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Microsoft's giant touchscreen

Microsoft is trying to out iPhone the iPhone. The software company, not renowned for its slick interfaces, has built a piece of equipment that will turn any flat surface into a giant touch-sensitive screen.

Michael Arrington, of the TechCrunch blog, got a sneak preview of Touchwall, due to be unveiled at Microsoft’s headquarters today. His video demonstration (above) shows off the screens capabilities.

Users will scroll through content by caressing the surface and zoom in by sweeping their hands apart in an amplified version of the finger-pinching motion used on the Apple iPhone. Tapping on images, videos or documents embedded in the surface brings them up to full-screen size, while digital drawing tools allow users to add text and free-hand illustrations.

Microsoft's demonstration focused on office applications, but with a little imagination the device could easily be yoked up to gaming and home entertainment systems.

Unlike Surface, Microsoft’s sophisticated but prohibitively expensive table-top computing system, Touchwall has been put together using hardware costing only a few hundred dollars: three infrared lasers and an infrared camera. The lasers project a mesh of beams over the front of the surface, while the camera detects when and where the beams are broken.

Inexplicably, Microsoft said it had no current plans to put Touchwall into production.

All the news that's fit to print (about your block of flats)

News organisations such as this one do the best they can to record events deemed relevant to a particular country and indeed the world, but what about stories that are of interest only to a single apartment block?

Residents in a particular postcode and in some cases on a single block may soon be able to read news tailored to their own 'micro-geography' thanks to a site which trawls the web for information relevant to a highly specific location.

The 'news' - which could include anything from a recent crime to a planning application having been lodged or a picture having been taken nearby - is then packaged up on a map so readers can see where events relevant to their location took place.

"A regular journalist would never write about a mundane planning application, but if you live in that block it's totally news to you," Adrian Holovaty, founder of the site, called EveryBlock, said.

EveryBlock, which so far only covers Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, works by trawling publicly available databases for information such as addresses using a process known as 'scraping'.

Notorious spammer must pay $234 million to MySpace

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a "Spamford Wallace", has been busted again. This time to the record tune of $234 million (£120 million) for bombarding MySpace users with more than 735,000 messages, the Associated Press reports. The judgment is being called a landmark victory for anti-spam crusaders, and it breathes a little respectability into the much maligned piece of American anti-spam legislation, the Can Spam Act of 2003.

MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told AP that Wallace and his business associate Walter Rines created scores of MySpace accounts and hijacked existing users' accounts by stealing their passwords. Once inside, the duo, in some cases masquerading as trusted friends, messaged other users urging them to check out cool new videos or websites, some of which linked to pornographic sites.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Wallace and Rines, who never attended the hearing, to pay $300 per message, the maximum penalty allowed under the Can Spam Act guidelines.

This isn't the first time Wallace has been busted. The US Federal Trade Commission ordered him to pay $4 million in damages for hawking bogus anti-spyware software in 2006, and in the 1990s his former company, Cyber Promotions, was sued by Time Warner's AOL.

While some see it as a day of justice for spam fighters, nobody expects that Wallace will actually pay up. AP had no luck tracking down Wallace at his last known address in Las Vegas, where he went into business of promoting night clubs. He's probably working on a new get-rich-quick scheme to pay off his legal tab.

Britain's online video habit: three web clips per day

Here's a finding that, while inevitable, is sure to raise the blood pressure of your typical ISP executive -- and your boss. Our daily online video habit is reaching a staggering proportion.

According to Comscore, Americans viewed 11.5 billion (yes, billion...with a b) videos in March, or an average of 83 videos for every American who ventured online last month. The most recent tally for the UK is even greater, Comscore says. In December, Britons watched 3.1 billion videos, or 108 videos per UK net user.

Assuming an average video length of two minutes, you are talking about more than 103 million hours spent (some may say "wasted") in front of the computer watching YouTube and, for a week at least, the BBC iPlayer (the iPlayer launched on Christmas Day klast year).

It would be interesting to see Comscore's most recent numbers, which will reveal the iPlayer's contribution to our video-snacking habit. It will also no doubt trigger more howls of protest from the likes of Tiscali and Sky, who see the iPlayer as the biggest threat to their business.

In the US, YouTube is the dominant player, Comscore reports. The video-sharing behemoth has 38 per cent of the market (by videos viewed; 51 per cent if you count unique viewers) and its audience is growing.

Adults miss out when they shun kids' games

I enjoyed all of the Harry Potter books, and I enjoyed them in their original children’s covers, not the darker, more sombre jackets designed to make adults feel better about reading them. They’re kids’ books, so why pretend they aren't?

I feel the same about video games. Mario Kart, Super Mario Galaxy and the forthcoming Super Smash Bros Brawl all got great reviews, but some adults feel the need to avoid these games as if, because they are suitable for kids, they must be unsuitable for adults.

I played the original NES Nintendo entertainment system when I was a child and have continued to play the company’s systems and games ever since. I enjoy the escapism of running around in a land with bright red and blue mushrooms and giant monkeys bounding about. Being child-friendly doesn't make the games easier, just generally more imaginative and brighter in the visuals.

That’s not to say I don’t still love a good online frag fest. Both types of game can be equally enjoyable, and I think some folk miss out on great games because they ignore the 'suitable for all' games, unaware of the similarities between them and more adult-orientated titles. For instance, both Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario feature jumping on or kicking other characters heads — just in a very, very different context.

The Google Street View car causes a stir in Rome

For many Romans, these are jittery times. For the first time in a generation, the mayor of the Eternal City, once a left-wing stronghold, is on the political right. Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-Fascist, swept to power late last month on a tough-on-crime platform that included bulldozing encampments of Roma people, expelling supposedly violent foreigners and installing London-like surveillance cameras around town.

So a group of Romans can be forgiven on Wednesday afternoon for assuming the worst when a black car sporting a massive, rotating video camera, slowly drove down Viale Trastevere, a busy thoroughfare, filming everybody in sight. On cue, pedestrians shuffled off the street and into bars, out of sight of the offending vehicle, no doubt wondering if these are the new intrusions that must be endured after a sudden shift to the right.

Your correspondent managed to snake through a queue of cars at a traffic light to get a better look at the vehicle that upset so many mid-afternoon espressos. A new type of video surveillance vehicle aiming to capture random Romans on a sunny afternoon? Nope.

It was the seemingly more benign Google Maps vehicle. After snapping a few photos on my Nokia N95, I was asked by a group of pensioners who was driving the offending vehicle. "Google", I informed them. "They are filming the city, street-by-street", I added. They just shook their heads in bafflement.

Just then the Google car swung left and I followed, in a very slow pursuit. The identical scene unfolded before me: Romans stumbling into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera's lens. I cannot wait to see when Google Earth will have a street-level view of Rome. Don't be surprised if you see the backs of a lot of Italian hurrying for the door.

Does Microsoft really want to buy Facebook?

Out of one multi-billion dollar attempt to take control of an internet company and straight into another?

So it would seem for Microsoft, which has reportedly lurched from aggressively seeking to take control of Yahoo!, the struggling internet portal, to politely approaching Facebook and asking what it would sell for.

Fresh from being rebuffed by Yahoo! - for which Microsoft had offered $47.5 billion - on the weekend, the company's bankers are said to have approached Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old chief executive, to inquire what he thinks his company is worth. Or so reported the Wall Street Journal. (Neither company has confirmed the approach.)

Certainly, for Microsoft to express interest in one of the world's most talked about and influential social networking sites is not surprising.

The software giant already owns a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook - having bought a $240 million chunk in October which valued the young company at $15 billion. And only last week Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, cited it as one of only six 'internet properties' that had "any real scale."

As with many of Microsoft's dealings, however - and the company is a veteran corporate operator, not least in the field of takeovers - there may be more here than meets the eye.

In their own ways, Microsoft and Apple push the next iPhone

Microsoft sent an unambiguous message to European consumers this week: the next iPod killer will arrive imminently. It's called the iPhone. The 3G iPhone. Well, in truth, Microsoft never mentioned Apple's iPhone. Instead, it announced a -- yawn -- new software upgrade for its Zune music store, saying the phantom device will now play video too. You'll have to take their word for it, European gadgetheads. There is still no word on when, or if, Microsoft will make the player available here. The latest rumour is that it will be 18 months from now, in autumn 2009, when Microsoft introduces the third generation Zune.

By our calculation, that will be a good 15 or so months after the European launch of the 3G iPhone, all but burying the Zune's chances here. Apple appears set to announce its plans for a high-speed 3G iPhone next month.

According to the New York Times, the 3G iPhone will arrive in Europe as early as August. Citing a person familiar with the roll-out plans, the paper says the first 3G iPhone market is Italy via a deal with Vodafone and Telecom Italia Mobile, I type with a huge grin from my perch here in Rome.

A 3G iPhone is seen as a necessity for Apple as sales of the current models, which plod along on GSM networks, have begun to dip and retailers fear a glut of unsold 2.5G models.

Freesat: a sign of Freeview's failure

An uncharitable view of Freesat, the free-to-air satellite TV service launched today by the BBC and ITV, is that it demonstrates the failure of Freeview. Why else would the very people who begged us to buy a Freeview set-top box now be urging upon us an alternative, incompatible system involving a new set-top box, a satellite dish and professional installation?

In fact, Freeview has not been a failure. It has the makings of something much more frustrating: a short-term success. More than 14 million British households already use it, but some doubt its suitability as a national broadcast system for next-generation television.

It faces two main problems: patchy coverage, which leaves more than a quarter of the population without a signal, and problems cramming bandwidth-hungry high-definition signals onto the part of the broadcast TV spectrum. Limited trials of HD over Freeview are expected to begin next year, but only four channels will be available and viewers will have to buy yet another set-top box.

Freesat, which delivers its signal via satellite, will liberate the BBC and ITV from the constraints of the broadcast spectrum and allow them to offer more high-definition programming. Both broadcasters see HD as a way of holding onto viewers (and advertisers, in ITV’s case) in a fragmenting media market, and until now they’ve had to sit back and watch Sky TV take an early lead in HD programming.

Encouragingly for both broadcasters, nearly half a million subscribers have stumped up for Sky’s high-definition channels, proving that there is an appetite for super-sharp TV. A similar service without the barrier of a contract and monthly subscription is likely to be popular.

So where does that leave Freeview? Anyone who gets a good signal with the existing system and has no interest in upgrading to HD will probably stick with what they’ve got, but it would be hard to recommend it to anyone who has not yet made the switch to digital TV. For a relatively small, one-off fee, Freesat offers a much more future-proofed system.

That’s frustrating for those who plumped for Freeview but now have an HD-ready TV and want to make the most of it. Some will no doubt find the cash for Freesat, but the cynics among them may be wondering how long they’ll have to wait before it too is rendered obsolete.