Prompt's TechBlog

It's taken 17 years to make, but the new Guns N'Roses album is available now. It's a measure of how the media has changed in that time that the first place you can hear it (legally) is on MySpace, where the band is streaming the whole thing. When the last studio album was released (1991's twin LP-set "Use Your Illusion"), the only way to hear it was to buy the album or visit a friend who had already done so. Now you can play new release "Chinese Democracy" whenever you want, wherever you can get a web connection. The new album's in the shops Sunday/Monday (depending on whether you're in the US or UK).

Labels: music, MySpace

If I say "Apple"? What do you think of? Fruit? No, probably not.
Possibly iPod or music? Yes, that's more like it.

This week Apple reported that soon they may also be known for gaming. With their high-end iPod Touch rivalling well known popular gaming devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP over the Christmas period.

The latest iPod Touch allows users to download music and games from Apple's online store. Since the iPod Touch has been released over 6,000 applications have been designed by third party developers, 1,500 of which are games. Most games in the store range from £2.99-£5.99, a lot cheaper than the games available for the Nintendo DS which usually start from £25. So, is the iPod Touch the gamers answer in the credit crunch? No I doubt it. According to the research company VG Chartz, 85 million Nintendo DS's have been sold worldwide, making it one of the most popular pieces of gaming hardware ever made.

There's nothing stopping people using and enjoying playing games on both, as they do offer different types of games to users and a different gaming experience. The iPod Touch uses a touchscreen and accelerometer which works well for more strategic games like puzzles, while the Nintendo DS has the traditional joy pad and button control, which suits action type games that require a quick reaction. It is hard to compare the quality of games available with the iPod Touch to those offered by the most powering players in the gaming industry such as EA and Sega.

Nintendo are moving quickly to ensure that they aren't being left behind in the race, offering new forms of digital distribution to their customers. The latest version of the Nintendo's console the DSi allows users to download games directly from the internet just like the Apple iPod Touch and it is available in the UK later this year. This leaves Apple lagging behind. But watch this space, I'm sure Apple will come fighting back with more sophisticated games. It wouldn't surprise me if many people have both a Nintendo DS and iPod Touch on their Christmas lists this year and therefore I'm sure both will do equally as well over the Christmas period.

Good old Google - it's already revolutionised the way we all work each day. Now - it's decided to tackle history.

Google Earth, once the exclusive preserve of narcissists locating their own house has branched out... into ancient Rome! Containing 6,700 buildings and more than 250 place marks, each linked to key sites in a variety of languages, Google has attempted to bring AD360 back to life.

Bernard Frischer from Virginia University, who worked with Google on the reconstruction, described it as: "Another step in creating a virtual time machine. The project is a continuation of five centuries of research by scholars, architects and artists since the Renaissance, who have attempted to restore the ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images."

Well, it's a noble effort. But you can't just shoehorn a city into these sanitised graphics. Juvenal, writing in the early second century AD, paints a picture of Rome which breathes far more life, than any fancy reconstruction ever could:

"So farewell Rome, I leave you to sanitary engineers and municipal architects, fellows who by swearing black is white find it easy to land contracts for a new temple, swamp-drainage, harbour works, river-clearance, undertaking the lot - then pocket the profit and fraudulently file their petition in bankruptcy."

This week I attended the Chinwag MoSo Rising panel discussion The panel was filled with many mobile social networking gurus and was lead by well-know mobile journalist, Bena Roberts from GoMo News . It was a great opportunity to hear about the future of mobile LBS (location based services), mobile pricing for application usage and what the next steps will be in mobile convergence.

Out of the guru panel came some interesting ideas:

The mobile world is still seen as separate from the digital world by consumers
With the exception of MVNOs like Blyk (the world's first MVNO based on mobile advertising) mobile advertising has not been living up to expectations and it not yet a sustainable business on its own

Successful mobile social networks need to be niche i.e. based around a football club at the moment. Sites like Facebook have not been developed for the mobile space but there is lots of untapped potential for them in this space

The Apple iPhone has started to pave the way for more mainstream consumers to use mobile web apps and to set the expectation that the mobile user should have the same UI as the PC user

Some really effective mobile web campaigns include a recent one from Strongbow and flirtomatic to give friends and flirts a virtual pint of Strongbow where they can register to receive a free pint mobile voucher, along with details of the nearest pubs where it can be redeemed during Bowtime (5pm to 7pm each Tuesday). Clever indeed!

What does the future hold for mobile? Greater personalisation of location based services and making applications easy to use. The catch phrase of the night was 'sharing your life in real time'. No doubt this will be a hot topic at the 2009 Mobile World Congress - watch this space!

Labels: Chinwag, Facebook, iPhone, LBS, mobile phone, Mobile World Congress

CS4: Now in store.

24 October 2008

Adobe's developed a reputation for doing things on short notice and this time was no different. Creative Suite 4 was announced on Sept 23. It's in stores already. And it's really rather good.

CS4 is the latest version of Adobe's award winning Creative Suite solution, and it's carrying some nice new changes. CS4 now supports 64-bit and multi-core processors, and early tests showed performance increases of up to 12%. For those who work with really large files, digital video and the like, CS4 renders and processes up to 10 times faster.

CS4 also boasts nice, shiny features like a 'Unified Application Interface', as well as 'Adobe Dynamic Link'. This means that CS4 launches within a central program, and all the other Adobe programs, like Photoshop or InDesign, will be tabs within it. Once you have multiple programs running, the Dynamic Link means you can work on the same thing in different programs without having to render or save first. Recording a digital video? Save it directly to disk with On Location - no time-capture needed. Once that's done, fire up Premiere. Any edits you make will be exactly the same when you open After Effects. Photoshop a title frame? No problem. That frame will automatically update in Premiere as you change it in Photoshop. As will audio, while you work on it in Soundbooth. Seamless integration.

Impressed yet? I am.

Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash, have all been tweaked and touched up. Photoshop does 3-D, for example. Premiere can turn spoken audio in a video directly into text. There are new features galore. Check them out here:

The Adobe website seems to use certain phrases a lot. Integrated. Dynamic. Intelligent. Flexible. With CS4 I can see why.

Everybody knows how Google started. It was founded by Larry Page, who was then working on his PhD thesis about web search, and Sergey Brin, his Stanford mate. They didn't initially realise what a huge commercial potential their creation had. But everybody knows today.

For those of you who'd like to know more, this video shows why they have gone so far, even if some have not appreciated their unstoppable success. One of the most thrilling things I learned from the video is that Google projects involve biosciences, which could lead to important medical and scientific breakthroughs.



At Google they already know what's in my webmail and what I search for, and what my needs are. And they know what URLs I visit and virtually everything else about me. Of course, the data is gathered to enable the delivery of cut-to-measure, powerful advertising. But it's all quite scary. Nobody knows what is going to happen next.

Before I started writing this post, I spent some time searching for more information about Google to make my post objective and complete. What I found glued me to my screen for more than five minutes: an image on the Undergoogle website called Google masterplan, a hand-drawn plan supposedly made by the Google engineers showing that they are clearly trying to involve themselves in everything, from people's personal lives to their workplaces.

Labels: google, search engines

The mobile phone (or cell phone) celebrated its 25th birthday this week.* Depending on your age and how early you were to adopt these now ubiquitous devices, you'll either be amazed they've been around so long, or will be astonished people could actually exist without being constantly contactable until so recently.

Today we live in a world where a commitment of twenty quid a month or so can get you a sharp looking phone capable of making voice and data calls across multi-megabit high-speed digital networks as well as taking high-resolution photos, storing every CD you've ever owned, playing up to the minute games and films, and organising your entire business and social life.

Back on 13 October 1983, the very first commercial mobile phone call was made by Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech Mobile communications using a Motorola DynaTAC handset that weighed over a kilo. Affectionately known ever since as 'The Brick' this phone retailed direct from Motorola for $3,995, with customers then having to pay $50 per month rental and up to 40 cents a minute for calls made across embryonic 1G analogue radio networks

And as CNET pointed out recently, it's not just the technology of mobile phones that has changed so dramatically over the last 25 years, but the customers. In the 80s mobiles were strictly the remit of the very rich. It didn't matter whether you were a banker or a plasterer, as long as you had the money, a massive inside pocket, and the front to use such a preposterous device in public. Nowadays of course, even our children carry smartphones with enough computing power to manage a moon landing or two, as long as they are able to guarantee a well-paid Saturday job and no social life for a minimum 18-month contract. Consequently the 12,000 total subscriber market of the Motorola DynaTAC has now grown to over 260 million mobile customers in the US alone.

So what's next for mobile phone operators, handset manufacturers and subscribers? One thing is for certain, there's absolutely no point at all trying to predict how we will be making calls in 25 years time. Mind controlled messaging or precognitive perception - your guess is as good as mine - but the likelihood of us carrying around 100g plastic screens with novelty rings is probably zero, all things being well. More immediate challenges are easier to tick off - fourth generation broadband networks, desktop identical functionality, and more multifunction convergence in our pockets than we truly need or frankly, want.

Expect all of this in around 25 months though, rather than another 25 years. Scarily, that's not a lot longer than your next iPhone contract.


* Well, kind of. People had been trying to get mobile phones off the ground (literally) since the first decades of the last century, and NTT in Japan was really the first to toy with the idea of commercial mobile phones back in the late seventies, but Motorola's DynaTAC system was the first mobile phone that an average, if affluent and American, man on the street could practically buy and use.

Labels: 1G, 4G, cell phone, mobile phone, motorola

Microsoft has been really making some weird videos lately, from their short-lived commercials with Seinfeld, to an ad tricking people testing Vista thinking it was the next OS, and now the video below. I think that Bill Gates leaving his day-to-day role at the company may have had something to do with the company going completely and utterly crazy.

Microsoft hired a boy band and filmed in a video about it in an ironic style that came right out of The Office (how fitting for Microsoft to use that style) to promote its upcoming Professional Developers Conference 2008. Someone at Microsoft must've said "hey guys, let's make a bad boy band song for Windows 7," realized that it really did come out bad and then said "well, let's make an ironic intro and outro so it seems like we meant to do it like that the whole time."



It's actually pretty catchy, and better than most NSync and Backstreet Boys songs were. That still doesn't cover up the sheer finger-scratching-against-the-chalkboard terribleness of lyrics like:

"Windows 7 my love is true,
Now let me use Direct3D to unlock your GPU"

"PCD 2008, Windows 7 is coming and I can't wait,
I'm going to get the first one out of the crates, wrap your Windows around me"

"I'm going to need my developer guys, get tons of content on 160 Gigabyte drives"

It could've been a hit if Microsoft didn't go for the ironic angle. It worked for Wrigley's.

Labels: Advertising, boy bands, microsoft, video, Windows