News from the front

The WWDC keynote is this afternoon (I’m writing tuesday monday europe time). The rumour mill started up in force last week and people are mostly talking about a big ipod touch. Surely Apple needs to do something in the iPhone front with all the Android and Nokia news. What will it be ? Nobody knows! Gizmodo did a rumour round-up for our benefit.

On police state news, the UK Police and MI5 has green light to crack into people’s peces and steal ‘evidence’. Apparently, it’s EU’s idea too.

IE Market share goes below 70% and Firefox/Mozilla went over 20%. This is clearly a new era people.

In a rather interesting twist, when faced with Viacom ultimatum TimeWarner (which is an ISP and cable TV operator) says people should just watch online.

In monopoly news, EU govts, namely the Portuguese one, keep on dolling out money to Microsoft because they always did - original portuguese news.

The Economist has posted a per capita computer ownership country breakdown and Portugal is tied with Mongolia for 44th place. Brasil is in 38th, Finland in 20th with one computer for each two fins and Israel is number 1 with a stunning 122% penetration. Coincidentally, Israel’s cell phone penetration is a bit over 120% too so my theory israelis are born with a cell and a laptop.

Palm probably does have something to show off at CES as it managed to secure another $100M from Elevation Partners. I still think it’s going to be too little too late but oh well.

Those wacky science guys at UtahU are riping off sea worms (urgh) and synthesizing their bioglue to hopefully make bone mending super glue. As opposed of pins and such metal work the glue will (hopefully) be used on shattered bones and joint injuries. With some luck, it will be commonly available when I shatter my hip some 40 years from now!

Palm is apparently announcing the Nova at CES. I’m pretty sure this will end in tears for them.

On a refreshing move Motorola’s CEOs are taking a pay cut in the cost-cut effort so there may be hope for Motorola after all. On the other hand, a nonsucky G2 may be in the works so that’s not so much good news for Moto there. And in even more mobile news, LTE finally got published so a bright new mobile high bandwith future is up ahead.

Mercedes clearly doesn’t know what the future is bringing so their making a electric and hydrogen and hybrid car.

The week was full of Nokia. Not only a mystery new touch UI interface showed up in the intarwebs but the Maemo5 SDK first alpha saw the light of day. And on an ironic twist, the Nokia 5800 EU version showed up in the US before EU

Android seems to be the cool kid on the block and everybody’s and his dog is jumping in. Most noticeable, SE is trying to dig itself out with an Android phone next year. And to make us really jealous, Lenovo is making a China-only sexyphone

Just cause they scored both Nokia and Ericsson our friends up north are getting 21Mbps HSPA. That’s like, more than passes for broadband in the US!

Microsoft seems to really be trying to be a new company under Ray Ozzie and released their infinite zoom tech as an iPhone app. On the other hand, OEMs and/or MS are using Vista’s general suckiness to gorge an extra $150 from idiots^Wpeople so the old business model seems to be alive and well.

On mobile, Nokia unleashed the top of line N97 N-slider-qwerty-touchphone which was promptly reviewed. Shortly after we learned Apple is kicking Nokia butt stealing a bit over 10% of smartphone market share. Lets see if the Tube can take it back or if the $99 WalmartPhone comes true.

The Amazon MP3 store has finally landed on amazon.co.uk. Continental europe goes medieval on the cheap pound. On unrelated DRM news, Spore is awarded the most pirated game of 2008. Way to go annoying your paying customers with crappy DRM guys!

More mobile news, Android is going Asiaside with the Kogan Agora.

After nearly being banned by EU the three strikes French law is back on the table. How ? Sarkozy used is position has head of the Council to remove the ban from the Telecom Package. And on censorship(!?) some UK ISPs are blocking Wikipedia. Apparently it works by sending their customer’s traffic to a third party for inspection in probable disrespect for privacy laws and telecom traffic tampering laws.

On Green Brilliancy, a non-profit bough an ad denouncing Panasonic bad recicling practices on the Times Square Panasonic huge display. More on green, Michelin is developing a in-wheel drivetrain for electric cars which means the transmission weight is gone and there’s actually better weight distribution across the chassis. Nice to see Michelin is not sitting on their collective hands waiting around for their business to die.

The single best feature of the iPhone platform for developers, being one single hw platform doesn’t seem to be holding up so well as iPhones/iPods vary greatly in 3D performance. On related touchphone news, the Nokia 5800 as finally gone on sale on some parts of the world and on expansys featuring a craptastic 550EUR pricetag which probably is good news for Nokia cause it means expansys actually believes some units will ship at that price.

While the PSP game sales are not too shabby, the DS game sales are astronomic. Basically, despite 0effort game piracy on the DS, DS users buy more games and each title sells more copies than on the PSP. People really love Nintendo.

Surprisingly, EU slapped France on the three strikes law. French ISPs and French ISP customers rejoice.

For lolz, the ISS compared to famous spaceships.

In an insanely cool tech advance scientists have developed tiny “light sabers” to kill individual cancer cells. It’s not everyday you find light sabers and cancer fighting on the same news bit.

On the mobile front, Flash is coming to Android/G1 to annoy Apple, sadly but expectedly the Nokia 5800 will be marked up with services for Xmas and Sagem has figured out how to put a GPS in a SIM card for some reason (definitely not for good reception).

There’s one more wave generator but this one needs to be tied to the sea floor and Better Place’s grid is going to be deployed in the Bay Area which is a major boost for electric cars in the US.

This has been a sad sad week for democracy in the EU. Not only has the EU Secretariat found there’s no public interest in finding out how public money is funneled into MS despite Microsoft having convicted in the EU for unfair trade practices but also it has turned down requests for access to the ACTA documents. The European Union wastes our money as it sees fit and signs into secret laws. All for our own good of course.

In an ironic twist of fate Halliburton applied for a patent on patent trolling and may soon be taking patent trolls to court on patent infringement …

Lots of Nokia stuff this week. The list of upcoming phones might have been leaked and if it’s true a phone with a big screen, hw keyboard and an heap of sensors is in the works. On the other hand the Nokia 5800 promised at under 300 EUR is showing up on nokia.es at 429 EUR. Bad Nokia, bad! On more phone news, treos and blackberrys are crappier than iphones contrary to anecdotal evidence, according to a SquareTrade study at least.

While Dean Kamen is working on a Stirling powered car some guys are working a way to make hydrogen from water without precious metals. And the friendly neighborhood mini nuclear reactor is making the rounds again so this has been an energy filled week.

Finally, a must have iphone app, Ocarina for the iPhone

Obviously, the big news this week is Obama becoming president-elect of the USA but CNN made the rounds too with craptastic pointless holograms

Apple’s plan seem to be humming along nicely and the iPhone is #2 in smartphones market share totally bypassing Blackberry and inching closer a distant Nokia. I’ve said this before, the no-brainer exchange integration on the iPhone (not even mentioning Nokia enabling exchange on all E and N phones) will kill RIM unless they make depoying their service easier.

In tech, not only are clever fellows working out how to make fuel grade oil with fungii but also clever fellows seem to be figuring out how to make chlorophyll bateries, Wireless USB is going nowhere fast, France passed laws to ban P2P users and cable and dsl ISPs have started filling for bankrupcy, Nokia is hiring like crazy but it’s also laying off, Firefox hit 20% worlwide and Ballmer admited tacitally the IE engine is a turd and they may explore other options like WeKit,

Amazon saves the world, one frustration at a time

I knew bundling software patents and business processes was a good thing. That’s cause there’s a lot of money to get software patents going there’s even more money to get business processes patents not going. This was the case in this court case where a Federal Appeals Court made patents on non-material ideas against the law. So, as it stands, and untill it’s overturned again patents on methods to scam the IRS, speedy online shoping cart processing or double-clicks are unenforceable.

In a “strange” case of life imitates The Simpsons real life voting machines are switching votes from Obama to McCain. Turns it the touchscreen was not properly calibrated or something.

We knew my kid’s gokart is faster than IE7 but we didn’t know the PS3 browser is faster than IE7. I’m not sure how this benchmarks are achieved but they’re fun anyway.

On tech, nuclear powered planes are back to the drawingboard, a US based company developed coloured e-paper type stuff that looks promising, bot swarms will either settle Mars or kill us all.

Japanese rhino zoo emergency drill. ‘Nough said.