Could all the fuss about solid-state drives for laptops be a flash in the pan?

Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest hard drive maker, thinks it is, but then he has every reason to want flash drives in notebook PCs to flop.

Japanese analysts have predicted that 64-gigabyte flash memory chips could start to replace standard hard-disk drives in laptops in 2009 as their price falls below $120. Toshiba has announced a massive expansion of Nand flash production to take advantage of the trend.

Flash has no moving parts, so it is faster, lighter and needs less power than a hard drive, making it an ideal alternative for laptops.

But Mr Watkins, talking to us after Seagate announced full-year earnings, pooh-poohs the idea.

“[Microsoft’s Windows] Vista takes about 18-19Gbs to load, if you buy a notebook with a 32Gb [flash] drive, you don’t really want a notebook, you want an MP3 player and a pencil and paper,” he says.

The forthright Mr Watkins recalls giving a speech recently to industry executives in Tokyo and asking for a show of hands on who had one of the new flash-drive laptops made by companies such as Samsung. No one did.

In the last quarter, his average hard-drive size supplied for laptops was 100Gb and he feels consumers choosing between same-priced 64Gb flash drives and 250Gb hard drives in a few years’ time will go for the extra storage.

Mr Watkins predicts the next storage technology that is likely to emerge will be a hybrid one, combining flash chips with their power-saving and performance features with the cost-per-gigabyte and greater reliability benefits of hard drives. Seagate began shipping its first hybrid drive in the second quarter.

We recently noted that this blog was no longer accessible in China, and wondered aloud why Beijing’s shadowy censors had seen fit to target ft.com. Well, we should probably have looked a little more closely at our blog setup. FT Tech Blog actually resides on servers run by blog host company Typepad, and it is access to Typepad that is being blocked by the Great Firewall see here. 

So there’s no reason to believe it was something we said that got us blocked - and rather than the target of some of China’s increasingly sophisticated and targetted censorship, we are merely among the many victims of a rather blunt instrument of internet control. Not that that is much comfort, of course.

Casual gamers received their share of the limelight at last week’s E3 video games convention in Santa Monica and this booming segment of the industry got its own conference this week in Seattle.

Attendees at the Casual Connect convention were well up on last year and the Casual Games Association reported that investors had put $200m into the industry in the past year, with more than $35m invested in massively-multiplayer online casual games.

The audience is still overwhelmingly female at 74 per cent, but the CGA said it was broadening, with males taking up 50 per cent of the non-paying player segment.

Announcements in and around the show included Google’s plans to launch Adsense for Games, an in-game advertising technology, Microsoft Casual Games’ introduction of the GoPets virtual world to its instant messaging client and Electronic Arts’ announcement that its Club Pogo casual gaming destination had sold more than 100m virtual gems.

Oberon Media also completed its triple-play of casual games offerings with the acquisition of PixelPlay, which offers interactive TV games. It had earlier bought the I-play mobile casual games company to complement its own online computer game offerings.

King.com, formerly known as Midasplayer in the UK, announced it would be an exclusive provider of skill games for RealNetworks RealArcade service.

Skill games differ from gambling games, relying mainly on skill rather than chance, but they can have the same tournament-based play or contests with cash rewards. King has exclusive rights to skill games such American Idol and Deal or No Deal.

Its co-founder and joint chief executive Toby Rowland, based in London, and Los Angeles-based Robert Norton, head of business development, dropped into our San Francisco office after the Seattle show to talk about the company.

The two are well-known serial dotcom entrepreneurs in the UK, where their first company, Clickmango, was a casualty of the first internet wave.

King, founded in 2003,  seems on a much sounder footing, with VC backing from Apax Partners and Index Ventures and $26.5m in revenues last year and operating income of $1.4m.

"King is still very Web 1.0," says Toby, introducing his latest project MyGame.com, a site with Web 2.0 values of creating and sharing games that aims to address a younger demographic.

This has none of the ambition of MIT’s Scratch however - building a game goes no further than personalising an existing one with photos, but then we are talking casual gamers after all.

Facebook’s acquisition of Parakey is interesting for several reasons. Not only is it Mark Zuckerberg’s first acquisition on the road to becoming an internet mogul, it may also be an engineering coup. Before they founded Parakey, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt were better known as the founders of Mozilla Firefox, the company behind the popular Firefox web browser. They are known as some of the best developers around, and adding their formidable talent to Facebook’s growing team should be good for all involved.

Another interesting aspect of this is Parakey itself. In its press release, Facebook says Parakey’s software, which is still in the development phase, is a "platform for bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop." If Facebook folds this software into its platform, it will join Google, Adobe, and others who are all working on ways to break down the barriers between the online and offline worlds. What role an offline capability might play in Facebook’s platform strategy remains to be seen - but it’s an interesting step. For further reading, see Valleywag’s take here.

Finally, assuming that Facebook paid for Parakey in stock, Thursday’s deal means that Facebook may now be part-owned by Sequoia, the powerhouse VCs behind Google and other big Valley success stories. Sequoia, which didn’t manage to get in on the ground floor at Facebook, was a big investor in Parakey. 

It was fun while it lasted, but no one need pick up a game of draughts again. Researchers at the University of Alberta say they have solved the game of checkers, as it is known in the US and Canada, using brute force computing.

Since 1989, a dozen or more computers have been working simultanteously to calculate all possible moves arising from the game’s traditional starting position. The result? A perfectly played game of daughts will result in a draw every time, just like tic-tac-toe.

Anyone anxious to test their skills against the Canadians’s perfect chess computer can try it here.

SpinVox, the leading UK speech-to-text voicemail service, is setting up shop here in San Francisco as it expands into converting the social conversations of the Web 2.0 crowd into the written word.

SpinVox started out using its speech-recognition technology to offer a time-saving conversion of voicemails into text transcripts, which are emailed to its users.

In May, it announced a deal with San Francisco’s Six Apart that allows its 12m LiveJournal members to post by voice over the phone to their blogs.

Now it is voice-enabling SMS messages and email, helping Twitter users to post by voice. Further development work is taking place in unified messaging for the corporate market.

Christina Domecq, chief executive, who was in the city this week to open the new offices, describes SpinVox as a “global managed service provider” that is now working with five carriers in the US to deploy “voice-to-screen” voicemail services.

She sees competition emerging from the big players such as Microsoft, which bought Tellme in March, Google, which is working on speech recognition for mobile search and has bought GrandCentral, and Nuance.

There are also smaller players already offering a similar service to SpinVox in the shape of SimulScribe, CallWave and Jott.

Daniel Doulton, vice president of strategy and development, claims SpinVox has a superior technology, protected now by over 40 patents, which delivers more accurate transcripts whether the language is English, French, German or Spanish.

SpinVox earns revenues “per event” from carriers – whenever a voicemail is converted to text by a premium service. But with messages being literally spelt out, the possibility of contextual ads being included is also being explored.

Chalk one up for the Google PR team. The search engine scored a public relations coup earlier this week when it announced that it would begin deleting ‘cookies’ - the little bits of data that help web sites identify their users and track their browsing habits - after two years.

The immediate conclusion of most journalists seems to have been that Google’s new policy will help allay privacy conerns. Understandable, since that’s how Google sold the story. From the Google press release:

After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we’ve concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy.

But hold on. A CEO I spoke to yesterday, who is following the privacy issue closely, says Google’s new policy will have almost no effect on privacy. That’s because Google will reset its two-year cookie countdown each time you visit the Google site. The only way the policy would have any effect at all is if people didn’t return to the site for two years. Fat chance.

A few reporters have caught on to Google’s little PR hoodwink, including Ryan Singel at Wired:

People who go two years between Google searches on a given browser will have their old queries de-linked from their new ones.  Google users who do not occasionally destroy their cookies will continue to have their entire search history recorded for posterity and potential subpoenas.  Google users who sign up for an account and don’t know to UNCLICK the Web History box will have almost all of their Web usage recorded by Google.

To be fair, Google is quite upfront about all this in its press release. It also says that users who return to the Google site will continue to be able to control their cookies through their browsers. Still, for Google, or anyone else, to suggest that Google’s decision to delete cookies after two years is a big step forward to privacy is an exaggeration, at best.

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Guessing the value of Facebook has become Silicon Valley’s favourite pastime. According to one of its biggest investors, however, it really isn’t for sale - at least, not at anything like the price anyone would be willing to pay for it.

Peter Thiel, who says he’s the second-biggest shareholder in the hottest private company du jour, is pretty direct. "We believe it’s worth $8-10bn," he said at a meeting last week. (The "we" includes his fellow directors at the social networking company, founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Jim Breyer.) He adds:

We could probably get $2-3bn at the moment, but there’s noone who thinks it’s worth what we do.

How do Thiel and co justify their price tag? With 30m users, growing at 3 per cent a week, Facebook could have 100m users by the end of this year, he says. As a former boss of PayPal, he also says he’s seen before just how significant companies with built-in network effects can become:

The big lesson I learnt from the PayPal experience was, people tend to underestimate how far it can go.

He makes two other claims for Facebook’s lasting competitive advantage. One is its new platform strategy. Quoting Bill Joy ("Most of the smart people in the world don’t work for you") he says that opening up to other developers gives Facebook a degree of future-proofing. The company may not itself anticipate the killer app of online behaviour five or ten years from now, but if the smartest developers are drawn to its platform there’s a fair chance it will play host to the next big thing.

The other is that Facebook is collecting valuable information about all those new users. At some stage, that will prove very valuable - even if, for now, it has its eyes fixed on growth rather than monetisation.

Can the question of business model be dismissed so easily? A partner in one of the Valley’s most prominent VC firms (while confessing to deep envy at not having been able to invest in Facebook himself) points out that simply plastering display ads over Facebook pages will not do. That is simply a recipe for degrading the user experience. Where is the killer app for commercialising the site - the AdWords of the social networking world, something which fits naturally into the experience in the same way that search marketing complemented Google? Short of such a breakthrough, it seems purely speculative to try to put a value on Facebook.

If Thiel’s price tag represents his (and Zuckerberg’s) true opinion, and isn’t some elaborate attempt to stoke up a bidding war, then it seems Facebook will stay an independent company for a good while yet. That’s what Fred Wilson believes (or rather, hopes) - he’s counting on an IPO next year.

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While pirates are readying their photocopiers in India and China for the publication of the final Harry Potter book this weekend, a digital camera has already been used as a crude photocopier here in the West to publish the book illegally online.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is available on file-sharing sites and has already been downloaded thousands of times.

This digital version of the book consists of a photo being taken of it two pages at a time. The book - a US edition published by Scholastic - is lying on a carpeted floor and the pirate’s hand can be seen holding the pages open, an empty coke can lies on its side next to it.

With bit-torrent technology, the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it can take place, making the two-file 75-megabyte Harry Potter download possible in a matter of a few minutes.

However, fans would probably prefer to buy the book – the images are sometimes fuzzy and likely to cause eye-strain after a while. For the curious, the download may sate their appetite a little before Saturday’s launch and there are already plot summaries online and lists of the characters who die, if you really can’t wait to find out how the saga ends.

It’s nice to hear One Laptop Per Child and Intel have patched up their differences, but will two heads be better than one in solving the problem of providing schoolkids with computers in the developing world?

Stephen Dukker, chief executive of Silicon Valley’s nComputing, thinks not and has a seven-computers-for-the-price-of-one solution of his own.

“Can you do serious work for eight hours on a seven-inch screen?” he asks of the OLPC laptop and Intel’s Classmate PC.

“They are not right for these markets because the support ecosystem is not there and they won’t be as long as it’s charitable - the governments don’t have the people to do the infrastructure.”

“They are products for college students in the developed world who can’t afford a notebook, and I think they would sell very well in our markets.”

Mr Dukker should know: he co-founded eMachines in the 1990s, which helped drive down PC prices in the West to around $400. He says the industry has hit a wall on pricing since, although PCs now have the power of the old mainframe computers.

With this in mind, he is pushing the out-of-fashion idea of thin clients. One PC in a classroom equipped with nComputing’s plug-in card and software can be linked to up to six of its little black boxes, which have connections for keyboards, mice and monitors.

The main PC’s processing power is able to drive an operating system and programs on the other six terminals. With four PCs and the $70 boxes daisy-chained to them, a classroom computer lab for 28 pupils can be set up for a fraction of the normal cost.

NComputing’s solution is gaining traction in rural US school districts and the developing world.

In the UK, Ndiyo is a not-for-profit initiative that combines both charitable aims with a similar belief in thin clients.

Ndiyo, whose commercial spin-off DisplayLink enables multiple monitors to be connected to a PC through a USB connection, has produced a similar black box to nComputing’s, called Nivo.

Nivo will also cost less than $100 and Ndiyo envisages 20 such boxes being run off a single PC server in a developing-world internet café.

Both nComputing and Ndiyo say their solutions are greener as well – standalone PCs tend to consume around 100 watts each, while their thin-client boxes consume just five watts of power.