Toca Boca talks digital toys for iPhone, iPad and Android

Before Apple's original iPad went on sale, the notion that parents would hand over their shiny new tablet to sticky-fingered children seemed ridiculous. Now it's that assumption that looks risible, for there is a burgeoning market in apps aimed at kids – a trend that extends to iPhone and other smartphones.

One of the developers currently creating a buzz around its kid-apps is Toca Boca. Based in Sweden, the studio is part of media company Bonnier Group, which is better known for its newspaper, magazine, television and cinema businesses.

Toca Boca has been winning parental praise for a series of apps, including Paint My Wings, Toca Tea Party and Toca Hair Salon. They're not games or book-apps – the two most popular genres for apps aimed at children – but are described by the developer as digital toys.

"We started off by looking at the different ways kids like to play in the real world, " says chief executive Björn Jeffery, who outlines several kinds. Active play is sports and general running around; make-believe play can be dolls and role-playing; manipulative play is building and making; creative play is drawing, painting and music; and learning play is games and books.

"We realised that 85% of what was in the App Store [for kids] was in the learning play category, " says Jeffery. "That seems strange until you realise that this is the type of play that adults do: we play games and read books, but we don't play with dolls all that often! There is something lacking there. And that's what led to us exploring the more uncharted areas of play, looking at toys rather than games. "

Toca Boca's apps are open-ended: no winning or losing, high scores or time limits. They have beautifully crafted graphics, but are also tightly focused. Toca Hair Salon involves cutting and styling the hair of four characters, while Paint My Wings invites users to paint the wings of a pair of butterflies.

"We test with kids two or three times during the development process to validate the concept – what's fun about drawing on the wings of butterflies? – and we are trying to take these tiny little concepts, and make them really good, so that kids love them, " says Jeffery.

Toca Boca has been clever about the relative lack of speech or text within the games, which means they can be sold around the world with the minimum of localisation. Toca Hair Salon has been bought in more than 70 countries, even topping Apple's Top Paid chart in Kuwait. That experience colours Jeffery's views on the App Store itself.

"The market itself is slightly broken, in that there is a large supply of apps, and sufficient demand – a lot of kids – but the problem is the discoverability in the middle, " he says.

"The supply and demand don't really meet, and there is not even a Kids category in the App Store. At the same time, once you actively skew your apps to reach the whole world, the App Store is great. How could we have possibly sold in 70 markets in two weeks with relatively limited marketing before? "

Toca Boca also has some strong principles at work behind its applications. One is that the studio does not see kid-apps as pacifiers, used as a substitute for playing with their children. Jeffery says he has nothing against passing an iPhone to a grumbling child in the back of a car to keep them occupied, but is hoping for a different usage pattern from his company's apps.

"There is a time and a place for the pacifier idea, but it's quite a limiting way of looking at the segment. We think you can make these apps as fun for parents as for children, and when the two can play together, it can be a very powerful thing. iPad is a family-oriented device, as opposed to the iPhone, which is a very personal device. "

Toca Tea Party is a good example. The iPad app is a tea party, where children drag plates, cups and biscuits around a virtual table, eating and drinking with their fingers. The point being that the items are virtual, but the tea party participants are real: the child, siblings and/or friends, and family members.

Jeffery talks of being sent videos of children using the app to have a tea party with grandparents, and also expresses awe at a review from a user saying the app had sparked "the first non-aggressive play interaction between her autistic son and her daughter".

Toca Boca is also strong on the fact that its games are all paid titles, with no advertising or use of in-app payments. Jeffery stresses that he is not opposed to use of IAP itself, but takes a hardline stance on its inclusion in apps made for children, citing previous discussion around children making large virtual purchases in iOS games like Smurfs' Village that were charged to their parents' iTunes accounts.

"By making products and putting them in the kids category, you should have disqualified yourself from using that technique, " he says. "We have to make our money somewhere else. Developers must take bigger responsibility, rather than expecting parents to have the level of knowledge on how in-app payments work. If we want to build any kind of credibility, we can't start using these mechanics. "

For now, Jeffery hopes that Toca Boca will become a recognisable brand to parents, as the company launches more apps that may feature characters and elements from previous titles. What about looking beyond iOS? Jeffery says that the decision to avoid ads or IAP are a barrier to diving onto Android.

"So far, iOS is the only platform on which apps are being sold in a great number, " he says. "If you're not doing advertising or IAP, this is clearly an iOS market for now. Android Market and the likes are broken: they just don't work from a purchasing point of view for various reasons. "

However, he says that Toca Boca is not writing Android off altogether, and is keeping a keen eye on any data that shows Android Market or comparable stores are becoming more lucrative for paid apps.

"I'm very interested in it from a marketing point of view, because it's a more open ecosystem where you can use more things: bundle apps together with others, or give them away with partners, " he says.

"It's a free-er ecosystem to work with, but no one's buying anything. The sooner that changes, the better. We're looking forward to the day when these stores work, because there are plenty of Android users out there. ".

Google suffers curse of diversity with Android

One of Apple's great advantages in the phone and tablet markets is the lack of choices it provides to customers. This may sound counterintuitive in our consumerist culture. But the Android mobile ecosystem, which is growing like crazy, has been, in some sense, burdened by its diversity.

Google, which owns Android and makes it available to device makers, is addressing one of the more serious issues in its part of the market: different devices of the mobile device operating system run different versions of the software. The tech world calls this "fragmentation". But even as Google is working to make the software part of the ecosystem less fragmented, buyers of Android devices are facing a similar issue with the hardware – and there's little or nothing Google can do to solve this problem.

Software fragmentation is a particular problem for Android phone users, who wait endlessly for updates to the operating system so they can run the latest apps. This contrasts in big ways with Apple's iOS mobile ecosystem. When Apple updates iOS, all reasonably recent iPhones and iPads get updated. Many powerful Android handsets – notably, Samsung's Galaxy S line that was a hit last year – are still waiting for the most recent Android version.

This software Babel also annoys app developers, who can't sell to the largest possible marketplace – and, as several questioners at Google's annual developers' conference noted Tuesday, means they have to write different versions of their apps instead of one.

Relief may be in sight. Google said Tuesday it was working with carriers and hardware makers such as HTC, Samsung, AT&T and Verizon (among others) to standardise Android across a wide variety of devices and networks.

Statements like this are easy. Creating a consistent platform is not, for a variety of reasons that include companies' wishes to differentiate what their devices and networks can offer. We'll see how seriously Google and its Android partners take this vow.

Even if they do mean it, they can't do much about the hardware fragmentation. Here, again, Apple is at an enormous advantage. The iPhone and iPad come in one size each, respectively, and they are selling in huge numbers. This means, for each model of these devices, makers of peripheral hardware – cases; docks for desks and cars; keyboards and much more – need only one design for the individual Apple products.

Contrast that with the Android marketplace, where there are dozens of phone models and, at long last, more and more different tablets. A peripheral manufacturer has to pick which devices it wants to support, come up with different designs and then manufacture for what are likely to be relatively small sales numbers for any single device. You can certainly find accessories and add-ons for Android tablets and phones, but not in nearly the iPad numbers or variety for any specific device.

This doesn't mean that Android tablet and phone makers should standardise on hardware. One of the best parts of the Android ecosystem is the wide experimentation. The more of that we see, the better-off the ecosystem will be in the long run.

For now, buyers of Android devices – tablets, in particular – should understand that they aren't going to have the rich variety of add-ons they can easily find if they buy iPads. This is especially true of newer Android tablets and phones, which are also the cutting edge.

Buyers of some Android devices also have something Apple steadfastly refuses to give them: the liberty to use their devices as they see fit. Apple's walled-garden approach is entirely about controlling the ecosystem. But while mobile carriers and their device-making partners have put some restrictions of their own on many Android devices, there's more freedom in the Android universe for developers and users alike.

The Android ecosystem is growing rapidly. But the device makers in the ecosystem are having loads of trouble competing with Apple's hardware ecosystem. That's unlikely to change anytime soon.

IPv6 internet address system receives test flight

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and hundreds of the world's largest websites are now testing the enormously expanded internet address system, known as IPv6, in preparation for the time – expected within the next year – when it becomes impossible to add new sites to the web using the existing system, called IPv4.

The biggest problem though in implementing the new system lies inside people's homes – where barely any of the broadband routers now in use can handle the new system.

In the UK, the communications minister Ed Vaizey is marking World IPv6 Day with an industry summit to discuss progress on switching to the new protocol. Vaizey said: "We must ensure we create the conditions that allow the internet to continue to grow and for companies to produce fresh innovations. IPv6 is key to the continued growth of the internet. It is essential industry deals with the switchover before there is an impact on the internet. "

Earlier this year the Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that the IPv4 address exhaustion was "one of the urgent problems" that the industry needed to tackle.

The "test flight" day is being used to motivate organisations throughout the internet industry – including internet service providers (ISPs), router manufacturers, computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX and web businesses – to get ready for the time when the IPv4 "address space" runs out.

Only 5, 375 of the top 1m web sites by popularity have IPv6 connections, according to Atoom Net. The amount of IPv6 traffic has spiked since Tuesday as the test began, according to the website provided by Akamai recording it.

Sites on the web are connected using "internet protocol" addresses, which work rather like telephone numbers. The IPv4 system, introduced in January 1980, uses "dotted quad" addresses such as 127. 255. 255. 0. 255 77. 91. 248. 30 to allocate locations to sites. That allows a theoretical maximum of 4. 2bn connected devices on the network, though various workarounds have allowed that to be greatly expanded.

Once there are no more IPv4 addresses, new sites will only be able to join the net via an IPv6 address. That will mean people using IPv4-only equipment will not be able to reach the site. They could type the URL into their browser, but the address that it translates into will be unreadable by their computer and/or router.

The IPv4 address space has almost completely run out. The last blocks were allocated in Europe earlier this year. The growing shortage of available addresses that can be reached by existing systems has led to concerns that there will be a crunch in 2012 around big events, particularly the London Olympics, as a huge number of devices are attached all at once to the net.

IPv6 allows 3. 4 x 10^38 (340 trillion trillion trillion) internet addresses, which is enough for every IPv4 address to have its own internet of IPv4 addresses. That should mean that once a shift to IPv6 is made, the world – and even other planets – will never run out. It offers a large enough address space for everyone to have their own internet space.

The problem for users, ISPs and webmasters is that IPv4 addresses cannot be translated directly into IPv6 addresses. Though an IPv4 address may point to the same site as an IPv6 address, the two use different addressing methods.

The key obstacle lies with the home routers used by millions of users, which may not be able to handle IPv6 communication. It may be possible to update their software, but the scale of the problem could mean that users or ISPs will have to carry that out manually.

In the UK, the government has supported the creation of 6UK, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to help smooth the transition to IPv6.

Abour 0. 05% of internet users may have problems reaching sites which are using the system – but with more than a billion people online, that could run to tens of millions. Microsoft has offered a fix for affected Windows users.

People can test their readiness for IPv6 at the IPv6 test site.

Piers Daniell, of Fluidata, an independent connectivity company which has been working on the changeover in the UK, said: "What's going to be really interesting is to see how companies and ISPs will work with IPv6 on a daily basis. Getting websites to be viewed over IPv4 and IPv6 is proving problematic for some. Indeed, much of the rationale for World IPv6 Day is driving companies to combine their IPv4/IPv6 websites. What most companies don't realise is that their website, for a time, will need to be seen by both. This means that companies need to almost dual-stack their sites, but this is problematic and so the focus must be on solving the issue on a wider scale. Even today most hardware shipped by ISPs to providers still doesn't cater for IPv6 or will only once a software patch is applied. "

Microsoft Office 365 goes into battle with Google Apps

Microsoft is hitting back at Google in the cloud with the release of its Office 365 offering – a cloud service which extends Office to the cloud.

But not to be outdone, Google got its own punch in first on Monday night – with a blog post offering "365 reasons to consider Google Apps".

It's the latest instalment in a battle between the two in which Google is seeking to undermine Microsoft's Office monopoly – which generates around 50% of its profits – and divert some of the revenue to itself, while also getting more people to use the internet, where its search offering, and associated advertising, dominates.

Part of the reason driving Microsoft to make the shift – so that people in businesses can get Office-like facilities directly online – is people like Tom Conophy, who are stirring anxiety and action in Microsoft's executive offices these days.

Conophy, the chief information officer of the InterContinental Hotels Group, decided earlier this year to begin moving nearly all the company's 25, 000 office workers off Microsoft's email and Office applications onto Google's web-based alternatives.

About 6, 000 employees in the hotel management company have converted so far, Conophy says, and things are going well. The savings, he estimates, will add up to millions of dollars a year. And Google's online offerings, he says, have improved steadily since it entered the business market four years ago.

''We could do this now because the Google cloud apps are ready for prime time, " Conophy said.

Halting such defections is a top priority at Microsoft. Office 365 is the response – a cloud-based version of Microsoft's email, whiteboard collaboration software and word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs, which will get a marketing launch later on Tuesday from Steve Ballmer, the chief executive.

But in this battle, Google is already making a preemptive strike. That Office 365 is on the way has been known for some time – and so Google has been shoring up the defences around Google Apps.

On Monday, the day before the launch, it put up a post on its Enterprise blog offering to help people make "an informed choice", suggesting that "Office 365 is for individuals. Apps is for teams" and "Office 365 is built for Microsoft. Apps is built for choice" – on the basis that "Office 365 is optimised for Windows-based PCs and devices, which reduces your flexibility. Our applications are designed to work well on any device, on any operating system. Desktop, laptop, Chromebook, tablet, smartphone. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows Mobile. "

In fact, you can connect to Office 365 from a tablet or smartphone – note that Google only suggested it was "optimised" for a PC.

Microsoft's long-awaited move, analysts say, is a studiously crafted bet, including various offerings at different prices. They are not sure though whether it is a workable strategy – or wishful thinking. Microsoft's plan is to embrace the demand for cloud-based tools for office workers, which promises to be less costly for companies than conventional software, and yet avoid cannibalising the business that is its biggest single money-maker.

''If Microsoft stumbles, it really opens the door to Google, " said Matt Cain, an analyst for Gartner. "It's a tremendous long-term threat to Microsoft and its Office franchise. "

The Microsoft unit that includes the Office family of products is a $20bn-a-year business with pre-tax profit margins of 60%. It's bigger and more profitable even than the company's other big profit engine, the Windows PC operating system – which ebbs and flows with the sale of PCs.

Google portrays the arrival of Office 365 as an endorsement, if not a capitulation. ''This is a recognition that our business is for real, " said David Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division. "We've really helped move the needle in the marketplace. "

The company now claims more than 30 million active users of Google Apps, its collection of online office productivity and communications programs. But about 12 million of those users are university staff and students, who typically get free access to the apps.

The standard charge for business and government customers is $50 per user a year. Google will not disclose how many customers pay that fee. However, in its latest quarterly results revenues from "non-advertising" sources was $269m, compared to $8. 2bn from advertising incomes.

Google says Apps are gaining momentum. Earlier in June, it announced a series of large converts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US agency that conducts climate and ocean studies, with 25, 000 employees, is adopting Google Apps. Others include the state of Wyoming, with 10, 000 workers, and the McClatchy Group, a publishing chain, with 8, 500 workers.

The subscription renewal rates to Google Apps, Girouard said, are higher than 90% and for larger companies the rate is nearly 100%.

There are other cloud-based business email, productivity and collaboration tools including entries from Zoho, VMware's Zimbra, IBM's Lotus Live and Salesforce. com's Chatter.

Yet Google, analysts say, is the main rival that Microsoft has in mind with Office 365. ''There's no doubt that the increasing popularity of Google Apps has forced Microsoft's hand, " said Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC. "But Microsoft is really embracing the cloud now. This is the other shoe dropping. "

At $50 a year, Google's pricing seems far more appealing than the standard price for the Office PC software, which costs from $200 to about $400, depending on features. Office 365 prices are from $2 per user a month to $27 per user a month.

The $2-a-month service is just email and is intended for companies that want to extend communications to employees currently not being served, such as factory workers. The $27-a-month offering is all the online features, including Web conferencing and digital whiteboards for team projects, and a license to the most powerful version of the Office personal computer software.

A $6-a-month offering is aimed at extending Microsoft's email server services and collaboration tools, like SharePoint, to small businesses. These small businesses typically have the Office PC software but not the related software, analysts say.

So with cloud-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus several new communications and collaboration tools, that offering could be quite appealing, analysts say. The price, at $72 a year, is somewhat above Google's, but it carries the Microsoft name and familiarity.

"It could be a lot of net new business, and stable recurring revenue, if Microsoft can pull it off, " Webster said.

The question though is whether doing so will add to Microsoft's revenues – or whether that will eat into Office revenues and profits. And if people get the idea of using the cloud, will that make Google more attractive – and cheaper? For Microsoft, the risk is that the cloud may turn out to be a knife.

iPhone 5 release in September

Apple is on the way to build an "iPhone 5" release in September, according to reports from suppliers in Asia who are preparing for the next generation of enterprise smartphones.

Although reports are based on the naming - with some sources suggesting that it will be called the iPhone 4G or 4S - The Guardian was told that the shape of the device very similar to the existing iPhone 4, which was published in summer 2010.

The suppliers are also to be understood for another iPhone release prepared during 2012, although the timing on that is less secure. Some suggest that could be the next model coming out in March.


The Guardian understands that while the new version will look very like the iPhone 4, it can dispense with some of the visible buttons on the side of the device for volume control.


Other reports on Bloomberg suggests that the new phone is an A5-processor to include the iPhone in second March and published applications have a 8MP camera (5MP compared with the iPhone 4). Reports suggest that tests with higher resolution or a larger version on the screen than that in the present model.


The new devices include Apple's new 5-IOS software, the icloud their ability to synchronize data between the devices to activate and upgrade phones, and without connection to a computer, as well as offering photo-sharing and Twitter messages over many apps .


Richard Windsor, a global technology marketing analyst at Nomura Securities, said he expected the version sold in September, at around the same price as the existing one, which Apple sells for around $ 600 have. "We think it is an iPhone in September 5 - the suppliers have been booted for that," he said.


The crucial question, Windsor said, is whether Apple is a mid-range phone for around 300 dollars to capture a larger share of the market. If that happens, he suggests, Apple's share of the smartphone market - currently sells about 19% of the 100 units per quarter - could explode, as the market itself is growing this year and 2012.


But Windsor said he has seen no signs, early next year that Apple is preparing a "mid-range" phone so far for the start, which would be required in order to capture a significant slice of the market.


Phones with Google's Android operating system have taken a dominant share of the smartphone market in the past six months, with a 31% share in the first quarter. Android driven by Nokia's Symbian operating system was the leading smartphone platform for years, in the first quarter of this year. Apple is in third place, although analysts Apple Nokia in the current quarter, which ends in just over a week expect to pass.


The smartphone market is expected to grow 55% this year, hit by 472m and 1 billion units in 2015, according to market research firm IDC. With Android devices and from October, Nokia devices with Microsoft's Windows Mobile software in the competition for this market, it may become a necessity for Apple at a mid-range device, producing in order to capture more revenue, as in the music player market has, when he launched the iPod Mini, iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle.


IDC expects that Android will grow to more than 40% of the market by the end of 2011, while Windsor at Nomura expects Apple to Nokia over to second in smartphone sales to Samsung to take.


The new iPhone would be hotly anticipated, but Apple wants to play down the reports before the summer season in case relates to sales.

Nokia Samsung boss dismisses bid rumors

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop dismissed as "baseless" rumors that the electronics giant Samsung's bid for the company in London on Thursday.


On the occasion of the Open Mobile Summit, Elop said that "deprived of all the rumors without foundation" and reiterated Nokia intends to create third smartphone ecosystem to compete with Apple's iPhone and Google Android mobile operating system dominating.


He said that Nokia's designers are design to be used with the so-called "Mango" version of new phones that use Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system, which he has predicted to come later this year. This is due some time in the autumn.


Earlier this week, began to circulate rumors that Samsung would be for the Finnish mobile company that still makes more mobile devices than any other offer, but has seen their stock pummeled after it warned at the end of May that it might make no profit on the mobile business in the quarter.


Previous buyout rumors suggest Microsoft would bid so far for Nokia, but the company denied this also.


Elop said that Nokia is continuing a huge fan base in many emerging markets such as Asia.


It was also evident on Thursday that Nokia's Chief Technology Officer, Rich Green, takes a leave of absence from the company. Officially, it's for personal reasons, but other reports put contradictory statements. The Wall Street Journal suggested it for medical reasons, but the Economic Times said Green had with Elop, who took over as chief executive in September 2010 on the abolition of the MeeGo platform did not agree.


But Richard Windsor, a marketing analyst from the brokers Nomura, Elop was the talk, told the Guardian that he thought the company faced at least four quarters of significant problems.


"In losing smartphones, any company that market share has gone to considerable problems," said Windsor. He thinks that Nokia should bring dwindling market share, its margins and profits under tremendous pressure, especially as to produce the Chinese mobile phone manufacturers cheaper versions of Android phones for less than $ 200.


"Nokia is strongest in markets where it has not yet asked by sub-$ 200 handset in question," he added. Nokia's smartphones, which it sold 24m in the first quarter, had an average selling price (ASP) of 147 € (£ 130). Unlike most smartphones have an ASP of approximately $ 300, while the iPhone from Apple has an ASP of $ 660


"The high-end Nokia is gone - they can not go back," Wilson said. "And it will not be able to get the price of its Windows Mobile devices to low enough to make a profit. The hardware requirements of Windows Mobile are quite strong [Microsoft is a 1 GHz processor, faster than any other platform], and so will never be able to get the price low enough. "

Boost Europe's Galileo navigation system into the big money

The European Commission says it has about 500 million euros (£ 440) "in the pocket" using it to will make the additional purchase.

It would be the European version of GPS from 18 active satellites in the next few years to take to 24.

This should make a big difference to Galileo's performance.

It should also accelerate the eventual completion.

The announcement was made at the Paris Air Show by the Vice President of the European Commission Antonio Tajani, who has taken the overall responsibility for the flagship in Brussels the EU space project.

"It is possible to not only reduce costs but also the timing," he said. "And by reducing the time, we reduce the cost, this is a very good cocktail -. cost and schedule together."

Mr Tajani was necessary at Le Bourget airfield on the last two industry contracts to Europe's satellite navigation system venture to sign a reality.

The combination of these two agreements is estimated € 355m. They are both concerned with ground operations.

One (€ 281m), with Thales Alenia Space of France, who are looking for with the Galileo navigation and timing data, so it is correct for the transmission of the satellite commissioned formatted.

The other contract (73.5 million euros) is going to Astrium UK. Their work will ensure the good "housekeeping" of the satellite, including the maintenance and the correct positioning of the satellite in orbit.

But it was the news that Mr. Tajani had managed to find the major economies in the project that dominated the discussions at Le Bourget.

The much-delayed Galileo initiative is under constant attack from critics for its cost.

EU Member States had to have been € 3.4 billion on 18 satellites into orbit by the end of the year celebrated in 2014, and it recently said they may find a further 1.9 billion to a completed form "constellation" of 30 to get the satellite to the end of the decade.

The British government in particular has argued vociferously against any further funding, although the UK national companies are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries.

London will be pleased to hear that Mr. Tajani was now to be able to slow the expected future expenses.

Mr. Tajani said the Paris Air Show event that the savings from additional efforts by the industry to contain costs and were an improvement in the management of project resources as a whole. Are taken from the 500 in reserve, and for other obligations, believes that the EC-VP he will spend about 300 m are available.

The timing is crucial. It means, Mr Tajani has money available before the next EU budget, or new financial perspectives, to acquire more satellites.

The first two Galileo satellites will start to go into orbit in October, on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. They are followed by a further pair in 2012.

Another 14 are under construction, with the last satellite of this series due to roll off the assembly line in mid-2014th That would total 18 in the orbit until 2015.

But Mr. Tajani now has it in his power to get the pace of construction, either by running the current contractor (OHB-System in Germany), his production continues, or by turning to the back-up provider (Astrium) parallel to the production of additional spacecraft.

Six more satellites, a total of 24 would be close to full capacity very Galileo.

It is assumed, of course, that finding enough rockets to launch additional satellites are, and that there is no startup failures or disruptions in the probe itself, as soon as they arrive in orbit. Were these problems arise, the newfound opportunity budget could quickly evaporate.

But if events go the way of the Lord Tajani 24 satellites in orbit could be by 2015/16.

The savings also mean that the EU Member States will be asked for less money for Galileo in the next Financial Perspective.

Galileo is expected to improve substantially the availability and accuracy of timing signals from space.

Its next-generation technologies to the users to get faster, more reliable fixes and be able to find their positions with an error of one meter, compared with the current GPS error of several meters.

It should in particular benefit in those locations where GPS signals penetrate current struggle, as in high-rise cities.

With Galileo cooperate with the American system, the performance improvements seen Navi work well even in the deepest "urban canyons".

Soon the majority of mobile phones, navigation integrated as standard, and many new companies are likely to spring up around the use of time and location data about the movement.

Colin Paynter, CEO of Astrium UK, said it was time for everyone, even the British government has fully behind Galileo because of the opportunities they are offered.

"We must do more to inspire the downstream applications market in the UK," he told BBC News.

"Over the next year while we work to promote at Astrium in the delivery of infrastructure, government and industry to get out there and Galileo needs. There is great income from UK companies have to be in the future."

Technology Growth Robots In Disguise

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing wrote that within 50 years it would become difficult to distinguish between humans and computers. In 2004, Bill Gates claimed that it would take two years to solve the problem of spam e-mail.

Turing proved to be correct, if a few years away on its projections. Gates seems to be simply wrong.

While the free web services, only 6% of Internet-pill-hawking and scam e-mail pitching generated a year ago, automated spam programs use Web e-mail services now produce more than 12% of digital junk mail, with Microsoft's webmail services alone accounting for around 4%.

In pictures: Protect yourself from identity theft

Since webmail spam comes from a reputable company servers, it is more likely to defeat filters, and at the end in users' inboxes. (And the volume of Web-based spam, according to MessageLabs, was affected far less than other spam the shutdown of the notorious McColo hosting companies on the Internet earlier in November, an event that wiped out over two-thirds of all spam .)

The weak link that allows robots to webmail in turn has a spam-tube? The CAPTCHA - the distorted image hateful words and numbers on some websites, the user to create or find an account or a message. A CAPTCHA - or "completely automated public Turing test to computers and people to distinguish from each other" - help websites keep robot spammers (see "Meta Data: An Invisible CAPTCHA").

The problem, according to many security experts, is that computers today are capable of much too many human abilities. In February, Web security firm Websense announced that CAPTCHAs for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo's Web e-mail services, all was broken. Company founder Jeremiah Grossman posted screenshots of a PC software has been successfully hijacked by criminals read the CAPTCHA to jointly documented a Gmail account after another for spamming purposes.

Some security experts even believe that the CAPTCHA-breaking software with Tesseract - an open-source image detection software from Google itself promoted and used in its book-scanning projects - to recognize the distorted characters.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all the harder to break since the release of their CAPTCHAs. But in July dipped reports have already been beaten that services upgraded "CAPTCHAs too. After another round of patches, claimed the makers of XRumer, a $ 450-spam program, in October that it circumvented the Gmail and Microsoft's CAPTCHAs again.

"It's a cat and mouse that has no end," says David Dagon, a professor of Internet security at Georgia Tech. "The cyber security challenge of the next decade, the distinction between man and computer will be."

Some computer scientists are trying creative approaches. Microsoft last year introduced a CAPTCHA that the user asked to look into a grid of nine images of dogs and cats and asked them to identify the cats. Another experiment showed users pictures of women or men from the field assessment "Hotornot.com" drawn and asked to select the user which three were "hot."

The problem with this clever test of humanity, according to analysis of CAPTCHA hackers sla.ckers.org on the message board, is that both images are accessible sources. It is too easy to use hacker wrote Robert Hansen, also known as RSnake to indicate the source of the images, they use the same tools the CAPTCHA builder and use this index to find breaking the puzzle.

More generally, CAPTCHAs have a bigger problem: Teams of people in India and China together to solve the puzzle for a few cents. Some sites even import CAPTCHAs and entice users to break them in exchange for a pornographic image and then export the results back to a spambot.

But apart from that the human basis of fraud aside, the challenge of building a CAPTCHA, which can not be understood by automated software, much more complex. In August, won the National Federation of A $ 6,000,000 settlement against retail giant Target for using a CAPTCHA Blind on its website that are not visually impaired could be passed through. Then use the blind surfer automatic reading software to interpret pages that represent insurmountable walls CAPTCHAs on Target's website.

Now, with the target sentence must CAPTCHAs also offer an audio option - read a distorted recording of letters and numbers that is often much easier to interpret for a computer as a distorted image.

In a presentation at DefCon hacker conference showed August's security expert, Michael Brooks, how can the audio CAPTCHAs of computers are dismantled. Brooks was a program that he had written that guesses the audio file of the content, these assumptions are superimposed on the playing field level diagram of the noisy audio file. By analyzing the distance between points on the distorted grid CAPTCHA chart and the pitch chart of possible answers to the mystery, his program was able to remove the noise and "listen" to the file only as accurate as a man.

Luis von Ahn, one of the original inventors of the CAPTCHA and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says that it's still sort out the fight for hope spambots. Last year he founded reCaptcha, a new take on the CAPTCHA, that he says is not yet broken, and is already in use on thousands of sites like Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist.

ReCaptcha takes a new approach: The project will scan and digitize thousands of pages of real-world text, including old books and archives of the New York Times. When interpreting the image-recognition software may not be a passage in the age or faded text, distort it, the picture and it serves as a CAPTCHA. This means that the project is not only a tremendous achievement of digitized documents produced for the purpose of preservation - it filters text and much more difficult for computers to recognize words to find.

"People are still testing our right about 96% of the time," says von Ahn. "Amazingly, they are still much better than computers on some things."

But dealing with reCaptcha still the same problem as any other test of human abilities: access for blind people. And von Ahn admits his audio CAPTCHA, is much harder for humans than its visual counterpart to solve: While computers can not crack, people make mistakes 30% of the time.

In a test of their own superiority, robot, I decided to test me on audio reCaptcha present. The first time I played the file, the stream of sound came out as an indecipherable garble of voices, therefore, played in reverse, and static. I suspect the answer to the test - and failed.

But listening to the audio CAPTCHA again only a few seconds later the numbers started from noisy confusion arising spoken by a mixture of high and low voices. Through to the fourth time, I was able to test more rigorously. In a few minutes I had marked man, had audio test reCaptcha predicted seven out of 10 cases as of Ahn. ? Had adapted to it - my brain was something done that solid software algorithms don t.

Holiday Gadgets For The Holidays

It is time to return to the basics. Travel to exotic resorts are plunging. The sale of macaroni and cheese are on. And in the digital age, consumers do not switch on only known food if the news is terrible for the economy, but also friendly digital toys.

"It's about trust and comfort at this point," said Sheri Greenspan, senior analyst for consumer electronics at tech tracker iSuppli. "Consumers want to be comfortable with what they buy, comfortable with the brand they buy, and comfortable with the price they pay."

We may in the worst downturn since the Great Depression, but few are talking about a future that looks like Planet of the Apes. Digital toys will continue to sell. The sale of game consoles, for example, are booming.

Two years after the first went on sale, which saw Nintendo Wii, for example, as an inexpensive way to entertain family and friends, and the consoles are hard to find in many locations.

Blu-ray players are another gadget that can turn up in many homes in the first time this year. Movies are a popular escape from bleak economic headlines since the 1930s, and now that the Blu-ray HD-DVD format war was decided in favor of Blu-ray, the once exotic players are seen as a safe investment - especially Now that they come at the beginning, in the price.

Shoppers also want to gadgets sporting prices that they can comfortably. Television revenues could suffer, as to overthrow the prices on high-definition, big-ticket screens further. However, these falling prices for digital cameras and music players, they will remain popular gifts. Samsung Pebble music player like Apple's Shuffle and make hip, affordable stocking stuffers.

Low-cost alternative to prior art devices could also flourish. Instead of dispensing with an expensive laptop, for example, the consumer, to stripped down systems like the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, the Asus Eee PC and HP Mini 1000 flocking.

The gadgets promise users familiar Web tools like Google, Facebook and MySpace to connect, and provides mobility and touch a low price traditional notebooks can not.

The trend could even extend to such well-known casting services in simple, easily understandable units. Take the Peek. The $ 80 gadget is consumer-class e-mail services and displays them in your bag for $ 20 a month. The device is not attraction is the price - it is the simplicity. The sturdy plastic gadget has more than a little keyboard for the development of e-mails and a large, bright display to read for them.

Find a virus scanner that Works

If it counts for online threats, freshness comes. In mid-December, for example, Microsoft showed that cyber-criminals were never recognized, found an unpatched vulnerability in its Internet Explorer browser, which tens of thousands of websites in order to install password-stealing software on users' PCs.

This kind of new attack - what cyber-researchers used a "zero day" exploit - tests the limits of the anti-virus scanning software, the ability to not only filter previously unrecognized infections but also in competition with the cutting edge of cyber-fraudsters innovation. And for consumers, but it is the right choice of PC protection software harder than ever before.

The best performer in the company tests? Two names that most Americans have never heard of: the German company and the Slovak company ESET Avira. And the rankings, cyber analysts say can only think so much about the industry's growing pains, as they do on the two companies the ability to clean up your hard drive.

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Avira in Tettnang, Germany, AV-Comparatives' label as the overall best antivirus product of 2008 on the basis of their ability, more malicious files from hard drives as big name competitors such as Symantec, McAfee and Microsoft move in less time and with less influence on PC performance.

In the latest AV-Comparatives tests last month, for example, Avira found about two-thirds of previously undetected malware - collected over a period of four weeks - installed on the machines scanned. ESET NOD32 is the program found 51%. Symantec and Microsoft, by comparison, found only 44% of the samples, while McAfee detection rate was below 30%.

Andreas Clementi, AV-Comparatives' Chief Executive Founder, chalks has to apparent superiority Avira to the fact that it has a smaller user base than their larger competitors, it can be faster pipe from new virus watch lists for users without a massive network. "Symantec, for example, is used by many millions more people around the world," said Clementi. "Smaller companies can more quickly release the updates from Symantec has to be careful.. If it triggered a false alarm, it would be much harder for the millions of users to create"

However AV-Comparatives' top ranking for Avira is not the last word in anti-virus vendor rankings. In fact, means the development of malicious software to measure the effectiveness of anti-virus vendors is more complicated than ever.

In its quarterly cyber-showdown, AV Comparatives uses 50 1.5-terabyte hard drives with a single set of newly collected from malicious software "bait" computers all over the world filled.

In half the tests, it pits antivirus software against malware detected earlier and measures the software's ability to successfully deliver these large disks. Have collected in the other half, it "freezes" waiting for a version of anti-virus software, a month without updating it and test against all the malware testers this month. This technique has been developed to the anti-virus' ability to find previously undiscovered race check of malicious code.

But even in these sophisticated tests, AV-Comparatives is not possible to measure the latest features of anti-malware programs, protests, Symantec senior director of product management, Dave Cole. The next generation of malware detection, he argues, is "behavior-based" detection, which filters out bad files to a large extent, how they act in the course of time after they are installed on your PC basis - not just their looks in the moment of a scan.

"We know it was bad because it was used" the bumpy Trojan, "Cole says." Now we know there is something bad, because it uses the keyboard, sends the data to China. "

Another test last September by a German antivirus analysis company called AV-Test, however, the behavior-based scanning features are included. AV-Test, in fact, gave Symantec Top Marks for the kind of "proactive" scan that Cole describes. Avira, but fared even worse.

The actual winners, it turns out may be ESET, placed near the top of the two AV-Comparatives and AV-Test "proactive" scan tests. The company, whose anti-virus software, serving more than 70 million users largely in Russia and the United States, said her secret is "heuristics," the ability to detect statistically a familiar piece of malware in a new form.

"Viruses are constantly today. They are like wolves in sheep's clothing," says Jeff Brosse, ESET's Director of North American research. "Recognizing that the malware is where we distinguish ourselves."

ESET began on heuristics, long before other anti-virus companies said John Hawes, a researcher with the British Security analysis online newsletter Virus Bulletin, and it was the false alarms that most of heuristic tests to avoid plague. "You have a good balance between strong heuristics and false positives," he says. Hawes' own tests to ensure the other two: he says that has the 16-year-old company was located on the newsletter of the VB100 certification list more frequently than any other company.

But the real result of the two tests can show how become outdated signature-based detection of malware. The fact that Avira could outperform competitors and to capture only two out of three new types of malware, says security expert, blogger and consultant Rich Mogull, shows that no real behavior-based detection, cyber security can not keep up.

In fact, he says the real key to victory is not malware, antivirus approaches, like Firefox but no-script plug-in, the web pages blocked the execution of potentially malicious programs. Mogull also supported software platforms such as Windows Vista or Google Chrome, the "sandbox" applications or limit access to computer resources. "You give applications a very small, safe place to play," he says.

Until these kinds of safety features have become commonplace, the explosion of different races means malware antivirus companies are fighting a losing battle, says Mogull. "The tests can show which of these work better, but they are all far from perfect," he says. "The truth is, it does not really matter which one is better. The bad guys will scoot around each of them."