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The Weekly Round-Up: 19.10.07
The old order changeth...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 19 October 2007

When a 23-year-old college drop-out with a novelty website is voted the most influential person in technology it can mean only one thing: the second internet bubble is most definitely upon us.

Break out the bubbly and the vastly over-priced stock options.

Actually, you can break out the bubbly for another good reason - silicon.com's annual Agenda Setters special report has been published and the top 50 is probably the most intriguing line-up in the eight-year history of the survey.

Heading the list this year is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has taken his social networking fireball from Harvard dorm to Silicon Valley darling in just a few years.

His position at the head of the list of technology's movers and shakers rather neatly ties in with the runner-up in last year's vote: the 'next generation'. In 2006, the Agenda Setters panel decided that the second spot should go to a whole generation which was, in their words, "more networked", "more open" and even "more fickle" than those that have come before. Pesky kids.

Facebook and Zuckerberg would certainly fit the bill as champions of the web 2.0 wave that has swept over the industry in the last 12 months. In fact, it's hard to recall either Facebook or its fresh-faced CEO being out of the news this year. Or the Weekly Round-Up, for the matter.

(If you aren't fans of the company then the Round-Up offers its apologies for that but its brief is to ride the zeitgeist with gay abandon and it does its best with the material it's given.)

While Zuckerberg may represent both web 2.0 and Bubble 2.0 he certainly isn't following the lead of many of the companies that boomed and busted so spectacularly just a few short years ago.

For starters he isn't going to be rushed into a sale for Facebook, neither is he planning to float the company for a good few years. At a San Francisco web 2.0 conference he told a packed conference hall: "I'm not saying it's never going to happen. But it's definitely years out."

Pah! Amateur. Five years ago web entrepreneurs in his position would have sold the company and formed a VC firm with the resulting millions.

Meanwhile, this year's vote also saw social networking and blogging make a real impression with Rob Pardo of World of Warcraft, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and Cory Doctorow, editor of BoingBoing, all staking a claim to a top 50 spot.

So the old order changeth, yielding place to the new, eh? Not quite.

Back in this year's poll are some familiar names that have made the grade again. Apple's Steve Jobs maintains his impressive tenure in the top five (he's been impossible to shift over the last five years.

Google CEO (and Apple board member) Eric Schmidt has also been a mainstay of the top 10 in recent years.

However, a fascinating development this year is that neither of Microsoft's titans of tech, Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, made the top 50. Although if they wanted to reconsider their careers and form a pro-wrestling tag team then 'The Titans of Tech' has a fine ring to it.

The only representative from the world's biggest software company is Kim Cameron, the Seattle giant's identity supremo. Even last year's overall winner, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, drops out of the top 50 after taking over from Bill Gates and gaining responsibility for sorting out the company's product lines.

Yep, it seems Vista really was that bad.

You can check out this year's Agenda Setters special report here. The site allows you to cast your own vote over the list and track how individuals have performed over the last eight years...

And here's something else to tickle your fancy - an interview with the writer and director of cult sit-com The IT Crowd - and photos to boot. The Round-Up is truly spoiling you…

The French Tourist Office for France may be about to get a pleasant surprise thanks to Apple and the iPhone.

If you've been following the trajectory of the iPhone since it was launched you'll have noticed that while its technology and the interface have got a lot of people very excited, they're somewhat less excited about having to commit themselves to one network provider: AT&T in the US, O2 in the UK, T-Mobile in Germany and Orange in France.

Apple, Orange - nice brand synergy there. (And is it just the Round-Up or are the partner choices all with networks that have 'national flag-carrier' status still in the eyes of some?)

Anyway, some people decided to take matters into their own hands and applied third-party hacks to their iPhones to unlock them.

In recent months, Apple has resorted to draconian tactics to deal with iPhone owners who hack their phones to run on other networks. First they warned that hacked iPhones could become inoperable when future updates were applied to the phone. A few days and a firmware update later reports flooded in of "bricked" iPhones. 'Whatever,' came the reply from Apple, 'we did warn you. If you're sore about it then you could always buy another one.' Or something along those lines.

Now, thanks to some French consumer legislation you'll be able to get your hands on an unlocked iPhone without running the risk of Apple's updates turning it into an over-priced paperweight.

Once again the French government is giving Apple more headaches. Remember the fierce iTunes DRM row? The one which started out promising to crush Apple's iTunes hegemony and ended with a puff of Gauloises smoke, a three-hour lunch break and a Gallic shrug?

This time the three revolutionary principles - liberty, equality and the other one - are being brought to bear on the Cupertino's company's latest must-have, paradigm-shifting device.

Under French law, the company will have to offer an unlocked iPhone for sale alongside the Orange device.

This clearly isn't going to do much to placate early adopters in the US, already vaguely miffed at a $200 price drop. More so when you consider that Franco-American relations are still slightly frosty.

However, before gadget-loving Francophiles book their tickets for Paris to get their hands on unlocked iPhone goodness you should probably know that while it appears Apple needs to make the concession to French consumer law it also has the option to set its own price for the unlocked handset.

The Round-Up's guessing it might be quite a lot...

Remember David Carradine in Kung Fu? Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon? Well, if you're an aficionado of on-screen kung fu and its esoteric ramblings consider the following: "The fox knows many things [but] the hedgehog knows one, and that one thing in depth. We need to become foxes."

You may be forgiven for thinking these may be the words of a wizened grandmaster to his students. And you'd be dead wrong.

Surprisingly enough they're the words of a government CIO called Mark O'Neill and the Round-Up was intrigued enough by his esotericism to don a pair of kung fu pyjamas and learn more.

O'Neill, who heads up the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's technology, thinks that techies can't just be good at technology anymore but have got to be good at other things too. Burn the witch!

It's not enough that you can program in Java with your toes, these days you also need to know that applying your cheesy feet to a keyboard in the workplace is not the done thing.

That's not to say that tech skills are no longer important, heck no. O'Neill casually tosses a couple of metaphors in a blender and pushes the puree button with: "The challenge for us is not to throw out the geek with the bath water."

The Round-Up would love to know the rationale behind those two animals. Why a fox? How do we know that foxes can multi-task and have transferable skills? And how do we assume that hedgehogs, while highly adept at rolling themselves into balls or being flattened by cars on A roads have no other skills or talents? Bill Oddie would probably know but the Round-Up didn't think to ask him before filing this copy.

It's all a bit vague, really. The point (at least as far as the Round-Up can discern) is that we need to become more rounded human beings. Surely, this is axiomatic for all humankind as opposed to just tech workers but if tech workers can shuffle off their image of being insular, uncommunicative and highly focused on their own specialities, then there's hope for everyone one would suppose. Even people who work in HR...

Finally, if the latest bit of research is to be believed - and that's a monumentally large 'if' - then the amount of money that mobile users spend on 'flirtatious' text messaging is comparable to the GNP of a small African nation.

According to price comparison website uSwitch.com, a poll of 2,000 adults reveals that 235 million flirtatious text messages are sent every month, at a cost of £231m. (Ed: Almost £1 per text? Surely that includes the type of flirting that takes place through premium 'flirt' lines, advertised late at night.) In other words, we are spending nearly £3bn a year 'flexting' - you had to fear there was a new neologism in there somewhere.

The research reports that in addition to spending a fair part of our salaries on flirtatious text messaging we're also becoming increasingly reliant on texting to bring order to our hectic love lives.

Furthermore, we're also having to learn new SMS etiquette rules, such as 'how long should I wait before replying?', 'can you dump someone by text message?' and the big one: 'should I use a smiley?'. It's all nail-biting stuff.

Other findings include stats like: 'Men send five texts on average to arrange a date compared to the six sent by women'. This is presumably because women, as the more discerning sex, also send a text message that men don't bother with, asking: "Who is this?"

A quarter of men feel that texting has actually made the dating game harder, while 12 million Britons feel texting 'adds a whole new dilemma' to the dating game. So why bother?

All these rules and concerns are ploughing up a whole new emotional minefield rather than bringing people closer.

Frankly, if you talk to people you'll usually find a whole jungle of neuroses and anxieties attached to relationships. There's really no need for technology to add any more.

Finally this week, don't forget to clap your ears round the Weekly Round-Up podcast - available here - and from iTunes. And try your luck at the latest Caption Competition.