The Weekly Round-Up: 08.06.07

There are many common challenges we all face in life. Paying the bills, finding time to spend with your family, juggling weighty questions about what we want to make of our lives, capturing leopards, putting the kids through school...

What's that you say? Capturing leopards isn't something you struggle with on a daily basis?

Well you clearly aren't a forest ranger in the Indian state of Gujarat then are you? (Though if you are, drop us a line because the Round-Up would love to hear from you.)

Forest rangers in the region have turned to technology in their quest to capture stray leopards which are finding their way into villages and making a nuisance of themselves (presumably not by sitting in a prominent position in the living room and licking their own anus, which the Round-Up's cat always used to do whenever visitors were around - but he's dead now. These cats are probably problematic in a more 'bite-y' kind of way.)

The cunning plan that rangers have devised involves putting mobile phones in a cage, ringing the phone from a safe distance and then waiting until the leopard enters the cage to check out the ringing mobile phone.

Because leopards hate to leave a phone unanswered?

You may well ask what ringtone are they using that is such a lure to leopards. Well, the rangers hit upon the genius stroke of recording cows mooing and are now using that sound to entice leopards who will presumably come down from their trees to work out what all the mooing is about... or possibly to tuck into some nice rare steak.

Through all of this, the Round-Up carried just one thought: 'Well I never knew they had leopards in India.'

You learn something new every day.

Moo-ving on, what a week it's been for Kieran O'Neill…

'Who he?' you may well ask. Well, O'Neill is a student from the University of Bath who this week sold his website for £630,000, which is probably a very decent sum of money to have sloshing about in the bank when your only outgoings are 50p pints of fizzy lager, an occasional pot noodle and a Smiths poster (unless student life has dramatically changed since the Round-Up's day).

In between the usual distractions of uni life, O'Neill somehow found time to run the website HolyLemon.com which offered users a way to broadcast their own videos. Think YouTube, only far less successful and yet set up - somewhat annoyingly for O'Neill - a full two years before YouTube launched.

YouTube, lest we forget, was bought last year by Google for an eye-watering $1.65bn.

... and all of a sudden £630,000 doesn't sound so impressive. But let's not take our eyes off the prize.

HolyLemon.com boasts around 1.1million unique visitors per month, which isn't bad for a website that O'Neill originally set up while studying for his GCSEs as a way of showing off some Flash animations he'd created.

According to a press release from the rightly proud University of Bath: "After spending three weeks at the company headquarters in San Francisco, O'Neill accepted an offer from Handheld Entertainment who impressed him with their vision for the company."

... not the £630,000 then? Which, albeit quite a low sum for a website with such a proven user base, no doubt sounds like the moon-on-a-stick to a student (a fact Handheld Entertainment may well have been aware of).

So the next obvious question is what did O'Neill do to celebrate? Big knees up in the Students' Union with a few close friends? Or perhaps a trip up to London for a 48 hour orgy of drinking, casinos and showgirls...

"With exams, I haven't really had time to celebrate yet," said O'Neill, a second year business administration student.

Or revision, that's a good option.

The Round-Up would probably have put off revision and let the exams look after themselves. After all, it's only the second year. He could still wrestle back a 2:2 if he got his head down in the third year, especially as university exams are about as taxing as the Dubai government.

So does O'Neill harbour any ill-feeling towards YouTube - which really just did the same thing, only bigger and better.

"At the time of its launch I remember seeing YouTube and thinking that it was good," said O'Neill. "This was back when my site was 10 times the size.

"YouTube's success came through a widget that allowed people to distribute video content - but then they have had a team of developers and a lot of money to get it where it is today."

But although he's not living the squillion-dollar gold-plated lifestyle of Chad Hurley or Steve Chen, who sold YouTube to Google, it sounds as though O'Neill has found the whole thing very fulfilling, if something of a balancing act.

"I have had to learn a lot about optimising my time to fit in work, studies and socialising," said O'Neill. "There is always an interesting balance between developing an advertising proposal for the website or going clubbing."

... the Round-Up would have been out the door, glow-sticks and whistle in hand before thoughts of an advertising proposal had even dawned.

The University of Bath is now hoping O'Neill will serve as an example to others.

Everybody's favourite internet search behemoth Google has been ruffling some feathers this week as it rolls out Street View functionality within its hugely popular Google Maps.

Not content with enabling users to zoom in on sunbathing nudists, swastika-shaped apartment blocks or potty-mouthed cornfields, Google is now zooming in to street level and enabling users to have a look around cities such as New York, Las Vegas and San Francisco.

However, given the clear detail of the pictures some people are kicking up a bit of a stink over what they claim is an invasion of privacy. One woman took issue with the fact she could clearly see her cat, Monty, when zooming in on her own home.

That's the problem with these new-fangled technologies. Nobody ever thinks about the cats.

Mary Kalin-Casey, told The New York Times: "The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives. The next step might be seeing books on my shelf."

"If the government was doing this, people would be outraged," she added, quite rightly. But somehow Google seems to have some special dispensation.

Other sights on Street View that have been causing a stir include a trailer with an advertising hoarding on, outside the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas promising the services of some 'Hot Babes' ('direct to you'), along with a photo of one of said 'hot babes'.

Hot babes? It's 45 degrees in Vegas right now, of course they're hot... which might explain why she's had to take her clothes off.

And then there's the image of a man who appears to be entering an 'adult book store', and another of man, clearly recognisable (if you knew him), who looks like he's coming out of a strip club - though in truth he's probably just paying cash into a parking metre outside the place. So you could forgive him too for being a little peeved at how Google's image could be misconstrued.

Google compiled all these images by driving around the cities in question snapping away with cameras to build up 360-degree street level scenes.

If you just happened to be walking through the shot at the time, or sunbathing in a bikini, as two girls are pictured doing, then that's your bad (or good) luck, depending on whether you fancy the notoriety.

And finally, the Round-Up likes to think it is a great egalitarian and nowhere should equality be more apparent and transparent than in the use of technology.

Previously the Round-Up would have said everybody should be entitled to access to computers and the internet. One of the silicon.com editorial team even cycled across Kenya earlier this year to help make this happen.

But over time it has become clear that this is too simplistic an assessment.

Because it's a sad fact that of course some people should lose all those privileges and should be denied access to computers.

Scammers, spammers and virus writers for starters.

And the people who designed the 2012 logo for the London Olympics, which was unveiled - or perhaps more accurately 'sicked up' - this week to choruses of derision and howls of laughter.

It's a technicoloured yawn of design absurdity that perhaps wouldn't have looked out of place as a Top of Pops logo in about 1984 when animating blocks of neon colour might have been considered a feat of unrivalled computer graphics. Now, 23 years on, it looks decidedly, well, crap, for want of a better word.

The Round-Up wholeheartedly endorses any effort to track down the designers behind this £400,000 monstrosity, confiscate their Macs, encase them in concrete (the Macs, not the designers... although... ) and go drop them far out in the North Sea so they can never harm people's sensibilities ever again.

And then the Round-Up recommends some major amendments to the Computer Misuse Act to prevent against any such future design nightmares.

If you think you can do better, then UK training company The Training Camp has launched a competition for budding designers, asking them to submit their entries. The winner will get £400 and the best designs will be passed on to the 2012 organising committee to ignore.

Rob Chapman, CEO of The Training Camp said: "The fact it took 12 months and £400,000 to produce a naff, garish logo which seems to be universally detested proves the exercise was a complete waste of time and money. Our competition will generate hundreds of designs in a week, for far less cash."

Find out more, here.

And on that note, the Round-Up will sign off for another week. Watch out for leopards. And don't forget to check out this week's Round-Up podcast - for more on Google Street View, ringtones to catch big cats and a lot more besides. (You can even subscribe in iTunes here - or pick up the XML feed here.)

And there's also a new caption competition - so get stuck in. Congratulations to last week's winner: Ian Herold.