Bluetooth is getting smarter, according to the British company that dominates the market for the short-range wireless chips.

John Scarisbrick, chief executive of Cambridge Silicon Radio, produced as proof his Jawbone, made by  San Francisco’s Aliph, on a visit to our office.

The high-end mobile earpiece depends on CSR’s Bluetooth chip, but the Cambridge, UK company has also crammed digital signal processors and other features onto the silicon that improve voice quality and battery life.

In Sony’s PlayStation 3 Bluetooth headsets, CSR has tweaked its software to eliminate any delay between something exploding on screen and players hearing the sound. The same low-latency derivative of Bluetooth will power headsets for portable media players to ensure accurate lip-syncing between video and audio.

The Bluetooth standard itself has enjoyed several upgrades between the 1.0 and 2.1 version. 2.0 added the stereo capability and 2.1 eliminates the need for inputting a pin code to pair devices – instead, just putting the two in proximity to one another makes them assume a connection.

Bog-standard Bluetooth chips now cost only $1 - $2, which is why CSR is trying to add value with extra processors and software. It is also expanding into Wireless USB chips and ultra low power Bluetooth, which could add features such as remote-control functions to phones.

CSR has 60 per cent of the Bluetooth market, with its nearest rivals Broadcom and Texas Instruments of the US taking 20 per cent and 5 per cent respectively.

Mr Scarisbrick’s visit to Silicon Valley to meet investors made him realise CSR was still only a small voice in America’s ear, but he was able to point out with some satisfaction that they were probably hearing about it through one of the 85 per cent of Bluetooth headsets that contain CSR’s chip.

There is an old kids’ riddle which goes:

Q. When is a door not a door?
A. When it’s ajar.

And in a similar vein we can ask:

Q. When is a portal not a portal?
A. When it’s Nokia’s Ovi (door).

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia was reluctant to use the word "portal" yesterday at the launch of the Ovi service.

"I prefer to call it a gateway," in an FT interview following Wednesday’s gala news event.

Ovi means door in Finnish, and of course, "portal", "gateway" and "door" are all pretty much the same thing, semantically speaking.

But there are many reasons Nokia wants to steer clear of the "portal" word.

For one thing, mobile operators have portals and Nokia wants to minimise the sense that Ovi will be a competitor to these services. Although, of course, it will be. Ovi is designed to be a sort of jumping off point to access the mobile internet, a home page through which you can access music downloads, games and other services. A lot like what Vodafone Live or Orange World might offer.

Secondly, "portal" has mutated from its original Latin meaning of gateway and in today’s internet world has come to signify something closed, a walled garden where mobile operators steer you towards their own branded services and only reluctantly allow you to see the wider world. Nokia wants to stress openness. The Ovi can connect you to the wider internet, to Google or Yahoo or eBay as easily as it connects you to Nokia’s online music store.

By fostering a sense of openness, Nokia wants to make the mobile internet more enticing. It’s all about perception - the doors of perception in this case. 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”

William Blake, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Second Life, the virtual world where users can create new personalities, is to insist its members identify themselves in real life if they want full access to the service.

Linden Lab, Second Life’s creator, today unveiled an identity verification system for residents.

The company said users identifying themselves would be voluntary, but necessary if they wanted to access restricted regions in the metaverse where explicit sexual or excessively violent content was available.

The service is in its beta testing phase and uses Aristotle’s Integrity technology. The process of providing information such as digits from a Social Security number, driving licence or passport takes place in the “My Accounts” section and should take less than two minutes. Data will not be stored by Linden Lab or Aristotle.

When real-world rules have been introduced in the past, Second Life residents have protested that their experience has been diluted. Linden Lab’s latest move has received a similar reception in comments on its blog post about Integrity.

“Sorry folks. RL [Real Life] and SL [Second Life] need to be separate. Move your servers to some other country that doesn’t require such levels of scrutiny,” says one.

Robin Harper, head of community development, described the move as “an important and necessary step in the development of Second Life.”

"Anonymity has long been both a benefit and a challenge for online communities: a benefit because it offers opportunities to reinvent yourself; a challenge when it comes to the creation of trusting relationships. With the option to verify aspects of their real life identity, such as age and name, Second Life Residents can begin to build trust and safety systems inside the virtual world and their virtual community."

Of course, Linden Lab may be responding to some of the pressure it has been coming under of late. It banned gambling last month after FBI agents had visited in-world casinos and earlier banned material related to child pornography after the Dutch public prosecutor threatened legal action.

A search engine for hot concert tickets and a social networking site for silver surfers are among 20 fledgling web businesses selected for a week-long entrepreneurship bootcamp that its founders hope will spawn Europe’s answer to Google.

Seedcamp, which starts on Monday, is billed as an intensive series of events, run by investors, entrepreneurs and experts in marketing, finance and human resources, aimed at equipping European high-technology start-ups with the skills to grow into multi-billion dollar companies.

(more…)

Call it the winner’s curse. Facebook Platform - a service that allows outside developers to build applications that work on the Facebook social networking site - sparked huge interest when it launched this spring.

The service proved so popular that Facebook almost immediately began receiving complaints that some rogue opportunists were spamming users’ friends with application invites. Power users who installed many applications soon found that their Facebook news feeds - an important source of information about what is going on in their friend networks - were being flooded with application updates. Other users reported isolated cases of developers engaging in deceptive or misleading practices, such as tricking users into inviting friends to join a new application.

Earlier this month, Facebook’s platform team delivered a stern warning to its developer community: Dodgy practices that mislead users would no longer be tolerated. On Monday Facebook followed up by announcing plans to tighten up its platform offering. Among the changes, developers will no longer be able to build custom invitation features - they will have to choose from among a set of standard invitation templates designed by Facebook. Developers will also no longer be able to send emails to users informing them that a friend has added their application.

Dave Morin, head of Facebook’s platform team, says the changes are designed to "shift the balance more in favor of good apps, which we think in the long term is good for everyone."

Whether Facebook can use its platform to become an "operating system for the web," as some observers have suggested, remains an open question. But its response to  platform abuse has demonstrated an ability to make adjustments on the fly, all while keeping its users’ interests in mind - an important skill to master in the fickle world of social networking.

The supposed Chinese bid to buy a US disk drive company gets more and more curious. It all started over the weekend, when the New York Times quoted Bill Watkins, ceo of Seagate, as saying that an approach had been made - though he wouldn’t say who had made it, or to whom. For good measure, he added that people were "freaking out" about this in Washington DC, since control of advanced disk drive technology could help the Chinese plunder US secrets.

Since Seagate and Western Digital are the only remaining US disk drive makers (IBM having sold out to Hitachi), and since it was Watkins making these comments in public, this seemed to point a finger directly at Western.

So what does the famously loquacious Watkins have to say for himself? He was said by the company to be travelling today, but Seagate issued a clarification to say that, for its part, it "has not received such an offer and we are not trying to sell the company."

Without denying the weekend’s story, it went on to try to distance Watkins from the report:

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told the NY Times that he was aware of growing interest in disk drive technology from companies located in China, Korea and Japan, all of which are working in concert with their governments and have made disc drive storage a national agenda, and that in light of this there were important public policy considerations that the United States government should be thinking about.

That’s far from a denial, though. Western Digital continued today to refuse to comment. Whether or not it is considering a sale, it can’t have helped Western to be on the receiving end of comments like these from one of its biggest competitors.

New friend notifications on Facebook, weekly events newsletters, Twitter updates; the list goes on. As web-based services have come to permeate our lives, so too have automated email updates come to permeate our inboxes. 

Such messages present a dilemma. They resemble spam in that we are bombarded with them daily. Subscribe to too many web services and you may soon find that such updates are clogging your inbox, just like spam. They are unlike spam, however, in that you actually want to read them, at some point - just not right now. Computer geeks now have a term for this kind of troublesome "non-spam spam": Bacn. As in, bacn is better than spam, but still clogs your inbox.

The term has been picked up by hundreds of blogs since it was mentioned at a conference on Sunday. Having now decided on a sufficiently ironic buzzword for the bacn problem, one hopes that the tech community will set about finding a solution. 

Below, a video documenting the birth of the internet’s latest buzzword, courtesy of lifeblogger iJustine.

Colleagues at our sister paper Financial Times Deutschland have unearthed some tantalising details about Apple’s iPhone distribution deals in Europe. FTD reports that T-Mobile of Germany, Orange of France and O2 of the UK have agreed to hand over 10 per cent of their iPhone service revenues to Apple in exchange for the honour of being the first European mobile networks to partner with Apple on the new mobile handset. Most industry watchers are fairly certain that Apple had struck a similar revenue-sharing deal with AT&T in the US, but today’s story marks the first time that a concrete number has been established.

Assuming that Apple’s 10 per cent cut applies not only in Europe but to its US AT&T deal as well, and further assuming an average monthly iPhone bill of $79.99 (that’s not including overages or roaming charges - which have proved substantial in some cases), Apple could be making an additional $95.88 per handset per year on service revenues on the iPhone. If Apple hits its goal of selling 10m iPhones by the end of 2008, that would mean an extra $950m in service revenues by the end of next year. Not half bad.

Leaving the numbers aside, the fact that Apple has managed to hold out for such a high percentage of service charges in Europe - where the mobile market is much more advanced than in the US - is a sign that the iPhone and Apple really are changing the rules of the mobile game. While Research in Motion managed to get a revenue share on its Blackberry, no one until now has managed to do it with a consumer-oriented handset. The question now is whether the iPhone really is a unique case or whether Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other handset makers have the bargaining power to follow Apple’s lead.

There’s a natural cycle in the corporate tech business. Suppliers come up with the latest Big Idea. PR departments promote the heck out of it. Tech journalists, always on the lookout for some shiny new thing, rush to write about it. Sometimes, customers even buy it. Within a couple of years the spotlight moves on to the next Big Idea - and noone stops to ask too much about the ideas that flopped.

"Service-oriented architecture" has been climbing this hype curve for some time. Yet the platforms on which SOA are meant to be built - such as those from Oracle and SAP - are still years from completion. Early adoption rates are very low. This may end up being the new architecture of the software business, but somehow these things have a way of mutating. Few customers bet big on a whole new architecture. In time, the idea is revised and adapted, a new label is found. The PR departments come up with a different slogan.

A good mark of the hype is the number of mentions that a new technology gets in the media. The chart below shows a 12-month count of the press mentions of SOA (from the Factiva database of media sources.) For a comparison, look at what happened to another Big Idea that fizzled - utility computing. Turns out companies weren’t really ready for that one after all.

Watching the Web measurement companies trying to keep pace with changing audience habits on the internet is a bit like watching the credit rating agencies attempting to keep up with the latest trends in sub-prime mortgages: by the time the score-keepers work it out, the rest of the world has pretty much figured out what’s going on.

comScore’s latest stab at defining the internet search market is of interest nonetheless. It has changed its methodology to reflect the fact that many searches these days originate on affiliate sites, not the main search engines themselves, and that internet users often carry out different types of search for the same query by clicking on the "web", "images", "news" and other tabs - something known as "cross-channel search." It has also started to include results for search queries on "vertical" sites like eBay and Amazon. These are the highlights:

Google’s dominance is even more pronounced. Thanks to its dominance of the affiliate business, Google’s share in July of what comScore calls the "core" US search market was 20 per cent higher than a year before: Yahoo’s share had fallen by a similar degree (For the record, comScore gives Google a 55.2 per cent market share, Yahoo 23.5 per cent and Microsoft 12.3 per cent.) A Yahoo spokeswoman says the company turned its attention away from the affiliate business during Project Panama but is now fighting hard for alliances again.

The rise of MySpace: The number of searches conducted through Fox’s network of websites has now reached nearly 50 per cent of the number seen on Microsoft.

Ecommerce and classifieds: More searches are carried out on eBay than on fourth-placed search engine Ask.com. That creates both an opportunity and a dilemna for eBay: is the best way to monetise all those searches simply to return product listings, or to attach adverts as well that generate leads for other merchants - though at the risk of alienating its core users? Meanwhile, classifieds service Craigslist saw its query volumes grow faster than any of the other big sites in July, rising nearly 9 per cent from a year before and accounting for 40 per cent as many searches as eBay.