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The Weekly Round-Up: 17.11.04
Who ate all the digital pies?

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 17 December 2004

Britain is a nation of porkers.

That's the view of one major hardware vendor, which this week claimed our obsession with "storing information and data on mobile devices has turned the country into a 'fat nation'" - virtually speaking, of course.

The theory makes for quite an interesting discussion point - more on that in a moment. What's also rather intriguing, or downright baffling, is the metaphor the release uses to describe this volume of data in 'real-world' terms:

"Based on the average number of text messages, emails, digital images and MP3 files consumers are storing on mobile devices today, users are carrying on average a ten gigabytes of data on their person daily. Based on research carried out by the University of California at Berkeley, one gigabyte of data is the equivalent to one pick-up truck full of books."

A pick-up truck full of books? The Round-Up would love to learn how the same clever boffins who brought us BSD came up with that particular sum.

Perhaps the techies were inspired by the 'Encyclopaedia Galactica' in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was such a comprehensive repository of information it required several articulated lorries to transport its micro-chipped volumes from points A to B.

Or, more likely, it sounds like the 'let's quantify data as books' metaphor was 'The Idea' that emerged from a brain dump by some marketing execs and not a result of a complex algorithm calculated by techies.

"So let's imagine that 10 gigabytes equals roughly 10 billion words, in say, Verdana, maybe 7 point..."
"Eight point!"
"You're right, Quentin, eight point, with single line spacing."
"In what size book? Demy Quarto?"
"Imperial Folio surely? The bigger the better."
"Why the hell not, Folio Imperial it is."
"So what does that gives us?"
(Sound of furious scribbling) "Carry the one..." (more scribbling) "Erm 12?"
"Hmm, right stick a zero on the end and make it 120, write up the release and assign it to some obscure research lab in Berkeley."
"That's gold dust, baby, gold dust..."

The Round-Up's got your number.

The subject of digital obesity (as the release calls it) is an interesting one and it's difficult to dispute that we are carrying more and more information around with us.

The Round-Up is a case in point: two mobile phones, one with a 2MB capacity, the other with a 32MB media card installed, a USB drive with 197MB in files, a laptop crammed with 37GB of information and an ageing 20GB iPod full of music that hasn't been played once in two years.

It’s the 'unused information' in the latter device that represents the crux of the problem. It's in our nature to hoard and we end up with vast amounts of useless information around the stuff we really need.

If it's of any interest, the three most useless things the Round-Up found on its hard drive this morning were (in no particular order):
• A file called 'asdsdaf' dating back to 1999 which just contains the text 'asdsdaf'
• An intriguing document entitled 'More ideas' which irritatingly is password-protected
• Old account details for NTL - which prompted a rush of painful memories and immediate deletion

Combine our natural instinct to hoard information with the endless growth of storage device capacities and we have a little problem. The iPod is a case in point. When the now-ubiquitous gadget launched in 2001 its initial 5GB capacity seemed an awful lot of space.

Then it became 10GB, then 20GB, then cheekily back to 15GB, then 30GB, 40GB, 60GB. This week Toshiba announced it had managed to produce an 80GB version of the 1.8-inch drive that is likely to debut in iPods next year. The company has also managed to build a thinner version of the 40GB drive that Apple currently uses in two existing iPod models. More storage in a smaller space, like an ever-shrinking personal Tardis.

Meanwhile, anyone who's anyone these days is offering 1GB of email storage free of charge.

However, as we gleefully cram more and more information onto our nice, shiny storage 'solutions' we become increasingly reliant on a different sort of technology to help us find what we really need among the gigabytes of data. Just where the heck is that file?

It’s no coincidence that as personal storage devices limits rise ever higher, the sexiest, funkiest company around today is also a pioneer of search technology.

Only this week Google announced a deal with three of the world's biggest universities - Harvard, Oxford and Loughborough (OK, Stanford) to digitise their vast, dusty libraries.

(That's not to say that that librarians in those worthy institutions have been a little remiss with their dusters recently - it just helps add to the old media-new media counterpoint.)

In addition, Google this week unveiled its latest innovation: a predictive searching beta that tries to guess what you're looking for in real-time (see here or give it a go here.)

Just take a brief glimpse at the news archive on silicon.com and the same names keep popping up: Google, Yahoo!, MSN.

Both Microsoft and more recently Yahoo! have redoubled their R&D efforts to keep up with the trailblazing guys 'n' gals at Google and rolled out desktop search tools.

Meanwhile, that other big personal OS vendor, Apple, is focussing its own developer talent on cracking the conundrum with the mega-search feature Spotlight - one of the key selling points of Tiger, the next iteration of OS X, due out in 2005.

So we have one load of companies indulging our natural tendency to hoard information, while another load of companies (in some cases, the same ones) are helping us find all the information we want among all the information we don't need.

Supply and demand in a nutshell. And to think some people think storage isn't sexy...

Staying with iPods, Apple has taken revenge on erstwhile rival RealNetworks.

The Mac maker has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks' online music store of the popular MP3 players.

Earlier this year, RealNetworks made the rather interesting move of publicly breaking Apple's DRM (digital rights management) technology - thereby allowing iPod owners to download music from its own store and not just iTunes.

At the time a "stunned" Apple denounced RealNetworks as utilising the tactics of a "hacker".

Now it seems it's followed up on its promise to block RealNetworks - and some might say customer choice - through a firmware update that renders songs bought on the competing music store unplayable on the iPod.

Despite the fact that RealNetworks was violating Apple's proprietary technology, executives from several record labels applauded the company's attempt to create compatibility between its store and the iPod, with or without permission.

Curious, then, that these were the same record companies so affronted by the abuse of intellectual property they alleged file swapping was responsible for.

It seems IP abuse + falling record sales = heinous misdemeanour, while IP abuse + good record sales = just fine and dandy...

If you have no common sense, way too much money and are looking for the ideal gift this Christmas, you'll no doubt be interested to learn that the Segway Human Transporter may be on its way to Europe.

The Segway Human Transporter is the device that many senior tech execs (Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos among them) predicted would transform cities and stop the world spinning on its axis.

However, when it was finally launched sales of the Segway were spectacularly underwhelming. A 2003 recall for the devices to fix a bug that was causing people to fall off the machines that were touted as being "unfalloffable" (as rugged football sex symbol Ian Dowie might put it) revealed that a mere 6,000 had been sold.

At a recent event in New York Dean Kaman, founder of Segway and inventor of the device, said: "It's difficult to gauge what my expectation should be... It's hard to say whether I should be ecstatic that we've even sold one of these things for $5,000 or be devastated that cities aren't filled with them... "

Given the initial hype, the Round-Up imagines the latter is more likely.

However, the company behind the grass strimmer on wheels thinks the European mindset might be more suited to understand what "fun, smart transportation feels like" (Segway's own marketing slogan, not ours) given that we are apparently more open to alternative forms of transport, such as the Smart car.

So in an attempt to transform Europe's fundamental transport paradigm/shift warehouses full of unsold inventory (delete as appropriate) the Segway is making its gyroscopic way over the Pond.

However, the last time the Round-Up heard rumour of Segways appearing on the streets of London, Paris and Munich some bright spark in the Dutch civil service pointed out that the devices were actually illegal in Europe as they hadn't been approved as a new vehicle type. But the Round-Up is sure that’s in hand.

(At the time, a separate legislative loophole stated that the devices could be ridden on pavements as long as they don't exceed 3.7 miles per hour - roughly walking speed - which kind of misses the point in owning a vehicle for most people.)

So if you have the inclination and the cash you could say it with a Segway this Christmas. Though truth be told it would be a bugger to wrap...

And finally this week, Peter Cochrane and silicon.com are pleased to announce the winners of our competition for the best idea based on the well-loved format of his fortnightly column for us, 'Uncommon Sense'.

The first-prize winner is Ian McNairn, an IT professional, trained biologist and serious photographer living in Buckinghamshire, England. He's been reading Peter's columns for over two years after coming across them on silicon.com.

His idea: "I would like to suggest that a 'backward looking' column, from the perspective of 10 to 15 years hence, would be a powerful tool to use to both predict what may happen, and to enlighten, as you so effectively do, the masses, and hopefully the decision-makers as well, as to some of the hard decisions that need to be made now."

The four runners-up are: Dick Winchester, Richard Sheppard, John Scott and Norman Bartlett.

All will receive copies of Peter's latest book, based on his work for silicon.com, the Round-Up may humbly add, and without further ado, read the column based on McNairn's suggestion, here.