But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

When you install Windows 7 with IE 8, you’re usually going to get Bing as the default search engine - at least until you change it to Google. If you install Windows 7 on enough machines, you’re probably not going to get around to changing the search engine on all of them straight away. Sure it’s on the list with installing Office, and your favourite blogging tools, and ‘can’t live without them’ utilities like ClipMate and SpeedFiler (and in one case, downloading a 114MB NVidia graphics card driver file to get Aero Glass and flashing the BIOS on this Dell XPS M1330 to stop the display driver spinning the fan up to the speed of a jumbo jet); but between importing my extensive AutoCorrect definitions from my last PC and remembering the IRC addresses to put into Trillian, I’ve not got around to changing the search engine on a couple of my PCs. And when I have, I’ve actually considered changing back.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got most of my exposure to Bing through a game that used to be called Club Live Search (so yes, I do spend time at Club Bing, groaning at the pun). They’re fun little word and puzzle games that earn tickets you can spend on air miles (or donate to charity). And when you ask for a hint or fill in an answer, you see a Bing search in the bottom of the browser window. And over time, you start to get used to seeing related searches and your search history down the side of the page, and being able to hover over an orange dot next to a link to see the first few lines of the page previewed and being able to choose image results not just by size but by whether they’re in colour or black and white, a photo or an illustration, a picture with people in or not… You notice that, hey, Bing has a couple of useful features.

The kind of searches you do when you’re playing a word game don’t relate to the kind of searches you do for work (unless your job is writing word games), so it isn’t until you forget to switch your default search away from Bing that you also notice that, hey, Bing doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to. I’m researching Windows 7 deployment tools and I accidentally ran the search on a newly 7-ized PC that still defaulted to Bing. I found what I was looking for on Bing, but I checked Google for comparison. Many of the results were the same, but Bing had more results about Windows 7 on earlier pages of results; Google had more results about a range of Windows versions on the earlier pages, it had more results from older pages (years older in some cases) and it had more irrelevant results overall. Google did find one useful link I didn’t spot on Bing: did you know you can use GFI LANguard (which I think of as a security tool) to deploy client software as well as patches? Handy to know now that there’s a freeware version that will scan up to five IPs…

Bing didn’t find it, because the page doesn’t mention Windows or Windows 7 anywhere and until I confirm that GFI LANguard can actually deploy an OS as well as an application I don’t know if Google was exceptionally clever or benefiting from synchronicity. I do know that if Google’s ‘all your data are belong to us’ attitude gets too irritating, I could probably stand to use Bing for searching the Web without complaining about it all day. And that really is a major improvement.
Mary

It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

I’ll admit it; I actually like IE. I’ve used it as my main browser for years because I know it will be the same on every system (although I have to supplement it with the IE7Pro tools to be really happy). I distrust Chrome slightly because of the Chrome teams’ initially disappointing attitude to user privacy and security (especially with Gears and the Gears features Google wants to see in HTML5). I would use Firefox, but almost everything I like about it is down to Greasemonkey, which is a security threat waiting to happen (and he author is now on the Gears team) - although Weave might change my mind. Opera can try to include every standard going, but there are too many sites that complain that I’m not using a ’standard browser’ - and the special pleading from Opera (to the EU in particular) doesn’t win me over either. Personally speaking, the way I see it is that thanks to the EU, when I install Windows 7 I will have to take longer to do the installation because I’ll have to take the time to install a browser; gee, thanks.

Professionally speaking, should I be pleased that the European versions of Windows 7 will be browser free? Not if you know what you’re doing. Organisations who want to install Windows 7 without IE can do it by customising their setup image; they’ll be doing that anyway and they can choose the components that go in the image, including whether they want IE 8 or not.
Have all the court cases forced Microsoft to clean up its act? Maybe. It always amused me when Netscape revealed their distribution figures as part of the DoJ case against Microsoft. Despite charging ISPs anything up to $20 per users to distribute the Netscape Navigator browser, Netscape distributed it to half as many people again as were online at the time (or to everyone online 1.5 times). Which says to me the reason Netscape didn’t succeed wasn’t lack of access to the market - it was lack of being a better browser than IE.

The counter-argument was that even though they got a copy of Navigator, IE users wouldn’t bother to install it because they had a browser they thought was good enough. Leaving aside the implicit criticism of users in that view, maybe a majority of people do use IE because it’s there and we’ll now see the true popularity (or not) of IE, but I think we’ll mostly see a lot more support calls. Perhaps Microsoft could suggest that some of the fines the EU is doubtless totting up could be ear-marked to pay for free phone support for all those users who are having trouble getting a browser installed?
-Mary

It’s not often that you get a standing ovation at a technology conference. That’s what just happened at Google IO here in San Francisco, where a team from Google Australia just finished unveiling Wave.

Wave certainly appears to be an impressive piece of work. Developed by the team that created Google Maps, it’s a radical reworking of the many different tools we use for collaboration - mixing IM and email with document creation and editing. Unlike most online collaboration tools it’s a real time experience - and it all runs in the browser. Communication takes place in “waves”, conversations and information streams tied to groups of online IDs - so each participant can be verified. New arrivals can scrub back through the history of a wave to see just what was said and by who.

Anything you type is echoed in the browsers of all the people you’re working with, as soon as you press each key. There’s no waiting for someone to hit return, everything is there as soon as it’s typed, so you can start your reply at the same time as you’re waiting for the last word to come in. Edits are in real time too, and anyone can edit anyone else’s text.

That last feature is ideal for document collaboration. The Wave user interface supports rich text and images, and there’s very little isolation between user edits. Two or more people can work on the same document just a few characters apart, with no locking at all. If you’ve grown used to the line or paragraph locking of most online collaboration tools you’ll find this an effective - and much faster - way of working. There’s even scope for inline commenting in documents, and as comments are associated with users, moving a document from one wave to another.

Google’s Wave implementation is only one possible Wave. Like Microsoft’s Live Mesh the real secret sauce is in the protocols. Anyone will be able to write a Wave server or a Wave client, and they’ll be able to federate with each other - so my Wave server will be able to work with yours in a (sorry, Ray) big mesh of Wave servers all over the world. The open Wave is an interesting place, and it’s one where there’s going to be a lot of innovation - even if it’s not just the Emacs client that Google demoed in the keynote.

As Google goes on to evangelise Wave with the rest of the industry (after several years of complete secrecy), it’s going to be interesting to see just how much uptake we see. It’d certainly be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the call Vic Gundotra says he’ll be making to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie…

–Simon

Is it really just a buzzword? Since 2001, the venture capitalists who fund start-up businesses have invested $29 billion in Web 2.0 companies, but there hasn’t been a single company in the sector that’s been successful enough to have an IPO and become a rich, successful company (and pay back the VC investors). Even if you want to push the definition of Web 2.0 to include Skype, they got their investment in 1998.

In fact, talking at the Future in Review conference this week, Seattle VC Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners says only 15% of venture funds have made money since 2001.  “VC as we know it is over”, says Jeb Terry of Aberdeen Investment Management and the US has some hard lessons to learn. Engineers and developers who used to train in the US and start companies in the US now go back to China or Japan and set up there. US companies and products aren’t always setting the standards for the rest of the world either, he says; “The idea that if you won here you could be successful elsewhere is no longer true. You have to think about the rest of the world.”

For Australian companies, the US used to be 65% of the global market; Roger Buckeridge of Australian VC Allen & Buckeridge says it’s down to 30-40%. And start-ups in other countries get more support - from government or other programmes - than new US companies. “Everyone is trying to solve the same problems all around the world and in other countries they’re helping far more than we are helping,” says Michael Pfeffer of Kolohala Ventures in Hawaii. “How much time does a start-up spend fund raising? Five, six months out of the year? If there’s some guy in Israel working on the same problem and all he’s doing is building value in his company, you’re at a disadvantage.  We all have to think globally now.”

If investors don’t get a return from start-ups, they’ll stop putting money in and we’ll stop seeing new companies and new products. The venture capital business has made so much money it’s not going to stop overnight, but it is going to change. The VCs are going to be more involved in fewer companies, for a longer time.  Expect more tools to come from start-ups in countries other than the US as well.
-Mary

What’s the difference between a hacker, a security expert and someone looking for a job? Hackers play around with systems, find vulnerabilites and exploit them - for fun, fame, or profit. Security experts play around with systems, find vulnerabilites and report them to the vendor - which occasionally brings fame or profit. Both methods improve the system in question, but exploiting vulnerabilities instead of reporting them - even exploiting them to get vendors to pay attention - puts users at risk. You might be doing it for the best of reasons, but someone less altruistic now knows how to attack the system. Proving that you can get past security on live systems looks good on the CV, but what about the ramifications?

Twitter has had more than its share of attacks recently, many of them pure social engineering (was Jack Straw really stranded with no better way of asking for help?), others the good old virus-disguised-as-video. The 17-year old behind last weekend’s StalkDaily and Mikeyy worms turned his hacking into a job application and has been picked up by a Web development and hosting provider in the US, who presumably value the combination of tech ability and publicity nose more than any moral issues about whether recruiting black hat hackers quite so openly is a good idea. The spate of public messages the CEO has fired off to the founder of Twitter are a combination of disingenuous defence and more publicity seeking: “hope u understand Mikeyy did u favor and could have compromised personal information,” he says. Some favour…

Security companies have always hired hackers; usually white hat hackers who stuck to penetration testing and notification. Some black hats grow up and turn responsible. Frank Abergnale - whose story is far more interesting that the film (Catch Me If You Can) - went to the FBI; after his sentence and because he wanted to. Kevin Mitnick didn’t take consulting gigs until after he came out of jail.

Mikeyy (to whom I’d like to suggest that naming malware after yourself isn’t the way to stay undetected) has a new job. His new employers have plenty of publicity. And everyone who uses Twitter has to hope that the service patched all the holes he found so that someone looking for more immediate rewards can’t use them.
-Mary

Windows and IE get the features that people use; that’s good if you’re in the majority.

In early betas of Internet Explorer 8, when you typed a search into the address bar rather than the search box, the list of results you got was five URLs from your history and five URLs from your RSS feeds.  Less than 1% of the IE8 beta testers ever clicked on those RSS results and most people said what they wanted was URLs they’d typed in - so the shipping version of IE 8 doesn’t give you RSS results when you search in the address bar, just ten results from your history. ..

Well, actually, it does, but only if you dig into the options and turn RSS results back on. There’s some confusion in the IE team about this. Depending on who you ask you’ll be told it’s relegated to an option and off by default or it’s gone completely because having everything be an option increases complexity and the number of combinations you have to test. The ‘ordering pizza for 150 million people’ analogy that Dean Hachamovitch is applying to simplifying Internet Explorer and Steven Sinosfky is applying to simplifying Windows comes from a boss they once both reported to and it’s true that you can’t have all the features and only the features that suit everyone, and that if everything is an option there will be many users who never figure out the right options for them. (And that the more combinations you have to test, the longer it takes to ship.)

If RSS results from the address bar had gone away, that would be bad news for 1% of IE 8 users, which is quite a large number of people - except, of course, it’s not really 1% of everyone who uses IE. It’s 1% of everyone in the beta test group, Paul Cutsinger of the IE team told me, and “it would drop way down in the mainstream population”. Beta users are different; we’re actually prepared to use beta software for a start. “They’re early adopters, they tend to be power users, they tend to have more tolerance for problems that show up - but they also complain more!” Dev teams at Microsoft have to compare what they see from beta users with what they see in usability labs and in other tests. They have to filter out the biases from internal Microsoft users as well; nearly half of all Windows user have between six and nine windows open at once but most Microsoft employees have 20, 30 or 50 windows open at the same time.

Balancing that out is a difficult problem and I’m not sure Microsoft always gets it right. In the M3 and beta builds of Windows 7, Win+E opens the Explorer pointing at your document Libraries; in RC it will go back to opening My Computer, so that wherever you want to go is a click away. I should start by saying I’m a huge fan of libraries - I’ve been waiting for years for an easy way to search all my documents without having to remember which drive the one I want is most likely to be on. But most people who open Explorer are going to be looking for a document - at least most of the people who will use the final version of Windows 7. Beta users are implicitly more technical folk so a higher percentage of them will be going to a variety of places and so they want My Computer; but users will want documents more often than they’ll want multiple drives. Libraries are the way that we’re ‘intended’ to get at the majority of our files so having them as the default target of Ctrl-E made huge sense to me, both for immediate use and as the way going forward. If Libraries become as widely used as Microsoft must hope, not having them be what you see first every time will come to seem a confusing thing in a few years time.

And that’s the other problem with relying on users voting with their mice, even if you manage to remove the bias of early adopters, technical experts and other oddities. If what you want to do isn’t already a feature, how can Microsoft see in the statistics that it’s what you want to do? And if there’s a visionary feature that may not become part of the way you work until you’ve used it for a while, should Microsoft give up on it because the usage isn’t there at first? At the MIX conference this week, Senior User Experience Designer Stephan Hoefnagels claimed that the taskbar in the 1985 release of Windows 1 predated the Apple Dock by 15 years. If you want to take credit for a feature, you have to have the courage of your convictions and make it prominent - not hide it away behind the old way of working, even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest on the first day.
-Mary

Tim Berners-Lee may not have been Sergeant Pepper, but his work at CERN has left the world with a vital and powerful communications tool.

CERN has chosen to mark today to commemorate the approval of the initial project that two years later became the public web. It’s been surprising to think just how quickly the Web became the stuff of everyday life, and the place (the cyberspace?) where millions of us work.

I’ve been using the web since a few days after the first public web server went live, with my first access through a university terminal and a little text browser. It was a year or so later that I sneaked into the old SCO offices in Watford on a Sunday afternoon to be shown the the glowing grey pixels of the first release of the Mosaic browser.

It was only a year or so later that Mary and I wrote a round up of all the web browsers then available. It’s hard to imagine in these days of IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari that there more than 20 different browsers - a pre-Cambrian explosion of the Web. Shortly after that I moved to Bath, to help found UK Online, one of the first web-based content services - a direct ancestor of the CMS systems that power IT Pro…

Time flies, and the Web has become all pervasive - on our phones, our TVs, even baked into the hardware in our homes. We work using web-based cloud services, and we shop and talk all across the Web.

So, in a flash of historical perspective, here is a picture of the first web server. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube, now in a case in CERN’s small museum. And the sticker? “Do Not Power Down. This Is A Server.”

–Simon

(In Silicon Valley)