My take on technology and other topics...

Google + brands = ?

11/18/2011 20:12:00

The June launch of Google+ was met with a mixture of intrigue and bemusement. Intrigue because social media has become such a phenomenon in the second decade of the 21 Century that anything new inevitably provokes curiosity. Bemusement for much the same reason – in an online world which offers Facebook and Twitter, who needs a third mass market social network?

Of course Google+ is not the search giant’s first venture into social media. 2010 saw the launch of its previous attempt - Google Buzz – but this was severely criticised at launch for lax default privacy settings. In particular, users’ most frequent Gmail contacts were openly displayed on their profile pages. Although such security holes were later plugged, Buzz never recovered from the bad publicity and last month, Google announced the discontinuation of the service.

To date, Google+ has fared better and after a wobbly exit from an invitation-only beta status, this brand new and shiny social network is open to all. For those who spend their social media lives bouncing giddily between Facebook and Twitter, Google+ still excites little interest, but in spite of widespread indifference, a modest but growing user base has begun to develop. Google+ offers some advantages - a much less cluttered interface, as well as an innovative ‘circles’ feature for easy contact and friend tracking, but the site is still a very long way from competing with Facebook’s global audience.

Google’s latest addition to the network is Google+ Pages, their answer to Facebook’s feature of the same name. Pages allow brands, companies and organisations to establish a promotional presence on the network and were unveiled earlier this month to a decidedly mixed reaction.

More positive commentators have hailed the intriguing innovations available in Pages, including:

*The ability to add a brand page to your Google+ circles straight from a search results page.

*Access to ‘hangouts’ (live audio/ video chats) – providing an excellent way for brands to talk directly to their fans on Google+.

*The ability to place followers of a particular brand page into different categories and share different content with each. (Of course, the latter option depends on the Google+ Circles function).

But most of the reaction has centred on the things Google+ brand pages cannot do. There is, for example, no ability for more than one person to administer a page, and extraordinarily for Google, no analytics are available. Custom URLs are not also available, and admins cannot run contests or promotions.

Respected tech journalist Robert Scoble highlights the many difficulties that will be faced by large companies trying to maintain brand pages when only a single member of staff can administer them. Scoble is so unhappy with Google+ brand pages in their current form he delivers the unambiguous verdict: “I wish I’d never heard of them”, adding “Google, did you really think this through?”

No doubt Google+ brand pages will evolve and develop over time. But there is something very Google about the launch. The world’s premier search engine has so much power and so much money that it can get away with half-finished product launches that would cripple a less influential firm and kill a start-up. They know full well that the power of the Google brand will draw people to brand pages whatever their shortcomings. As website Search Engine Watch put it: “Google Brand Pages Lacking, But You’ll Make One Anyway”.

Blaming the Messenger

09/05/2011 16:53:00

For a few weeks in August, the UK was racked by some of the worst urban unrest in decades. Windows were smashed, fires started and shops and restaurants across the country looted. TV news reports were filled with images of the police in massed ranks fighting off hooded gangs armed with bricks and bottles.

Of course, there is nothing particularly new about such scenes, even within relatively recent history. In 1981 the nation was convulsed by serious riots in major cities and just four years later, an infamous riot in Tottenham turned truly ugly.

In the aftermath of last months’ disturbances politicians queued up with worthy but predictable condemnations of the violence and destruction. But this time, they had something new to blame for the disorder, something undreamt of by their 1980s predecessors: social media.

In response to old media reports of rioters using social media to organize and plan their activities, Prime Minister David Cameron told a hushed House of Commons:

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Much old media attention focused on the alleged use by some rioters of Blackberry Messenger, which some confused journalists appeared to think was a social network. It is actually, of course, an instant-messaging application which allows users of the eponymous smartphone to talk directly to each other. At the height of the riots, Tottenham MP David Lammy responded to reports that some rioters were using Blackberry Messenger to plan disorder by calling for the service to be suspended.

And at the end of last month, representatives of Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion duly joined others from Twitter and Facebook at a meeting with government officials. This was held, according to reports, to discuss “voluntary” ways of restricting access to social media. Home Office Minister Theresa May insisted the aim was not to restrict “internet services” but to “crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior”, but to do so without seeking “any additional powers”. (At least, not yet!)

Unsurprisingly, this ‘blame the messenger’ approach has provoked consternation and criticism. We are used to hearing about repressive regimes attempting to control radio and television broadcasts, or filtering the whole Internet like China, and the British Government is never slow to criticise such oppression. Why should we regard restricting access to social media in some yet-to-be-specified way as any different?

Whatever their initial spark, the August riots quickly turned into orgies of opportunistic criminality and vandalism. But if we set a precedent and allow the government to restrict access to social media to try and prevent future outbreaks, how do we know they won’t take that easy step further forward and restrict access to the Web to try and hinder legitimate protest at some point in the future?

If nothing else, such a move would send out all the wrong signals. Social media services such as Twitter played a real role in recent democratic uprisings across the Middle East. As Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship magazine, recently noted in the New York Times: “You do not want to be on a list with the countries that have cracked down on social media during the Arab Spring."

E-reading done right?

08/11/2011 18:31:00

I now have not one, but two e-readers. Do I really need two? Perhaps not, but in my defence I offer the fact that e-readers combine two of my obsessions – books and gadgets - in one neat package. Bargain!

The newest device is a Kobo eReader Touch, which joins the third generation Kindle I have been using since last autumn. The new generation Kindle has proved massively popular since its launch in July 2010. Not much more than a month later, the company announced that the new model was the fastest-selling ever, and by December it had been proclaimed Amazon’s best-selling product of all time.

So why the second device? There is no doubt that Kindles have an enormous brand recognition – for many people Kindles are e-readers, in the same way that hoovers are vacuum cleaners. They are also very capable e-readers, although not without their quirks and failings – a stiff and arguably unnecessary hardware keyboard amongst them.

I first became aware of Canadian eBook seller Kobo (the name is an anagram of ‘book’) when they released an e-reading app for the Apple iPad late last year featuring a suite of social and other features they dubbed ‘Reading Life’.

So was Reading Life shallow gimmick or exciting innovation? The jury is still out, but I was intrigued. Social networking has spread into so many other areas of modern life, why not reading too? Then in May Kobo announced a new model e-reader which incorporated both a touch screen instead of that clumsy Kindle keyboard, and some (though not all) Reading Life features – specifically reading awards, reading statistics and the ability to post awards and content on Facebook. I had only ever played around with the Kobo app, not bothering to seriously tackle any books as I have never been entirely convinced by the iPad as a reading device. But here was a an actual e-reader with Reading Life incorporated. That had real potential.

One visit to eBay and a week later a Kobe eReader Touch arrived from the US. It is not a perfect device by any means, but it looks and feels so different to the Kindle that I have never regretted the purchase.

Rather than cheap grey plastic, the Kobo Touch is made from tactile rubber with a distinctive quilted back which invites you, appropriately enough, to touch it. It is also noticeably smaller than the Kindle – about two inches shorter and around an inch narrower. My first reaction to this size difference was disappointment – they’re squandering the extra screen real estate provided by that virtual keyboard, I thought. But I was gradually won round as I realised the more bijou dimensions of the Kobo Touch let it sit very comfortably across the palm of one hand. The Kindle, by contrast, requires a rather less relaxing two-handed

pinch.

Other Kobo niggles include the absence of such basics as Twitter integration – it’s present in the iPad app, so why isn’t it here? – and a search function. Read a long and complex book on the Kindle and you can search it at any time for previous references to names and events. Great for people obsessed with details like me, or for those with bad memories. There is no equivalent on the Kobo Touch and this lack initially jarred, but perhaps I spent too much time looking things up on the Kindle and not enough time actually reading. Sometimes, perhaps, it is better to just keep ploughing on and not worry about events three chapters ago.

The ‘awards’ – badges that pop up every so often, for performing particular ‘feats’ (reading at particular times of day, reading a certain number of books, looking up words in the built-in dictionary, etc) – are quite fun in a competitive kind of way, and if you feel like showing off you can post them to Facebook too, no doubt to the baffled bemusement of all your friends.

Read a physical book and watch your bookmark slowly travel from the front to the back cover. It’s an organic, visual experience. But read the same book on an e-reader and you will know precisely how far you have read at any one time. And I mean precisely – for example, my Kobo Touch tells me I am currently 32 per cent of the way through A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin.And the Kobo Reading Life statistics feature is an amplification of this e-reader characteristic – not only will it tell you how far you have read (curiously the Kobo numbers pages by chapter rather than by the whole book), but also the length of your average reading session, how many pages of the book you have read, the percentage of your ‘library’ (e-book collection) read to date…the list goes on. Geeky, perhaps, but strangely compelling. I don’t find it difficult to imagine Kobo readers comparing their stats like school boys trading football cards in the playground.

So is the Kobo eReader Touch e-reading done right? Its approach is very different to the mega-selling Kindle and it offers some distinctive reading experiences. That pleasingly smooth rubber case and (admittedly not as responsive as it could be) touch screen make the Kindle feel cheap and plasticky by comparison. The Kobo even features an expansion card slot!

But there is one area in which the Kindle wins – choice. Amazon is a juggernaut, a behemoth, and the number of Kindle titles available with just one click of a button leaves the modestly proportioned Kobo in the shade. Will bestsellers and popular fiction keep Kobo afloat? Only time will tell.

Little bird getting bigger

06/19/2011 12:53:00

Ah, Twitter. Some people still scoff at the supposed mundanity of many tweeters and the site’s alleged lack of visual excitement when compared to Facebook, but the San Francisco-based service is now five years old and has attracted a very impressive user base in that time – currently in the region of 200 million users.

And if recent news is anything to go by, that user base will only get bigger. Earlier this month, tech giant Apple announced that Twitter would be deeply integrated into iOS5, the next version of its mobile and tablet PC operating system. When it is launched this autumn, iOS 5 users will be able to tweet directly from several built-in apps, including Photos, Youtube, Safari and Maps.

Currently, iPhone and iPad users must open either the Twitter app, or the Twitter website in the Safari browser, and pull in any content they wish to tweet from there – for example, photos or videos.

Given the huge, multinational popularity of the iPhone and iPad, the launch of iOS5 will almost certainly lead to a further dramatic spike in the Twitter user base. So why did Apple – which has gone from the edge of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s to the world’s most valuable brand in little more than 15 years - choose Twitter for this coronation, not global leader Facebook?

According to Joe Wilcox, writing on technology site betanews, the decision may be down to Apple and Facebook having different priorities. Facebook is, he writes, intensely focused on pulling user content into the ‘cloud’, pushing related advertising there – and, of course, making it difficult for users to pull that content back out. Apple, by contrast, still makes the majority of its profits from hardware sales rather than software, and so prefers user content to flow freely between devices.

Facebook is also, in one sense, a web- (or cloud-) based operating system, and one for which software developers can write applications. Some of these have proved enormously popular (yes, Farmville, I’m looking at you!). You don’t need a degree in business studies to see Facebook apps as direct competition to Apple’s iOS and Mac OS app stores.

We saw a glimpse of such conflicts of interest in September last year, when Apple launched Ping, a poorly received social network focused on music which was integrated into its iTunes jukebox software. At its launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly demonstrated Ping’s various features, including Facebook integration. But to the disappointment of many, the latter feature was almost immediately removed.

A subsequent investigation by Wall Street Journal columnist Kara Swisher revealed that Facebook and Apple had failed to reach agreement on Ping integration, because, to quote Steve Jobs, the social network had demanded "onerous terms that we could not agree to." So, of course, Apple launched Ping with unauthorized Facebook integration, and this was, predictably, quickly blocked by the site!

Meanwhile, app hype aside, a great number of tweeters still use the Twitter website to broadcast to the world – at least some of the time! With them in mind, Twitter recently announced two new website features: improved search results and integrated photo hosting. That latter will mean photographs can be attached directly to tweets without the sometimes use of third party sites like Twitpic.

It seems we’ve come a very long way since the first ever tweet, sent on 21 March 2006 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Wondering what this momentous pronouncement was? “Just setting up my twttr”. Prophetic words!

Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software at Apple, demonstrates Twitter integration in iOS5 at the Wolrdwide Developers Conference June 6 2011

Further adventures in e-reading

05/12/2011 11:46:00

News from the publishing front line: UK sales of "digital book products" rose by 20 per cent last year. According to the Publishers Association, total sales hit £180 million last year - a healthy figure which helped make up for a 3 per fall in physical book sales.

It seems pretty clear in which direction the wind is blowing. As Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, says in The Guardian article: "Digital publishing is growing at an impressive rate in whichever part of the sector you choose to look."

As more and more of us become comfortable with handheld electronic devices, reading book on gadgets like the Kindle no longer seems anywhere near as strange as it might once have done. I am currently using my own Kindle to plough my way through all 835 pages of A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, book one in a series of five (and counting!) equally door-stopping high fantasy epics. According to the Kindle, I am currently 29 per cent of the way through and it all seems very natural.

Some people react the rise of the Kindle and its rivals with desperate-sounding jeremiads. "It'll never replace real books!" they proclaim. But has anyone ever said they would? The experience of reading an e-book will always be different to that of reading a real book (or 'treebook' as they have now been dubbed in certain corners of the internet!), and that will never change. Reading a printed book is a physical, sensory experience and sometimes that's just what you want.

Some of you may have read my previous blog post on the Kindle. Since then, a software update has brought at least one welcome change to the device: real page numbers! Only some e-books feature them at the moment but it is the proverbial step in the right direction.

I have also been exploring one pretender to the Kindle crown. Based in Toronto, Canada, Kobo is a self-described 'eReading service', combining a website, apps for popular mobile devices like the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, the Blackberry and even the Palm Prē! There is, inevitably, also a reading device complete with e-ink screen. It's been given the self-explanatory name Kobo eReader and looks not unlike the Kindle but it does have a few distinguishing features - a quilted back, for example, and a range of exotic-sounding colours. Pearlized Lilac or Onyx anyone?

At the end of last year, the iPad version of the Kobo app saw the introduction of an innovative but perhaps not entirely practical suite of features called 'Reading Life', since introduced to the iPhone version as well. Readers can track their reading habits via statistics and an evolving personal 'Book Cover', share favourite passages on Facebook and Twitter, unlock virtual trophies to mark particular reading achievements (which can also be displayed on social networks), and even check in, foursquare-style, with characters and places in the books they are reading.

"People who are making the switch to e-reading and building their lifetime libraries want an innovative social experience to go with it,” proclaimed Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis when Reading Life was unveiled. “E-reading is going social, local and real-time with Kobo Reading Life, allowing us to create a fun, engaging and meaningful experience for our users.”

Combining the popularity of social reading experiences like book clubs with the popularity of social networks? It would be easy to dismiss reading life as nothing more than a collection of gimmicks, but Kobo may well be on to something here. We are still waiting for anything resembling a response from Amazon. Perhaps they feel Facebook check-ins would get in the way of just reading books?

My Dad and the Silver Screen

05/12/2011 11:29:00

At a recent family gathering, talk turned to my late father, who died more than eight years ago. Dad was a man of voluble opinions and of enthusiasms too - when he passed away, he left a home in downtown San Francisco filled with valuable first edition books and rare tools. These are the things which we and his friends remember most easily. But his interests extended into many areas and some were easier to miss. He never entered higher education but in the right mood could talk knowledgeably about Scottish history and had an unshowy, sincere interest in poetry. He inherited his mother's love of animals, especially cats, but in a very understated way - while Granny Annie (as we called her) openly doted on her furry friends, he quietly looked after strays in need, feeding a feral cat who lived on nearby rooftops and another who prowled the boatyard where he worked as a carpenter. One day he found a fledgling which had fallen from its nest and painstakingly hand-reared it - later telling me the story in great detail over coffee and cake in a cafe somewhere in the Cotswolds.

When my brother and I flew over to California to visit him as teenagers, he often took us to the cinema. I recall him rolling in the aisles at 1988 crime comedy A Fish Called Wanda and on another occasion recounting the plot of 1981 apocalyptic action flick Mad Max II: The Road Warrior to my brother and I with great relish (and sound effects!). He also took us both to see old Japanese samurai films on several occasions. One that made a particular impression on me was the famous Yojimbo from 1961, later remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. Afterwards we would retire to - where else? - a Japanese restaurant.

At the time I took all this for granted - after all, doesn't everyone like going to the pictures? - but Dad's interest in the silver screen dated back decades even then. For him it seems to have been more than a bit of escapist fun on a Saturday afternoon. Long before I came on the scene, my parents regularly went to see films purely because of the director, like true cinema buffs, and my mother also recalls my father and his brother Jay excitedly returning from viewing samurai epics in the mid 1960s. I am told that his all-time favourite film was the 1948 gold prospecting yarn The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, although oddly, he never mentioned this to me.

Reminiscing over a meal with my mother, something startling suddenly occurred to me. I've turned into my Dad! I go to the cinema so often I have a loyalty card, I am a long-standing member of rental service Lovefilm, and doubtless to the delight of my local HMV, I buy films. My living room and study brim with DVDs and a small but steadily growing collection of high definition Blu-rays. I have been doing all this for years , but for some odd reason, I never really connected it to my father until that moment.

As he once said to me: "it's funny how the genes bounce around". Very true Dad.

The ‘Color’ of Money

04/13/2011 12:35:00

It was sometime in 2007 that I first began hearing my friends and colleagues talking a new website called ‘Facebook’. I didn’t get it. Oh, I got the basic principle – that you could post photos of yourself and share details of your latest escapades and musings with friends near and far. What I didn’t get was why you’d want to. I said to the Facebook users around me: “If you want to have a presence on the web, why not just start a website, or write a blog?”, and they looked confused and slightly baffled, as though they hadn’t thought of that.

But of course, they were right and I was wrong. What I initially failed to grasp was the social nature of Facebook and its predecessors. If you set up a Facebook profile, you are, of course, not just creating a presence on the web, you are linking yourself to everyone in your friends list, all of whom have full, real-time access to everything you post. Such distinctions seem obvious these days, now that the concept of social networking has crept into so many corners of our interconnected, internet-saturated lives. But just four years ago, they were rather less obvious – to me at least!

Back here in 2011, Twitter and Facebook have become the twin pillars of the social media landscape and it is hard to escape links and connections to either network on news media and content sharing sites across the Web.

But the Internet never stands still and over the last year or two, the field of social networking has begun to evolve away from the desktop in ways that reflect the rise of mobile computing and the exponential growth of the smartphone market. In 2009 we saw the wobbly rise of location-based social network foursquare, which takes full advantage of the GPS chip embedded in many modern smartphones. And now an even newer wave of social networking services are focused on their cameras.

Last year the world was introduced to Path, a app-centred social network based around the idea of sharing photos from your daily life with your ‘50 closest’ friends and family, in contrast to supposed sprawl of Facebook. (But does anyone out there really have 50 “close” friends and family?)

Meanwhile, Instagram, for the iPhone, is, and I quote, “a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.” It sounds like fun, but you do have to look closely to see much of a difference between it and Path.

And now comes yet another iPhone app for sharing your smartphone snaps with the world: Color, recently launched with the help of a hefty $41 million in venture capital funding. Does Color bring anything new to the photo-sharing party? Users can tag their photos with location data and browse the photos of people in their current vicinity. In other words – it’s Instagram meets foursquare.

Clearly the venture capitalists who have backed these concepts with hard cash think they have a future – and perhaps they are just months from becoming all the rage. Smartphones with embedded GPS chips and decent cameras are, after all, no longer expensive novelties confined to the well-off.

But until significant numbers of people start to use these apps and post their photos, Color et al. will struggle. I have several friends who simply cannot grasp the concept of Twitter, now second only to Facebook in mainstream appeal. How many of them use Path? Precisely none – there was little point in installing the app on my phone! I know a handful of people who occasionally dabble with foursquare, and even fewer who use Instagram.

A recent update to Path added several new Facebook sharing options. You can now tag Facebook friends featured in your Path photos, publish your Path snapshots to your Facebook wall and privately share them with – your guessed it – your Facebook friends. No doubt the developers felt that such compromises were necessary to broaden Path’s appeal, but the danger is clear. If people start to use Path as a mere add-on to Facebook, any chance it has of establishing a distinct identity will start to crumble.

Celebrity Twitter tittle-tattle

03/13/2011 17:34:00

One of Twitter's most distinctive features is its 'follow' mechanism. You can 'follow' other tweeters and thereby see their tweets in your timeline, but they are under no obligation to follow you back. This is in stark contrast to Facebook, where you 'confirm someone as a friend' - the very phrase implies a reciprocal relationship. Add someone on Facebook and you automatically see all their updates in your news feed. No real problem if you have 32 - or even 102 - friends, but less ideal if you are famous and have thousands of people competing for your attention online.

Once celebrity users began to voice their frustrations with these issues, Facebook introduced a new mechanism, whereby you could declare yourself a 'fan' of someone or something on the site. This dealt with the issue of communication overload but there was still something missing. There is little real difference, after all, between a Facebook page and a conventional website. It is just as packaged and impersonal.

Then Twitter came along and the celebrities flocked. Here was the perfect way to talk directly and easily to your fans, unmediated by PR men or even – gasp! - journalists. It was direct, immediate, and heart-felt - or at least it seemed to be. Fans could follow the famous in the tens of thousands and that had no effect on who they personally chose to follow. It was ideal.

But celebrity tweeters still have a problem - what to do when one of their Twitter followers tries to talk to them. Anyone can, after all, send an '@' message to anyone else on Twitter, and that person will then see it in their timeline, regardless of whether they follow you. They can choose to block you, but this is a painstaking, individual process.

If the famous person responds to '@' messages, they please a few fans but risk encouraging a flood of other messages from enthusiastic but unrealistic tweeters. Or shold they just ignore them? Most celebrities - understandably - opt for the latter course most of the time, and this has the additional benefit of discouraging Twitter 'trolls' who might otherwise line up to make rude comments in the hope of provoking a response.

Last week saw the launch of an entirely new spin on celebrity tweeting. Twitrelief, part of the annual Comic Relief initiative, sees a variety of comedians, presenters, authors, fashion designers and actors offering eBay bidders the chance to win a 'superfollow', in which said celebrity will follow their tweets for 90 days, retweet one of their 140-character utterances, and also send them an '@' message. Many of the participants are also offering various extras, including personal appearances, signed scripts and walk-on parts.

Despite the worthiness of the cause - all the money raised goes, of course, to Comic Relief - the launch caused a great deal of controversy on - where else? - Twitter. Many Twitter users condemned the concept - it was self-aggrandising, they claimed, it was reducing genuine, albeit Internet-enabled, human interaction to a commodity. Others argued passionately that it was for charity and therefore above any kind of criticism. Proponents of each view angrily unfollowed each other and for a while on launch day (March 10), Twitrelief was an official Twitter trend.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I took the critical view. Isn't there, after all, something inherently undignified about effectively paying to have a celebrity listen to what you have to say? I also think the eventual winners of each so-called superfollow will find it hard to relax and be themselves on Twitter for the duration of the 90 days. Some will no doubt gush and embarrass themselves, others will feel they need to engage in 140-character performances in the probably vain hope of impressing their temporary Twitter buddy. And even if they do manage to engage the celebrity in a genuine conversation or two, the artificiality of the whole enterprise will be thrown into stark relief on the 91st day when their new Twitter friend unfollows them.

But perhaps I am taking too negative a view. Lots of money will, of course, be raised for worthy causes and perhaps many of the auction winners will genuinely enjoy the experience.

Twitrelief poses some intriguing questions about the nature of social networking. Can it be packaged and commodified in this way? Should we expect social networking-enabled communication to be genuine on some level or is it inherently artificial? In other words: is a tweet from Stephen Fry the equivalent of a backstage autograph?

'Outcasts' cast out

02/16/2011 20:13:00

And so, after only four episodes, it seems the end is already nigh for BBC big budget sci-fi drama Outcasts. Today the corporation took the rare step of announcing that from as soon as next week, the show will be moved from its primetime slots to late Sunday nights thanks to low ratings. No doubt any planned second series will now never be made.

I reacted to the news with a frustrated sigh. After some initial scepticism I had found becoming getting increasingly gripped by Outcasts. The drama's premise - humans fleeing a catastrophe-wracked earth have established a colony on a planet named Carpathia - is reasonably original, the characters and conflicts engaging and credible (within a science fiction context). There are no cheesy aliens, laser blasters, robots, talking computers or any of a hundred other science fiction clichés.

Indeed, for a show set on another planet, Outcasts takes a decidedly down to earth (!) approach to events. An episode earlier this week showed two engineers casually tramping up into the hills to repair a communications antenna with rucksacks on their backs, like two hikers setting for a bracing day in the Lake District. It sounds mundane but you would never see Captain Kirk and Spock doing any such thing.

The colonists' city is a completely convincing huddle of prefabricated buildings and storage containers. You watch and think: "yes, if humanity ever finds an inhabitable planet with a breathable atmosphere and also solves the not inconsiderable problem of actually getting there, then that is exactly what a settlement would look like!".

Outcasts was filmed in South Africa and the first few episodes broadcast have featured some striking visual images - a fat moon hanging low over jagged mountains, creeping clouds of white dust, a disintegrating space craft burning through the sky in a streak of fiery purple, churching cyclonic storms viewed from orbit.

Outcasts may not be perfect but at least it takes risks. At least it's something different and has the courage of its convictions. But I seem to be in the minority for thinking so. I have been genuinely astonished by some of the negative reviews of Outcasts on Twitter, for example. You find yourself wondering - like a strident fanboy huffing and puffing on the letters page of their favourite magazine - "were they watching the same show?"

Perhaps a brand new science fiction show was never going to find a huge mainstream audience, but it does look as though some people just won't give anything new and different a chance.

No doubt the next time a slightly left-field script crosses the desk of whichever commissioning editor green-lit 'Outcasts', they will play it safe and choose something predictable and mainstream instead. What a pity.

Television is a harsh mistress, both here and in the US. So rarely are shows given the chance to grow, develop and find their audience. If they are not instant hits, they are quickly and mercilessly cancelled, like unadoptable strays being put down in a dogs' home. And the people who did enjoy the shows are left dangling. Few things are more unsatisfying than a story with no ending.

NOkia

02/16/2011 20:09:00

When the first iPhone went on sale in the UK in November 2007 I was there on launch day. I had been using Apple computers of various kinds for a full decade by that point and was very curious to see the Apple take on the mobile phone. Despite being relatively underpowered, the first iPhone looked astonishing, quite unlike any other mobile phone available at the time.

Before the iPhone I used a succession of Nokia phones - most recently the N95. The N95 featured a then-innovative slide-out keyboard and came clad in a shiny silver metal case that gave it a curiously armour-plated look, as though Nokia suspected users might take into a war zone.

At the time Nokia smartphones seemed impressively high tech, bristling with gigabytes of memory, GPS systems and multi-format multimedia capabilities. That was the hardware. The software was something else entirely: treacle slow, buggy, and weighed down with fiddly menus. At the time, I took this for granted as I simply didn't realise that anything better was possible on a mobile phone.

Until, that is, I took my first iPhone out of its box. Yes, it had an average camera, and couldn't multitask, cut and paste or send MMS (picture) messages, but the interface and user experience was so far ahead of the clumsy N95 that there was no going back.

Three years on, current iPhones come with much better cameras capable even of atmospheric shots in low light (see photograh). They can happily cut and paste text, run more than one app at at a time and send picture messages with the best of them.

Nokia, meanwhile, is struggling. Last week, a startlingly blunt memo by recently appointed CEO Stephen Elop was leaked to the press. In it he claimed the venerable Finnish company was "standing on a burning platform".

He compared competition from the astonishingly popular iPhone and the ever-increasing number of devices running the Android OS to "multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us".

Dramatic language indeed. Elop continued: "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

This was followed by a few days later by the announcement of a new alliance with Microsoft. Nokia will adopt the Seattle software giant's recently released Windows Phone operating system as its primary smartphone platform, (although not until October at the earliest), slowly phasing out the aging Symbian OS. A radical move, and one which has received a decidedly mixed reaction. Both Nokia and Microsoft's share prices dropped following the announcement (Nokia's by an alarming 25 per cent) and a group of Nokia shareholders even launched a short-lived initiative calling for Elop's immediate dismissal.

Nokia is still a huge company but there is little doubt that is in big trouble. Reading the news I couldn't help but recall the fate of the once mighty PDA maker Palm Inc. After floundering for years with self-defeating corporate strategies and confused and confusing attempts to replace its increasingly long-in-the-tooth Palm operating system, the ailing technology firm eventually released the well-received webOS. But it was too little, too late. The company struggled to make headway in a newly crowded and utterly changed smartphone marketplace. Last summer Palm was wholly acquired by Hewlett-Packard for a relatively modest $1.2 billion.