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Browser Wars update: Firefox continues to gain on IE

Firefox continues to make impressive gains among Europe's web surfers, chipping away further at the once unassailable lead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to web measurement firm Xiti Monitor, Firefox's pan-European share of the browser market was 28 per cent in December, up from 23.1 per cent in the year earlier period. In some countries -- namely, Finland, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary -- at least 40 per cent of web surfers use Firefox, impressive for a browser that is a little over three years old.

How a wayward ship off the coast of Egypt paralysed half the world

Call it "the mother of all outages". Two submarine cable networks a few miles off the coast of Egypt were snapped by a passing ship earlier this week, knocking out completely or seriously disrupting internet access and telecommunications service to vast portions of the Middle East and India. Repairing the line will take 12 to 15 days, Bloomberg is reporting.

The theory is that an anchor scraping along the floor of the sea snapped the lines, cutting access to tens of millions.  "It's a national disaster,'' Joseph Metry, network supervisor at Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, the biggest mobile phone company in the Middle East and North Africa, told Bloomberg. He said all Egyptian internet users have been affected.

Will eBay's new fees please?

Picture a person of large girth who, while enjoying a gigantic feast, nodded off at the table only to wake up hours later still sated but rather envious - not to mention anxious - that the other guests had moved onto dessert. And now it is hard for him to move.

That is the image that eBay's recently announced changes to its listings fees conjures up.

For those who missed it - and that will likely be the majority - eBay today announced that it was cutting the price of putting something up for sale on the site by a third. The site said it would make up for the lost revenue by increasing the commission it charges when a sale is completed from 5.25 to 7.5 per cent.

The change was hinted at last week by the company's new chief executive, John Donahue, who said that eBay - long a synonym for 'online auctions' - needed to shift its emphasis towards 'fixed-price sellers': people who were just looking to shift goods, without the fuss of an auction, and whose goods make up an increasingly large proportion of the site's core revenue.

At first glance, it seems a sensible move. Attract more people - hopefully new ones - to list items on the site by making it cheaper to do so, but don't hurt your books by making up the loss elsewhere. (Financially at least, that will been the objective. According to Mark Lewis, eBay's managing director in the UK, the shift in fees will be 'value neutral' from a revenue perspective.)

But on reflection, it may in fact fall flat by working against the very people it is arguably most important for the site to attract: namely, first-time sellers who are keen to sell the odd item, probably not for a lot of money. Just the sort, in other words, who - because they buy books there - have worked out they can now do the same thing on Amazon, which looms large as a competitor.

The shiniest computer ever

Not to be outdone by the golden Apple laptop featured on Mousetrap a little while back, Japanese computer manufacturers Zeus have announced a new range of PCs that redefine the term ‘conspicuous consumption’.

The Jupiter casing is cast from solid platinum encrusted with a dazzling array of diamonds (no low-budget Swarovski crystals here) arranged to resemble astrological constellations. If you were to ask your valet to open the case you’d find a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 256MB GeForce 7200GS graphics card, a 1 terabyte SATA drive, 2GB of RAM, and a choice of  Blu-ray or HD-DVD optical drives. Vista Ultimate is installed at the factory.

The entire package will set you back around ¥80million, or a shade over £375,000. If you’re on a budget Zeus also offer the ‘Mars’ casing, which wraps up the same PC works in gold instead of platinum. That’s only ¥60m (£280,000).

Of course if you have that sort of money burning a hole in your pocket you could always buy 100 Area-51 ALX CrossFire desktops and network them together for the finest LAN party setup the world has ever seen. They aren’t quite as shiny though.

Tax the internet? Not so fast, says the EU

Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial proposal to tax new media and give the money to struggling old media has hit with some tough opposition this week from Europe's top geek: Viviane Reding, the EU's telecommunications commissioner. Earlier this month, Mr Sarkozy floated the idea of taxing internet access and mobile phone contracts to help the state-owned TV broadcaster in its transition to go advert-free. Sarkozy, perhaps sensing the attack he would endure in the blogosphere, called it an "infinitesimal sales tax."

Still, Ms Reding isn't buying it.

Can Peter Gabriel take on iTunes?

Last.fm to offer free, on-demand music streaming from all the big labels

Relative to the technology around it, the music industry moves at a glacial pace - which is why it's worth recording little announcements such as the one today that Peter Gabriel's digital download service We7 has received a further $6 million in venture funding.

We7 is one of relatively few sites to be exploring the ad-supported model for music downloads by virtue of a clever technology it developed which lets an advert be attached to the beginning of any song that is downloaded.

The idea is that when people download a track, an ad plays before they listen to it for a limited number of times - eight times for new songs, five for older ones - before disappearing, at which point the song can be enjoyed like any that has been bought on iTunes.

(In fact We7 - which went live in April last year - goes further. Its tracks are all DRM-free, meaning that they can be transferred from one place to another and played on any device.)

So far none of the majors have signed up, and the two biggest independents to dip their toes in the water have been cautious. (V2, home of Bloc Party, the Stereophonics, and Mercury Rev, has only made a limited portion of their catalogue available. Sanctuary - to be fair - has put forward Morrissey and the Charlatans among its offering.)

But the new round of funding - led by Spark Capital, the Boston-based venture group who also backed the Veoh, the online distribution system, and Gabriel himself - should give the site and its 90,000 users a filip. (In eight and a half months, the number of tracks available has grown from 80,000 to half a million, and the site recently celebrated its millionth download.)

Facebook and MySpace a threat to Britain's competitiveness?

Is your daily Facebook/MySpace/Bebo habit a threat to Britain's competitiveness? Indeed, says a new survey of UK workers conducted on behalf of IT security specialists Global Secure Systems and the upcoming IT security conference, Infosec 2008.

There's even a price tag that's being attached to our daily workplace ritual of updating our Facebook status, perusing MySpace for a local gig and sending alerts to our Bebo friends.

The damage?

£6.5 billion per annum, calculated in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage required to keep our friends and contacts informed on our latest mood swings and whereabouts.

Green Google unveils $175 million philanthropy fund

For a moment, anyhow, Google is doing its part to live up to its "don't be evil" slogan. The company's philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced yesterday that it will issue $175 million (£89 million) in grants over the next three years for a series of do-gooder initiatives. The focus will be on bringing basic services and improved education to the developing world, mimimising the impact of climate change, improving security and the development of green technologies, including investments in alternative energies aimed at reducing our addiction to coal.

Report: Over 10,000 websites infected by keylogging Trojan

A worrying development in criminally inspired malware, or 'crimeware' for short, emerged last year with a bang -- then it seemed to fade from view. It involved malware that was installed on legitimate websites and passed onto unsuspecting web users, infecting an untold number of web surfers who simply visited the sites. They included those run by The Economist, Major League Baseball and Canada.com, to name a few. The menace is back, net security specialists are reporting, and it's much worse than the first time around.

Zuckerberg: 'I don't have a proper bed'

Seeing as titbits of information about Facebook tend to be gobbled up rather like food at a frat party, it's worth trawling through the interview the company's 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to 60 Minutes last night.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the 'curious but largely inconsequential' things we learnt about Mr Zuckerberg:

1. His bed has no legs. (He sleeps on a mattress on the floor.)

2. He plays Scrabulous - a tool which enables Facebook users to play Scrabble - with his grandparents.

3. He doesn't have his own office - his desk sits on an open plan floor alongside those of the company's 400 other employees.

4. He won't say what he makes of suggestions he is the new Larry or Sergey - a reference to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. ("Is that a question?", he said, when the show's Leslie Stahl suggested he was replacing them as the most important guy in Silicon Valley.)

Game over? Scrabble takes on Scrabulous

The legions of Facebook users who try to outsmart their friends with better, longer, and higher scoring words using the site's online version of Scrabble may soon be in need of another time-waster.

Hasbro, which makes Scrabble, has written to Facebook asking that it take the application down.

According to a report in Fortune, Hasbro has said that the game - called Scrabulous - is in breach of its own trademark, and is therefore unreasonably tapping into revenues that are rightfully its own.

Scrabulous, which was created by two Indian brothers, lets Facebook users play games against one another online, often over long periods of time.

The game began life as a standalone website in 2006, but has developed a huge following since launching as an application on Facebook in June last year. More than 41,000 people now play it in the UK each month, according Nielsen/Netratings, and other estimates put the number of global users at 2.3 million.

Pretty as a picture: Sony's OLED TV screens

Sony's OLED screens, which use organic light emitting diodes rather than an LCD or plasma screen, attracted one of the bigger crowds at CES. The super-slim screens, just 3mm thick, did have the instant buy-me appeal that may well make them a hit, once the price falls, despite the questionable need for such a skinny TV.

OLED technology, which also consumes less power than other displays, have been used in small screens such as those found on mobile phones, but Sony is now selling these 11-inch TVs in Japan and the US (Europe will be getting them soon). They cost $2,500 (£1,250) in the US.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

Philips' white TV: in any colour, as long as it's black

 

Black and glossy has been the finish of choice for TVs for the last couple of years, so a promotional video from Philips showing a white-framed set in the company's Design Collection seemed to be something of a departure. Oddly, though, when the people at the Philips booth were asked about it, they knew nothing about it. A call to the press office confirmed that the Design Collection is available only in black, and that any white-framed imagery was just for show.

It looked good in white, if a little like the last-generation iMac.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

See where you're going in the dark

In-car technology has a strong presence at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, with one of the cavernous halls filled entirely with cars and related accessories. Much of the space is devoted to mine’s-bigger-than-yours stereo systems, with so much bass filling the room that it was hard to keep the camera steady for a photograph.

More usefully, though, a company called Flir offers drivers the chance to see where they’re going at night. Its PathFindIR thermal imaging equipment lets you see five times further than you could with headlights alone, according to the company.

The demo looks impressive, but given that video from the console is displayed on a console mounted in the dashboard, keeping an eye on the screen and an eye on the road could be distracting. The next step must be to combine the system with a heads-up display.

Without PathFindIr, left, and with it, right

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

CES 2008: a video report

Click here to see the video

Let your shoes do the walking

So you need to get to a meeting in a hurry, but you don’t want to arrive all hot and bothered from running. The answer, obviously, is a pair of motorised shoes, and fortunately just such a thing is made by iShoes. They have a top speed of 13.5 mph and cost $599 (£300) for the pair.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

SlingCatcher will beam web video to your TV

The company behind the SlingBox, which lets you watch live and recorded TV on your PC via an internet connection, has launched a sister device at CES, which sends video in the other direction.

The SlingCatcher will allow you to watch web-based video from sites such as the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s on-demand service or YouTube on a TV screen. Users will be able to draw a box around the part of the PC screen that they want to send to the TV, so that only the video will be seen, without the content that surrounds it.

The SlingCatcher will connect to the TV either wirelessly, or using one of several possible cables including HDMI. It will also be able to play video from a USB stick.

The device is designed to convert web video from a ‘lean forward’ experience, where the viewer sits at a desk and hunches over a screen, to a ‘lean back’ one, with the viewer placed more comfortably on a sofa.

The device will be available in the US in the second quarter of the year for $250 (£125). The gadget was supposed to be ready in time for Christmas, but the Blake Krikorian, the chairman and chief executive of Sling Media, said the project was delayed. "We have been spending a lot of time perfecting new technology that is vital to the SlingCatcher's user experience but sometimes these things take longer than expected."

The company also announced plans for a version of the SlingBox capable of handling high-definition video.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

Video glasses: the long transition from sci-fi to reality

Mobile TV is one of those technologies that’s been rattling around for a good few years without yet making much impact. The problem it always comes up against is that mobile gadgets are meant to be small, but screens have to be big enough for comfortable viewing.

Video glasses are one potential solution, and judging from the evidence on display at CES this year it won’t be long before they provide an inconspicuous, comfortable way of watching TV and DVD while on the go.

Previous attempts have generally been bulky, odd-looking and the picture size and quality has been little better than you would get from a mobile phone. The Lumus glasses pictured above are not exactly indistinguishable from standard shades, but you wouldn’t get laughed at on the train.

Where they really come into their own is with the picture size. Lumus has used a miniature projection system that beams the image onto the lens – unlike most of its rivals, which use small LCD screens. This fools the brain into thinking that the picture is being projected onto whatever is in the field of vision – turning my head towards the conference centre wall in the middle distance, I appeared to be looking at a 20m-tall screen. It’s quite disconcerting at first, but after a couple of minutes it felt natural and comfortable.

The glasses shown here are expected to go on sale towards the end of this year. The price will be in the $300-$500 range, but this will fall if mobile phone networks choose to subsidise them (as they do with handsets), to encourage the take-up of mobile TV.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

CES in pictures: Monday

^ Logitech's driving game controller is designed to give driving games a realistic feel

Can Yoggie make online security sexy?

Yoggie, already the winner of a CES ‘best innovation’ award, has announced a hardware-based firewall to add to its line-up of distinctive security devices. The Firestick, pictured above, looks like a USB drive, but contains a 300MHz Linux-based computer dedicated to protecting your PC from attack.

It's one of the few security applications that you might buy for its looks alone, but under the sleek casing it's a serious piece of kit.

"It takes the protection outside your PC, and so it stops any attack before it even reaches your PC," Shlomo Touboul, the founder and chief executive of Yoggie, said. "Our mission is to put Pentagon-grade security on personal computers."

The Firestick, which has a recommended retail price of $119 (£60), is an entry-level product designed for people who have already signed up to antivirus packages. Yoggie also makes a comprehensive security package, the Pico, which includes 12 security programs including antivirus, antispyware, antispam and firewall applications.

Click here for a full review of the Yoggie Pico, which was named CES’s best innovation in the computer accessories category.

The mouse: 1968 – 2008?

Bill Gates has suggested that the era of the computer mouse may be coming to a close. Certainly the tactile interface of Apple’s iPhone points the way to a more direct interaction with our data in the future.

 

We thought it might be time to provide, if not a eulogy then at least a little look at how the computer’s best friend got started.

The idea of a hand-held computer controller was first mooted by Douglas Englebart in  1963, he applied to patent the concept in 1967. US patent 3541541 was granted in 1970.

A possibly apocryphal story about the origin of the name suggests that when  Bill English built the first Englebart-designed mouse prototype it was originally called a "turtle". When a mouse ran across their workbench while Bill and Doug were working they changed their minds

In December 1968 Englebart demonstrated the mouse, and many other key IT concepts at the Joint Computer conference in a presentation that has since become known as The Mother of all Demos

 

Englebart never received any royalties for the mouse, to an extent because his patent expired in 1987, before the personal computer revolution put a mouse in every home, and partly because many subsequent mouse designs used slightly different technologies that did not infringe upon the original patent. During an interview, he said "Stanford Research Institute patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."

 

Bill Gates's home video

Bill Gates made a home video to lighten up his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Being Gates, it wasn't your average home video.

Pretending to be a documentary about his last day at work at Microsoft and his efforts to find a new job, the bulti-zillionaire is shown toodling around the campus of the company HQ in Seattle in a humble Ford Focus, with a briefcase perched precariously on the roof, Mr Bean-style.

Inside the company gym, he does a bench press and asks his personal trainer: "Am I ready to take my shirt off?"

"Not yet," says the trainer, who is played by Hollywood heartthrob Matthew McConaughey.

Later, Gates is seen playing the music video game Guitar Hero, and talking to Bono on the phone about a career in rock.

"We're full up in the band. All positions are filled. I can't just replace The Edge because you got a high score on Guitar Hero," says Bono.

Gates thinks about politics but gets more setbacks as he is seen offering himself as a running mate to Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Barack Obama. (So, probably not going to be voting Republican, then.)

Thwarted, he turns out the lights in his office, picks up the box full of his belongings and goes out to the car, placing the box on the car roof. Then he drives off, sending the box crashing to the ground.

The video ends with Brian Williams, the NBC news anchorman, complaining that he won't be able to report on Gates anymore, a man "too cheap to spend more than $7 for a haircut".

Interactive underpants at CES

If you think Facebook is an invasion of privacy, brace yourself for digitally networked underpants that warn wearers if they are getting dehydrated or unwell.

The underwear is designed for the elderly and incontinent, and is one of the more extreme examples of the mania for interconnected technology on display at this year’s CES tech fair.

A group of companies working together as the P2P Universal Computing Consortium, or PUCC, is showing off products and prototypes based around wireless connectivity between home electronics, which is one the big themes of this year’s show.

More mundane applications include the ability to control heating, lights and other devices remotely using a mobile phone, but the most intriguing is a set of health-monitoring equipment that feeds information to a central database.

The device has been designed with high-tech Japanese care homes in mind. Elderly residents – as well as hypochondriacs of all ages – can monitor their body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, ECG trace and, using an "automatic urine collector", the composition of their waste products.

The data would be collated automatically and the system would alert carers to any anomalies.

Although the products are not yet available commercially, Fumio Nagasaki, who works for Epson, one of the companies involved in the consortium, said that they soon would.

"It depends on the market demand and the marketing strategy," he said. "We know that we can make them and that some people would buy them, but we have to wait until the potential market is big enough."