I woke up this morning to this story on the BBC Breakfast television News about the UK having the highest rail fares in Europe, which is no great surprise to anyone who’s spent any amount of time on the continent. At one point during the report it cut to one of those vox pops with some bird quite rightly saying that the price keeps going up but we’re not seeing any difference in the quality of service.  Here’s a quote from the same BBC article: “British annual season tickets for journeys of no more than 25 miles were 88% more expensive than the next most expensive country – France – and more than four times pricier than the cheapest country – Italy”. Pretty incredible stuff, not surprising but at one point the Department of Transport were giving a statement to the effect that once improvements had been made to the infrastructure of the railways we could see prices falling more into line with the rest of Europe. ‘”Bollocks”, I thought, even if the current system was running bullet trains that were time managed by atomic clocks there is no way they’re going to turn around and say “Right lads, time to stop taking the piss – slash ticket prices by 50%”.

Anyway, I completely forgot all about it and went about my day routinely getting sodomized by the extortionate London public transport system before sitting down to begin reading ‘The Undercover Economist’ by Messr. Tim Harford. Precisely 30 mins ago I came across this gem on page 18:

“Why would improvements in the quality and price of the commuter train services that bring people into London’s mainline stations, such as Waterloo, from the sorrounding suburbs please anyone who rents a property in central London? And why might the city’s landlords be less than ethusiastic about such improvements?

The answer is that improved public transport increases alternatives to renting a place in the city. When a two hour commute becomes a one hour commute, and people are able to get a seat instead of standing, some decide they’d rather save money and move out of central London. Vacant apartments then appear on the market. Scarcity lessens, and rents fall. Improving commuter services wouldn’t just affect commuters; it would affect everyone involved in London’s property market”

Now that the housing boom is on it’s arse, this situation is not going to get any better. We’re still going to have to have our noses pressed against people’s armpits every Monday to Friday whilst paying a minimum of 1200 quid a year for the priviledge.

Moving on to page 19…

The future is here and the future is MoMail. Not heard of it yet? It’s a matter of time. Momail is simple, free downloadable software that turns any mobile into one that can receive and deal with email. A mobile email account that levels the playing field between those with crackberrys and those without. Compatible with all existing email accounts like Hotmail and Gmail and free, it pushes emails to your phone, alerts you with an SMS style alert and minimizes content so you can view it on your handset. We’re waiting for the catch.

So no longer are we just consumers and listeners of music, we can now make money from our personal preferences and favourite artists. Bizmo is a new widget that is easy to cut and paste in blogs and social networking sites that allows people to buy tickets for gigs. They get an instant text message ticket and a pdf ticket to their email and can pay by credit card, text or paypal all within the widget, and you as host get a percentage. FeedMe music is the first music promoter to start using this, but the widget also sells MP3s, ringtones, pictures and video clips…enabling up and coming acts to cash in on the content craze.

As discussed within these pages over two weeks ago it seemed a little nonsensical that Google should be asked to value Facebook at $18 billion when the social network is making relatively little cash. It seems that Google quickly came to same conclusion and have acted fast to put together a social networking platform that not only has mass appeal but can actually hold the attention of the user for longer than 6 months.

OpenSocial is an API for Google’s Orkut that opens up the social network to other social networks and hosting sites. Namely; Ning, Plaxo, Friendster, viadeo, Hi5, LinkedIn, Oracle, Flixster and Slide. The idea is to build plug ins for the social network that are actually useful rather than merely entertaining (for those of you who find getting ‘bitten by zombies’ and choosing to be either ‘a ninja or a pirate’ even mildly amusing). 

If Google get this right (which I think is inevitable) they could be unstoppable.

via BetaNews

Last Thursday news came through that Sony was selling its PS3 chips to rival Toshiba and is no longer interested in developing the technology further. Yesterday we heard that PlayStation is currently begging games developers not to forget about its console (having previously taken a very arrogant stance towards them), and now it’s being reported that the new 40GB PS3 worldwide launch is aimed more squarely at those seeking to use the console as a digital media center.

This is pretty interesting for this reason: Sony appear to be preparing for the worst case scenario on their games development business and are now completely focusing on the console’s ability to become a digital media center. The last week has seen them making noises about being fully committed to making a successful games console whilst also pointing at the sky and telling you to take a look whilst they do a runner stage left.

Tough decisions have clearly been taken to see what can be salvaged from a product that is losing the company an estimated $200 – $300 dollars every time a unit is sold, and due to the now very well documented problems of programming for the PS3 the company’s aim seems to be to concentrate on the machines abilities as media center and Blu-Ray player. Considering the console is deathly silent (unlike the Xbox) and is one of the cheapest Blu-Ray players on the market it should prove an attractive proposition and therefore could prove a safe bet.

The PS3 is an incredibly powerful machine that’s been given an open platform that can do anything from streaming IPTV to calculating the weight of theoretical gravity waves when a star is being swallowed by a super-massive black hole (click here if you don’t believe me), therefore with a little help from Linux/Ubuntu (can’t see Microsoft somehow) and some imaginative developers it could cause a serious threat to its rivals in both the gaming and media center worlds if targeted to the right market. Namely: twenty somethings who like having their mates round to watch YouTube on living room TV, download a movie and like listening to tunes through their iPod …and who knows, they may eventually end up playing a game or two while they’re at it.

Last Wednesday I wrote on these pages that sooner or later Facebook was probably in for a  rude awakening due to the inevitable drop in users once everyone got bored. Quite frankly, the interface is so dull I immediately got bored first time I looked at it and quickly left, forgot all about it and was surprised to find I already had an account next time I visited the site quite a few months later.

Anyway, according to a report recently published today by a company called Datamonitor it appears that critical mass for the current heavy hitters in the social networking sphere  (read: MySpace and Facebook) will happen in 2009. According to them that is when there will be no one left to sign up. In addition, we’ve all seen first hand how easily people getsbored after a month or two of usage – we’ve all experienced it with MySpace, in some instances with Bebo and now with Facebook.

I’d seriously consider deleting all my social networking profiles if I knew I didn’t have to use them for work on a regular basis.

More info from Tech

Due to upcoming changes in the UK chart rules, the 29th of October will see the widespread selling of singles on USB keys. This move according to Brian Rose (Commercial Director at Universal UK) is aimed at “12 to 24 year olds, who no longer believe that the CD is as cool as it used to be”. Right, slightly misguided there as to why the ‘kids’ are no longer buying singles, but this USB doesn’t sound so bad until you find out they want to charge £4.99 for the pleasure. Yes, that’s right – 5 FUCKING QUID, Just in case you forgot what that looks like, here’s a picture:

Now I possibly wouldn’t even mind forking out a fiver if I knew that I would be able to buy my Justice/UNKLE/DaftPunk/Fill-in-as-appropriate branded USB single, take it home, dump the contents contained therein onto my PC or laptop and use the now empty key to store documents and other data as I see fit. I very easily imagine it appealing to the kids who care about ‘cool’, it lets people know you like the band and it serves a function – like a band t-shirt. But you just know that these major label guys are so fucking stupid on DRM that they’re never going to let that happen. Idiots.

More on Paste

HMV is launching its new gamin center at one of its flagship stores in Edinburgh. It will turn itself into an old fashioned arcade where you can hang out with your mates, smoke round the corner and get the older lads to buy cider for you.

In all seriousness this decision makes perfect commercial sense -  the disappearance of old style arcades (which I’m not afraid to admit took up a fair bit of my youth), the slow decline of traditional forms of income for record stores in addition to the complaints from urban ‘yoofs’ that there is nothing to do leaves a gap in market for a retailer who is willing to provide a top class gaming experience for you and 15 of your mates for the princely sum of 3 quid an hour.

HMV are on to a winner with this. Mark my words.

Napster U.S. announced yesterday that it plans to drop it’s standalone application subscription model in favour of a new web based subscription model.

Christopher Allen, Chief Operating Officer at Napster, said, “With this new platform, Napster can easily be integrated into consumer electronics devices or integrated into other Web sites such as social networking sites.”

What this means for Janus enabled players, how this will actually function and whether or not this will be happening in the European market at the same time as the U.S. is not yet clear.

via Betanews

The whole MySpace/Skype get together as reported in your national newspaper makes total commercial sense for both parties. What I find most interesting about this story however is is not how each side is going exploit the new opportunities now afforded to them in linking up but the wider picture that’s being presented, namely this:

In less than two years these two companies have sold for a combined total of over $3.5 billion to two of the biggest corporations in the world purely off the back of projected earnings that were at best speculative, at worst, foolhardy. Neither of these start ups would’ve dreamed of sharing their platform with anyone else at the point of sale, nor would they have been expected to considering the absolute certainty with which the financial sector decreed their ability to make enough money – and more – to easily cover to the cost of sale. Now a very different picture emerges: Niklas Zennstrom, one of the creators of Skype and now a Joost co-founder, essentially admitted this week that eBay paid too much for the VoiP company, “We overshot in terms of monetization,” he said on Tuesday at a tech conference in Hungary. “Our position in the market has strengthened… you need to look at the long-term value of companies” …nice way of dressing up his never-to-be-repeated payday.

Facebook is being valued at $18 billion and supposedly has Google running scared. Personally, I find it incredibly hard to believe that a company that is easily valued at ten times more than the social network and more importantly, is actually making cold hard cash is worried about a social network that is far from perfect. It hasn’t yet reached as many user account sign ups as MySpace yet and speaking to friends I get the distinct feeling that they are all starting to lose interest in it pretty quickly. Google has the creative muscle and know how to build a social network with the ability to capture peoples imagination and hold it by letting its myriad of additional services be exploited within that environment.

Only time will tell.

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