio.

As someone who got heavily - perhaps obsessively - involved in Facebook a year ago, I can't help noticing that it seems to have gone very quiet lately. I still use it quite regularly, but many of the 400 or so people in my personal network seem to have given up on it, with most of the tech crowd heading off to Twitter instead. A day ago I sent a poll to all of these " friends" asking them whether they were still around and whether they visited Facebook more than once a week. So far only a handful have responded, which suggests that either they have left Facebook, or that they are bored witless with pointless polls.

But a better indication may be that only around a quarter of my friends have updated their Facebook statuses in the last 24 hours, whereas a year ago there was a ceaseless flow of "news" about their activities. Like all journalists, I tend to extrapolate from my personal experience - but I think in this case I'd be wrong. While the middle-aged media folk in London may have moved on to something else, it seems Facebook is still growing in popularity amongst the young.

When I visited Dundee University last week, a student told me it was still seen as an indispensable part of campus social life. But it's the rapid spread of Facebook amongst young professionals in countries like India which has helped it to the number one spot. One US blogger is questioning whether these users are as valuable to advertisers as networkers in America - where MySpace is still well ahead - but I don't imagine Facebook will be too fussy after a year which has seen it become a global brand.

MySpace is responding today with a revamp of its home page - out next week - and is promising what it calls "a summer of innovation". It sounds as though the network has heard the calls for a cleaner, less complex interface, with a promise that you will be able to change the look of your profile with one click.

But it seems to me that the social networking scene is settling down into separate camps. The very young are with Bebo. The music crowd are still on MySpace. The obsessive technophiles are on Twitter - latest Tweet from one sad West Coast blogger: "I have 3,500 unanswered direct messages. Please do not send more." But the mass of students and young professionals seem to be gravitating towards Facebook. It may be "over" in the coffee-bars of Islington, but from Manchester to Mumbai, Facebook marches on. All it needs to do now is start selling serious amounts of advertising - which may be more of a challenge.