http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/index.cfm?forumid=16 en-US FuseTalk Standard Edition 3.2 Build 80405 Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52520 2013-05-17T10:05:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52520#comments 0 part one of this blog, we looked at BT's Premier League 'giveaway'. This time, let's consider YouTube's decision to start charging for some of its content.

OK, the YouTube plan is bound to make any journalist smirk a little. A service that has built itself on free content, now wants to charge for some. With a few exceptions, my business has found that harder to achieve than it would have liked.

And YouTube faces similar problems. Erecting a pay-wall between the public and something they are used to just being there never goes down too well. Particularly in the mass market.

Specialists like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal (focused on markets that have long been willing to pay for good analysis) are getting bettter and better numbers. But it will be interesting to see how The Sun gets on, now that it is following more upmarket News International stablemates The Times and The Sunday Times in charging for access. The Currant Bun is, after all folks, relentlessly populist.

As is YouTube. While it's wonderful to have online, on-demand access to the thoughts and lectures of Richard Feynman, the service is essentially about anthropomorphic felines, mindless amateur blatherers, and people otherwise (but not quite so consciously) making planks of themselves. Oh, and a few movie trailers.

Having said that, the video market has been better prepared for YouTube's move than that for newspapers. Netflix's successful transformation from a DVD rental to streaming-based service - despite the many analysts who forecast disaster - is the best example. There are several others, both at home and abroad.

Of course, you did always have to pay something for Netflix. But beyond that, YouTube does seem to have taken note of the success of the specialists.

Its launch channels variously include episodes from Sesame Street and clips from National Geographic. This kind of video works well online. Parents are increasingly looking for educational content online, as their offspring - even pre-schoolers - seize control of iPads, Kindles and Galaxies. One's own curiosity about the wonders of the world is often sated by Wikipedia or some other specialist site, so offering visual content in the same vein doesn't look like a bad bet.

And we come back to sport - famously termed the 'battering ram' for subscription services by Rupert Murdoch himself. YouTube has a deal with the PGA golf network (and The Sun, it should be noted, has its own deal for online Premier League highlights).

Also, on the face of it, this will all cost just a few pennies a channel - YouTube is charging from around 80p to £1.50 a month. And it only needs a tiny fraction of its one billion regular viewers to jump in to makes pots of money. The scale of the Google-company's reach is another important point here.

It is - or should be - confirmation that the traditional 'packaged' pay-TV model is broken for good. And it may well be that. But a couple of notes of caution.

Whenever the online audience perceives that you have taken something away from it, its attachment to what you continue to offer is challenged. This is particularly true when you have built your brand on user-generated content - i.e. ordinary people making stuff for you for nowt. The blogger-fuelled Huffington Post was merely sold with its owners pocketing a good few million - no question of subscriptions - and the blowback there still isn't done.

However, the other question YouTube's partners may ask themselves is why they need to stay with the company in the long term. Unlike an old-school cable or satellite TV operator, it's not as though YouTube controls the delivery mechanism. Nope, Google does not own the Internet.

As such, YouTube says that the subscription channels are an experiment for now - and, of course, there's no question of it ever charging for you to upload and share your own material. Of course, there isn't.

But the company does need to be wary of who wins from this over time. Consumers may be willing to pay for specialist content, but its very nature means that it's also now pretty straightforward for its providers to use YouTube as the pathfinder, and a way of building up their subscription brands, before striking out on their own.

As Netflix showed with House of Cards - and will soon do so again by bringing back the terrific Arrested Development - you need to supplement your 'partners' offerings with material of your own. Strangely, I would have thought that with Google's resources, YouTube would be doing that from the very beginning. But it remains a promise for the future.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52429 2013-05-10T08:25:59 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52429#comments 0 unveiled its first subscription channels. But in the first of a two-part blog, we look at BT. It's gone the other way and announced that once paid-for live Premier League footy will next season be free-of-charge over your computer, if you take its broadband service.

BT's is a huge punt. The company is paying £738m alone over three years for rights to 38 EPL games a season. On top of that, it is acquiring content for a BTSport service in markets such as rugby union, Scottish and foreign football, tennis, UFC, MotoGP and more. Then add facilities costs, talent costs, marketing costs, what BT's already paid to acquire the UK ESPN channels and more operational overhead. It's fair to say this must be close to a £1bn-marketing bet.

And the pitch is all about getting BT's pipe into your home. It flips the established satellite/cable broadcasting model by giving away something traditionally considered premium (sports) to sell something increasingly seen as a commodity (bandwidth).

It sounds crazy, but there seem to be three aspects to BT's strategy.

1. Like Google, it's decided that the traditional broadcasting model is bust for good. Streaming is the way forward and whoever offers the most reliable connection will get the business as services become more sophisticated and complicated, require higher resolutions (3D, 4k), and, perhaps most important of all, more of our in-home devices require highly reliable connections - all hail The Internet of Things.

2. The chance to offer some premium material is still there, it's just changing. The second generation of smart TVs reaching the market now offers much richer apps and the user interfaces are greatly improved. But these are manufactured by big global players who will, therefore, predominantly cut deals with other big Internet players like Netflix. BT can offer the same well-known services - not everyone's going to change that new LED display tomorrow - but also more local ones. Indeed, it's local content and service providers who say they struggle most on the open Web. Beyond that, there are also local services like telemedicine, which will require the kind of 99% reliability only offered by wired networks - and which, if it saves on GP or hospital visits, the NHS could be convinced to pay for, whether the patient is on BT broadband or not.

3. For the first time I can remember BSkyB looks vulnerable. As I type that, I can't help but feel it may prove a very daft sentence. BSkyB is and has long been a brilliant company strategically. But its core business remains tied to a fairly traditional pay-TV model that is looking rather tired. I'd bet that it will adapt. But from BT's perspective, this may be the time to strike. Again, it all comes back to who owns not just the pipe or signal but also the box in the home - and what that box can do (remember, don't just think content, think about the incoming realities of the machine-to-machine based connected home).

The question then is whether £1bn - or more properly, an annual £330m or so for three years - is too high a price to pay. BT currently has an estimated 5m broadband subscribers. The 2011 Census estimated there are 21.7m UK households. If BT got all 16.7m it doesn't already have on broadband, that would represent an initial acquisition cost over three years of about £60 per household. It won't do anywhere near that many, but if that figure stays below £150 (c.7m new customers), possibly £250 (c.4m new customers), this might work.

These numbers are, very much, finger in the wind. You do have to pay for the broadband pipe to get the free channel. A BTVision set-top box is also £5 a month if you want one (a reflection of the separate hardware subsidy). In balance though, they assume acquisition costs paid off over three years and telecoms, particularly wired telecoms, often allows much longer than that. Moreover, these numbers are not that far off the subsidies mobile operators apply to handsets, and we typically buy a new one of those every 18 months.

So they do suggest that BT may not be as far off with its numbers (if not its strategy) as has been suggested since the EPL giveaway was announced.

Perhaps more importantly, the end-game here goes far beyond that traditional content and how it is consumed. This is owning the gateway to the next major shift in communications.

And if you don't think it's coming soon, think again. Last week, a senior VP at ARM, the British company that provides technology that goes into almost every mobile phone, offered a projection that suggests its shipments inside embedded processors - those that will power this Internet of Things - could exceed those for mobile in just four years. That's simply staggering.

And, more than telly, it's why BT really wants your broadband business, and is willing to play big to get it.

Come back early next week and I'll try to similarly pick apart YouTube's opposite move into pay-TV, and the challenges it faces. And how, ironically, some of those may be the same as its parent Google has dumped upon my trade, journalism.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52282 2013-04-29T06:23:12 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52282#comments 0
The results of the UnGrounded 'lab in the sky' will be presented at the DNA Summit on innovation that awaits the passengers in London, this June. Then, more importantly, they will be pushed before the G8 Summit of major world leaders a few days later in Northern Ireland. The United Nations is also supporting the project.

I like the idea. It's too easy to scoff about 'talking shops' or grasp for comic parallels with some old Airport movie. And you always have the rather hobbled notion of the 'great and the good' jetting in with wisdom. But there's enough potential in UnGrounded that means we should give it a chance.

First, as I've noted before, we need to look at what has made Silicon Valley so successful and borrow the best of those tools, not just in the UK but worldwide. Any notable initiative with that goal should be worthwhile in terms of both what it says and making sure that plenty of people hear it.

Second, UnGrounded has the sensible aim of kick starting the debate. Its participants will not fly into Heathrow with a definitive solution. Rather the objective is to get STEM issues much higher up the global macroeconomic and political agendas. What's the harm in that?

Third, UnGrounded is to go beyond the 'same old voices' in recruiting its contributors. Ten of the 100 think-tankers will be recruited openly via Mashable. It's running a How Did You Get Your Best Idea? contest offering seats on the flight.

Finally, there is that core block of Valley leaders on board.

We do need more than platitudes. Beyond that, those of us who have closely followed the emerging STEM crisis and the Valley's development may end up finding many of the high level proposals familiar. However, we don't matter that much - if UnGrounded (and the DNA Summit in general) tugs at the coats of the unaware, it will do its job.

And to do that, you need heavy-hitters, such as those UnGrounded has recruited out of Google, Stanford Business School and Andreesen Horowitz, the VC-firm co-founded by Mosaic innovator Marc Andreesen. Just like the US domestic pressure group FWD.us, you need people who will be listened to.

So, let's keep a close eye on this one.

Meanwhile, here are three modest proposals from me on how to make it work.


1. Turn off the WiFi

Too many 'planes have it. It's actually a better discipline if you board with everything you need for your work, and shut out the usual distractions (and let's face it, the calibre of people UnGrounded wants have neverending inbox dings).

2. Easing the way for smaller companies

A couple of points from this column's feedback from recent articles on immigration. For newer companies, the issue isn't just policies that make it difficult to recruit foreign talent. Too often there are bureaucracies that make the process hideously expensive, even where national policies are relatively sane.

Then, there are the issues companies all face - but again, it's much harder for emerging ones - where they decide not to bring talent to them but to go to where it is. Far too many countries have regimes that make it unnecessarily complicated and expensive to set up overseas representative offices and the like. Create environments for the job creators at all levels.

3. Kick the politicians hard on education

STEM is an education issue, though one that will take laggards a generation to fix fully wherever they are in the world. However, even based on the existing talent pool, a more sensible approach to the cost of education would be a big help.

Inflation here is running at a frightenting level in the US and many other countries. However, the US is the most extreme case. From 1986-2012, overall US inflation was 115.06%; college inflation was 498.31%. Such numbers price out potential talent. And it's hard not to conclude that tuition fees in the UK are having the same effect, even if to a lesser degree so far.

The situation is surely unsustainable in any country that would truly be part of the 21st Century knowledge economy.

All the above are pretty obvious, but still must form part of both the UnGrounded and DNA Summit programmes. It is all about that link between talent and commerce.

So, good luck and bon voyage.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52228 2013-04-25T05:56:28 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=52228#comments 0
It's one thing to talk of rediscovered artifacts 'speaking to us across the years'; quite another when one literally delivers on the metaphor.

The recording dates from Spring 1885, when Bell's Volta Labs in Washington were seeking to compete with, inevitably, Thomas Edison in recording sound.

Edison developed a technique that used foil to capture speech. Bell and his colleagues tried metal and a number of alternatives.

And here's one great irony. Aware that Edison was a patent warrior (some would say the first 'troll'), Bell's Volta group carefully documented its work, later passing these papers and more than 400 resulting records and discs on to the Smithsonian. However, all those papers did not give any indication as to how the R&D recordings could be played back.

So, since at least the 1920s, the recordings have sat in Smithsonian's archives as "mute artifacts", National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens tells the institution's in-house magazine.

The chance to unlock them finally arrived two years ago. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and the US Library of Congress used optical scans to extract sound from French recordings made a decade before even Bell entered the fray.

The same technology has now been used to capture the sound of Bell speaking by scanning a paper and wax disc. And he sounds every bit the erudite, deliberative chap you'd expect.

But don't take my written word for it. The Smithsonian has posted this clip from the recovered disc. You can also read more about the work involved here.

Just one final note to say that if you ever are in DC, the collection of museums managed by the Smithsonian around the National Mall truly is one of the world's greatest cultural resources. It is such a treasure that it's hard not to be massively pleased for them with this huge revoicing.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51999 2013-04-12T10:57:53 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51999#comments 0
FWD.us also lists senior executives from, among others, Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Dropbox, Yammer and Cisco Systems as founders and supporters. Several high profile tech investors are also on board. But it is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg who is leading the charge.

An op-ed column by him for yesterday's Washington Post uses personal experiences as a volunteer teacher in entrepreneurship to reemphasize Silicon Valley's repeated reform demands: more visas for skilled foreign technology workers, and the passage of Dream Act provisions that will guarantee college opportunities and a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.

We've gone over the background to these demands before, but FWD.us adds a few bullets of its own.

57% of engineering graduate students in the US are foreign-born

40% of the companies in the 2010 Fortune 500 stock index included immigrants or their children as founders.


OK, but what does all this mean for the UK?

Britain faces its own immigration challenges today, although the subject is becoming mired in increasingly dangerous rhetoric. One newspaper recently claimed that a plan to deprive all children of illegal immigrants access to any level of education was before the government. The story was quickly shot down, but the fact that it could even very briefly be seen as part of acceptable political discourse was disturbing.

Any society that would hold children to account for their parents' lawbreaking in such a way could hardly consider itself humane.

Beyond that though, the UK needs more smart workers and graduates, but does government understand that?

Institutions like the IET bang the drum long and hard, but a couple of aspects of FWD.us are interesting because they augment the traditional - but still vitally necessary - channels.

This is a 'dream team' exercise for the Dream Act. Apart from Zuckerberg, here are some of the others on the roll call: PayPal founder and space entrepreneur Elon Musk, Netflix's Reed Hastings, Google's Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Zynga's Mark Pincus, and Dropbox's Drew Houston. Chances are even a fair few Brits will recognise plenty of those.

However, FWD.us is also a 'new economy' play. With Cisco's exception, the 'old school' Valley titans of hardware and software are noticeably absent, though all share the new organisation's goals. The point though is that the group's active members represent the latest sources of technology-driven economic growth.

The comparable economic debate in the UK remains dominated by traditional - you could even say pre-silicon - industries. Newbies might get the occasional invite to a ministerial reception, but their proactive attempts to influence things are sporadic.

The UK agenda is by no means identical to that facing technology in the US, but how FWD.us fares - and there's no guarantee of success or even no great ego-driven falling out - may provide some useful pointers as to how to best address it.

(And just to remind you, as if it were necessary... but it is: these are my personal views, not those of the IET)]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51937 2013-04-08T08:10:24 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51937#comments 0 growing homelessness in Silicon Valley, people take notice.

To be frank, Moyers isn't first to the story. The Latino press has repeatedly addressed it - Hispanics in San Jose have seen their average incomes crumble in the last three years - and in the last month, the Associated Press highlighted the issue.

Economic hardship drove many of last year's Occupy protests on the West Coast. Visiting several, I was struck by how many former Valley workers were among those at the camps.

Still, the fact that there is a huge (and growing) tent city in the shadow of San Jose's Mineta Airport will come as a shock to many Americans. Silicon Valley has traditionally been held up as an example of what regions need to do to survive in the new economy: run lean, focus on technology and innovation, scale red tape, you know the rest.

Instead, the vaunted region is now being offered as a successor to Wall Street in illustrating the gap between the 99% and the 1% that includes many local moguls. But does the comparison really stand?

Moyers rightly identifies the general flight of manufacturing jobs from the US as part of the problem. But it is also something of a dead end. So too is the increasingly obvious trend that many of the more skilled engineering jobs that were cut in the Valley during the recession are now resulting in upturn-fuelled rehires elsewhere, generally abroad.

Both these factors can be attributed to economic determinism rather than heartlessness.

Factories are cheaper and easier to build, operate and staff overseas - the US has allowed its manufacturing infrastructure to decay to such an extent that labour costs are no longer a first-order issue.

Global rivals, meanwhile, have aggressively invested in education meaning they have not just cheaper but far greater technology talent pools - education inflation in the US is simply ridiculous.

Meanwhile, who is buying the Valley's products and services? It was recently noted that more than 90% of ARM's sales come from outside the UK. The proportions are certainly smaller for its US equivalents, for now. But almost every Valley senior executive I've spoken to recently has pointed to India, China and South East Asia as current sources of growth. And many of those markets insist that you are 'close' to them, or the shutters get slammed down.

Given the landscape, calls to 'Buy American' (or, rather here, 'Sell American') seem Canute-like.

But Silicon Valley also faces a serious systemic and technological challenge - and it's right there in its name. Until now, the semiconductor-driven hardware and software sectors have driven regional growth for more than 50 years. A good run by any standard. But things are changing. San Jose is not immediately seen as the natural cluster for emerging health sciences or nanotechnology (though it's doing its darnedest to seize those crowns).

It's way too early, clownish even, to start talking about 'the end of an era'. It is fair however to reflect on the consequences of pricing talent out of the university system, pursuing immigration policies that have put a brake on entrepreneurship and innovation, and the inherent insanity of letting the local cost of subsistence for a typical family reach nearly $100,000 a year.

This offers little comfort to those tragically thrown onto the streets, and there's probably no quick fix. However, all this was foreseen - indeed, it was many of the, yes, obscenely wealthy Valley leaders who nevertheless warned that it could happen.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51782 2013-03-29T06:30:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51782#comments 0
You see, Segars has spent five years on the US West Coast, and received wisdom is that when you've tasted that technology culture, Blighty looks downright ugly.

Well, first off, Segars doesn't remotely match the character in Thomas Wolfe's novel. That's about an 'expat' who publishes a book about his home town that the folks back there hate. Segars' time in Silicon Valley, by contrast, has been marked by his performances as the US front-man bigging up ARM's vision and achievements and, more importantly, the senior exec maintaining and building key contracts.

But let's go deeper. I've spent some time recently looking at the Chinese 'sea turtle' phenomenon, the emerging superstate's nickname for those expats it is aggressively wooing home to establish entrepreneurship and create new technology companies. That's something the UK is utterly hopeless at, and, remember, even Segars is coming back to run a hugely successful company.

That said, you have to take heart from his comments in a recent interview, given jointly with outgoing CEO Warren East to The Daily Telegraph. Here's one key quotation:

"In the UK we need to have more of a culture of entrepreneurism and risk-taking. We need a tolerance of failure, too.

"I lived in Silicon Valley for five years and it is totally accepted there that someone's going to start a company with some idea that seems completely off the wall and that they may well fail but that something good will come of it.

"Failing on the way towards success is seen there as a credible path to success. Failing once isn't something that dooms you forever.

"It's almost seen as a necessary building block in your education towards building a highly successful business."

The UK desperately needs more of this thinking. It's also to Warren East's credit that he says he wants to use his post-ARM career to promote local entrepreneurship (but also global best practices) and strengthen the belief that you can build and run a world-class technology company from the UK.

And alongside ARM, the likes of Imagination Technologies, CSR and Wolfson Microelectronics are among others that have proved much the same thing.

The problem is that these companies are largely outward-looking. The same Telegraph piece reminds us that 99% of ARM's sales are from abroad, and I'd imagine the others have much the same proportion.

Where its progenitor, Acorn, was very much a darling of British computing, ARM was always going beyond our borders. In his time as CEO, Sir Robin Saxby truly was its knight errant, racking up the air miles long before he got his official gong. And what choice did he have - it was the likes of Nokia that had products that best fit that launch ARM core?

There have been moans that the UK has experienced no 'ARM Effect', some clustered blossoming of companies around a tech titan of the kind that made Silicon Valley so powerful.

But in identifying the 'right to fail' that has so long marked Valley culture, Segars hits on one key difference between the UK and the US that goes beyond foster companies, government subsidies, dirigiste clustering and all that stuff.

I'm sure he knows of several more, but the key is to get the people on the end of any largesse - such as it may be - thinking the right way.

So, shouldn't we really argue that the more people who do 'come home again' and have the stature to push those ideas into British technology, the better?

In short, Simon, you're still going to have to give an awful lot of speeches just for engineers! But do feel free to give Messrs Osborne and Cable (and our sclerotic bankers) a poke while you're at it.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51745 2013-03-27T12:55:37 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51745#comments 0 Person of Interest and the topic is the hot one of cybersecurity.

I'm also a fan. It's very much a mainstream format, a marrying of the Q-James Bond/boffin-spy relationship to the US superhero trope of the urban vigilante. But it is also subversive in a smart way. Oh, and the actions sequences are top notch.

That's perhaps not too surprising once you learn that its creator is Jonathan Nolan, brother of the director Christopher and one of his key collaborators on the recent invention of Batman.

Person of Interest's big idea is that an IT genius called 'Harold Finch' (Lost's Michael Emerson) created The Machine for the US government to spy on and analyse every bit of electronic traffic and then identify 'outliers' that point to terrorist attacks. He's built in some obfuscation to protect 'privacy', but now he, a former special ops hitman and a couple of cops are also using his creation to help ordinary folk at risk. It's a fun but somewhat far-fetched notion.

What grabbed my friend, whose stock-in-trade is the cybersecurity business, is how the show depicts its heroes' processes, once The Machine gives them a name (in fact, not even that - just a Social Security number).

Every week, he said, it's "built around people acting dumb". Finch and Co track their subjects by, for example, exploiting weaknesses in WiFi networks (like not changing the default password), ignorance about the now widely acknowledged trick of how your mobile phone can be turned into a bug, and how analyzing your social network profile can help hackers determine the subject for a Trojan-bearing email.

But why bring this up? Well, a senior aide to President Obama recently named China specifically as a cyberwarfare rival - the first time anyone from this administration has done so. The comments also followed on from some less specific irritation voiced by Obama himself in his State of the Union address.

The problem with the latest rhetoric is that it seems to be contributing to cybersecurity being seen as a high tech extension of the Cold War arms race - something beyond our control because of the technological muscle required. The reality is that most hacks - whether originated in the east or the west - are still undertaken by exploiting our carelessness and ignorance. There is very much a Home Front, if you will.

Which brings me to steal my friend's killer argument. As wildly implausible as it is entertaining, Person of Interest may still be doing more right now to clue up Joe Public on his personal relationship to cybersecurity than any government.

For all the noise in Washington and Whitehall about initiatives and all the global sabre-rattling, that is extremely damning.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51219 2013-03-05T11:52:57 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51219#comments 0 Glass heads-up display product moved into the developer/early adopter phase. Then, with more immediate ambitions in the Air/Ultrabook market, the search giant unveiled its Chromebook Pixel entry.

I haven't tried Glass but did get the chance to play with a Pixel for an hour or so, while visiting a friend on the West Coast who'd got his hands on a review model.

And what has struck me about both is that they don't feel like 'traditional' Google products. Without wanting to be rude, they feel a bit upmarket.

Let's take Pixel first. It's the one more of you will get your own chance to test drive. The aluminium casing echoes the MacBook Air but with its own sense of style. This is a very good looking machine. Then there's the high definition 2,560x1,700px touchscreen - the tablet meets the retina display. It looks splendid. And there's a chunky Intel Core i5 microprocessor running the show.

So far, so good. Add that Pixel's light and you can see a potential attraction to road warriors - until, that is, you remember this is a Chromebook. The means the browser is the OS, so not only do you essentially have to use Google's versions of popular productivity software but you also need a decent web connection to do so.

It's perhaps worth noting here that this week has seen the US Telecommunications Industry Association disclose that, for the first time, 2012 saw north American mobile subscribers spend more on data traffic than they did on voice. The trend to mobility is confirmed but remember that most of those subs continue to complain about the huge variability in network quality.

Then, there's Pixel's price: £1,050. That's essentially parity with the Mac OS or Windows-based alternatives that will let you work with your desktop software offline.

As beautiful a machine as it is, Pixel's problems are obvious. Beyond Googlephiles (or Googleheads or Googlies?), it's hard to see the product finding a mass market. And remember, existing base Chromebooks retail in the £200-£300 range.

Meanwhile, Google is also charging about £1,500 to pathfinder users of its Glass product. That number will fall, as these smart specs move towards a full launch. But I don't suspect it will go that far.

Like Pixel, Glass feels like an upmarket product. Indeed, if Google can tweak it with a few of the industrial design smarts it has brought to its new 'touchtop', the company could also have a very stylish one.

But both innovations raise an interesting question. The Google Labs operation - and the company's willingness to let staff spend 20% of their time working up their own ideas - is delivering some cool stuff. But there are two sides to this.

Software and apps can largely be built into Google's existing infrastructure. They surround a primary service - that built around the search engine - that is arguably the best value on the web. The best search, free (or reasonably priced) apps, free email and so on.

The Chromebooks and Glass (and other products we can expect as the company integrates its purchase of Motorola Mobility) can leverage this infrastructure, but they exist in a world of hardware economics. Even here, Android-based handsets are increasingly seen as 'value' alternatives to the iPhone.

In short, Google has to marry its innovation to hard price tags rather than its ability to sell advertising. You can assume some subsidies given Google's wish to keep your online spending mostly in its gently-fenced garden. But the numbers will only shift so far. Amazon still matches the cost of its Kindles to the cost of the components (though not the software and marketing), even if they are essentially shop windows.

So far, Google's ability to match its offerings to the sense that they are premium is unproven. Indeed, for a company that has built itself into the most powerful web name by essentially 'giving it away', the shift it needs to make in one part of its marketing will be challenging. Right now, it appears that the company is still feeling its way.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51122 2013-02-27T04:37:52 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=51122#comments 0
Awarded the best animated short Oscar in 1975, Great has been out of official circulation for quite some time. Briskly pulled every time it surfaces on YouTube, your best chances of seeing it are currently knowing a fellow cartoon buff who can produce a much-played VHS.

That's a great pity. Great actively does not give Brunel the kind of mystic aura that accompanied his appearance at the Olympics opening ceremony, but it does capture and celebrate the character of the man and the objectives of the profession as a whole. It is a terrific, and hugely entertaining endorsement of what engineering does.

Bob Godfrey, who passed away last week at 91, was frequently attracted to planners. His most famous creations, Roobarb, Custard and Henry's Cat, are full of schemes - some of which do and some of which don't come off. But you could tell he loved those characters - as did so many of us as children - because they tried.

Godfrey himself was a wonderfully inventive talent, innovating so that he could craft his films on shoestring budgets while working in what was regarded as the most expensive branch of film and TV production. He'd have a go and, by all accounts, was incredibly generous in passing on his insights to those entering the field. Famous graduates of the 'Godfrey School' include Terry Gilliam.

Which brings us to his take on Brunel. Unusually, Great is as much if not more about the man's disappointments as his triumphs. But it adamantly refuses to end on a note of tiresomely British 'heroic failure'. This Brunel represents a spirit of striving to push boundaries, ambition and overcoming the received wisdom of naysayers. That, Godfrey says, is how you get stuff done.

The tone is not one of veneration, though. Great is very funny. Its songs have wit and its images are often ribald, recalling the seaside postcard. But there is far more affection than ridicule.

We often talk about how to promote the values of engineering without becoming too dry, too worthy and - yes - too technical. Yet Godfrey achieved that nearly 40 years ago in a lauded film that has nevertheless fallen out of circulation. When perhaps we should still be showing it to, at least, each prospective generation of engineering undergrads.

It is sad that Godfrey's passing should prompt the thought, but it does so nevertheless. Shouldn't some of our world's great and good lobby to get Great back before the public? You could always ping Bob's company, for example.

As the Olympics showed, Brunel remains a powerful figure to British society as a whole. Indeed, only a few years ago he was also voted into second place in a BBC poll of Great Britons, just behind Winston Churchill.

A dry view of the man might invoke his contemporary Tennyson's view of the challenge before their age in 'Ulysses': "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Bob Godfrey did the same with jokes.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50917 2013-02-17T21:47:07 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50917#comments 0 House of Cards is superb TV, but is it really as much of a 'game changer' in terms of how content will now be made, distributed and viewed as has been claimed?

Today, you must be a subscriber to the Netflix streaming service to see the programme. And Netflix has certainly rolled the dice, putting $100m behind a two-season commission. At just under $4m per episode for 26 hours of television drama (the first 13 are available now), House of Cards is more expensive than almost all other shows, including those made for the big networks.

It should come as little surprise that content producers are excited, declaring the move revolutionary and disruptive. Whenever a new source of production dollars turns up, you give it a cuddle. That's made easier by the fact that House of Cards has a terrific cast on top form (led by the peerless Kevin Spacey) as well as an excellent script and directors whose background stretches from Seven to The Sopranos.

But the show is more of a natural step than the hype suggests.

First, Netflix has been forced into the production game by some of its former suppliers. Largely old school networks, they were slow to wake up to the kind of binge/box-set viewing of TV series that streaming and DVD enabled. When they did, several responded by cancelling earlier agreements with Netflix and other streamers, and are either looking for much more money or have launched rival online services. Netflix needed more 'A grade' content.

Beyond that, all subscriptions services ultimately find that they need exclusive content. Netflix's gamble today is a descendant of the sports and film rights deals Rupert Murdoch struck to get Sky (now BSkyB) established two decades ago. Before that, US pay channels such as HBO came to much the same conclusion.

Then, there is the arrival of 'smart' TVs and set-top boxes. The current first generation offers a lot of apps that act as gateways to selected services. Netflix's own app is one of the most popular. Their next generation, though, will likely aim to go out and find content for you, effectively Google-style aggregation. This makes exclusivity in video still more important - indeed, you can see an analogue in the content investments made by The Times and The Financial Times to support their paywalls.

In this context, Netflix's move is as much about defending its market as anything else. To that end, it is building a house with very expensive bricks, as opposed to timber or straw. Or so it hopes.

Either way, House of Cards could sound the death knell for packaged media, the umbrella term for content sold on disc and an already struggling market. That 'window' created the box-set viewing phenomenon: you could watch an entire series of 24 on your schedule rather than a broadcaster's. With the increasing shift towards 'running' as opposed to standalone per episode plots (itself the old 'come back next week' trick used by the earliest cliffhanger movie serials), box-sets became very attractive. Now you can do the same thing via streaming - and it's typically much cheaper.

Before we go, there is one other issue House of Cards has highlighted. It is that old chestnut about how far we still have to go in getting actual communications networks that can ensure a ubiquitously excellent streaming video experience, one comparable to HDTV from more traditional channels.

In the US, I was lucky enough to plough through the show on a fibre-optic network that carried the full HD image to a large display with little difficulty. And trust me, that is how House of Cards should be seen. It invites comparison with and exceeds the quality of - in production values as well - most TV anywhere. Netflix needs subscribers to understand that to lure them away from its old school rivals.

Elsewhere here and in the UK, however, friends report having to trade down to SD and watch the series on a computer screen. They've still enjoyed it, but their willingness to view House of Cards as fully comparable to anything an ABC, BBC, HBO or BSkyB can offer was obviously diminished.

So, room for improvement - nonetheless, let's say that the next step in TV's evolution is under way.

(Incidentally, many apologies to those of you who've tuned in hoping to hear the details on how Washington DC is aflame with gossip about the show and which character has a supposed real-life equivalent. It is. But this is also a town full of lawyers. Or putting it another way, you might want that, but I couldn't possibly comment.)]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50850 2013-02-13T04:30:53 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50850#comments 0
A few headline points. No doubt, we'll return to these issues over the next few days (and weeks and months).

On manufacturing, the US is to immediately launch three more innovation institutes, joining the pilot project launched in a vacant warehouse in Ohio last year. Ultimately, Obama wants to bring the total to 15. These centres are developing technologies such as 3D printing.

On climate change, the recent brutal storms in the US including Sandy and Nemo have put the issue properly back on the agenda with Obama now making it clear that if Congress will not pass a bill, he will use Executive Orders that do not require its approval. 'Market-based' cap & trade mechanisms remain the favoured strategy. Despite controversies such as the loan guarantees given to failed clean energy player Solyndra, Obama again namechecked an urgent need to develop this sector with federal help.

On education, schools that "create classes" in science, technology, engineering and mathematics - the so-called STEM quartet - will be rewarded for developing partnerships with further education and industry. Just how this would work will become clear over the coming days.

Finally on immigration, confirmation that the comprehensive reform package will include measures aimed at retaining and wooing entrepreneurs and smart graduates in the face of growing global competition (see more on this issue in the next print edition of E&T).

Climate change aside, these are all motherhood and apple pie proposals unlikely in themselves to stir up much Republican opposition, but welcome nonetheless.

The real problems though continue to reside at the macro scale - specifically, how will the US government cut the deficit?

The key part of Obama's address, for his opponents at any rate, was this:

"Nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth."

The counter argument here, though, is that the real challenge is not arresting the deficit but reducing it, and from a level where the notion that the US can simply grow its way out of its difficulties can be considered. The numbers are too big.

The president has unveiled an aggressive agenda for the first year of his second term and the instapolls suggest that he captured the public mood, with a 70% positive response (albeit from a more Democratic-leaning TV audience). However, among politicians, the phrase 'laundry list' was being thrown around a lot, often suggesting that the agenda had too much on it for their liking.

So, liking the ideas is one thing; now it's all about their relative priorities.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50532 2013-01-28T04:24:49 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50532#comments 0 a five-fold increase in the US Cyber Command, its military electronic warfare operations. Such an aggressive programme at a time when most other Pentagon budgets are being cut underlines once more the shift in US defence thinking under the Obama administration.

The plan has not yet been officially announced but the Post's reputation and the detail its story provides suggests this is well-sourced. At the very least, senior generals are flying a kite for some thinking that is already well advanced.

The tentpole features are:

1. The five-fold increase in human resources from about 900 today to just under 5,000.

2. A three-pronged strategy:
(a) National Mission Forces: these will seek to protect US domestic and other foreign infrastructure (e.g. power plants, hospitals, etc) deemed vital to national security.
(b) Combat Mission Forces: these will develop the US' own cyberweapons for use against 'malicious actors'.
(c) Cyber Protection Forces: in addition to protecting social infrastructure, these will specifically address the state of Department of Defense's own networks.

As a high level template this makes a lot of sense, and it reflects the thinking present in several cybersecurity reports issued since Obama took office. No-one should be terribly surprised.

While awaiting what official - though still necessarily sparse - detail may soon be added to this, two questions arise.

First, cybersecurity contines to represent an area where the interweaving of traditional military activity and covert surveillance (usually, mostly the province of security services) raise questions over civil liberties. One only has to look at how post-9/11 paranoia has fuelled one of the most successful TV series of recent times, Person of Interest, to see how this debate has jumped into the mainstream.

Second, as much as the US is seeking to extend its own defensive and offensive capabilities in this area, there is also the degree to which its public pronouncements both put potential enemies on notice and drive its allies to make similar investments.

On this last point, it is notable that one specific cyberattack cited by the Post's unnamed sources took place against a Saudi Arabian oil company.

In this regard, the UK is not a slouch - and so much is to its credit. Like it or not, these types of attack are increasing in frequency and represent an explicit threat to national security. However, both it and other US allies, through NATO and elsewhere, will undboutedly feel they have just received a friendly-but-still-hefty shove in the back.

However, one key point raised by the Post story is concern that the military Cyber Command is 'too close' to the covert surveillance organisation, the National Security Agency (jokingly called No Such Agency). There will always been some understandable - and necessary - discomfort when the operations of the secret state become entwined with those of the traditional military.

The staged leak to the Post could be seen as setting the stage for a US debate over that dilemma, one that sets the scene for radical changes in defence strategy. Could we say, though, that the same is happening in the UK, because it probably needs to?]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50389 2013-01-20T12:03:01 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50389#comments 0
That Armstrong's use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) secured him one, and a series of now rightly struck-off victories in the Tour de France and an Olympic medal, is beyond doubt. However, part of the explanation he offered Oprah Winfrey, that basically PEDs levelled the playing field because everyone else was taking them, is more problematic.

Whether or not you accept that as the whole story (and I don't, nor I suspect do most of you), it does play to a disturbing theme in elite sports generally.

A 2008 survey conducted across 12 states found kids willing to admit to using anabolic steroids in grades 8-12 - that's between roughly 14 and 18 years of age. Think about that for a moment: these are adolescents still way below the elite professional cadre of which Armstrong was a part.

And two of the survey's most devastating findings were:

1. Some 65 percent of steroid users (versus 6 percent of non-users) said they would take a PED that would help them reaching their athletic goals even if it there was a chance it would affect their health.

2. Some 57 percent (versus 4 percent of non-users) said they would take those drugs even if there was a likelihood that they would shorten their lives.

The pressure upon young sportsmen and women to excel is intense. In many cases, it is not solely about winning races and medals. Increasingly, and particularly for those from US blue collar families (but this also applies in a number of other countries), teenage sporting excellence is directly linked to scholarship opportunities at college. As the recession bites harder and tuition costs everywhere rise, such scholarships are now also increasingly appealing to the middle class.

Beyond that, there is the issue of how technologies beyond drugs (arguably the easiest 'trend' to vilify and ban, if not to detect) are now used to enhance performance.

Increasingly powerful IT can be used to analyse a runner's stride, a rugby player's tackles or a young golfer's swing. And more beyond that. But some coaches worry that these 'programmes' provide formulaic responses that might not be best suited to the physical make-up of the subject. Could they, it is asked (although I stress not proven), force the subject to change his or her playing style in such a way that they seed longer-term, post-career physical ailments.

Then from another perspective - and going back to the original argument about 'unfair advantages' - such analyses are typically not available to all, only an acknowledged elite at a school or club with good 'connections' or those who can afford to pay for them.

There has always been a tension between those who are truly the best at a particular sport and those who ultimately win because they have access to the best facilities. It's at the heart of why Britain suddenly rediscovered investment in both elite and grass-roots sports in the run-up to this year's Olympics.

But as technologies arguably go beyond simply human coaching or basic, common-sense dietary advice, Armstrong's deserved shaming also gives us an opportunity to ask how much we want our sports to be the result of a increasingly technology-driven, more artificially engineered infrastructure or a truer sense of human endeavour.

Simply as fans, we also have questions to ask ourselves. The Olympic motto is 'Citius, Altius, Fortius'. 'Faster, Higher, Stronger.' But does that imply 'by any means necessary - or available'?

The Olympic ideal has traditionally been built around human rather than technological excellence. This has been chipped away, for many, most notably by the admission of professional competitors. For its part, the Tour de France has long been seen as a test of a combination of all-round excellence in cycling's different disciplines and endurance. Again, a test of very human qualities.

But for supporters, the vicarious sense of victory is often all that matters. Which poses the further issue, beyond the goals that drive competitors and the short cuts they may consequently take: What do we have the right to expect from them? Is it right to turn a blind eye as young men and women to risk damaging their health or even shortening their lives for our entertainment?

Until now, the impact of all technologies on sport (from life sciences through to IT) has never really been reviewed in a comprehensive sense. Armstrong's fall, among the greatest in sporting history, may have given us that chance. We should take it.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50293 2013-01-15T04:03:05 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=50293#comments 0
Its demise was entirely predictable. Or at least, its departure from the High Street. 'Twere downloads and online retail wot dun it. Indeed, the last big dedicated US chain, Tower Records, gave up the ghost in 2006, battered also by broad-based discount rivals like WalMart. The killer blow for HMV was a slow Christmas.

Nevertheless, when record shops (excuse my age) close, it affects you in a different way to the departures of, say, a Woolies. There are places that you buy stuff from and there are others that are part of the social fabric.

For my generation and a couple before and after, music stores were places where you sought out the rare or undiscovered, got to know the (often grouchy) staff, and just generally hung around. They weren't just in at the foundation of teenage culture, they were one of the things that defined it.

Of course, what's funny about HMV having lasted longest is that it was - in 1970s/1980s Manchester, at any rate - not that well liked. It was the corporate store that didn't stock independent labels. It stuck clumsy slabs of duct tape over offending words on Sex Pistols' album covers or concealed them in brown paper bags. Still went there, though.

The other aspect of this - and it's something that also came to mind living in the US when Tower went down - is that the emotional connection does make you stop and think about the technology-driven shift underway in retailing. Is it inevitable? (Yes) Is it for the best? (Hmmm. Get back to you on that)

Last year, I bought just half-a-dozen physical CDs and about half-a-dozen DVDs and Blu Rays. Everything else I purchased, audio and video, was downloaded or pay-per-viewed. So that hardly gives me much right to pile on the outrage over HMV.

Except that the bulk of those goodies were purchased on an expat trip home from the company's flagship Oxford Street store. They were the result of a trawl for stuff I wouldn't hear about in the US or that had slipped out otherwise unnoticed. And this is where I think the departure of an HMV (or a Tower) is a big deal.

The one thing that online retailing still doesn't do well is browsing. I've always found the 'customers like you bought this' line a bit off-putting - a desperate attempt to preserve my individuality. And the 'you might also like this' recommendations tend to be stuff I already own or have rejected.

Browsing a record store is, as I said earlier, a chance to discover something new, something beyond your worldview. Much the same applies to bookshops. It expands your horizons; online, in my experience, still constrains them.

Online profiling is becoming more sophisticated all the time, but the very term merely extends that idea of constraint. For any retailer, knowing what you like, merely encourages them to give you more of the same. Its the same 'Top 40-only' model that we did rail against in shops and on radio almost four decades ago.

Of course, it could just be that the demise of HMV sends the very clear signal, 'You're not young anymore'. Though I've got a waistline that tells me that already.

No, somehow I think that we are culturally quite a bit poorer with Nipper the Dog's retirement. Independent stores will carry on, though, so please give them your support. Discovery matters.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49592 2012-12-06T09:13:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49592#comments 0 Doha UN climate change talks teeter on the verge of collapse. Whodathunkit? After all, developing nations only want as much as $60bn in new funding from the developed world by 2015 - that's the currently very broke developed world.

Perhaps when buoyed by victory, US President Barack Obama put climate change back on his agenda. "We want our children to live in an America that... isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet," he said on election night.

So, a signal that COP 18 could expect quick action from Washington? Er, no.

One not-unexpected irony of UN politics is that the focus on money may even hinder such progress that Obama can make.

It ignores the fact that Obama is engaged in frustrating but vital negotiations with Republicans aimed at tackling the mushrooming US deficit.

Does any mildly savvy individual believe a Republican majority in the House of Representatives will drop its opposition/denial (take your pick) on climate change as well as making concessions on the budget? That majority won't change, if at all, for at least two years until the next US mid-term elections take place.

So, Obama has his 'Fiscal Cliff' and Republicans who will not ratify any treaty they don't like. Include him out.

But that is just the beginning.

The usual first-world backstop for pressure on climate change funding, the European Union, has the Euro crisis. That now seems to be reaching Germany. Skint.

In Euro-unburdened Blighty, Chancellor George Osborne just tore up his most cherished economic targets in the Autumn Statement. Cowed. And skint.

Then, Japan is so politically befuddled that it now has the kind of governmental revolving door we used to associate with Italy. In a tizzy. A skint tizzy.

Oh well, I suppose New Zealand could soon be flush off the Hobbit trilogy.

I appreciate that many developing nations see climate change and more extreme weather patterns as existential threats. I accept that developed nations built economies and belched out greenhouse gases with impunity for decades. I see the political strategy in asking for more now not in the hope of getting it, but just to get developed countries to stick to existing commitments.

I acknowledge the scientific integrity of climate change theory.

But here's something else to consider.

UN-sponsored demands for advanced countries to cough up could right now play into the hands of the theory's opponents.

It's easy to sell voters the 'absurdity' of increasing foreign development aid when austerity rules domestically. Certainly it's easier than trying to get them on-side in a scientific debate. It becomes more convenient to believe that climate change is bunk. What politician in the first world would go there - even one who doesn't need to worry about his own re-election?

What could Doha have achieved?

The UN could have done more to answer critics of climate change theory on a public level. Joe (and Joanne) Public might be taking a battering off the elements, but he and she are also getting mightily confused.

It could have promoted research into practical and cost-effective responses. After all, it's not as though we've done little technologically to improve power consumption already.

It could even have addressed a better husbanding of such resources as are available. However, since we don't want to be here until the next COP, I'll spare you my views on the UN as all too often a kleptocrat's ATM.

Practical, path-setting realities - unfortunately this is the UN we're talking about.

A new treaty by 2015, in force by 2020? Violins, matches and - erm - wetsuits all round, methinks.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49468 2012-11-29T02:17:02 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49468#comments 0 "seize the moment" on immigration reform. The comment acknowledged his debt to Latino voters, but was also noted in the high technology industry. Bringing foreign 'skilled workers' to the US in big enough numbers has long been a bugbear. But is it still, even as the White House stepped in to oppose Silicon Valley-backed legislation this very week? Or have priorities shifted?

During my time here, almost every Valley leader has visited Washington to call for a raising of the caps on skilled immigrant visas for foreign-based recruits, most notably the H-1B. If you ask them today if this is still necessary, they'll say yes in public. In private, however, those caps are becoming less of an issue.

What's changed things is globalisation. The current wave is well into its second decade (some would say, third) and it is no longer adventurous but mandatory for leading engineering companies to set up satellite design offices worldwide. Projects where the entire team has to be based in one building or one country are today largely confined to those under the 'national security' umbrella.

Beyond that, bringing staff to the US is - and always has been - an expensive business. If wage demands, employer contributions and infrastructure costs are lower overseas, better that they 'work from home', so to speak.

Finally, while there may be some people that you do ultimately want to bring to head office, the process of getting a visa for an existing employee is comparatively straightforward. The H-1B cap is really about where you get your new hires.

Yet US technology does still need some immigration reform to prosper. The good news here, for the US at any rate, is that the local engineering community and the president are roughly on the same page regarding one of the key priorities. The not-so-good is that politics remains part of the process.

Specifically, the idea is to ease the path to green cards and beyond that citizenship for highly qualified foreign graduates from US institutions. These are the young men and women who come to work on advanced research within the country's still preeminent postgraduate system. Currently, many are forced to leave on completing a masters or doctorate. Some even struggle to secure visas in the first place.

Lobbying from both industry and academia (with, not surprisingly, both Stanford and MIT among the institutions at the forefront) has begun to pay off. It's accepted (and, miracle of miracles, broadly bipartisan) wisdom that the current system drives away precisely the type of immigrant America needs and has hitherto built its economy upon: ambitious individuals whom the biggest companies will fight to employ because of their talent, or who might themselves go on to launch start-ups that become tomorrow's giants. There has been talk of a reverse brain drain.

However, we do right now have the ironic spectacle of the White House currently opposing the STEM Jobs Act of 2012 that would give 55,000 visas to just such masters and doctoral students, and which has backing from, among others, Apple, Microsoft, Qualcomm, IBM and Cisco Systems. As I said, politics. The Obama Administration wants the measure bundled with broader reforms as a way of bringing the more discrete Act's Republican supporters on board its whole package.

Nevertheless, the path is set.

We should note here that some architects of UK immigration policy are thinking along the same lines. Also when the US did previously throw some foolish obstacles in the path of high caliber graduates, UK colleges took advantage and recruited them.

That though appears to be coming to an end. And what we see is how globalisation is shifting the immigration debate and also once again intensifying the battle for, and opportunities available to the brightest and the best... oh, and the young.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49350 2012-11-22T05:24:55 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49350#comments 0 claims and counterclaims over HP's acquisition of Autonomy to one side for a moment. This accounting scandal surely threatens to derail recently announced plans to ease high tech companies' access to stock markets - and could do so for years as any resulting legal cases p-r-o-c-e-e-e-e-e-d.

It's only two months since UK Science Minister David Willets announced a government's plan to smooth the IPO path for technology companies by easing reporting requirements and cutting red tape. The proposal was a touch 'me too' in echoing similar White House-backed ideas that are part of President Obama's startup agenda.

You can see the problem. If the biggest UK technology M&A deal in recent time involves accusations that books were cooked, it's hard to see where the political will to undertake those reforms can be maintained until the charges are legally tested.

Even in the US, the Autonomy story has broken so large that any relaxation of reporting requirements - no matter how well intentioned towards stimulating economic growth - is likely now both politically and financially toxic.

Wall Street is skittish. HP's disclosures are the surprise of the year there even given the company's ongoing difficulties. Meanwhile in Blighty, the claims are another body blow to the City of London's global credibility.

There is an argument that the real IPO problem has nothing to do with the extent of companies' financial reporting. Rather, two other dead hands have long been at work.

First, the City has consistently failed to understand new technology with the exception of a handful of savvy analysts. That has led many European companies to seek IPOs in the US, typically on Nasdaq.

Second, the increasing obesity of leading City institutions had led them to set the bar on an entry-level IPO valuation ever higher. Even companies with mid-size valuations are not worth the time to manage, they argue. Too busy making a coin from buying one another, you imagine.

Still, this creates a chasm between where technology firms can get with venture capital funding (still very limited in Europe anyway) to growing to justify the kind of nine-figure valuation the UK stock market now demands. Heck, it cramps VC investment to start with.

So, even if a mid-size company could IPO more easily thanks to regulatory reform, it is fair to ask whether investors on either side of the Atlantic would get on board regardless of any 'Autonomy Effect'.

Today, though, these more fundamental problems also look likely to be beset by a new wave of post-Autonomy risk aversity.

There is at least one further irony. Lacking an IPO route, the typical 'exit' for current European (and US) VC investors is the hope that companies they back will be acquired by existing tech titans. Of course, HP's charge is that Autonomy massaged its numbers to achieve just that. And did so under existing reporting rules. Oh dear.

It's grim stuff, and any solution would be warmly welcomed. Meanwhile, to at least leave you with a smirk (if not a smile), there is perhaps one factor that might help the Serious Fraud Office deliberate speedily.

It's listed as one of Autonomy's key clients in the now infamous 'shopping' presentations its CEO Mike Lynch gave last Spring to Oracle co-president Mark Hurd, before getting the HP deal. Presentation 1, Slide 8, to be precise.

Just below - oh look - the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So, it shouldn't be too hard for even the famously arteriosclerotic SEC and SFO to find copies of these controversial sales contracts.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49316 2012-11-20T13:38:39 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49316#comments 0
Until recently, Intel's dominance of CPUs for the enterprise, PC and laptop segments meant that running the business required a very close understanding of the highly focused and inextricably interwoven design and manufacturing abilities that enabled that. They still do.

But mobile has made Intel more vulnerable. From cellphones through smartphones through to tablets, chips based on the less power-hungry ARM architecture have consistently had an edge on the x86 to which Intel has remained devoted. And by volume, mobile is overtaking PC though the latter will always remain strong.

Even though Otellini got mobile and the growing importance of these and other 'mobile Internet devices', the company has remained devoted to x86. It sold off its own ARM-based technology, XScale, to Marvell in 2006; and the Atom now appearing in Google smartphones and one version of the Microsoft Surface is another, albeit far more power-efficient x86 family.

Otellini, to his credit, pushed for better power numbers. Technologically he has also recently seen Intel move far in advance of its rivals from planar 2D chip features to 3D finFETs/TriGates.

But the challenge arguably runs deeper. Throughout its history, Intel has essayed a number of 'new' markets, but with little success. There have been digital watches, children's toys, TV platforms and more. However, while Wall Street continuously pressed for diversification, the CPU business was so strong and earned such good margins that failures could - at the corporate level - be swallowed whole.

And of course, each failure could tend to drive Intel back to what it did - and still does - superlatively well.

Frankly, it is hard to imagine that Intel will recruit a new chief from beyond its own borders. The need to retain its fundamental and very closely guarded strengths and methodologies is no trivial matter.

But, perhaps alongside the new CEO, could next May also see senior appointments that bring into the boardroom a less dogmatic and broader view of where rivals (including some Intel customers) are now driving the industry.

Because also now on the horizon is the intrusion of the GPU on the CPU space and, perhaps more important, ARM-based chips moving up the chain from mobiles into one of Intel's most cherished markets, the server.

In the longer term too, Intel Insider might not be enough.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49251 2012-11-16T11:32:33 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49251#comments 0
You yourself may well have already received an email from LinkedIn saying that one of your contacts has endorsed you for, oh I don't know, dexterity in handling a fork. And it's accompanied by a chance for you to endorse them and a few more of your contacts at the click of a mouse.

OK, so I can see how this drives clicks for LinkedIn, but I'm blowed if I can see how on earth it benefits anyone else. Frankly, it's spammy to start with.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I've always felt that references and endorsements should be a private, you know confidential thing. I also can't see what employers might get out of this. People you know well think you're good at what you do. Well now, there is a humungous surprise.

But now what happens the other way around? Let's say that someone endorses you but you don't endorse them back? What's the message, there? Well, in my case, it's that I don't like the feature and would like it torn out of LinkedIn's site pronto. But the interpretation on the undendorsed's side may be that you don't rate them, that you're an ingrate, that you're not the friend you're supposed to be. And then there are those expected endorsements that never arrive.

An exaggeration. Well, let's not forget that, unlike Facebook, the primary driver for your connections on LinkedIn is professional. There are few better ways to tick someone off - particularly if you know them primarily through work - than to be thought to be questioning their competence. It is, to translate the Latin broadly, 'the indignant digit'.

It has echoes of Mark Zuckerberg's initial Facebook blunder when he launched that quite literally as an on-campus beauty contest. And got hammered for his troubles. At least that was a youthful, pre-IPO blunder.

Potentially, the endorsement feature works directly against what LinkedIn has built its business around, weakening rather than strengthening your business contacts.

I can understand that any web business needs to drive clicks - and so, if you are a LinkedIn member, might I suggest you give them one, right now. To send a message that this Endorsement nonsense needs dumping immediately.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49092 2012-11-07T05:31:59 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49092#comments 0
This has only a little to do with engineering, except in how these errors allowed Team Obama to use its considerable IT skills to motivate and organize its core vote, despite widespread disappointment with the President himself. Nevertheless, they did get 2008's 'rainbow' coalition to turn out in formidable numbers, even as mainstream pundits warned of a 'stay at home' defeat.

I'll look more closely at the election's longer term implications for both technology and the global economy in the next edition of E&T, but let's go back to that Republican defeat.

The key indicator was not so much the national presidential vote as those for the Senate. Even analysts who always thought Obama would be returned expected the Republicans to achieve majority control there. At time of writing, it looks like they could lose seats instead.

In an incredibly tight vote, several Republican positions were interpreted as too extreme. Here are three that could each have cost Romney more than a million votes nationally and may well have swung some individual Senate races. They were the difference between winning and losing.

Latinos, an increasing proportion of the US electorate, could be motivated by Obama's supporters by Republican opposition to immigration reform.

African Americans were then motivated through their interpretation that many of the welfare cuts pushed in vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's alternative budget were disproportionately aimed at their community.

Many, many women did not simply disagree with the Republican position on abortion, but were horrified when one high profile Senatorial candidate said a pregnancy caused by rape was a 'gift from God'. Their understandable revulsion undoubtedly leaked into the broader campaign.

There were Romney's own gaffes, particularly his speech to donors that apparently dismissed those at the bottom of society's ladder. But, he made a significant personal recovery after his first debate with Obama.

In retrospect it now seems clear that there was too much ideological baggage. Particularly given the long-standing issue over Republican intransigence over Washington legislation since 2010.

For sure, Obama created a firewall for himself in the automotive states that benefited from the sector's bailout. But there was nowhere near the same enthusiasm for the President this time out - and his team ran a very negative campaign. He has secured four more years as the lesser of two evils.

And so we got the reverse of 2008. A country then united behind Obama to say, "Yes, you can". This year, its swing voters told the Republicans, "No, you can't."]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49010 2012-11-01T08:37:13 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=49010#comments 0
We're in the process of moving from DC, so luckily missed out on Superstorm Sandy. But with friends and a house in the affected zone, it was impossible not to spend the day amid a permanent soundtrack of rolling news and occasional diversions on major websites.

The experience provoked mixed emotions, but in retrospect one thing was particularly galling: the repeated calls for photos and clips from the public - interspersed, without one iota of irony, with various states governors giving interviews to beg people to stay off the streets and shelter in place.

The mobile citizen journalist is undoubtedly playing a bigger role in the media. At times, there's an argument to be made that he or she has to, particularly when the traditional press is corralled or excluded. Instances of oppression during the Arab Spring and from the ongoing Syrian civil war spring to mind.

But these are instances where the risks people have taken could - individually, but more likely cumulatively - make a difference. They were not just about reporting, but effecting change (and as such the term 'citizen journalist' has obvious limitations).

OK, so now tell me all how the mid-storm gallivanting of some putative Darwin Award nominee is going to change the weather? Rather, there's a good chance that this would-be John Simpson or Christiane Amanpour will get themselves in danger and thus also put highly stressed emergency services personnel at risk too.

There is only so much that you can do for an idiot. But encouraging them, during an emergency driven by nature, does beggar belief. You'd almost rather they sat at home Photoshopping and making stuff up on Twitter - almost, but actually that's Darwin Award stuff too, when the neighbours eventually turn up to kick your deserving behind.

More to the point, we've made some fabulous communications tools, tools that can be used to do genuine good. News organisations are aggressive adopters of new technologies these days and that's basically a good thing. But aren't there also obvious boundaries, particularly when Joe Public is involved?

As a latter day Canute might have agreed, an iPad is no flotation device and you wouldn't count on your ever shrinking phone as a windbreak.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48969 2012-10-29T09:30:19 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48969#comments 0 Cyber Security Research Alliance (CSRA) is worth a look. Particularly since it also involves Lockheed Martin, Honeywell and RSA.

However you slice it, last week's announcement gave us a very American approach to the problem. All five companies are publicly known, but they are also significant Pentagon contractors. The plan is for their new, shall we say, assembly to now team up with Nick Fury - sorry I meant NIST, the federal government-controlled standards/research agency and build viable digital defences.

I can't blame any of the companies for doing this. Indeed, they should be lauded. President Obama has banged the drum pretty hard on cybersecurity threats throughout his administration but there's been little public evidence of comparative private sector response. Until now.

But anyone believing that the CSRA will provide benefits beyond US shores, should think again. The issues being addressed here are first and foremost those of 'national security'. Sharing the initiative's fruits in an age where cyberattacks may well be the ultimate expression of asymmetric warfare will be difficult. Remember, some of the tenser moments in this area have more recently arisen where supposed 'allies' have been caught hacking one another.

To its credit, the UK coalition government has also tried to get British companies thinking about the same threats. However, where right now are the country's equivalent players in terms of developing tools and protection?

Perhaps it's just our traditional secrecy and plans are well advanced. Somehow, though, I doubt and so I suspect do you.

Certainly, something a little more immediately obvious than a Bond movie - even a really, really good Bond movie - should get the ball rolling.

For sure, the CSRA does talk about developing viable 'technology transfer' mechanisms and all its members sell to NATO members as well as the Department of Defense.

But, as ever, nations will only have the most advanced systems in an arena where the 'latest' changes every day, if its own national technology powerhouses (even if it can only be done at NATO or EU level) get involved.

The CSRA is therefore something of a global wake-up call.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48647 2012-10-04T11:59:59 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48647#comments 0
As an observer, the fun in these debates lies both in watching the dynamic between the two candidates and then trying to parse the instapundit reactions offered afterwards by TV and online media. Reading some of the American verdicts today, you might be led to believe that Romney is President elect - the job's done; Obama has no hope. Of course, that's exactly what many were saying about his rival only the day before.

The problem here largely rests in mathematics. The 'raw' overnight poll data scores highly in Romney's favour on just about every count. So it should. But an important caveat is that these numbers tell only a small part of the story.

Most obviously, Romney's victory will get the media to take his candidacy seriously again - assuming that his gaffe handlers now have their muzzles and coshes permanently at the ready. More importantly, though, is what influence the debate will have, if any, on those who didn't actually watch it. Better newspaper and TV coverage of the candidate will help, but only to a degree.

The popular image has the entire US voting population glued to the debates, particularly the undecideds. Most are not. They work to avoid these gabfests as eagerly as we Brits dive for the kettle on hearing the words "party political broadcast".

And this, funnily enough, is why the ranks of pundits proclaiming on the night rarely include actual pollsters. They would immediately dampen the arguments, the quality TV studio confrontations, by calmly observing that what matters is how the numbers shift over the next few days, not the immediate verdict on the gladiatorial contest.

Romney and his team know that getting a two-thirds thumbs up from the live viewers will count for little if it does not now translate into a significant, extended rise in voting intentions and popularity. Obama and his will be looking at the same medium-term numbers to see if they've dodged an arguably deserved bullet.

Polls that matter are about trends, indeed so ultimately are elections. For us watchers, the first debate was therefore good stuff. It keeps the contest going - and while Romney could never have won the election at it, he could indeed have lost it as a poor performance nestled atop his earlier missteps.

So, it's still about accumulation. Now though Romney has to build on last night's surprise comeback.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48399 2012-09-14T04:52:54 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48399#comments 0
Now we also have Mitt Romney's hopelessly misguided and even grinning take on terrorist attacks against the US embassy in Libya. But still I say, "Phooey."

The vast majority always votes the same way. A comparatively small proportion of swing voters in the middle determines the result, and the evidence is that they make their decisions on the basis of "Who will be better for me?"

Or as Clinton, the greatest political communicator I've ever seen, put it: "It's the economy, stupid."

(And that point alone diminishes the importance of Romney's actually quite alarming Libya gaffe - particularly after earlier foreign policy blunders like his gold medal for foot-in-gob gymnastics at the London Olympics - because while political wonks care, most voters don't.)

Events though can have an impact in a cumulative way that technology has influenced. To illustrate that, I'd like to yoke (roughly I admit) those two of those key moments - Clint and the chair, Bill's big speech - to the launch of iPhone5.

First, Eastwood. It was a bizarre, rambling skit. Clint has admitted he came up with idea of haranguing an invisible President Obama just 15 minutes before going on stage. And once upon a time, it wouldn't have mattered. In fact, even now, it doesn't matter the way you think.

Voters don't really care if some celebrity turns up at a political event and goes hatstand. Almost 30 years ago, comedian Kenny Everett bowled into a Conservative rally and turned his zany wit on communism and the then Labour leader. "Let's bomb Russia," he bellowed. "And let's kick Michael Foot's stick away."

Back then, the Tories' rivals dusted off the high dudgeon, but the general electorate gave nary a stuff. The same applies today, in that sense, over Clint's implied profanities to Obama.

Eastwoodgate has rippled through the Romney campaign though as a distraction. It preceded the candidate's big thematic speech, the convention closer that sets the tone and themes for the battle ahead. And it has totally wiped clean the electorate's memory of what was one of Romney's best appearances to date, to the extent that while on the trail some Republican advisors feel Romney has been forced into launching rather than reiterating his message. In political terms, that's arguably two weeks campaigning lost.

Now consider Clinton's masterful speech the following week to the Democratic Convention. He also preceded his party's candidate and he also completely overwhelmed him. But this time, it was part of the plan.

It looked like Clinton's job was simply to energise the faithful. Instead, he set about recasting the relationship between Obama and the economy. The messages were simple: "It ain't happening yet, but this guy is doing the right things and the will pay off. I know that because they paid off for me. Oh, and those other guys are pretty dumb."

The real genius lay, though, in how Clinton sought to influence voters. He asked people to - wait for this - stop and think. And it may well have worked, neutralising the more visceral appeal to voters offered by Team Romney.

Beyond that, he also gave Obama the space to deliver a speech that expressed humility (his verdict on himself seemed a blunt "Could do better") while at the same time reaffirming his leadership.

So Obama answered persistent criticisms but in a way that was secondary to the economic pitch delivered by Clinton, and it's the Clinton meme that is being amplified and reiterated by the campaign.

In both cases, what you see are events that were not so much isolated as tone-setting, the foundations necessary given the communications networks we've built and their influence over politics. In Krazy Kenny's day (how many of you would have got the ref, if I'd put Captain Kremmen or even 'Cupid' there?), a few poor taste jokes fell off the agenda in hours. Today, everything has to be seen through the filters of endless news cycles, YouTube, and social media (have you been #Eastwooding recently?).

Which brings us to the iPhone5. J.P. Morgan's chief economist Michael Feroli has said that Apple's latest increment could add between 0.25 and 0.5% to US GDP in the immediate aftermath of its launch. Some of that could be reflected in US trade figures issued just before the vote on November 6, obviously benefiting the incumbent.

Cue headlines declaring that it could be "Apple wot won it" - except again, it's more about accumulation. Because the other clever thing that Obama and Clinton have done - and got their message across clearly where Romney did not - is manage expectations. In that context, yes, those actually quite modest numbers from one product could indeed make those swing voters feel better, but only because the scene has been set.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48197 2012-09-03T06:18:26 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48197#comments 0 cheer up DC - and he wants our help.

Concert promoter Massoud Adibpour has begun occupying (kinda) busy intersections, brandishing placards that encourage drivers to, "Honk if you love someone!", or simply, "Smile". He's encouraging others to join him, and wants to raise his honk-rate from about 350, to 1,000 a day.

OK, so what's this got to do with us? I think that comes in the intersection between culture, generation and technology.

In her breezy coverage of the tale, the Post's Maura Judkis notes that Adibpour recycled his career goals early on, dumping his first post-college job to go traveling.

There's a bit of Millennial myopia here: Most people can't afford to quit their job and live off of credit cards and hang out in Laos for a few months, and this appears to be something that Adibpour hasn't thoroughly considered. Still, Adibpour's attitude toward work seems to be in sync with that of his generation, many of whose members believe in flexibility and balance rather than nose-to-the-grindstone workweeks.

I would add a couple of things to this. The story appears to have caught attention - and beyond DC's boundaries - because of innate contrasts to what it isn't. It isn't another tale of youth hiding behind technology but rather of it getting very old school (though, yes, emails and blogs are being used to organize the happiness patrol) and it is another one of these self-assembling trends that you can see going global, like Occupy, but with a more positive outlook.

Even the choice of DC is curious. As the Post's story notes, it is not an innately unhappy city. Unemployment is low and the relative quality of life is high. However, in its role as a reflection of the US as a whole, there is the feeling of missing mojo. Adibpour has come up with a specific response to the general.

It's public and it's inclusive - he wants local people to participate and react. At the same time, though, it's extremely well-tailored to proselytizing through today's mass communications - you, for example, are reading this, but almost certainly are not in or from Washington DC.

Of course, the design of the act is one thing. It's entirely another as to whether you can effectively 'engineer' happiness (though the Post article has some views on that too). But for now, I just like the ironies here, the collisions.

Meanwhile, it's also more interesting that trying to find something new to say about last week's Republican convention, other than that Clint was a bit bonkers (when it came to coups de theatre, I expected more than an empty chair too), but even his ramblings couldn't detract from this:

"If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now that he's President Obama? You know there's something wrong with the kind of job he's done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him."

That is a killer of a good line for Romney, perhaps his first that should really have rocked the White House.

"Honk if you love someone!" vs "Honk if you don't love Barack so much!" Now that could be a noisy honk-off.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48098 2012-08-23T06:01:48 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=48098#comments 0
On Monday (August 27), the Republicans get this year's campaign properly started as their glitterati gather in Tampa, Florida for the party's 2012 National Convention. Those of you who view climate change denial with anything from an arched eyebrow to outright disdain may already be aware that (at time of writing) Isaac is on a potential collision course with the event. Just to set your minds at rest, though, the odds of the storm achieving hurricane status and forcing a mass evacuation are between 1% and 3%.

So, fate duly tempted, here are five alternative engineering minded things you might want to watch out for as the news broadcasts go wall to wall in Tampa and then, for the Democrats, Charlotte, North Carolina.

5. Taming - ho, ho, ho, - the Internet
In recent times, the nominees have almost always been chosen well before the conventions, so their formal purpose is to rubber stamp the primary process (rumours of some delegate shenanigans on Ron Paul's part notwithstanding). Add the impact of blanket TV coverage since the 1960s, and there has long been a focus on consumption beyond the hall itself. The 2008 election saw social media become almost as important as TV though there was a question over how well it was managed. That will be one big watchlist item for 2012. Both the Republicans and Democrats have made heavy IT investments aimed at drilling and dragooning their online forces and activities in a more disciplined as opposed to 'self-organizing' way. That retreat to more traditional campaigning has been happening behind the scenes as the Obama and Romney campaigns have ramped up for their unofficial openings. But meanwhile, those wacky 'Occupy' funsters are planning a comeback.

4. Media morons
Accredited media for Tampa outnumber official delegates and their stand-ins by three-to-one, 15,000 to 5,000. This is when the current affairs departments and rolling news networks roll out new but hideously overegged graphics and presentation technology they plan to fling repeatedly at our eyeballs until the actual vote in November. Even though much of it was peerlessly parodied a decade ago in The Day Today, it will be unleashed by 'serious news' to rob some seasoned hack of all remaining dignity and gravitas - has CNN's Wolf Blitzer ever recovered from having to carry out off-eyeline virtual holodick interviews in 2008? - then quietly abandoned... or released as a 'free upgrade' to Final Cut.

3. The baffled politico
At some point, some older politician will be confronted during the convention with new (or even established) technology and will bluster publicly, thereby exposing a complete lack of understanding. He may even encounter it unawares, rather like Gordon Brown. There will be exceptions for such bluster when it is offered as a response to the preceding category - "No, I'm not doing that - it'll make me look like an idiot." - but otherwise, you should merely mark this down as evidence that another four years have passed yet our lords and masters are still no closely to understanding what really makes economic growth happen. Decide for yourself whether or not to keep a head-sized paper bag handy for these moments.

2. Instant verdicts
We're all now familiar with instapolling technology where various shades of voter are asked to tune a knob during a politician's speech expressing feelings between 'Herbert' and 'Hero'. A clever pollster then tells us all the absolutelybloominobvious by observing whether a line creeps up or down when particular subjects and responses are discussed. Well, the corridor gossip is that this process is taking another step forward. While such focus group verdicts still form an important part, clever chaps are also feeding in abilities to read body language, vocal tonality and more besides. Whether the addition of biometrics will tell us much more is debatable, but it could be fun watching the egos of potential world leaders take such a battering for a few months.

1. The coup de théâtre
Often the best kept secrets are the - hopefully - astonishing pieces of stagecraft (or combination of such pieces) that will introduce and accompany the presidential nominees during their climactic convention-closing speeches. The Democrats have already upped the ante by moving the Obama address outside even the cavernous convention centre to a nearby football stadium. But alongside the games of scale, there are always games of technology that pull on the latest ideas from Hollywood and Broadway's imagineers. Personally, I'm guessing that Team Obama is going for an Oz theme with the man himself looming over the audience, while Joe Biden frantically dodges steam jets and twirls wheels behind a curtain. Team Romney, meanwhile, may take its lead from not one but two West End hits - the nominee himself will arrive in an updated Chitty Chitty Station Wagon with a pedigree pooch perched on each wing, while his potential VP running mate descends from the sky holding an umbrella. Sadly, Danny Boyle was unavailable to quote me any odds.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=47965 2012-08-13T12:16:09 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=47965#comments 0 new report suggests that as much remains the case in at least sixteen US states before November's Presidential election.

Given the still recent history of Bush v. Gore, you might think they'd learned a lesson. But according to the report, the offending states continue to use newer machine-based voting systems that do not produce an independent record of the vote cast. The vote therefore cannot be subsequently audited to provide any proof losers demand. The group includes swing states such as Colorado, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

We have had these machines for a while, but the research (produced by the Rutgers School of Law - Newark, the Verified Voting Foundation, and Common Cause) notes that as recently as March, only the intervention of a judge to force an audit in Florida discovered the allocation of votes in one election not only to the wrong candidate but the wrong actually vote.

E-voting always comes into the spotlight during an American election but 2012 presents the vote's administrators with a particularly acute challenge.

There have been numerous - overwhelmingly outrageous - challenges to the validity of President Obama's election four years ago. A vocal but bitter minority, largely on the Republican right, continues to challenge his legitimacy.

Meanwhile, 2000 and Florida's 'hanging chads' remain an equally distasteful memory on the Democratic right. Indeed, both sides seem to delight in accusations of voter fraud, rigging and - now - hacking.

The Rutgers-led report says that there is time between now and November to get better audit-verifiable systems in place (and be honest, the perfect electoral system does not exist). Whether the political will to do so is also there is another question, but in a viciously divided America, you'd hope some of the relevant administrators do wake up in time.

Meanwhile, this blog is back after an online break to once more begin reviewing all the fun and games in the run-up to November's vote. Excuse the absence - though there are a few things afoot, more of which shortly.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46681 2012-05-22T02:32:04 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46681#comments 0 Avengers and yer Dark Knight. There's one Summer blockbuster that my generation has the bunting out for. That's right, the Seth Macfarlane thing about him as a real-life teddy bear. OK, you got me. PROMETHEUS.

The is-it-isn't-it Alien prequel (and track 18 on the CD is "Friend from the Past", so there's yet another b***d*n obvious clue) conjures memories among the 'certain age' of the one film nobody could take with a pinch of salt. I know plenty of folk who left Star Wars cold; Alien provoked a reaction whether you loved it or not. It was the nastiest, most relentless scare machine most of us had ever seen. It was, to borrow a technical term, chuffing ace.

So, the idea of Sir Ridley Scott heading back to - possibly - chart the genesis of the xenomorphs (yes, old retractagob does have a name) and the spectacular visuals we've seen so far have me completely in their grip. It's just that I could do without the pseudo-babble, sub Erich von Däniken stuff now surrounding it. Indeed, all the fake tech being used to support Prometheus through viral marketing might be amusing, but it's also complete and utter rot.

I know I'm not the only person to take issue here. And to some extent, I'm happy to take a large slice of Barnum and an equal slab of Ripley (Robert L.) with my Hollywood salesmanship. What I don't get is why Prometheus has to be about anything other than scaring you witless?

Also, what makes all this a bit - well - dangerous is that the film is (pun intended) monkeying around with creation myths. Living in the UK, you don't have to face the debate in its full gory delight, but I'm sure you know about the whole evolution vs intelligent design argument in the US, and the levels of misinformed, wilful and downright malicious ignorance that underpin parts of it.

I don't think there's any underlying political intent on the part of Prometheus' makers. They're more like Monster Inc's Sulley and Mike: they want to power their bank accounts on our screams. And assuming they do that, my green beer vouchers will be duly handed over with pleasure.

But, seriously, what were the organisers of a provocative open forum like TED thinking?

So, having burned my chances of ever getting an invite from them, let's wind it all back a bit. The super-rich are not the answer to moral decay (though at least Tony Stark was playing "I've privatised world peace" for laughs). Arms manufacturers do not make super reptiles and arachnids in the subterranean lab. And we are not an alien experiment.

Which, funnily enough, brings me back to Seth Macfarlane. I hope his Ted will be a hoot, but more to the point, the Family Guy creator is also backing a new version of Carl Sagan's 1980 TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Again, a formative moment for the younger me and perhaps one of the most powerful pieces of scientific advocacy ever. And Macfarlane's got his version ready for mainstream US network television (no cable ghetto for this) with the help of Sagan's widow and the eloquent American astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Here's what Seth, in typically robust style, told Forbes about his motivation for the new programme.

"The resistance to science is idiotic. Those people shouldn't be allowed to have antibiotics. Give us back your TVs and the dentures."

Like I said, 'robust'. So, let me instead end by reminding you what the late and hugely missed Professor Sagan had to say about Prometheus' 'other' grandaddy:

"I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken."]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46501 2012-05-08T21:00:33 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46501#comments 0 Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Facebook.

OK, so who's comfortable with that?

The issue of profiling and social media has been bubbling under the surface for a while. But the announcement of Facebook's IPO, and the potential implied valuation of $96bn has pushed it more to the front of the debate.

Already, it seems unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg's company will ever reach the lofty goal set out in the offering's roadshow video.

For example, new research from Consumer Reports, the US equivalent of Which, has found that 25% of people deliberately falsify their Facebook profiles to protect their privacy, compared with 10% just two years ago.

It also highlights a number of "causes for concern", the foremost being:

Some people are sharing too much. Our projections suggest that 4.8m people have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a potential tip-off for burglars) and that 4.7m "liked" a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments (details an insurer might use against you).
Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said they had never set, or didn't know about, Facebook's privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.
Facebook collects more data than you may imagine. For example, did you know that Facebook gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook "Like" button, even if you never click the button, are not a Facebook user, or are not logged in?
Your data is shared more widely than you may wish. Even if you have restricted your information to be seen by friends only, a friend who is using a Facebook app could allow your data to be transferred to a third party without your knowledge.
Legal protections are spotty. US online privacy laws are weaker than those of Europe and much of the world, so you have few federal rights to see and control most of the information that social networks collect about you.
And problems are on the rise. Eleven percent of households using Facebook said they had trouble last year, ranging from someone using their log-in without permission to being harassed or threatened. That projects to 7 million households - 30 percent more than last year.

The necessary caveat here is that these warnings do apply specifically to the US experience - Europe does indeed have much stronger online privacy laws. But otherwise, it seems fair enough to extrapolate to the global experience.

And all these concerns feed into the question, "Why is it almost certain that Facebook will meet it's valuation?" Or putting it another way, "What are these investors buying?"

Since no valuation can ever be deemed wholly altruistic - not even 1% probably - the answer has to be "You". Or "Me". Or "Your family".... Or "Your friends".

It isn't clear to me how Facebook can justify a valuation on a par with a retailer like Amazon unless it - horrible word alert - monetizes access to its audience. And the way in which it can do that in arguably a more powerful way than its most obvious rival here, Google, is by being 'closer' to it (i.e. profiling it) to the fullest extent possible.

This could be highly-focused advertising or simple marketing data that can be bundled and sold to interested companies. It could be by knowing what kind of farm games to sell you. But however you slice it, from the IPO's perspective, we are the bulk of the product.

Once you make that connection (and, perhaps more to the point right now, once someone puts an actual number on it), it all gets a bit creepy. We all know that the customer list is a massive part of the value of any company, but once it is so incredibly personalised as we see here, you have to wonder about the long-term.

Nor do I think that the 'vision' that Zuckerberg outlines of his connected world really convinces you, once the company becomes a publicly traded stock, subject to the demands of investment managers (and there is only a small 'retail', as in public, component within the IPO).

We're back with that old idea of "Too much information" - but with a new twist.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46262 2012-04-23T17:09:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=46262#comments 0
You see, beyond the raids on pop culture and mischievous gender-bending he's best known for, this career view also outs JPG as, well, a bit of a geek. Religious imagery sits side by side with patterning that seems obviously inspired by PCB or chip layouts. There's an interest in the structure and re-engineering of the human body in his obsession with corsets (though nor is he a 'size 0' designer).

But it's his further co-option of technology that sets him apart. He's always used and then flipped new ideas and media to promote his products and worldview. He industrialises his perfumes in baked bean cans, scatters LEDs within designs, and, in the UK at least, it was video (and specifically the delightfully outrageous Channel 4 series Eurotrash) that put him on the map. For the de Young exhibit, JPG lavishes on a shedload of today's multimedia technologies to great effect.

For example, it opens with a typically arch tribute to the greatest 'imagineer' of them all, Walt Disney. Mannequins have film projected on facial casts that chatter and sing in basically a demented (and very funny) take on Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

Elsewhere, the influence of France's great sci-fi bande desinee Metal Hurlant pours out, but for me, the most striking image is his costume for Victoria Abril's tabloid TV journalist in Pedro Almodovar's 1993 satire Kika.

It integrates all the tools of her dubious trade. She has a camera helmet, touch screen controls on one sleeve, a microphone on the other and (Lord help us) camera lights in her bustier. And apart from that last element, nearly 20 years later, I've seen people today adopting a similar get-up (with far less panache, obviously) as today's vloggers, prowling the aisles of a consumer electronics show. The mediannequin is now with us.

This is design that reflects the things and techniques that engineers use, and also how end-users exploit them. It's also an absolute hoot. If you are headed to the west coast, set aside your prejudices (and dump the pocket protector) to take a chance of being both challenged and amused. In a 35-year career, JPG's been doing mash-ups before the term was even coined.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From The Sidewalk to the Catwalk runs at the de Young Fine Arts Museum until August 16, 2012.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45942 2012-03-30T21:06:12 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45942#comments 0 retailing. Big boxes, but more likely mall and High Street outlets. Sound crazy? Well, just stick with me for a while.

This week, the largest real-world electronics retailer in the US, Best Buy, announced that it is to close 50 of its sheds and focus on smaller mobility-focused stores. "More doors and less square footage," went the soundbite from CEO Brian Dunn.

Amazon is part of the reason. Its lower online overheads and the public's increasing willingness to buy large brown goods like TVs online have both hurt Best Buy. But Amazon could also be one of the victims.

Going back to the trend in higher priced electronics, it's not uncommon for a consumer to check out products like some 50" 1080p 3D monster in a shop and then go home and buy them at the computer. In fact, that's what Amazon's iPhone and Android apps are all about. For some products you can identify them by taking a photo while you're in the store; for others, you just key in the stock number. Either way, back comes the competing offer while you browse.

So, if Best Buy closes 50 stores, that means it's also closing 50 Amazon showrooms. And, of course, the same goes for any other online electronics outlet.

I'd accept that Amazon still makes most of its money from smaller products. It's a lot easier to offer a preview chapter of a book online, or a movie, an album or game. But as the company looks for growth in more and more traditional products - and this isn't just about electronics, but everything from clothing to furniture to gardening tools and more - it has inevitably built up something of a dependency on the traditional retailers it's supposed to be killing off. Sure, people used to buy a lot of 'big' stuff from catalogues but there's an increasing amount of try-before-you-buy-elsewhere going on too.

And there's another factor here that goes beyond simply Amazon's challenges. The other reason Best Buy is retreating wounded (as it did from its JV with the Carphone Warehouse in the UK some months ago) comes in the form of competition from the broad-based mega-discounters - back home, the Tescos and Asdas; over here the WalMarts and Targets.

They've also gone way beyond food into all manner of markets and, much as Amazon has done historically, chiefly adopted a 'Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap' approach to their stock. But for high tech, this isn't where the real margins and growth lies.

Standard TV prices - even for HD LCDs - have been tumbling for three or four years, largely the result of massive production capacity in Asia but also an inevitability of Moore's Law economics. The same goes for media players and mobile phones. Growth lies in new technologies, and Amazon is increasingly under pressure to deliver on that front. Unlike a WalMart, it does have the image of being a high tech retailer.

But how are you going to get the public turned on to, say, 4k or later 8k resolution in TVs, if they can't see them and measure up how they'll grace the living room wall before buying? What about next generation gaming consoles? I'd argue that even online sales of small products like the iPhone are largely driven by the consumer's ability to go into an Apple Store and look and feel how beautiful they are before whipping out the Visa back on their MacBook.

Then, yes, some technology needs explaining to the punter as well - and that ain't gonna happen in your local MegaExtraHumungoworld supermarket.

All this stuff needs a showcase. Perhaps independent retailing could have provided one, had it not been so hammered already by the big players and, more recently, the recession.

So, I think Amazon does have a few questions to ask itself. Sure, Best Buy ain't going away, but there's a concerted trend towards smaller shops that inherently provide less space for those big ticket items. And I think other innovators in engineering -- on all scales -- face the same issue.

Apple, as ever, seems to have perhaps pointed some of the way here. Its stores are clearly designed to make sure that you can browse a controlled number of key products in comfort - even on a Saturday afternoon - in the knowledge that it may not close the sale there and then. However, that's one brand's specialist shop for its own products. The model for multiple brands needs a bit more work.

Possibly even more work than getting Apollo 11's engines out of the water, Jeff.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45871 2012-03-27T02:55:15 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45871#comments 0 to the bottom of the Mariana Trench hasn't thrilled you just a little bit, what on earth are you doing reading an engineering magazine? But more to the point, isn't it just generally exciting as a piece of human exploration?

It has become rather commonplace (and tedious) to sneer at big ideas like this. And then, at their accomplishment. Ask Newt Gingrich. Probably the most technologically engaged of all the prospective Republican presidential candidates, he took it in the neck for suggesting that the US establish a base on the Moon.

Yes, he was trying to gather votes in Florida's space corridor, but those who know how closely Gingrich follows all things geeky also knew that (unlike some of his predecessors), he wasn't being entirely cynical. He gets the connection between setting big goals and the fostering of innovation.

Now, it's Cameron's turn. The Mariana dive was a rich man's outing, much like that fella who went to Mir. It won't tell us anything, it won't change anything, it will simply further stuff the bank balance of the world's richest filmmaker. And yes, there is both a TV special and - inevitably - a 3D movie on the way.

Well, hang on there. First off, the technology used in Cameron's Deepsea Challenger submersible may well now find uses in commercial deep sea exploration.

Second, it pushed the limits of marine engineering (and comms as well given that Cameron was able to tweet from the bottom of the world). Compressible syntactic foam - I doubt we've heard the last of that. But in the broadest sense, pushing the limits is how it should be.

Third, the samples. Yes, there have been robotic visits to the Mariana before, but this is an area 50 times bigger than the Grand Canyon. Who knows what Cameron might have literally picked up?

Sure, the director's wealth meant that he could afford to underwrite much of the cost. But what else would you have him do with it? People, this is still all about discovery and, given the parlous state of most world economies, if the phenomenally well-off are not prepared to engage in that right now, it's hard to see who will.

And yes, I'm dying to see what Cameron saw. The last manned expedition to the site, 52 years ago, used state-of-the-then-art technology but on landing the submersible kicked up so much silt, its two occupants could see little outside. Now we will get a chance, albeit vicariously, to visit the Mariana trench in 3D, and for once something in that tired format has got me buzzing. Indeed, the last time I actually did hanker after a 3D movie, it was Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams which also took us to a 'closed' place: the Chauvet Cave in France with its ancient art that would fade from view if exposed to public visits.

Beyond that, I really want to know how they built the submersible, or at least a bit more than the gnomic specifications out there right now. Certainly, it's a pity that the site for the designers at Australia's Acheron Project's remains resolutely password protected, but I suspect the documentary will be a little more revealing.

This is an alien world and we've sent a man there to document and explore it. You don't get many real 'WOW' moments these days - but this is unquestionably one of them.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45752 2012-03-17T03:50:43 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45752#comments 0 This American Life retracted the show in full and embarked on an agonised mea culpa.

The show was based on a monologue by performer Mike Daisey, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and reproduced 39 minutes of the full version that I myself planned to write about here when it travels to Washington DC in a few weeks time. Why? Because, in astonishing numbers for public radio, the broadcast was downloaded worldwide almost 900,000 times as a podcast. Soon after came further reports on Foxconn in the New York Times (though not as shocking as Daisey's claims and, the paper says, unrelated to the broadcast) and a new probe by Apple itself across its Chinese suppliers.

This was a fringe theatre show that radio took global. More than that, This American Life has built an extraordinarily high reputation for its reportage. Behind an apparently casual tone, the series has, for one example, done a far better job than just about anyone else in explaining the complexities of the recent financial meltdown to the common man.

Now it turns out that Daisey simply made stuff up. He told the show's producers that his interpreter, the main witness to many of his claims, was not contactable. She has since been easily found. He claimed to have met underage staff. The interpreter denies that, and now Daisey has admitted that he exaggerated many parts of his tale for dramatic effect.

The monologuist's defence is chiefly that he is a theatrical artist not a journalist, and that he now regrets allowing his performance to be excerpted in a journalistic context. The show's defence - though to be fair, it's rather an explaination - is that it was deceived but also sloppy and should have pulled the plug before broadcast.

Make no mistake, the US media will chew this wasp for a long, long time. But there is another issue. Our relationship to Chinese-manufactured products is an increasingly awkward one.

In the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a character famously says, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." What most people forget is that the film criticises this view. Without ruining its twist, it revolves around the truth behind just such a legend. Somehow, though, the soundbite has become the film's message over the years. If you get at a 'greater truth', a degree of distortion is acceptable.

In Daisey's case, his monologue jumps on a number of criticisms that were being levelled at Apple and other offshore manufacturers before he decided to visit Foxconn. In one specific case, Daisey reproduces charges about the use of n-Hexane but which originally related to an earlier incident at a plant hundreds of miles from the one he visited and cites. He 'confirms' a great many rumours. If you want to believe in talk of near slave labour in China, let's be blunt, Daisey panders to that view. It's a politically correct version of those who wibble on about President Obama's birth certificate.

This weekend, the This American Life podcast will initially feature an near-forensic exploration of the original show's errors. Once you get through that, though, the ending revisits the whole controversy and arguably becomes more difficult to palate.

The show's host, Ira Glass, talks to Charles Duhigg, one of the New York Times reporters who revisited the controversy. Here's part of what he says (if you follow the link to the This American Life retraction above, you can also download a PDF of the full transcript):

Some people told us that you could, from a labour perspective you could build the iPhone in the United States for just ten extra dollars a phone if you're paying American wages. But wages, labour is such an enormously small part of any electronic device, right?

Compared to the cost of buying chips or making sure that you have a plant that can turn out thousands of these things a day or being able to get strengthened glass cut exactly right within, you know, two days of this thing being due, that's what's important. Labour is almost insignificant. What is really important are supply chains and flexibility of factories. You want to be able to be located right next to the plant that makes the screws so that when you need a small change to that screw factory, you can go next door and say, "Give it to me in six hours," and they can say, "Here you go." Because if that factory was in another state or on another continent, it would take two weeks. It's the flexibility within the Chinese manufacturing system, that's what you can do in Asia that you can't do in the United States.

Yes, there is an issue about buying luxury products made by workers on comparatively poor wages and labour conditions in Chinese factories do not match those in the west, and often fall far short of acceptable. But can we take Daisey's word for that? No.

Yet beyond that, the real point may be the erosion of the manufacturing infrastructure that countries in the west allowed to happen and on which China capitalised. And sorry, but there's no sin in that and if there are criticisms to be fired off, maybe they should be aimed closer to home.

And Daisey's greater blunder may well be in giving too many of us an easy moral high ground to ascend and lecture from at the expense of what really is the greater truth.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45583 2012-03-08T03:07:17 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45583#comments 0
Apple has discounted lines after a rev before and not just to run down old stock. It's done it with the iPhone, for example. So maybe I'm overdoing the Kremlinology a bit here, but Phil Schiller's rationale that the 25% iPad 2 cut - from £399 to £329 in Blighty and from $499 to $399 here - was in some part to seed the education market didn't really wash. OK, Apple declared those ambitions in January, but don't you think that any school system could get that kind of discount anyway on a big volume order? Why make it part of a public price-tag?

Most Apple watchers see the move as a reaction not to how the company is being challenged in tablets specifically but across its ecosystem. There's no comparison between an iPad and the increasing number of cheaper alternatives anyway. But you can compare how Apple integrates the iPad (and iPhone and Apple TV boxes and PCs) with its burgeoning iTunes media empire, with what Amazon is trying to do with the Kindle Fire ($199) and its online media store.

Meanwhile, the corridor gossip about the Google-ASUS link up on a tablet (supposedly called Play and also, like the Fire, heavily subsidized at once more a rumoured $199 price) just won't go away. Again, Google has a pretty good web marketplace. And you can be sure that Google (and Apple) noticed how the Fire blazed from a standing start to 14% of the tablet market on sales of just under 4m, according to IHS iSuppli.

Apple's big long-term battle is not about hardware or even maintaining a tablet market share that will inevitably decline (just as Ultrabooks will inevitably take sales from the MacBook Air). It's about the whole supply chain from the hardware to the content. And that's not just about profit, but also the brand. Set aside the fanboys and girls. Millions of people today buy Apple products because they are easy to use and the company is happy to serve as a one-stop shop. Even a technophobe can look like a geek.

Apple had the field to itself while other technology companies tried to turn themselves into retailers with middling success. Even with all its content, Sony has been an online gaming retailer, while others hawked its music and movies. Amazon has changed the game by coming into it as a retailer looking to play in hardware.

Now there's competition - and I think Apple has blinked. And in the longer term, that could prove a far more important moment than any absence of haptics or voice control.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45449 2012-02-29T01:22:41 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45449#comments 0 EU, 36 US state attorneys general, France, just about every civil liberties group, just about every consumer rights group, the bloggerati, the Twitterati, Microsoft, newspaper editorials and Rebekah Brooks dead horsey-loaner from the Met. OK, I made one of those up (but give me props for the Huffeandt-ton Post SEO). The point, though, is that all this is actually your fault.

Sure, Google's recently disclosed hacking of Apple's Safari browser was an egregious act. It denies 'intent', but the other three companies caught with equally sneaky hands in the cookie jar have not. That makes it rather difficult from Larry and Sergey to detach their company from a loudly quacking row of - thank you, Douglas Adams - "small aquatic birds of the family anatidae".

In reality, though, the important thing that has got lost in the entire debate here is the continuing misconception behind the 'Why?' behind Google's actions, and you'll find it lurking behind your consciousness every time you go online. It is the continuing assumption that the Internet is a wonderland of free stuff.

Well, we've tried that model, very much to our cost in the publishing business. It doesn't work. If you have something inherently valuable, you don't give it away. Because if you do, you go bust, you starve. I'm getting paid to write this although you're not paying to read it. But, look. I see at least three ads on the page surrounding my 'valuable' words.

Google is an advertising company. Forget this week's goofy goggles, last week's klutz-free car, and last season's (oh, so last season's) set-top box. Google gets more than 95% of its sales from ads. So it is in its DNA to develop most of the products it does launch, particularly for web browsers, to service its core business.

By integrating the privacy policies for most of its products, Google wants to more closely integrate the way in which it gathers data about you to sell more 'effective' ads for more money to more and existing customers. You may not like that, but you cannot deny the commercial logic. And here's the thing, it is paying to do so. It provides search, online video, basic productivity software and more from its side of the bargain.

Each click you make with Google is a transaction, even if no money changes hands.

Now, has it handled this well? Absolutely not. Do I care for the proposed policy? Not a jot. Indeed, beyond an intrinsically British distaste for Nosey Parkers and Peeping Toms, I think the open letter from the US attorneys general raises other important concerns (particularly about identity theft). I have not one iota of sympathy for Google here - in fact (as, I admit, a Safari user), I hope they get hammered.

But it isn't just Google, is it? Facebook has had its privacy blunders. Twitter. Linked-In. In fact, just about every site that requires registration but does not charge an access fee is not only conducting some form of profiling - it probably has no choice because the web has now taken us from the old media world of one-to-many to one-to-one marketing.

We have to accept that there is a devil's bargain here. Much as supermarkets profile our buying habits through loyalty cards that we willingly present at the checkout (What, you thought those vouchers and discounts were that every little that helps?), so our online activities are scrutinised in return for information, software and ways of connecting with friends. The issue concerns extent and context.

The online exchange is becoming unacceptably intrusive - to me and many, many others, at any rate. But if there is to be any chance of resolving the inherent tension, we need a better understanding of the terms of the debate.

It has been depressing to see the privacy issue now often descend again into a squabble over the "seizure" of civil liberties. Sorry, you can say that about the actions of a dictator or a government. Here, though, they are being bought. By a company - an essentially amoral entity (and isn't Google's "Do no evil" one of the daftest, most self-regarding corporate mottos ever).

So, three questions.

1. How much privacy are you prepared to give away in return for paying a website nothing in cash for its content and services?

2. How much are you prepared to pay for online content and services to protect your privacy?

3. How much of what you currently do with Google or any other 'freely available' web service, could you actually live without?

If we're all honestly prepared to answer those, it could put us on the right track. Not holding my breath though. We do love them 'freebies'.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45424 2012-02-27T23:49:45 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45424#comments 0
ISSCC is a must-go, but in my opinion, it's one of a dwindling number of such events. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you subject your - in my case, anyway - Homer-esque brain to session after session. Inevitably, some of the new stuff does push the old stuff out, and in high tech, that's often a good thing. But it's also easy to get carried away.

There was plenty of cool stuff at ISSCC from the likes of Intel, Belgium's imec research hub, Texas Instruments, AMD and academia. However, when an unnamed company announces that it has, say, integrated WiFi alongside a dual core processor on a single piece of silicon, it's a terrific piece of research. But it isn't a product yet. Particularly not if, say, the modem for all this still has to be implemented elsewhere (i.e. on another chip) in software.

Problem is that in the heat of conference coverage, the rush to declare 'on sale tomorrow' is intense. Even when you have to go to an event, you miss having time to think. And when we're talking about hour after hour of complex circuit design, thought and reflection are essentials.

Which brings me to my sudden love for the virtual event. I like to network - I'd be in the wrong job if I didn't. But being able to follow something online and then mull it over in the relative quiet of the office is becoming increasingly attractive.

For another project, I've recently spent a lot of time working with online presentations and, in a way that face-to-face does not, they do seem to encourage more considered and responsive reactions on both sides. It isn't just the inherently smaller scale of the medium (typically one-to-one/two/three, but quite often one-to-many). It's more the case that when you stop, you can take a breather and digest what you've just heard or seen.

It may seem strange to say this about online, but it can therefore be a more thoughtful channel.

Of course, there is an irony in this. If conferences have become more intense and - let's say it - shallow, it's also largely because of t'Interweb. Maybe you can't record or film sessions, but you can Tweet, Link-In and Facebook your way through. And many do, not just the journalists. But we hacks are then expected to have instant opinions about even the most complex subjects. Frequently - and to add a second irony - from those who the next minute argue that we don't do our research.

I don't think I'm about to join the 'slow down' brigade, despite my advancing age (for sure, no dotage signs yet, if you don't mind). But I am trimming.

What is the real value in going? What could be done by other means? And how do I get time to think? These aren't obstacles to throw in the road of the technological road warrior. They are questions we need to ask not just about conferences but about the general discourse.

So, with ISSCC this year, I've gathered the info, come back, reread my notes and papers and I'm going to use this thing called the telephone (and OK, failing that, email) to follow up stuff in a little more detail. We're forgetting the difference between hearing and understanding.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45153 2012-02-13T00:44:36 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=45153#comments 0 first nuclear power plants in nearly two generations, Washington also began to open up another potentially huge engineering market last week: civil unmanned aviation systems (UAS).

The popular image of UAS is dominated by the Predator and other spy drones that prowl over Afghanistan on the hunt for terrorist training camps. But the aviation industry has been pushing for years to bring the same technology to commercial use, for everything from crop monitoring to fully-laden airfreight. Following bipartisan approval in the Senate - and yes, you read that right - it should get its wish within the next four years.

The provisions on seeding a US unmanned aviation market are within a long overdue spending authorisation for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Until now, it has muddled by on a series of interim budgets and even endured one short shutdown, in spite of its massive safety responsibility for US air traffic control.

The main part of the new bill, which now awaits President Obama's signature, transitions US air traffic control from a radar- to a GPS-based system. The $11bn (£7bn) upgrade will overhaul a 50-year old system in response to an anticipated 50% increase in flights over the next few years. That extra capacity - as well as the extra safety implicit in a GPS system that will monitor airplanes every second rather than every five or six seconds - is what will provide air lanes for UAS.

"I'm confident that once people can fly UAS in the national airspace for civil and commercial purposes, such as oil and pipeline monitoring, crop dusting, and search and rescue, a whole new industry will emerge, inventing products and accomplishing tasks we haven't even thought of yet," said Michael Toscano, president and CEO of the sector's trade association, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Research by the Teal Group claims suggests the UAS sector could "more than double over the next decade from current worldwide expenditures of $4.9bn annually to $11.5bn, totaling just over $80bn in the next 10 years."

Even with the bill's passage, UAS are not yet necessarily a done deal. The FAA package does mandate that commercial flights must begin before September 2015 (and bear in mind that deadline could slip depending on when the legislation is signed). However, it does not address any of the civil liberties issues associated with large sensor-packed machines flying overhead.

Human rights groups have already indicated - with some justification - that they are going to raise concerns about not merely airborne photographic intrusion but also wifi 'sniffers' and other monitoring technologies being allowed to exist in private hands. Indeed, there are already worries that UAS operated by domestic US law enforcement, largely for border control, are not yet suitably regulated.

Nevertheless, high technology industries can already sense a market that they see growing as fast as mobile communications or even tablet computing, even if the ultimate value will be smaller.

Meanwhile, the European Union is fearful of being left behind. There's already been a push from the continent's leading air forces to develop UAS for military use, so as not to be overly dependent on today's US and Israeli mil-aero market leaders.

This has now expanded to include a drive to seed a parallel European civil market, with the European Defence Agency sponsoring a meeting only a few days ago in Brussels aimed at laying the foundations for an EU UAS timetable that matches that before the FAA.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44885 2012-01-27T19:08:32 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44885#comments 0 E&T, but before then, I wanted to mention some of the thinking about cooperation between the US and EU on smart vehicles.

In the next few months, the US Federal Highway Administration will publish a report comparing strategies and progress in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) R&D worldwide. For now, I just want to pick on one observation it makes.

In a preview presentation, author Steven Shladover, researcher at UC Berkeley and former chair of ITS America, noted that in Europe, the focus tends to be on using ITS to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions whereas the governmental focus in the US is on safety. Indeed, Shladover said that GHGs came far above safety in some cases noted within EU projects.

You can see why. Climate change is a political hot potato on this side of the Atlantic, even with a sympathetic president. Trying to get federal funding for anything shaped by GHGs is going to be an even harder battle than usual.

But the question does arrive as to whether the two different priorities could hamper the automotive industry's attempts to deploy new technologies through economies of scale. And there's another one: how could this difference affect regulation for the ITS era and thereby the various requirements placed on OEMs serving multiple international markets?

To a big degree, economics could align things. Separately at TRB, Ford talked about the models it is developing to assess the comparison between plug-in electric hybrid vehicles (PHEV) and all electric vehicles (EVs). Again, I'll talk more about this work in the next magazine, but the topline is that PHEVs make more sense because they'll attract more buyers and fit more real-world use cases.

Similarly, while everybody wants to be 'green' (take away the GHG debate and it is motherhood and apple pie, after all), the best way of convincing a car buyer is that his or her new vehicle will be both safer and cheaper to run. That's how you get the largest number of adopters, leading to the largest GHG reductions, whether it is your stated target or not.

However, nuance is a nasty beast and this particular strategic divergence probably needs watching with care. Ultimately, so much of ITS' promise comes down to commercial viability.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44823 2012-01-25T04:22:03 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44823#comments 0
Specifically, the initial policy brief is that Obama wants to introduce legislation that forces multinational corporations to pay much, if not all of the difference between US and international rates, even if they do not repatriate profits from their overseas operations.

"No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas," Obama said. "From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here."

In political terms, Ireland's 12.5% rate has never been popular with its neighbours. Within the Eurozone, France and Germany hate it with a vengeance. It also raises bile in Whitehall. But in all these cases, the issue has been mostly about competition for inward investment, particularly from the US. So, though these big European hitters want Ireland to eventually bring its rates into line with the rest of their region, they have not launched a head-on attack while the country struggles to restructure.

Obama's agenda is different. He knows the coming presidential election will be fought on jobs, jobs, jobs. Note that his proposal does not envisage the extra revenues being used to pay out the massive US deficit but directs "every penny" towards rebuilding domestic manufacturing.

There is still a long way to go for any such proposal to become law. Be sure that the corporations themselves will lobby hard against the new basic minimum rate, and plenty in both the Republican and Democratic parties will be less than keen.

But it was also one of a number of bear traps that Obama aimed to set for his opponents as the 2012 campaign begins. Bringing manufacturing home sat as one of Obama's specific themes alongside clean energy (in the broadest sense), more 'fairness' in income tax and others.

Targeting offshored jobs and profits plays well to the centre of the US electorate, voters in the heartlands hardest hit as companies have globalised and factories have moved abroad. So, right now, Ireland - and other low corporation tax states - should be wary of the proposal.

The particular challenge for Ireland is that wages have risen as its inward investment policy has delivered benefits. So, while many companies say that tax is now a secondary-order issue in their decisions to shift manufacturing (the real issue may no longer be even salaries but the ability to deliver capacity quickly), the Irish have less of an advantage here than in still lower labour cost markets, particularly in Asia.

It may well be a Canute-like response to globalisation in practical terms. But this is politics, and in America, that's a contact sport.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44649 2012-01-13T00:50:08 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44649#comments 0
So, as we continue to slog through this year's International Consumer Electronics Show, a word of warning. I'm not about to anoint any of this clutch of innovators that I met as NBTs. In one case, the company is already an established player, but has done something which is being overlooked. But more generally, this wasn't an NBT show, as we saw yesterday.

Perhaps when the global economy lifts for real - and you have to be sceptical about that given some recent financial results - some enterprise will emerge as a massive player that made its debut in 2012. Instead, though, this is cool, interesting and innovative technology and let's not start loading it with any more baggage than that.

After a period of development work with Panasonic in Japan, PixelOptics has been rolling out its emPower technology in the US for a few months already, but it's just now preparing to come to Europe - France initially - with a nifty approach to bifocals. Yes, this is cool stuff that's also for us older folk.

Bifocals, split or progressive, make life much easier for millions of people but there are sacrifices, even some risks. The 'reading' portion of a lens, typically the lower half, is blurred in normal use, reducing the field of view. Sad to note, it can even lead to trips and falls when the wearer doesn't quite spot an obstacle or misplaces a step.

PixelVision's idea is simple yet clever. It creates lenses that have a liquid crystal layer embedded within their lower half. In normal operation these are 'off', so the entire lens is set to the user's prescription for short-sightedness. However, by tapping a button on the side of the frame, the crystals can be activated and instantly change their molecular structure to match the 'prescription' of the lens' bottom half to an 'electronic reading zone'.

A single overnight charge provides enough power to use the glasses for two or three days. They focus faster than you can blink and are available to correct all ranges of presbyopia covered by traditional bifocals. Other than the LCD inlay, the system is made up of an ASIC, accelerometer and batteries that all fit within a traditional frame without significantly adding to its weight.

We'll keep you posted as to when the technology arrives in the UK.

Valley TV technology firm Atlona is best known for its cable and video standards conversion products, but it came to this year's CES with a very nifty looking wireless HDMI product capable of streaming TV from one device to another over ranges of up to 45ft for full resolution (more, if you don't need or want an HD signal).

The LinkCast Wireless HD Audio/Video System caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, it operates at up to full 1080p resolution, even for 3D, with less than 1ms of latency - those are very chunky numbers. Second, my guess is that while there have been other wireless streaming products, this one is also reaching the market at the right time. And timing is the often neglected side of innovation.

The last couple of years have seen prices for LCD and LED displays tumble to the point where many families have invested in second screens, alongside the big HD panel in the living room. The problem is that this often means getting a second HD box, a second BluRay player and maybe even a second Internet media box. The costs can quickly mount up, and then there's all those cables.

The Atlona product, which has picked up an Innovations Design and Engineering Award at CES, does away with all that. You can connect up to five devices - most other systems are single point-to-point - over simple plug-and-play dongles. And this is its own network; it doesn't gobble up all the bandwidth on your traditional WiFi.

The LinkCast launches in the US next month at $299 and the company hopes to bring it to the UK soon.

OK, so we've saved the best till last, partly for rewarding your persistence but also, I'll admit, because I'll be talking a bit more about this one in our print CES round-up in the next edition of E&T.

Corel is an established name in the print and video editing and manipulation software market, but its new AfterShot Pro product is something else.

If you dabble in digital SLR photography, you'll know that managing and editing RAW files can be an incredibly slow process. If you don't, I'll just say that these are huge 20MB files and just getting them off your camera or memory card is usually the cue for a very leisurely cup of tea.

AfterShot Pro is a photographic workflow for Windows, Mac OS and Linux allowing you to view, rate, sort, edit and export these beasts - and it runs like the clappers. And the reason for that is that it has been optimised, in partnership with MPU vendor AMD, for multicore platforms.

And by optimised, I mean exactly that. One of the greater challenges facing software engineers today is writing programmes that properly exploit distributed processing across multiple cores in today's chips. There are few rules, few tools and only a small knowledge base to pull upon.

Corel built its own scheduler for the new software pretty much from the ground up. It had to. Analysis of the task management across the cores in the AMD eight-core CPU running the software at CES showed that this effort has paid off. It was even and it achieved extremely good loads across each of the threads. At the same time, you can run AfterShot Pro on a netbook.

This isn't just innovation; it's potentially vital. Corel's priority is now to take what it has learned with its new product and apply it to its existing and more established tools such as PaintShop Pro. The company is claiming an 8X speed up for AfterShot over Adobe Creative Suite, so there's obviously a battle that will extend there. Fair enough; it's Corel's secret sauce.

But the company remains open to sharing some of its war stories with the wider software community. Make no mistake, every sector of that faces a serious multicore programming challenge and will welcome all the help it can get.

For users too, this is good news. Multicore systems are already delivering major performance gains, but the feeling persists that much of their potential remains untapped.

As I said, more of this anon. However, it is a genuinely big deal.

Anyway, that ends today's data dump from Las Vegas. Innovation is alive and well (we'll also be looking at these and some other companies in the magazine), and delivering practical solutions. Whatismore, all of these products retain strong attractions even in today's recession - they meet needs, perhaps not the most essential, but enough to still grab some share of mind from consumers. And in Corel's case, from industry as well.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44623 2012-01-12T06:15:18 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44623#comments 0
Usually, one product group springs to the fore, even where there is no exciting new innovation to grab geek attention and dominate the headlines. This year, however, there was movement on a number of fronts, all of it roughly commensurate.

First, TVs. Samsung and LG both had eye-poppingly good 55-inch OLED displays on show and are about to start making sales rather than demos, albeit at prices above $5,000 (in Samsung's case quite some way above). This isn't a mass market technology yet, but it is now beginning to live up to its promise. The 3D on Samsung's display was perhaps the best I've seen though, strangely, it wasn't shown on the CES floor - rather, in some stirring footage of disaster relief after the Thai flooding presented at Tom Coughlin's Storage Visions conference.

Meanwhile, over at Sony, the Japanese giant had a number of large glasses-free 3D displays. This technology is now moving into the 20-24" commercial market but largely for specialist uses such as medical (with Panasonic joining its national rival here). However, Sony will this year launch a single-viewer glasses-free Vaio computer that uses sensors to track your head and adjust the image accordingly to give the best depth. It is very cool. And concept designs above 40" have arrived.

The other big trend in TVs was the launch of still more apps as the smartphone and tablet experience evolves up to larger displays. It was accompanied by more 720p, 1080p and HDMI ports appearing on those smaller devices to allow owners to offload HD content to their main home screens. However, more of this in our second trend (and more on a UK company that is sitting in a sweet spot as this happens, Imagination Technologies, later this week).

Anyway, on to Trend Two, the next generation of the 'walled garden'. Everybody wants to build their own 'ecosystem' of connected devices and also use apps within various sizes of device as gateways to selling digital media.

This is most obviously a big play for Sony's boss, Sir Howard Stringer, and his team. An important part of the marketing for its new phones and tablet products, ranging from the already-announced clamshell Sony Tablet P to new additions to its Bravia TV range, is access to various forms of content from the Sony Entertainment Network.

But beyond this, the company is also pushing the fact that its incoming range of tablets and smartphones (it recently bought out former handset partner Ericsson) will be PlayStation compatible. At the same time, the new PS Vita - launching in the UK on February 22nd - will be able to grab all the other music and movie content the highly integrated company offers.

Sony is the best placed of all the big electronics companies to really push this integration as a challenge to Apple. It has music. It has movies. However, it is not alone.

Panasonic announced a tie-up with Justin Timberlake for myspace tv, one of a number of projects that are looking to revive the fortunes of the pioneering (and no longer Murdoch-owned) social networking site. And I'll be honest Timberlake impressed me - he seems to have a good idea of what he and his partners want to do with the property that looks like bad news for a number of other start-ups that also had TV viewing/social networking hybrids at CES.

Samsung and LG too are getting into the content market game to support app development, both on its own account and with partners. But it does raise some interesting questions. TVs are becoming digital shop windows, much as smartphones and tablets already have (and the Amazon Fire is selling at a rate of one million a week). So, if you're a retailer, you do start wondering where your upsale really comes from if, potentially, you are competing with the companies that take up the greatest square footage in your stores.

The obvious comparison with Apple here is that it built its own retail network, augmented by bigger players. They wanted in on some of the 'magic'. As the other big players move in on the same model, one can't help but wonder if they'll be reminded of some 'history'.

And so, for now, to the third trend: 'I wanna be Apple'. OK, nothing new, you think. Wannabe iPods, iPads and - said it myself in the last post - MacBook Airs. We have indeed seen them at each CES for the last seven or eight years, at least.

This time, there's something else. OK, throw in the iTunes-like content stores and you can see where this comes from. And much the same goes from the PC-lite app model invading TVs. But what I want to add to all that is the industrial design.

Some of the products I've already talked about look fantastic, though at the same time they don't all slavishly copy the work of soon-to-be-Sir Jony Ive and the late Steve Jobs. Yes, their influence is there, typically in an elegant minimalism, but they don't look like a bunch of guys were locked in a room with nothing but iPods and iPhones to look at. They may have been told what prevailing tastes were like, but then asked to deliver excellence.

I'd say that of some of the ideas coming forward for Ultrabooks from Intel's partners. I'd say it of much that I saw on Sony's stand (although that company's design standards have been historically high; they just slipped a little for a while). And I'd say it of the OLEDs from Samsung and LG - truly, they are things of beauty.

But generally, this year's CES had far fewer 'clunky' looking plays from everyone. No, it wasn't universal, but Apple's impact on design and UIs was really nice to see. Indeed, and I'm no big fan of the honours system, in noting that Ive has been knighted "for services to design and enterprise", it looks like that might be true in the broadest sense.

Anyway, there are some Day One thoughts. And as you can see, they're all about increments. But in a good way. Next stop, innovation that was happening at CES, but largely on the quiet.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44586 2012-01-09T21:42:31 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44586#comments 0
These ultra thin - 17.8mm - notebooks certainly take their cue from the MacBook Air and its remarkable success. The fact that their commercial launch was accompanied by a tie-up between Intel and voice recognition specialist Nuance also had more-than-half the CES journalists whispering "Siri" within nanoseconds.

However, before we all carp too much, keep a few things in mind.

First, this is Intel's backyard. Ultrabooks were begat by laptops which were in turn begat by PCs. When the company lasers in on the traditional computing space, it delivers strong brands like Pentium, Centrino and, more recently, Core.

Second, this is about the mass market. The MacBook Air remains, for the moment, a premium product with a $999 entry level price tag - and Apple likes protecting its margins. Intel began to seed economies of scale in the ultra-thin laptop space last August by having its venture capital arm launch a $300m Ultrabook Fund. The further below that $999 figure the company and its partners can get, the more reasoned a judgement can be made.

Third, a huge proportion of those critiquing this morning's press conference were Mac owners (many of them using lightweight Airs or, like myself, iPads). It's CES. We're not that normal. We're mostly geeks. And we work in publishing, one of the few industries where the Mac is an established platform for business. Sometimes, preaching to the converted isn't that fruitful.

Beyond all that, the Ultrabooks on show here had some cool features. It wasn't the usual visual demos that impressed me, so much as things like the Identity Protection and Anti-Theft techologies that sync your credit card with your computer. Not so good, if you're looking to cut down on those impulse purchases (near-field communication allows for a tap-to-pay feature). But much better in terms of securing card data transfers to the web.

And, whisper it do, there were also some cool examples of industrial design. One, the Slider, has a touch screen and a keyboard that can be used in either a traditional laptop configuration or with the keyboard folded underneath the screen as a tablet. Go thinner and you get the ability to do that without having a clunky-looking brick.

Another interesting take was the Nikiski. This has a transparent track pad that doubles as a display, taking up about a third of the surface, when the laptop is closed.

Mooly Eden, VP and GM of Intel's PC Client Group, said the company has already secured (or should that be 'seeded') 75 design wins for various Ultrabook configurations. He also promised still further slimming down for the format.

However, the Ultrabook launch isn't going to stop some analysts feeling that, again, Intel still isn't breaking out of the microprocessor 'ghetto'. Indeed, having progressively relinquished positions in mobile communications and, more recently, TV (where it had, from my point of view, a solid looking strategy), the company is open to the charge (though we're told to expect more stuff from a subsequent Paul Otellini keynote later this week).

Nevertheless, with Ultrabooks set to be Intel's biggest marketing push since the Centrino wireless launch, expect to see the company expand the ultra-thin space in a major way from April onwards.

The one thing we didn't get was that much more detail about the third-generation Core processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, that will power the new range. That will probably have to wait on next month's International Solid State Circuits Conference.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44416 2011-12-27T16:25:13 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44416#comments 0
As 2011 comes to a close and the 2012 CES looms, I actually don't think that slinging a bit more mud at 3D is a bad thing, partly because it's a good technology that is being allowed to persist in bad variants. And, unlike other such offerings, one of the biggest problems with 3D is that there's very little 'try-before-you-buy' available.

Let's remember that there are basically three types of 3D today. Movies that are shot in 3D; animated movies that are created inside computer environments in 3D; and 'flat-shot' movies that are converted to 3D.

Great filmmakers working in 3D from the ground up are achieving remarkable results. Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a superb film in every respect. The visuals work with top-notch storytelling and characterisation to deliver an extraordinary experience. And much the same is achieved by Werner Herzog in the 'simpler' documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams which takes us inside the Chauvet Cave to view the prehistoric art within. Artists working with and applying new technology to give us new (or otherwise impossible) experiences. No complaints. Indeed, breathtaking stuff.

Nor will I carp about the 3D animations being produced by Pixar or Aardman or many, many others. They are mostly extending the form and are not simply theme park rides. To find oneself forced to admit that even a Smurfs movie can be made that is not entirely without value is remarkable.

However, there is then this post-converted dreck. I am frankly depressed to hear that George Lucas and James Cameron are to deliver 3D versions of Star Wars and Titanic early next year. Until now, both filmmakers have argued against conversion and in favour of digital technologies throughout the production flow. And while I know that they will be more attentive to the process than others have been to date, I'd rather they simply hadn't done it at all.

When it comes to conversion, Marvel has been a particular offender. In the last week, the Disney subsidiary announced that it would be converting next Summer's The Avengers to 3D for release, the film having been already shot flat. Last year it did the same to (and ruined) both Thor and Captain America.

Indeed, I'd recommend that you try and see Captain America in particular on a flat Blu-ray disc. Stripped of the murkiness imposed by viewing it through a pair of sunglasses, the film proves to have a very distinctive colour palette intended to reflect, would you believe, comic art of the 40s, 50s and 60s. It's a very good film but only when not viewed through a glass, darkly.

I actually cannot think of one successful 2D-to-3D conversion to date. The process has been used to give mediocre films a supposed fillip or to blot out the original intentions of the director for the sake of a couple of extra quid per ticket.

And getting back to our bailiwick, let's not forget that this is largely the content that will be driving 3D out of theatres into the home as we get display and glasses prices down to more acceptable levels. Except that it won't be doing that - it will just leave the public wondering what all the fuss is about.

Because at the movies, they already are with ticket sales generally trending downwards and not even getting a much of a holiday boost as has been traditional, regardless of any recession.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44353 2011-12-20T15:03:32 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44353#comments 0
The 'heroes' of Egypt's Tahrir Square used texts, tweets, blogs and more to foment revolution and oust a corrupt leader. But in the country's recent elections, more traditional parties prevailed. Even though The Muslim Brotherhood also opposed (and was oppressed by) the Mubarak regime, it stood at one remove from this year's protests yet has emerged a winner at the ballot box.

Meanwhile the Spanish 'Indignados' who borrowed from the Egyptians also found that while they could use both protest camps and online tools to build popular support, their country recently voted in a government that is likely to be still less open to any dialogue than that they originally attacked. In their case, the Indignados recommended that voters abstain, thereby handing the ruling Socialist Party an even bigger thumping from the 'Conservative' Popular Party than was already expected.

Part of the issue is that these were young protests (in every sense) that quickly came up against more established forces on existing political battlegrounds. Another comes down to the old notion that it is easier to break something down than it is to create. But the value of politics' shiny new e-tools also stands exposed.

A repeated criticism of the US Occupy movement has been that it "doesn't stand for anything". I'm not sure the point is entirely valid. You can equally say that as a new grouping, it is still putting things into its ideological shopping bag and would be wise to keep it open for as long as it can to have the makings of as broad a platform as it can.

However, it remains true that even after all these months, after all the media coverage and after gaining sympathy because of some remarkably cack-handed policing, most Americans in the mainstream still struggle to understand what Occupy represents (never mind how it can represent them as part of 'the 99%') beyond its directed anger towards Wall Street's egregious avarice.

With the sad death of Velvet Revolution figurehead Václav Havel last weekend, an inevitable comparison occurs. He was a dissident who expressed his perceptions and his philosophy through a remarkable canon of plays, essays and books produced over a period of 25 years before he saw democracy begin to emerge in the former Czechoslovakia. His influence also spread through the Iron Curtain. Along with another Czech writer, the Paris-based exile Milan Kundera, Havel was both a literary and ideological hero of my own youth.

This does not imply that any new thinking needs a quarter of a century to get a hearing. Unlike the young Havel, almost all of us live in democracies. However, I do think his ability to articulate positions in depth was important and, again, this is where the Internet and social media today fall flat.

I'm sure the brilliant comedian Stewart Lee could get a nice slab of suitably withering material from the notion, "Build a valid political ideology in 140 characters or less". So - and this comparison will get me into trouble - could David Cameron. But does either really need to? Go on, imagine. "Forward with Facebook". "Linked In to Victory".

The Internet, as we currently use it, remains an essentially reductive medium. Given its foundations in academia, that's full of ironies in itself. Even a 'sophisticated' blog post - the kind of thing that when commissioned in that way makes me think of pineapple and cheddar on a cocktail stick - is not supposed to exceed 500 words. Because you, dear reader, will go no further. You are a bunch of attention-span-challenged amoeba (given that we're now at 575 words, I can safely chuck out that insult in the knowledge that, indeed, no-one will see it).

There are exceptions. E-readers are once again providing opportunities for essayists (something another recent sad loss, that thrillingly robust polemicist Christopher Hitchens, was just beginning to explore). But as the discussion about politics and the Internet once more heats up - and it will because the US is about to enter a presidential year - the question of 'depth' is worth posing.

Coming back to Occupy, some within the group are asking themselves that right now. The movement has been forced into something just short of hibernation over the winter but it does still have its network, the online tools the various camps built to support their physical efforts. So, if you don't want to be washed over like similar movements abroad, what do you do - do you use this time to build out and flesh out that platform?

As a famous US political campaign once wondered, "Where's the beef?" Well, if you have made it this far, there may be cause for hope. Maybe.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44001 2011-11-26T01:47:10 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=44001#comments 0 Kindle Fire when it reaches the UK.

We've had one for almost two weeks and judged by how well a product delivers on its promises, the web retailer's seven-inch tablet is a cracking piece of kit. Notwithstanding, the odd freeze or app crash.

It has an excellent LG/eInk touchscreen for video and gaming. Its dual-core Texas Instruments 1GHz OMAP processor and peripherals provide ample muscle. It has a zippy web browser, Silk, that exploits cloud-caching to deliver pages quickly.

And it has a US retail price, excluding sales tax, of just $199 (£128).

But this is a qualified love. The Fire does its job but has been primarily designed as a shop window for Amazon to sell movies, TV, music and mainly info- and entertainment apps, as well as magazines and newspapers.

Amazon subsidises the Fire heavily. According to IHS iSuppli, E&T's teardown partner, components and manufacturing for each tablet come to $201.70. On top of that, there are costs like its bespoke version of the Android operating system, Silk's development and maintenance, and marketing.

How the real money will get made becomes clear once you populate the device. For example, you can stream from a smorgasbord of archive video by buying a one-year Amazon Prime membership for $80 but newer content has to be rented; other streaming services have all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Similarly, newspaper readers may find that while existing subs include most forms of e-access, the Fire version is supplementary.

This is not a bad thing. We accept this model for mobile phones and loss leaders are a retailing mainstay. Amazon's other Kindles are sold at below-cost. If there are issues worth raising about the Fire, they concern what it consequently does not do.

To hit its price target, Amazon has skipped a clutch of supposed tablet basics. There's no camera, no microphone, no Bluetooth. Never mind that this explicitly isn't a productivity device, the omissions exclude a number of fun uses (as well as popular utilities like Skype) that consumers like but that Amazon considers non-core to its sales strategy.

Even as an e-reader, the Fire has limitations that were acknowledged by CEO Jeff Bezos in a recent interview with Wired's Steven Levy.

Levy: For years you've been touting e-ink as superior to a backlit device for reading. But the Fire is backlit. Why should Kindle users switch?

Bezos: They should buy both. When you're reading long-form, there's no comparison. You want the e-ink. But you can't watch a movie with that. And you can't play Android games. And so on.

Moreover, unlike traditional Kindles there's no 3G (or 4G) option, just WiFi. But that I understand. An e-book is a small file; mobile streaming for longer videos must wait on more robust LTE networks.

I've avoided the iPad comparison because there's the risk that it becomes a technological one, particularly for an engineering audience. The relevant stuff always comes back to what you want from a tablet.

Both the iPad and Fire exist within walled gardens (though Android-based, you have to hack your Fire to buy apps outside Amazon). While acknowledging that it's early days for the Fire Store, it's hard to see it ever matching the range in Apple's App Store. The iPad/iOS is a far more versatile platform. And for that, so is Android unbound.

If you want a portable media player/gaming console/web viewer/emailer that does the odd extra thing here and there, you cannot beat the Fire. For a great many people, it's a perfect fit. But if you genuinely need to add even something as simple as communication beyond email, it may look more like a devil's bargain.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43920 2011-11-21T21:42:46 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43920#comments 1
Even if they eventually get it (and as I write Chu remains in place, having thumbed his nose at opponents by going straight from the committee to visit another US solar manufacturer), his inquisitors failed to address fundamental and systemic problems the Solyndra saga has exposed. These problems are also relevant far beyond US borders.

True, Chu seemed to have borrowed much of his strategy from James Murdoch's defence on phone hacking, with comparable success for now although it was not pleasant to watch.

Chu repeatedly claimed ignorance or belated knowledge with regard to some of the more serious charges. And serious they were given (1) the largesse extended to Solyndra when one leading investor was a major Obama campaign backer George Kaiser, (2) several credible warnings that Solyndra was in difficulties while it continued to receive federal backing and (3) an email pointing to some collusion between the Department of Energy and the company over holding back an announcement of layoffs until after mid-term elections. But there was no killer blow.

And that is because the reality, notwithstanding an ongoing investigation by the FBI, is that the market killed Solyndra by taking an unexpected turn. This wasn't inherently a con job nor foolish nor a clever but always doomed loser; it was a risky venture in a new market that turned out to be over-engineered and over-priced when it finally reached commercial production. Happens a lot, unfortunately.

In this particular case, when the company first drafted its business plan, it had a complicated technology based on thin film tubes of copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) but that still promised to be 20% more cost efficient than traditional photovoltaics. Its killer was a nosedive in the price of silicon. Even after further efficiency gains, Solyndra's competitiveness was gone as traditional technologies could consequently increase their dollar-per-Watt ratio.

Nevertheless, what happened after that, most specifically the US government's decision to renegotiate the terms of and preserve Solyndra's guarantee, is at the heart of the tale. Just not in any true 'Solargate' sense.

There are three key questions that remain unresolved.

1. How should governments structure the delivery of loan guarantees?

2. What resources should governments set aside for due diligence?

3. What does the assertion 'We have to compete with China' actually mean?

Let's take each in turn.

Loan guarantees

The federal support Solyndra received was part of a package arranged for renewable energy within the first Obama stimulus. This raises an important distinction between the typical guarantees all governments give across a range of industries (ranging from the capital intensive like construction and defence to emerging markets such as solar) and those that are bundled within a stimulus programme.

The stimulus effort was, and it was stated repeatedly, biased towards 'shovel-ready' projects. That is, companies that could produce jobs quickly. In Solyndra's case, it wanted support for a second fab that would provide employment for 3,000 people overall (including its construction) and create 1,000 new posts. Did those numbers and the stimulus criteria cloud the judgements made by Chu's department from the very beginning?

That still isn't clear but there is a potentially important lesson. Making guarantees part of a stimulus package is very tempting. They apparently add to the dollar value of the package, making the government providing them look more generous, but don't necessarily have to be fully accounted for on the books. Indeed, you hope that the guarantee doesn't ultimately get called in.

At the same time, tough times do require governments to provide more guarantees. Recession-based risk aversion among banks is but one of the challenges they address, though arguably the biggest. Still, they also bolster investor confidence and can give a company scope to refine its operations for full commercial launch.

The issue here though may be the stimulus vehicle through which the guarantees were made available. They should perhaps have been a separate activity.

Certainly, they now bring us to point two.

Due diligence

Chu told the hearing that his department's decision to restructure Solyndra's original guarantee (although it did refuse a request for a second one) represented an acceptable risk.

These judgements are always difficult to make and easy to criticise when armed with hindsight. Nevertheless, disclosures about Solyndra since its collapse have cast the US government's actions in a poor light, including that from Obama advisor Larry Summers' now infamous admission that a federal agency is a "crappy VC".

Questions must arise as to Washington's understanding of the collapse in the price of silicon relative to not just Solyndra's progress in the market but the glut of solar ventures being publicly funded elsewhere in the world. That collapse was under way when the guarantee was renegotiated.

The galling thing is that this has happened before. Individual banks can have more depth of analytical expertise than the entire federal apparatus, and the number of public guarantees that have been called in because civil servants understood far too late what was happening to a particular market is, to be frank, legion.

In that respect, Solyndra is less a cautionary tale than an all-too-familiar one. Also, it actually gives credence to many of Chu's claims of ignorance: chances are there really weren't the resources to flag up what was happening in strong enough terms to the head of department.

Again, this issue hasn't really been addressed. Indeed, it's a rather uncomfortable one for the Republicans leading the Solargate charge since it implies an expansion of government whereas their mantra today is all about slashing the administration to the bone.

China

Chu repeatedly referred to competition from China in his responses as a main driver for supporting Solyndra and US energy innovation efforts generally. He has a point.

But right now, China's solar industry is also suffering, and again this is attributable to the collapse in silicon prices, now down 93% to $33/kg from $475/kg just three years ago. As a result, analysts at the China Nonferrous Metals Industrial Association recently suggested that 90% of the country's polysilicon plants could soon be mothballed or closed.

The solar sector is rapidly turning into a bloodbath as much for the Chinese as it already has for the likes of Solyndra. So, repeated assertions that '[Insert name of your country here] must compete with China' are not exactly helpful if it turns into a case of pushing your handcart to hell a little faster than everyone else.

Our problem may be that with China (and other nations in Asia) having 'won' in bulk manufacturing, there is a fear of losing to it in any other sphere. And energy is about as sensitive a sphere as you can imagine, given that it can be taken as a root cause of ongoing military action. But such sensitivities can overwhelm rational thought and there are suggestions that this happened in the case of Solyndra.

This is not necessarily the answer - indeed, I'm not sure I can answer any three of the points raised here, but am rather concerned they have been pushed off the agenda - however perhaps the priority has to be (and should have been) on competing still more aggressively with support for intellectual property in a more discrete way.

What perhaps brings that point into relief is China's own declared aim as part of its incoming Five-Year Plan that generating IP must be made a higher priority. The country sees its economic growth programme as having to move from simply making stuff to owning what goes inside it. And this applies not just to energy, but across the board.

That change in emphasis means that citing China as a competitive threat today has to be done in a more nuanced way. Would Solyndra have stood a better chance by developing its technology using US research resources but then manufacturing its tubes in Asia? We'll never know for sure, but given the silicon slump, probably not.

However, had its second fab been in Asia, it is a pretty sure bet that it would not have received any stimulus loan guarantees. And thereby hangs another thread in this saga.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43723 2011-11-09T21:45:47 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43723#comments 0
First, the good news. According to the latest data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the US CE industry is poised to rack up shipments worth $190bn (£118bn) in 2011, up 5.6% on last year despite the lingering recession. Consumers' planned average household spending on electronic gifts this year is also up, by 6% to $246.

Now, the not so good. In tracking this data, the CEA came across a huge difference in the holiday plans of those households that plan to spend more on hi-tech pressies this year and those who plan to spend less. The 'spend mores' are at an average of $478; the 'spend less' contingent is at just $101.

"There's about a 5X difference," said the CEA's Steve Koenig. "Clearly these two different groups have very different products in mind, and if we see movement between them it will significantly impact the results."

It is not that hard to see what might be happening here. Even with the US economy still in the doldrums, many people have relatively stable jobs and they continue to spend. Many others though have either recently had to face redundancy or are at companies where rumours that the axe is about to fall continue to spread. And another group may simply see this as a good time to pay down debt and live more modestly - remember these people are at least still buying something... for now.

That though is still one heck of a gulf in terms of buying intentions between two definable groups.

The further concern, as Koenig rightly notes, lies in the balance of sentiment and how it might shift in the critical few weeks ahead.

The most important group here is those households that plan currently to hold their spending steady - a finger-in-the-wind here from me, but my guess is that this group probably represents the largest of the three that the CEA has surveyed.

Among US retailers, there is therefore a strong push to drive customers into stores. The CEA's analysis shows how the one-day offers that would be available on 'Black Friday', the day immediately after the US Thanksgiving holiday this month, are now being extended over several days, and some outlets (online and bricks-and-mortar) are even shifting to 'Black November' strategies.

However, here too, there is an important contrast. According to the CEA's other senior analyst, Shawn DuBravac, retailers are nevertheless holding inventories at their lowest levels in four years. "They're not at all-time lows," he said, "but they're close."

Broad economic uncertainty isn't good for any market, even one that has traversed the recession as well as consumer electronics and continued to deliver new products that have generated demand. And the fact is that the challenge here is not restricted to this sector, nor is it one that the retailers and brands can necessarily resolve on their own (though given Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi's connections to brown goods, someone might want to give him another nudge).

However, if the industry does offer some message, it is that businesses that continue to innovate in bad times as well as good will fare better. Certainly, the 2012 drivers that come out of CES in January will give us a further sense of that.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43639 2011-11-04T02:58:08 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43639#comments 0
Of many questionable acts the book details, one involves a 2008 confrontation between Jobs and Fortune. The magazine had prepared an article that discussed Jobs' cancer and a long-standing controversy over Apple stock options. The privacy-obsessed Jobs played this card while lecturing Fortune's managing editor that the piece should be spiked:

"So, you've uncovered the fact that I'm an a**hole. Why is that news?"

Isaacson says this illustrates Jobs' self-awareness. It does. But for many Silicon Valley workers and commentators, the anecdote chimes another way.

'High-tech CEO exposed as so-and-so' isn't news (although the article was, and Fortune rightly went ahead and published). Jobs' generation saw a clutch of driven founder-leaders spend their youths building start-ups into empires. While there are many 'gentlemen' running Valley companies today, the 'players' necessarily outnumber them.

Isaacson gets this. Although as many of Jobs' contemporaries remain powerful business leaders with powerful lawyers, he wisely makes it an implicit theme. The book is so well structured that the enforced fudge doesn't matter too much.

Isaacson humanises Jobs. He negates the distortion field to deliver a comprehensive overview of the traits and experiences that shaped his subject. More important, he successfully highlights the differences in Jobs between the simply atypical and the truly exceptional.

One talent that set Jobs apart was understanding not so much technological detail but entire systems, through to industrial design. Here is Jobs addressing Apple staff after the ousting of CEO Gil Amelio in 1997:

"OK, tell me what's wrong with this place," he said. There were some murmurings but Jobs cut them off. "It's the products!" he answered. "So what's wrong with the products?" Again, there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down the correct answer. "The products suck!" he shouted. "There's no sex in them anymore!"

The book shows how Jobs' aesthetics developed and how he lived them - at one point occupying a largely unfurnished house not simply because it suited his 'less-is-more' tastes but also because he could seldom find a sofa or table he liked. This feeds the recounting of Jobs' later involvement with Pixar in computer animation and how his return to Apple seeded the iFamily of products that made it the pre-eminent technology company.

Isaacson is also strong on the Apple founder's relationship to money. The young Jobs spotted the commercial opportunity in selling 'blue boxes' that Steve Wozniak designed to scam long distance phone charges (and he cheated Woz on payment for some contract work). But while counterparts remained obsessed with earnings or switched to philanthropy, the mature Jobs wanted to change the world through his business. He probably has.

The book shows signs of having been rushed out following Jobs' death: it needs a few edits for the paperback. But overall, this is a powerful combination of the general and the specific. It is the life of a great innovator painted in Cromwellian style, and gives a real sense of Silicon Valley from the 1980s to the present. Yup, you're going to buy it - and not just because Jobs basically designed the cover.

Steve Jobs is published in the UK by Little, Brown in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats.]]> Paul Dempsey http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43581 2011-10-31T14:06:47 00 http://www.theiet.org/forums/blog/blogpost.cfm?catid=367&threadid=43581#comments 0
A recent US poll said that more than a third of Americans support the protest, 37%, while more than half, 58%, are thoroughly hacked off with the country's political direction.

So, while those pitching tents and braving the worsening weather may well come from the ranks of traditional protest groups, those who attend individual marches and are donating cash, clothing and other help to the occupiers represent a much broader range of society, albeit still one that trends left rather than right (although, in DC, its participants also include supporters of Republican politician Ron Paul).

In the last week, I've been able to visit encampments on both coasts, around San Francisco and here in Washington DC. My primary objective has been to see if the protests have any connection to the technology economy. The signs are that they do, even though bankers' 'greed' remains the primary target.

With its claim that, "We are the 99%", the Occupy movement has been canny. Its critics have said that its approach is unfocused, the message is too big. Instead, the protesters have adopted a simple theme, one that they say reflects a growing inequality between the top and the rest of society. They thus allow all those who feel their concerns are manifestations of that division to jump on board.

This is no different to what most of today's established governing parties did at their outset, and they consciously seek to remain broad in terms of what they represent. There is neither a sustainable electorate nor, more relevant here, the potential for lasting influence in single issue politics.

But where do engineering and technology fit into this? Right now, one would have to say that it is most explicit in terms of education.

According to The Project on Student Debt, an American graduate leaving college in 2009 owed an average of $24,000 as he or she moved into working life. Meanwhile, the US Department of Education recently published data showing that the default rate for students who had begun repaying these loans after graduating two years ago was 8.8%, against a 7% rate for those who graduated in 2008.

Finger-in-the-wind it may be, but it's also worth noting that the unemployment rate in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, is running at about 10%, unusually ahead of the US national rate of 9.1%, but below the 12% across the state of California.

In both San Francisco and Washington DC, I met students who are frustrated by this combination of a stagnant economy and their own rising debt. Their anger is exacerbated by the fact that many of the loans are provided through private for-profit banking operations linked to those who received bail-outs.

These, though, are students who have embarked on, and often nearly completed courses. There are two bigger threats. First, growing numbers of existing graduates feel that they may not be able to undertake postgraduate degrees because they cannot afford to take on any more debt. Second, there are those who may be considering college but are either prevented from going by the debt threat or, if they feel they can, cannot meet the extra cost of an engineering degree relative to other disciplines. Bright young men and women are trading down.

For the US, this comes in addition to existing difficulties in attracting the best candidates to STEM courses (STEM standing for science, technology, engineering and mathematics). A serious economic problem - creating a skilled and innovative workforce - is massing and is now being very tightly linked to issues of wealth distribution and growth powered by high tech.

The UK imposes far lower fees upon its students, but the situation remains analogous. You could take it as a preview of what might be on the way in Blighty.

But for now, this is a more immediate illustration of how the Occupy movement is spreading beyond issues simply of banking to become a more systemic criticism of what western governments have done since the current financial crisis really began to take hold.

The students represent only one example. Support for their goals (as well as the broader theme expressed by Occupy) is percolating up beyond undergraduates, graduates and deans into industry as company owners grow still more concerned about the size of the skills pool needed to sustain innovation in US engineering.

Over upcoming blogs and columns, I want to tell you some of the specific stories of those people who have directly attached themselves to the Occupy movement, and those further up the employment chain who are beginning to share their concerns. And, to be fair, we'll also talk to those who see the issues as separate.

Still, I think the important point here is the process that has got underway, and how it is developing. There is something to Occupy that is far more than a rainbow alliance of crusties, anarchists and lefties, and potentially far more influential, stretching into a technology economy that once held itself aloof and apart from wider political trends.]]>