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Rather than merely act as a memorable address for a website, a .tel domain is designed to serve as a repository for contact data. By listing phone numbers, websites, Google keywords, IM names, Facebook address, physical addresses, email addresses, etc in their .tel entry, companies and individuals can make themselves much easier to get hold of.
Apple has brought us the iPod, iMac, PowerBook and OS X, and has also pumped countless dollars into products that didn?t live up to its standards for mass production. As sought after as Apple?s finished products, Cupertino prototypes are the stuff of lore. Here are 10 of the best unreleased Apple Prototypes.
With fewer iPod users upgrading, the days of explosive growth are over. And that leaves iPhones and Macs picking up the slack.
More than 400 years after Tycho Brahe analyzed a strange new light in the sky, scientists say they've finally nailed down just ...
Do you wish you could easily send videos or photos from your PC screen onto your living room TV? SlingCatcher, the latest hardware ...
Investors bid up shares after reports that Jonathan Miller, AOL?s former chief executive, is attempting a private buyout of Yahoo.
Strong Web sales over the holiday weekend are unlikely to bail out the retail industry, which is contending with a recession and a sharp decline in consumers? wealth.
In addition to outselling a broad and combined range of Windows Mobile handsets, Apple's iPhone 3G is being credited this week as the lone force responsible for growth of the smartphone market during the September quarter.
Mac OS X, mythically immune to common computer plagues, has actually always welcomed antivirus software. Or, uh, maybe not. Confused? No worries?here's how OS X and Windows differ on resisting viruses and other nasties.
The BlackBerry maker cut its third-quarter profit and revenue outlook well below expectations, pointing to slower subscriber growth.
The Target Gift Globe mimics the holiday tradition of the snow globe. After downloading it, users shake their iPhone, producing an on-screen snowfall that clears to reveal a gift idea from the retailer. Users can tap through to visit Target's site and buy the item or find a store nearby.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The computer notebook segment is showing signs of serious weakening as the global economy slows and the ill effects will start to be felt by chipmakers, analysts said Wednesday.
Requirements that internet cafes in a southern city install Chinese-developed operating systems raise concerns
A strong customer base has insulated the business, but the future may hold far less innovation and originality, says Huw J Williams
I don't often get invited to fifth birthday parties these days, and least of all by corporations. For a start, more than 40% of new companies don't reach their fifth birthday anyway, and those that do are more concerned about survival than celebration. Skype, which offers free internet telephone and video calls to anyone anywhere in the world with a broadband connection, has not only survived five years but appears to be flourishing. Like Google, it has become a verb: people say "I'll Skype you".Giving away something for free is not a self-evidently brilliant business plan unless you attract advertisements - which Skype doesn't. Skype is very unusual. It is an international telephone and video conferencing operator that doesn't have any infrastructure of its own. This might explain why it hasn't encountered the problems of the rest of the corporate voice over internet protocol (Voip) industry. Instead of gluing itself onto an existing telephone infrastructure, it bypasses it by using the internet.So, unlike normal business plans, new customers, even millions of them, can be added at no extra cost. It can afford to give away its basic service and earn money from calls made to people outside the network, from corporate adoption and from sales of add-ons. It believes that a combination of the credit crunch and the need to avoid unnecessary plane journeys will make its services increasingly popular.A few years ago it was bought by eBay which, intuitively, thought Skype would be highly popular, enabling punters to chat for nothing about what they were buying and selling. But, err, it turned out that they didn't actually want to talk to each other. There is no such thing as a free hunch. In recent days there has been talk of it selling Skype as "non-core".Skype's business appears to be prospering, with a claimed 330 million users - although it is coy about how many are regulars. There are enough to produce income of $137m (£91m) in the most recent quarter with a good profit margin. It claims that 7% of all international calls are now made using Skype and a quarter involve mobile calls routed through the internet (though utilising mobile operators at each end).For families spread around the world, the ability to talk and see each other via a webcam this Christmas is a big bonus. It is easy to download the software and then start talking. It works most of the time, though there are occasional glitches.If this sounds like a plug, then so be it. It is difficult to criticise a company that offers free international calls and makes its money from extra services you don't have to sign up to. But it has downsides. Calls are routed mainly from computer to computer so you have to be in front of a terminal (though SkypeOut will link you to outside phones). More seriously, it is a proprietary system pitching to become the default world standard. It is incompatible with internet phones using open standards such as Truphone, which I have written about before and which is gaining a serious reputation. It has just been added to BlackBerry and has won awards, including some at the recent GadgetFest show in San Diego.Now Google has entered the fray by adding a video function to Google Talk. In theory, Google's awesome powers of leverage from its search base could make it a big competitor to Skype. But Google Talk has been around for ages without becoming dinner table conversation. I tried to test it years ago but didn't know anyone else hooked up to it. The same was true at the weekend when I downloaded the video function. Google's recent withdrawal of its new virtual world, Lively, shows that having a near-monopoly base doesn't always translate to new services. That's reassuring. What is not reassuring is the prospect of the world being divided into proprietary and non-proprietary telephone systems that can't talk to each other. That would be a giant step backwards.vic.keegan@guardian.co.ukTelecomsInterneteBayE-commerceGoogleeBayGoogleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Size isn't everything when it comes to a compact projector that doesn't quite make the grade
Snapping at heelsWe are a Swiss small business which has received just such a threatening, letter from Getty for alleged misuse of some inconsequential graphic and asking us to pay £1,500 (Is a picture really worth £1,000?, November 27). We were wondering if we should just pay as we have had no experience of such matters. We won't pay now as the demands are totally unreasonable. Thanks again.Jim Romaguera Zurich, Switzerland In our case the original demand was for over €1,770 - for an image of 180x90 pixels used on a website that gets a few tens or hundreds of hits per month! Getty Images is not an easy company to deal with. In our case, the correspondence was in German, written from a London address, posted in the US and the bank account we were supposed to send the money to was in Ireland. Why did they write in German when the website was completely in English? keyscorner.com And one wonders why a lot of photographers are still afraid on the internet.1854.eu Google's cold comfortIf Google were to sell its information to drug companies, would we end up getting emails and/or phone calls asking us if we have flu or know someone who has, and if so, would we like to buy this wonder drug (Read me first, November 27)? jherring.wordpress.com Storm frontIn Charles Arthur's Technophile column (November 27) he says that the Storm has the BlackBerry "two letters per key" keyboard, but the ad for the phone on page 19 of the main newspaper today states that it has a full Qwerty keyboard. Is Charles wrong or is the ad misleading? [It's only Qwerty when held sideways - Tech. Ed]Colin Robertson Oxford I've had a Storm for a week now and I really don't think the review does it justice. Touchscreen - OK, that guy doesn't like the click screen and fair enough. What I dislike is that in effect he is saying "I don't like the screen, therefore nobody else will". I can understand that Charles doesn't like the Storm, but I don't think the review presented a rounded opinion on the device.Tom Woodforde via email Elegant geeksAn innovative approach which made me shout for joy (Antispam weapon recaptures lost text, November 27). How elegant is that? Who says IT people can't be creative?!itasitis.wordpress.com Report fingeredThis article would have done the author some credit if it had bothered to look more critically at the Unisys report instead of simply taking it at face value (Identity theft fears prompt biometric thumbs up, November 27). The reports produced by Unisys are designed to encourage uptake of the services provided by Unisys. Alisdair Laird Beverley In the pinkAs a very regular reader of FT Online, I found the redesign wonderful: it is very much clearer to read and navigate (Read me first, November 20). It's about whether the front page of a complex website should be clearly laid out and well structured, and on both counts this redesign works extremely well. Sol Picciotto Leamington Spa On the decksThe Guardian gadget offer fills the whole back page of today's Technology Guardian (November 27). We're offered a USB turntable to digitise our vinyl. Minimum system requirements PCs only. So why is it connected to a MacBook Pro? Paul Laxton New Brighton? Email us at tech@guardian.co.uk. Read all this week's letters in full at blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Although the problem has been fixed, people have been reminded that the technology is in place to block programme copying, writes George Cole
Aleks Krotoski: Not content with merely writing about games, the Guardian's Games blog has produced its first game, Spaceship!
Remember the dead pool? No, not Clint Eastwood's fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, but the internet graveyard that became a byword for failure during the last dotcom crash. In the lowest days of 2000 and 2001, the topic of who would be next to sink into the dead pool became a Silicon Valley obsession, with websites like FuckedCompany gloating over the collapse and closure of scores of startups.These days, with the recession starting to eat away at the industry once again, echoes of the dead pool are bouncing back - but this time startup entrepreneurs are trying for a more dignified exit.Earlier this week Pownce, a messaging startup that let people share messages and files, announced that it would be closing - but only after selling its assets to Six Apart, the makers of blog software including TypePad and Vox. In what was described as a "bittersweet" decision, Pownce's technology and its employees are being folded inside Six Apart's engineering team for an undisclosed sum. Users of the service, meanwhile, will see it cease to exist on December 15.The move came despite the site's early buzz, largely gained through celebrity co-founder Kevin Rose (who also founded news aggregator Digg) and lead programmer Leah Culver's links to a string of high-profile dotcom entrepreneurs.Such moves are known as asset acquisitions - buying up the technology and talent inside a company rather than its shares. It's often the least profitable way to get out of a company, and is rarely seen as a successful end to any startup's story.Pownce isn't the only company taking this path. Last week Twitter bought in Rael Dornfest, founder of productivity software company Values of N - which also closed. Dornfest, something of a totem in the tech community after his stint as chief technology officer at O'Reilly Publishing, had been working on his own smart internet applications without much success. Asset acquisitions are a dignified, if unexciting, exit for struggling companies and allow entrepreneurs to keep at least a few of their ideas alive. But they are generally the domain of big corporations, which use them to hire superstar developers hitched to underperforming businesses; Google has a record of buying small companies and then shutting them down, for example. But this new phase of asset acquisitions by smaller companies could prove a hallmark of Crash 2.0. After struggling to break into the big time - and facing a lack of further funding thanks to the harsh economic climate - moving sideways could appear to be the best option all around.After all, at least this way entrepreneurs can say that they dipped their toe in the dead pool, but lived to fight another day.E-commerceInternet startupsInternetTechnologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
The Treasury's best guess is £115m - but it is a guess, and many analysts and businesses think it will be rather more, says Chris Edwards
Michael Cross: The government gets a kicking for its tardiness in modernising the 'shamefully antiquated' technology of courts
Scientists are developing techniques to turn waste glycerol from biofuels into high-value hydrogen gas, writes Michael Pollitt
The government's mapping agency Ordnance Survey has eased the licence on its OpenSpace mapping system, opening it up for "light commercial" use - as a struggle rages within government over the future of trading funds including OS.The changes to the OpenSpace licence, announced late last week, do not however officially change OS's "landgrab" approach to intellectual property (IP) created by developers using OS maps - so-called "derived data". OS argues that any IP created while using an OS map is itself the property of OS.This has put some developers off using the OpenSpace API, even though it offers maps down to the 1:10,000 scale - not available on Google Maps - although it then jumps up to the 1:50,000 scale (equivalent to the "Landranger" map series), without the intervening 1:25,000 ("Explorer") scale.Meanwhile a debate is under way within Whitehall about the future of the trading funds, the government-owned agencies run on a self-funding, commercial basis. The Pre-Budget Report contained an enigmatic section saying that under the Operational Efficiency Programme there will be reviews of the "the potential for alternative business models, commercialisation, new market opportunities and, where appropriate, alternatives to public ownership". Among the funds under consideration - besides OS - are the Met Office, Land Registry, Forestry Commission, British Waterways, QEII Conference Centre and Royal Mint.Some question whether the Treasury, eager to minimise the ballooning national debt, might want to privatise OS. Yet attempting to sell OS would lose a vital national asset, and also require the restatement of years of accounts - because OS has always refused to value its principal asset, the National Geographic Database, which might cost £50m or more to recreate from scratch.Ministers will also be keen to avoid a repeat of the Qinetiq debacle, when the Defence Research Agency was partly sold to a private equity company, and then floated in 2002 at a time when stocks were at a low, leading to accusations that the Treasury had rushed the sale.? Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog: freeourdata.org.uk/blogFree our dataIntellectual propertyPolitics and technologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds