Judge of EU beauty contest for 'sexy' startups is VC backer of winner
Comment 'Oh dear', says EC after Steelie Neelie blush gush
The European Commission has sponsored an award in which a VC was part of a panel that gave the top prize to one of his firm's investments. The first ever Europioneers Awards, presented by EC Vice-President Neelie Kroes, crowned the founders of two European startups, SwiftKey and SoundCloud, as "Young European Tech Entrepreneurs …
UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now
Everyone = Silicon Valley ad platforms tech companies
Have you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?
If so, you'll probably want to read this, because the rules on who can exploit your work have now changed radically, overnight.
Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by …
Review: Nokia Lumia 520
At last - an alternative to Landfill Android
A few years ago the late music magazine The Word coined the phrase "landfill indie" to describe the thousands of generic groups it encountered. Today the shops are full of "landfill Android": utterly generic, non-too-inspiring handsets. It’s into this Valley of Death that Nokia tosses its new Lumia 520.
In the UK, the average …
EE: Of course we're going to get 1m 4G users by the end of the year!
Brave numerical spinning by EE, but is it enough?
Everything Everywhere put a brave spin on its latest 4G numbers today and insisted it was on course for its goal of 1 MEEEELION users by the end of the year.
With its new LTE network criticised for being buggy, patchy, and wildly overpriced, EE has nevertheless found 318,000 punters to step up to the plate. These include …
Make cool shows, make money: Netflix's SHOCKING TV strategy
'Internet TV' biz counts House of Cards gamble winnings
Netflix added 2 million US subscribers and made a profit of $2.69m (£1.77m) in the first quarter of 2013, buoyed by its critically acclaimed exclusive drama House of Cards.
The DVDs-by-post company now bills itself as an “internet television network” and is edging up in US customer numbers - its subscribers now almost equal …
Review: Nokia's Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 720
Ah, a battery life just like the old days
Nokia completed its Windows 8 range with two new models recently, including this midrange offering the 720. With a choice of five Lumias it's now clearer to see what Nokia hopes to achieve.
The 720 strikes me as the Ford Cortina of the Lumias, a well made mass market compact. The 720 has everything going for it except, perhaps, …
BlackBerry OS 10.1 leaks its secret goo over all the web
Half-baked next version to try, if you're mad enough
A work-in-progress build of the next BlackBerry OS, version 10.1, has leaked onto the interwebs.
This latest update is due to ship this month to coincide with the planned launch of the BlackBerry Q10, a touchscreen phone with a QWERTY physical keyboard. This model follows its all-touchscreen cousin the Z10, which went on sale in …
More and more likely that double CO2 means <2°C: New study
Yes, it warms the planet - just not as much as thought
The results of a new approach to calculating the effect of CO2 - using empirical observations - suggest it has a lower impact on the climate than previously thought, and its effects are being over-estimated by the IPCC.
Publishing in the American Meterological Society's Journal of Climate, a new paper called An improved, …
How to save UK's open data: Meet the 'Fair Value Licence'
Comment Data hippies! Stop singing Kumbaya and get real
The Royal Mail's postcode database is to be privatised and campaigners for "open data" are furious.
But they only have themselves to blame; the open data campaign has been conducted with staggering utopian naivety. I strongly support the idea of opening up public datasets and I'm going to explain how open data can succeed, …
Nokia: OK, Q1 has been weak, but there's 'underlying' profit
Budget phone lines might yet save the day
Nokia warned of a weaker first quarter last year and duly delivered. Sales were €5.85bn in Q1 2013 with an operating loss of €150m.
Net phone sales were down 32 per cent year on year, with 6.1 million smartphones shifted in the first three months of the year, of which 5.6 million were Lumia Windows phones.
In Q4 Nokia shifted …
UK's first copyright swap-shop for cat pics (etc) still yonks away
You know you need to buy the rights for that, yes?
The UK's Copyright Hub, designed for high-volume legit trading of copyrighted material, will launch in July.
Ultimately the service will allow individual Brits to, for example, easily license music to use in wedding videos, cat photos for calendars or illustrations for books. But not just yet.
Its chairman Richard Hooper …
UK Supreme Court backs news leech in copyright fight
But asks EU court to give final say on browser cache scuffle
The UK's Supreme Court has sided with a technology company and a public relations industry group in a long-running copyright case - but bounced it up to Europe for ultimate clarification.
The decision (PDF) by the court offers a temporary respite for the Meltwater Group, a parasitic news scraper-cum-headline aggregator, after a …
Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?
Analysis Famine-causing ... and not even environmentally friendly
The craze for biofuels* - a part of EU legislation for a decade** now - is costing Europeans a fortune and isn't even environmentally friendly, a new report (PDF) by renowned British thinktank Chatham House argues.
In the name of "climate change reduction", the EU passed a mandate requiring 10 per cent of transport energy to …
Will Google's rivals swallow the 'labelling remedy' pill?
Analysis Web giant's in Europe now, where complainants count
Google will have a green light to offer "manipulated" search results and "to discriminate against competitors" if its preferred competition remedy is accepted by the EU, at least according to 39 national consumer bodies in Europe.
We don't yet know the specifics of the terms Google offered (and that the European Commission will …
Most brain science papers are neurotrash: Official
Don't believe everything you read
A group of academics from Oxford, Stanford, Virginia and Bristol universities have looked at a range of subfields of neuroscience and concluded that most of the results are statistically worthless.
The researchers found that most structural and volumetric MRI studies are very small and have minimal power to detect differences …
Half of US smartphone owners have no idea which mobe to buy next
What was that about platform lock-in?
Were "ecosystems" of apps and developers ever the clincher in the smartphone wars? The conventional wisdom is that once users are locked in an online software store they will never leave. Perhaps this stickiness has been oversold.
Now 44 per cent of 1,500 smartphone owners surveyed by MKM Partners in the US aren't sure which …
The gloves are on: Nokia emits super-sensitive £99 Windows Phone
Along with svelte sibling
Nokia's sub-£100 Lumia 520 has rolled out in the UK this week, alongside a keenly priced and attractive unibody sibling, the Lumia 720. Both were announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.
The Lumia 620 put a modern Nokia at a price point under £150, but now the slightly larger size has made it even cheaper. …
Vinyl sales reach 15 year high, Blighty becomes No. 3 music buyer
You just can't trust that singing fat lady
The UK overtook Germany as the world's third largest music market last year, according to the yearbook from trade association IFPI. The USA and Japan remain the largest two music nations.
Revenues from music recordings were about the same as last year - $16.4bn - but a slow shift from physical (down 5 per cent) to legit internet …
Facebook VOICE is what telco barons should fear - not a Zuckermobe
Analysis Just killed a chicken, now your profits are next... bitch
Facebook disappointed anyone expecting the unveiling of a "Facebook phone" last week - including me. But device manufacturers and mobile operators should watch their backs: it's barely the start of what the social-networking website can achieve.
As a thought experiment, put yourself in Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg's Adidas …
Brit musos now trouser more crumpled fivers from online music than radio
Annual British royalties cheque check
For the first time, online services are dishing out more money to British songwriters and composers than radio. Music authors bagged £641.8m last year worldwide from the performance of their music, up 1.7 per cent from 2011. The annual figures (PDF) from the Performing Rights Society (aka "PRS for Music" - still) provide an …
Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay
Analysis Those fat pipes and extra Gs don't come cheap
It isn’t unicorns that keep the internets running, but eye-watering amounts of capital investment by infrastructure operators. However a substantial chunk of that investment never pays for itself and most of it barely repays the cost of the capital, reckons consultancy PwC.
The telco industry as a whole spends $320bn on …
Prime Ministerial exploding cheese expert to become 'entrepreneur'
'Visionary' who gave us the Magic Silicon Roundabout
Rohan Silva, the Downing Street wonk behind the fabulous soaraway Silicon Roundabout, is leaving politics to join a venture-capital firm closely associated with his biggest initiative.
As the Prime Minister's 33-year-old special policy advisor, Silva branded the name Tech City on the cluster of small businesses huddled around …
BitTorrent opens kimono, gets out one-to-many streaming tool
Has Bram finally cracked what the BBC couldn't?
BitTorrent’s live streaming protocol has finally emerged into the daylight after years of development. The beta program is now public. You can try it.
The broadcast data is assigned to small groups - "clubs" - which then share the stream with a UDP protocol. Congestion control is added at the last hop.
There’s more detail in …
Entire internet credits snapper for taking great pic while actually dead
He was good, says bloke who really took it, but come on
One of the web's best loved classic photographs - universally credited to the great photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson - was taken just six years ago, quite some time after Cartier-Bresson's death. Let's meet the bloke who snapped it.
It's an atmospheric image of a girl and a dog on a beach, with a storm brewing in background …
Torygraph and Currant Bun stand by to repel freeloaders
It's a paywall - like the one at the grocer
The Daily Telegraph is to begin charging regular web readers for web access.
The Telegraph doesn't use the term 'paywall' in its announcement, which is fair enough, really. The P-word is really a propaganda word, as the FT's M B Christie has pointed out: "Why don't we call it paying for content, just like paying for milk or …
Not got 4G? There's a reason we aren't called 'Four', sniffs Three
Want 4G and battery life? It's called HSDPA+, and it's 3 G
Ofcom designed its 4G auction so there would be four winners - but the UK's fourth player is in no rush to turn on 4G-LTE.
In fact, it thinks 3G connectivity is not all that different from 4G.
Three UK says its 4G mobile broadband service will go live later rather than soon. UK CEO David Dyson said today that the upgrade would …
After Leveson: The UK gets an Orwellian Ministry of Truth for real
Analysis Cause, an untrue news report. Guardian, though, not NotW
Ever wondered what a British coup d’état might look like? You’ll have to bring your own visuals, but the soundtrack would probably go like this ...
“Other than an Index of Censorship press release, where is your evidence for '300 years' of freedom?” demands one Reg comment-poster after your correspondent suggested MPs had ended …
Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski
'I'm NOT upset. Anyway I've got more Twitter followers. HA'
Official British National Treasure Stephen Fry has responded to El Reg teasing last week with an emotional defence of his TV voice-over work, in two impassioned audio burps this weekend.
"It doesn't upset me," Fry insists. "I am a voice-over artist, I have read every one of the Harry Potter novels - and I'm proud to have done so …
Freetard den isoHunt loses appeal against search ban
But owner no longer prohibited from getting a proper job
Canadian file-sharing website isoHunt has lost an appeal against a court injunction that required it to filter out searches for copyrighted material. Canadian national Gary Fung, who operated the site, was ordered to filter searches for BitTorrent downloads in 2010. He was also prohibited from using the terms in the website's …
The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures
Wrap up and think of Gaia
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, we’re about to save you reading 3,000. The UK is running out of gas. Very rapidly indeed. So much so, that shortly after Easter cuts and rationing may be introduced, with industrial users and hospitals getting preferential treatment.
This month is the coldest March in …
Dongle smut Twitstorm claims second scalp
Possible blokey jokey sees cross woman in pink slip
Life can imitate a Charlie Brooker drama, after all.
A programmer who made a "dongle" joke at a Python developers' conference has been fired, unleashing a Twitter lynch mob. His feminist accuser has also been fired after her employer suffered a DDoS attack.
"Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth through …
News scraper Meltwater loses US court case
Paltry traffic ruled no compensation for lost fees
Headline-scraper Meltwater has lost another court case, this time in the US. The Associated Press brought the case in a federal court, with Judge Denise Cote arguing that the service had stolen an unfair advantage over its rivals by refusing to take out a license for headlines and excerpts.
In 2011 the aggregator lost a case in …
Stephen Fry explains… Alan Turing's amazing computer
Universal Machine upgrade needed, where can I find the parts?
It's been almost two years* since Stephen Fry last put his foot in his mouth - but the boy has gone and done it again.
The nation's most cherished TV advertisement voiceover artist is cherished here, too, at El Reg - for his technical wisdom. After his attempt to explain how the internet works (it needs atomic clocks), we hosted …
Is UK web speech regulated? No.10: Er. We’ll get back to you
On-the-hoof tabloid crackdown leaves bloggers, online journos in the dark
As plastered all over the news yesterday, politicians and anti-tabloid campaigners finally hatched a plan to form a publishing regulator, by royal charter, with the ability to fine misbehaving organs and demand corrections to articles. The letter of the law underpinning the watchdog states it will cover websites; government spin …
Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC
Comment What's that, Sooty... you DON'T want to pay compulsory fee for havin' telly?
We're not making this up. TV Licensing™*, the outfit in charge of collecting the BBC's licence fee, has published a new report entitled "TV Licensing Reveals TV Elation Across The Nation".
The outfit has created what it called "The National TeleHappiness Index" to measure how, er, happy TV makes people in the UK. There is also a …
Muso scrapbook Soundcloud gets $50m, corporatespeak makeover
Comment Megabucks investment? Must talk shite
Soundcloud, a long-time favourite site of musicians and DJs where they can post their doodles, demos and remixes, has raised $50m in venture capital funding. And you know what that means: it’s now obliged to talk new media marketing gibberish with a straight face.
The website announced revised payment plans for musicians …
How UK gov's 'growth' measures are ALREADY killing the web
Analysis A digital landgrab for Google, everyone else can find the EXIT
Yesterday the House of Lords debated measures smuggled into the proposed Enterprise and Regulatory Reform law - measures that would lead to fewer photographs on the web and potentially cripple British businesses. Allow ace aerial photographer Jonathan Webb to explain.
Webb runs an aerial photography business and deals with …
Here's the $4.99 utility that might just have saved Windows 8
Vid Is Microsoft listening, though?
Veteran software outfit Stardock has offered Microsoft an elegant way to escape its Windows 8 Metro Notro dilemma.
With Windows 8, Redmond foisted a new and radical touchscreen-driven user interface on a desktop PC market that was already in a once-in-a-generation slump - and both consumer sales and enterprise interest have been …
Congratulations, freetards: You are THE FIVE PER CENT
Keep calm and carry on pirating, fellas
Meet the most pampered group in the UK. Bankers? Farmers? Wind-farm operators? The depressed river mussel?
Actually, none of the above. It's copyright infringers.
New research from UK communications regulator Ofcom shows that filling your boots with pirate downloads remains risk free and a money saver, particularly if you like …
Android 'splits' into the Good and the lovechild of Bad and Ugly
Top-end kit world away from crippled cheap cousins, warns analyst
Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress last week - there seems to be no stopping Google's mobile operating system that's now almost as ubiquitous as a colour display. But the success hides the platform's problems, insists one analyst.
Former Nomura analyst Richard Windsor paints a picture of increasing fragmentation …
TalkTalk bigwig parks knighted-rear in cursed YouView chair
Temporary move for Sir Charles after Lord Sugar legs it
Retail genius Sir Charles Dunstone will chair the YouView consortium until a permanent appointment can be made. Sir Charlie co-founded The Carphone Warehouse and is chairman of budget ISP TalkTalk.
TalkTalk has been a YouView member since 2009. The ISP offers a free YouView box and claims to be adding 10,000 punters a week - …
No.10 guru: UK tech scene is AN EXPLODING CHEESE
And we've got exotic offices for you too, in Bangalore
Rohan Silva - Downing Street's backroom adviser credited with hyping east London's Silicon Roundabout of tech startups - has given a rare interview. Speaking to WiReD UK, the "senior policy adviser" to the Prime Minister attempted to find a metaphor for the phenomenon.
This is what he came up with.
I think a tech scene is …
Tesco: Every little (effort to kill Amazon, Spotify) helps
Supermarket titan to flog ebooks, stream music
With a £64bn turnover and £3.9bn operating profit, Tesco was always going to make a big splash when it dived into the online media delivery market. We're just going to have to wait a bit longer to find out what it will be doing.
The supermarket announced some new appointments and its new branding - but much remains under wraps. …
Inside Lord Sugar's 'you're fired' YouView bust-up with TV baron
Apprentice head honcho quits telly box biz
YouView has announced that Lord Alan Sugar will leave the consortium two years after he headed up the organisation.
It was reported over the weekend that he stepped down after an especially animated Apprentice-style boardroom bust-up between the peer and Richard Desmond, owner of Channel 5. Lord Sugar was apparently told "you're …
MWC 2013: The Chinese are coming - and you ain't seen nothing yet
MWC 2013 Who can possibly stop Huawei's new mobile hardware?
When the signs at an international trade event are in Chinese first, you know things have changed. This was only true of the photocopied signs posted all around Hall One at this year's Mobile World Congress, home to the giant Huawei hospitality booth - but expect to it spread. The Chinese have barely got started.
"Why are we …
Take that, freetards: First music sales uptick in over a decade
Industry parties like it's almost 1999, pirates face extinction
Year-on-year sales of recorded music have risen for the first time since 1999, albeit by a smidgen, according to industry stats.
The business of selling and licensing sound recordings is now 40 per cent smaller than it was pre-Y2K, but in 2012 revenues increased by 0.3 per cent - and that hasn't happened before in this …
So much noise on WinMob, but Microsoft's silent on lovely WinPhone
MWC 2013 When it had a terrible OS, it wouldn't shut up
I came to Barcelona to take the pulse of Windows Phone - which I’ll confess I've grown to like quite a bit - I came away trying to make sense of the following paradox.
A decade ago, and for some years either side, Microsoft had a terrible mobile device platform but noisily insisted it would succeed. Perhaps because it was …
Nokia wants to build the Google of human behaviour - and share it
Interview Really, really, really Big Data to work out who's doing what, when and why
Nokia has a radical strategy to outflank some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, and it shared some of the details with El Reg in Barcelona this week.
According to Michael Halbherr, a key member of Nokia’s top executive team and arguably number two to CEO Stephen Elop, location-based human behaviour …
That Firefox OS mobe: The sorta phone left behind after a mugging
MWC 2013 Why do they bother? asks our man in Barcelona in his conference sketch
Mobile World Congress - the mobile networks' annual shindig - was getting unwieldy when 10,000 attendees and exhibitors hobbled between yachts in Cannes harbour, so it was moved to Barcelona.
Last year, 70,000 attended MWC in the Spanish city, so it was moved to a new venue with twice the floor space and moving walkways between …
Nokia opens Maps to rivals, flogs uber-budget €15 phone
MWC 2013 Saves 'best' of Maps for Nokia mobes
A Linux phone running Mozilla OS can be found on Nokia’s stand at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week – but it’s not a "Plan B". It’s more a statement of intent from the Finnish handset company about its Maps platform, which Nokia is opening up and licensing more aggressively to non-Nokia mobile devices.
CEO Stephen …
