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The Weekly Round-Up: 17.10.08
$12.5m for a pint of lager? Hang on...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 17 October 2008

Did you hear the one about the $12.5m pint of lager?

This has nothing to do with the rising price of beer in London's West End but everything to do with a legal spat between a developer and a brewery.

A chap called Steve Sheraton has filed a lawsuit against brewery giant Coors for allegedly stealing his idea for an iPhone application and releasing a similar app of their own.

The two apps create the effect of lager swilling around inside your iPhone. Rather neat but also rather useless but no matter, the brewery is using the app to advertise Carling.

Both apps use the accelerometer inside the iPhone to create the illusion of beer swishing around when the device is tilted.

The Round-Up downloaded the Carling version and spent all of five minutes playing with it before getting bored and deleting it. The Round-Up must also confess to not trying the other app as it costs £1.79 and the Carling one is free.

Unlike Sheraton's app, Carling has also thrown in a little game for free. The Carling game lets you control a beer glass sliding across a bar while trying to avoid common pub obstacles like unconscious, leaking alcoholics and under-age drinkers. (Actually olives and peanuts but the Round-Up's version would be better.)

The Carling app has been downloaded more than six million times, which Sheraton's suit very reasonably points out, reduces the chances of anyone buying the exact same app for $2.99. Particularly as it doesn't have the little beer glass game.

It's probably fair to say that the fact the app is free had no small part in its popularity but that hasn't stopped Sheraton and his legal team asking the Central District Court of California for $12.5m for loss of profits.

In the future only Jeremy Clarkson will read newspapers - and then only to read his own column.

The first half of that statement is the view of former Fleet Street chief Piers Morgan; the Round-Up made the rest up but suspects it to be accurate.

Now Piers isn't normally the first person who springs to mind when one thinks of tech visionaries but after 10 years as editor of the News of the World and the Mirror he knows a fair bit about how we consume media.

He also knows a fair bit about Jeremy Clarkson, too. Particularly his right fist which forcibly made contact with Piers' head a number of times at an awards ceremony a few years ago. It's not often the Round-Up gives a cheer for Jeremy Clarkson and today is no exception. Violence is bad, even for Morgan.

Not wanting to drag up old grievances, the Round-Up will scamper swiftly back to the point which is that the newspaper is on an irrevocable journey towards extinction with electronic readers stepping in to take its place on the evolutionary ladder.

The current affection some of us have for "grubby newsprint" will not be continued by the next generation. Oh no, said Piers, the yoof will instead carry "flexible readers" and the Round-Up's guessing he's not talking about yogic librarians.

Morgan made the bold prediction at an event in honour of the Palm Treo Pro, which coincidentally is not a "flexible reader" but an "effortlessly usable smart phone" or at least that's what the marketing says and who's the Round-Up to question that?

The analysts tend to agree with Piers. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, newspaper readership has been declining steadily in recent years. In May 2003, the US consumed more than 650,000 tonnes of newsprint. Presumably, of which Clarkson was one. Five years later, that figure had dropped to under 450,000.

Meanwhile, interweb news readership continues to climb. Yay!

Nielsen/NetRatings found there were 41 million US web paper readers in May 2004. By May 2008, there were 69 million.

Meanwhile, Piers wasn't stopping there with his bold predictions. Hell, no. He went on to predict that print papers will be forced to emulate the pricing structure of online content.

"Newspapers will go free," he said, which is just as well. A revenue model based on a single cantankerous TV presenter buying your product is a rubbish business model in anyone's standard. It would never make it on Dragons' Den.

Morgan added: "If you give away coffee every day on the streets and it gets to the point where it's as good as the coffee you pay for, you stop paying for it."

Leaving the Round-Up to wonder just who is giving away free coffee, where are they giving it away and can one get a latte with an extra shot of hazelnut syrup?

More good news about the future of technology came courtesy of the 18th annual Loebner Prize event held last weekend. The event featured a $100,000 jackpot for a machine that can fool judges into thinking it's human.

You can insert your own 'politician' or 'bus driver' gag here, if you so wish.

Yes, a time is approaching when conversations with machines will be indistinguishable from conversations with humans bringing us ever closer to the advent of true artificial intelligence.

So has the momentous day arrived? Has a machine convinced a bunch of humans that it, too, is a human?

In a word, no. But it was pretty damn close.

The prize has eluded entrants for 18 years. To clinch it, artificial conversation entities (ACEs) have to convince around a third of volunteers, a mixture made up mainly of computer scientists and journalists, that they are having a conversation with a person.

Every one of the five top ACEs tested at the University of Reading managed to convince at least one person (probably a computer scientist) into believing they were talking to a human rather than a machine.

However, while one ACE managed to fool a quarter of the people during text chats, none managed to hit the crucial 30 per cent threshold laid down by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950.

Turing said that a machine could be "attributed with intelligence" if it managed to have a "text-based conversation indistinguishable from a human".

So close. Not to fear, the event's eponymous prize founder and silicon.com Agenda Setter Hugh Loebner has no doubt the Turing Test will eventually succumb to the march of human progress.

In fact he told silicon.com as much earlier this year. We asked him: Will the Turing Test ever be in our grasp?

"Oh, I think so - I don't know about the timescale," he answered.

At least we thought it was him on the end of the phone, it might have been his toaster...

Thanks to the internet, women are more sexually promiscuous than ever before.

No, the Round-Up isn't making this up, it's simply reading from a press release. No, really.

The press release claims that with the recent popularity of internet dating, the number of women looking for sex has doubled since 2004.

That's the bold claim of the PR team at plentyoffish.com, an online dating site with more than 10 million registered users.

Despite this sudden burst of available ladies, rest assured, men are far more up for it than women. Three years ago, men who were looking for intimate encounters online outnumbered women 10 to 1 - now, the ratio is only five to one.

Within a decade, it's predicted that men and women will be equally promiscuous, with a one-to-one ratio of those looking for intimate encounters. All thanks to the internet.

In a week where the news has been dominated by statistics relating to massive falls in stocks and indices these are exactly the kinds of numbers we all like to hear as we prepare to hit the town on a Friday night...

After announcing a new range of Apple notebooks that reached levels of shininess previously unimaginable by the human mind, CEO Steve Jobs gave a rare insight into future products and technologies. Blu-ray? "A bag of hurt". NetBooks "nascent" and touchscreens "not on a laptop".

Want to keep up with the IT crowd? Then you need to know what's hot and what's not in emerging technology. Happily, Gartner thinks it knows and silicon.com has all its predictions for 2009 right here.

Real royalty meets Web 2.0 royalty. Find out what happened when the Queen dropped in to see the Google offices in London. There may even be a picture of Her Madge perched on a red bean bag in here, although there may just as likely not be.

Until next week, chance your arm, or your brain, in this week's Caption Competition in a chance to win an oh-so-desirable silicon.com desk toy.