He told me that he considered the iPhone 4 for about 30 seconds, but wondered why he should pay anything from £35 to £65 a month for the privilege of owning a “free” one?

For the last few months he’s been using a Microsoft smartphone from HTC. It certainly is not bad but he can’t see that he’ll be happy with a Microsoft phone over an 18 month contract.

He’s also owned several Nokias in the past and says that they are certainly good devices. But he accidentally broke the screen on his 6500, which is why he now uses the Microsoft device.

Blackberry would be a good choice for him, but he doesn’t like the keyboard! So that leaves Android and Android devices look like they are getting cheaper, which is good news for a cheapscape like him (love you really hun!)

There’s even a fair variety of free and relatively low cost handsets to choose from and a pretty substantial apps store with plenty of freebies.

Most operators offer a basic smartphone package for about £20, which includes a couple of hundred free minutes of talk time, text messaging and 500 megabytes or so of mobile broadband.

Okay so he won’t be streaming BBC iPlayer or hi-definition YouTube, but I think he could actually live with that. Stay tuned…

We are big supporters of Lance Armstrong and his charity, and will be doing our bit, so its great to see such a lot of interest for the events. According to the organisers some 28 million people will be taking part in the global events.

The big event, and perhaps the easiest to take part in is the Global “Wear Yellow” party, which should be simple enough to achieve. While others, such as that being held in the Hague, just ask riders to add a splash of yellow to their bikes.

You can search through the relevant events on the Livestrong Day website, so with any luck you should be able to find something to do in your area. If not, you may still have time to sort something out yourselves.

Failing that, the party at Ceasers Palace in Las Vegas sounds terribly tempting. If a little extreme.

http://www.livestrong.org/Take-Action/LIVESTRONG-Action/Livestrong-Day-2010

Good times are back…at least if businesses buy the into the pitch that cloud computing can well and truly help them to save money on their IT costs.

Whilst cloud computing can perhaps be seen as simply old school bureau services, this time around the services are based on internet standards, virtualisation and web services.

Computer systems can indeed be run more efficiently by an external provider rather than in-house, that’s why companies outsource their IT or use hosting services.

The cloud is an extension of this concept, packaged for the mass market. A manager can buy Salesforce’s monthly subscription using a credit card. There’s no prolonged tender and procurement process.

This all makes sense. But there appears to be a lot of confusion surrounding the cloud, particularly the concept of a private cloud. It is no wonder therefore that businesses cannot understand the nuances of cloud computing. Simple definitions, built on existing concepts is the approach we would take.

The private cloud, in its most empirical form, is an approach to offer IT on a per use basis to the business, rather like a utility. The business does not need to understand how this is achieved technically with virtualised, multi-tenanted architectures et al. All it needs to know is that the IT service can be provided as a subscription with guaranteed service levels cost effectively.

According to a report on Cnet this week, Snoop took to the internet, and specifically his Twitter account, to make the following announcement, “Ayo sumbody tell Zuckerberg to holler at me. He n I need go buy a pro sports team tgether.”

Confusing phrasing aside it seems that the rapper is looking to hook up with Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire boss of Facebook with the intention of buying a professional sports team together.

How much pedigree the pair of them has when it comes to managing professional sports is up for debate, but presumably they have the cash for it. Snoop has been a popular figure since we were puppies, and Zuckerberg, well, he is just loaded. In fact, according to Forbes’ rich list, he even has more money than God. Sorry, we mean Steve Jobs, but the implication is the same.

What Cnet realised though, is that apparently Snoop’s influence may be slipping. Surely the infamous rapper’s people can reach out far enough to touch base with Zuckerbergazizzle? Aren’t they even, at the very least, friends on Facebook?

We thought Snoop had tha hookups when it come to tech firms. It seems like only yesterday that he thrust Norton’s Hack is Wack competition on us.

How wrong we were.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20017495-71.html?tag=mncol

http://www.hackiswack.com/

Having stumbled over the story while full of dinner and half dozing through an episode of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’, we really like the idea of a game that combines the parlour fun of Call My Bluff with the ability to donate meals in countries where they are keenly needed.

The BBC tells us that three years since its launch on the World Food Programme pages, the Freerice.com game has set its sights on social networking big hitters Facebook and Twitter and the Apple iPhone and iPad.

The game is a simple enough proposition, users are asked to find the correct meaning of a word from four options, and for every one they get right 10 grains of rice are donated to countries such as Uganda and Bangladesh.

Ten grains of rice may not seem like a lot, but consider that the game gets 40,000 users a day – without being part of the Facebook/iPhone fold, that’s a lot of rice. In fact, in the three years it has been live, the game has raised enough rice to feed four million people in day. When the game hits Facebook it will be exposed to some 500m more users, which can only be good news.

Nancy Roman, director of communication for the World Food Programme, told the BBC, “Freerice is making internet history. It’s a stellar example of how a fun and simple idea can harness the internet’s potential to contribute to the world’s most pressing global issue – hunger.”

We are off for a game now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11218557

HTML5 presents a real and significant challenge to Java which has long enjoyed dominance in the web graphics area. So strong is, or was its position, that everyone was shocked when Steve Jobs chose to keep it off of his must-have iPad gadget. However, now it seems that Jobs may have been right to go with HTML5 – even if Flash was still to be found on many, many web sites.

So what of HMTL5? Well, the proof was always going to be in the eating, and from the samples we have tried it is tasty indeed.

Microsoft’s latest IE9 preview release used HTML5 to great effect, and presented early users with a dazzling array of apps, games, fun and trickery, but now Google has trumped even that effort. Google is also fighting for a share of the browser market, and like Microsoft it must do all it can to show off its application. And show off it has.

The HTML5, and Chrome only “The Wilderness Downtown’ site is an interactive pop video that is as technically astounding as it is charming and beautiful. The song may be a bit middle of the road for some tastes, but its inoffensive enough, and anyway, it becomes more of a soundtrack to what you are watching than the centre of attention that presumably the band thought it would be.

It is a staggering achievement and one that really shows how the internet is changing, and gives us a glance into the future. As Google said in a blogpost that coincided with the web site launch, “The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen…
We hope you enjoy it.”

Enjoy it we did.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

First of all Dell signalled its interest in the firm and began courting it, coyly offering its hand in acquisition in return for a significant dowry. 3Par graciously accepted, and all appeared to be happy and content in their new partnershop.

But, then, out of nowhere came the dastardly HP with a rival offer for the firm’s hand – an offer that came with more praise and more treasures, and it seemed that Dell had lost its new love – just like that.

The firm rallied though – no late night drinking and tears before bedtime for it. Instead, it threw itself back into the arena, and countered with another offer. And again it seemed to have won out.

The next installment in the saga came just hours later though, when HP made another, larger offer for the firm – by which time 3Par was probably thinking about auctioning itself off on eBay and just letting everyone have a go.

This to-ing and fro-ing must have caused champagne bottle pops to sound out all over 3Par HQ, as the firm saw its market value change on an almost hourly basis – and we doubt the story is over yet. We can’t help but wait anxiously for the next installment.

With twists and turns like this, you can forget Eastenders.

So this was a scam. They didn’t click on the link, and haven’t had their account wiped through a phishing attack. You can’t pull the wool over that pair of eyes (well, at least not very much). He logged into eBay directly and checked. He had indeed purchased a genuine copy of Windows XP SP3.

Scouring the site he finally came across a menu option to flag the transaction as fraudulent. An automated email from eBay informed him that it takes fraud very seriously and would respond within 24 hours. He did indeed receive a response within 24 hours – an automated response informing him that his eBay account had been compromised, and advising him that he should change my password immediately.

Oh my God. How did that happen? He quickly changed his eBay password and went onto PayPal, just in case the hacker had got that too.

PayPal was pretty useless – given the level of fraud it is open to. PayPal makes it extremely difficult for users to change their passwords – no easy to find “reset password” button. After PayPal he also changed a few other accounts just to be on the safe side.

At home he logged into his PC and ran a full F Secure online scan (btw, this is an extremely good free online malicious code scanner), then updated and ran Microsoft Security Essentials – neither found anything serious.

Is eBay still investigating the fraud? He received an automated response and potentially wasted ages resetting passwords and scanning for viruses but hasn’t had any contact with an update as yet…

The body said that us UK citizens get up in the morning, clean our teeth and almost immediately get connected in one way or another. In total, we spend about seven hours out of every day connected.

The most popular pastime amongst respondents was television, which accounts for about four hours out of the day. Ofcom said that almost a quarter of us have bought an HD telly this year and almost a third use the internet to watch television. That’s a lot of television.

This internet/television cross-over, called Media Multi-tasking by Ofcom, extends to other devices too, and the body found that over half of the 16-24 year olds it spoke to would make phone calls, or surf the internet while watching television – and vice versa.

Ofcom also found that only a quarter of older people – 55 and up – would be as easily distracted but we imagine that has something to do with grandparents finding phonecalls with their offspring’s offspring to be a maddening affair.

Even the once simple mobile phone is now its own communications superhighway, and compromises the ability to make phone calls, check emails, watch the television and surf the internet – if it made monosyllabic answers and grunts we could probably use it to replace teenagers too.

The good news, in the face of this ‘always on’ connectivity is that prices for services are falling. Ofcom found that monthly spending on communications had fallen this year. Only by under two percent, but a fall none the less.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-reports/cmr10/uk/

The Swede in question was caught driving at 180mph in Switzerland, and could, according to reports, face a world-record speeding fine of £656,000, or to put it more sensationally $1m.

That’s ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

The unnamed 37 year old was motoring about in a Mercedes SLS AMG at about three times the speed limit.

Speaking to the BBC local police spokesman Benoit Dumas said, “nothing can justify a speed of 290km/h. “It is not controllable. It must have taken 500m to stop,” – stopping, possibly, was the last thing on this driver’s mind.

The car has been inpounded, we suspect that it could do with the break, and the driver is awaiting his fate and the size of his fine. Whether or not he is ever allowed to drive the car again is open for debate, but it’s rather unlikely.

The case, and the suggestion it lead to – that he should be a professional racing driver – reminds us of the once highlighted trend of white hat security firms signing up virus creators to join their team as professionals.

This move was often scorned by the rest of the community, but certainly gathered column inches for those involved.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10960230