Free broadband firm TalkTalk promises competitive prices in mobile services deal with Vodafone

Internet and phone firm TalkTalk has struck a deal with Vodafone to launch a mobile service under its own brand.

TalkTalk, which helped revolutionise the broadband market by introducing “free” internet access four years ago, will offer both contract and pre-pay tariffs to existing customers from the autumn.

Market watchers will be looking to see whether the company, the second-largest residential broadband provider in the UK, will have as big an impact in the mobile industry as it did in on internet services.

Chairman Charles Dunstone said TalkTalk, which was spun out of Carphone Warehouse earlier this year, would make a “gentle” entry into mobile services, but would offer competitive prices.

“It will be a way to add a very good value mobile package to the account you have with us for your fixed-line phone and broadband,” he said.

TalkTalk entered the phone market in 2003 and the broadband market in 2006. Carphone Warehouse, meanwhile, still has its own mobile venture called TalkMobile, which also uses Vodafone’s network.

News of the mobile phone service came as TalkTalk announced first-quarter results which showed it added 34,000 net broadband customers in the second quarter, taking its total to 4.23 million. That puts it ahead of Virgin Media, which announced earlier this week that it had 4.21 million customers, having added 28,100 in the quarter. BT said yesterday it had 5.2 million broadband customers, adding 96,000 in the last three months, although it does not split out its residential customers from its large base of business users. The UK’s fourth-largest broadband provider, BSkyB, meanwhile, added 119,000 broadband customers in the quarter, taking its total customer base to 2.6 million.

TalkTalk’s average revenue per broadband user was £23.90, slightly up on a year ago. TalkTalk, which bought rival Tiscali a year ago, said its share of net broadband adds was about 10% this quarter, keeping it on track to add 140,000 to 180,000 customers over the year as a whole.

Revenues climbed 31% in the quarter to £444m, broadly in line with expectations.

The company said it remained confident it would deliver 6-8% revenue growth, and 20% growth in normalised earnings per share and dividends per share for the year to 31 March 2011.

Vodafone, meanwhile, has a number of other wholesale deals which allow companies to use its network to become what are termed mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). It provides network coverage for BT, Asda and Lebara, which targets the UK’s immigrant population.

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(Source The Guardian)

Adults banned from searching children’s computers or phones under a new law passed in Chongqing, southwest China

It is a ruling that teenagers around the world will regard with a certain amount of envy. Parents in one Chinese city are to be prevented from snooping on their children’s online activity and text messages.

Adults, including family members, are banned from searching through children’s computers or phones under a new regional law passed in Chongqing, southwest China, state media reported today. The regulation outlaws snooping into their emails, text messages, web chats, and browser history. The regulation is designed to protect the rights of children, but is surprising given widespread concern in China about excessive internet use among young people and their access to unsuitable material. Psychologists have sought to have internet addiction listed as a clinical disorder and treatment camps have sprung up across the country. The Chongqing Evening Post described the new regulation, adopted on Friday by officials in Chongqing, as the first of its kind in the country. Other Chinese media said it expanded an existing national rule. But both experts and children doubted whether it would have an impact in practice.

Lu Yulin, a professor at the China Youth University of Political Science, told China Daily that children were unlikely to take their parents to court.

“Parents who habitually check such information won’t stop due to the regulation,” he said.

Eleven-year-old Song Jingbo, from Xi’an, told the newspaper he did not think his mother and father would be able to access his data anyway, adding: “I am far more internet savvy than them.”

China has the largest population of internet users in the world and minors alone account for more 126 million of them, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

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(Source The Guardian)

Mobile phone operator reports its first quarterly service revenue growth since the recession

Strong demand for mobile data has helped Vodafone increase its service revenues for the first time in 18 months, as its key markets recovered from recession.

Britain’s third-largest mobile phone operator today reported a 1.1% rise in service revenues to £10.58bn in the last three months, reversing a trend that began in the final quarter of 2008. Revenue from data services such as smartphones and high-speed internet “dongles” jumped by 25%.

“These are the first quarterly results to show service revenue growth since the global recession impacted,” said chief executive Vittorio Colao.

“We have achieved these results through our continuing commercial approach in key European markets, focusing especially on data, and from strong growth in emerging markets, with India now cash-positive at an operating level and our highest ever quarterly revenue in Turkey,” he added.

Colao also said that Vodafone would announce a change of strategic direction in October, to “drive shareholder value”. This is understood to include a new focus on data services, especially in emerging markets like India and China.

Colao declined to give further details this morning, saying it would be “disrespectful to his board”, but hinted that it may be driven by the increased number of mobile operating systems on the market today.

“The world has changed,” he told reporters. “Many operating systems are strong and competing … this is a good opportunity to have a look at our strategy.”

Vodafone saw strong growth in demand for smartphones in Europe during the quarter, particularly in the UK where the company started selling Apple’s iPhone earlier this year.

Since taking over as chief executive in summer 2008, Colao has been trying to increase growth in Vodafone’s existing territories rather than continuing with the acquisition drive that has given it stakes in markets around the world.

Vodafone also announced today that it has finally resolved a long-running dispute with the UK tax authorities. This row centred on Vodafone’s decision to register Mannesman, the German mobile giant it acquired in 2000, in Luxembourg.

HM Revenues & Customs had claimed that Vodafone owed taxes in Britain under the Controlled Foreign Companies rules, which the mobile operator disputed. It has now agreed to pay £1.25bn to settle the case, having previously made a provision of £3.1bn on its books.

Shares in Vodafone rose 1.88% this morning to 151.85p.

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(Source The Guardian)

Reports that phone-maker Nokia has launched top-level search as it struggles with falling profits and declining market share

Nokia is reported to be searching for a new chief executive as its CEO for the past four years, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, struggles with the company’s falling profits and market share, notably in the smartphone market.

The report in the Wall Street Journal of the top-level search follows reports on Bloomberg at the end of last week that the board of the Finnish company was calling for changes after seeing the company’s value slump by $77bn (€60bn) – about 67% – in the three years since 2007, when first Apple’s iPhone and then Google’s Android platform have transformed the smartphone market.

Although Nokia is the world’s largest phone-maker, and has the largest market share in smartphones at about 41%, it has issued two profit warnings in the past three months and seen its stock fall by 25% this year alone as it was forced to delay newer smartphones.

Nokia’s last big success in the smartphone market came four years ago with the N95, which boosted profits in its smartphone division to 21%. But since then Apple, Android and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, have eaten away at Nokia’s profitability, so that the division’s profit in its most recent figures was just 12%.

James Kelleher, an analyst at Argus Research in New York, told Bloomberg that a new chief executive is “the first order of business”. Nokia’s share price has dropped to €6.83, from €20.81 on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone went on sale.

The Android platform also poses a considerable threat to Nokia: Google announced earlier this year that it was activating 160,000 Android phones every day.

An analysis by Goldman Sachs earlier this month comparing smartphone companies’ profitability in 2007 with 2009 suggests that Apple has grabbed a growing slice of profit from the handset industry. While total profits remained static in total at about $14bn since 2007, the American company took up to $8bn in 2009, and is expected to take more than half the industry’s profits in 2010 and 2011 – despite selling far fewer handsets than its rivals.

Earlier this month the new head of Nokia’s Mobile Solutions division, Anssi Vanjoki, wrote a combative blogpost on Nokia’s “Conversations” blog in which he declared that “the fightback starts now” and said that “I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm.”

He also insisted that there were no plans to adopt Google’s free Android software platform; Nokia will instead remain with its own open-source Symbian and Meego mobile operating systems: “Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumours to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia,” he wrote.

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(Source The Guardian)

Growing speculation on the future of Apple’s iPhone 4 has hit the company where it hurts – and its reputation is also on the line

Apple shares dived by 4% last night, cutting $9.9bn (£6.5bn) off its $230bn value after speculation grew that the company would have to recall or issue hardware fixes for the new iPhone 4.

The fall follows a report by the independent American testing organisation Consumer Reports which said reception problems meant it could not recommend the device.

Apple was accused of censorship by removing discussions about the negative Consumer Reports evaluation from its official message boards over the weekend, though it seems now to have relented.

A number of PR experts contacted by Cult of Mac blog yesterday said a recall of the iPhone 4 was “inevitable,” comparing the situation to Toyota’s global recall of its hybrid cars earlier this year.

Yet others including Marco Arment, lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper, say that a wholesale recall would be a step too far, but that Apple needs to “replace, redesign, or relocate the proximity sensor” – which tells the phone when it is close to the user’s head or hand and changes its radio output and screen brightness accordingly.

UK consumer watchdog Which? told the Guardian that although it had done initial tests on the iPhone 4 proximity sensor – finding that the screen is “disabled” the closer to your head the phone is held – it would carry out a “more comprehensive” review of the device in the near future.

Others have suggested that Apple should give owners free rubber “bumpers” – sold for $29 (£25 in the UK) – which fit around the edge of the phone, ostensibly to protect it from damage, but which also cut the signal loss that is at the core of the dispute.

But for Apple to do that would be tantamount to admitting that the device has a design problem, which could open it up to class action lawsuits from aggrieved buyers.

Apple has tended to decline recalling products that have had design issues, preferring to deal on a limited basis where people complain. Earlier this week it quietly announced that it would replace faulty versions of its Time Capsule backup product, after thousands of them failed after just 18 months. When a number of its iBook computers were found to have faulty soldering in 2007 by a Danish consumer investigation, it did not issue a recall.

Apple UK had no comment this morning on whether it will be making any announcements about the iPhone. UK Consumers’ Association magazine Which? said that it intended to test the phone “soon”.

Despite the fall in the technology company’s share price, it remains the largest on the US stock market, ahead of long-term rival Microsoft. And although Consumer Reports did not “recommend” the iPhone 4, other commentators have pointed out that it still ranks it highest among the smartphones it has tested – and that its second-ranked smartphone is the iPhone 3GS, the predecessor to the latest version.

Even with a growing clamour from users and testers who have discovered that the phone’s reception seems to drop off abruptly when they position their hand around the left side, the company has remained almost silent – except for a statement on Friday 2 July, when it put out a “letter” a week after the phone’s release in which it said that the dropoff in reception was due to a “simple and surprising” mistake in every iPhone’s software which meant that it overstated signal strength in weak reception.

Although the launch on 28 June saw 1.7m iPhone 4s sold in the first three days, the most successful yet of the annual refreshments to the model, it has proved to be a continual headache for Apple.
The first issue to appear was the discoloration of the high-quality “retina display“, which appears to be linked to the adhesive used to bond the glass and display together.

But the major woe for consumers has been the signal issues. Testers at Consumer Reports said that holding the iPhone at the bottom left-hand corner causes the signal to decay significantly.

Despite Apple’s low-key suggestion that there is nothing wrong with the phone, it is understood that staff on its warranty service AppleCare have been advising customers to buy a case or hold the phone in a different way.

Consumer Reports has held off recommending the iPhone 4, despite it gaining a higher rating than all other smart phones they have evaluated.

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(Source The Guardian)

Number ‘porting’ must take place within one working day from April 2011, regulator rules

Mobile phone users in the UK will at last soon be able to transfer their phone number to another network within one working day.

Britain will come into line with European Union guidelines on the matter in April 2011, Ofcom ruled today, following several years of wrangling between the communications regulator and the mobile telecoms industry.

Currently a mobile operator is allowed to take two working days before allowing a departing customer to “port” their number to their new operator. Ofcom originally tried to bring this down to two hours, but lost a court challenge from Vodafone, O2 and Orange in 2008.

Ofcom has also decreed that the code required to switch provider and retain a number, called a PAC, should be issued to consumers immediately over the phone or within a maximum of two hours via text message. This will end the practice of some PACs being sent out by post, forcing customers to wait several days before changing to a new operator.

“Ensuring consumers can switch between communications providers by removing unnecessary barriers is one of Ofcom’s priorities for 2010/11,” said the regulator’s chief executive, Ed Richards. “Being able to switch quickly and easily between mobile providers is an important part of healthy and effective competition.”

But the decision was criticised by 3, the fourth-largest UK mobile operator. It is unhappy that the onus for moving the number still falls on the customer, rather than the operators involved, and accused Ofcom of failing UK consumers.

It said that the system of “recipient-led porting”, where number transfers are handled by the new provider, was “the fundamental platform for choice and competition” in the mobile market. “Nowhere else in Europe is a consumer forced to ask permission to take their number with them when they choose a new operator,” said a 3 spokesman. “The donor-led porting system that Ofcom proposes to keep makes it more difficult for customers.”

But other operators argue that if consumers did not have to request the PAC themselves before swapping networks, they could fall victim to high-pressure sales tactics known as “slamming”, where their mobile phone providers are summarily changed without their full consent.

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(Source The Guardian)

Mobile company claimed its 3G network reached most people, but ad watchdog said this could not be substantiated

The advertising watchdog has forced Orange to retract a claim that its 3G network reaches more people than competitors’ networks, after a challenge from rival company 3.

A press ad run by Orange for its mobile broadband made the boast that “the Orange 3G network covers more people in the UK than any other operator”.

Hutchison 3G Ltd, parent company of 3, challenged the line, arguing that on the basis of population coverage it had the largest UK 3G network.

Orange argued that it had the biggest network measured by population coverage, while admitting 3 was larger by geographical coverage.

The mobile operator said that its own population coverage percentages “were calculated based on a marriage of in-house tools and recognised public domain population to location information and that the claim was capable of objective substantiation”.

However, the Advertising Standards Authority said that while Orange may have intended the ad to solely mean covering more people where they lived – as opposed to wherever they might geographically go – the claim was ambiguous.

The ASA checked Ofcom’s UK geographical coverage maps for the big five mobile companies and found it was not ranked No 1.

As a result the ASA banned the ad, ruling that it was misleading because Orange could not substantiate the claim as it was not based on directly comparable measurement and reporting methods.

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(Source The Guardian)

Chief executive Steve Jobs hails ‘most successful launch in Apple’s history’ despite reported problems over phone reception

Apple says it sold 1.7m iPhone 4s in its first three days, a record for the newest version of its top-selling product, and the company could have sold more but for production constraints. The latest model features video calling and an updated body, although some users have reported problems with reception, apparently due to a design flaw.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, called the iPhone 4′s launch “the most successful in Apple’s history” but added: “We apologise to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

Research in the US by the analysts Piper Jaffray and in the UK by AQA suggests that 77% of iPhone 4 buyers queueing outside stores on the first days were upgrading from previous models – implying that 23% of buyers were new to the platform.

The record sales have come despite shortages of the smaller-capacity 16-gigabyte version of the iPhone, which is coloured white. Apple apologised last week and said it would be unable to fulfil early demand for them. By comparison, the previous iPhone 3GS model, launched a year ago, sold 1m in its first weekend.

Apple is competing for market share in the smartphone arena with RIM, maker of the BlackBerry brand; Google’s Android software, which is used by multiple handset makers; and Nokia, which has the lion’s share of the smartphone market but which has seen its share and profitability shrink since Apple and Google entered the market in 2007.

Analysts reckon Apple will be able to sell plenty more of the devices: Colin Gillis of BGC Partners in New York and Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon, project that Apple will have sold 2m to June 26, the end of the company’s fiscal quarter. Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, had previously estimated 1m to 1.5m.

Apple had a difficult time getting enough touch screens to meet demand for the device, said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in New York, so the early sales figures may not be an accurate reflection of demand. “It’s too early to say if this is negative,” said Kumar.

While Apple has some production constraints, the company “has a captive audience”, he said. “Demand for the iPhone 4 is not yet satiated so it just gets pushed out into subsequent quarters.”

The iPhone sales results follow Apple’s statement last week that it sold more than 3m of its iPad tablet computing device in the first 80 days. With the iPad, introduced April 3, and the three-year-old iPhone, Apple has widened its business beyond the Macintosh computer and iPod media player.

Sales of the iPhone accounted for 40% of Apple’s revenue last quarter. The device has shown an upward trend in sales: the first sold 700,000 on its first weekend in June 2007, despite a high price that was later cut. In 2008, the iPhone 3G sold 1m in its first week.

Apple’s share price has more than doubled since the original iPhone’s release on 29 June 2007, and it passed Microsoft as the largest technology company by market value late in May.

Some iPhone 4 customers have reported trouble with the new antenna design, which uses a stainless steel band on the outside of the casing. The phone signal drops when users cover the bottom left corner of the device with their palm.

Apple responded by recommending holding the phone differently or using a case to solve the problem. Customers in the five countries began lining up days in advance to buy the device. Apple said the iPhone will be available in 88 countries by the end of September.

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(Source The Guardian)

Authors such as Iain Banks and Martina Cole are increasingly supplementing book releases with apps full of bonus material

The way the books industry is interacting with digital media is developing faster than many had foreseen, with the latest example an attempt to offer fans of author Iain M Banks exclusive unseen chapters, his original notes and commentary for his latest novel.

Mobile software company TradeMobile has worked with Banks’s publisher Little, Brown to develop the free application for the iPhone, which launches this Thursday (1 July). Readers who have bought the paperback of Banks’s latest novel, Transition, will be able to scan a unique barcode on their edition with their iPhone, and companion features for the novel will be transmitted to their screen.

A best-selling author, the publishers also hope the new app may entice readers uninitiated into his complicated universe of difference worlds and civilisations. “For something as complicated as Transition it makes sense,” said Banks. “It’s very much like a DVD extras.”

The app also includes character biographies; after a “slightly anguished” email from his German translator, Banks realised that a character called Bisquitine might need her language and cultural references explaining.

“She appears toward the end of the novel and has an important part to play, and a very eccentric way of expressing herself,” says the author. “It took half a day to write and three to explain.”

Kirk Bowe at TradeMobile says: “You’re able to tap in a page number and get back all the characters, scenes and locations which may be relevant to that page.”

Beyond the iPhone

TradeMobile is currently in talks with Little, Brown about extending the application to other handsets as well as the iPhone. “This helps people who aren’t particularly familiar with an author, especially an author like Iain whom they might not have approached before … it will fill in the blanks that may sometimes scare people away.”

In March the number of books available as iPhone apps passed the number of games for the first time (www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/09/books-overtake-games-iphone-apps). “It was a tipping point,” says digital editor Dan Franklin at rival publisher Canongate. “The plan is now to be creating something you can only experience digitally” — something which, he admits, defies the instincts of a publisher. “It’s our next challenge [but] it’s difficult,” he says.

TradeMobile’s Bowe feels the “companion” approach works particularly well for fiction. “Tolkien for example would be amazing,” he says. “Really for authors with rich, detailed characters and locations it’s great.”

Banks agrees. “It works well for science fiction, especially when you have a universe or place you go back to. These places gradually build up.

“It’s there if you want it – and that’s the beauty of it, it’s an opt-in thing. It’s not being forced down your neck; if you just want the story, you can have it,” says the author. “We’ll see how it does with the science-fiction stuff – if it’s successful it’s the obvious thing to do to extend it to my other novels.”

Added value

Little, Brown is part of the UK’s largest publishing conglomerate, Hachette UK, which has already launched a similar app for popular crime novelist Martina Cole, and has apps in development for authors including Stephenie Meyer, Patrick Holford and Ian Rankin.

“Anyone can replicate the experience of reading a physical book in an app. Our feeling is that just isn’t very exciting,” says head of digital George Walkley. “With Iain Banks and Martina Cole we’ve tried to provide added value and extra material for authors who have very passionate followings.”

At Canongate, Franklin is impressed with Little, Brown’s new app. “What is cool is that they’re getting it to directly interact with a print edition,” he says. “It’s very clever and something we’re looking to do.”

Canongate is no slouch in the digital department itself, however, launching a (paid-for) enhanced iPhone app for Nick Cave’s novel The Death of Bunny Munro in September, complete with videos of Cave and an audio version synched to the text of the book, scored by Cave himself. The app won second place in MediaGuardian’s own innovation awards, the Megas, earlier this year. And in May, it brought out an enhanced app for David Eagleman’s short story collection Sum: Tales from the Afterlives, featuring videos of Eagleman discussing the book, and a synched audio version read by the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry and Noel Fielding.

Like Walkley, Eagleman believes it is important for an app to be more than just an electronic version of a book. “An electronic version of a book merely grants portability. But a thoughtful app can open new inroads to explore the material, as well as ways to keep the material updated and fresh,” he says.

“By having the option to explore a book beyond the original text — by dint of videos, living links, and so on — it becomes a living, breathing, updating organism, just like the rest of our technology.”

Banks adds: “Everyone’s feeling around – no one knows what’s going to work. It’s quite a nervous time to be a publisher. They’re trying to do what they can to keep books interesting. We will just see how it goes.”

Eagleman agrees. “We’re at an exploratory period now, and no one knows where it’s going. If you imagine yourself 100 years from now looking back, it’s clear that apps are in their infancy and just learning how to crawl. Once they become adults, they might offer such a different experience of the material that they will speciate into an entirely different storytelling animal — as has happened, for example, with movies.”

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(Source The Guardian)

The transcript of the phone call earlier this week with Google’s chief reveals the real signals he’s sending out: Android wants to be the Windows of mobile phones

Android is getting too big to ignore. Photo by mathrock on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Below is a transcript (taken with shorthand, contemporaneously) of a conference call with Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, on 23 June. There may be some inaccuracies. After that, there is an analysis of what Schmidt said – and where the mobile market is.

Also on the conference call were journalists from Germany, the UK and Brazil. I won’t indicate here who asked what questions; see if you can work it out.

Call begins

Eric Schmidt: Verizon is just announcing the Droid X made by Motorola, its fourth Android phone. We have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of Android. This is one of the best phones ever made, on the very fastest network.

We’ve now got 160,000 new users per day. That’s a 60% increase per month [compared to the 100,000 figure per day that was given at the Google I/O conference in May]. If you get an increase like that going on, well, I’ve done the maths, and it looks like an incredible trajectory.

[That equates to 58m per month, a 60% increase month-on-month would mean that by the end of the year there would be about 16m Android phones being activated every day, or 480m per month - which doesn't really sounds feasible. Obviously it is going to tail off or even slow down at some stage.]

Counting the number of apps, there are 65,000, compared to 50,000 a month ago. So the growth is accelerating. OK, questions?

Q: How large is Android in the US market and European market compared to the iPhone, because it hasn’t done too well in Europe?

ES: I prefer not to talk about the iPhone as a competitor. The growth rate is very very strong, but I don’t think it’s really appropriate to make claims about market share.

Q: What’s driving that acceleration?

ES: having multiple hardware partners – LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola. The thing is it’s a totally open platorm, so open that the source is available too. Any application can run on Android as long as it doesn’t damage the network.

Q: Android is lagging in Europe compared to the US – why do you think that is?

ES: I don’t know that it’s lagging; I would have to look at the numbers. It was launched first in the US but we have enough European partners. The Droid phone was a big driver.

Q: Have you made any contacts with Nokia to discuss Android on Nokia?

ES: We have talked to everybody… I don’t want to talk about any specific companies. [A rather odd response which tailed off amid expectation.]

Q: What sort of revenues are you seeing from Android?

ES: We make zero from it. Because it’s free. (Q: but you get advertising revenue from it…) We don’t break out what our mobile advertising revenues are… [in general] we make money when people have powerful broadband devices so we invest in Android so that people can invest in it. But our mobile revenue growth is very very quick.

We know that there will be a great deal of money made in ads from the mobile industry.

Q: Do you think Android can become for mobile what Windows was for the PC?

ES: well, the thing about Android is that anybody can use it.. Android in many ways is better than Windows because it’s free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point. So anybody can build on Android, and it’s free.

Also Android has GPS and a full media stack [possibly misheard], so it can do things that even the ordinary PC doesn’t have and might never have.

Q: Who is your biggest competitor in this fight – Apple, Nokia, who?

ES: I try to spend time not focussing on those questions. Nokia has the largest market share, certainly. Apple, I was a proud board member there, I respect them. Nokia and Apple are both highly organised to be competitive.

Q: Isn’t a problem with Android that of fragmentation of the platform – that some handsets can’t update from earlier versions either because of the networks or the phones, so people are stuck on older versions which means you’re trying to cope with a broad range of versions?

ES: That’s a very good question. The first thing to say is that the networks are quite interoperable. Some phones shipped a year ago can’t be upgraded. But most can be, to 2.2, though it might take some months to roll out.

The argument about fragmentation has been used by competitors of open source for years. But we agree to support compatibility at the platform level. It’s important to understand this. Android apps will work on the current generation; any Android app written for one version will run on any phone with that version. That prevents fragmentation. Apps are written on a per-OS basis. But of course not every app written for any version will run on every version of Android – otherwise the platform couldn’t evolve.

Q: A team at Larva Labs estimated that while Apple has paid developers $1bn from App Store revenues, the comparable figure for the Android Marketplace is about $200m. Is enough money going to developers to make Android attractive?

ES: Well, I haven’t seen those figures, so I can’t talk to them. The thing is, developers go where the volume is. That’s the most important lesson from platform economics. It’s about scale and volume. It’s very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.

Q: We’ve seen other companies talking about Android-based tablets – does Google intend to produce a tablet running Android?

ES: We’ve seen a number of announcements from other companies about tablets running Android. It’s a reasonably obvious product extension that people have announced. We haven’t announced any form of Google tablet.

[end of interview]

Analysis: the timing of this announcement – on 23 June, just as Apple’s iPhone 4 was reaching its first customers – was clearly aimed at taking some of the shine off the iPhone announcement by implying that even if Apple activates 1m iPhones in the first sales burst, Android will almost match that in a working week. (Do the maths.)

That of course leaves out all sorts of maybes, gotchas and provisionals: are the activation figures volatile? What’s the churn like – how many of the activations are new customers, and how many are renewing customers? An interesting calculation from the analysts Piper Jaffray, via Fortune suggests that (in the US, at least) 77% of iPhone 4 customers were existing iPhone users.

You can look at that two ways: what an enormous number of renewals! Or you could look at it from the other end: wow, Apple grew its customer base for first-day iPhones by 23% – among people who had to wait in enormously long lines. What’s the last consumer product you recall people queueing through the day for? I recall how Microsoft managed the hype machine perfectly for Windows 95, with midnight store openings; rather less so for every subsequent OS release. The Xbox 360 got some dedicated queuers too.

But in truth, Schmidt really isn’t looking at iPhone sales; he’s not trying here to court buyers dithering between iPhone and Android. This was actually a piece of dog-whistle PR aimed at mobile developers.

Unfamiliar with dog-whistle PR? It’s like dog-whistle politics: aimed at a particular group, couched in terms which don’t say a lot to the average person, but which zero in on that target group and make them sit up. The people who Schmidt wanted to hear this latest bit of PR are mobile developers. He wants them to multiply 160,000 by 5 (working days – perhaps 6), and then by 4, to reach about 4m Android phones being activated per month, and to get them to think that this is a really good platform to be building for.

That’s the point of his “platform economics” answer. Google can only capitalise on mobile advertising once it gets Android to a specific market share. It seems like that it has already crossed it, since it’s by all accounts bigger than Apple in smartphone share in the US (and may even be challenging RIM, though still some way behind Nokia). What the numbers are like for Europe – well, we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the end of the quarter for all those numbers.

The interesting challenge though will be whether the Android platform will indeed become the Windows of mobile. That could cut both ways: sure, the handset makers don’t have to pay a levy to use Android (as PC makers do to Microsoft). But when they go to the networks (who are the equivalent, in this scenario, of PC purchasers) they may find that they’re forced to bid down, and that their margins get eroded as more rivals pile into the market.

Apple, meanwhile, can be entirely happy with not having the lion’s share of the market, yet making a colossal profit from both the hardware sales (because nobody else can make an iPhone) and the app sales. It does exactly the same in the computer market: it has about 5% market share worldwide, yet makes a stonking profit on every computer sold. PC manufacturers, by contrast, have long since reached the point where price-cutting to win share simply opens a vein in their profits.

Android could thus win – and for Nokia, the idea of using Android must look ever more enticing, since it would cut costs and let it use its heft with the networks to win back share – and yet the hardware makers would lose. That’s a great danger – not imminent, but it exists – for Schmidt, Android and Google. By creating a flourishing ecosystem of app developers, Android could make life better for the handset makers.

Oh, and the company we haven’t mentioned here at all, except in passing? Microsoft. If you look at what the Android and iPhone platforms are now doing, you have to ask how on earth Windows Phone – which will have a paid-for licence – is ever going to attract any handset makers. Schmidt’s Android dog whistle might be loud for iPhone developers annoyed at the company’s capricious treatment of their apps, but it must be loudest for developers considering whether the shrinking, forwards-incompatible pool of Windows Mobile phones is really worth bothering with.

Between the handset makers pondering the economics of paying for a Windows Phone licence, and developers wondering why they should write code for a platform, Windows Phone, that’s presently activating zero phones a day – because it hasn’t been released – versus one doing 160,000 per day, Microsoft has a real problem with Windows Phone. Apple can survive Android because it has that 77% base of loyal customers. Android has an expanding customer base.

But what on earth has Microsoft got?

* I asked the questions about fragmentation and Larva Labs.

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(Source The Guardian)

Since the very first iPhone applications were downloaded from the Apple App Store in July 2008, the app economy has grown exponentially. As industry analysts forecast the four billionth App Store download, the world’s second-largest apps store quietly continues its upward trajectory.


Photo by thetechbuzz on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Not many people have heard of GetJar, but this month the four-year-old open-market store hit one billion app downloads and secured $11m in series B funding from venture capital firm Accel Partners.

GetJar differs from the Apple App Store and, for example, the Windows Mobile Marketplace because it hosts applications for a number of platforms and devices. This, the company insists, is what will ensure its continued growth in coming years.

And GetJar founder and chief executive Ilja Laurs isn’t one to mince his words on the company’s future. He said: “It’s hard to believe that six guys that set up the first beta testing community for mobile app developers would eventually transform into the world’s second largest app store with over 1bn downloads to date.

“We look forward to our continued partnership with Accel Partners and this new funding will be instrumental in taking GetJar to the next level in our business strategy for aggressive global expansion and product development.”

In January this year Gartner predicted 4.5b mobile apps would be downloaded in 2010, saying this would surpass 21.6billion by 2013.

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(Source The Guardian)

TOKYO/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hundreds of fans flocked to stores in Tokyo to be the first buyers of Apple’s iPhone 4 and some lined up in San Francisco as the red-hot smartphone rolls out on Thursday in five of the world’s six largest economies.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Chief executive Eric Schmidt says both takeup of operating system and number of apps are growing rapidly

Google is now activating 160,000 mobile phones using its Android software a day, equivalent to 4.8m a month, according to the company’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt.

The number is also accelerating, having been put at 100,000 a day in the third week of May during Google’s annual I/O conference, Schmidt said – indicating sales growth of 60% per month.

“We have seen a tremendous increase in adoption,” Schmidt said in an interview exclusive to the Guardian in the UK. “We’ve also seen a growth in the number of apps available for Android – there are now approximately 65,000 compared to only 50,000 a month ago.” He believes that that means Android could have reached the volume necessary to become an essential mobile operating system – and perhaps the equivalent of Windows on PCs.

At those numbers, roughly 15m Android smartphones would be sold every quarter, compared with a worldwide total of 54m sold in the first quarter of 2010, according to the research company Gartner.

Though Schmidt’s announcement was clearly timed to steal some of the thunder of Apple’s launch in five countries of the iPhone 4 on Thursday, Schmidt declined to compare the Android platform’s market position against its better-known rival. Apple has said that it had orders of 600,000 in a single day for the iPhone 4 last week, and was unable to keep up with demand.

Google is notified whenever a smartphone using the Android operating system is activated by a mobile network. In the US, a number of different models are sold on different networks from different manufacturers, including Motorola, which on Wednesday unveiled its latest Droid X phone on the Verizon network. “It’s the best phone ever made on the fastest network,” Schmidt said – which could be seen as a dig at AT&T, which has the exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in the US but has struggled to satisfy users’ demands for mobile data bandwidth.

Asked whether he saw Apple or Nokia – which has the largest market share of smartphones – as Android’s biggest competitor, Schmidt said: “I try to spend my time not focusing on those questions.”

Android is a free mobile operating system which any handset maker can use and alter to produce a new version, while developers are able to write apps which will work on any specific version of the system.

However, while Apple has maintained a tight focus on its App Store, which has roughly 250,000 free and paid-for apps available, Google offers them via a “Marketplace”, and allows any app to run on Android “as long as it does not harm the network,” Schmidt said.

But calculations by a company called Larva Labs, which develops for Android, suggest that iPhone developers may be faring better financially than those on the Android Marketplace. Steve Jobs said earlier this month that Apple has paid out $1bn to developers through a revenue split (which has earned Apple roughly $420m).

By contrast, Larva Labs reckons that Android developers have only earned $20m in total from the Marketplace. Schmidt said he had not seen the figures, but added: “Developers go where the volume is. That’s the most important lesson of platform economics: it’s all about scale and volume. It’s very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.”

Asked whether Android could become the equivalent of Windows for PCs – the dominant operating system – Schmidt said: “The advantage with Android is that anybody can use it. In many ways it is better than Windows because it’s free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point.”

He declined to say whether Google has been talking to Nokia about the possibility of an Android-driven Nokia phone, or whether Google would release its own tablet computer similar to Apple’s iPad, which has sold 3m units in 90 days.

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(Source The Guardian)

PARIS (AFP) – The largest study of its kind said pregnant women who live near a mobile phone mast do not run a higher risk of having a child who develops leukaemia or other cancer in infancy.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

LONDON (Reuters) – British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman’s baby developing cancer.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Apple sees sales of 600,000 units on Tuesday, with demand in Germany 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model

Apple has reported overwhelming demand for its new iPhone 4 model, selling more than 600,000 in a single day on Tuesday which saw ordering websites crash in the US and UK.

In Germany, demand for the new model, which was only unveiled by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs at the start of the month, is running 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model, the iPhone 3GS, reported Deutsche Telekom.

By comparison, when the iPhone 3GS went on sale last year, 1m were sold in its first three days. But that debuted in eight countries, whereas the iPhone 4 has gone on sale only in five.

Apple has apologised to people who tried to order the phone and gave up in frustration, saying demand was far higher than it expected. “We hope that they will try again.. once the iPhone 4 is in stock.”

Since its debut in June 2007, Apple’s smartphone has taken a huge chunk of the smartphone market and forced companies such as RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, and Nokia, which has the lion’s share of smartphone sales, to play catchup. Nokia issued another profits warning on Wednesday, and its share of the smartphone market is falling every quarter.

In the UK, where Apple is offering the phone without a contract through its online store, Apple’s website crashed as people tried to order it. And in the US, where it is only available with a contract from AT&T, the telephone company’s website froze as it tried to cope with an avalanche of orders each of which had to be verified on its own servers. That also led to problems in which some customers saw details of other peoples’ accounts – a reminder of the flaw exposed by a security group last week in which hundreds of thousands of Apple iPad users’ emails were stolen via weak security on AT&T’s site.

As a result of the heavy demand Apple has had to push back the delivery date for phones ordered online, and on Wednesday AT&T suspended orders, citing “unexpectedly high demand”.

Apple said “it was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions.”

Last year in the UK O2 had exclusive rights to sell the new iPhone, and said then that more of those handsets were sold in the first two hours of trading than all handsets in an average day.

This year Apple is selling the iPhone 4 without a contract – at £499 for the cheapest version – and O2, Vodafone, Orange and 3 are competing to offer it on contract terms. However neither O2 or 3 have yet announced prices, or allowed customers to pre-order the phone.

However the new contracts being offered for the phones have sparked anger among web users, who say that the carriers’ use of the word “unlimited” for the amount of data that can be downloaded through the smartphone is misleading. The companies impose a “fair use” cap, while describing the service as “unlimited”.

Now, a formal review by the advertising regulator could be about to put a cap on the practice.

This could mean that fixed-line and mobile operators will not be able to use the term “unlimited broadband” unless they are offering a genuinely unlimited service – and that means nothing in the small print that lets the provider send warnings to customers if they reach a certain threshold.

The review is being led by the Advertising Standards Authority, reports New Media Age, which will work with two ad industry bodies to make a comprehensive assessment of industry claims and consumer complaints on both broadband speeds and “unlimited” tariff penalties.

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(Source The Guardian)

Apple’s ’4G’ device is out this month. Will Steve Jobs also cut the price of the current model and challenge Nokia head-on?

Steve Jobs will appear before the Apple faithful tomorrow to reveal the latest version of the Californian technology group’s mobile phone. Nicknamed the iPhone “4G” – on the basis that the last one was the 3GS, with the “S” standing for speed – it will be the summer’s must-have gadget, hitting the UK this month. But it is also seen as being in the vanguard of an all-out assault on the mobile market.

In the three years since it launched its first handset, Apple has grabbed the headlines and, more importantly, snatched a lucrative share of the more mature mobile phone markets of the US and Europe, where consumers are willing to pay upwards of £30 a month to get an iPhone. Now, speculation is rising that the company is approaching a so-called “iPod moment” in mobiles: the point at which it will decide that it can capture a much larger slice of the market by producing more than one device.

The success of the App Store, which has seen iPhone users download billions of applications, coupled with the pressure to have a wide market to attract advertisers to its embryonic iAd platform, is pushing Apple towards diversifying, just as it did with the iPod six years ago when it introduced the iPod mini. There is also increasing competition from Google’s Android platform. After two and a half years, handset manufacturers are finally producing compelling Android phones – such as the HTC Desire – and more are slated for release this year, including the mass-market HTC Wildfire.

But rather than unveil a new, cheaper version of the iPhone, Apple is expected to position the iPhone 4G at the top of the smartphone market and reorganise the existing range. The company is likely to halt production of the iPhone 3G – which cannot cope with Apple’s new multi-tasking software – and scrap both existing versions of the iPhone 3GS, which have 16GB and 32GB of memory. It will replace them with a new 8GB version of the 3GS, which is expected to be aimed at the wider market.

The iPhone 4G – according to mobile industry insiders who have seen one and confirmed widespread web leaks – will be available in two versions: 32GB and 64GB. These will put “clear blue water” between it and the mass-market 3GS, as one industry executive puts it. The 4G is slightly smaller and slimmer than the current 3GS. It has an improved 5-megapixel camera with flash and uses micro-sim cards, as seen in the iPad. It also has a glass back, which greatly assists phone reception. In the UK, it is expected to be sold by the same mobile phone networks that have the current iPhone: O2, Orange and Vodafone. It is unclear whether Tesco Mobile will have the 4G when it is launched in the last week of this month.

The parallels between Apple’s current position in the mobile phone market and the place it held in the digital music market when it introduced the iPod mini are revealing. The first iPod appeared in late 2001, but it was not until 2003 that Apple launched the iTunes store. One million tracks were sold in the first five days and 70m in the first year. That showed Apple there was a real mass market for digital music and was a spur for the creation of the first variant of the iPod line, the iPod mini, the following year.

At the time, Apple was lodged firmly in the high end of the market for digital music players. The iPod was the benchmark by which all others were measured and Apple had a share of about 30%. The iPod mini – replaced at the end of 2005 by the Nano – was designed to grab a large part of the next third down. In similar fashion, the iPhone has become the handset by which other mobiles are measured, and in markets including the UK it has made Apple the third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Nokia and Samsung. It is now a question of how much of the rest of the market – chock full of me-too touchscreen devices from the likes of Nokia, LG and Samsung – Apple wants.

“I would argue that they may already have reached the tipping point,” Ben Wood at CCS Insight – a long-time follower of the mobile market – says. “The iPhone has become a ubiquitous product in the markets where its pricing is acceptable.”

He believes that a real driver behind Apple’s growth will be the iAd platform, which Jobs announced this year alongside the new version of the iPhone software – which is also in the iPad. The new mobile advertising platform is designed to allow iPhone app developers to create in-app advertising. Currently, anyone who clicks on an advert in a downloadable app is bounced out of it and on to the advertiser’s webpage. As a result, many users are put off clicking on adverts. In contrast, iAd will allow full-screen video and interactive advertising content to be served within an application. Crucially, Apple will sell and serve the adverts, and developers will receive 60% of their iAd revenue.

“With iAd, which could be as significant to Apple as the iPod franchise itself, Apple has a tremendous opportunity. It will provide a further chance to lock in their leading position in application development,” Wood says. “If iAd becomes the kind of phenomenon that Apple appears to be able to create, and becomes as big as it could, then potentially Apple could really disrupt the market by subsidising the iPhone from their iAd revenues.”

But whether iAd means that Apple needs to go all the way into the low end of the market is doubtful.

“IPhone users are a segment of the population that has affinity with technology and disposable income, and that is a marketeer’s dream already,” Wood says.

And Carolina Milanesi, research vice-president at rival analysts Gartner, is not convinced that this is the right time for Apple to go mass market, citing price constraints on the iPhone’s most important feature – its large touchscreen.

“On the iPod touch and the iPhone, the screen is very important,” she says. “Music is easier [to do in a mass-market device] because it is just [data] storage, and with the price of storage coming down you can experiment with design. But when you have applications running on the device, how much dumber can your device become before it is useless? And that is where they are going to struggle. What else do you cut?”

Apple could cut its own profits, but it has shown little desire to do that in the past: the switch from the 3G to the 3GS actually reduced the manufacturing cost of the phone, analysts reckon.

“Yes, of course, they can expand their addressable market so much quicker, but do they want that?” says Milanesi. “Just as Jobs says Apple does not want to be the Dell of the PC market, [so] Apple does not want to be the Nokia of the mobile market.” How true that is will be revealed tomorrow.

Focus on Apple’s factory

While Apple fans will drool over the new iPhone this week, tragic events in China have thrown a spotlight on the human cost of the west’s obsession with shiny toys. A spate of suicides at the massive Chinese plant run by Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn has called into question working conditions at one of Apple’s largest suppliers.

The Californian company has dispatched a team of investigators to discover why 10 people have killed themselves so far this year. Management at the Shenzhen facility, which stretches across three square kilometers and employs more than 250,000 people, are trying to solve the problem by hiring counsellors, playing soothing music on production lines, increasing wages and asking new recruits to sign a ‘”no-suicide” contract. They are also taking more direct action, installing netting around outdoor stairwells of the dormitory buildings, where workers sleep eight to a room.

Speaking last week, Steve Jobs said Apple was “diligent” when it came to understanding the working conditions in the supply chain, auditing its direct suppliers as well as tertiary suppliers.

“We are over there trying to understand what is happening and more importantly trying to understand how we can help because it is a difficult situation,” he told the D8 conference organised by All Things Digital. He said many young workers came from poor rural areas and were away from home for the first time.

“They are probably less prepared to leave home than your typical High School student going to college in this country. I think there are some real issues there,” he said.

But he stressed: “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. They have got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it is a pretty nice factory.”

Some of Foxconn’s workers disagree, complaining the monotonous workload causes depression. “I do the same thing every day,” Xiao Qi, a college graduate who works at Foxconn in product development told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I have no future.”

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(Source The Guardian)

A whole new standard has been set with the Dell Streak that is certainly capable of matching the functionality of a laptop, with the added benefit of phone calling, and surpassing the experience given by smartphones with its 5 inch capacitive touch-screen and super slim 10mm design. Four customisable home screens, multi-touch capabilities, a 1Ghz processor and pinch and zoom ensure that all the applications and features run smoothly.

The graphical qualities are amazing with a resolution of 800×480 pixels providing high-definition video playback. Your own videos can be uploaded to YouTube within a few easy clicks and social networking integration makes uploading pictures a breeze. The 5 megapixel camera has the functionality of a dedicated device with auto-focus, dual LED flash, geo-tagging, an editor and face/smile detection. A secondary camera is also provided to allow video calling.

Access to the Internet is granted with a 3G HSDPA connection that rivals the experience obtained via broadband and with portrait or landscape viewing web pages can be enjoyed with ease. The Android OS v1.6 can be upgraded to v2.2. The connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, quad-band roaming and a HDMI port is provided for connecting to a TV. The Dell Streak offers the best of both worlds and with a GPS receiver, digital compass and Google Maps the package is rounded off nicely.

Compare all Dell Streak deals

Although Nokia can trace its lineage back much further than Yahoo, both companies rose to prominence in the 1990s, only to fall from grace in the noughties.

The Finnish mobile phone company started life in the late 19th century as a paper, rubber and cables conglomerate (rubber boots being one of its best-known product lines). It started making mobile phones in the 1980s but it was the switch to the digital GSM standard across Europe in the early 1990s that provided the spur to growth.

Presented with such a mammoth market, Nokia saw sales explode. Innovative products such as the Nokia 101, the first so-called “candy bar” phone, and the Nokia 8110i (which featured in the film The Matrix) helped it blast past America’s Motorola and its Swedish rival Ericsson to become the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer in 1998. While Nokia was changing mobile phones into fashion items, two students at Stanford University – David Filo and Jerry Yang – were playing around with the internet. They started keeping a list of their favourite links and other people who also wanted to be able to get around the web were increasingly using the pair’s links. In mid-1994 Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web became Yahoo! – a name coined by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels for an imaginary race of rude, brutish creatures. When Yahoo floated in 1996 it had fewer than 50 employees and was quickly becoming one of the web’s hottest destinations.

But as the web increased in size in the late 1990s, directories such as Yahoo, which used human editors instead of automation to rank web pages, were creaking under the strain. Then in 2000 Google started selling adverts alongside its search results. While Yahoo was fast cornering the online display advertising market, Google sparked a boom in search advertising. Google has since pushed Yahoo into a series of restructurings and then finally in 2008 an acrimonious bid battle with Microsoft ended in a search and advertising tie-up.

Nokia rode the mobile phone wave in the early part of this century but alienated the mobile networks. When newer manufacturers such as Samsung started producing fashionable phones, the operators grabbed the chance to dump the Finnish firm.

But it was the arrival of the iPhone, launched by Apple in June 2008, that really showed how far Nokia had slipped. It quickly became a must-have gadget for the mobile phone operators in a way that a Nokia device had never managed. Rivals rushed to produce touchscreen phones but Nokia has yet to produce a real “iPhone killer”.

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(Source The Guardian)

Bogus headlines about phones giving you cancer are naff. If we’re going to panic let’s do it well, and keep disbelief suspended

Mobile phones give you brain cancer, and a bacon sandwich a day puts up heart disease by a half. It makes the choice pretty simple: bacon is tastier than ceaseless phone chat, and myocardial infarction is a lot quicker than a brain tumour. That said, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that you’ve eaten a bacon sandwich while on the phone – in which case it’s not a choice but a double whammy.

Both of these appeared as headlines in the Daily Mail: on the mobiles and brain cancer risk, its report was a marked contrast to those of the broadsheets, who agreed that the study on which the story was based had found no statistically significant raised risk. The author of the study, Professor Anthony Swerdlow of the Institute of Cancer Research, clarified the findings for me (as he had already, in a press conference – the misreporting here isn’t accidental): there were 10 usage groups, ranging from very low to very high. In the very highest group – those reporting using their phone for 12 or more hours a day – there was a raised chance of both glioma and meningioma.

However, that level of use is in itself improbable, and you have to take into account the possibility that, since this sample is of people with brain tumours, they were confused or misremembering. (“They’d have to have been millionaires,” Swerdlow commented, in passing; I personally think their wealth of time is more remarkable.)

Furthermore, there is a dose response missing: “Real causes tend to give progressively larger risks with larger doses. Biases sometimes don’t, because the most extreme values can be errors,” Swerdlow said, adding: “The study isn’t useless or pointless but it needs careful interpretation.”

Finally, biological literature can find no mechanism by which radio waves can cause cancer at all. Mobile phones don’t disrupt DNA, which is the way ionising radiation causes cancer – that much was already well known. This makes me wonder whether the study was worth doing at all, but Swerdlow is very clear on this: “There is public concern, and it’s part of the function of scientists to answer the questions that people are concerned about.”

My view is that cancers are so diffuse, now – in cause, in treatment, in aggressiveness, in fatality, in the people they attack – that we’re not really talking about a disease at all, we’re using it as an umbrella term for death. The two elemental truths are that nobody wants to be ill, and yet nobody wants to live forever. This presents a chasm of realistic expectation: how do you eradicate disease while preserving mortality? What, exactly, do you want to die in your sleep of? There is also the ticklish conflict between what you want for yourself today and tomorrow, and what you imagine you’ll want when you’re 80. If we were to talk openly about death, the onus would be on everybody to charge on to this fraught, conflicted territory; if we only talk about cancer, we can leave it to doctors.

That doesn’t, however, tell the whole story about our love affair with scare stories. To move on to bacon, the Harvard School of Public Health has just produced a study showing the risk of heart disease goes up by 42% with every two-ounce (about 56g) serving of processed meat. It sounds extraordinarily high, but on closer inspection isn’t. Compare it to smoking, which raises the risk of cancer by 20 times, that is, 2,000%. A 42% rise is small, in epidemiological terms, and could have been thrown up by a bias (maybe angry men eat more bacon than placid women?). But it would be an extraordinary bias that could produce a 2,000% increase.

The newspaper, in reporting this story (in fairness, it was, again, only the Daily Mail), takes the role of the Friend Who Exaggerates. They expect you to enjoy the drama of their tale, adjusting it down to reality afterwards.

And they’re right, to a point. Medical melodrama in the media is emphatically not taken as a guide. Well, smoking has diminished, by dint of the fact that it is manifestly dangerous and there aren’t many places you can do it. But drinking, eating meat, not doing enough exercise – all the core modules of carcinogenic (or, generally, illness generating) behaviour steadily rise. We look at scare stories not as a blueprint for a better life, but for thrill-tainment; we’re looking for the fright elements of the horror genre; the masochistic guilt of the religious experience; and enough cod statistics to feel, fleetingly, as if we’re being educated.

My beef with the Mail and its ill-explained stats and totally bogus headlines, is not about the spread of the panic itself, which serves a cultural purpose and is enjoyable, but that it doesn’t do it very well.

When the author of a study says there is most likely no connection between mobile phone use and brain cancer, the headline to print is not “more muddle over mobiles as study suggests raised brain cancer risk”. Poor statistical analysis is like bad CGI: it breaks the spell, drags you back to a world where robots don’t exist and the causes of cancer are quite incremental and quotidian. Health journalism (and it’s not just the Mail) needs more scientific credibility, even to function as entertainment.

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(Source The Guardian)