Meganet

NOMAD make USB cables, but cables with a difference, they're in the shape of a credit card or key fob. They also come in two varieties of each, micro-USB or Apple's Lightning connector.

Do you really need another USB adapter? Well the NOMAD devices (are they devices?) are really easy to carry around with you all the time, so you never have to be without a USB adapter.

The Card is just that, a credit card sized adapter with two bits that push out, one being the normal USB bit that plugs into a laptop or charger and the other bit is a micro-USB plug or Lightning plug. It's a bit thicker than a normal credit card, but not much and it will fit in a wallet credit card slot, Oysters holder, or jacket without much fuss.

The Clip is about the same length as a key and has a "loop" at the micro-USB/Lightning end. It does look a bit like a key when viewed at the right angle. This easily fits on a key ring and won't look out of place.

Both products are pretty durable, though if either was REALLY bent a lot, the plastic could become stressed, though it would require a LOT of effort.

Though they can both be ordered off the NOMAD site, they're now available on Amazon.

The Apple Lightning version of the Clipand Card and the the micro-USB versions Card and Clip, each cost £16.

That sounds quite a lot for what's basically a USB cable, but it's not much for being able to carry something around all the time, so being able to charge your phone or tablet wherever you are (ok you might not have a charger, but it's often easy to find a USB port somewhere, the issue being never having the right cable with you). The NOMAD solutions just fit the bill - well your wallet or key holder.

The HTC One (M8) comes in a box resembling an Apple Mac Mini and sliding off the top reveals the phone in all its glory. It's a well made phone and feels very solid in construction with an aluminium body and big screen (the phone is bigger than an iPhone), coming in at 160g the weight matches the solidness of the chassis. It's also 9.3mm thick which feels right (and not clunky).

The screen is very bright (Gorilla Glass form Corning) and it uses Super LCD technology supporting 1080 x 1920 (HD) pixels with a wide viewing angle it's 5 inches from corner to diagonal corner, it's possible to watch a movie on this and really appreciate the vibrant colours.

The M8 also supports the latest generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, the 801 with 4 cores (ARM) - though it's a 32bit CPU (Apple's new CPU is 64bit), though there's a lot of power and the phone doesn't feel underpowered in the slightest. The CPU also has on-board graphics, a DSP and support for the latest GPS technologies.

The battery is also 2600mAH which allows the phone to operate for a sensible amount of time before recharging (obviously dependant on application use, but it can last a full day on a full charge).

There's front and rear cameras and front facing HTC Boom speakers which don't sound too tinny.

The phone comes with Google's latest Android Operating System Kit Kat and some HTC application pre-bundled. HTC Blinkfeed is an app that manages all your social feeds (and email) in a single view, which is actually quite nice to use. there's also Sense TV which is a TV remote on steroids and works with both terrestrial TV channels and services like Sky and Virgin Media. There's also all the standard Google apps like Maps, Google Now and voice actions (like Apple's SIRI).

There's 8GB of internal memory which is enough to run quite a few apps, but there's also a MicroSD slot which can take a 128GB card which should support most people's app desires.

There's also NFC, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5 GHz) and DLNA allowing wireless streaming to another DLNA device such as a TV.

The cameras should also be mentioned as HTC has done some magic with the rear camera (well it's actually two), the primary camera is an HTC UltraPixel™ camera, BSI sensor, pixel size 2.0 um, sensor size 1/3”, f/2.0, 28mm lens, HTC ImageChip 2. 1080p Full HD video recording with HDR video and the secondary camera is used to capture depth information. This allows a picture to be taken and the depth of field changed (so the foreground or background can be brought into focus).

The front camera is more 'normal' with a 5MP, BSI sensor, wide angle lens with HDR capability, 1080p Full HD video recording. Gallery with UFocus™, Dimension Plus™, Seasons, Foregrounder, Image match.

The phone is really best of breed and it's one of the snappiest phones around, there's no lag and the screen really is fantastic.

O2 kindly lent the phone and it's on their O2 Refresh service which costs from £38 to £48 per month (with a zero upfront cost for the phone) or £13 to £28 per month paying the full £609.99 for the phone.

This week Wonderluk, a new e-commerce site went live (well into beta) that sells 3D printed jewellery and accessories for the more avant-garde woman.

Though there's not a huge amount on the site on the moment (there are 17 items of jewellery and 3 iPhone cases), this is just the beginning. Currently all the designs come from Wonderluk themselves, though it could easily add 3rd party items and become a (the?) destination site for 3D fashion items.

3D printing has the power to revolutionise jewellery and accessories as designs can be conjured up mathematically that are almost impossible to imagine mentally and impossible to construct using normal jewellery fabrication methods. Mathematics is beautiful, nature uses it in everything (think of a sunflower head and the spiralling of the seeds). It will also open up the use of new materials which aren't currently used by jewellers.

All the designs are currently made out of nylon in various colours, but there's no reason in future metal or other sintered materials couldn't be used and in combinations (both in material and colour). Any piece on the site can be printed in various colours (white, black, caramel, indigo blue, ice blue, green, purple, pink, red, sunset orange and yellow).

Prices aren't cheap for what some may think of as something made of plastic, but then the pieces are exquisitely designed and made to a very high standard. If the site really takes off, volume effects will probably come in and costs may go down.

Though the site is squarely aimed at women, the iPhone cases would happily suit a Shoreditch hipster or even a geek who like tech and the thought that their phone is both protected, looks nice and comes from a 3D print.

Microsoft, who aren't known for giving away anything for free, have decided to drop licensing fees for Windows Phone 8 (for devices with displaces less than 9 inches). Though it only has about 3% of the phone market, that's still quite a big hit to cope with as current fees are around $5 - $15 per phone, though that's estimated to be less than $1bn per year.

Of course Microsoft do get a nice revenue stream from Android licensees as they still have to pay royalties to Microsoft for their mobile patents.

This might just tip the balance and get more handset manufacturers to switch to Windows Phone and though Microsoft won't get direct revenue for the OS, they will get revenue from the add-on services such as Office 365 which users are encouraged to sign-up to.

Ben Southworth has launched the website for the Ada Lovelace Academy which wants to train the next generation of entrepreneurs in Hackney, giving them the skills to succeed in the new digital age.

The Academy is looking for a home and will teach children aged 16 - 19, hopefully opening in 2015.

The skills on offer will be: -

• Design & Digital Comms
• Entrepreneurship
• Business Skills
• Presentation Skills
• Latest Technologies
• A sense of community

Ben has already been involved with education designing courses for both General Assembly and Decoded. He spent a year with Government being the Deputy CEO of TCIO (or as it known now as TechCityUK) and now is on several boards.

This is a great initiative and anyone wanting to help should contact Ben. It's also possible to donate on the site itself.

Ofcom, the Super regulator, has made a statement allowing the use of short range devices to use the spectrum in 870 to 876 MHz and 915 to 921 MHz.

The spectrum will be made available in a license exempt manner and Ofcom expect to publish the technical requirements in April 2014, though there may be changes to allow higher power and duty cycles (suitable for use as network relay point for Internet of Things devices) which will be published later in the year which should allow implementation in Q4 2014.

The main objection seems to come fem the railway industry as these bands may interfere with proposed railway GSM systems (E-GSM-R) though they are not in use at this time. The UK met office also uses potentially conflicting frequencies for wind profiling radars. Ofcom will monitor the situation.

The full statement is on-line as a PDF

Ofcom, the Super regulator, who look after radio spectrum is proposing to allow increasing the transmit power on the 1800MHz PCN band. Ofcom varied the original licenses so the band could be used for UMTS, LTE and WiMAX services. The new variation would allow a 3dB to 65 dBm per carrier for 3G and 3dB to 65dBm on the 5MHz channels for LTE and WiMAX.

EE Limited (“EE”), Hutchison 3G UK Limited (“H3G”), Telefonica UK Limited (“Telefonica”) and Vodafone Limited (“Vodafone”) have all requested that their 1800 MHz licences be amended in this way.

Ofcom's preliminary verdict is to allow these variations, however the results of the consultation will be taken into consideration.

Any stakeholders may respond to the consultation on-line.

Apple wants to own the entertainment space, it first created the iPod with its companion iTunes which soon completely disrupted the music industry. With the advent of iPods and iPhones which could play video, Apple then went into the film distribution and rental business too.

Now it's the car industry that is getting the Apple makeover with a play (Carplay to be exact) to integrate your iPhone into your car experience which when you plug your iPhone in, will now support Apple services such as Maps (maybe you'll get to where you want, though Apple is improving Maps all the time), iTunes, messaging and other services. Everything can be voice controlled through Siri or the car's own voice recognition system.

Though Apple is meant to be announcing embedded iOS 7 for exactly these types of applications, it seems that Carplay actually uses Blackberry's QNX (Blackberry purchased QNX a while back and it's now the basis of BB10). QNX is a "micro" kernel realtime operating system and has been around for a long time and powers many ATMs and devices such as that. QNX also pushes their OS to auto manufacture to power their "infotainment" systems (formally known as ICE or In Car Entertainment) and it's exactly this use that powers Carplay.

The first cars to support Carplay will be Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, followed by BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda and Jaguar Land Rover.

If Carplay gets widely deployed, it could be Blackberry's saving grace, though maybe Apple will just buy them.

Ofcom, the Super regulator has decided to make the use of Earth Stations on Mobile Platforms (ESOMP) license except, but in conjunction with existing mobile licenses such as ship or aircraft radio licenses.

This should allow ships and aircraft to offer mobile broadband services with downlink speeds of around 50Mb/s from a single satellite, which would equate to about 10Mb/s to each passenger (multiple satellites can be used).

Ofcom is making available 4,128 MHz worth of spectrum in the following bands: 27.5 – 27.8185 GHz (transmit); 28.4545 – 28.8265 GHz (transmit); 29.4625 – 30 GHz (transmit); and 17.3 – 20.2 GHz (receive) which is a fair chunk of spectrum.

Ship's use should come into force this month and aviation, in collaboration with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), by summer 2014.

The full statement is here.

Ofcom, the Super regulator is proposing to allow the use of UMTS 2100 and LTE 1800 license free in aircraft. The use of 2G on the 1800MHz bands has been allowed since 2008. This is in-line with European spectrum frameworks.

This extends the harmonisation of mobile communications service on Aircraft (MCA) services to cover 3G technologies in 1920 -1980 MHz and 2110 - 2170 MHz (the "2100 MHz" frequency band) and 4G in 1710-1785 MHz and 1805 - 1880 MHz (the "1800 MHz" frequency band).

Though MCA services are not mandatory, more and more airlines are installing MCA services and they will be responsible for the installation and operation of such services and to ensure they don't interfere with ground based systems.

The consultation is available on-line and closes on 12 March 2014 and Ofcom is proposing to bring the regulations into force by May 2014.

HTC the company that produces innovative mobile phones and Futurizon have produced "The Future of Football" report.

They have made some predictions (that may or not become actual reality).

Ones that are more realistic are: -

• By 2020 footballs will have impact sensors and accelerometers embedded in the ball, as well as in the kit that players wear, which will allow precise measurements on how players are playing and what the ball is doing.
• By 2014 players could have 'active skin' which could entail electronics printed on to the skin (or built into the materials of the clothing players wear) which can measure such things as blood chemistry and even link to their nervous system which will be linked to external monitoring system.

Some of the more "interesting" predictions are: -

• By 2050 fans will be able to receive full sensory information so they will 'feel' like it's like to actually be playing on the pitch.
• By 2060 Android (as in robotic humans, not the Google OS) players remotely controlled by fans.

They have also produced an infographic about football.

By 2018 fans will be able to hold a small flexible card display displaying players and info about them as well as links to social networks etc.

Then by 2045, phones will have 3D holographic type displays which can display the action in realtime.

And (this is more realistic, though maybe not in insect form) there will be tiny drones giving access to views that aren't possible now.

Isn't the future going to be fun.

Some very sad breaking news out of Bowling Green, Kentucky. A sinkhole has opened up underneath the Skydome of the National Corvette Museum. Currently, 8 cars in the museum have been affected. And it's heart breaking because it affects several of the most significant Corvettes built. It sounds like a very bad April Fools joke started by some Corvette haters, but it's very real and very scary. We have even included a picture broadcasted out to Twitter. This is a very sad day for the automotive world. Below is the media release from the museum.

We received a call at 5:44am from our security company alerting us of our motion detectors going off in our Skydome area of the Museum.  Upon arrival it was discovered that a sinkhole had collapsed within the Museum.  No one was in or around the Museum at the time.  The Bowling Green Fire Department arrived on the scene and secured the area.  The Fire Department has estimated the size of the hole is 40 feet across and 25-30 feet deep.

It is with heavy hearts that we report that eight Corvettes were affected by this incident.  Those cars include:

    1993 ZR-1 Spyder on loan from General Motors
    2009 ZR1 “Blue Devil” on loan from General Motors

The other six vehicles were owned by the National Corvette Museum including:

    1962 Black Corvette
    1984 PPG Pace Car
    1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette
    1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette
    2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette
    2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette

None of the cars affected were on loan from individuals.  The Skydome exhibit area of the Museum is a separate structure connected to the main Museum.  A structural engineer is now on-site to assess the existing damage and stability of the surrounding areas.  The Museum is closed to the public for the day to allow us to carefully assess the situation.  We will keep everyone informed as we know more.


Source: National Corvette Museum.

Nominet are the domain registry for .uk (i.e. all domains ending in the UK suffix), which is a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) - as an aside it should really be .gb but companies such as Demon Internet broke that it in the early 90's.

Nominet have generally been very sensible in the past when it comes to domain registration policy and other matters relating to the UK domain space.

Now Lord Macdonald QC has published (PDF) a "Review of .uk Registration Policy" and made some recommendations which Nominet have now adopted.

The summary of the report is this: -

• Nominet should remain an open registry. Amongst other reasons set out in the body of this Review, this is because the market in domain names requires a speedy and efficient registration process and because the screening technology currently available is blunt and incapable of judging context. In circumstances where Nominet registers between 150,000-200,000 new domain names every month, this inevitably means that any pre-registration scrutiny of applications will throw up unmanageable numbers of false positives, slowing down registrations to no purpose and to a point that is likely to become commercially unviable.
• Nominet should consider instituting a system of post-registration screening, to be conducted within 48 hours of registration, for domain names that appear to signal sex crime content, or to amount in themselves to sex crimes. Where examples in this category are discovered, they should be reported to the police and suspended or de-registered. This process, in so far as it is designed to detect grave criminality, is plainly consistent with an open registration policy.
• Nominet should restrict post registration scrutiny to domain names in the serious sex crime category. This is because the relevant screening terms for sex crime are highly specific and have a stronger chance of identifying true positives. Post-registration screening for other forms of criminality will inevitably rely on very general terms that are bound to throw up unmanageable numbers of false positives.
• Nominet, which is a private company, should have no role in policing questions of taste or offensiveness on the Internet. It is not set up, trained or by culture competent to act as Internet censor, in contrast to identifying possible examples of criminality for onward reporting to the police. Furthermore, there are no objective, generally accepted standards of taste that could guide Nominet in undertaking such a role. This means that any decision- making on its part would risk uncertainty and inconsistency, which are highly undesirable ingredients where the restriction of free expression rights is concerned. Nominet would not have public confidence as censor, and it should not be expected to assume such a role in circumstances where government and police are content not to act.
• Where domain names that are alleged to signal criminal content, or to amount to crimes in themselves, or to be attached to criminal content, are brought to Nominet’s attention, Nominet should, if it agrees that they might fall into any of those categories, refer these cases to the police for further action. In consultation with the police, this could include suspension or de-registration. It is only in these circumstances that Nominet, which is not a content provider, should involve itself in the examination of website content for any regulatory purpose.
• Nominet should amend its terms and conditions to make it clear that any registration of a domain name that signals criminal content, or amounts in itself to a crime, will constitute a breach of Nominet’s terms of business, and is liable to be reported to the police and suspended or de-registered.

This all sounds very reasonable at face value, however this can lead to lots of ambiguities ... as Adrian Kennard points out in his well written blog piece ... so someone registering therapist.co.uk can fall foul of these recommendations as it may be interpreted as TheRapist.co.uk which is a sex crime.

A registrant could quite happily register murderwhoever.co.uk as this is NOT a sex crime.

It's also quite easy to circumvent as Nominet will only check the top level domain, so (again thanks to Mr Kennard) children.co.uk can be registered with no problem, and then the registrant can just use a sub-domain like f*ck.children.co.uk which Nominet have NO control over.

The law is an ass and this is a good example where it can rapidly lead to a horrible mess.